Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

She wasn’t driving very fast. She drove with the blithe obliviousness of someone who was early, who had time to kill and a really insatiable curiosity about the contents of store windows. Doing the tail was a character-building exercise in patience; if I’d been behind her by accident instead of on purpose, I’d have probably had my horn welded permanently into honk position by now. But, of course, I couldn’t do that. The people behind me , however, were free to abuse both her and me in any way they felt was appropriate, and they did. If there was any comfort to be taken, it was that the exercise gave me some time for thought.

The way it looked, I had five problems.

1. Staying alive, as opposed to spending a very vivid final five or six minutes as dog chow.

2. If I did stay alive, not making a permanent and possibly lethal enemy out of Trey Annunziato.

3. Finding a way to neutralize Hacker, who, as a cop, I regarded as a separate problem from Rabbits, Wattles, and Trey.

4. Keeping Rina and Kathy out of the line of fire.

5. Doing something about Thistle.

I had a feeling that the last point was a lot easier to put into a simple declarative sentence than it would be to implement. First, there was the issue of finding her, although I didn’t think she was in the hands of anyone who meant her harm. The state of the apartment announced the searcher’s failure to find her in the most likely place, and I doubted they knew any of her other hidey-holes, of which there must have been several. After all, her bone-grinder of a mother had said she disappeared on a regular basis. My best guess was that she’d gone to ground somewhere and she’d reveal herself whenever her internal clock said it was time.

Even if I could have located her in the next quarter-hour though, Thistle had more problems than most saints have blessings, and there was nothing I could do about some of them. She was going to have to deal with the drugs by herself, although Doc had said something, back in the coffee shop the first time we met, about helping her out. She was going to need some money, especially if she didn’t do Trey’s “art film,” as Thistle had described it in her journal. And since I was going to try to make sure she didn’t, it might also be nice if I could find some way to put some bucks in her pocket. Not to mention giving her an opportunity to rediscover the talent she believed had abandoned her.

And maybe, while I was at it, I could arrange for two Sundays in every week, too.

But I’ve always figured that aiming high is just as easy as aiming low, so what the hell. And actually, now that I’d opened my mind to it, there was a slim chance I actually could so something for Thistle’s moribund career, if my educated guess about Wattles’s customer for that ugly Klee I’d stolen was correct. Assuming, of course, that I survived past Friday night, when Rabbits and Bunny came back.

And this, I remembered uncomfortably, was Wednesday.

Following my murderer as she navigated her browser’s course down Ventura, it was impossible not to focus on the item I’d left off of my list.

I was going to avenge Jimmy.

It all came down to the dress. I’d said that Jimmy liked women too much, but until the dress, I hadn’t been certain that his weakness had been responsible for his death. But when the dress suggested a physical impossibility, the dematerialization of a living woman, I’d thought woman and suddenly seen in my mind’s eye the symbol Jimmy had drawn with his own blood on the inside of his windshield:

He’d been making the first two strokes of one of the most common Chinese radicals, the character nu , or “woman.” Jimmy had taught it to me as indispensable if I ever went to China if only as insurance against stumbling into a women’s bathroom. He’d helped me to remember it by pointing out that the first two strokes resembled a breast. And after the breast, only two simple strokes remained to complete it.

But it had taken the dress to prod me to that recognition, and I’d almost missed it. It had nearly slipped past me because the whole thing had been unnecessary, a diversion to give the other side a one- or two-hour start on trying to find Thistle before I started searching for her. And so they made something impossible happen. A woman went into a building and never came out, and wasn’t there when it was searched.

The murderer put on her right-turn signal and braked, although she was already a good ten miles per hour under the speed limit. She made a right into the parking lot of a three-story, poison-green office building that had once been a Cadillac dealership and now played host to entertainment-business fly-by-nights, the kinds of companies whose most substantial asset was their logo, plus one very substantial thug, a thug whose business address I’d already researched.

Thistle never came out of the administration building because she had never gone in. She had left Palomar Studios on her own, probably hiding in the back of some car, wearing the jeans and blouse she stole from wardrobe, about five minutes after Tatiana and Ellie left her in the dressing room. And the person wearing the black dress who had run into the administration building was, of course, the young woman who had reported the dress as missing, who had already doubled for Thistle in a few dozen shots, a woman who looked enough like her, from the back at least, to fool the camera even when it was up close. And almost certainly the young woman who had shot Jimmy.

So I sat at the curb and watched yet another link fall into place as mousy little Ellie Wynn got out of her car, her face alight with love and tenderness, and fell into the arms of an impossibly handsome lunk whom I recognized, with no surprise at all, as Antonio Ramirez, aka Tony Ramirez, aka Mr. Trey Annunziato.

Back in the days of my apprenticeship, Herbie always said, When in doubt, find out .

So I was back at the Snor-Mor for the first time in almost forty-eight hours, preparing for an informational burglary with the well-equipped modern burglar’s tools, which include the amazing portable Canon IP90v printer and a stack of business card stock, when the phone rang.

“He’s just staying in there,” Louie the Lost said. “For all I know, he’s climbed into the freezer. He could be in there all night.”

“And by in there , you mean …”

“The Encino address you gave me. His house.”

I was watching a business card emerge from the printer and I said, “What time is it?”

“Maybe I should forget the cars and sell you a watch,” Louie said. “It’s a little before nine.”

“Are you sure he’s alone in there?”

“He’s not,” Louie said. “There’s a very nice-looking lady in, I’d say, her middle fifties, got that kind of face says she bakes a really good apple pie and the kind of waistline says she eats a lot of it. But nobody else.”

“I don’t know,” I said. The card was nice, but it wanted to be a darker green. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

“Call the LA Times ,” Louie said. “We can probably make the morning edition.”

“Give it another hour. She’s been depending on him for her dope supply. She’s going to come down from those three shots sooner or later, and I’d guess she’ll call him.” I tweaked the color and added a drop shadow to the company’s name. Drop shadows provide substance. Pushed print .

“Sure,” Louie said. “Another hour. Why not? It’s not like this is the only life I’m gonna get.” He hung up.