Stalking the Angel

by Robert Crais

  He stopped to reload, still facing down-range, and said, “Want to shoot a few?” You see? Cosmic.

  I went to the stall where he had set up Rick’s tape player and clicked off the music. “How’d you know I was here?”

  Shrug.

  “We’ve got a job.”

  “Yeah?” Pike loves to talk.

  We walked down-range, collected his targets, then examined them. Every shot had been within two inches of center. He was delighted. You could tell because the corner of his mouth twitched. Joe Pike does not smile. Joe Pike never smiles. After a while you get used to it. I said, “Eh. Not bad.”

  We gathered his things and walked back along the dim corridor, me telling him about Bradley and Sheila and the stolen Hagakure and the phone call from person or persons unknown that had scared the hell out of Sheila Warren.

  He said, “Threat like that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe there wasn’t a threat. Maybe somebody’s having a little fun.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe the lady made it up.”

  “Maybe. But we don’t know that. I figure you can stay with the woman and the kid while I look for the book.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Pike was pulling off his sweatshirt when we walked out into the lobby. The fat man said, “Well, it’s about goddamned time,” and then he saw Joe Pike and shut up. Pike is an inch taller than me, and more heavily muscled, and when he was in Vietnam he’d had a bright red arrow tattooed on the outside of each deltoid. The arrows pointed forward. There is an ugly pucker scar high on the left side of his chest from the time a Mexican in a zoot suit shot him with a gold Llama automatic, and two more scars low on his back above his right kidney. After the fat guy looked at the tattoos and the muscles, he looked at the scars and then he looked away. Rick Barton was grinning from ear to ear.

  Pike said, “Use your shower, Rick?”

  “No problem, bo.”

  While Pike was in the shower I used a pay phone to call Sheila Warren. “I’m on the way over,” I said. “Bradley hired me to look out for you.”

  “Well,” she said, “I should hope so.”

  “I’m bringing my partner, Joe Pike. He’ll make sure the house and grounds are secure and be there in case there’s a problem.”

  There was a pause. “Who’s Joe Pike?”

  Maybe I had lapsed into Urdu the first time. “My partner. He owns the agency with me.”

  “You won’t be here?”

  “Somebody has to look for the book.”

  “Maybe this Joe Pike should look for the book.”

  “I’m better at finding. He’s better at guarding.”

  You could hear her breathing into the phone. The breaths were deep and irregular and I thought I could hear ice move in a glass but maybe that was the TV. I said, “You were pretty gone last night. How’s your head?”

  “You go to hell.” She hung up.

  Five minutes later Pike came back with a blue leather gym bag and we drove across town, me leading and Pike following in the Cherokee. When we got to the Warren house, Pike parked in the drive, then got out with the gym bag, walked back, and climbed into my car. Hatcher and his T-bird were gone. I told Pike about Berke Feldstein in the Sun Tree Gallery and Nobu Ishida and the two Asian Task Force cops.

  “Asian Task Force are tough dudes,” Pike said. “You think Ishida’s got the book?”

  “I think that a couple of hours after I saw him, someone threatened the Warrens. If Ishida doesn’t have it, maybe he’ll want to find out who does. Maybe he’ll ask around.”

  Pike nodded. “And maybe you’ll be there when he gets some answers.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The twitch. “Nice.”

  The front door opened and Sheila Warren stepped out. She was in Jordache jeans over a red Danskin top that showed a fine torso. She put her palms on her hips, fingertips down the way women do, and stared at us.

  Pike said, “The lady of the house?”

  “Yep.”

  Pike opened the gym bag, took out a Walther 9mm automatic in a strap holster, hitched up his right pant, fastened the gun around his ankle, then pulled the pant down over it and got out of the car. Maybe he was saving the .357 for heavy work.

  “Be careful,” I said.

