Cash Burn (5 page)

In desperation, he shoved the pot between the faucet and the plates. A crack appeared, thick, deep, running the length of the side.

With a shout, he wheeled and threw the pot against the wall.

It shattered into a hundred pieces. The circular top spun on the linoleum.

Black sludge smeared the wall in the shape of a spider.

He jammed his cap onto his head. He would get coffee somewhere else.

In the hallway, there was no sound. He moved past the closed doors with his ears attuned, wanting noise to distract him, needing some kind of exchange to draw him away from the image that plagued him whenever he blinked.

His legs were weak as he descended the stairs. They felt like needles joined together by frayed thread.

How long without sleep? Three days?

He’d slept the first night. When he came back to his place, he had laid his head on the pillow without the boy’s face accosting him. After an hour or two, his juices had settled from their seething boil, and sleep had come. But the dream of the boy had awakened him before sunrise. In the dream, he was leaning over the body, looking at the bloody face in the light from the bulb behind the gas station, and the boy’s dead eyes turned in their sockets to look back at him.

On Melrose now, people passed him. When they approached, they looked under the bill of his hat to his eyes and quickly looked away.

They always did that. Didn’t they?

He came to a coffee place. His hand went to the cool metal handle and pulled.

Reggae music bounced behind the swoosh of a barista frothing someone’s drink.

He went to the line. A woman had her back to him. Middle-aged, a scarf restraining pony-tailed hair with strands of gray in it like worms in earth. She stepped away. Then it was Flip’s turn.

The cashier was about the age of the boy. A girl, freckles sprinkled across her cheeks and nose, she could be a cheerleader or somebody’s high school sweetheart. Her smile held, then drifted. She’d said something to him. She shifted her feet. Her eyes left him, returned.

He spoke. “Large coffee. Black.” His voice sounded alien to his ears.

The smile returned, automatic. “Any room for cream?”

“No. No cream.”

She turned from the counter and tilted the tall cup underneath the spigot to fill it and returned.

The black coffee trembled in the cup, smoking.

“Sir?”

He looked back to her face.

Her smile was frozen in place. “It’s $2.10.”

He dug into his pocket, and a wad of cash came into his hand. He sorted through it and found a ten. With a start, it occurred to him that it belonged to the boy. Flip couldn’t seem to open the bill. As if something sinister might be on the face of the dead president pictured there.

Her hand reached out for it. He put it in her white palm.

With the coffee, he turned away. She called to him, wanting to give him the contaminated change, but he waved at her, ignoring her thanks for the tip.

He paused with his back to her. She could have known him—the boy. She might have been his date. Flip turned to look over his shoulder at her. Her eyes met his. Something about the way he looked at her cratered her smile. She stepped back from the counter, bumped into the machine behind her, but could not seem to look away from him.

He rushed for the door. His uncovered coffee sloshed, searing his knuckles and the back of his hand. A man on the other side of the glass door yanked it open. Flip passed him, head down, the bill of his hat shading his eyes.

On the sidewalk a half-block away, he stopped. Pain simmered in his hand.

He brought the cup to his mouth. The brim quivered against his lips, and he sipped. Hot, hot, it coursed down his throat, into his chest, the heat spreading there, finally slamming into his stomach.

He put his back to the wall, held his eyes wide to watch the pedestrians and the cars hurtling down Melrose.

Don’t close your eyes.

9

Jason approached Kathy’s front door, but when it opened, it was the pastor, Gates, who emerged from behind it. Head bowed, brow fixed as if his gaze held the ground in place, the pastor moved his bulk onto the stoop and lifted his eyes to Jason.

“Hello.”

“Jason Dunn.” The small porch was a step below the door, and Jason extended his hand upward. The pastor reached down to shake.

“Jason, how are you?” A paternal smile passed onto the pastor’s face.

“How’s she holding up?”

“We met at the funeral, didn’t we? You’re her boss?”

“Yes. How is she?”

Gates stepped down to Jason’s side and drew his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “She is doing her best. As well as anyone could. She has great faith.”

Faith?
“I hope that’s helping her.”

