Everything but the Squeal Read online

  “Please,” Annie said. “Take him.”

  “Wouldn't miss it for the world,” I said, rising. “I've never met anyone named Blister.”

  Wyatt glared at me as though he'd never seen me before. It's a very peculiar feeling when your oldest friend suddenly looks dangerous.

  “Whatever you want,” he said. “I'm going.”

  As I followed him out, I heard Annie say in her Perfect Hostess voice, “Please. Eat your dinner.” Then I heard a chair slam to the floor, and Joyce said, “Bernie.”

  In the Jeep Wyatt slugged the steering wheel a couple of times before he turned the key. The horn coughed each time. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch.1’ Then the motor caught and we jerked backward over the bridge across the creek. A Chevy van, heading north on Old Canyon Road, hit its brakes and slithered around us, its driver shouting one-syllable words with ancient Old English pedigrees that didn't make them sound any less rude.

  “Double damn,” Wyatt said, accelerating and raising the cognac bottle to his lips. I hadn't realized he'd brought it, and the new knowledge wasn't reassuring. “I can handle enemies. What do you do about your own kids?”

  “I've never had any.”

  “So you're lucky. So shut up.”

  I shut up for three or four miles that would have made Wyatt's insurance agent, had he been there, give serious thought to a new career. After we'd passed everything in the vicinity, and after Wyatt had settled the bottle between his thighs, I crossed my fingers and said, “So who's Blister?”

  “A dealer,” Wyatt said, jerking the wheel to the right to avoid a plummet down to the creek, which was by then three hundred feet below us.

  “Dealing what?”

  “Mainly crack. Also regular old coke. Free-enterprise system, you know? Whatever the little kids want to buy.”

  “How old?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty?” I asked, shocked in spite of myself. “Jessica's only thirteen.” She was, after all, my goddaughter. “How long has this been going on?”

  “A month. Son of a bitch,” he said again. This time he pounded the dashboard with a closed fist.

  “What happens if you maim him?” I asked.

  “My daughter hates me.”

  “Not for long.”

  Wyatt caught up with something with four wheels, a Starion or a Jetta or a Sentra or something else with a name that was chosen because it sounded good to someone with an accent, and passed it on the right. Gravel rattled beneath the fenderguards, and the horizon took a dizzy spin. The creek, with its ample complement of hard sharp rocks, yawned beneath us, and then we were on the road again.

  “Not for long,” I repeated when I could trust my voice.

  “What? A week? Two weeks? Do you know how long that is when you're thirteen?”

  At least he was conversing in whole sentences. Pushing my luck, I said, “Then let me be the heavy.”

  He glanced over at me, and I instantly wished he hadn't.

  “Wyatt” I mewed. He looked back at the road, crooked the wheel, and somehow managed to navigate between a car that was turning right and another that was coming straight toward us. Various brakes screeched, and he laughed for the first time in five minutes. “Another coat of paint on any of us,” he said, “and we'd be a memory.”

  He slowed to maybe seventy. “Anyway,” he said, “we're almost there.”

  He wrenched the wheel to the right and we jolted up Entrada, a goat path that can be called a street only by courtesy of L.A. County, which marks it as such on its maps. By anyone else's standards, it is a treacherous, precipitous collection of gaping potholes, so narrow that kids on two-wheelers have frequent head-on collisions. The tops of eucalyptus trees waltzed overhead in the wind, and the stars were as cold and bright as Mrs. Sorrell's sapphire. The scent of sage filled the air. Cold or not, it was too nice a night to die.

  Wyatt said, “We’rehere.”

  He pulled the car to the left side of the road. Sage scraped at the paint job and the tires squealed. Wyatt looked out his window and swore. Vegetation was pressed against the glass like man-eating plants that smelled blood. “I'll get out on your side,” he said.

  He waited, but I didn't reach for the door handle.

  “Listen,” I said. “I'm not going to tell you I know how you feel, but listen anyway. We're here to get Jessica. If anyone has to do anything unpleasant, let it be me. It's time to think about short-term goals. All we want is for her to come home with us. If you spread good old Blister's brains all over the wall, she might decide not to. If I do it, on the other hand, she'll just hate me for a while, and I think I can live with that.”

