Stalking the Angel

by Robert Crais

  “Nope.”

  There was a long pause. “If you don’t clear the drive, sir, we’ll phone the police.”

  “Okay.”

  I turned off the Corvette, got out, crossed my arms, and leaned against the fender. After about fifteen minutes the front door opened and two Asian guys came out and started down along the drive. They wore the same cute little gray jumpsuit some of the kids wore. Gray Army. Only these guys weren’t kids and they weren’t cute. They were close to my age and had flat faces and eyes that didn’t think much was funny. The guy on the left walked with his hands floating out from his legs like he was a gunfighter. The guy on the right bounced a nightstick off his thigh in rhythm with their stride and looked pleased with himself. When they got to the gate I said, “Hey, Kira didn’t have to send a welcome wagon. I’m touched.”

  The guy with the priest said, “You’re going to be more than touched if you don’t move that shit pile outta here.”

  I said, “Shit pile?”

  The gunfighter said, “You got no business here. You’re also trespassing. Beat it.”

  I took out my license and held it up. “Mimi Warren is being sought by the police and the FBI as the victim of a kidnapping. I know Mimi Warren is in there because I saw her. If I have to leave here without speaking with her, I’ll call the cops and the FBI and you can play tough with them.”

  The guy with the priest said, “Open the gate, Frank. Lemme kick his ass.” The license impressed the hell out of ’m.

  Frank ignored him. “You’re mistaken. There’s nobody here named Mimi Warren or anything like that.” Frank looked as if he didn’t like the thought of the Feds coming around. Probably had a couple of outstanding traffic warrants.

  I said, “There is, and I’m going to stay here until I see her.”

  Nightstick gave me you’ve-done-it-now eyes and slapped his open palm with the priest. “Open the gate, Frank. How ’bout it?” Neither Frank nor I looked at him.

  Frank said, “You gotta go.”

  I said, “You won’t be able to move me without the cops.”

  Nightstick said, “Oh, man.” He was smiling.

  Frank said, “Maybe not.” He was looking at me the way you look at someone when you’re remembering things you learned the hard way. He’d probably learned some things the guy with the nightstick would never know. He raised his right arm, and the gate lurched inward.

  Nightstick stepped back out of the way, then came around. He was smiling like a loon, gripping the stick tightly with his right hand. “Last time, asshole. Move it or lose it.”

  I hit him on the side of the head with a reverse spin kick just about the time he said lose it. The priest spun off against the gatepost and clanged against the gate and he was down on the drive. He didn’t try to get up. Frank hadn’t moved. He said, “What style?”

  “Tae kwon do. Know a little kung fu. Know a little wing chun, too.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Saw the kung fu there in the leg move.”

  “Where are we?” I said.

  Frank shrugged. “Guess I’ll go in and tell’m you’re serious about staying. The man says move you anyway, guess I’ll come out and give it a try. I’m better than Bobby.”

  “Yeah. I guess there’s that chance.”

  Frank hefted Bobby over a shoulder in a fireman’s carry, then went back up the drive. The gate closed. I went back to leaning against the Corvette. I waited.

  Twenty minutes later I was still waiting. Frank hadn’t come back, and it didn’t look like the cops had been called. Maybe they thought I bored easily and would soon grow tired and lax in my vigil. Maybe they were planning to wait me to death. Maybe they were all out back at the pool, grilling hamburgers and drinking cold beer while I stood around out front trying to look tough.

  I left the Corvette blocking the gate, walked back along Mulholland and around Asano’s ridge to a fire trail, and followed it away from the road. The fire trail angled down into a little erosion gully, then slowly wrapped around the ridge toward Asano’s estate. It flattened out across the ridge crest and came out behind a little concrete retaining wall. I scrambled up the slope and the concrete wall and found myself standing by a pool. The pool decking was stained and cracked and needed repair. The pool itself was a fifty-foot oval with a discolored bottom. A slim young man in black racing goggles and a black Speedo suit was swimming laps. He wouldn’t notice the Circus Vargus troupe rumbling past.

