Bad Guys (18 page)

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about that,” I said. “Before my time.”

“Who did that to Lawrence?” He motioned with his head in the direction of the apartment.

“I don’t know.”

“He’s in surgery now. The paramedics say he was stabbed. So far, none of the neighbors report hearing anything.”

I repeated for him everything I’d told the uniformed cop. About the store stakeout, the guys in the black Annihilator, how the night before, they’d followed us when we were in Lawrence’s Buick.

“You think it was that bunch who tried to kill him?” Trimble asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just telling you what I know. It’s kind of convenient, though, getting him out of the way before they raid the men’s shop.”

Trimble didn’t say anything for a while.

I continued, “Plus, someone was looking for something. The room he used for an office, it’s been tossed.”

“Tossed?” Trimble said.

“Isn’t that the word?” I said.

He reached for the radio hanging from the elaborate communications setup in the center of the dashboard. “Trimble here. We get anywhere tracking down the SUV that rammed in that store over on Garvin?”

“Negative,” a voice squawked back at him.

“If you get anything, let me know. That vehicle may also be wanted in connection with this thing here on Montgomery.” He replaced the handset and said to me, “I guess you’ve got a real good story to write now, huh? Hanging out with a detective who ends up nearly getting killed doing his job. That’s kind of lucky for you, right?”

I just shook my head. “Let me guess,” I said. “Next you’ll say, ‘Anything to sell newspapers.’ You know what sells newspapers? The horoscope. Where do you get off saying shit like that?”

Trimble almost looked ashamed. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.

“Look,” I said, “I haven’t known Lawrence as long as you, but I like the guy. We hit it off. And if you don’t need me for anything else, it’s been a very long night, and I’d like to go home.”

Trimble reached into his jacket and brought out a card, handed it to me. “If you find out anything, hear anything, give me a call. My home number’s on there, too. Look, Lawrence was my friend, too, he still is. I’m guessing . . .” He let the sentence trail off, like he didn’t want to say what he was about to say. “I’m guessing he told you that I let him down one time, a while back, and there’s a lot of truth to that. I wasn’t there for him that night, and I’ve got to live with that for the rest of my life. But if there’s anything I can do now, to help him, to find out who did this to him, I’m going to do it. And I’d appreciate any help that you can give me.”

I nodded, took the card from his hand and slipped it into my jacket.

“Okay,” I said.

I got out of the cruiser and noticed that one of the uniformed cops was just finishing up with my cabby. As I approached the cab, my cell phone rang, and I jumped.

“Hey,” Sarah said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Listen, I’m sorry to call, I know you’re on your stakeout now with Lawrence, but I wanted to give you a quick call.”

“Yeah,” I said, evenly. I felt very tired all of a sudden.

“I called home, talked to Paul. And he sounded, I don’t know, I think he sounded drunk.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“I mean, he’s sixteen, I’m not stupid, I was sixteen, too, once, but I just wondered what he was like when you left the house.”

“He was fine.”

“I asked Angie what he’d been up to, but she either didn’t know or was covering up for him. She says she ran into you at the mall?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Angie’s home?”

“You were at the
mall
?”

I was trying to remember. It was true. I had been at the mall, but instead of just a few hours ago, it felt like days.

“Yeah, I guess I was. But when you talked to Angie, was she home?”

“Yeah, she said she’d just got in. Zack, what is it? You sound almost as weird as Paul did on the phone.”

“Listen, Sarah, I’m in a bit of a situation here at the moment. Why don’t we talk in the morning?”

“Is something going on? Is everything okay?”

“Lawrence didn’t make it to the stakeout tonight. He ran into a bit of trouble. I’m at his place now.”

“What kind of trouble?”

I wanted to tell her. Sarah was my rock. When I was down or hurting or scared, she was always there for me, even when I was being the jerk of the century. But I was tired, and too weary to handle the hundred questions she’d be entitled to ask.

“Honey, I’ve really got to go,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it later.”