  “Open the door,” he growled.

  “Eat the big patootie,” I said. “Are you going to behave?”

  He lifted his shoulders almost to his ears and blew air out through his mouth. Then he shook his head several times as though he were clearing it, and when he looked at me he was Wyatt again.

  “Okay,” he said, “you're the tough guy.”

  “Good at heart, though.”

  “Whatever you say. Can we go? That bloodsucker could be on top of my daughter right now.”

  “If he is,” I said, “you get her out from under, and I'll put him on top of something else. Like a broken aquarium, okay?”

  He nodded, and I opened the door.

  I was out and he was past me so fast that I barely saw him. He sprinted up a series of stone steps that put a permanent part in the sagebrush, and I followed as best I could. By the time I got to the top of the steps I was winded, and Wyatt was pounding at the door of a surprisingly nice house that commanded a panoramic view of hills and sky.

  I grabbed his hand in mid-pound, and it was a good thing I did, because it opened at precisely that moment and Wyatt would have begun the negotiations by hitting his daughter in the face. He tried to jerk his hand away from me, then focused and let it drop to his side.

  “Daddy,” Jessica said coolly. “Is dinner ready?”

  I hadn't seen her in a few months, and I wasn't prepared. Sure, she was still a baby to anyone who'd known her as long as I had, but she was a woman too. Most of the baby fat that makes children look so tentative had dropped away, revealing a face that had made up its mind to be beautiful. She wore a raggedly slashed T-shirt, shrunk bleached jeans, and a cloud of light brown hair with golden highlights. She sighted behind her father to look at me, and her hazel eyes narrowed slightly.

  “Yes, it is,” Wyatt said tightly. “In fact, it's getting cold.”

  “Mommy's ropa vieja never gets cold,” she said. “Even when it's a week old, it'll blow your pants off.”

  “And I'm glad to see that yours are on,” he said.

  “Oh, please,” she said. It was the wrong thing to say.

  Wyatt grabbed her arm and gave her a shake that almost lifted her off her feet. “We're going,” he said.

  “So go,” said a male voice from behind her, and a lanky young man pulled the door the rest of the way open. “Take her with you. She was going home anyway.”

  “I don't need your fucking permission to take my daughter home,” Wyatt said.

  Blister passed a hand through limp hair that dangled over a narrow forehead. He was wearing white drawstring pants and slippers, and his stomach muscles looked like something you wouldn't want to hit your head on. His eyebrows collided above his nose. The air from the room inside was overripe with cigarette smoke.

  “This is boring,” Blister said. “Oh, and happy birthday, Dad.”

  My hand was on Wyatt's shoulder, and I felt him tense to lunge at Blister, but Jessica defused the moment. Without turning around, she said, “Don't call him Dad.” It was not a tone that invited discussion.

  “So what am I supposed to call him?” Blister asked indolently.

  “Call me Wyatt,” Wyatt said after a massive effort.

  “Yo, Blister,” I said softly. Blister's eyes went to me for the first time. “Hi,” I said. I made a small
confidential pointing gesture at Wyatt. “Call him Mr. Wilmington.”

  “Who's this?” Blister asked the world in general.

  “Nobody much,” I said, smiling. “You can call me The Man with No Name.”

  Jessica looked from Wyatt to me and misjudged the degree to which the conversation had become civilized. “How about you give me half an hour, Daddy?” she asked. “Blister will drive me home.”

  Wyatt looked at me and exhaled slowly. Then he arranged his features into what might have passed for an open smile at a nuclear-disarmament conference, turned back to Jessica, and said, “In a pig's ass.”

  “Huh?” Jessica said, except that she didn't even have time to finish saying that. Wyatt crouched down, grabbed her knees, and straightened up without so much as a grunt of effort. Jessica dangled over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, her blue-clad bottom pointing at the sky. I stepped aside to let them go. Jessica was squealing and hitting at her father's back with her fists.

  “Hey,” Blister said, stepping all the way into the doorway. “Put her down, you jerk.”

  “Blister,” I said, putting a hand gently on his chest. “Remember me?”