“How could it not? Our God is all any of us has. Everything else will be taken from us in the end.” He said it and waited, in no hurry, as if sons were murdered every day.

Jason looked into the big man’s brown eyes and gentle, round face. The expression in the laugh lines around his eyes was piercing, and that raw feeling from the funeral nudged at Jason. “Do you know what her plans are?”

Pastor Gates’s eyebrows lifted. “I expect she wouldn’t mind my telling you that she’s decided to go to her sister’s ranch for a while. She feels she needs to leave the city. I think it’s a good idea to be with her family.”

“Right. That is a good idea.”

The pastor was as still as a great boulder on a plain, as if centuries of erosion had revealed him where he stood.

Within Jason, the rawness pulled at him, a magnetism that seemed to open undiscovered pores in his mind. “This God you keep mentioning . . .”

“Yes?”

His BlackBerry chirped in his pocket. An e-mail. He pulled the device from his pocket and reset it to vibrate mode. “Nothing. I need to see Kathy.”

“Of course.” But neither man made a move.

Jason returned the BlackBerry to his pocket.

“Jason, why don’t you come by my office for a cup of coffee sometime?”

“Sure. I might do that.” Jason stepped around him and sensed the big man’s eyes following him as he moved into the house, leaving the pastor outside.

“Kathy?”

“In here.”

He found her in the kitchen. She came to him and hugged him but pulled back quickly.

“I was just making some lunch. Want a sandwich?”

“Thanks anyway. I’m on my way to the gym.”

No comeback. None of her usual gibes about staving off advancing age. She returned to the kitchen and reached for a knife to swab mayonnaise onto wheat bread.

Lettuce lay with sliced tomatoes darkening a paper towel. Jason plucked one up and had it in his mouth when he spoke. “You having a lettuce sandwich there, Kath?”

“Cold cuts are in the fridge. Sure you don’t want something?”

He sat at the counter on a bar stool. She wore jeans and an oversize T-shirt. It might have belonged to her son.

“Your pastor tells me you’re going back to the ranch with Carol.”

Kathy turned to the refrigerator. She pulled out what she needed and let the door close on its own, then removed a few slices of beef from a plastic container and layered them onto the bread. When the container was back in the refrigerator, she closed up the sandwich and cut it in half.

“I feel funny eating in front of you. Have half.”

He took it. “I can hold your job open for you.”

She didn’t answer. Her chewing seemed to take all her concentration. Finally she said, “I’m going to have some milk.” She drew a glass from the cupboard and returned to the refrigerator, pulled out a carton, and poured a glassful and held it out to him.

“No, thanks. I’ll just get some water.” He rose and crossed behind her, got down a glass, and filled it with tap water.

They were silent until the sandwich halves were gone. Kathy stared at the milk in her glass as if tea leaves floated there to resolve a mystery. “You know,” she said, “the night it happened, I had a dream.” She took a drink of milk. “I dreamed someone was in my room.” She wouldn’t take her eyes off the milk. As she brought the glass up to her lips again, her eyes followed it. She swallowed, her smooth throat pale, flexing.

“Anybody in particular?”

Her eyes rose from the glass to meet his. “No, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that kind of dream. I was lying in bed, and someone was in the room with me. A man was in my room. Standing there. I could feel him there, close by the bed.” Blood vessels traced tiny red lines in the whites of her eyes. She didn’t blink. “I could smell him.” She let the glass rest on the counter.

“You don’t think it was a dream, do you?”

She tilted the glass, and the milk residue gathered in a bend at the bottom. “In the morning, the sliding glass door downstairs was unlocked. And the electricity was off.”

“That’s strange.”

“The circuit breaker was switched off.”

“Probably just a surge or something.”

“Sure. That’s what I’m telling myself. But it’s the first time it ever happened. The breaker box is outside, so someone could get to it easily enough. And that dream . . . the same night Greg—Greg’s killed. Some coincidence, huh?”

Jason worked his tongue to clear his teeth of the remnants of the sandwich pasted there. “You tell the police about it?”

She nodded. “They took a look around, but their heart wasn’t in it. After I told them about Greg, what was going on . . .” She brought her hands to the countertop, and her head dropped.

