Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (34 page)

    
“What
are you thinking?”

    
“Something
I don’t want to think: that Harry Wolfe wouldn’t be dead if they hadn’t let him
be. And that my crazy kid Scotty is the perfect patsy.”

    
“Now
you’re thinking like a cop. Now you know why I don’t sleep.” Aquino hailed the
waitress for coffee. “So maybe the Syrian girl works both sides and the feds
figure she can lead them to the end of the rainbow . . . but I don’t get your
kid. How do you figure that someone you were hired to track from Vermont over a
year ago showed up on cue in this case? To tell you the truth, that makes me
wonder a little about you.”

    
Now,
Raszer finally leaned forward.

    
“I can’t
account for it,” he said. “Except by the logic you use when you say that these
people are in the woodwork. The kind of logic that gets you locked away for a
long time. If Silas Endicott came to me to find his daughter, it was in some
weird way a consequence of my involvement in Scotty’s case. The connection is
that there’s someone out there grabbing kids when they’re in that limbo between
adolescence and adulthood, and using all avenues of approach: the Internet, the
military, the fundamentalist churches . . . anywhere kids are in a passive,
acquiescent state of mind. They lure them like the Pied Piper off to this
‘Garden’—wherever that is—do whatever it is they do, and then shoot them back
into the world like time-release viruses. Whether Katy Endicott is being
programmed as a sleeper agent or a sex slave, I couldn’t tell you, but it all
serves someone’s agenda. What I want to know is whose.”

    
“Yeah,”
Aquino whispered, and at last sat back and relaxed. “Thanks for sharing. I
wouldn’t want to start mistrusting you. I’m just beginning to like you.”

    
“Don’t
trust anyone but yourself and God,” said Raszer. “And keep an eye on God. She
makes a lot of wardrobe changes.”

    
Aquino
lifted his brows. The jukebox flipped from one Italian crooner to another.
Perry Como was singing “Catch a Falling Star.” The place was stuck in 1959.
“When you see Ruthie Endicott,” Aquino continued, “and I know you will, be sure
and ask her if she’s had a visit from our friend Agent Djapper. It’s none of my
business, really, but I’d like to know.”

From the Avanti, Raszer phoned Monica and asked
her to come in an hour early the next morning to make his travel arrangements.
He cursed when she told him he’d made the evening news in his makeshift turban.
In the end, he thought, there was no way to avoid celebrity in Hollywood.

    
The last
stop on Raszer’s long road home was the Kingdom Hall, where—if he had his days
straight—the weekly meeting of the Theocratic Ministry School ought to be just
letting out. He hoped to get a few words, and a check, from Amos Leach. He
wasn’t at all in the mood for it, but it had to be done, and he wanted a second
chance to size up Leach. There’d been something unnatural about the man,
something not right: clothes a bit too loose on his frame, head and hair easily
a size too large for the body. Then there was the voice—the voice of a
ventriloquist’s dummy. The fundamentalist sects were rife with odd, sexually
conflicted characters who’d sought refuge from their own shadows in Christian
rectitude, but Raszer had never met anyone quite like Leach. He didn’t
seriously suspect the man to have been complicit in Katy’s abduction, but he
wanted to be sure Leach hadn’t made him a pawn in some larger game.

    
He spotted
the stark, white building in the overspill of a streetlamp and adjudged that
the assembly, if it had occurred, was long over. The curbs were empty, as was
what he could see of the rear parking lot. The lights in the kitchen, however,
were burning, and it stood to reason that if anyone was keeping late hours, it
would be Amos and the Elders. Raszer dimmed his headlights and rolled up
against the curb. For a few moments after he turned off the engine, he sat and
listened to the frogs spawned by the heavy winter rains. Then another kind of
croak made itself heard.

    
It was
Leach’s voice, all right, issuing from an open kitchen window. He was engaged
in what sounded like heated argument—more precisely, bickering—with another man
whose own vocal timbre was too low to identify from this distance. Raszer
opened and closed the car door quietly and crept up the driveway to a place
just beneath the high window. He wasn’t able to see, but he could hear.

