Angels (Nevada James #3) (Nevada James Mysteries) (9 page)

Chapter 11

I spent a
few minutes in my car trying to figure out what to do next. Getting food and
going home was about all I could come up with. I had nothing else to
investigate.

I didn’t
really want to go home, though. I had nothing to do there and it seemed like
I’d run through Netflix’s entire catalog. I’d just wind up staring at the
ceiling and obsessing over the bottle of vodka in my cabinet. I was pretty sure
I wouldn’t touch it, but you could never be too sure about that kind of thing.

It was
nearly 5:30, which meant the A.A. meeting I occasionally went to was starting
soon. I hadn’t been there in quite a while. It wouldn’t kill me to spend an
hour commiserating with the drunks. It would at least be something to do.

The
meeting was in a side room at a small Lutheran church downtown, a few blocks
from SDPD headquarters. Only cops knew about it, and hence only cops attended.
A.A. was open to anyone, but there were certain private groups for people who
couldn’t afford to have their identities made public in case someone got too chatty.
Airline pilots were one example. Cops were another. If you got pulled over for
drunk driving and recognized the officer who was arresting you from your
meeting, you could bet that was going to come up in court.

I
reached the church a few minutes late. The chairs had already been put in a
circle and Miranda Callies, a cop I knew from the gang unit, was asking the
group if anyone had anything pressing they wanted to discuss. She looked
surprised to see me, and my appearance raised a few eyebrows. I wasn’t sure if
that was because I hadn’t been here in a while, or whether the marks on my face
were raising questions. It could easily have been both.

I poured
coffee into a Styrofoam cup and sat down. Most of the cops here I knew. Jason
London from Narcotics pointed at his face and mouthed a question as he looked
at mine. Yeah, the stitches were going to be a thing. I should have known.

Paul
Wilkins wasn’t in the room, which surprised me. He was a retired cop who had
been the training officer for Sarah Winters and enough other cops that everyone
knew him. A.A. didn’t have leaders in any traditional sense, but he generally
ran things. I couldn’t remember him ever missing a meeting.

“Well,”
Miranda said after I’d taken a seat. “Maybe we should start by asking if anyone
has any anniversaries for special days they’re celebrating today.” She looked
at me pointedly.

At first
I wasn’t sure what she meant. Then it occurred to me. She had a calendar,
didn’t she? “I’m Nevada,” I said. “I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi,
Nevada,” everyone said. It was the standard A.A. call-and-response. I’d heard
it a hundred times before. There was something almost comforting about the
routine.

“I guess
I really haven’t been here in a while,” I said. “I...I guess I got a year a
while back. I just haven’t been in to tell you guys about it yet.”

Everyone
clapped. “Did you get a coin?” Miranda asked.

“No,” I
said. She went over to a cabinet and took out a plastic box that looked like it
had been meant to carry fishing lures. It held the various coins people
received for varying lengths of sobriety. There was one for 24 hours, then
coins for one through eleven months, and then they went up by year. I’d seen
them for as many as 22 years and I was sure they made them for longer amounts
of time, but I couldn’t imagine those got handed out very often.

Miranda fished
a coin out and put the box back in the cabinet. She walked over to me. “Well,
stand up,” she said.

I stood.
Miranda hugged me. I wasn’t a hugger. I patted her on the back twice and waited
for her to let me go. Once she did she handed me the coin. “I wasn’t sure you’d
make it,” she said quietly.

“Yeah,”
I said. “Me neither.” I looked at the coin. A year. I had a little more time
than that, but this was close enough. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do
with it. Put it in a picture frame? Keep it in my pocket? Probably I’d do
neither of those things.

Miranda
headed back for her chair. “Speech!” Jason London called.

“Nah,” I
said. I sat down. “Not today. I’m just going to listen.”

“At
least tell us what happened to your face,” Jason said.

“Later.”

The
meeting proceeded the way they usually did. Some people spoke when it was their
turn. Some people passed. A.A. was kind of like group therapy, I supposed. I’d
never actually been to group therapy, but I couldn’t imagine it went any
differently than this.

