Stalking the Angel

by Robert Crais

  After they’d had their fill, Torobuni and the Big Shots went inside, and Eddie went over to a thin guy with nothing for a mustache and said something to him. The thin guy went into the main house and Eddie strolled around to the carriage house. After a while the thin guy came out of the big house with Mimi Warren and walked her over to the carriage house. He knocked once, the door opened, Mimi went in, and then the door closed. The thin guy took a walk down to the water.

  I stayed at the top of the wall between the branches of a Douglas fir and I did not move until something touched my leg. Joe Pike was on the ground below me.

  “Not now,” he said. “It’s too light, and they’re too many. Later. Later, we can get her.”

  34

  Riding back toward Blue Jay, Joe Pike said, “We can wait for dusk, then come in from the water. If we come in behind the boat house, the guards won’t be able to see us, then we can move up along the wall to the carriage house.”

  I nodded.

  “Or we could call the cops.”

  I looked at him.

  Pike’s mouth twitched. “Just kidding.”

  At Blue Jay, we turned east along the southern edge of the lake and drove to Arrowhead Village. The village is a two-tiered shopping and hotel complex on the southeast rim of the lake. On the upper tier there’s a Hilton hotel and a Stater Brothers market and a video rental place and a narrow road that brings you down to the lake. On the lakeside level there’s a McDonald’s and an ice cream shop and an arcade and a couple of million gift shops and clothing stores and real estate offices. There is also a place that will rent you a boat.

  Joe parked in a spot by the ice cream shop, and took a canvas Marine Corps duffel bag from the Jeep’s cargo space and slung it over his shoulder. Probably packed a big lunch. We walked down past the McDonald’s to the lake, stopped by a wharf they have there, and looked out. This close, the lake was huge, all dark flat planes and black deep water. There was a little girl with very curly hair on the wharf, throwing white bread to the ducks. She was maybe eight and pretty and gave me a happy smile when she saw me. I smiled back.

  Then I looked across the lake again and the smile faded. There was about an hour of light left. Plenty of time to call the cops. I said, “If we call the cops, they might blow it. The guys across the lake are pros. They’re there to protect Torobuni and those other guys, and they won’t hesitate to pull the trigger. I want the girl and I want her safe and if it’s me over there I won’t be worrying about something else when I should be worrying about her.”

  He looked at me through the mirrored lenses with no expression. “You mean us over there.”

  “Yeah.”

  The little girl tossed her last piece of bread, then ran back up the wharf into the arms of a tall man with glasses. The tall man scooped her up and heaved her toward the sky. Both of them laughed.

  Pike said, “You’re riding the edge on this one.”

  I nodded.

  “Be careful.”

  I nodded again. “No one has ever been there for her, Joe.”

  The little girl and the tall man walked back toward the parking lot. Holding hands.

  Pike and I went along the shore past boat slips and a tour boat dock and several small shops to a wooden wharf with a flotilla of little aluminum boats around it. There were kids on the wharf, and moms and dads wondering whether or not it would be safe to rent one of the boats so late in the day. At the end of the wharf there was a wooden shed with a rail-thin old man in it. He needed a shave. We went out on the wharf past the moms and dads and kids and up to the shed. I said, “We’d like to rent a boat, please.”

  “I got’m with six- or nine-pony ’Rudes. Which you want?”

  “Nine.”

  He turned a clipboard with a rental form toward me. “Fill that out and gimme a deposit and you’re all set.”

  He came around with a red plastic gas can and got into one of the boats and filled its tank. “Watch out for those rat bastard ski boats,” he said. “Damn rich kids come out here and run wild all over the goddamn lake. Swamp you sure as I shit peanuts.” He was a charming old guy.

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said.

  He looked at Pike’s duffel bag. “You plannin’ on doin’ some fishin’?”

  Pike nodded.

  The old guy shook his head and hawked up something phlegmy and spit it in the water. “Rich little bastards in their ski boats ruined that. You ain’t gonna catch shit.”