    
“You’re
threatening me, Sam,” Leach shrilled. “You oughtn’t threaten a brother, least
of all one who backed you all the way to Bethany.”

    
“I’m not
threatening you, Amos,” replied a low, even voice that Raszer now recognized as
that of Sam Brown, the ministerial servant. “I’m counseling you, as you’ve
counseled me, but you don’t seem to be listening.”

    
“Listening
to what?” Leach shot back. “Innuendo? Some fairy tale from eight years ago?
Didn’t you learn anything from that McMartin business?
Children lie
,
Sam.”

    
“The
mother stood against you before the assembly, Amos. She said there was a second
witness. I think we both know who that is. At the least, it’s my duty to inform
the district overseer, maybe even Circuit. I know what they’ll say: There’s
been enough bleeding; close the wound. I just wish you’d make it easy on us.”

    
Raszer
squatted down and rested his back against the stucco. The night was quiet and
cool, almost sepulchral, but apparently, noise and heat surrounded Amos Leach.
The boy’s mother? Which boy? A second witness? To what?

    
“Make it
easy on you,” Leach mocked. “
Make it easy
. . . You mean resign my position as an Elder. It’s not going to happen, Sam.
I’ve been chosen to lead.”

    
“Amos—”

    
“You
don’t get it, do you, Sam? I guess maybe you wouldn’t, growing up . . .
disadvantaged. There’s rules for the flock and there’s rules for the shepherds.
Men like you and me—spiritual leaders—we’re not gonna go out and rob a
convenience store. They’re not gonna find us in the gutter with a needle in our
arm, or catch us plotting against the government. We’re accountable. And in
return, we get—”

    
“Yes,
Amos,” said Sam Brown gravely. “We
are
accountable. That’s why—”

    
In the
midst of the tomblike darkness, Raszer’s cell phone beeped. He’d forgotten to
silence its ringer, forgotten that it was in his pocket.
Idiot
, he thought, as he fumbled for it, scampering back down the
driveway toward his car: his sanctuary, if he could reach it before Leach
apprehended him, before the doors of the Kingdom Hall flew open and his first
paying job in a year hissed away with the curse on Leach’s lips. He dove into
the front seat, scrunched down, and pressed the phone to his ear.

    
“Hello?”
he whispered harshly.

    
No
reply.

    
“Hello?
Who is this
?” he repeated.

    
The
hall’s doors opened, spilling light on the stoop and the sidewalk. Sam Brown
stepped out and surveyed the driveway, then the street. When he’d gone back
inside, Raszer slid himself up against the worn-smooth leather of the seat
back.

    
In his
rearview mirror, a dark, inchoate form materialized, barely in motion, but
Raszer was too busy finding his breath, fumbling for his keys, to take it into
his field of conscious vision. He turned the ignition key and let the engine
warm.

    
He
waited a few moments and then eased away from the curb, making the first
available left to get back to Azusa Avenue. He’d just lowered his window and
lit a cigarette when the high beams blinded him. There was a Lincoln on his
tail.

    
His
first conscious reaction was willful disbelief.
No way
. Men in black limos didn’t come after him; he went after
them. And until now, the Lincoln had seemed almost chimerical, a thing imagined
as much as seen.
Get on the freeway and
go home to a fire and a good rioja
.
Yes
. But in his mind’s chronology, Raszer had already registered fear. Deep
and primal, beyond rationalization, it had traveled up his brain stem from his
gut, and he’d known decisively that home and hearth would never truly be safe
zones again. What he felt was the certainty of prey that a predator had found
his lair.

    
Twice
the big Lincoln rammed his rear bumper, and indignation as much as anything
else made him drop the Avanti into second gear and floor the accelerator,
blowing through the red light at Foothill Boulevard with his horn blaring.

    
The
westbound freeway entrance was a hundred yards up on the right, and Raszer
hugged the shoulder and sped up as he entered the overpass, knowing that he
could take the ramp at sixty while the Lincoln would almost certainly have to
slow down. He heard the V-8 surge and saw the headlight fill his right side
mirror as the bulky Lincoln rode up improbably on his right, its rear bumper
throwing sparks off the inside wall of the viaduct. Its angle of attack was
designed to force him away from the approach and onto a straightaway into the
industrial south end of town, a far better place to do murder.

