The Watchman (20 page)

Pike said, “Breathe.”

Chen couldn’t stop talking. The words rushed out with no more thought than his decision to run.

“The feds took the guns. I would have run them, honest to God. I didn’t have anything to do with—”

One moment Chen was talking; the next, Pike’s hand clamped his mouth like a vise.

Pike said, “You’re my friend, John. You don’t have to be afraid. Can I let go now?”

Chen nodded. His friend?

Pike let go. He opened the backpack, then held it out. Chen thought it might be a trick guys like Pike were always playing on guys like him; you look in the bag and a snake jumps out.

Chen slowly peeked into the bag, ready to jump, but it wasn’t a snake.

“What is this?”

“Guns the feds don’t know about and two sets of fingerprints.”

Chen peered into the bag but touched nothing. He saw two small glasses in plastic sleeves, and what appeared to be two 9mm pistols, both pocked with rust and beat to hell. He knew right away from their shabby condition they were street guns; guns that had been stolen many years earlier, then traded for dope or sold, then sold or traded again, passing from scumbag to scumbag. He also saw three spent shell casings.

“Where did you get this stuff?”

“The feds who confiscated the guns—did you get their names?”

Pike had ignored his question.

“Pitman. Pitman and something else.”

“Blanchette?”

“I don’t know. Harriet didn’t remember.”

Chen glanced back at the shell casings. Their once-gleaming brass was scorched, and the backpack smelled of burnt gunpowder. Chen began to feel afraid again, but not afraid Pike would beat him to death; afraid of something deeper. Chen found Pike watching him. John saw himself reflected in Pike’s dark glasses as if they were reflecting pools. In a weird way he would later wonder about, Chen grew calm. Here was Pike, calm there in the water, and his calmness spread to Chen.

John settled back.

“Are there more bodies to go with these guns?”

“Two.”

“Are they connected with Eagle Rock and Malibu?”

“Yes. LAPD is on the scene now. Shots were fired, so they’ll know guns are missing, but they won’t know who has them. Bullets will be recovered, and those bullets will match one of these guns—the Taurus—but not the other.”

Chen nodded, taking it in. If his shift hadn’t ended when it did, he might have rolled out to the crime.

“If the feds knew we had these guns, would they take them?”

“Yes, but they won’t know. Only you and I know, John. You’re going to have to make a choice.”

Chen didn’t understand.

“Choice about what?”

“Seven men are dead. The Department of Justice is involved. Here we are with these guns. Least case, you could be looking at obstructing a federal investigation. Worst case, accessory to homicide.”

Chen still didn’t understand.

“What are you saying?”

“Tell me you want no part, I’ll walk away.”

Chen was stunned. He was
flabbergasted
.

“Wait. Waitaminute. You’re giving me a choice?”

“Of course, it’s your choice. What did you think?”

Chen stared at Pike and wondered how Pike could be so calm. His impassive face; his even voice. He studied Pike, and once more saw himself in Pike’s glasses, two faces in one. In that moment, Chen remembered a meditation pool he once saw at a Buddhist monastery, its surface flat, featureless, and perfect. Chen was six years old. His uncle brought him to the monastery, and Chen had been fascinated by the pool. The mirrored surface was absolutely smooth; no leaf, no mote of dust or insect marred it; no breeze stirred its face. The pool was so like a mirror that Chen could not see beneath the surface, and believed it was no more than a few inches deep. His uncle turned away, and Chen decided to jump. It was a hot day in the San Gabriel Valley, and Chen was only six. He wanted to splash in the cool water and run to the other side. Only an inch or two deep. As empty as glass. Chen readied himself to leap, but in that moment the surface roiled and a monster reached for him, scaled in glistening armor. Red, black, and orange plates, shimmering and horrible; it broke the surface with frightening power and then it was gone. A koi, his uncle later told him, when Chen stopped crying; but the lesson was not lost on John Chen, even at six years old. A calm surface could hide great turmoil.

Chen said, “What’s going on?”

“I’m trying to find out. I think the feds confiscated your evidence to hide something. If they knew about these guns, they would confiscate them, too.”