We
closed with the Serenity Prayer and then most of the attendees started to file
out. Jason and Miranda came and sat down next to me, as I was sure they would. They
were the only people I really thought of as friends here, although I was still
kind of pissed at Jason. He’d been the one who had brought the Anita Collins
case to me, and that had been a debacle. It wasn’t really his fault, but I’d
still been pretty mad at him about it. “So,” Jason said. “Your face.”

“Jumped
through a window,” I said. “Long story.” I told them about it.

Jason shook
his head while Miranda chuckled. “That’s so
you
,” Miranda said.

“I guess
it is,” I said. It wasn’t like I could argue with them. Jumping through a
window wasn’t anywhere close to the most insane thing I’d ever done. I looked
around. “Where’s Paul today? He never misses a meeting.”

Jason
looked away. “He’s in the hospital,” Miranda said.

“Oh?” I
asked. “Is everything all right?”

“It’s
his liver,” Jason said. He shook his head. “Things don’t look good.”

My heart
sank. “He’s been sober for twenty years,” I said. “More than that.”

“Yeah.”
Miranda sighed. “The damage was done. It just took a long time to catch up with
him.”

I looked
at the floor. What was I supposed to say? That Paul was living through my worst
fear? “I guess it gets all of us in the end,” I said.

“Some of
us, anyway,” Miranda said. “He’s a candidate for  a transplant, though, so
there’s hope.”

“At
least there’s that,” Jason said. “I have to tell you, I hope I never end up
like that. Have you ever seen someone die of liver failure?”

“No,” I said.
“I’m guessing it’s pretty rough, though. You?”

“My
uncle.” Jason shook his head. “It took a long time. Your liver dies and then you
have to wait for your body to catch up to it. It’s terrible. If it was me I
think I’d just put a gun in my mouth.”

Truth be
told, I’d probably do the same thing. I guessed I’d be finding out in a few
years. Or whenever the hospital called with my test results. That could only be
bad news, after all.

“You
should go see him,” Miranda said.

“I’m not
much for hospitals,” I said. Besides that, I couldn’t imagine what I’d be able
to say that would have made him feel better. I was pretty damn far from a ray
of sunshine, and that was on my best day. It had been a while since I’d had a
best day.

“He’s in
good spirits,” Jason said. “He was cracking jokes when I was in there last week.”

I nodded
half-heartedly, hoping that would be taken as a sign of my acquiescence and that
the conversation would be over. “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Do either
of you have three unsolved murders on your desks? They might be linked, or
maybe they wouldn’t, but there’s just something off about them?”

“Here we
go,” Jason said. “Nevada’s back on the job again.”

“I’m
just looking into something,” I said. “And I’d rather Dan Evans didn’t find out
about it.”

“What
are you into, Nevada?” Miranda asked.

I told
them about what had happened with Krystal. It wasn’t a pleasant story, but it
was a good excuse to stop talking about Paul being in the hospital. When I was
done Miranda bit her lip. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll mention this to Dan if I
see him.”

“Why
not?” Jason asked. “It’s not a secret that he wants you back in the department.”

“Well,
I’m not going back,” I said. “And he’ll be pretty pissed if he finds out I’m
running around working cases behind his back.”

“Fair
enough,” Jason said. “Well, sorry, but I don’t have anything like that.”

“Me,
neither,” Miranda said. “I haven’t even heard of anything that fits your
description. Do you think Krystal was on the level?”

“I
don’t  know,” I said. “I think so, but it’s hard to say for sure.”

“Could
have been trying to scam you,” Jason said. He put a hand on my forearm. The
violation of my personal space was duly noted. “Junkies will say pretty much
anything when they get desperate. I should know. I was one.”

I shifted
my arm away from Jason’s hand, doing it gently enough that it wouldn’t seem
like I was reacting as if he’d dropped a spider on me. One had to maintain the
appearance of a person who wasn’t totally crazy. Or had he been hitting on me?
I’d never been sure with him. If he was, that story wasn’t going to have the
ending he was hoping for. “She’d never lied to me before,” I said. “Maybe she
was this time. It’s just a weird play, though. She calls me after all these
years, out of the blue, hoping I’ll give her money for drugs? I mean, that’s a
longshot.”

“At
best,” Miranda nodded. “I’d guess she was on the level. I just don’t see how
Homicide wouldn’t know about this.”

