Royal Flush (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 6) (24 page)

I must have closed my eyes, because the image was printed in my mind in red, on a black background. All my teeth ached.

That would certainly explain the damage to the inside of his mouth.

Rosie had closed her eyes too, but she hadn’t opened them again. Artie was whiter than usual.

“He bit his tongue,” Deeanne wailed, “and a bunch of his teeth are gone, and…”

The doctor came out to the waiting room.

“I’ve got him all stitched up now. Any of you a parent?” The way he said it, cold, tight, wary, someone was responsible for raising a Nazi.

“No,” I said. “But that’s a good point. Deeanne, give us his parents’ number. They should be called.”

“I’m going to have to keep him here tonight, under observation— he got a pretty substantial kick to the head. I think he’ll be okay, though. If he stops hanging out with the wrong crowd.” The doctor looked at me sternly.

I wanted to tell the man not to be so smug and self-righteous, to clean up his own medical corner of the world and go fight the HMOs, and the doctors who keep scared patients waiting for an hour while they talk to their brokers on the phone, and the ones who are in such a hurry to make another buck they cut off the wrong leg. But I really couldn’t blame him for his attitude, under the circumstances, even if I wanted to.

“I’m not his father, remember? Deeanne?”

“He lives with his dad and stepmom. But Royal doesn’t want anyone having their number.”

“Deeanne, they have to know where he is.” Rosie spoke quietly, but her authority was clear, and Deeanne caved in and wrote down the number.

There was a pay phone in the hall. It was a good ten rings before someone answered. This was, after all, two in the morning, and not everybody leaps out of bed at the sound of the phone like I do. Or like I think I do. The voice was sleepy and female.

“What!” it demanded.

“Mrs. Subic?”

“Yeah. What?” She was a bit more awake, and sounded worried.

“Mrs. Subic, I’m a friend of your son’s—”

“Why are you calling us? I don’t want to talk to you.” Now she sounded scared.

“Wait! He’s in the hospital. Emergency room. He’s been beaten up pretty badly and he’ll be in here at least through the night. I thought you should know. He’s at Marin General.”

“I think you better talk to his father.”

This time, the sleepy voice was hoarse and male.

“What’s going on?”

I repeated what I’d told his wife.

“I’m a sick man. I can’t take much more of this. He’s going to be all right, you say?”

“Looks that way. Much more of what?” Had Royal gotten beaten up before? Had they been awakened before at two in the morning?

“Damned kid. He’s crazy. Always up to some kind of trouble. He didn’t steal a car or anything, did he?”

“No.”

“And he’s going to be okay, he’s just beat up?”

“Yes. But pretty bad. He’s here for the night, at least.”

“Well, then, I guess we’ll see him tomorrow. Tell him to call if he needs a ride home.” And the man hung up.

I wanted to give the message to Royal himself, but the nurse said he was resting, whatever that meant. She took down the information.

“Okay, Deeanne,” Artie said. “Time to go home.”

“I want to stay here. I can take him home when he’s ready.”

Artie sighed, and thought about it. “How many days of school you missed lately?”

“Artie!”

“I think you better stay away from him for a while.”

“Artie!”

He grunted. “Okay, you call here first thing in the morning, early, and if he can go home you call Jake or Rosie and they go with you to take him home. That way you’ll be protected. Then you can go right to school. Okay with you guys?” Rosie and I said it was. “Early, though, Deeanne. So you can get to school on time.”

She nodded, then abruptly, awkwardly, kissed Artie on the cheek.

Before we all went to our separate cars, we told Artie some of what had been happening. He was especially interested in the story about Gilly.

“Be a real kick in the pants,” he said, “if half the people in the Command are Jewish spies.”

Rosie laughed and shook her head. “I don’t think we’re that lucky.”

Driving home, I thought about Royal’s parents and their reaction to the news that their son had been beaten. They’d sounded mostly nervous, maybe even scared, and only half-concerned about the kid. I wondered if they had started out that way or if he’d pushed them over the edge.

I couldn’t worry about his family relations now, though. I’d had an hour of sleep, and Deeanne would be calling early in the morning for help in carting Royal home.

