Thursday's Child (6 page)

“All right,” Robert mumbled. “All fucking right.”

He pulled on some jeans as he hopped and staggered into the living room. En route, it did occur to him that while he knew it was two o'clock, and probably
P
.
M
. rather than
A.M
., he wasn't altogether sure what
day
it was.

For a man who prided himself on being super-organized, this realization was more than a little disconcerting.

He zipped the jeans and then opened the door, blinking rapidly against the sudden and unpleasant invasion of southern California sunshine. Maureen was standing there. “Oh, hi,” he said. His voice sounded strange, sort of rusty, and he realized that it had been some time since he'd actually spoken.

“
Oh, hi?
” she repeated, pushing by him and coming inside without actually being invited to do so. “That's all you have to say? I've been calling for days. What's the matter with you?” She dropped a load of newspapers and mail—which looked like mostly just ads and shit like that—onto the couch. “Why is it so dark in here?” She began yanking the curtains open efficiently. “I was starting to think that you were dead or something.”

It all came back to him then.

“No,” he said. “I'm not dead.”

She trailed him into the kitchen and watched, arms crossed, as he poured himself a large glass of orange juice. “Bobby, I was worried. You call me to say that your brother—who I didn't even know existed, by the way—had died and and so you'd be busy for a couple of days. I certainly understood that. But then, nothing. You wouldn't even answer your phone.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. The juice was helping his voice return to normal. “Like I said, I've been busy.” He tried to remember what it was that he'd actually been doing, but his mind couldn't quite focus yet. “And I think that maybe I had some damned bug. The flu, maybe.” When he thought about it, that sounded right. The flu, yeah. That would explain why the last few days were all sort of fogged over in his mind. A high fever could do that. He gulped some more juice. “I'm feeling better now, though.”

“Good.” With one quick look, she took in his unshaven, rumpled appearance, and then the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Her attitude softened a little. “It must have been terrible. Your brother dying.”

Robert sat at the table and began to search through the debris there for a pack of cigarettes and some matches. The red-and-gold matchbook he finally uncovered was from the bar where he'd had drinks with Brown after Andy's funeral. He held it between two fingers for a moment, then flipped it open. When the Winston was ignited, he looked at Maureen again. “My brother didn't just die, you know. He was murdered.”

She gasped. “Murdered? Oh my God, I didn't know that.”

He rubbed a hand over his face stubble. “Well, it happened a long time ago.”

Now she looked puzzled. “I don't understand.”

“I know you don't.” He picked up the glass of juice again, but instead of drinking, stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “I know you don't understand, Mo, but I'm just too damned tired to explain it all right now.”

She opened her mouth and then closed it again without saying anything. After a moment, Maureen went to the sink and turned on the hot water. She squirted lemon-scented liquid soap over the dirty dishes.

Robert shifted a box of Grape-Nuts and threw an empty Ruffles bag to the floor. This place was a mess. He must've really felt crummy the last couple of days, because usually he was a very neat person. After surveying the tabletop with dismay, he got up and went back into the living room. Dropping onto the couch, he started going through the mail with absolutely no interest.

The business-sized manila envelope, with his name neatly typed on it, caught his attention. He ripped it open and found, as expected, a single sheet of paper with another name typed there. Name, address, and an amount of money. The amount was satisfactory, so he carefully folded the paper and put it into his pocket. Probably it was time to get back to work.

Only one other piece of mail interested him at all. The envelope was creased and dirty and it was addressed in block printing. Pencil.

After looking at the envelope for a moment, he carefully opened it and slid out a page ripped from a child's writing tablet. The message was also in pencil, and reading it he had the impression that the act of writing it had been a real effort. The message itself was brief and admirably to the point.

Maybe you want to know that Danny Boyd is out of the joint
.

That was all. No signature. Nothing except the simple fact that Danny Boyd was a free man.

