A Hard Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  I had my feet solidly under me, waiting for the moment of impact.

  The bus driver corrected his aim, accelerated, then he rammed that Ford again, obliterating its front end. I was on my feet, sprinting toward the bus when the car door clipped Bowles on the head and spread him out along the pavement. It was oddly quiet after the impact, as metal, glass, and radiator fluid spewed through the air. I ran right toward the middle of it.

  “Get her,” Scar screamed.

  “What about Arnie?” Dowd spat.

  “Leave him.”

  The bus backed up again, and, finally, I saw the driver.

  “Leon!” I yelled.

  He swerved the bus so close to the curb that the front tires scraped against the concrete as he came for me. He opened his door. “Behind you!”

  I could feel someone back there, so I dove again for the ground and rolled, coming to my feet as a hand sloshed through the air past my ear. I saw the white scar out of the corner of my eye, knowing I was in a race against inches whether I got to the bus before Scar caught me again.

  He snagged my arm, but I wrenched it free before he had a solid grip. His fingers glanced across my shoulder and then caught a handful of the torn silk that had been my sleeve.

  “Come on,” Leon urged. Two more steps and I would be on the bus.

  I lunged for the open door, hearing the fabric in Scar’s hand give. Scar was left off balance beside me with a handful of torn silk.

  I was on the bus, both hands on the guardrail, one foot on the bottom step.

  “Atta girl, Maggie.” Leon beamed at me and began to pick up speed.

  That heavy, scarred arm reached out again and caught my ankle above the boot and held on, short nails digging into my flesh.

  “Help me,” I begged Leon. I couldn’t support Scar’s weight, and my grip on the handrail began to give. The big man managed to get one of his knees wedged inside, taking a lot of the weight off me, small consolation as I smelled his foul breath.

  Still, he held on to me. Blood from my leg ran down his hand and followed the raised line of his scar, as if we had formed some sort of gross merger.

  Repulsed, I wanted him off. I raised my free foot and kicked him in the neck. He ducked from the second blow and smashed his face against the edge of the door. I heard his nose go, sending up a vivid fountain of blood. He began to bellow like something crazed and tried to squeeze farther into the bus.

  His determination alone was frightening, inhuman. He inched his grip farther up my leg, gouging the flesh as I landed blow after blow with my free foot.

  “Hang on,” Leon ordered. He bounced over the curb, and Scar’s knee, lubricated with his own blood, slipped off the step. His legs waved out the door like laundry flying in the wind.

  “Kick him again,” Leon shouted.

  I tightened my grip on the rail and gave him everything I had left, ramming my foot into the exposed hollow of his throat just as the bus came abreast of a fire hydrant. Scar’s shins collided with the hydrant, got snagged on the valve, and he was ripped out of the bus with Leon screaming, “Fucker.”

  As his hand left my leg, I pulled myself up the last two steps and Leon closed the door. He bounced us back onto the street and sped around a corner onto busy Orange Grove Avenue. When the rocking of the bus settled, I sat on the floor with my back against Leon’s seat for support.

  All that was left of my blouse was a few shreds that didn’t cover any vital territory. Leon passed me the jacket he had draped over the back of his seat. When I had it zipped up, he touched my shoulder. “You okay?”

  “I think so.” I had some trouble breathing normally, and I had some pretty good cuts and scrapes. My leg throbbed where blood ran in five-finger sets, clotting with patches of caked mud. I pretty much hurt all over, but I was intact, nothing broken. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was Scar’s contorted face as he jetted out the door. An ugly vision, but a satisfying one.

  Leon cleared his throat. “Who are those guys?”

  I looked up at him, saw the pallor under the deep brown skin, a fine sweat glowing on his bald head, and felt bad. He had landed in the middle of something that had nothing to do with him. But then, as far as I knew, so had I.

  I said, “These men killed my ex-husband.”

  “Jesus.” He swallowed hard. “What, like in the war?”

  “No. Tonight. Right outside the restaurant. Unless someone found him, his body is still there.”