After a mile or so, I noticed that a distinctive set of headlights had been lighting up my rearview the whole way. Distinctive in that one of them was dimmer than the other. The car was big. It looked a lot like Floyd’s Camaro, but the street wasn’t very well lit and I couldn’t be sure. Were his headlights messed up this way? I’d never noticed them. Sloppy work on my part. It wasn’t strange that someone coming from the vicinity of the hospital would turn up Drake, the only main street around. The question was: Would he stay on Drake and keep going if I turned off onto a side street?

I sped up, passing College of Marin, passing the Art and Garden Center and the gated estates of Ross. The headlights dropped back. When I got to San Anselmo, I turned a corner, then another, wandering through downtown. Then I cut over to Center Road and headed toward Fairfax. The headlights stayed with me. Had to be Floyd. Who else would be following me? I went straight through Fairfax and back onto Drake, hung a fast right at the gas station, left again, cut my lights, and pulled into a dark driveway. It was a wonder, through all that, that the alert Fairfax cops hadn’t stopped me for speeding or driving stoned.

The car was nowhere in sight. Had I really lost him? I waited a while. Nothing. I pulled out of the driveway and cruised, watching the rearview, back to Drake and east again to my own street. No uneven headlights. No Camaro. The only other car moving on the street was a VW bus that still had its flower decals. Not a Command kind of vehicle, unless they were slicker and sneakier than I thought they were.

Even so, I was nervous. After I got in the house I stationed myself by the front window and watched for half an hour.

No uneven headlights. I went to bed.

Deeanne called me at six o’clock. I’d been asleep for maybe two hours.

“He wants to go home. Can we do it now?”

“Sure. I’ll pick you up.”

“I’m at the hospital.”

She had slid around the letter of Artie’s instructions. He had told her to call the hospital in the morning, call me, and then go to get Royal with me or Rosie. I’d seen Artie take her home; I wondered how long she’d stayed there before she’d turned around and gone back to Royal’s battered side.

“See you in a few minutes,” I told her. “Need some coffee or something.”

I could have just gone by myself, but it occurred to me that this would be my first sight of Royal’s parents and his home, and I wanted Rosie’s sharp eyes along. I called her, waking her up, and told her I’d be there in ten minutes. She said, “Glmf.” I mentioned that I thought I’d been followed the night before.

She yawned. “Okay, I’ll pick you up, then. I’ll drive. That Falcon of yours is just too damned distinctive.”

Which no one would ever say about Rosie’s white Ford Taurus. A car favored by cops, PIs, and other people in hiding.

This morning, Rosie informed me as I stepped into the Taurus, she’d decided to carry a gun. The thing was, she said, she wanted to be sure that if any warriors were waiting outside the hospital or outside Royal’s house, she’d be able to convince them we didn’t need a lesson in skinhead justice, curb-stomping style. She had also been negatively impressed, she said, with their treatment of Gilly.

In order to carry the weapon, she was wearing a little outfit she’d ordered from a catalog of “fashions for the gun-carrying woman.” Slacks and a blousy jacket that had a concealed, lined pouch made to hold a handgun.

Honest. There’s a catalog.

She’s been trying to convince me to get a weapon too. Maybe one of these days I will.

When we got to the hospital, Deeanne was sitting beside Royal’s bed, but he wasn’t in it. The toilet flushed and he came out. He didn’t look any better than he had the night before, but at least he was ambulatory.

The eye above his purple cheek was swollen shut, and bruises I didn’t remember from the night before had bloomed beneath the dirty-looking stubble on his square Aryan jaw. His arms below the T-shirt’s sleeves were scraped. His lips were scabbed. He nodded to me, picked his jacket off the back of a chair, and indicated with a slow movement of his hamburger head that he was ready to go. That was when I saw the bandage on the back of his skull. At least the prep work had been easy— no hair to shave. I thought of mentioning that, but didn’t think either he or Deeanne would find it funny.

I held up a hand— wait a second— picked up the phone, punched 9 for an outside line, and called his parents’ home.

The father answered.

“I talked to you last night, Mr. Subic. Royal is coming home now. His girlfriend Deeanne and I and my friend Rosie will be with him.” There was a tense silence on the other end.

“Listen, Mr.— what’s your name anyway?”

