The Bohemian spoke. “Then what are you telling us? We’re not to chase down our own leads, yet you’re too busy to offer us help?”
“I’m telling you to quit being such damned fools,” Till snapped. “I don’t want you chasing down anything, making things worse, like your man Elstrom might have done last Sunday night.” He looked around the table. “Have any of you considered that Elstrom was spotted and scared away the bomber from the pickup? And that now the money is rotting somewhere, buried under tons of food waste and household trash, while your bomber is angrily planning something worse?” He glared down the table at Bob Ballsard. “But even more, I want you to quit being negligent with human lives. What is it about evacuation you don’t understand? You might have bundles of D.X.12 wired together all over your little community, wanting just one spark to turn you all into ash. And don’t tell me about your security; it’s for shit. Get the people the hell out of Crystal Waters.”
Till grabbed his wristwatch from the table, jammed it in his suit coat pocket, and stood up. “I’m done. Any questions, direct them to Chief Morris.” He turned quickly and left the room. Chief Morris got up before anybody could ask him anything and followed Till.
“Bob-” the Bohemian began, but Ballsard, red faced, was already marching out of the door. Stanley made a move to follow him, but the Bohemian motioned for him to stay.
“We must trace this Nadine Reynolds on our own,” the Bohemian said to both of us.
“You just heard what Till thinks of that,” I said.
“I also saw him fumble the lead about Nadine Reynolds. The man has too much on his plate.”
I looked at Stanley.
“Stanley has other commitments, Vlodek. You have to be the one to go to California to find Nadine Reynolds.”
“Chances are, she’s long gone,” I said.
“What other leads do we have?”
“Till said he forwarded the information to the A.T.F. office in San Francisco,” I said. “He’ll follow up.”
The Bohemian nodded, watching my eyes.
The clock ticked on the cinder-block wall.
“Surf’s up,” I said.
Eighteen
“How are you going to start?” Leo yelled into the phone.
I pressed the cell phone harder against my ear. I was next to a window at an unoccupied discount airline gate at Midway Airport, trying to get away from yelling kids, hysterical parents, and the bobblehead on the loudspeaker, so in love with his own voice he’d been paging the same guy for the past half hour. I like discount flyers; they’re cheap, and they take off the same day they’re scheduled. But sound bounces around their end of the concourse like monkeys banging on drums, and it’s always tough to talk on the phone. I moved behind a vacant check-in counter and crouched down.
“Say again, Leo.”
“Do you have a plan?” he yelled.
“Drive up to Clarinda, ask at the bank, start trolling the town looking for people who know her.”
“Why fly all the way to California? Hire a local. Or better yet, why not have A.T.F. do it?”
“That’s what I told the Bohemian. He doesn’t want to wait. Since Nadine Reynolds is our only lead, he wants me out there,Johnny on the spot, to pursue it right away. Besides, A.T.F. is easily derailed these days, getting tons of threat alerts.”
“At least the Gateville people are no longer buying the idea that the matter’s over, since the payoff’s been made.”
“No. Now they’re realizing that if getting five hundred large is that easy, this Michael Jaynes, or whoever, is coming back for more. What scares me is he’ll blow up something else first, to get us frantic before he sends another note. Next time he goes for a million, the A.T.F. agent said.”
The bobblehead was back on the P.A. system, this time with four new names.
“I told you, Dek,” Leo said when he heard the bobblehead pause for air.
“Told me what?”
“Told you you’d get lucky with a lead. I just didn’t think it would be this quick.”
“Or this good. A bona-fide link to a name.”
The boarding call for my flight came over the loudspeaker. I told Leo I had to go.
“Dek?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t let the California beach babes touch your privates.”
I laughed, sort of.
If I’d owned a surfboard, I would have been angry I’d packed it. San Francisco Airport was cold, fifty-five degrees, and rainy when my flight landed at three that afternoon. I took the shuttle to the car rental building and stood in line at Avis. When it was my turn, I told the blond lady I wanted a convertible. It’s been raining for days, the lady said. They had plenty, Mustangs and Sebrings. What did I want? I said red.
I snailed north on 101, one more clot in the afternoon rush hour. To the north, San Francisco was invisible in the soup. Afteran hour, and maybe ten miles, 101 dissolved into a maze of city streets. I kept on for another ten minutes, following the traffic and looking for a gas station to ask for directions, when the Golden Gate Bridge came out of the mist like a ghost ship, not gold at all but a rusty red-orange, almost the same hue as Willadean the Electric Lady’s hair.
I drove across the bay, into the green haze of hills in Sausalito and Mill Valley. By now, the traffic had thinned and the rain had stopped. It was six thirty. And it was California. Fifty-five degrees or not, I pulled over, dug a sweater from my duffel to put on under my windbreaker, slipped on my Cubs cap to alert the Californians I was a tourist, and dropped the top of the Sebring.
I cut west, over to Highway 1, the old two-lane blacktop that chases the crags of the California coast. The airline magazine said it was all hairpin turns and switchback curves, offering views of protected land and undeveloped shoreline that were not to be missed. The airline writer was no romantic, but she was right. I got stuck behind two flatbed produce trucks lumbering through gear changes and a vanload of gawking tourists, their heads stuck out their windows like pigeons begging for peanuts, and I didn’t mind at all. In the mist, the rock formations down in the froth along the shore looked like herds of prehistoric dinosaurs, hunkering down in the shallow waters for the night.
The road curved inland, and I drove through farmland that looked like Iowa until it curved back again to the sea. I got to Bodega Bay at dark. Clarinda was due north, and Santa Rosa, boyhood home of Michael Jaynes, was east. I opted for neither and pulled off in front of an old frame motel right on Bodega Bay.
While the dark-haired teenaged girl processed my credit card, I thumbed through a guidebook for sale on the counter. It said that Bodega Bay was the film site of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I remembered three scenes in the movie: a house that was attacked by birds, a school that was attacked by birds, and a café where atweedy old lady, who resembled a bird, opined that doom was in the offing. The guidebook said the house had been extensively modified with plywood by Hitchcock and had never been a recognizable tourist site once the plywood was removed; the school wasn’t in the town at all, but several miles to the east; and the café had been expanded so often it no longer looked like the place in the movie. Welcome, film buffs, to Bodega Bay, site of The Birds.
The girl handed me my room key and told me that the restaurant across the street would close in half an hour. I have that kind of face; it always looks hungry. I left my bag in the car and ambled across Highway 1, deserted now, in the dark, of trucks and tourists. The restaurant was old and paneled and apparently had not been featured in The Birds, but it was serving sea bass and lime pie, and I had both, with coffee, although it was late for caffeine, past ten o’clock. I was the only customer, and the waitress, a nervous woman without much of a smile, left me alone. At eleven, having successfully fended off starvation for another night, I walked back across the highway. My room was old enough to have windows that opened all the way, and I fell asleep listening to the water lap at the pier pilings, remembering another such place, on an inlet off Lake Michigan, where Amanda and I stayed once when we were married.