  “Get out of my way, shithead,” he said. “He can't do that.” Jessica's squeals echoed up through the sagebrush. He pushed against my arm.

  “Wrong on two counts,” I said. “He can, and I'm not a shithead.” I looked past him. “And how come there's another woman in your house?”

  He looked confused. “There isn't . . .“he said, and then he turned his head to check. I hoisted a steel-toed cowboy boot and cracked him right below the kneecap. Blister made a gurgling sound and involuntarily grabbed his right knee and lifted it. As the gurgle turned into a moan I kicked his left knee, and it buckled beneath him, hitting the floor with a reassuring crack. He rolled on the floor, holding a knee in each hand and emitting high puppylike yelps.

  He'd forgotten I was there, so I stretched out a foot and tapped his groin with the toe of my right boot.

  “Have I got your attention?” I asked. He screwed his eyes up and nodded.

  “For a couple of days you're going to walk like you're on stilts,” I told him. “After that, you'll be fine. And remember, the next time you're screwing around with Jessica, or anybody less than sixteen years old, that The Man with No Name might be just outside the window.” I wiggled my eyebrows for emphasis. “Got that?”

  “You asshole,” he said in a choked voice.

  I lifted my right foot. He winced, and I looked down and examined the boot. “You've made me scuff it,” I said. “Now say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

  He let his head slump to the floor. “Yes, sir,” he said, squeezing back tears.

  “Much better,” I said. “Also, you might think about where else the boot might have landed. I don't think a scrotum with the word Frye permanently printed on it backward is much of a selling point. Anyway,” I added, “for the future—and this is free advice, okay?—don’t call anybody shithead unless you know where both his feet and both his hands are. And never, never look behind you.” I bent down and chucked him under the chin with my index finger. ” ‘Bye, now.”

  I went down to the car, where Wyatt had dumped a sullen Jessica into the back seat. When we got to the Wilmingtons’ house, I said good-bye. Neither of them had much to say to me.

  Leaving Alice parked at the side of the road, I scaled the driveway to my house. It was cold and dark and empty. The light on the answering machine blinked a red semaphore while I uncapped a bottle of Singha beer from Thailand, a brew so sublimely lethal that it regularly loses its import privileges. With the first two gulps dizzily chasing each other down my esophagus, I pushed the Play button on the machine.

  “One,” the machine announced. It says that on the twelfth message too. I ignored it for the moment and looked around the living room. Eleanor's curtains, left over from the time when we'd lived together, still hung over the windows. Patches of damp glowered at me from the rug. Then the machine whirred and I finally got to the message.

  “Out and about as usual, are you?” Hammond's voice said. “Well, we've got one, and she may be yours. Problem is, she's in the morgue.”

  4 - Underground

  M orgues are even colder than you'd think they'd be. It was the next morning. I had a headache, and I was blowing on my hands as Hammond led me down a long linoleum stairway, our feet scuffing against steps that somehow managed to look as though they'd been washed every fifteen minutes since the tile was laid but were still gray. It was a gray that didn't have anything to do with dirt. If grief were a color, that was the gray it would be.

  Hammond had his hands stuffed into his pockets. He heard me huffing and puffing away behind him, and said, “Brisk, isn't it?”

  “Brisk?” I said. “An oyster could get chilblains.”

  “No oyster with any sense would be caught dead in here,” he said with a flash of the wit that makes cops welcome additions to cocktail parties the world around. “Jesus, it's ten a.m. I usually try not to visit the morgue until after lunch.”

  “Not soon after lunch.”

  “No,” he said, puffing on his cigar. “And not too close to dinner, either.”

  Hammond's cigar smoke, for once, smelled good. It momentarily elbowed aside an odor that suggested that all the frogs ever dissected by all the high-school kids in history had decided to hold a convention.

  “I could get my ass in a sling for this,” Hammond grumbled fragrantly, trailing a cloud of smoke. “You got no official status here, you know? You're just some dork from off the streets.”

  “Somehow,” I said, “I don't think most of the folks here will care very much.”

  “The folks down here don't write reports,” he said. “Not the majority of them, at least. But the guy you're going to meet does. What's the guy supposed to write?”