  At the far left edge of the pool was a tennis court. The court looked old and was flaking surface paint. Beyond it, the ground had been terraced in ascending levels up to the house. I walked along the length of the pool and up three stone steps and passed two young women coming around the tennis court. One wore red pants and a white blouse, the other a sleek lapis lazuli one-piece swimsuit. The one in the suit was quite pretty. Neither of them was Mimi Warren. I nodded and smiled and kept walking as if I had just had a nice conversation with the young man swimming laps.

  I walked along beside the tennis court until they were out of sight, then turned up a walk past several dwarf orange and lemon and kara tangerine trees. Fruit had dropped to the ground, and no one had bothered to pick it up. At the main house, a boy in the nifty Gray Army uniform was coming out of a set of French doors. I said, “They told me Mimi would be out by the pool, but I just went there and she wasn’t. Any idea where I could find her?”

  “Try the community room on the second floor.”

  I gave him a big smile and went in. The house was as large and open as it looked from the outside, with high ceilings and blond wood floors and plenty of glass to let in the view. It might have been nice except that the walls needed painting and the floors were due wax and there were cobwebs in the high corners. Maybe when you’re founding a revolution, basic maintenance just sort of gets away from you.

  Every room and every wall contained large wash paintings of beaches and dunes and flat placid lakes and other lonely places, all in pale, cold colors. There were quite a few tall and spindly steel sculptures. Some of the work was impressive. All of it was signed by Kira Asano.

  I was halfway up a wide curving staircase when Mimi Warren and her friend Kerri came around the corner and started down. Mimi’s nose was red and her hair looked like she hadn’t brushed it. When she saw me she took a half step back up toward the landing, then stopped. “How did you find me?”

  I spread my hands. “You’re supposed to be kidnapped. You go to clubs on Sunset Boulevard, you gotta expect to be found.”

  Kerri said, “Who is this?”

  I said, “Peter Parker.”

  Kerri looked confused.

  “Most people know me as The Amazing SpiderMan.”

  Kerri turned and ran back up the stairs.

  “Mimi,” I said, “you and I have to talk.” Somewhere deep in the house, doors opened and closed and footsteps sounded on hardwood floors.

  She said, “I won’t go back.”

  “I won’t make you go back.”

  She said, “You won’t?”

  Frank, Bobby, and another man came out of a door on the ground floor and looked up at me.

  Bobby’s cheek was swollen and beginning to color but he still managed a grin. Probably because he had a Ruger .380 automatic in his left hand instead of a nightstick. He aimed it at me and said, “Here’s where I put the fuck on you, asshole.”

  That Bobby. What a way with words.

  25

  Frank shook his head like Bobby was backward, and pushed the Ruger down. “Don’t be stupid.” He looked at the third man. “This is the guy from out front. Elvis Cole.”

  The third man was in his early sixties and good-looking in a solid, muscular way. He was deeply tanned and had crew cut hair and the sort of nose you get when you spend a little time in the ring. Kira Asano. He said, “What’s the meaning of this?”

  “Gosh,” I said, “I never heard anyone say that in real life.”

  Asano stepped forward and put his fists on his hips.

&
nbsp; I looked at Mimi. “Are you all right?”

  She blinked big eyes and scratched herself.

  “Answer me.”

  She nodded.

  I looked back at Asano. “You’re in a world of shit, old man.”

  Half a dozen kids had gathered below us in the big room, watching. Asano glanced over them, let his fists drop from his hips, and turned away. “Bring Mr. Cole along, would you, Frank?”

  Frank took the gun away from Bobby and held it down along his leg. Frank looked at me. He wasn’t Bobby, all right. “Come on.”

  We followed Asano across a large sunny room with a pool table and into a smaller room that looked out over the tennis court and pool and most of the San Fernando Valley. I didn’t see any more of the Gray Army. Maybe there weren’t any more. Eddie Ditko had said that once there had been a couple hundred members, but that was a long time ago. Maybe, like the house, the Gray Army’s time had passed and its smell had grown musty and it had fallen into disrepair. Old news.