She could sense I was holding back. She needed to ask just one question. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”

As I slipped the phone back into my jacket, I thought,
I am
so
not okay
. And I
so
did not want to go down this kind of road again. A road that led me, and those around me, to danger, and violence, and heartache.

I asked the cabby to give me a lift back to the doughnut shop where I’d left my car.

“I got the word,” the cabby said as we drove through the night. “It was ‘pooch.’ ”

BACK AT THE DOUGHNUT PLACE, once again behind the wheel of my car, it occurred to me that, as a staffer with the biggest newspaper in the city, I had some obligation to notify the city desk about what was going on.

I got hold of Dan, working late on the city copy desk, who generally feels that I am a total fucking idiot, stemming back to an incident before I joined the paper. Because he mostly worked nights, our paths had rarely crossed since I’d started my new job.

“Hey, Dan,” I said.

“Zack. Sarah’s not here. She’s at that retreat where all the management types went.”

“I know, Dan. She’s my wife. She tells me things.”

“So, what can I do for you then? Pretend to fall down the stairs again?” Some things end up haunting you for a very long time.

“I thought you’d want to know that a
Metropolitan
employee, in the course of conducting his journalistic duties, found the subject of his feature nearly stabbed to death.”

I could hear Dan’s breath intake. “Which
Metropolitan
employee?”

“Me, Dan. Is there time to write anything for the replate?”

“It’s like, ten minutes to deadline. Best I could do would be to get a brief in or something.”

“What do you think? I’ve got a hell of a story here, about a private detective by the name of Lawrence Jones, who’s been investigating a series of robberies and ends up getting stabbed in his own apartment. I was doing a whole takeout on him.”

“You found him?”

“Yes.”

“And called the police?”

“Yes, Dan.”

“What’s the address? At the very least, we can get a photog out there so we have crime scene pics to run with a story for tomorrow.”

The thing was, there wasn’t that much we could print even if we’d had more time. Lawrence, it was clear, might already be dead on the operating table at Mercy General, and we couldn’t go naming him in the paper before the police had made their attempts to contact members of his family. Nor could we say, with any certainty, that the smash-and-grab at Brentwood’s was related to the assault on a man who lived above a hair salon. Nor would we want to say, in a two-paragraph story, that the injured man had been found by a
Metropolitan
reporter, thereby tipping the competition and undercutting that reporter’s exclusive for the following day’s paper.

So Dan decided the best thing to do would be to run a bare-bones item on the Metro page, tucked into the digest, that police were investigating a violent attack on an unnamed private investigator, but details were unavailable at press time.

“You’ll have to come in tomorrow and write something major,” Dan said. “I’ll leave a note for dayside to expect you.”

I slipped the phone back into my jacket, feeling chilled and exhausted. It was only now, sitting in the Virtue, that it occurred to me that there was a chance that the car was not going to start. I prepared myself to dig my auto club emergency card out of my wallet. I slid the key in, turned it, and to my astonishment, the engine came on just like that.

“You are one unpredictable piece of shit,” I said, backing the Virtue out of the doughnut shop parking lot.

On the way home I detoured by Mercy General and went to the ER to find out how Lawrence was doing. There was a cop there, just standing around, who told us Mr. Jones was still in surgery, but he was either not at liberty to say anything more or simply didn’t know.

A man who looked like the guy in the photo pinned to the bulletin board in Lawrence’s was pacing in the waiting area and, when he heard me ask the cop about Lawrence, approached.

“Are you the one who phoned the restaurant?” he said.

I nodded. “You must be Kent. I’m Zack.”

He extended a hand to me. “Kent Aikens. Thanks for letting me know.”

“I didn’t know who else to call. Has Lawrence got family?”

“Not local. I think his parents are dead, but he’s got a sister named Letitia out in Denver, I think. I’m going to try to locate her, let her know. And when . . .” He hesitated, not sure whether the word he was looking for was “if.” He composed himself and continued. “When Lawrence wakes up, I can find out from him who else he wants me to call.”

“Sure,” I said. “Have you spoken to the doctors?”

