Timothy Hallinan - Skin Deep

"Lordy," she said on an indrawn breath.

The place was a ruin.

Keeping her hand in my left, I reached around with my right and pushed the door all the way open. It slammed against the wall and groaned back toward us a foot or so. At least nobody was standing behind it. I counted my blessings and got as high as one.

"I'm going in." I squeezed her hand hard enough to make the joints pop. "You stay right here. If I say come in, come in. If I say anything else at all, run like hell. Get to a phone and call the cops. Got it?"

She nodded, looking past me into the room. I patted her cheek and went inside, hoping that I looked braver than I felt.

The living room was a clutter of junk, trashed objects that had once been possessions. The overhead lights were on, or there wouldn't have been any light at all; both lamps were strewn in fragments across the floor. Pictures had been ripped from the walls and their frames snapped over somebody's knee, probably the same knee that had shattered Amber's arms. Bright shards of light glittered from sharp pieces of glass and mirror. There wasn't a square foot of the floor visible.

The door leading to the hallway was closed. Stepping over the wreckage on the floor as if the crown jewels of England were scattered there, I moved toward it. I put a hand on the knob, counted ten to slow the beating of my heart, and shoved it open.

Blackness. I felt for a light switch. There wasn't one. Either the hallway was unlighted, which seemed unlikely, or the switch was at the other end, a typically dysfunctional example of Hollywood architecture. I was going to have to go in. The small amount of light that filtered in from the living room would be just enough to allow me to see my own blood. Closing my mind's eye tight, I went in.

More junk littered the floor, but otherwise the hallway was empty. The bathroom door yawned open at its far end, and I snapped on the light inside. Nobody behind me, nobody in the bathroom. The destroyer hadn't missed much: even the mirror on the medicine cabinet had been broken. Aspirin, hairpins, and tampons were scattered across the tiles.

That left the bedroom. The door was ajar, and I shoved it, hard. Lights were on, throwing the devastation into sharp, ugly relief.

The bed had been eviscerated. A sharp knife had slit the mattress from top to bottom, and the stuffings had been thrown around the room. The contents of the open closet were strewn around like the random refuse of a tornado.

Across one wall, written on a crooked diagonal in Nana's lipstick, were the words WHORES DIE .

"I don't believe it," I said.

I heard a sudden sound behind me and whirled, my hands drawn back and open to blind or kill. I was halfway into the air when I saw Nana. I grabbed the edge of the table to stop myself, and my feet tangled in a blanket and I fell. It was a heavy fall.

"That wasn't your cue," I said from the floor. "If you heard that, you should be running by now."

"And leave you here alone?" She reached down to help me up. All her attention was concentrated on me. She wasn't even looking at the room. If I hadn't been flat on my face and feeling like an idiot, I would have been flattered.

"You're okay?" she asked.

I waved away her offer of help and stood up. "Yeah, sure. I'm fine."

"Jeez," she said, finally looking around. The words on the wall caught her eye. "Oh. That's really sick."

I waited until my pulse had slowed to double speed. "What do you need?"

"For what?"

"To leave, to be gone for a few days while we arrange to get this cleaned up. Find what you need and let's get out of here."

"Why? Why should I go? Some dickhead trashed my place and probably took everything I own, but why should I leave?" Her jaw was as knobby as Lincoln's before he grew his beard. "Let's just straighten up a little, and I'll stay here."

"You're leaving," I said. "I don't think anybody took anything. I think something's on the move and you're in its way. I don't know why, but you are. Get what you need. We're going."

She took a steely look around. "I don't need anything. You got a toothbrush and shampoo, right? You got aspirin? We are going to your place, aren't we?"

"Of course we are."

"Oh, darling," she said. "I thought you'd never ask."

The birds chirped at her when we let ourselves in. It had to be for her; they never did it for me. Nana moved to the birds' cage and made little kissing sounds at them. They both looked at her. Hansel, I think, cocked his head appealingly.

She pushed a finger into the cage.

"Careful," I said. "The little peckers peck."

"Not me they don't," she said smugly. Hansel jumped up onto her finger and perched there, looking more proud of himself than anything with the brains God grudgingly doled out to a bird had any right to look. "He's sweet," Nana said.

"I thought you hated birds."

"Well, hell, I'd rather you had a Weimaraner trained to attack, especially after tonight. But women learn early to be satisfied."

"Explain tonight."

She coaxed her finger back through the bars, and Hansel leapt up onto the perch and let loose a volley of song. "Who knows?" she said, watching him. "Maybe it didn't have anything to do with anything. Maybe it was a bunch of skaggers who ran out of skag or some Jesus freaks who ran out of Jesus. Maybe they didn't even know who lived there."

"Do you believe that?"

"No." She turned to face me.

"Me neither. Where murder is concerned, I don't believe in coincidence. I'm just glad you weren't there."

She looked away and then back to me. "Me, too," she said.

"Nana, do you have any idea what's going on? Any idea at all?"

"Somebody hates somebody," she said. "More than I've ever hated anybody, more than I hate snakes. It's somebody who hates even better than me. Somebody like Toby."

"Toby didn't kill Amber."

"Because Saffron says so? Little Miss Saffron?" She almost laughed. "Saffron could lie to a Senate subcommittee with her left hand while her right was dealing blackjack. And winning. She lies for the sheer fun of it."

"It's not just Saffron," I said. "Let's go to sleep."

"No." She crossed the room and took both my hands in hers. "Let's go to bed. I don't want to sleep alone. Come on, Texas Ranger, even your heart can't be that pure."

It wasn't. After her shower and my shower and some meaningless small talk, I smelled the warm yeasty fragrance of her skin and passed my tongue over its impossible smoothness. She laughed when it tickled and reached down to caress me, and I said, "No, don't. This is a one-man show."

"Don't be silly," she said, grasping me, and our arms and legs tangled into the ancient knot, and after a while we achieved the ancient release. As I dropped into sleep I heard her voice, lazy and contented.

"I promise," she said. "I won't be a bother."

So Saffron was a liar. It wasn't the first time I'd heard it, and it didn't mean as much as it would have if I hadn't talked to the Peeper, but it put her ahead of Pepper on my list of people to bother. The best time to catch all the ladies with their guards down was in the morning, so I woke Nana with a hot cup of coffee and a boatload of good intentions at six-thirty. The coffee went down quickly, and the good intentions hoisted anchor and set sail when she shrugged the sheet from her shoulders, placed the hot cup between her breasts for a moment, and then removed it and invited me to warm my unacceptable nose. "No gentleman has a cold nose," she said.

Following the dictates of etiquette, I warmed my nose.

It was nine-twenty, and we were both sporting satisfied Toby-class grins by the time we coasted down Topanga Canyon Boulevard toward the sea. As we hit the Pacific Coast Highway an offshore breeze kicked up, right on cue, fracturing the sunlit ocean skin into a tangled riot of scattered light. Two surfers slid gracefully down the smooth slope of a single wave.