Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) (27 page)

She looked up at him, angry and scared. The blanket had pulled away from the little girl’s head; she looked scared, too.
He felt sorry for them both, but not too sorry. They were strangers. His head hurt so much and they were strangers and the only thing that mattered was taking them back and putting them where they had to be put, so he could go home and start looking for Angie again.

T
iming.

Everything we do in this world, everything that happens good and bad, planned and unplanned, expected and unexpected, is ruled by it. Right place or wrong place, right moment or wrong moment, salvation or disaster. Runyon’s intervention in last night’s gay bashing and his capture of one of the perps had been a matter of timing. And now, this morning—

We went into a turn on Old Stovepipe Road, nobody around, hadn’t been another car since we passed through Rough and Ready, and we started to come out of the turn and it was going down smack in front of us, less than a hundred yards away. All three of them there on the road—Tamara, the kidnapped child, a middle-aged man who had to be Robert Lemoyne. Tamara sprawled on one hip, half on and half off the pavement, clutching the blanket-wrapped little girl protectively against her body. Lemoyne hovering over them with a gun in his hand. The Chevy Suburban was there, too, slewed at an angle across two-thirds of the road surface.

The shock of it was like a blow to the eyes. I humped forward so fast I nearly cracked my head on the windshield. “Jake!”

He punched the gas, leaned hard on the horn at the same time. The blatting noise and the sudden awareness of our approach had opposite effects on Tamara and Lemoyne. She scrambled away from him, onto the grass-furred verge. He stood as if paralyzed, still in a half crouch, looking up at us out of a rictus of confusion.

Runyon braked the car to a sliding stop on the side away from where Tamara and the little girl were. Both of us were out before it quit rocking. Lemoyne straightened with his weapon pointed downward at a forty-five-degree angle to his body, and when he saw that we were both armed he stayed that way, his mouth open and his eyes bulging. I went to one knee, the .38 straight-armed out in front of me. Runyon yelled something that had no effect on Lemoyne; he kept on standing there, gawping. If he’d lifted that piece of his any higher, made any movement to cap off a round, I’d have shot him and so would Runyon. He didn’t, but even so I came close to squeezing off anyway, shooting one of his legs out from under him or worse. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that Tamara and the child were alive and not seriously injured.

What Lemoyne did was fling the gun down clattering and skidding onto the road, the way you’d throw something that was burning your hand, and then turn and run away.

I was up and after him almost instantly. Behind me I heard Tamara calling out something, Runyon telling her to get into the car and lock the doors. Then he was running too.

Lemoyne fled straight up the road fifty yards or so, then veered off onto a rutted driveway. He had fifteen years on me
and he was in better shape; he should’ve been able to outdistance me from the get-go. But it didn’t happen. Anger and adrenaline gave me speed I wouldn’t normally have had, but the main reason was the way he ran. Splay-legged, stiff-backed, both hands clamped down hard on top of his skull and elbows jutting out at right angles, as if he were trying to keep his head from flying off his shoulders. It was the weirdest gait I’d ever seen, like a comic character being chased in a Mack Sennett two-reeler. But there was nothing funny about it. It was as if he were in the throes of an uncontrollable frenzy that had thrown his motor responses out of whack.

I dogged him up the driveway, gaining with each step. He veered sideways onto a grassy clearing with an old Silver Stream trailer at the far end, and that was where I caught him, about halfway along. I grabbed a handful of his jacket and brought us both up short, jerked him around to face me. He lashed out with one hand, the other still clutching his head. I ducked away from it and slammed the flat of the .38 across the side of his face.

The blow knocked him down, flopped him over on his back grunting and moaning. I could hear Runyon coming; I didn’t need the weapon anymore. I threw it to one side, threw my body down on top of Lemoyne’s. He flopped again, flailing with his arms, but I got both hands on his neck and lifted his head and slammed it on the ground.

It tore a scream out of him, a high-pitched animal sound threaded with too much pain for the amount of force I’d used. His body convulsed and he bucked me off; rolled over a couple of times clenching his head again, his back arched and his legs kicking. Sweat and spittle came flying off his face, glistening in the sunlight. His eyes were rolled up so far you couldn’t
see the whites; something that looked like foam crawled out of one corner of his mouth.

