The impact threw him thirty feet into a construction company’s dumpster. He was still alive when I got to him; still alive when the emergency ambulance arrived; still alive for the next twelve days. But he had suffered massive brain damage as well as internal injuries and he died on the thirteenth day of his coma, without regaining consciousness.
I was exonerated of any blame, of course-any legal blame. But Jackie Timmons had a mother and she didn’t exonerate me. He had a twenty-two-year-old pregnant sister and she didn’t exonerate me. He had street friends, neighbors, and they didn’t exonerate me. And I didn’t exonerate myself, not at first, because no matter what Jackie Timmons was and might have become, he had been sixteen years old and he was dead and his death was on my conscience. It was a long time before I could sleep at night without seeing him lying broken and bloody next to the dumpster on that rain-slick Emeryville street.
His mother screamed at me in the hospital when I went there to check on him a couple of days after it happened; she called me a damn murdering pig and worse. His sister spat in my face. But that had been the end of it. I did not see either of them again; I didn’t see any of his friends, either, including the two who had been with him that night, because the van turned out to be stolen and they were never identified, never made to answer for those particular crimes. There were no threats on my life, no attempts at reprisal-no repercussions of any kind. It was just a tragic incident in a profession filled with tragic incidents, buried under layers of scar tissue. You have to forget; you can’t go on doing my kind of work unless you learn how to forget.
Only now it looked as though somebody hadn’t forgotten. After sixteen years, somebody connected with Jackie Timmons not only still hated me enough to want me dead but to put me through the worst kind of torment before I died. It didn’t seem possible, this long after the fact-and yet nothing else made sense either. Thirteen days for Jackie to die… thirteen weeks for me to die. And for some reason, a span of sixteen between the two thirteens.
Sixteen. Jackie had been that many years old when he died; was there some kind of correlation between the two? Possibly. But what kind of madman waits sixteen years to avenge the death of a sixteen-year-old kid?
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I start to find out.
Part Three. Hunt
The First Day
MORNING
Sluicebox Lane turned out to be a short, carelessly paved street a third of a mile from the Pine Rest Motel. Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating took up most of the second block on the north side-a good-sized combination of pipe yard, warehouse, showroom, and business office. It was twenty of nine when I walked into the office and showroom at the front.
Water heaters, sinks, and small color-coordinated mock-ups of a bathroom and a kitchen took up two-thirds of the interior; the other third was the office, with a couple of desks arranged behind a low counter. Only one of the desks was occupied, by a plump middle-aged woman with streaky, dyed blond hair and a demeanor that just missed being bovine. She stood when I approached the counter, smoothed out the tweed skirt she was wearing, and showed me teeth any dentist would have been proud of, real or not. “May I help you?”
“I hope so. I need some information?”
“Yes?”
“About a customer of yours six to eight years ago. The owner of a cabin up near Deer Run.”
Wrinkles appeared in her forehead, creating a V that pointed down the length of her nose. “I don’t understand…”
“I’d like the person’s name.”
“You don’t know his name?”
“No, Ma’am. That’s why I’m here.”
“Why do you want to know his name?”
The impatience came crawling back; I could feel the muscles in my stomach draw tight. All right, then, I thought. Tell her who you are, show her the license. If she read or heard about the disappearance and makes the right connection, bluff it through.
I said, “I’m a private detective. Working on an investigation.” I got my wallet out and flipped it open to the photostat of my California PI license.
She said, “Oh,” with a small amount of surprise and nothing else in her voice, and looked at the license just about long enough to identify the state seal And if she noticed that I was clean-shaven in the photograph she didn’t comment on it. One of these placid types, born without much imagination or curiosity. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t give out information about our customers.”
“It’s very important-”
“Besides,” she said, “all our work orders and invoices are filed alphabetically. Without the customer’s name, I couldn’t very well… oh, Mr. Hennessey. Could you come over here a second?”
There was a door to the warehouse back beyond her desk and a silver-haired guy in his fifties, wearing a pair of overalls and duck-billed cap, had come through it. He angled over to the counter, smiled and nodded at me-I smiled and nodded back at him-and said to the woman, “What’s up, Wilma?”
“This man wants to know the name of one of our customers. He’s a private detective.”
The guy’s craggy face lit up at that, as if she’d told him I was somebody important or famous. He gave me a closer, appraising look and an even broader smile. “No kidding?” he said. “A private eye?”
“That’s right.”
“Like Magnum, huh? Mike Hammer, Spenser?”
“No,” I said, “not like them.”
“What, no fast cars and hot broads?”
“No.”
“Mean to tell me real private eyes aren’t like what you see on TV?”
“Not hardly. I’m just doing a job, the same as you.”
It was the truth and he liked it; it put him on my side. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. All that bang-bang, sexy stuff is so much crap, right?”
“Right.”
“Sure. It’s like I told my wife: Private eyes don’t get seduced any more than plumbers. I been in this business thirty years and I never had a customer try to get in my pants. Man or woman.” He laughed as though he’d made a joke, and winked at Wilma. She smiled dutifully, but without either humor or appreciation; the expression in her eyes said that as far as she was concerned, all men were little boys and sometimes it was a chore putting up with them.
I managed a small chuckle for his benefit. He liked that too. He said, “I’m Bert Hennessey, I own the place,” and poked a callused hand across the counter at me. I took it, gave him my right name-just the last one, in case he wanted to look at my license. But he didn’t. And the name didn’t seem to mean anything to him, any more than it had to Wilma. “So why do you want the name of one of my customers?”
“A case I’m working on.”
“What kind of case?”
“A confidential one.”
“Oh, sure. He live here in Sonora?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that he owns a mountain cabin up near Deer Run, on Indian Hill Road-or he did six to eight years ago. You installed a water heater for him, maybe ran some copper piping and did some other work on the place.”
“How’d you find that out?”
“The water heater’s got your tag on it.”
“Ah. Deer Run, you say?”
“On Indian Hill Road. Six to eight years ago.”
“Deer Run, Deer Run… oh, yeah, I remember. I don’t get many jobs up that way. Only reason I got the one you mean, the customer called three or four shops for estimates and I gave him a low one, even with all the travel time, on account of it was a slow spring and I needed the work.”
“Do you recall his name?”