  There was a glass desk in the room and some modern chairs and about a million photographs on the walls. On the largest wall there were several mounted samurai swords and a Japanese flag and a portrait of Asano in a Japanese military uniform. He looked young and strong and proud. The portrait had probably been done very close to the end of World War II. Asano went behind the glass desk, crossed his hands behind his back, and stared at me. When Asano walked, he had a tendency to strut, and when he stood, he had a tendency to posture, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of confidence to it, more like the strutting and posturing were habits he had developed a long time ago. He said, “You have no right to be here, Mr. Cole. This place is a private home which you have entered against my wishes. You are not welcome.”

  “I rarely am, but that’s beside the point,” I said. “Mimi Warren is a minor whom the police and FBI believe is the victim of a kidnapping. They’re looking for her and they’ll find her. I’m interested in her well-being.”

  Asano smiled reasonably. “Why would anyone think Mimi has been kidnapped? Does she look kidnapped to you?”

  “She staged a phony kidnapping when she ran away from home.”

  “Ah.”

  “Mimi seems to have a lot of anger toward her parents. I think she saw it as a way to hurt them.”

  “Ah.”

  “I think you had something to do with it.”

  Asano sat down. He put his hands on the desk in front of him and laced his fingers. “Don’t be absurd. I am the leader of a movement, Mr. Cole, a locus for the lifeblood of a system as old as any on earth!” He made a fist and gestured with it.

  I said, “Jesus Christ, Asano, I’m not fourteen years old. Save all the Divine Wind crap for someone else.”

  Bobby said, “Hey.” Bobby had been recruited a long time ago and nothing better had come along. He probably wasn’t bright enough to know, one way or another. Frank had been around a while, too, but he was smarter. He put a hand on Bobby’s arm. Waiting to see what I had.

  Asano made the reasonable smile again. He said, “If Mimi has done something as foolish as involving the police in a false crime, I certainly know nothing about it. Mimi is free to come and go as she pleases. Everyone here has that freedom. Gray Shield Enterprises and the Gray Army are duly licensed nonprofit political organizations of the state of California.”

  “Really aboveboard and oh-so-legal, huh?”

  Asano nodded.

  I said, “Is Eddie Tang a member?”

  Asano’s eyes flickered.

  I said, “Here’s what I think. Maybe you didn’t participate in the runaway or the fake kidnap, but I’ll bet you knew about it and that makes you eligible for a contributing charge. And I’ll bet you’ve got the Hagakure. That puts you on deck for grand theft, receiving stolen goods, and accessory before and after the fact.”

  When I said it about the Hagakure his hands started to shake and all the hard edges softened and he looked like an old man caught on the toilet. It hadn’t been Eddie, all right.

  Bobby said, “Jesus, Frank, shoot the motherfucker.” Frank shifted behind me.

  “The Hagakure has to go back,” I said.

  Asano said, “What are you talking about?” His voice sort of croaked and he looked at Frank. It made me wonder who ran the place. It made me wonder a lot of things.

  “She’s a screwed-up kid with garbage for parents and she came to you looking for something, and you screwed her, too. You had her steal the Hagakure for you.”

  “No.”

  “The kids you’ve got out there are here because they’ve got no place else to go. Not because of any ideal. The Gray Army movement is dead, and having the Hagakure isn’t going to bring it back to life.”

  Asano stood up. He started to say something, but nothing came out. He looked confused. Frank took a step toward him, then stopped. The Ruger was up now and pointing at me but Frank didn’t seem interested in using it. He said, “If that’s the way it is, why aren’t you here with the cops?”

  “Because the cops are going to want a piece of Mimi for setting all this up and wasting their time. If the cops were here they’d drag her home or maybe to juvie detention.” I looked at Bobby. “You remember juvie detention, don’t you, Bobby?”

  Bobby said, “Fuck you.”