“The
connection won’t be obvious,” I said.

“It’s
too bad you can’t get a look at their files,” Jason said.

“Yeah.
Too bad.” I hadn’t mentioned Sarah Winters was already doing that for me. I
didn’t think either of them would slip up and tell someone they shouldn’t, but
there was no reason to take the chance.

“Anyway,
I should go,” I said. I stood up. “I’ve got a lot of important sitting around
to do.”

“You
free for dinner?” Jason asked. “We should catch up.”

An alarm
went off in my head. Now I thought the hand on my arm had been deliberate.
“Another time,” I said. “I scratched at my stitches. “This is really starting
to bother me. I’m going to take some Advil and lie down.”

Miranda
stood up and hugged me again. Why did people always feel the need to do that?
“Take care of yourself,” she said. “And go see Paul. He likes the company.”

“Yeah,”
I said. “I will.” But realistically, what were the odds I was actually going to
do that?

Chapter 12

I checked
my mail when I got home. There was a catalog from a company I’d never shopped
at, a flyer from Pizza Hut, and a green envelope roughly the correct size to
hold a greeting card. It didn’t have a return address, and the writing on the
front looked like it had been done by someone using their wrong hand. It
probably had been. I knew who the card was going to be from. The Laughing Man
was saying hello again.

I waited
until I was inside and had the doors locked and the security system on before I
opened it. Inside I found a cheerful card with a depiction of puppies at play
on the front. The Laughing Man had written, “Thinking of you,” on the inside. And
he’d drawn the face, of course. The face was on everything he’d sent me over
the years. That horrible, laughing face. It was a simple drawing, but it never
failed to give me chills.

I turned
the card over, but he hadn’t written anything on the back. Thinking of you?
That was it? He normally only sent cards on my birthdays and holidays. Maybe
he’d been lonely. If that was true, I could probably expect to hear from him
again soon.

After a
moment I took the card to a hall closet and tossed it inside. That was where I
kept all of the things he’d sent me over the years. Well, except the flowers he
occasionally had delivered. I wasn’t going to store dead flowers. Technically I
was supposed to turn over everything that came from him to the crime lab so
they could go over it for fingerprints and traces of DNA, but I never bothered.
The Laughing Man wasn’t going to lick an envelope and hope we couldn’t match
his DNA to a database somewhere. To be honest, I didn’t know if the police
department even had that capability, anyway. I was pretty sure the FBI did,
though, and they also wanted a shot at him. That was just too bad. He was mine.

I ended
up microwaving a bowl of instant noodles for dinner. I wasn’t hungry. I had a
lot on my mind, and that tended to kill my appetite.

About an
hour after I woke up the next morning my phone rang. It was Abercrombie. “I
need to see you,” he said.

“You
have something for me?”

“Of
course I have something for you, Nevada. That’s why I’m calling you.”

“You
can’t just tell me what it is over the phone?” I asked. I smirked, even though
I knew he couldn’t see me. “Let me guess. Krystal was a spy. Do we need to meet
in a darkened parking garage somewhere and flash our headlights at each other?
I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“Stop
being a smartass,” he said. “I have something to tell you, and some things need
to be said face to face.”

That
threw me for a loop. Abercrombie and I enjoyed a sarcastic banter most of the
time. At least, I enjoyed it, and I was pretty sure he did, too. He sounded serious
now. “Okay.”

“The
Jiffy Lube on El Camino. Twenty minutes.”

“Are you
getting your oil changed?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh,” I
said. I honestly wasn’t sure what answer I’d expected him to give me.

“You’re
getting your oil changed, too. We’ll talk in the lobby.”

“I don’t
need to get my oil changed.”

“I don’t
care,” he said. “You need a reason to be there. They don’t let people just come
in to enjoy their shitty free coffee.”

I
sighed. “Fine,” I said. “Twenty minutes.” I hung up on him.

It
didn’t take me twenty minutes to reach the Jiffy Lube, but I loitered in my car
until that much time had passed and then drove it into a bay to be serviced.
Abercrombie was waiting for me in the otherwise deserted lobby. He wore a sport
coat and khakis. As always, he looked like a model from a catalog.

