Thursday's Child Page 5

  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.�
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  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.

  Deniability was as important to these street kids as it was to the idiots in the White House. If you made sure not to know what was going on, how could you possibly be blamed for anything? The place to be these days was as far out of the loop as you could get.

  Gar reached into another pocket, this time coming out with the photo that Mrs. McClure had given him. “Maybe if you look at this,” he suggested. “I heard that maybe she was turning tricks in this neighborhood recently.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.” The girl finished her hot dog before reaching out to take the photograph from him. At once, her face brightened. “Hey, you want to hear something really wild?”

  Maybe his luck was turning. “What’s that?”

  “I had this same dress once,” she said in a dreamy voice. “The exactly same dress, except that mine was yellow, not pink.” She held the picture out at arm’s length, tilting it, and pursing her lips critically. “It was much prettier in yellow.”

  “You must have been a real knockout,” Gar said quietly.

  “Yeah.” She gnawed at her upper lip for a moment and then tossed the photo down onto the counter. “I don’t know the bitch.”

  Gar quickly removed the picture from a puddle of some unknown liquid. The denial didn’t ring true for some reason; or maybe he was just naturally suspicious. He took out a ten-spot and fingered it suggestively. “You absolutely sure about that, honey?”

  She looked at the bill, then at the photo again. The instinctive desire not to get involved warred with her need for the money, and after a brief struggle, need won out, as it usually did. “Well, it could be I’ve seen her around. She sure doesn’t look much like that anymore, though.”

  Gar didn’t bother to tell the girl that with her stringy, greasy hair, druggie’s pallor, and hard eyes, she wasn’t such a knockout anymore either. She probably already knew it. “Where have you maybe seen her around?”

  “Here, like you said.” She wanted to take the money, but he moved it out of her reach.

  “When was this that you might have seen her around here?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighed. “Not lately. I heard some talk that maybe she split. Went to Venice.”

  “Venice? Why?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Maybe she fell in love. How the fuck should I know why?”

  “Okay. Thanks.” He moved the money closer.

  She plucked the bill away and shoved it out of sight in a hurry, as if afraid he might change his mind. “When you find her …”

  He gulped down the rest of his coffee, which wasn’t improved much by the fact that it was now cold. Of course, on the upside, it wasn’t much worse either. “When I find her what?”

  “You going to take her back to her parents?”

  “That’s the idea, yeah.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to go?”

  He crushed the empty Styrofoam cup. “Then she’ll probably just take off again.”

  She shook her head in apparent dismay. “People can be awful stupid sometimes, can’t they?”

  Gar was tired. He didn’t want to look at her face again, to have to see the naked fear and hurt that he knew would be there. Instead, feeling like an asshole, he reached into his pocket one more time and brought out a quarter. He set the coin carefully onto the counter next to the soda can. “You might want to call home sometime,” he said. “Put this away and save it for then.”

  She probably wouldn’t do it, of course. But, then again, maybe she would. Maybe.

  He gripped his cane and walked away without waiting for her to say anything else.

  Sometimes after a day that dragged on much too long, his leg would rebel. That rebellion would come in the form of a throbbing pain, often becoming so intense that he would get nauseous. When things degenerated to that point, he would have no choice but to lean all two-hundred-plus pounds onto the cane and move with aggravating slowness. He would also quietly curse the inept second-story man with the nervous trigger finger, who had put three bullets into him on a rainy night four years earlier.

  This was not exactly what Gareth Sinclair had expected to be doing in this, the forty-eighth year of his life. By now, he was supposed to be off the streets, firmly planted behind a desk someplace, elevated to a position within the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department that would not require him to tramp up and down Hollywood Boulevard in the freaking middle of the night.

  Of course, honesty forced him to recognize that when the opportunity for that desk job came along a few years earlier than expected—thanks to the intervention of one Jose Diego, nervous crook—Gar ran the other way as fast as he could. Quit the damned department. Threw it all away so that now, at his advanced age and state of physical deterioration, he was still playing the games that should have been left to a much younger man. One who was not, in the baby whore’s word, a crip.