  “That you assisted someone in an identification, and that that someone was assisting the police,” I said patiently. It was all part of dealing with Hammond. If he didn't make a big production out of it, I might not share his view of how much I owed him.

  “And are you going to assist the police? I mean, are you planning to talk to a cop at some point, or is this just between you and I?” We'd reached a corridor about twenty feet below street level. It was lighted by sickly fluorescent tubes, and emergency lines painted in different colors competed lividly with each other on the floor. There were no windows, which was just as well, since they would have opened onto dirt.

  “I mean,” Hammond said, without a pause, “I'm just a cop with a reason to be here, escorting someone with no reason to be here, and worrying about my future. What I'm getting at, in my uneducated way, is what're you going to say? That you're a relative of the deceased?” He slid a plastic card into a slot to the right of a metal door. “Just be careful what you say to the guy, huh?”

  “Al,” I said, “I'll be careful. If I'm not, just step on my foot.”

  “I'll fucking eat it for dinner,” Hammond said as the door slid open. “Just be careful what you say to the guy.”

  The guy who stood behind the open door was a slightly overweight Asian female in her middle thirties whose hairdo looked like a cosmetic-surgery transplant; it had been teased and tossed and curled and back-combed and sprayed, shellacked and, probably, deep-fried. Somehow, it lifted my spirits. It was clearly the hairdo of someone who planned to leave the morgue and go someplace really important later. In a morgue, it looked pretty good.

  “Hi,” I said involuntarily.

  “Hi, yourself,” said the woman beneath the hairdo, which, despite all the teasing, didn't even come up to Hammond's red bow tie. “Hi, both of you, in fact. I'm Yoshino. Who are you?”

  “Hammond,” Hammond said, jabbing himself in the chest with a thumb to help her follow the conversation. “I called last night.” He was doing his best to deal with the guy as though she were a real person.

  “Lieutenant Hammond,” she said neutrally. “You're visiting two-oh-eight, right? You l
ook just like your voice.”

  “Is that a compliment?” Hammond asked.

  Yoshino shrugged. “I guess it is, if you like hulking, oversize, red-faced, supermasculine men who smoke.” She gave his cigar a glance that packed enough venom to stun a cobra. “It was two-oh-eight, wasn't it?”

  “I'm not sure,” Hammond said, yanking his cigar out of his mouth and holding it behind him. His ears turned bright red. “I haven't got the paper. She's about twelve.”

  “You haven't got the paper,” Yoshino said. She'd heard it before. “Who's your boyfriend?”

  “He represents the family.”

  “If it is the family,” I added, moving the nearer of my feet away from Hammond's heavy shoes.

  “Honey,” Yoshino said to me, “for their sake let's hope it isn't. You a lawyer?”

  “Something like that,” Hammond said.

  Yoshino took a step back and surveyed us. Her hairdo didn't even jiggle. “If she turns out to be the right one,” she said, “you'll have to do better than that. We need something official, remember?”

  “We both hope she won't be,” I said.

  “You don't know how much you hope it,” Yoshino said.

  She turned her back on us and led us into a large room with a bare cement floor with metallic drains in the center, and stacks of large file drawers, about three feet by two feet, set into the north-south walls. The tiny tips of Yoshino's black spike heels clacked on the floor. The gray gave way here to stark white, with a slightly bluish-green tint because of the fluorescent tubes buzzing overhead. It couldn't have been more than sixty degrees. The smell was stronger.

  “Two-oh-eight, two-oh-eight, two-oh-eight,” Yoshino said, reading little cards set into the file drawers. “Here we are.” She slid the drawer open, tugged a white sheet halfway down, and stepped away.

  My first reaction was surprise that the drawers had no sides. The dead were sharing the space on the other side of the wall, lying there next to each other on their metal tables, a little community in the cold. Hammond grunted inquisitively, and I looked down at the person on the table.

  She was tiny. I hadn't been prepared for how tiny and still she would be. She was pathetically thin, and her skin was mottled, bruised and discolored. One hand clenched nothing. A red tag had been fastened with a twist of wire to the big toe on her right foot. It said Juvenile Jane Doe.