  I said, “Maybe there’s a better way to do this than bringing in the cops right now.”

  Frank looked at me a little more and the gun lowered. “What do you want?”

  “The kid doesn’t want to go home and I won’t know what I should do about that until I talk with her. Maybe there’s a way to get her back home that will make things right for her.”

  Frank said, “Okay.”

  I looked at Asano. “Either way, the book has to go back. Maybe if the book goes back, nobody has to take a fall. Maybe, if things work out and certain people keep their mouths shut, the cops can be smoothed out.”

  Frank said, “That sounds good.”

  Asano went to the wall with all the photographs. There were pictures of Asano speaking to crowds and Asano with his Gray Army recruits and Asano riding in an open convertible in a parade. They weren’t recent pictures.

  Frank said, “If no one takes a fall, the Gray Army stays in business.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Everything stays like it is.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Asano blinked the way Traci Louise Fishman had blinked, but he wasn’t wearing contacts. He said, “Mimi has indeed been very distraught. Almost certainly due to the state of her home life.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If there were some way to ease those tensions. If there were some way we could bring the child and parents together.”

  “My thinking exactly,” I said.

  Kira Asano let his eyelids flag closed, and then he raised a finger. “Get Mimi, would you, Frank? If Mr. Cole can help the child in any way, we should encourage it.”

  Frank nodded and left. Asano watched him go, then drew himself up and turned to stare at his photographs, his only army an army of memories.

  His shoulders were wide and his arms were muscular and his legs powerful. His neck was taut and corded. Long ago, when his dreams were alive, he had probably been something to see.

  26

  When Frank came back with Mimi, I took her out the back and down along the terraced walks and past the rows of little potted fruit trees with their fruit rotting on the ground. Frank and Bobby walked behind us, the Ruger still dangling down alongside Frank’s leg.

  At the tennis court, I opened the gate and said, “Let’s go out here.”

  Mimi and I went to a table and some chairs they had near the outer edge of the court. Bobby started out on the court after us, but Frank pulled him back to wait at the gate.

  The court had been cantilevered out over the slope, which fell away sharply and bowled down into a deep ravine. On the fall-away side, the chain link fence hadn’t been woven with green fabric so you could enjoy the view while you played. Sta
nding there was like being at the edge of a cliff.

  I said, “You want to sit?”

  Mimi went to the table and sat.

  I said, “You don’t have to sit if you don’t want to.”

  Mimi stood.

  “You staying here full time?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anyone forcing you to do something you don’t want to do?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Could you leave now?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “If you wanted to.”

  “Uh-huh.” Mimi was staring down at the court. Little scout ants were searching along the white court lines as if they were great white bug highways. Maybe she was watching the ants.

  I leaned against the fence and crossed my arms and stared at her. After a while she looked over and said, “Why are you staring at me?”

  “Because I am the Lord High Keeper of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, and I am trying to figure out what to do.”

  She blinked at me.

  “Jiminy Cricket,” I said. “He was also Counselor in Moments of Temptation, and Guide Along the Straight and Narrow Path. You need that.”

  Mimi shook her head. “You can’t make me go back.”

  So much for Jiminy Cricket.

  “Yeah, I could. I could shoot Frank and Bobby and throw you over my shoulder and bring you home.” The skin around her eyes looked soft and nervous. “But I couldn’t make you stay. You don’t want to be there and you’d leave again as soon as you could. Besides that, I don’t think your going home is necessarily the best thing.”

  She looked at me with Traci Louise Fishman out-from-under eyes. Suspicious. She said, “You don’t bring me home, my dad is gonna fire you.”

  “He already did.”

  “He fired you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was supposed to provide security for his family and it didn’t stop his daughter from being kidnapped.”

  Mimi giggled that sort of nervous, red-nosed giggle, like maybe she was giggling at something else, not what you thought she was giggling at. She took a crumpled pack of Salem Lights out of her pocket and lit one with a blue Bic lighter. She took a quick, nervous puff. I said, “Was Asano part of that?”