Jason came around. He put his arm across her shoulders. She didn’t move.

He searched for words that might fit. Something about what you couldn’t help, couldn’t expect. You could only do so much. Teenagers.

Nothing came out.

His BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket.

Kathy reached for the empty glass and saucers and pulled away from him. At the sink, she rinsed the dishes and leaned over to slot them into the dishwasher. Then she rose and stood in front of the running faucet, looking out the window above the sink, into the backyard.

“He wasn’t a gang member, you know. Nothing like that. And he wasn’t a druggie. He just had some friends that used, and he tried it a few times. That’s no reason to write him off. I never did. You never did.” Sunlight from the window made the straight ridge of her nose glow. “Maybe I overreacted. If I had taken it in stride more, maybe it would’ve just passed. A phase.”

“Maybe so. Maybe not. You did all the right things, Kath.”

She turned off the water but left her palm resting on the handle. Her eyes returned to the window.

“You sleeping at all?”

She frowned. “I got a prescription. But every time I go to take it, I think about that dream.” She swallowed. “No. Not sleeping.”

“It’ll be different at the ranch. Don’t you think?”

“Sure. Sure. But I have this weird thought that Greg’s out there, wandering around lost, wanting to come back, and if I leave here he won’t be able to come home. He won’t be able to get in.” She turned to him. Her eyes were dry.

The BlackBerry vibrated again. Three buzzing tones floated out of his pocket and through the room like a fly against a pane of glass.

“Somebody’s trying to reach you.”

“They can wait.”

Her hand appeared to force the faucet handle further. But the water was already off. “Well. Thanks for coming by. I appreciate it. I’ll keep in touch.” She stepped past him, and he followed her to the door.

“I’m thinking of bringing on Brenda Tierney while you’re out. You know her?”

Kathy was in the dark foyer now, reaching for the knob, cranking it and pulling the door open, letting the light stream in. She leaned against the edge of the door. For the first time, Jason noticed that she stood stooped, her neck at an angle, as if the thoughts and sorrow in her head carried too much weight.

“Of course. She works in HR.” Kathy reached out, put a hand on his shoulder, and brought her face up next to his. Her lips touched his jaw briefly, and she withdrew. “Good-bye, Jason.”

No words occurred to him. Even after all she’d done for him, all the days she’d covered for him and planned for him, propped him up when he was dragging. After all the ribbing and laughing. After the tears when she confided in him through her divorce and Greg’s rebellion. After strings of ten-plus-hour days. She had worked for him and stuck by him in every downturn and upswing for four years. All this, and no words of support entered his mind.

“Call me when you’re back,” was what he said. “There’ll always be a spot for you.”

As if that would help.

10

Tom Cole’s pate tingled with the beat of the sun. Even this early the Hollywood air was stiff with smog.

He’d spent way too much time on Flip since seeing his bruised hands, but what could he do? Of all his parolees, this one disturbed him most.

Now Tom was back for another official visit. As soon as he mounted the stairs, the little men with pitchforks got busy in his knees. They jabbed with every step, and he cursed them silently, pulling himself up by the banister. His steps were slow, tired.

He’d been up since 3:41. The homicide dick had apologized for calling him at home so early, but Danton couldn’t wait until a decent hour after finding the flag Tom had placed on Flip’s information in the Law Enforcement Agencies Data System. Tom had stared at the clock, watching the digits turn as he talked to Danton, nagged by the image of Flip’s damaged hands.

A teenager. Beaten to death and dumped behind a gas station. Last Tuesday.

They had gone over the evidence. The stolen car with the teenager’s blood in it had been left three miles south of where the body had been found. No fingerprints other than the owner’s. All the blood in the car belonged to the kid. The techs were still working on the fibers recovered from the kid’s body, but the only conclusive findings matched what was in the car or the last places the kid had visited.

Nothing put Flip at the scene. Tom’s gut told him with absolute assurance that Flip had done this, but with no evidence, Danton wouldn’t haul him in just to listen to him lie. Danton knew interrogating a convict like Flip was pointless unless you had something on him, and even then he’d deny it. All Danton said they could do was watch him and hope he made a mistake.