I didn’t say anything.
“Keep your eyes to yourself, man, you know what’s good for you.”
I let that pass, too.
Lila came back from the restroom looking pale. “About the damn time,” Kyle said to her.
“I couldn’t help it. I told you I was sick.”
“Take those sacks and let’s go.”
She picked up the sacks and they started for the door. As far as Lila was concerned, the rest of us weren’t even there; she was focused on Kyle and her own misery. Otherwise she might have been more careful about what she said on the way.
“Kyle … you won’t hurt him, will you?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“You hit him twice already.…”
“A couple of slaps, big deal. He’s not hurt.”
“You get crazy sometimes. What you did to his mother—”
“Goddammit, keep your voice down.”
“But what if she calls the—”
“She won’t. She knows better. Now shut up!”
They were at the door by then. And out into the gibbering night.
I glanced at Runyon. “Who’s the plain burger and milk for, if she’s too sick to eat?”
“Yeah,” he said, and we were both off our stools and moving. Trust your instincts.
At the door I said, “Watch yourself. He’s armed.”
“I know. I saw it, too.”
Outside the rain had eased up to a fine drizzle, but the wind was still beating the night in bone-chilling gusts. The slick black street and sidewalks were empty except for the man and the woman off to our right, their backs to us, Kyle moving around to the driver’s door of a Subaru Outback parked two car lengths away. There was a beeping sound as he used the remote on his key chain to unlock the doors.
Runyon and I made our approach in long silent strides, not too fast. You don’t want to call attention to yourself by running or making noise in a situation like this; it only invites a panic reaction. What we did once Kyle saw us depended on what he did. The one thing we wouldn’t do was to give chase if he jumped into the car, locked the doors, and drove away; that kind of macho nonsense is strictly Hollywood. In that scenario we’d back off and call 911 and let the police handle it.
The woman, Lila, opened the passenger side door. The dome light came on, providing a vague lumpish view of a rear cargo space packed with suitcases and the like. But it was what spilled out from the backseat, identifiable in the wind-lull that followed, that tightened muscles all through my body. A child crying in broken, frightened sobs.
We were nearing the Outback by then, off the curb and into the street. Close enough to make out the rain-spattered license plate. 5QQX700—an easy one to remember. But I didn’t need to remember it. The way things went down, the plate number was irrelevant.
Lila saw us first. She called, “Kyle!” and jerked back from the open passenger door.
He was just opening the driver’s side. He came around fast, but he didn’t do anything else for a handful of seconds. Just stood there staring at us as we advanced, still at the measured pace, Runyon a couple of steps to my left so we both had a clear path at him.
Runyon put up a hand, making it look nonthreatening, and said in neutral tones, “Talk to you for a minute?”
No. It wasn’t going to go down that way—reasonable, nonviolent.
At that moment a car swung around the corner up ahead, throwing mist-smeared headlight glare over the four of us and the Outback. The light seemed to jump-start Kyle. He didn’t try to get inside; he jammed the door shut and went for the weapon he had under his coat.
Runyon got to him first, just as the gun came out, and knocked his arm back.
A beat or two later I shouldered into him, hard, pinning the left side of his body against the wet metal. That gave Runyon time to judo-chop his wrist, a blow that loosed his grip on the gun. A second chop drove it right out of his hand, sent it clattering along the pavement.
Things got a little wild then. Kyle fought us, snarling; he was big and angry and even though there were two of us, just as big, he was no easy handful. The woman stood off from the Outback, yelling like a banshee. The other car, the one with the lights, skidded to a stop across the street. The wind howled; the child shrieked. I had a vague aural impression of running footsteps, someone else yelling.
It took maybe a minute’s worth of teamwork to put an end to the struggle. I managed finally to get a two-handed hold on Kyle’s arms, which allowed Runyon to step free and slam the edge of his hand down on the exposed joining of neck and shoulder. The blow paralyzed the right side of Kyle’s body. After that we were able to wrestle him to the wet pavement, stretch him out belly down. I yanked his arms back, held them while Runyon knelt in the middle of his spine and snapped handcuffs around his wrists.
I stood up first, breathing hard—and a white, scared face was peering at me through the rear side window. A little boy, six or seven, wrapped in a blanket, his cheeks streaked with tears. Past him, on the other side of the car, I could see Lila standing, quiet now, with both hands fisted against her mouth.
Runyon said, “Where’s the gun?”
“I don’t know. I heard it hit the pavement—”
“I’ve got it.”
I turned around. It was the guy from the car that had pulled up across the street; he’d come running over to rubberneck. He stood a short distance away, holding the revolver in one hand, loosely, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. Heavyset and bald, I saw as I went up to him. Eyebrows like miniature tumbleweeds.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Police business.”
“Yeah? You guys cops?”
“Making an arrest.” I held out my hand, palm up. “Let’s have the gun.”
He hesitated, but only briefly. “Sure, sure,” he said then, and laid it on my palm.
And I backed up a step and pointed it at a spot two inches below his chin.
“Hey!” He gawped at me in disbelief. “Hey, what’s the idea?”
“The idea,” I said, “is for you to turn around, slow, and clasp your hands together behind you. Do it—now!”