  “You’d be surprised at what I catch,” Pike said.

  The old man squinted at Pike. “Yeah. I guess I would.”

  It took twenty minutes to cross the lake. There was mild chop and wakes from the ski boats but the little Evinrude motor gave us a steady dependable push. Halfway across we could make out the houses that dotted the north shore, and a little past that I turned to a westerly heading, looking for Torobuni’s.

  Pike took the Colt Python out of the duffel and clipped it over his right hip. He snapped a little leather ammo pouch beside it. The pouch held two six-round cylinder reloads. He went back into the duffel and came out with a sawed-off Remington automatic shotgun and a bandolier of Hi-Power shotgun shells. It was a 12-gauge skeet gun with a cut-down barrel and an extended magazine and a pistol grip for a stock. It looked like an over/under, but the bottom tube was the magazine and had been modified to hold eight rounds. Pike had done the modifications himself. He put the bandolier around his waist, then took out eight shells and fed them into the shotgun. Buckshot.

  Torobuni’s elaborate dock with its boat house and slips and bright yellow sun awning wasn’t hard to spot. The stonework was intricate and beautiful and gave a sense of enduring wealth. It was easy to imagine long-ago times when life resembled an Erté painting and men and women wearing white stood on the dock sipping champagne. I said, “You see it?”

  Pike nodded.

  From the water you could see up past the dock and the boat house and along the walks that wound through the trees up to Torobuni’s mansion. The carriage house was to the right of the main house and about sixty yards up from the lake. On both sides of the property big walls started at the water. There were two guys sitting under the awning and another guy walking up toward the carriage house. One of the guys under the awning went into the boat house, then came back with a third guy. A man and a woman on jet skis buzzed around the point, looped into the cove, then out again. The woman was maybe twenty-five and had a lean body and the world’s smallest bikini. One of the guys under the awning pointed at her and the other two laughed. Nothing like America.

  Pike said, “Property to the right is what I was talking about. We put the boat in there and come around the wall, the guys under the awning won’t be able to see us.”

  The home next to Torobuni’s was a sprawling Cape Cod with a sloping back lawn and a new wooden dock. The trees had mostly been cleared from the east side of its property, but Torobuni’s side was still wooded and trees kneed out into the water. A sleek fiberglass ski boat was in one of the house’s two slips, tied down and tarped, and the house was shuttered tight. Whoever owned the Cape Cod probably wouldn’t be up until the weekend.

  We stayed well out in the cove until we were past Torobuni’s, then turned in and crept back along the shoreline. The sun was painting the western rim of the mountains and the sky was green and murky and cool. End of the day, and you could smell burning charcoal as people fired their barbeques. We tied up by the ski boat, then crept along the shore to the clump of pines at the end of Torobuni’s wall. We stepped into the lake and went around the wall and into the trees, Pike keeping the Remington high and out of the water. There were voices from the far side of the boat house and music from the main house and somewhere someone smoked a cigarette, and men laughed. We waited. The sun sank further and the sound of ski boats was replaced by crickets and pretty soon there were fireflies.

  We moved up along the wall to the carriage house and waited some more and pretty soon a short guy with thick shoulders and
no hair drifted out of the main house carrying a couple of Coors. He came over to the carriage house, kicked at the door, and said something in Japanese. The door opened and the guy with the cheap mustache stepped out. The mustache took one of the Coors, and the two of them headed down to the lake. Pike and I looked in a side window. One large room with a double bed and two lamps and an old wing-back chair and a half bath and no Mimi. I said, “Main house.”

  We slipped through the shadows to the main house, then along its base to an empty room at the front corner of the house. There were two windows and both windows were dark, though the door across the room was open and showed a dimly lit hall. I cut the bottom of the screen, reached through to unlatch the frame, then pulled myself up and went in.