I remembered that Royal had told me his folks had no connection with the Command, didn’t know it existed as a group, and that they hadn’t liked the warriors they’d met. So I told him my name. Another silence. I wanted to see the inside of Royal’s home, but his father needed reassurance before that was going to happen.

“Mr. Subic, you haven’t met me. I’ve been trying to help your son break away from that bad bunch of punks he’s been running with.”

“You some kind of social worker?”

“Not exactly.” I let him chew on that.

Then, a sigh. “Thank you. We’ll be eating breakfast. I’m sure we can make enough for everyone.”

“That would be very nice.”

I was curious about these people, about anyone who had raised a boy like Royal: ignorant, easily conned by bigots, stupid and silly, but still, underneath all that, and somewhere inside that thick skull, brave and even capable of shifting gears once he figured out which end was up. I was curious about this father he seemed ashamed of, too. Sounded like a decent enough guy— shut-off, scared, but okay.

Royal showed us with gestures that his head hurt and he didn’t want to drive, and Rosie said that was probably best anyway.

“If the warriors are keeping an eye on you, it’s just as well that your car stays parked near the hospital for a couple of days, so they think you’re still here.”

Of course. Rosie’s always thinking. I told him we’d drive his car over to his house later in the week. Deeanne hadn’t had any trouble finding a parking spot close to the entrance when she’d arrived at who-knew-what hour, so Rosie and I watched them get into Deeanne’s old Corolla and told them to wait, locked in, until we pulled our own car around. We got the Taurus and followed them out of the hospital lot, down Drake to the freeway, and north to San Rafael.

The Subic house was located in the Canal district, an area where you could open a body shop, find a cheap apartment, motel room, or homeless shelter, buy a boat, or drive through on your way to an expensive development. A California bungalow: small, pink, and stuccoed.

The woman who came to the door was tall and thin, wearing a blue paisley granny dress faded enough to be an original. Her graying hair was long, straight, and parted in the middle. She didn’t have any flowers in her hair, but I had the feeling that if I squinted and clicked my heels three times I’d be transported to Golden Gate Park, 1967. I was reminded of the sellers of the cottage-and-cottage I wanted to buy. People of the time warp.

She stared at Royal’s face, whimpered, and touched his shoulder tentatively.

“I’m okay, Mom.”

“Oh, good.” She looked happy to believe him, and turned to greet Deeanne pleasantly. Clearly they’d met before.

“And this is Jake and Rosie,” Deeanne said. “They’re detectives.” Well, that cat was out of the bag and running around the living room, screeching.

She shook her head sadly. “That’s such a violent thing to do for a living.” In an abrupt non sequitur, she added, “Please join us for breakfast.”

We followed her through the small, expensively furnished living room— the Persian rug looked real— and into an even smaller dining room that was stuffed with a gleaming sideboard, mahogany table, and six chairs. The table was set with blue-patterned dishes that looked pricey and silverware that, unlike mine, actually seemed to be part of a set and actually looked like silver. Mrs. Subic waved vaguely at the table, heading through the doorway to the kitchen and saying she’d “be right out.”

The man of the house appeared next, shuffling down a hallway that I assumed led from the bedrooms. He couldn’t have been much past his mid-fifties, but he was a tattered, potbellied, stooped version of his son, dressed in baggy gray pants and a gray seersucker shirt that sagged on his round shoulders. The same square jaw was just visible under the drooping skin. The watery pale blue eyes were resting, loose-lidded, in a bed of fine wrinkles.

He patted his son’s shoulder, barely glancing at the cuts and bruises. “I want to thank you for trying to help Royal,” he said, rubbing his lower back and sitting himself down at the head of the shiny table.

“Our pleasure.”

Everybody else sat down, following his lead. Everybody but me. I went to the door of the kitchen and asked the woman if there was anything I could do to help. She smiled blandly at me and shook her head, waving me back into the dining room. But before I went, I took a long look at a roomful of big, gleaming, new appliances, and a tiled cooking island hung with copper-bottomed pots and pans. The dishwasher was one of those top-of-the-line models with a control pad that looks like a computer keyboard. The refrigerator was huge, with glassy black double doors, and had an ice dispenser.

This was a very weird house and a weird household too. A low-end bungalow in a low-end neighborhood. With tens of thousands of dollars in furnishings. With a father who looked like a laborer and a mother who was a flower child gone to seed.