  “Jesus.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. I saw full realization dawn on Leon. When I touched his hand, I could feel it shake.

  I asked him, “What were you doing there?”

  “Those jerks pissed me off. I got a call from the driver on the three-oh-five. He says he spotted the car and the men I had a watch-out for after he picked up fares at Gabrieleno.” He looked down at me. “I had called in a description to the dispatcher from the picture you gave me and the other driver spotted them.

  “This other driver, he tells me that he picks up a couple of fares at Gabe’s, and starts off west, when this car like the one I said to watch out for starts to tail him. Then it comes up alongside and plays tag with him until the first stop. Then some guy gets on the bus, checks out the passengers, doesn’t find what he’s looking for. He shows the driver a picture and says call him if he sees this woman.”

  Leon handed me a Polaroid of myself walking along the Los Angeles River with Guido, just about at the spot where Minh Tam’s hovel had been. I wasn’t especially surprised; we had seen them at the marina that day.

  “I get the call,” Leon said. “I meet the other driver to show him the picture you gave me, and he says, sure, those are the guys. I drive on, one more block and I’ll be damned if they didn’t pull right in front of me and make me stop.

  “They come this close.” He showed me an inch between his thumb and index finger. “I got a perfect safety record, twelve years and not so much as a dent until yesterday. But I don’t think they can hold a bullet hole against me.”

  I said, “You wouldn’t think so.”

  “So, these creeps push their way onto my bus, show me their picture, and ask have I seen you. I say not me, and get the hell off my bus. Then they start questioning my passengers. When they finish with their business, they don’t even bother to apologize for putting me five minutes off my schedule.”

  Slowly, he started to grin. “So, maybe I help them off a little.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Damned if my foot didn’t slip off the brake pedal a little and one of them sort of fell out. Hurt his arm pretty good, from the sound of him. Only it couldn’t have been too bad, cuz his friends didn’t take any bother about it. They just got in their car and went away.”

  He hadn’t answered the original question yet. I asked, “Did you follow them?”

  “Of course not. I had fares on the bus. As soon as I let them off, I sort of headed back over to Gabe’s to see if you might need a ride.”

  “You’re my hero, Leon.”

  He laughed. “Tell it to my boss. I might be looking for a new line of work real soon.”

  “Don’t clean out your locker just yet.” I lay back on the floor of the bus, ignoring how cold I was. “If anyone gives you trouble, I’ll put your sainted face on every television station in this country. When I get finished, the RTD won’t dare touch you.”

  “Okay.” He smiled. “But maybe I’m ready for something new.”

  I felt prickly all over from adrenaline wearing off. I longed for a hot bath, and for Mike Flint. I glanced up and caught Leon watching me. I asked, “The guy with the scar, do you think he’s dead?”

  “Be my guess.” Leon had a grim set to his jaw. “If no, I don’t want to be around when he wakes up.”

  I closed my eyes. “Where are we going?”

  “The cop house. I already had my dispatcher call to say we was coming in.”

  “Wonder if Detective Mareno will be there.”

 
; Leon chuckled.

  “What’s funny, Leon?”

  “How long have I known you, Maggie?”

  “Just since this morning.”

  “It’s been quite a day,” he said. “Quite a day. I never had one like it since I left Vietnam.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  “May I go home?” I asked.

  “Pretty soon.” Detective Mareno wasn’t as friendly late Friday night as he had been early Friday morning. He looked worn and gray and thoroughly dispirited. He had been a detective in peaceful little South Pasadena for fifteen years, a street cop for a decade before that. He had worked his share of robberies, assaults, and domestic cases. But Khanh Nguyen was only the seventh murder he had investigated during all those years. Until recent budget cutbacks, the county sheriff would normally take over any murder investigation.

  Mareno put Leon and me in the police station’s assembly room because that’s where the coffeepot was. Other than the desk officer and occasional patrol officers coming in on errands, Leon, Mareno, and I had the station pretty much to ourselves. The quiet was eerie, broken only by radio conversation between the desk officer and patrol cars.