  It had all been his choice, yeah, but on nights like this one, Gar sometimes thought that maybe he had made a very big mistake. The absolutely last thing he wanted to do now was drive to Venice and walk some more streets, talking to still more lost children. He was just damned worn out.

  But even as he limped back to his car, stuck the cane between the seats and himself behind the steering wheel, Gar knew what he was going to do. It was hell to be conscientious, especially when you were sort of past your prime. Or maybe it wasn’t so much that he was conscientious at all; maybe he was just trying to justify his existence.

  Whatever.

  First things first, though. He took out and swallowed a couple of the tiny pink pills that were supposed to ease the pain. Unfortunately, they didn’t work all that well, probably because he never allowed himself to take more than two when he was on the job. They made him groggy and it was hard to work that way.

  So, ungroggy and with a leg that still throbbed, he started his car and headed toward Venice.

  2

  It was late, but on a warm summer night like this one there was still plenty of activity on the boardwalk. Some of what was going on, Gar figured, might have been neither illegal nor immoral. Maybe. The nice thing about being his own boss was that he didn’t have to concern himself with anything but the job he was on; it wasn’t his responsibility anymore to look out for the whole damned society.

  The beach was covered with tents; it wasn’t a Boy Scout jamboree, however. This was the new Venice, uneasy refuge for the homeless. Gar thought it was too bad, but he was just a confused liberal Democrat who didn’t know what to do anymore.

  After walking for a while and talking to a few massively disinterested passersby, Gar bought himself a large lemonade and found an empty bench. Gratefully, he sat.

  He hadn’t been there long when a boy with a chartreuse Mohawk skated over and dropped heavily down next to him. “Hi,” the boy said. “Got any change you’re not using?”

  Gar handed him a dollar bill.

  “All right,” the boy said appreciatively.

  “Don’t spend it on dru
gs.” Gar told all the kids the same thing, not that he imagined it really did any good. But it was something a confused liberal could do.

  “Hey, no way. The body is, like, a temple, you know?” The boy grinned suddenly and even with the absurd hair, he managed to look remarkably Tom Sawyerish. “’Sides, what the hell could I get for a buck?”

  Gar hid his own smile by taking a swallow of the tart lemonade.

  The boy didn’t leave with the dollar, but sat where he was, rolling the skates back and forth slowly, whistling a tune that Gar didn’t recognize. It was nice that he didn’t seem to mind being seen sitting with a gray-haired human being.

  After a moment, figuring what the hell, Gar took the McClure photograph from his pocket one more time. “You strike me as a young man who gets around,” he said.

  The kid liked that. “Yeah,” he said with a self-satisfied nod. “I keep on top of things all right.”

  “So maybe you’ve seen this girl?”

  “You a cop?”

  “No.”

  He seemed to accept that and took the picture. His fingers were slightly grimy and the nails were chewed down to the quick, but he held on to the picture with delicacy. “She does look familiar,” he said after a moment.

  “Her name is Tammi,” Gar offered. “And probably she doesn’t look so much like a prom queen anymore.”

  The boy glanced slyly at Gar and smiled again. “Must be demon drugs, right?”

  “Probably.”

  He gave the photo one more long study, then nodded firmly. “Yeah, that’s her. She hangs out.”

  “Where, mostly?”

  “House. A couple blocks that way. A few blocks.”

  Gar had the feeling he always got when a search was about to yield results, a sort of tingle at the back of his neck. “Show me the house. There’s another buck in it for you.”

  The boy shrugged. “Sure.”

  Gar finished the lemonade and threw the cup toward a trash can that was already overflowing. “Let’s go.” He still wasn’t moving very quickly, but the boy, who said his name was Perry, slowed his skating to Gar’s pace. He also talked most of the way, apparently recounting the plot of a science fiction movie he’d recently seen. The details of the convoluted story escaped Gar completely.