Runyon moved into my line of sight, gave me a hand up. He said, staring at Lemoyne, “Some kind of fit.”

“Looks like it. Better get him off his back before he swallows his tongue.”

Together we rolled him over, pinned him facedown in the grass. I loosened his belt and stripped it off and we used it to tie his hands. When we let go of him, he twisted over on his side and lay there twitching, his irises showing again but in an unfocused stare, foam still dribbling out of his mouth.

Runyon said, “I’ll get the car.”

“Tamara?”

“Okay. But looks like the little girl’s pretty sick.”

“Call nine-eleven.”

“First thing.”

It took me another couple of minutes to get my breathing back under control—too much exertion for an incipient senior citizen. Lemoyne didn’t need much watching, so while I waited I scanned around the property. Trailer in the woods. Yeah. The rust-flecked Silver Stream, a barn, a wellhouse, a child’s playset—it all looked ordinary enough. But it wasn’t ordinary. Some places give off bad vibes, and I’ve always been sensitive to that kind of thing. This was one. I could literally feel faint shimmers of evil, like something crawling on my skin.

Runyon’s car came bouncing up the driveway. Out on Old Stovepipe Road I could see a straggle of people—neighbors, probably, drawn by the noise—but none of them ventured onto the property. The car stopped and Tamara and Runyon both got out.

He said, “County law and paramedics on the way,” and I
nodded and put my arms around Tamara and held her. Normally neither of us went in for that kind of thing, but this situation was anything but normal; we clung to each other for several seconds before I broke the embrace and stood her back to get a good look at her. Scratches, abrasions, torn clothing, and the way she stood on one leg indicated a twisted ankle. Not too bad, considering.

“You’ve really had a hell of a time, haven’t you?”

“Not as bad as that poor little kid,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it when you and Jake showed up when you did. I guess we’re pretty lucky.”

“It wasn’t luck.”

“No? What was it then?”

I grinned at her. “Timing,” I said. “What else?”

A lot of stuff happened over the next few days.

Some of it was kind of exciting. Lauren and her being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance with the siren on full wail. All the attention while she repeated everything that’d happened to the county law, then a bunch of reporters, then a couple of honest-to-God FBI agents. More than once hearing herself called a hero for saving Lauren’s life, even though she’d made a really stupid mistake there at the end that’d almost gotten both of them killed anyway.

Some of it was horrifying. The four filled graves out back of Lemoyne’s barn, one adult and three children, probably his wife and the real Angie and two other little girls he’d kidnapped. And the two freshly dug graves that’d been meant for her and Lauren. And somebody telling her Lemoyne had been examined in a hospital prison ward and he had a malignant brain tumor.

Some of it she could’ve done without. Doctors and nurses fussing over her in the hospital ER, poking and prodding in rude ways; she’d never much cared for medical people even when she was growing up. Telling her story so many times it began to sound remote and unreal in her own ears, as if it’d happened to somebody else. Answering the same questions over and over and over. Too much attention, too many people getting in her face.

And some of it—no surprise—was same-old, same-old.

Ma: “I almost had a heart attack when I heard. That’s twice in four months we almost lost you. I swear, worrying about you is going to drive your father and me into an early grave.”

Pop: “Why didn’t you call me that first night, tell me what you suspected? What in God’s name made you go back there by yourself and prowl around that man’s property? You’re too reckless, you don’t think before you act, you don’t follow the rules.”

Sister Claudia: “Of course I’m glad you saved that poor little girl’s life, but you shouldn’t’ve been in that situation in the first place. You’re not a wild child anymore, you’re supposed to be a responsible adult.”

Horace: “It makes me crazy, thinking about what almost happened to you . . .
again
. I understand how you feel about your career, you know I do, but maybe it’s time you took a leave of absence. Come back here and let me take care of you for a while. Will you at least give it some serious thought?”