  The room had at one time been a child’s bedroom. There were two little beds and a very old chest and a high shelf of toys that hadn’t been touched in many years. Other people’s toys. Torobuni had probably bought the place furnished and hadn’t bothered changing the little bedroom. Maybe he had never even been in it. Pike handed up the shotgun, then came in and took the shotgun back. Standing in the dark I could hear voices, but the voices were far away.

  We went out the door and along the dim hall, first me, then Pike. The dim hall opened onto a wider hall that ran toward the center of the house. There were a lot of old landscapes on the walls and a double door into what was probably a den or trophy room with antelope heads. Halfway down, a guy was sitting in a brown leather wingback chair, smoking a cigarette, and flipping through a Life magazine that had to be thirty years old. I took out the Dan Wesson, held it down at my side and a little bit behind, then stepped into the hall and walked toward him. When he looked up I gave him one of my best smiles. “Mr. Torobuni said there was a bathroom down here but I can’t find it.”

  He said something in Japanese, then stood up and I hit him on the left temple with the Dan Wesson. It knocked him sideways into the chair and I caught him on the way down and dragged him back into the shadows. No one shouted and no one fired shots. The voices from the back of the house went on. Pike took him from me and said, “Go on. I’ll catch up.” His glasses shone catlike in the dark.

  I said, “Joe.”

  He said, “I’ll catch up.” His voice was quiet, soft in the darkness. “You want the girl?”

  We stood like that, both of us holding the man, and then I nodded and let Pike have him. I went back into the larger hall and followed it past the den and into the entry. When Pike caught up with me, there was a fine spray of blood across his sweatshirt.

  The main entry was paneled and wide and open the way they made them in elegant old houses. To our right was the front door, and across from the front door there was a stair going up to the second floor. I said, “If they want her out of the way she’ll be upstairs. Maybe the third floor. Old house, the servants’ quarters were up under the roof.”

  We went up. There was an ornate landing and a long hall running the width of the house and no one sitting in chairs. At the west end of the hall there was another, narrower stair that went down to the kitchen and up to the third floor. Servants’ stair. I said, “Check the rooms on this floor. I’ll go up to three.”

  On the third floor, the walls were plain and the carpet was worn and it was still very warm from the summer sun. There was a rectangular landing with a tiny bath and two closed doors. I tried the first door. It was locked. I knocked lightly. “Mimi?”

  Inside, Mimi Warren said, “Huh?”

  I put my shoulder against the door and pushed hard and the old jamb gave. Mimi was sitting cross-legged and naked on a queen-sized bed with satin sheets. There were yellow roses in a vase by the bed. Her hair was brushed and her skin was bright and she was wearing a thin gold chain around her ankle. She didn’t look scared and she didn’t look crazy. She looked better than I had ever seen her. When she saw me, her whole body gave a jerk and her mouth opened. I touched my finger to my lips and said, “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  She screamed.

  I ran to her and put my hand over her mouth and pulled her close to me. She made a sound like uhn and flailed and hit and tried to bite and the roses crashed to the floor. There was a tall skinny window in the room, open for air, and down on the terrace there were shouts and the sound of running men and then the heavy undeniable boom! of Pike’s shotgun.

  I let Mimi scream and took her around the waist and carried her down the stairs to the second floor. Pike was at the top of the main stair, firing down toward the front entry. I said, “Back here. Stairs down to the kitchen.”

  He fired off three quick rounds, then fell back, reloading as he came.

  The servants’ stair was long and steep, and a man with one eye appeared at the bottom when we were halfway down. I shot him once in the head and lifted Mimi over him and then we were off the stairs. We went through the laundry and across the kitchen and through a swinging door into the dining room just as Yuki Torobuni and the midget with stupid eyes and the three guys from Japan came in from the outside. Torobuni and the midget had guns. The guy from Japan with the pony tail had the Hagakure. The midget shouted something and Torobuni raised his gun and I shot him twice in the chest. He fell back into the guy with the ponytail, knocking free the Hagakure. The guy with the ponytail threw himself in front of the two older guys and pushed them outside as the midget jumped forward, firing crazily into the floor and walls. Pike’s shotgun boomed again and the midget slammed backward into the wall, a crimson halo over what used to be his head.

