Suddenly, Kearny felt better. He had a simile made sense to him, made it okay to take things slow with Jeanne, puzzle out what she needed. Minefield. He could live with that idea.
Where was he with the Rochemont thing? The would-be killer broaches formidable security defenses, gets by two pretty damned skilled investigators serving as guards, creeps upstairs to kill the sleeping Paul with a pickax — and suddenly it’s Three Stooges time. The head flies off the ax. The handle bounces away. Nobody is hurt. Inga not only screams so loud she brings the troops running, she identifies the attacker as an ex-lover computer nerd who promptly becomes Houdini at eluding the cops.
Paul’s car is shot up. Paul’s new car is blown up. Kearny’s car is almost rammed while Paul is in it, shots are fired... But as he’d told Giselle, shot up without Paul in it, blown up without Paul in it, not quite rammed, not quite shot. And the man doing all this wasn’t the man Inga had identified.
Not yet enough to start asking the clients hard questions. But plenty to start asking the hard questions elsewhere.
First, go down to the office and raise a little hell there, then go back out into the field himself.
O’B was stone-cold sober and feeling great. Not even a beer for breakfast. He’d left both car and truck parked in Tony d’Angelo’s driveway when he’d got home after midnight, so tired he could hardly see.
After unfastening his company car from the towbar he finished the condition report on John Little’s longbed. Then he drove to the post office, picked up the DKA mail from the box, and had a bacon-bacon cheeseburger with curly fries and a medium Coke at Jack-in-the-Box. Two spoons of sugar in each cup of coffee. Cut off the booze, you craved sugar.
Cut off the booze. Scary idea.
So was waking up with your nose in the floorboards of your car and your tongue tasting like used toilet paper, believing you’d been buried alive.
At the little printshop three doors down from the fastfood joint, a cheerfully rotund man with snapping eyes and receding black curly hair was inking one of the presses in the small cluttered room behind the counter. The place smelled of ink, paper, hot metal, and photo-developing chemicals. How long would he be lasting in the Internet Age?
O’B, who had decided a frontal assault on Blow Me Baby’s instruments would only end in disaster, laid down a half sheet of stationery with some hand-printed lettering on it.
Next, he laid down a page torn from the showbiz daily paper, the Hollywood Reporter, bragging about a $100-million-plus domestic gross for a big-star movie. The ad proudly bore the logo of the studio that had produced the film.
Finally, O’B laid two $20 bills on the countertop.
“Playing forty questions?” asked the printer.
O’B tapped his finger on the printing on the half sheet of paper, then on the logo in the ad.
“I bet you can’t print me up half a dozen business cards with this copy in the middle of the card and this logo in the top left-hand corner in two hours for forty bucks,” he said.
The twenties disappeared. “You lose,” said the printer.
Back at Tony’s after giving him the particulars, O’B checked for overnight faxes and phone calls.
Two new assignments and a closeout on one of his open files; he’d left his card stuck in the door and the guy had rushed into the bank and brought the account current. Probably thought that way he’d duck the collection charges. Sorry, Charlie. They just go onto your balance: at the end of the contract, no pink slip until you pay them all off.
A fax from Kearny, just a big scrawl across the sheet of paper: SHOOT THE ROTTWEILER. SHOOT THE SUBJECT. SHOOT THE MOON. GRAB THE TIRES.
The bastard had gotten his last report, telling what had happened to Tony and why, but did it touch him? It did not. He probably was waiting to enjoy the look of disgust on the paramedics’ faces when they had to give O’B mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after Nordstrom and his dog were through with him.
O’B simmered down. Tomorrow for the tires. Tonight for Blow Me Baby and their equipment. Today...
Today, pick up his new business cards, and then, after he opened the mail from the p.o. box...
“Shit,” he said aloud in the silent office.
It was a REPO ON SIGHT for a TV/VCR/entertainment center. His contract had been declared null and void. The subject: a man named John Little at 98392 Fallen Tree Road.
Yesterday his truck. Today his TV.
Maybe the poor bastard’s wife hadn’t really left him at all. Maybe the minister that married them had repossessed her.
Chapter Twenty-two
Ballard almost made it. He’d picked up his new assignments from his In box, he’d stapled all his copies of the memos on his various files onto the back of the case sheets he carried with him in his car folder, he’d made a few phone calls and used their results as if they had been fieldwork to dummy up four reports on cases where the clients were screaming for action.
He slunk down the back stairs and out past the Great White Father’s vacant desk. But just when he was starting out the big overhead door from the storage lot toward his car street-parked on Eleventh, he came face-to-face with Kearny.
“Reports are on Jane’s desk, Dan,” said Ballard quickly.
Kearny had been case-hardened by years of verbal battles with O’B over everything imaginable; Ballard wasn’t about to put anything over on him.
“There are three new assignments in your In box—”
“Going out on them now, Dan.” Larry patted his briefcase.
“And what about Danny Marenne?”
“I haven’t been able to...” Hey, Kearny wasn’t supposed to know about the Danny hunt! “I... ah... just spare time...”
“Well goddammit, get on it! Bev is worried sick.”
That stopped Ballard in midstride. How did Kearny know Beverly’s state of mind? At least, if he was yakking about field reports, he didn’t know about Bart Heslip. So offense was the best defense.
“Ah, Dan, could you, ah, anymore could you not do whatever it is you do in my coffeepot? I like to make only coffee in—”
Kearny uttered two rude one-syllable words and turned away. Ballard was sounding more and more like O’B every day. Which, the Great White Father reflected, probably meant he had turned into a pretty damned good investigator over the years.
The drive out to John Little’s house in the tall redwoods didn’t seem so long to O’B this time. The sheer falls didn’t seem so sheer, the deep shadows under the trees not quite so deep. Well, the day was yet young, and he wasn’t hung over.
O’B turned the company car in at the rutted dirt driveway, parked where the longbed had been the night before. He switched off the engine. The evergreen silence closed in around him.
Not silence at all, really. The kweee-e-e of a distant hawk. The chittering of a chipmunk under the house. The soughing of the wind bending the flexible tops of the trees. But you heard these sounds in a different way from man-made sounds. These were woven into the overall fabric of the forest, they blended into an impression of silence.
O’B got out of the car, slammed his door deliberately to break the spell, walked around to the front door. The rocking chair was empty. The porch creaked underfoot. O’B cupped his hands to peer in the window in the top half of the door.
John Little was sitting in an easy chair in front of the TV, his booted feet up on a stool, his guitar resting in his lap, his big clever hands moving on the strings. A half-empty whiskey bottle was balanced on one arm of the chair.
An ancient rerun of Hee Haw was on, Buck Owens and Roy Clark astrummin’ an’ ahollerin’, Hee-e-e-e Haw-w-w-w, hyuck, hyuck, hyuck. He opened the door and went on in.