Vonda: “Tam, my God, what a horrible experience. I mean, it must’ve been like living through a Samuel Jackson movie or something. Makes all my troubles seem pretty small, not that they
are
small. Not to me anyway. I thought Alton was gonna take Ben’s head off just for walking in the front door. And you
should’ve heard Daddy go off on him when he said he wanted us to get married in a
synagogue
. . .”

Best part, far and away, was finding out Lauren didn’t have pneumonia, just needed an IV and some antiobiotics and a few days’ rest, and then later on going to the hospital with Bill and Jake to see her and meet her folks. Her dad had a city government job in Vallejo and her mom was a schoolteacher—nice mixed race couple. There were a lot of hugs and a few tears; she even got a little moist herself when the mother said, “Thank you for our daughter’s life.”

Lauren was all smiley and happy, surrounded by stuffed animals and her Alana Michelle African-American doll. As if the kidnapping, all that’d gone down up in Nevada County, had never happened. That was the great thing about kids—they were resilient, they could get on with their lives more easily than adults because they didn’t have all the grown-up baggage to carry around yet.

She got a long, clinging hug and a kiss from Lauren. And a whisper into her ear that made her blink and grin all over her face: “I love you, Tamara.”

Sweet little girl. Funny, but she had a feeling she was going to miss her a little. The bonding thing. Or maybe it was more than that. In fact, she knew it was. For the first time in her life tough Tamara, independent Tamara, really wanted kids of her own . . . someday.

It was Saturday before he had a chance to talk to Joshua in person, at the Hartford Street flat. If he’d thought about it
beforehand, he’d’ve known how it would be, that it couldn’t be anything else. But he’d been too busy, too tired out, and so he walked into it cold.

The first thing Joshua said to him was, “I’ve been reading about you in the paper,” with a faint sneer in his voice. “Busy week, saving lives and catching bad guys all over the place. My father, the hero.”

“I’m not a hero. And I don’t give a damn about all the publicity. I’m just a man doing a job—a shitty job, most of the time.”

“Cops and plumbers, experts in shit.”

“Why the snotty remarks? What’s chewing on you?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I wouldn’t ask if I knew.”

“You expect me to be grateful, I suppose. Forget what you did to my mother, tell you all is forgiven and now we can start being buddies.”

“I don’t expect anything. I did what you asked as a favor, that’s all.”

“Is that why you didn’t tell me the truth about the bashings? Because you were doing me a favor?”

Runyon didn’t answer.

“You think I don’t know about Troy Douglass? Word gets around fast in the gay community. And I had to get blindsided with it from somebody else. I felt like a goddamn fool.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry.” Voice dripping scorn. “So why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wasn’t sure of the real motive the last time I saw you.”

“Oh, bullshit. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about Kenny
and Troy then. That’s why you wanted to talk to him alone at the hospital.”

“All right. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think it was my place.”

“More bullshit. Didn’t think I’d believe you is more like it. Didn’t think I could handle the truth.”

Again Runyon was silent.

“I’m not stupid, you know,” Joshua said. “Or blind. I know what Kenny is, I’ve known all along. Troy wasn’t his first affair since we’ve been together. And I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

“Then why do you stay with him?”

“I love him, that’s why.”

“Enough to risk him giving you AIDS?”

“That’s right. You understand what it’s like to love somebody so much you can’t stand the thought of losing them, no matter what.” His belligerent, challenging tone. “That’s how much you loved the woman you left my mother for, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t leave your mother for Colleen.”

“But that’s how much you loved her.”

“Yes,” Runyon said, “that’s how much I loved her.”

“Well, at least I still have Kenny. And I’m going to keep him. He’s coming home tomorrow.”

Nothing to say to that.

“You should’ve told me,” Joshua said.

“And you’re going to hold it against me that I didn’t.”

“Well?”

“Another reason to hate me, another excuse not to deal with me.”

“I don’t need excuses. I have all the reasons I need, twenty years and a dead mother worth of reasons.”

No use in arguing, in any more talk; they might have been living in alternate universes, for all the connection between them. Neither of them said good-bye when Runyon left. He might see Joshua again and he might not; it wouldn’t matter to their relationship either way. His son was lost to him, had been lost to him the day the Seattle court granted Andrea sole custody.