  Pike nodded without saying anything, then took the gym bag and walked up to the house. He stopped in front of Sheila Warren and put out his hand and she took it. She glanced my way, then back up at Pike and gave him a big smile. Twenty kilowatts. She touched his gym bag and then his forearm and said something and laughed. She slid her hand up his arm to his shoulder and showed him into the house. I think she may have licked her lips. I eased the Corvette into gear and drove away. It’s a good thing Pike’s tough.

  9

  Little Tokyo was jammed with the lunch hour rush. Every restaurant on the block had a line of Caucasian secretaries and their bosses queued up out front, and the smell of hot peanut oil and vinegar sauces made my stomach rumble.

  A small CLOSED sign was taped in the door at Nobu Ishida’s place. It was one of those cruddy hand-lettered things and not at all what you would expect from a big-time importer and art connoisseur, but there you go. I turned into the alley behind Ishida’s just to check, and, sure enough, it looked closed from back there, too. Probably out for lunch.

  I turned back to Ki, then went up Broadway past the Hollywood Freeway into Chinatown. Chinatown is much bigger than Little Tokyo and not as clean, but the best honey-dipped duck and spring rolls in America can be had at a place called Yang Chow’s on Broadway just past Ord. If bad guys can break for lunch, so can good guys.

  I parked in front of a live poultry market and walked back to Yang Chow’s and bought half a duck, three spring rolls, fried rice, and two Tsingtao to go. They put extra spice in the spring rolls for me.

  Ten minutes later I was back on Ki Street, pulling into a parking lot sandwiched between two restaurants. It was crowded but all of the lots this time of day were crowded. I was a block and a half down from Ishida’s, and if anyone went into his shop through the front or came out through the front or turned over the CLOSED sign, I’d be able to see it. If they came or went through the back I was screwed. You learn to live with failure.

  The parking attendant said, “You here to eat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Three-fifty.”

  I gave him three-fifty.

  “Park anywhere. Give me the key.”

  I took a spot at the front of the lot, blocking in a white Volvo so that I had an easy eyes-forward view of Ishida’s shop. I got out of the Corvette, pulled the top up to cut the sun, then climbed back in. I opened a Tsingtao, drank some, then went to work on the rice.

  “I thought you here to eat.” The parking attendant was standing by my door.

  I showed him the rice.

  “In there.” He pointed at one of the restaurants.

  I shook my head. “Out here.”

  “You no eat out here. In there for eating.”

  “I’m a health inspector. I go in there I’ll close the place down.”

  “You got to give me key.” Maybe he didn’t believe me.

  “No key. I keep the key.”

  He pointed at the Volvo. “What if owner come out? I got to move.” He rapped knuckles on the Corvette’s door.

  “I’m here. I’ll move it.”

  “You no insured here.”

  “Okay. I’ll get out and let you move it.”

  “What if you leave.”

  “If I leave, I’ll give you the key.” People like this are put here to test us.

  He was going to say more when two Asian women and a black man came out of the restaurant. The black man wore a navy suit and had a small mustache and looked successful. The attendant hustled over to them, got a claim check, then hustled to the back of the lot. One of the Asian women said something to the black man and they all laughed. The attendant drove up in a Mercedes
420 Turbo Diesel. Bronze. He closed the door after each woman, and the black man gave him a tip. Maybe the tip made him feel better about things. He went back to the little attendant’s shack and looked at me but left me alone.

  The honey-dipped duck was wonderful.

  Four hours and twenty minutes later the Volvo was gone and the first of the early evening dinner crowd were starting to show up. The lot had emptied after lunch and another attendant had come on duty, an older man who looked at me once and didn’t seem to care if I stayed or left or homesteaded. No one had gone into Ishida’s shop or come out or touched the little CLOSED sign. Maybe nobody would, ever again.

  At ten minutes after five the cop who had made me in the yakitori grill walked past carrying a large white paper bag and a six-pack of diet Coke. The Grateful Dead tee shirt was gone. Now it was ZZ Top. I got out of the car and watched him saunter down Ki Street and turn into a doorway next to the yakitori grill. I waited to see if he would come out and when he didn’t I did a little sauntering myself and took a look. He and a cop I hadn’t seen before were across from Ishida’s in a State Farm Insurance office above the yakitori grill. Those sneaky devils. Who watches the watchers?