“This is tied in with Eagle Rock and Malibu?”

“Yes.”

Chen stared down at the guns again.

“The firearms analysts are specialists, man. What they do, it isn’t just science—it’s an art. She’s already gone home.”

“First thing tomorrow.”

“I can’t just walk in, here’s two guns. I need a case number.”

“Use the Eagle Rock number.”

“She knows the feds took those guns.
She’s
the one who told me.”

“Tell her you got them back. Make up something, John. It’s important.”

Chen knew it was important. Everything Pike and Cole brought to him had been important.

He looked into the backpack again.

“What are the glasses, the fingerprints? Or you want me to print the guns?”

“The men who used these guns will end up with the coroner, but the coroner won’t be able to identify them. You will.”

Chen shook his head.

“I can lift the prints and run them, but it’s all the same database. Live Scan is Live Scan. If the coroner didn’t pull a hit, neither will I.”

“These people aren’t in the database. They came from Ecuador.”

Chen glanced at the glasses again. A standard NCIC/Live Scan search was not a worldwide search. An international search required a special request, and even then you pretty much had to request each search by country. No single worldwide database existed, so if you didn’t know where to look, you were shit out of luck.

Pike said, “Can you do that, John?”

“This is something big, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Big, and getting bigger.”

Chen chewed at his upper lip as he thought through what he would have to do, both for the guns and the prints. He was pretty sure he could get LaMolla to run the guns; she was still bat-shit furious with the feds for taking her toys, and doubly furious that neither Harriet nor Parker would tell her why. LaMolla would run the guns just to fuck them over.

Chen said, “I can do this. I’ll take care of it.”

Pike got out and walked away.

Chen stared after him, thinking Pike wasn’t so bad when you got to know him. Not so scary, even though, well, you know, he was scary.

You’re my friend, John.

Chen lifted out the glasses. He held them up, one by one, and saw the clean definition of fingerprint smudges even through the plastic wrappers. Chen smiled. The coroner had five unidentified stiffs, and now he would have two more. Everyone would be scratching their heads, wondering who in hell these guys were, but they wouldn’t know—

—until John Chen told them.

Chen smiled even wider.

The guns would keep until tomorrow, but now was the best time for the glasses. The lab crew was reduced, Harriet was gone, and no one would ask what he was doing. Chen stuffed the guns under his seat, locked his car, and hurried inside with the glasses.

Chen wanted to identify these guys, not only for himself and what he would get from it, but for Pike. He did not want to let down his friend Joe Pike.

PIKE STOPPED for takeout from an Indian restaurant in Silver Lake even though Cole dropped off food earlier that day. He bought a spinach and cheese dish called saag paneer, vegetable jalfrezi, and garlic naan, thinking the girl would like them, and a quart of a sweet yogurt drink called lassi. The lassi was rich like a milk shake, and flavored with mango. Pike enjoyed smelling the strong spices—the garlic and garam masala; the coriander and cardamom. They reminded him of the rocky villages and jungle basins where he had first eaten these things. Pike was starving. A queasy hunger had grown in him as the stress burned from his system.

The sun was long down by the time Pike arrived at their house and turned into the drive. Everything looked fine. The door was closed and the shades glowed from the light within the house. In the abrupt silence when he turned off the car, his ears still whined, though less now than before. Pike was not going to tell the girl about Luis and Jorge, but he would tell her he had made progress, and thought that might make her feel better about things.

Pike locked the car, went to the door, and let himself in. He remembered how his silent appearances frightened her, so this time he announced himself. He knocked twice, then opened the door.

“It’s me.”

Pike felt the silence as he stepped inside. Cole’s iPod was on the coffee table beside an open bottle of water. Her magazines were on the floor. The house was bright with light, but Pike heard nothing. He concentrated, listening past the whine, thinking she might be playing with him because she hated the way he always surprised her, but he knew it was wrong. The silence of an empty house is like no other silence.

Pike lowered the bag of food to the floor. He drew the Kimber and held it down along his leg.

“Larkin?”