I
pointed at the chair next to him. “Pardon me, person I have never met before.
Is that seat taken?”

Abercrombie
made a face at me. “Sit down already.”

I sat.
Abercrombie stood, to my surprise. He crossed over to a television mounted on
the wall that was showing a local news show and used the button on the front to
turn the volume up a few notches. I supposed he thought that would drown out
our voices if anyone happened to walk in and be in a position to overhear us.
Or maybe he was worried about recording devices. I doubted anyone was bugging
the Jiffy Lube, but I guess a person couldn’t be too careful.

When
that was done he came over and sat down. “Are you getting a little paranoid?” I
asked. “What was it you couldn’t tell me on the phone?”

He
hesitated for a moment, and then held up his left hand. A diamond ring was on
his finger. It hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen him. I’d have
remembered a rock that size. It probably cost more than my car.

“Oh,” I
said. “Fitch proposed.”

“He
did.”

I was
terrible with social niceties and had to struggle to think of something to say.
“Congratulations, Abercrombie. I’m happy for you. I mean, I don’t actually know
you, or Fitch, but I’m still happy for you.”

“Thank
you,” he said. He looked at the ring. “I wear this thing pretty well, don’t I?”

I
shrugged. “It’s a little big for my taste.”

He
smirked. “You strike me as someone who’d want something…well, not so much
exotic as unusual. Unconventional. Like a rock you found on the beach.”

“If it
was a really special rock, I guess. I don’t want just any old rock.”

This was
easily the most personal conversation Abercrombie and I had ever really had.
Did getting engaged make people sentimental? Was he supposed to talk next, or
was it me? I decided to go ahead. “I never thought about it much,” I said.
“It’s hard for me to imagine
me
getting married. Not with the life I
have. I’ll be lucky to be alive a year from now. I’m sure as hell never going
to reach 40.”

He
didn’t say anything for a moment. Was I supposed to talk again? But then he
said, “What if you did, though?”

“What?”

“Live.
What if you lived, Nevada? Would you still want to be living
this
life?”

What the
hell was going on right now? “Are you having some kind of existential crisis on
me, Abercrombie?”

He
turned the ring back and forth on his finger. “This thing has been making me
think,” he said. “About
my
future. About family. About how I can’t still
be doing this in ten years. I mean, not when I’m a father. My entire life is a
doing string of things that the government would put me away for forever if
they caught me. I’m going to have to stop. Fitch, too. We’ll have to live
normal lives.”

I had no
idea how to respond to that. What he was saying made sense, but I was nowhere
near qualified to give an opinion about somebody else’s lifestyle. I was a
train wreck.

“Anyway,
Nevada, I think you have to stop, too. Stop with all this Laughing Man shit.”

I
blinked. “Did you know about the card?” Was Abercrombie monitoring my mail now?

He
looked at me, confused. “What?”

“Nothing,”
I said. “But…are you being serious right now? Every time I see you all I get
are questions about what I’m doing to catch the Laughing Man. You aren’t always
polite about it.”

“Scott
wants him,” Abercrombie said. “I understand that. I want to see justice for
Scott and his brother. But I also wonder if you’re doing some Don Quixote thing
here.”

“I’m not
sure that’s the best analogy,” I said.

“You
understood it.”

“Well,
yeah, but…” I shook my head. “What else am I going to do?”

He went
silent again. “That’s the thing, isn’t it?” he finally said. He looked around,
and then scratched his nose. “If you ever wanted it, I could get you out,” he
said. He kept scratching his nose while he talked. I realized he was doing it
so his hand kept his mouth covered. He was concerned about being recorded by
security cameras and then somebody reading his lips later. “New identification,
new passport, an entire exit package. You already have money. I can do the
rest.” He put his hand back down in his lap.

I
couldn’t have honestly said I’d never had that thought before. But I’d never
had someone else say it to me. “You mean just…just run away?”

“Yes,”
he said. “Go and be someone else for a while.”

This
conversation had gone to such a strange place I was starting to wonder if I was
dreaming. Should I ask him to pinch me? He might take that the wrong way. “What
on Earth has gotten into you, Abercrombie?” I asked.