  I walked back along Ki, crossed over at the little side street, and turned up the alley behind Ishida’s shop. It looked the way it looked when I drove past six hours earlier. Empty. I went up to the loading dock doors and didn’t like the lock and went over to the people door and took out the wires I keep in my wallet and opened it. If the cops had had the rear of the place staked out there would be trouble, but all the cops were on the street side eating cheeseburgers.

  I let myself in, eased the door shut behind me, and waited for my eyes to adjust. I was in a dim, high-ceilinged freight room. Dirty light came through the little window beside the door and a skylight twenty feet up, but that was it. Boxes and crates were stacked ten feet up the wall. Some were wooden but most were cardboard, and most had Styrofoam packaging pellets or shredded Japanese newspapers spilling out. There was a metal stair against one wall that went up to a steel-grate catwalk and loft. There were more boxes and crates up there and a little office. If the Hagakure were here it should only take about six years to find it.

  I went through a hall at the head of the freight room and past shelves of bamboo steamers and into the showroom. The two desks were still there but the Hagakure hadn’t been left sitting on them. No one had left a note suggesting a safe place to store the manuscript or a photograph of the new owner with his prize collectible. There were memo pads and paper clips and a little purple stapler and assorted pens and pencils and a Panasonic pencil sharpener and an old issue of Batman with the back cover gone. I was hoping for a clue but I would have settled for Ishida’s home phone and address. Nada.

  I went into the brighter light near the front of the shop, put my hands in my pockets, and wondered what to do. From the edge of the shadows you could see into the insurance office above the yakitori grill. The cop I didn’t know was sitting a few feet back from the window with his feet up, drinking a diet Coke out of a can with a straw.

  I went back into the freight room. Ishida had come from the back. Maybe the little office on the catwalk was where he worked. Maybe there would be a little desk with pictures of the kids and a note to bring home some sushi and a Rolodex or some personal correspondence that would tell me where he lived.

  I climbed the steel stair and went along the narrow catwalk and opened the white door with the pebbled glass panel in it and smelled the blood and the cold meat and the death. It’s the smell that comes only from a great quantity of blood and human waste. It can sting your nose and throat like a bad smog. It’s a smell so strong and so alive that it has a taste and the taste is like when you were a kid and found a nickel in the winter and the metal was cold and you put it in your mouth to see what it would be like and your mother screamed that you would die from the germs and so you spit it out but the cold taste and the fear of the germs stayed.

  The little office was heavy with shadow. I took out my handkerchief and found the light switch and snapped it on. The guy with the missing finger who’d been out front my first time around was curled atop a gray metal file cabinet. His head and his right arm were hanging over the edge. His neck was limp, the front and side of it purple as if he had been hit there very hard. Someone had cleared Nobu Ishida’s desk of papers and ledgers and pencil can and phone. They had put all that on his swivel chair along with his clothes and then pushed the chair out of the way and tied Ishida spread-eagled on his desk, naked, arms and legs bound to the desk legs with brown electrical cord. They had used a knife on him. There were cuts on his arms and his legs and his torso and his face and his genitals. Some of the cuts were very deep. His bladder and his bowels had let go. The blood had crusted into delicate red-brown rivers along his arms and legs and had pooled on the desk and then dripped heavily onto the floor to mix with other things. The pool on the floor had spread almost to the door and looked slick and tacky. A gray stuffed Godzilla had been jammed in his mouth to smother the screams.

  I stepped around the blood to the chair and looked through the things that had been on the desk. Ishida’s wallet was still in his right back pants pocket. I took it out, opened it, copied down his home address, then put the wallet back the way I’d found it. I used my handkerchief to pick up the phone and called Lou Poitras. He said, “What now?”

  “I’m at Ishida’s place of business. He’s dead.”