Pike moved, and was at her bedroom. He moved again, checking the second bedroom, the bath, and the kitchen. Larkin was not in the house. The rooms and their things were in order and in place, and showed no sign of a struggle. The windows were intact. The back door was locked, but he opened it, checked the backyard, then moved back through the house. The doors had not been jimmied or broken.

Pike looked for a note. No note.

Her purse and other bags were still in her bedroom. If she ran away she had not taken them.

Pike let himself out the front door and stood in the darkness on the tiny porch. He listened, feeling the neighborhood—the streetlight above its pool of silver, the open houses with golden windows, the movement of the neighbors on their porches and within their homes. Life was normal. Men with guns had not come here. No one had carried a struggling girl out to a car or heard a woman screaming. Larkin had likely walked away.

Pike stepped off the porch and went to the street, trying to decide which way she would go, and why. She had credit cards and some cash, but no phone with which to call her friends or a car. Pike decided she had probably walked down to Sunset Boulevard to find a phone, but then a woman on the porch across the street laughed. They were an older couple, and had been on their porch every night, listening to the Dodgers. Tonight their radio played music, but Pike could hear their voices clearly.

He stepped between the cars through the pool of silver light.

He said, “Excuse me.”

Their porch was lit only by the light coming from within their house. The red tips of their cigarettes floated in the dark like fireflies.

The man drew on his cigarette, and the coal flared. He lowered the volume on the radio.

He said, “Good evening.”

He spoke in a formal manner with a Russian accent.

Pike said, “I’m from across the street.”

The woman waved her cigarette.

“We know this. We see you and the young lady.”

“Did you see the young lady today?”

Neither of them answered. They sat in cheap aluminum lawn chairs, shadowed in the dim light. The old man drew on his cigarette again.

Pike said, “I think she went for a walk. Did you see which way she went?”

The old man grunted, but with a spin that gave it meaning.

Pike said, “What?”

The woman said, “This is your wife?”

Pike read the weight in her question and took sex off the table.

“My sister.”

The old man said, “Ah.”

Something played on the woman’s face that suggested she didn’t believe him, and she seemed to be thinking about how to answer. She finally decided and waved her cigarette toward the street.

“She go with the boys.”

The old man said, “Armenians.”

The woman nodded, as if that said it all.

“She talk with them, the way they stand there all the time, them and their car, and she go with them.”

Pike said, “When was this?”

“Not so long. We had just come out with the tea.”

An hour ago. No more than an hour.

Pike said, “The Armenians. Where do they live?”

The woman jabbed her cigarette to the side.

“Next door, there. They are all cousins, they say, cousins and brothers. Armenians all say they are cousins, but you never know.”

The old man said, “Armenians.”

The house the old woman pointed to was dark, and the BMW was not on the street. She seemed to read Pike’s thoughts.

“No one is home there. They all drive away.”

“You hear them say where they were going?”

The woman tipped her chair back and craned her head toward the open window.

“Rolo! Rolo, come here!”

A boy wearing a Lakers jersey pushed through the screen door. He was tall and skinny, and Pike figured him for fourteen or fifteen.

“Yes, Gramma?”

“The Armenians, what is that place where they go?”

“I don’t know.”

The old man seemed irritated and flipped his hand in a little wave, saying stop kidding around.

“The Armenians. That club where you must never go.”

The old woman cocked a brow at Pike.

“He knows. He talks with those Armenian boys. The young one. They have this club.”

Rolo looked embarrassed, but described what sounded like a dance club not far away in Los Feliz. Rolo didn’t remember the name, but described it well enough—an older building north of Sunset that had been freshly whitewashed and had a single word on its side. Rolo didn’t remember the word, but thought it was something with a “Y.”

Pike found the building twenty minutes later, just north of Sunset where it was wedged between an Armenian bookstore and a Vietnamese-French bakery. The sign across the top of the building read
CLUB YEREVAN.
Beneath it, a red leather door was wedged open. Three heavy men stood on the sidewalk outside the door, talking and smoking, two in short-sleeved dress shirts and one in a gleaming leather jacket. A smaller sign above the door read
PARKING IN REAR
.