Diane lay fully clothed on top of the covers, a damp washcloth on her head. She had rosary beads entwined in her fingers. When she saw me, she tried to smile but it just came out as a wince. Even from there I could see the purple lump just below her temple. Whoever had hit her had done it with some relish.
I stood above her, reached down and touched her shoulder. “Can you talk okay?”
“I can try,” she said. She was hoarse.
“Did you get a look at them?”
She turned her head almost imperceptibly from side to side. “They had ski masks. But I know who they were.”
“Who?”
“You remember what I said about that Cadillac waiting for Stephen?”
I nodded.
“How the two guys in the front seat seemed to be the same guy. Clones.”
“Right.”
“That’s who it was. Those guys.”
“The twins.”
“Yes.”
“What did they want?”
“Stephen’s tapes.”
“What did you tell them?”
She closed her very blue eyes a moment, as if gathering her courage. When she opened them, she said, “I probably got you in trouble.”
“You told them I had the tapes?”
“Yes.”
I reached down again and took her hand. “That’s fine, honey. You did what you had to.”
“I was just scared.”
“We all get scared, hon. We all do what we have to.”
“They’ll probably come after you now.”
“It’s all right.” I touched the washcloth. “Are you starting to feel any better?”
“A little, I guess.” The eyes closed momentarily again. “I could take a little nap.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“I really like you, Dwyer.”
It was said with such innocent force that it overwhelmed me momentarily.
“I really like you, too, hon.”
“I like it when you call me ‘hon.’ I sort of remember my dad before he died. He called me ‘hon.’ At least I think he did. At least that’s how I like to remember it.”
I took her hand again. “Sleep tight.” I smiled. “Hon.”
Downstairs Eler paced in the vestibule. “What the hell is going on here?” he said. He looked more than ever like somebody about to literally fly apart, like a science-fiction-movie robot coming undone.
“I don’t know,” I said.
And the hell of it was, I didn’t.
The theme of the Guns and Ammo show today was “Salute to Mercenaries.” I guess if there’s one type of guy I really admire, it’s the big crazy galoot who takes pleasure in killing people for dollars.
Backstage I got into my survivalist getup and then went out on the floor and looked at all the fat failed dreamers walking around in their berets and gun belts and flak jackets. You never knew when you’d be walking down the street and somebody would whip out a Beretta AR70 and let you have it. During my years on the force I’d built up a real hatred for many of these people, as had most of my fellow officers. The police officer’s job is dangerous enough without all these maniacs caching up enough weaponry in their basements to start WWIII.
“You look kind of down today,” Lynott said.
“I guess I am.”
“Anything I can help you with?”
“Nah, I guess not.”
Here was this guy I should have hated — the kind of guy who took slime like Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell seriously — the kind of guy who dreamed of blowing up cities the way other guys dreamed of humping movie stars — and I couldn’t help but sort of like him. Right now, given my mood, I needed badly to hate somebody, but hard as I tried, it wasn’t going to be him.
“Nah,” I said, “I’ll be all right.”
“Must be about a woman.”
“Why’s that?”
“Man looks a special way when he’s down about a woman.”
“Well, it’s partly about a woman and partly about a case I’m working on.”
I had said the right word. Case. It excited him. “You working on a case?”
“Yeah.”
He patted his gunbelt. “You need any firepower?”
“Maybe a couple of jet fighters in case I need to strafe a few people, but other than that I’ll be all right.” I could see I’d hurt his feelings. “Shit, look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m just in an asshole mood.”
“Well, God knows I get in those moods, too.”
“Maybe I’ll go have a smoke. You mind if I take a break?”
“Not at all.”
I had this notion of calling Donna Harris. For one thing I wanted to know what she’d learned about the tapes. For another I felt this need just to hear her voice.
“Well, see you in a couple minutes then,” I said, and took off.
This place had been built just before WWII as part of FDR’s vast plans for employment and urban improvement. To the people of that era it must have been spectacular. Stained-glass windows detailed America’s fighting men from the Revolutionary days onward. Beautiful work. I went up the stairs that tracked these windows to a small ledge where you could stand three stories up and look down into the river. I’m not fond of heights, particularly when I’m outside, but I needed some kind of charge at the moment to blast me from my funk. I stood on the ledge and looked over the city. On the backs of some of the buildings you could see faded signs that had been painted several decades earlier advertising Pepsi for a nickel and Hirschman’s Tailor Shop and the Regal Hotel, and for a long moment that made me feel better. Understanding my place in the blood chain of history was just the kind of abstraction I needed to forget my more emotional problems, and probably if I hadn’t been so rapt, if I hadn’t been perched there right on the tip of the ledge, probably I wouldn’t have been quite so frightened when it happened.
A hand shot out from behind me. Got me by the throat and held me there. “You could fucking die, pal, right fucking here, you understand?” He smelled of expensive after-shave and the sharp sweat of excitement. He was having fun with me.
I looked straight down into the muddy river and calculated my chances of surviving a fall. Eighty to twenty against, the way I saw it. Then he surprised me by jerking me back from the ledge and slamming me against the balcony wall.
At first I thought that I’d injured my head and was suffering double vision. There were two of them, and they looked so much alike they were impossible to tell apart. They were dark-haired with the too slick handsomeness of matinee idols of the forties. They wore California sports clothes, yellow golf shirts tucked discreetly into white linen trousers. But what they most had in common wasn’t what they wore; rather it was the expression in their amused dark eyes. A cynicism and urbane evil I’d never seen before. These two looked as if they were capable of performing any crime the human mind could conceive of.
One of them had a knife at my throat before I had time to slow my breathing down. “We want the tapes, asshole,” he said.
“I don’t have them.”
“We’ve been looking a long time, ever since the Chandler kid died, and we’re getting real tired. Now who’s got them?”
“I don’t know.” The knife smelled of oil and clean steel. Its point penetrated flesh to the right of my Adam’s apple.
He smiled. “For a security guard, man, you sure do get around.”
“I used to be a cop.” I knew instantly it was the wrong thing to say. Just the kind of line hip guys like these two fed on.
“Gee, a cop. I’m impressed. Aren’t you impressed?” he asked his twin.
“Yeah, I’m real impressed.”
“Protect and serve and all that happy horseshit.”