He did it. He didn’t have any choice.
I gave the piece to Runyon. And then, shaking my head, smiling a little, I snapped my set of handcuffs around Floyd Maxwell’s wrists.
* * *
Funny business, detective work. Crazy business sometimes. Mostly it’s a lot of dull routine, with small triumphs and as much frustration as satisfaction. But once in a great while something happens that not only makes it all worthwhile but defies the laws of probability. Call it whatever you like—random accident, multiple coincidence, star-and-planet convergence, fate, blind luck, divine intervention. It happens. It happened to Jake Runyon and me that stormy March night.
An ex-con named Kyle Franklin, not long out of San Quentin after serving six years for armed robbery, decides he wants sole custody of his seven-year-old son. He drags his new girlfriend to San Francisco, where his former wife is raising the boy as a single mom, and beats and threatens the ex-wife and kidnaps the child. Rather than leave the city quick, he decides he needs some sustenance for the long drive to Lila’s sister’s place in L.A. and stops at the first diner he sees, less than a quarter mile from the ex-wife’s apartment building—a diner where two case-hardened private detectives happen to be staked out.
We overhear part of his conversation with Lila and it sounds wrong to us. We notice the blood on his coat sleeve, the scraped knuckles, his prison pallor, the Odin’s Cross—a prison tattoo and racist symbol—on his hand, and the fact that he’s carrying a concealed weapon. So we follow him outside and brace him, he pulls the gun, and while we’re struggling our deadbeat dad chooses that moment to show up. The smart thing for Maxwell to have done was to drive off, avoid trouble; instead he lets his curiosity and arrogance get the best of him, and comes over to watch, and then picks up Franklin’s gun and hands it to me nice as you please. And so we foil a kidnapping
and collar not one but two violent, abusive fathers in the space of about three minutes.
What are the odds? Astronomical. You could live three or four lifetimes and nothing like it would ever happen again.
It’s a little like hitting the megabucks state lottery. That night, Runyon and I were the ones holding the winning ticket.
REVENANT
1
The weirdest damn case I’ve ever been involved in began, innocuously enough, with a phone call.
I was alone in the agency office when it came in late that May morning, the day being one of the two per week I spend at my desk now that I’m semiretired. Tamara had gone down to the South Park Cafe to get us some take-out lunch, and Jake Runyon and Alex Chavez were both out on field assignments. So the decision to follow up or not follow up was mine to make, and the subsequent investigation mine if and when it came to that.
The caller gave his name as Peter Erskine, his profession as stockbroker and financial advisor, and said that he was calling from his home in Atherton. The location got my attention right away; Atherton is an uber-affluent community on the Peninsula some thirty miles south of San Francisco. His problem, he said, was personal and “very strange and disturbing.” When you’ve been a detective as long as I have, you get so you can read voice nuances over a phone wire. He didn’t sound particularly upset, but there was a detectable undercurrent of tension in his businesslike approach—the way a man speaks when he’s keeping himself under tight control.
“How do you mean strange, Mr. Erskine?”
“It’s … complicated, and it takes considerable explaining better done in person. Could you possibly come to my home this afternoon?”
I said, “Our policy with prospective new clients is an initial consultation here in our offices, to determine if our services meet your needs. You understand, I’m sure.”
“Yes, of course, but this matter also concerns my wife. She’ll want to meet and speak with you as well, but her health is poor and she doesn’t travel well. If you could see your way clear to driving down, I’ll pay you two hundred and fifty dollars for your time, plus travel expenses, whether you agree to help us or not. In cash if you’d like.”
Well, we’d been offered more than that up front, but not very often and not in recent memory. Besides which, the “very strange and disturbing” appellation to his problem was tantalizing, I was not particularly busy, just working a routine employee background check for a large industrial company, and the weather was too unseasonably nice for this time of year to be cooped up inside if you could justify a field trip. Two hundred and fifty bucks plus expenses was plenty enough justification.
I said, “What time would be convenient for you?”
“As soon as you can make it.”
“Two o’clock?” I was thinking about my lunch. No breakfast to speak of this morning, and my stomach was grumbling.
“Two o’clock, yes, that’s fine. Thank you.”
“Address? Phone number in case I should need it?”
He provided them, along with general directions that weren’t necessary. The GPS Kerry had talked me into installing in my car—rightly so, I had to admit, despite my general dislike of electronic gadgets—would take me to his home by the shortest possible route.
Tamara came back and into my office as I was ending the conversation with Peter Erskine. Tamara Corbin, my partner and just about young enough to be my granddaughter. Whip-smart and as organized and creative as they come—literally the guiding hand and beating heart of the agency. When I’d first hired her for her computer expertise several years back, I’d been running a modest one-man operation; once she learned the ropes and took on more and more responsibility, she’d worked tirelessly to expand the business to the point where now we employed two full-time field operatives and another on a part-time basis and were dragging down five times the annual profits I’d made on my own. One of these days, long after I was gone, she’d undoubtedly head up the largest investigative agency in the city.
She set one of two Styrofoam sandwich containers on my desk. Its contents had the warm, spicy aroma of hot pastrami. “New client?” she asked, nodding at the phone.
