Robert Crais - Stalking the Angel

The man smiled when he saw me. “The usual?”

I gave him one of my best smiles. “Sure. To go.”

I sat at the little table for two they have in the window of the place and waited and watched the people moving past along Westwood Boulevard and felt hollow. There were college kids and general-issue pedestrians and two cops walking a beat, one of them smiling at a girl in a gauzy cotton halter and white and black tiger-striped aerobic tights. The tights started just above her navel and stopped just below her knees. Her calves were tanned. I wondered if the cop would be smiling as much if he had just gotten fired from a job because a kid he had been hired to protect had gotten snatched anyway. Probably not. I wondered if the girl in the white and black tights would smile back quite so brightly. Probably not.

The oldest daughter brought my food from the kitchen while her father rang up the bill. She put the bag on the table and said, “Squid with garlic and pepper, and a double order of vegetable rice.” I wondered if she could see it on my forehead: Elvis Cole, Failed Protector . She gave me a warm smile and said, “I put a container of chili sauce in the bag, like always.” Nope. Probably couldn’t see it.

I went down to Santa Monica and east to my office. At any number of traffic lights and intersections I waited for people to look my way and point and say nasty things, but no one did. Word was still under wraps.

I put the Corvette in its spot in the parking garage and rode up in the elevator and went into my office and closed the door. There was a message on my answering machine from someone looking for Bob, but that was probably a wrong number. Or maybe it wasn’t a wrong number. Maybe I was in the wrong office. Maybe I was in the wrong life.

I put the food on my desk and took off my jacket and put it on a wooden coat hanger and hung it on the back of the door. I took the Dan Wesson out of its holster and put it in my top right drawer, then slipped out of the rig and tossed it onto one of the director’s chairs across from my desk, then went over to the little refrigerator and got out a bottle of Negra Modelo beer and opened it and went back to my desk and sat and listened to the quiet. It was peaceful in the office. I liked that. No worries. No sense of loss or unfulfilled obligations. No guilt. I thought about a song a little friend of mine sings: I’m a big brown mouse, I go marching through the house, and I’m not afraid of anything! I sang it softly to myself and sipped the Modelo. Modelo is ideal for soothing that hollow feeling. I think that’s why they make it.

After a while I opened the bag and took out the container of squid and the larger container of rice and the little plastic cup of bright red chili paste and the napkins and the chopsticks. I had to move the little figures of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse to make room for the food. What was it Jiminy Cricket said? Little man, you’ve had a busy night . I put some of the chili paste on the squid and some on the rice and mixed it and ate and drank the beer. I’m a big brown mouse, I go marching through the house, and I’m noooot afraid of anything!

The sun was low above Catalina, pushing bright yellow rectangles up my eastern wall when the door opened and Joe Pike walked in. I tipped what was maybe the second or third Modelo bottle at him. “Life in the fast lane,” I said. Maybe it was the fourth.

“Uh-huh.”

He came over to the desk, looked in what was left of the carton of squid, then the carton of rice. “Any meat in this?”

I shook my head. Pike had turned vegetarian about four months ago.

He dumped what was left of the squid into the rice, took a set of chopsticks, sat in one of the director’s chairs, and ate. Southeast Asians almost never use chopsticks. If you go to Vietnam or Thailand or Cambodia, you never see a chopstick. Even in the boonies. They use forks and large spoons but when they come here and open a little restaurant they put out chopsticks because that’s what Americans expect. Ain’t life a bitch?

I said, “There’s chili paste.”

Pike shook what was left of the chili paste into the rice, stirred it, continued to eat.

“There’s another Modelo in the box.”

He shook his head.

“How long since you’ve come to the office?”

Shrug.

“Must be four, five months.” There was a door to an adjoining office that belonged to Pike. He never used it and didn’t bother to glance at it now. He shoveled in rice and broccoli and peas, chewed, swallowed.

I sipped the last of the Modelo, then dropped the empty into the waste basket. “I was just kidding,” I said. “That’s really pork-fried rice.”

Pike said, “I don’t like losing the girl.”

I took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair. The office was quiet and still. Only the eyes in the Pinocchio clock moved. “Maybe, whatever reason, Warren wanted the Hagakure stolen and wants people to know and also wants them to know that he’s had a child kidnapped because of his efforts to recover it. Maybe he’s looking for a certain image here, figuring he can make a big deal out of recovering the book and his daughter. That sound like Bradley to you?”

Pike got up, went to the little refrigerator, and took out a can of tomato juice. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it’s the other way. Maybe somebody wants Warren to look bad and they don’t give a damn about the book just so they stir up as much publicity as they can. Maybe what they want is to make the big Japanese connections lose interest. Or maybe they just want to hurt him. Maybe he owes money.”

“A lot of maybes,” I said.

Pike nodded. “Maybe is a weak word.”

I said, “Maybe it’s the yakuza.”

Pike shook the little can of tomato juice and peeled off the foil sealer tab and drank. A tiny drop ran down from the corner of his mouth. It looked like blood. He wiped it away with a napkin. “We could sit here maybe all night and the girl’s still gone.”

I got up and went to the glass doors and opened them. Traffic noise was loud but the evening air was beginning to cool. “I don’t like losing her either. I don’t like getting fired and told to forget it. I don’t like it that she’s out there and in trouble and we’re not in it anymore.”

Mirrored lenses caught the setting sun. The sun made the lenses glow.

“I think we should stay in,” I said.

Pike tossed the little can on top of the empty Modelo bottles.

“We stay with the yakuza because they’re what we have,” I said. “Forget the other stuff. We push until someone pushes back and then we see where we are.”

“All we have to do is find the yakuza.”

“Right. All we have to do is find the yakuza.”

Pike’s mouth twitched. “We can do that.”

Nobu Ishida had lived in an older split-level house on a Leave-It-to-Beaver street in Cheviot Hills, a couple of miles south of the Twentieth Century-Fox lot. It was dark, just after nine when we rolled past his home, rounded the block, and parked at the curb fifty yards up the street. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked.

The house was brick and board and painted a light, bright color you couldn’t make out at night. Ishida’s Eldorado was in the drive, with a tiny, two-tone Merkur behind it. There was an enormous plate glass picture window to the left of the front door, ideal for revealing the house’s brightly lit interior. A woman in her fifties passed by the window talking to a young man in his twenties. Both the woman and the man looked sad. Mrs. Ishida and a son. With Dad not yet cold in the grave, there was plenty to be sad about.

Pike said, “Me or you?”

“Me.”

I got out of the car as if I were out for an evening stroll. A block and a half down, I turned, came back, slipped off the walk into the shadows, and went to the west side of the Ishida house. There were two frame windows off what looked like a bedroom. The bedroom was dark. Past the windows, there was a redwood gate with a neatly painted sign that said BEWARE OF DOG. I whistled softly through my teeth, then broke off a hedge branch and brushed it against the inside of the gate. No dog. I slipped back to the street, then followed a hedgerow to the east side of the house. The garage was on that side, locked tight and windowless, with a narrow chain link gate leading to the back yard. I eased open the gate and walked along the side of the house to a little window about midway down. A young woman in a print dress sat at the dining room table, holding a baby. She touched her nose to the baby’s and smiled. The baby smiled back. Not exactly a yakuza stronghold.