  Leon wasn’t much company. He sat sprawled in a chair and snored.

  I complained to Mareno when he wanted to begin again at the beginning. “I’ve told you the whole sordid story three times now.”

  “Four.”

  “Okay, four. I have nothing else to tell you.”

  “We have bits of clothes and people in little plastic bags all over the place. Enough to keep county Scientific Investigation people busy for a week.”

  “Excuse me?” The desk officer came in carrying a large carton. “You want to sign the booking slips for this stuff?”

  “Give it here.” Mareno set the carton on the table between us. I could smell some of the contents, so it was no surprise when the crushed remains of my boxed dinner were handed out. Mareno flipped the box open to show the congealing remains of salad and salmon and flan. “This belong to you?”

  “My dinner.”

  “Why didn’t you eat it at the restaurant?”

  “I told you, I was uncomfortable being with my former husband. We finished our business and I wanted to leave.” I slouched down, pulled Leon’s jacket higher on my neck; my hair made the collar all wet. “I told you already, four times.”

  Next, he took the attaché out of the carton, opened it, and fanned through the papers. I had dropped everything when I knelt beside Scotty, and hadn’t thought about it again until Mareno asked me to go over the evening’s events. Like the dinner box, the attaché was soaked. The papers inside curled at the edges, but they were intact. I was glad to have corroboration, because Mareno had seemed awfully skeptical about parts of my story.

  “This yours?”

  I nodded. “Those are the papers I told you Scotty gave me.”

  Mareno reached into the attaché and pulled out a thick envelope. I hadn’t actually laid eyes on it before, but I knew what it was.

  “Where did this come from?” Mareno asked.

  “I told you. Scotty offered me cash, but I gave it back to him.”

  “If you gave the money back to him, how did it end up in the case?”

  I gave him the only answer I could think of. “Scotty must have slipped the envelope in before he handed the case over to me. Does it matter? I told you about the money, and there it is.”

  “How about this?” He looked in the carton again and this time brought up a twist of stained tissue paper. “Belong to you?”

  I leaned forward. “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Déjà vu.” He opened the tissue. A little jade dancer, similar to the one Khanh had been carrying that morning, dropped onto the table.

  “It’s an apsaras,” I said. “One of a set of twelve that was on display in a museum in Da Nang until the spring of 1975. It’s listed in the museum catalogue. I saw it.”

  “You think it’s very valuable?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then what was it doing in your dinner?”

  I picked up the little figure and smelled it: salmon étouffée.

  Like hitting replay on a video, I ran through everything Scotty said and did all evening. Scotty had two meetings scheduled, one with me, and one with someone else. I remembered how nervous he had seemed when I watched him from the bus shelter, pacing the sidewalk, checking his watch. My guess was that he didn’t want to go into the second meeting with either a wad of cash or the precious little jade lady on him. Ordinary, legitimate business acquaintances don’t normally frisk one another, so the meeting probably wasn’t either normal or legitimate.

  Mareno was watching me.

  I handed him back the jade. “Has anyone asked Khanh Nguyen’s husband, Sam, about the items that Bao Ngo stole from their house?”

  “Funny thing.” Mareno rewrapped the jade in the soiled tissue. “You told me about this alleged invasion robbery, but the husband denies it ever happened. Hasn’t seen this Bao Ngo in twenty years, he says.”

  “That’s what Sam Nguyen told you?”

  “Either he was lying to me, or she was lying to you.” Mareno rubbed tired eyes with his fists, the way a sleepy child does. “My first thought was insurance scam. But no claim was filed. Nguyen told me no claim would be filed.”

  I repeated, trying to make the pieces fit, “You said, alleged invasion robbery?”

  “What evidence do you have that it ever occurred?”

  “None. Only what Khanh told me. I saw bruises on her.”

  “Bruises, huh?” Mareno’s hand was back inside the carton. “People can get bruises in a whole lot of ways. You’ve got some honeys your own self right now.”