  We were halfway across the dining room when Eddie Tang came in through the French doors. He didn’t have a gun. I pointed the Dan Wesson at him anyway. “Get out of our way.”

  That’s when the door behind us opened and the guy with the nothing mustache put a High Standard .45 automatic against the back of Joe Pike’s head. Eddie liked that a lot. “Man,” he said, “what a coupla assholes.”

  35

  Outside, cars were starting and there was more shooting and men running and then cars accelerating hard on the gravel drive.

  The guy with the mustache took Pike’s shotgun and .357 and my Dan Wesson. Eddie held out his hand toward Mimi and said, “Come on, Me. It’s okay.” Me.

  He didn’t snarl and he didn’t sneer and he didn’t treat her like a dumb kid he had used to get his way. He took off his jacket and put it around her. “You okay?”

  “It’s cold.”

  He rubbed her arms, cooing to her. He told her that he loved her, and he told her that they were going to be fine as soon as they got to Japan, and he told her everything was going to be just as he had promised. He said those things, and he meant them. Every word. It was not what I had expected, but then, things rarely were.

  I said, “You didn’t kill Ishida to get the book. You killed him because he wanted the book so bad he was going to hurt the girl to get it.” The yakuza hadn’t taken Mimi from Asano’s. She’d gone with them. Just like she’d gone with Eddie from the hotel.

  Mimi said, “Why can’t you leave me alone? Why do you have to keep finding me? We’re going to Japan. We’re going to be happy.”

  Eddie gave Mimi a little squeeze and tipped his head toward the Hagakure. “Get the book.”

  She padded over and picked it up and padded back. The jacket fell off and she was naked again, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  I said, “These people killed Asano, Mimi. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  Mimi gave me the out-from-under look, and there was something angry in her face. “He thought he was my father. He thought he could boss me just like my father.” Her eyes went red and strained. “I don’t have a father.”

  Eddie said, “Shh,” the way you calm a nervous dog. He snapped at the Mustache Man, pissed and wanting to know where everyone had gone, and the Mustache Man snapped back.

  I said, “You’re right, kid. You don’t. He bled to death where you dropped him on Mulholland Drive.”

  Mimi’s left eye ticked.

  Edd
ie said, “Shut the hell up.”

  There was a heavy thud from the front of the house, and loud voices, then another car roared to life.

  I said, “Hey, Eddie, you love her so much, how’d you help? You turn the crank? You say, ‘What the hell, off the old bastard?’ ”

  Eddie gave me uncertain eyes and I knew then that it had been Mimi. Just Mimi. Eddie probably hadn’t even known. She’d gone off, maybe slipped away from him, just done it, then come back and told him, juiced and a little bit crazy. Blood simple. You could see it in his face. Eddie Tang, yakuza murder freak, even Eddie couldn’t imagine killing his own father.

  Mimi pulled at him. “Let’s go, Eddie. I wanna go now.”

  I said, “She’s sick, Eddie. She needs to go back and work with people who know what they’re doing. If she doesn’t, she’ll never be right.”

  Mimi said, “No.”

  I said, “Leave her. I’ll see she gets help.”

  Mimi said, “No.”

  The guy with the nothing mustache shouted something, wanting to finish it and go, but Eddie ignored him. Eddie knew there was something wrong, but he was fighting it. “She goes back, they’ll put her in jail for killing her old man.”

  I shook my head. “They’ll put her in a hospital. They’ll work with her.”

  Outside, men crashed around the side of the house. Eddie barked something else in Japanese to the Mustache Man, then turned back through the French doors and yelled. Just as he did, a fat guy with no hair slammed out of the kitchen, waving a gun and screaming. Mustache Man looked, and when he did, Joe Pike took the High Standard out of his hand and shot the fat guy. I hit Mustache Man in the face with a roundhouse kick, and he went down, and then Eddie Tang was back in the house. It had taken maybe a third of a second.