Robert crumpled the paper into a small, tight wad. From the kitchen, he could hear the sound of dishes clattering and silverware clinking as Maureen washed them. She wasn't often this domestic; he must really look like hell to have evoked such sympathy.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. It seemed like some kind of a bad joke. Or maybe just pure coincidence. Danny Boyd out walking the streets again. The man who had killed Andy. Sick cosmic joke or just chance, Robert didn't know what the hell he should do about it.

He knew that what he needed was a long, hot shower, a shave, and some clean clothes. But not quite yet. Instead, he lit another cigarette and sat still. There was a lot to think about.

2

The hit on Gary Rydell was one of those easy jobs. Rydell was some kind of hotshot commodities dealer who had decided to triple his income in a hurry by also dealing in a very particular commodity. Nothing wrong with that, as far as it went. The big boys were always looking for salesmen, especially those who could peddle to their rich friends without having to hang out on street corners.

Where Mr. Rydell went wrong, just like so many others, was that he got too greedy. Greed was fine, maybe, in its place, but carried too far, it could be dangerous. Skimming off the profits from the bosses was dangerous and crazy.

Rydell lived in a fancy condo near the beach. The building had a vast underground parking garage. Getting into the garage required a coded magnetic card, but he'd gotten lucky there, because it turned out that one of his clients had a secretary (for which read “mistress”) who happened to live in the building. The man was glad to do him a favor, no questions asked, because Robert had gotten him out from under a very nasty blackmail situation a couple of years earlier. Amazing how a couple of strategically placed bullets could dampen the enthusiasm of even the most determined extortionist. You didn't even have to kill him.

The little red sports car pulled into the garage right on time. Rydell parked in his own personal spot and got out, carrying a soft leather briefcase. He was locking the car when Robert stepped out of the shadows.

Rydell peered at him. “Who are you?”

Robert didn't answer; he didn't really believe in chatting with his targets. His only response was to raise the gun and pull the trigger once.

Rydell held on to the briefcase as he fell.

Robert finally tracked down a guy named Pervis, a former cellmate of Danny Boyd. The dope was having a midnight snack at a pizza joint in downtown Los Angeles. Robert leaned on the counter next to him. “Evening, Pervis,” he said.

Pervis was a rat-faced man with grease covering his chin and a string of cheese hanging from one corner of his mouth. He hunched farther down over the pizza and didn't even glance at Robert. “We know each other, do we?”

Robert smiled faintly. “Not exactly. We have what you might call a mutual acquaintance.”

“Yeah?” He swiped at his chin with the cuff of his shirt. “Who?”

“Old roomie of yours. Danny Boyd.”

That got a reaction. Pervis belched and finally looked at Robert. “Boyd? What about him?”

“He's out, I hear.”

“You hear more than I do, then. But why do you think I care?”

“Well, gee, I thought maybe you'd be having a reunion. I mean, you two shared a cell for a long time. That makes a couple of guys close.”

The pizza was still disappearing. Pervis spoke through a mouthful. “I don't give a flying fuck about Boyd.”

“Well, I'd like to find him. Maybe you can tell me where to look.”

Pervis snorted; the guy had a variety of disgusting noises he could make. He was probably a real gas at parties. “Why the hell should I tell you anything?”

“Just to be a nice guy?” Robert suggested.

Pervis glanced at him. “Yeah, right.”

“How about for fifty bucks?”

“Boyd is a mean son of a bitch. Maybe he doesn't want to be found by you. I tell you where to look, he gets found, and then I find my ass on the line.”

“How about a hundred dollars?”

“Hmm,” Pervis said.

“That's as high as I go,” Robert warned him. “And there's other ways of getting what I want out of you. Ways that won't cost me a fucking cent.”

Pervis took him seriously. “I ain't saying for sure, you understand,” he said. “But before he got sent up, Boyd had a woman he shacked up with. A hooker named Marnie Dowd. Maybe he might have gone to her when he got out.”

“That's it?”

Pervis shrugged. “So where's my hundred?”