  There was a pause. “Did you kill him?”

  “No.” I watched the pool of blood.

  “Don’t leave the scene. Don’t touch anything. Don’t let anyone else in. I’m on my way. There’ll be other cops but I’ll get there first.”

  He hung up. I put the phone down and stepped around the blood back onto the catwalk and pulled the door closed. I worked up spit and swallowed and took several deep breaths. I expanded my lungs from the diaphragm and expelled the air in stages from the lower lobes to the mid-lobes to the upper lobes. I tried everything I could think of but I couldn’t get rid of the taste or the smell. I never could. Like every encounter with death, it had become a part of me.

  10

  I went downstairs and sat at one of the two tables in the deepening darkness until Lou Poitras pulled up out front in a light green Dodge. A black-and-white pulled up behind him and the plain white van the crime scene guys use pulled up behind the van. Cops on parade.

  I went to the front door and opened it. Across the street, the ATF cops were on their feet in the big window, ZZ Top screaming into the phone, the other one pulling on a jacket. I gave them a little wave.

  Poitras said, “Knock off that shit and come in here.”

  If Lou Poitras wasn’t a cop he could rent himself out as Mighty Joe Young. He spends about an hour and a half every morning six days a week pumping iron in a little weight room in his back yard in Northridge, trying to see how big he can get. He’s good at it. I’d once seen him punch through a Cadillac’s windshield and pull a big man out over the steering wheel.

  He shouldered past me. “Where?”

  “In the back. Up the stairs.”

  One of the uniforms was a black guy with a bullet head and a thick neck and hands four sizes too big for him. His name tag read LEONARD. His partner was a blond kid with a skimpy Larry Bird mustache and hard eyes. Leonard mumbled something and the blond kid took the crime scene guys into the back after Poitras.

  “You don’t want to see?” I said.

  Leonard said, “I seen enough.”

  I went back to the two tables and sat. Leonard found the lights, turned them on, then went back up front. He leaned against a floor-to-ceiling case of toy robots with his arms crossed, and stared out into the street. You do this job long enough, you know what’s going to be back there even without going back there.

  The little door chime rang and the two ATF cops from the insurance office came in. They showed their badges to Leonard and then they went into the rear. When they passed
me, the one in the ZZ Top tee shirt said, “You’re in deep shit, asshole.”

  Lou Poitras came back around the bamboo steamers and said, “Jesus Christ.” He looked pale.

  I nodded.

  The blond kid came out like it was nothing. He went back to Leonard and said, “You should see that, Lenny.” His voice was loud.

  In fifteen minutes the place was swarming with cops like flies on a nervous dog. Someone had found a Dunkin’ Donuts and brought back two boxes of crullers and about twenty little Styrofoam cups of coffee. Crime scene specialists from the Hollenbeck Division were dusting everything and snapping pictures and asking me every two minutes if I had moved anything before they got there, and every time they asked I said no. Two guys came in from the L.A. County Medical Examiner’s Office, but neither of them looked like Jack Klugman. One of them had a twitch. More than one cop came out of the back and sat down with his face in his hands, and everybody pretended not to notice when they did.

  I was working on my second cup of coffee when the bell tinkled and the ATF cop with the bantamweight’s face came in. He was wearing tan chinos and a pale lavender rugby shirt and a light khaki windbreaker and Topsiders with no socks. Like he’d been at home about to sit down to dinner with his family. Poitras went over and talked with him and then they went into the back. When they came back, ZZ Top was with them. Poitras and the bantamweight came over to me. ZZ Top pushed aside the cruller box, sat on the table, crossed his arms, and glared at me. Cops are tough when they’ve got you outnumbered.

  Poitras said, “This is Terry Ito. He works out of the Asian Task Force, Japanese sub-unit.”

  I put out my hand. Ito didn’t take it. He said, “What were you doing with Nobu Ishida?”

  “Taking chopsticks lessons.” The muscles in the tops of my shoulders and down through my mid-back were tight and aching.