“They don’t want to tell me much. I’m not, you know, family.” He shook his head angrily. “I’m just the faggot friend, the only one who’s even fucking here. But they did tell me that the knife punctured his lung, among other things. They said something about his lung filling up with blood. I spoke to him, like, yesterday. He phoned me. We were going to get together this Friday night, go to a club or something. He mentioned you, that you were some reporter?”

I nodded.

“And that you were hanging out with him. He had good things to say about you.”

I half smiled. “He’s a good guy.”

Kent swallowed, turned away so I wouldn’t notice his chin quivering. I gave him one of my own business cards. “If you need anything, or can let me know how Lawrence is doing, please let me know. That has my work and home numbers on it.”

Kent took the card without looking at it and slid it into the front pocket of his jeans. “Okay,” he said. “I thought, once he was through being a cop, there’d be less chance of this kind of thing happening. Working for himself, not chasing people down alleys, how could something like this happen?”

“It happened at his apartment,” I said. “Someone came looking for him, most likely these people he’d been investigating. They killed another detective a couple of nights ago.”

Kent took that in, said nothing.

I said, “You have any other idea who might have it in for him?”

He shook his head. “It just doesn’t make any sense. Lawrence is a good guy.”

The sliding glass doors to the ER parted and in strode Detective Trimble. Kent caught a glimpse of him and turned away, muttering, “Oh, great. Our hero has arrived.”

“What?” I asked. “You got problems with Trimble?”

“I know the history,” he said. “Lawrence nearly died a few years ago because of that asshole. Look, if I find out anything, I’ll give you a call, okay?” And he walked over to one of the vinyl and chrome waiting-room chairs and took a seat, studying the pile of outdated magazines on the small table next to him.

Trimble strode past me, nodded, and kept walking in the direction of the operating rooms.

It was about one in the morning when I got home. The Camry was in the driveway, pulled up close to the garage. Angie had returned from Oakwood some time ago, I guessed, considering that Sarah had spoken to her when she phoned home from the retreat. I wondered whether my daughter might still be up, but when I came in and did a walkabout, it was clear that both she and her brother were asleep. All manner of interrogations could begin tomorrow, should I choose to conduct them.

I phoned Sarah from the kitchen phone.

“God, I’ve been waiting up for you, hoping you’d call,” she said from her hotel room. “What’s happening?”

“It’s Lawrence,” I said. “Someone tried to kill him in his apartment. I found him. He’s pretty bad. I don’t know whether he’s going to make it.”

Sarah waited a moment, and said, “Tell me everything.”

I gave her the basics, that Lawrence’s attacker was unknown, that it might or might not be related to the smash-and-grab at Brentwood’s, that I had a major story to write first thing in the morning.

“Do you want me to come home?” she asked. “I can bail on this thing. I don’t have to stay. We won’t be learning anything. It’ll all be bullshit, the way these things always are.”

“No, no, it’s okay, there’s not much you could do if you came back.”

“I could be with you,” she said.

I felt a lump develop in my throat. God, it had been a long night.

“Really,” I said. “I’m okay.”

“And the kids? Is everything okay there?” Sarah asked.

“Sure,” I lied, thinking about Trevor’s surveillance of Angie, my surveillance of Trevor and Angie, Angie’s mysterious visit to Trixie’s, Paul’s drinking binge.

“Everything’s fine.”

I WAS TIRED ENOUGH to have slept for a week, yet I mostly tossed and turned during what was left of that night. I had a few things on my mind. There was my daughter, who was making secret visits to my dominatrix friend while being stalked all over town by a possibly unstable admirer. There was my son, who, at the age of sixteen, was getting into the booze, a behavior that put him in the company of most sixteen-year-old boys, and evidently my daughter’s stalker was supplying him with the stuff. My new friend lay in the hospital after a near-fatal stabbing. I had impulsively spent $8,900 that we didn’t have on a car that started only when it felt like it, plus another small fortune on a new wardrobe. And there was the fact that I was lying to my wife about just how serious things might be on the home front because it would involve disclosing that I was violating the privacy of a member of my own family.