He
smiled weakly. “I guess I’ve been thinking a lot,” he said. “Being engaged will
do that to a person.”

“I guess
so,” I said. I looked around. “Is that why we’re doing the spy routine with the
television and everything?”

He
nodded. “This one nobody can know about. Not even Fitch.”

“Well,
I’ll think about it, I guess. I don’t know. It sounds tempting, I’ll admit that
much. Odds are I’ll still be dead in a year, though. The Laughing Man isn’t the
only thing out there stalking me. My own liver…well, what I’ve done to myself
is going to catch up with me someday.”

“Maybe
it’s a question of how you live until it does, then.”

“Maybe.”
I sighed. “Was that why you had to see me in person?”

“Partially,”
he said, “but that wasn’t why I wanted to be face to face with you. The big
thing is…” He shook his head. “I can’t invite you to the wedding, Nevada. I’m
sorry, but I can’t.” He looked genuinely sad. I didn’t think I’d ever seen this
side of him before.

That may
have been the last thing I’d expected him to say. I’d been waiting for a
bombshell. “What?”

“I’m
sorry. Fitch is sorry, too, actually. He likes you more than he’ll admit. But
officially, we don’t know you. You understand? You and I right now are two
strangers having a friendly conversation in a lobby while greasy men work on
our cars. That’s all we’ve ever been. That’s all we’ll ever be.”

I’d
never expected a wedding invitation; it had never even occurred to me. It was
just as well. I wasn’t a fan of large public gatherings. I had nearly no
ability to make small talk, and I’d be looking at every stranger there as a
potential threat. But I saw his point. Every contact I’d had with Abercrombie
and Fitch over the last year involved committing a crime. Usually a serious
one. If any of what we’d done ever made it to court, none of us wanted it to be
easy for a prosecutor to prove a connection between us.

“I understand,”
I said. “I didn’t really think you’d invite me, honestly. I don’t even know
your real name.”

“No,” he
said. “But I know your name, Nevada James. You’ve always meant more to me than
you know.” He smiled gently. “Anyway, that was what had to be said face to
face. You didn’t deserve to hear it in a phone call.”

I wasn’t
sure it would have made any difference to me, but then again, maybe it would
have. You never knew. “Okay,” I said. “I appreciate it. You know, maybe one of
these days, when all of this Laughing Man shit is over…”

“No,” he
said.

Of
course he was right. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess not.”

There
was a leather satchel at Abercrombie’s feet and he reached into it now,
removing a thin stack of papers. “This is for you,” he said, handing it to me.

“What
did you get?”

“Every
call on that phone you gave me,” he said “Numbers of calls made and received,
names if they were listed, duration of calls. Her texts are all printed out,
too, but those were all to other burners and they were drug buys.”

I looked
through the stack. “How do you know that?”

“Because
I doubt she decided to order six sausage pizzas and nine pepperoni pizzas at
the same time.” He shook his head. “You’d think junkies would figure out their
codes aren’t fooling anyone. Besides, Pizza Hut lists their number in the phone
book. They don’t go buy burners at 7-11.”

“Fair
point,” I said. I turned my attention back to the papers. There wasn’t a great
deal to go on, but one of the names printed next to a number stood out
immediately. It was Second Star, the crisis center I’d visited earlier
yesterday. I’d left before I could actually talk to anyone besides the
receptionist, but Krystal had called them. It looked like they’d called her,
too. More than once. That couldn’t possibly be the norm, could it? Why would
they have reached out to her? “Thanks for this,” I said.

“You’re
welcome. And think about what I said, will you?”

“About
taking your exit package and running away?”

“Yes.”

I
nodded. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “I’m not sure I can…I don’t know,
Abercrombie. It’s not like I’d be any less crazy if I changed my name and lived
somewhere else. What I am isn’t something that’s easy to turn off.”

“But
you’d be away from the police department and all the shit that seems to follow
you around. Not to mention the Laughing Man. If I do your package, I guarantee
he’ll never find you.”

What
would a world be like where I didn’t get greeting cards from a serial killer
who had vowed to kill me someday? I had no idea. “What do you think that life
would be like?” I asked.

“I don’t
know,” he said. “But there’s only one way to find out.”