    
Raszer
again felt the Lincoln’s front bumper hard on his rear. “Goddamnit!” he howled,
as he lost control of the back half of his car. He punched the accelerator and
steered right, hoping to fishtail around the limo and come back at the ramp
from the other side. All that accomplished was to put the limo’s bumper
foursquare onto his right flank, bulldozing him down both lanes as effortlessly
as if he were new-fallen snow. In another two seconds, he’d most likely roll;
Raszer used up one of them to squint through the glare of the Lincoln’s
headlights and the heavily tinted windshield.

    
What he
saw informed him of how to use the remaining second.

    
The face
of the driver was utterly impassive. Not so much as a clenched jaw marred its fearsome
serenity. In fact, the lips were just slightly parted in anticipation of the
kill. From what scant information Raszer could gather in the blink of an eye,
the face had no marked characteristics, no obvious ethnic stamp—but then, of
course, Raszer was constructing a physiognomy from little more than an eye
socket and the line of a mouth.

    
It was
enough to tell him that his death would mean little to this man and would never
be recognized as murder. He would be just one of two or three dozen accidental
calamities visited upon L.A. that night.

    
He
accelerated forward—the only way he could go—and hurtled over the curb, shaving
steel from the Avanti’s oil pan and spinning up mud from the saturated earth.
As soon as he’d cleared the Lincoln’s bumper, he spun the wheels hard left and
shimmied back onto the pavement ten feet behind the limo. Its brake lights
glowed an unnatural red, and its rear tires were obscured in small clouds of
vaporized rubber.

    
Just to
the left was the eastbound ramp to the 210 freeway, bound for San Bernardino
and the desert beyond, headed anywhere but to the solace of home. Raszer shot
onto it, narrowly avoiding a broadside with a hearse bearing the stencil of the
Malthus Mortuary. For nearly five minutes, he purred along at ninety-seven in
the carpool lane with nothing in his mirror, crossing the double yellow to make
for the I-15 South, from which he could connect to Interstate 10 going back
into L.A.

    
He’d
just reached for his phone to page Lieutenant Borges when he spotted the
Lincoln again, bearing down from the right, making at least 103. Raszer made up
his mind to cobble the best from a very bad situation. The local news didn’t
cover L.A.’s notorious high-speed chases at night, but the highway patrol
might; failing that, he would lead the Lincoln back onto Borges’s turf, if its
driver would be led. He nudged the speedometer to 105, and with a less than
steady thumb punched in the rest of Borges’s number.

    
In spite
of its horsepower and the recklessness of its driver, the Lincoln could do no
better than keep up with the Avanti’s rebuilt engine. At 5,000 rpms, it made a
sound that limousines rarely make, and each time it crept up on Raszer’s
bumper, he shot forward by four car lengths. In fact, he could have lostit, but
then he would also have lost the opportunity for apprehension. He scanned the
freeway. L.A.’s deserted downtown glimmered ahead like a mirage. There wasn’t a
squad car in sight. He might as well have been on the Autobahn, for all the
undermanned LAPD cared about speed limits. He wondered why he hadn’t yet seen
the snout of a gun protrude from the limo,then realized that his pursuers might
have a greater purpose in mind: to follow him home.
 
He reconsidered his gambit.

    
The
junction of the I-10 and the Hollywood Freeway offered a last chance for
evasion. The 101 ramp came up quick and could be overshot, especially by
something as unwieldy as a Lincoln. If Raszer made as if he were continuing
west on the 10 and then veered onto the 101 at the last instant, he might shake
his tail. They’d been within six car lengths of his bumper for nearly thirty
minutes, and he was enjoying neither the steady trickle of sweat running down
the bridge of his nose nor the knifing pains at the base of his skull. Borges
hadn’t returned his page, the highway patrol hadn’t appeared like the cavalry
on his flanks, his gas gauge was on E, and he couldn’t reach his cigarettes.
Time to make a choice.