  “Has anyone talked to Minh Tam?”

  “We’re looking for him,” Mareno said. “He hasn’t been in his hotel room since early this morning. You want to see some bruises?”

  A new set of Polaroids was lined up in front of me. Crime scene shots. The one on the far left was a close-up of a face, or what remained of a face. Black eyes, the skin over the left temple burst open like the peel of a ripe grape. A deep gash in the chin showed bone. The rest of the face was discolored, disfigured, reduced to pulp. Over the caved-in right cheek, one colorless eye stared into nowhere.

  A second picture, a close shot of a torso with the outline of a car door’s armrest just as clear as if a vivid-purple felt-tip marker had been drawn on the poor man’s chest. One arm, an unscarred arm, was broken in at least two places. The close-cropped hair was so short that scalp showed through.

  “Is this the man called Arnie Bowles?” I asked.

  “I’m asking you.”

  I glanced at Leon, noisily snoring in his sleep, and reached for Mareno’s pen and paper. I wrote, “Was he killed by Leon’s bus?”

  Mareno also looked at Leon, a fleeting smile across his face; Leon didn’t sleep cute. He said, “Damn near. And given time, maybe his injuries would have taken him. That’s for the coroner to figure out. What killed him was a 9mm slug.”

  I sat up a little straighter. “He was shot? Who the hell shot him?”

  Mareno sorted through the Polaroids and picked out one. It looked like a gob of mud on the asphalt. “Blew off the back of his head.”

  “No one had guns. I would have felt any guns on Scar or Dowd.” I sucked in air, remembering. “Bowles sure as hell wouldn’t shoot himself. Who’s left?”

  “It wasn’t the guy you call Scar. We picked him up right where you dropped him out of the bus. He’s in the jail ward at County-USC hospital, pretty banged up. The one you call Dowd hasn’t turned up yet. But we’ll find him.”

  “Dowd told Scar that Bowles was his best man and he seemed really upset when the bus hit him. He wouldn’t go back and shoot his best man, would he?”

  “Would he?”

  “Maybe put him down like an injured animal? I don’t think so. And if Dowd had a gun, why didn’t he shoot Scotty? Much more efficient than a knife.”<
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  “Yeah?” Mareno cocked his head, waiting for me to talk.

  “And why didn’t he just shoot me right there? He had every chance.”

  “Guns make a lot of noise.” Mareno picked up his pencil and doodled on his pad. “Did it occur to you that maybe Dowd didn’t want you dead? And maybe he didn’t kill Scott?”

  “There was no one else around,” I said.

  “You told me there were kitchen workers outside. Could you identify them?”

  “I only heard them talking. I didn’t see them.”

  “You assumed they were kitchen workers. For all you know, the whole Mormon Tabernacle Choir could have been out there.”

  “True. I also didn’t see who stabbed Scotty.”

  “You said, you lost sight of Scott before the white Ford drove up. Scott could have been lying on the ground already when Dowd and company got there.”

  “The timing would be tight.”

  “But possible.”

  “Scar said something strange to me,” I said, trying to remember the exact words he used. “He said that I started all this. He said that I have to pay up.”

  “Started what?”

  “I wish I knew.” I folded my arms on the table and dropped my head on them, overwhelmed with exhaustion.

  “Let’s have a break,” Mareno said.

  “Yeah.” I closed my eyes.

  Mareno fiddled with papers for a while, and then I heard him putting things into the carton. And then his footsteps as he left the big room. Leon’s snoring devolved into a soft sort of purring.

  I don’t know whether I actually fell asleep, or whether I was dreaming or remembering.

  Mareno had walked me down the long, cold corridor at the county morgue earlier that night. We had to wait while the attendants at the receiving bay processed Scotty in. It was late, and all the day’s cadavers had been put away in the big coolers, but I could still smell them. The walls, the air ducts, were permeated with their singular odor.

  Under the cold fluorescent light in the green hallway, Mareno’s face was white. He asked me several times, “You okay?”

  I said I was, but it was a lie.