Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

I stood back and admired the effect. She looked like she belonged here, which in a sense she did. At the bottom of my bag was a pocket digital camera, and I worked for a few minutes to get her best angles. Then I dropped the camera in the bag and grabbed the handle, left the box Dora had come in right where I’d dumped it, next to a Rottweiler deposit on the Kirghiz, went down to the entry hall, stepped over a few dogs, picked up my new Paul Klee, and let myself out into the rain.

I hadn’t gone half a block when the phone rang and Jennie said, talking very fast, “Thistle was here, and the big man who wrecked the apartment tried to catch her. Please . You have to come. You have to come now .”

“Meet me there,” I said to Louie. “They need somebody with them.”

“Gonna take me some time,” Louie grumbled. “This fuckin’ rain’s gonna slow everyone down.”

“Then get moving. I’ll be there in thirty-five, forty minutes, but I can’t stay long. I’ve got a couple of things I’ve got to do.”

“Like your life is so much more important than mine.”

“You want me to live long enough to pay you?”

Louie said, “On my way.”

“He was so big,” Wendy said. The brightness of her eyes betrayed that she’d been crying. Jennie stood behind her, both hands on her sister’s shoulders, marginally calmer but still obviously agitated. She had a welt under her left eye that looked like it was going to swell until the eye closed.

“Let him in,” Jennie commanded. “He’s getting all wet.”

Wendy stepped aside, and I went in. The place had been a mess before, but now it looked like it had been invaded by a funnel of whirling dervishes. The two chairs were on their sides, dishes, pots, and pans were all over the place, and when I turned back to look at the door, I saw that the lower right panel of glass had been broken.

“He did that with his fist ,” Wendy said, her eyes absolutely enormous. “He punched our door and then reached in and opened it.”

“Whose is that?” I asked. Their eyes followed my finger to a long line of blood, left by someone on the move who’d been bleeding pretty freely.

“His,” Jennie said.

“What, when he broke the glass, he cut himself?”

“No,” she said. “Thistle had just come in, she ran in and slammed the door, and when he punched out the glass she grabbed a piece of it and sliced his hand while he was trying to turn the knob. I think she cut him three or four times. He was shouting like, I don’t know, a giant or something.”

“Okay, so he got the door open. Then what?”

“We started throwing stuff,” Jennie said. “Everything in the kitchen, everything we could get our hands on. But he didn’t even seem to notice us. He was just chasing Thistle, and every time he got near her she took a swipe at him with the piece of glass. She cut him one more time, across the arm, and then I got behind him and hit him with the frying pan.”

“He felt that ,” Wendy said.

“So he turned around and punched me,” Jennie said, her hand going to the welt under her eye. “And Thistle got out the door, and Wendy had the broom and when he turned to run after her, she stuck out the broom handle and it got tangled up in his feet and he fell on his face. And by the time he got up and got out the door, Thistle was gone.”

“And he came back in and said he was going to kill us,” Wendy said. “But he didn’t.”

“Well, duh ,” Jennie said.

“I mean, you know, not then.” Wendy blinked four or five times fast. “But he said he’d be back.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, and something banged on the door. The girls went straight up in the air, screaming, and came down with their arms around each other. The door opened, and Louie said, “You guys ain’t glad to see me?”

Two minutes after Louie stuck the girls in his big Detroit behemoth and took them to his house, where Alice would fuss over them until it was safe for them to go back home, I was back at the Camelot Arms. I had to check it, even though I was certain that the apartment was the last place Thistle was likely to be. The door was still leaning crazily inward, and things looked pretty much the same, although someone, probably a covetous neighbor, seemed to have nicked a couple of the vintage standing lamps.

I went through the place anyway, looking for anything to tell me whether she’d been here, and where she might have gone. I spent a few minutes wandering around in the bedroom, trying to figure out what was different, before I realized that the most recent journal, the one that had only had ten or twelve written pages, was missing.

So she had dropped by, at least. Almost certainly before she went to Jennie and Wendy’s place.

And the question remained: Was Eduardo working for Trey, or against her?

The old expression about waiting for the other shoe to drop is too vague, because it doesn’t tell you which shoe. Sometimes it’s not important which shoe drops first or second, but at other times it’s almost the only thing that matters.

I’d abandoned the horrible former police car at one of Louie’s garages and was back at the wheel of my anonymous Toyota Camry, meticulously obeying every traffic law in sight, just another sheep in the automotive flock. Since the garage was near Hollywood, I dropped by Wain’s, taking a certain amount of pleasure at his surprise that I’d survived whatever he thought I was doing, and got my deposit back. He nicked me for an extra ten bucks, the crook, pointing out a scratch on the gun that I certainly hadn’t put there, but I didn’t even argue.

I was trying to figure out which shoe to drop next.

Weighing the alternatives in my mind, I swung past my small Hollywood storage area, parked, and went inside. Out of a locked fishing-tackle box I grabbed a nine-millimeter automatic, one with no provenance of prior use in violent crimes. I knew this to be true because once in a while I staked out a gun shop, waited until someone bought a new one, followed the customer home, and waited for an opportunity to steal the gun. It had been worked on by an expert: serial numbers filed off, an acid bath to remove any lingering traces, and the kind of oiling and cleaning that a Marine drill instructor would approve. I kept three of these, two Glocks and a Heckler amp; Koch, one in each of my storage facilities. They’re part of my disaster-prevention kit. They didn’t get much use, but I was approaching the kind of territory where the weight felt good under my shoulder.

I also grabbed Bunny’s diamonds, which I thought might come in handy.

When I was on the road again, it was three-thirty, and the rain was a reality. From the color of the sky, a rich charcoal gray, it wasn’t going anyplace soon.

The thing I most wanted to do was find Thistle, but Los Angeles is a big city with a lot of places to hide. I could spend a month on it and get nowhere. On the other hand, there were two people I needed to see face to face pretty soon, and I knew exactly where both of them were. But which one first? Left shoe, right shoe?

Right shoe. Make the more difficult of the calls now, while there was still time to beat the deadlines for tomorrow’s entertainment trade papers.

Every burglar in Los Angeles knows where Jake Whelan lives. The house is famous, an eighteenth-century French chateau that had been dismantled, shipped to Los Angeles, and reassembled stone by stone in the middle of fifteen hilly acres in Laurel Canyon, where it hosted some of the most memorably debauched parties in Hollywood’s memorably debauched history. This had been back in Whelan’s sunny years, when he had the golden touch, when every film he made took in a zillion dollars and won every award in sight, when the studios bred starlets under the warm film lights like baby chicks, and Whelan had his pick. Before the studio system fell to pieces, making guys like Whelan secondary to stars in terms of clout, and driving the price of filmmaking into the stratosphere. Before starlets began to form their own production companies. Before white powder arrived on the scene and Jake Whelan fell to pieces, losing his touch, his sense of story, and his credibility.