She turned and walked back to her van. Did I want to see Annalise burn Fidel down to a pile of bones? Did I want to sit alone in a motel room, TV blaring, while I knew she was out there killing him, or any of them?
Hell, no.
I drove back to my motel.
Annalise had promised to tell me what she learned about Wally’s pictures. She had never offered to pass me information without prompting before. Now, just as she was trusting me, I wanted to be far away from her.
My duffel was still in my room; I was glad I’d paid for the week. Then I showered and lay on the bed. I dreamed of a huge mob of women, all of them clones of Captain, weeping on their knees beside tiny caskets.
When I woke up, it was just six o’clock. The air-conditioning had turned the place into a fridge. My throat was raw from the dry air. I went into the bathroom and ran cold water over my hands.
I’d nearly died the night before.
It seemed like such a small thing. I nearly forgot my keys. I nearly bought new shoes. I nearly died. I looked at my face in the mirror, remembering the way the talon had clamped down on me, and trying to picture how it would look in the light.
I also remembered the Iraqi kid with the Jackie Chan DVDs—maybe he would have made it if he’d had an Annalise of his own at his back—an Annalise who threatened a woman’s son.
I left the room and got into my car. The filling station was packed; cars were lined up three deep at each of the pumps. After I topped the tank, I drove aimlessly for a while.
Annalise had offered to kill my old crew for me. I knew she thought she was doing me a favor, but I couldn’t turn the responsibility over to her. I had come here because my old crew was in trouble. I wanted to save them.
That was the hard part. I wanted to be a guy who saved people. I wanted to protect them from sorcerers and predators, but that wasn’t how this game was played. Arne and the others were being eaten alive by predators, and I had no idea how to save them. In fact, I was nearly certain it couldn’t be done.
I knew what I had to do. I had to kill them. Because it didn’t matter what they’d done, and it didn’t matter if they had people who loved them and kids to look after. Only the predators mattered. Not the people.
I said it aloud in my car: “Only the predators matter. Nothing else.” It was easy to say when I was here alone. It was a lot harder when I was holding a gun to someone’s head, or swinging a length of pipe in a crowded room. I had killed people to get at predators, and if I had to be honest with myself, I knew I’d do it again.
But I couldn’t kill a woman’s kid because she refused to give me a boat ride.
The Twenty Palace Society had changed me, but maybe I needed to do more to change the society.
I parked a block away from the Roasted Seal. I didn’t have a conscious reason to go there, but it was as good a place as any to take the next step. I walked through the back alley to confirm that it was empty before I went to the front.
The bar was busier than it had been, which meant it had ten or twelve people in booths or sitting at the bar. The bartender was new, but he looked enough like the other guy to be his brother. A pair of middle-aged women gave me the once-over as I scanned the room, but Arne wasn’t there, and neither was Lenard, or anyone I knew. One thick-necked guy with a crew cut looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was talking on his cell and looking down at his beer, not at me at all.
Most of the crowd were watching Mexican soccer on two flat-screen TVs mounted high on the wall. The surging white noise of the crowd was the loudest sound in the room.
Three tall, slender men occupied Arne’s booth. They wore waitstaff black and had stylish haircuts. They were victims; they wouldn’t know where to find Arne.
The back door had already been replaced, and the wall was patched with fresh spackle. Soon it would be painted over, I was sure, and all traces of that incident would disappear.
Behind me was the alcove Lenard had been standing in. It was a wait station, but there were no waiters here. The plastic tub was dusty, and the notepad on the counter had yellowed at the edges. Only the bar stool looked as if it had been used lately.
Lenard’s small locker was there, painted the same dark color as the wall. The lock had a little slot for a key, but I had something almost as good.
The urge to look around the room to check who was watching me was powerful, but I knew it would just draw attention. I took the ghost knife from my back pocket and sliced through the lock. The door squeaked as it swung open.
Right at the front was a Nintendo DS; Lenard liked his videogames, especially when he needed to kill some time. Beside that was a roll of cash no thicker than the cord of a vacuum cleaner. But in the back, hidden in the shadows, was a foot-high gold statue of a hairless man standing on a black base. The base was made to look like a spool of film, and a nameplate had Ellen Egan-Jade’s name on it.
Oh, shit. Was this what Lenard did when he thought he could get away with anything? This?
I snapped up the roll of cash. If he’d been standing beside me, I could have beaten the hell out of him. I could have kicked him in the nuts. I even, for a few moments, considered calling the cops. But no. I couldn’t do any of that. I took his money—let that be an expensive lesson. Then I’d tell Arne one of his people was keeping evidence of a rape and murder at the Bigfoot Room. I’m sure that would go over beautifully.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
It was the bartender. I shut the locker as I turned around. “I’m looking for a guy,” I said, unsure if I should use Lenard’s name or how best to describe him.
“Try a bar in West Hollywood,” he said, to general laughter. “This place is for people who want drinks.”
Now every face in the room was turned toward me. Only Crew Cut wasn’t smiling. Suddenly, I recognized him. He had been the one who tossed Wardell’s jacket at him in front of Steve Francois’s fancy white house. He shut his cellphone off and put it into his pocket.
At that moment the front door opened, and I saw several large figures backlit by the desert sun as they entered. Crew Cut slid off his stool.
I sprinted to the back door, slamming it open. This time an alarm sounded.
The alley smelled of garbage and concrete. I vaulted onto the dumpster, then jumped for the edge of the bar roof. Crew Cut and the rest of Potato’s crew weren’t idiots, even if they looked like they were. I was sure they’d have someone at the mouth of the alley.
I scrambled onto the roof, feeling like a coward. Which I was. Ghost knife or not, I didn’t want to tangle with anyone in Potato’s crew. The door banged open a second time, and I heard heavy treads scraping against the ground.
“Dammit,” a man said. Despite the alarm, I recognized the voice as Potato’s. “Gone.”
“He didn’t come this way,” a second voice shouted. It sounded farther away.
Another voice came from a good distance away. “Not this way, either.” I’d been right about the entrance to the alleys.
Someone opened the dumpster lid and let it fall shut again.
“How do they do that?” Potato didn’t sound annoyed at all. In fact, he sounded almost admiring. “Okay. This fucking alarm is going to bring cops. Let’s get gone.”
I risked a peek over the lip of the roof and saw them moving away. Good. Just as they turned the corner, I threw my leg over the sheet-metal roofing and hung by my fingers. It was a three-foot drop to the concrete, and when I hit the asphalt, I was face-to-face with the bartender. He scowled at me from the open doorway, the Oscar statuette in his hand like a bell.
“What the hell do you call this?” With the door open, he had to shout to be heard over the alarm.
“Evidence,” I shouted back. “And you’re putting your fingerprints all over it.”