“Prospective. Peter Erskine, stockbroker and financial advisor, Atherton.”
One of her eyebrows went up at that, climbed another fraction when I told her about Erskine’s cash offer. “Man’s serious, whatever his problem. Could be interesting.”
“Could be,” I agreed.
Interesting? What a hell of an understatement that turned out to be.
2
Atherton is one of those expensive, wooded, hillside communities that prides itself on its scenic attractions and considerable amount of open space. The homes in the upper sections below Highway 280 are mostly situated on large parcels shaded by heritage trees and surrounded by lawns and carefully tended gardens. There are quite a few that qualify as estates, tucked away on acres of real estate behind stone walls, ornate fences, high hedges. You could buy yourself one of those for ten million on up to thirty million or more if you were one of the upwardly mobile, mega-rich folk who’d made their pile down in Silicon Valley. Even the less opulent properties would cost you seven figures on the open market.
The property that evidently belonged to Peter Erskine and his wife was modest in comparison to some of its neighbors, probably worth a paltry three or four mil. It had a whitish stone fence and a gated entrance drive, the gates mounted on ornate pillars and open now. I drove on through.
Half an acre of barbered lawn and flowering shrubs separated the house from the road. Two stories of angular modern architecture, faced in the same kind of whitish stone as the fence and decorated at the corners with red fire brick, the house wasn’t half as large as most in the vicinity—no more than a dozen rooms, not counting baths. Over on its right side I had a glimpse of a redbrick terrace and, at a distance at the edge of a copse of evergreens, a large hexagonal outbuilding that I would call a gazebo and the Erskines probably labeled a summerhouse. There’d be a swimming pool, too, somewhere around back.
The driveway ended in a white-pebbled parking area that would accommodate half a dozen cars. Mine was probably the oldest and cheapest passenger vehicle that had ever been left there. I made my way to the porch and rang the bell. Rolling melody of chimes, footsteps, a pause while I was scrutinized through a peephole magnifier, then a male voice saying my name interrogatively even though it was five minutes of two and I was expected. Erskine being careful nonetheless, for reasons I was about to learn, before he admitted a stranger.
When I confirmed my identity, a chain rattled and he opened up. He was not quite what I expected, but then that’s often the case when you form a mental image of someone you’ve only spoken to on the telephone. I’d figured him for fifty-plus; he was not much older than thirty-five. Casually dressed in a long-sleeved, light blue shirt and fawn-colored slacks. Well set up, fair-haired, strong jawed—not quite pretty-boy handsome but on the cusp. His unsmiling mien, the tight little muscle bulges along his jawline, confirmed the impression I’d had from his phone voice: man under some pressure and determined not to show how much he was affected by it.
If I was not what he’d expected, either—a conservatively dressed man in his mid-sixties instead of your typical young, mod Hollywood version of a private investigator—he gave no indication of it. He thanked me for being prompt, shook my hand, ushered me in and down a long hallway into a large, bright room with two walls of floor-to-ceiling French-style doors and windows that overlooked the terrace and the gazebo/summerhouse in the distance. The terrace wrapped around to the rear, where I could see a lot of white wrought-iron lawn furniture and the glint of sunlight on water. Swimming pool. Right.
On Erskine’s invitation I parked myself on one of several red-and-green-patterned chairs. The room, warm from the sun’s slanting rays, was decorated strictly according to a woman’s taste—the remaining two walls painted a pale yellow, half a dozen whimsical watercolor paintings of el
ves, gnomes, and leprechauns, lamps with frilly shades, a glass-front display cabinet filled with expensive-looking porcelain and pewter knickknacks. Bright, cheerful elegance, but the kind of room that would make me uncomfortable if I had to spend much time in it.
He didn’t immediately sit himself; he went first to the side windows, stood there as if composing himself, then turned abruptly and went to perch stiff backed on a chair facing me.
“This thing that’s going on is unnerving enough to me,” he said without preamble, “but it’s having an even greater effect on Marian, my wife. Her health is fragile as it is. She’s resting in the summerhouse now; she likes to spend her afternoons there when the weather’s good. We thought it would be best if I spoke to you alone first.”
I said, “What is it that’s going on, Mr. Erskine?”
“I think my life may be in danger. We both do.”
“You think so? You’re not sure?”
“Not completely, but there’s every indication of it.”
“Someone has cause to harm you, is that it?”
“Not as far as I’m concerned. The idea is fantastic.”
“A person you know well?”
“A man I never knew at all. What brought us together, if you can call it that, was an accident. And it was his fault, not mine.”
“What kind of accident?”
“On the freeway, just over a year ago.”
“A year is a long time to hold a grudge,” I said.
He made a chuckling sound, dry and humorless. “You don’t know the half of it yet.”
“Did this man threaten you afterward?”
“Yes. Vowed he’d have his revenge.”
“In front of witnesses?”
“Yes.”
“Make any threats since? Any attempt to carry out his vow?”
Erskine shook his head. Then, “I thought it was all past history until last Friday night.”
“What makes you think differently now?”
“There’s no other explanation for why I’m suddenly being stalked.”
Zigzag Page 12