Robert took out fifty dollars and dropped it onto the counter. “That's only worth fifty,” he said, staring at Pervis. “You got a problem with that?”

After a moment, Pervis shook his head. “No sir,” he mumbled. “I got no problem at all.”

Robert smiled again and walked away.

6

1

The girl he was looking at couldn't have been more than sixteen years old, if that. She was wearing a yellow halter top that did its best to push her small breasts up and out. The effect made him think, in a melancholy way, of a little girl playing dress-up in her mother's clothes.

Finally she realized that he was watching. Her shoulders, which had started to slump a little from weariness, straightened. The pink tip of her tongue appeared and ran slowly, deliberately, over her already shiny red lips.

He limped over and propped himself against the counter next to her.

She lifted a half-eaten hot dog, took a small bite, and chewed it languidly. Her eyes never left his face during the whole routine. She was damned good. Anybody would have imagined, looking at her looking at him, that this sweet young thing with big blue eyes had the hots for a somewhat overweight, middle-aged man with weariness etched into his face.

If she ever wanted to give up walking the streets, she could probably have a really good career in the movies. Hell, for all he knew, maybe she had already done her bit on celluloid—or, more likely these days, on video tape.

She was still staring at him.

Gareth Sinclair sighed and reached into the pocket of his rumpled windbreaker. It was too hot by thirty or so degrees for the jacket, but it served very nicely to cover the holster and the gun that he still carried. Too many years as a cop had left him feeling naked without it. He flashed his ID in her direction.

Her expression became one of complete disgust, as if the hot dog had gone suddenly bad in her mouth, and then her face shut down completely. “Cop,” she said, spewing both crumbs and contempt into the air between them.

“No,” he said. “You didn't look closely enough. I'm private.”

Her shrug caused one strap of the hardworking halter to slip from her shoulder. She pushed it back impatiently. “Same fucking thing.”

Gar put the ID away. “Not quite. Just for starters, I can't bust you for soliciting.”

The girl smiled sweetly; there was a smear of mustard across her pearly whites. Teeth as pretty and as straight as those had visited an orthodontist. Somewhere her parents were probably still making payments on that smile. And wondering if they'd ever see it again, no doubt. “Solicitin'? Why, sir, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just standing here eating a hot dog. Is there any law against that?”

“No law,” he said, although he knew and she knew that no girl—or boy, for that matter—would be standing in this place, at this time of the night, unless she or he was trying very hard to hustle up some cash.

Gar had ordered some coffee. It finally arrived and he stirred it with the skinny plastic stick provided by the sleepy counterman. “Don't worry,” he said. “I just want to talk.”

“Uh-huh.” A sudden light came into her eyes. “Like, how do I know that my parents didn't hire you to find me and drag me back there?”

Before answering, he risked a sip of the coffee, which tasted pretty much the way you would expect coffee at a twenty-four-hour hot-dog stand on Hollywood Boulevard to taste. Luckily, a man who was a cop for nearly twenty years acquired many skills, not the least of which was the ability to swallow any foul brew that called itself coffee. “No,” he said. “Your folks didn't hire me.”

The light was gone from her eyes as quickly as it had appeared. “Yeah, well, it's a damned good thing, 'cause I wouldn't go anyway. Fuck them, is what I say.”

Absurdly, Gar felt as if he should apologize to the girl for the fact that he wasn't looking for her. But such an apology would be pointless, as he knew from painful experience, because it would only piss her off so much that she might not give him any information at all. Assuming that she had any to give, of course, which was a pretty big assumption to make. None of the dozen or so kids he had talked to over the course of what was becoming a very long evening had known anything. Or, if they had, nobody was talking.

She picked up a can of orange soda and drank. As she set the can down again, her eyes seemed for the first time to notice the black ebony cane at his side. “So, what're you, like a crip or something?”

“Something like that, yeah. I'm looking for a girl named Tammi McClure.”

“Don't know her,” she said immediately.