Robert Crais - The Monkey

O’Bannon pointed his finger at me. “Your ass is mine.”

I said, “Get out of here before I beat you to death.”

O’Bannon gave Poitras another attempt at a bad look, then walked away. It was sort of a cross between a wince and a squint. I guess it really wilted them in court.

Poitras said, “The kid doesn’t know about his father. We’re going to let the mother tell him.”

I was still staring after O’Bannon. Then I looked over at the nurse. She smiled. It was a nice smile.

“We did a little talking,” Lou said. “Mort and the kid weren’t kidnapped on their way home from school. Mort didn’t even get to pick the kid up. One of Duran’s people snatched him when he was walking out to his father’s car.”

I stared at him.

“I talked to Lancaster,” he said. “They didn’t find a. 32 in Lang’s Caddie.”

“No?”

“So I had the ME run a paraffin. Came back positive.”

I nodded, thinking about Ellen Lang, thinking about Mort and his. 32, thinking about a positive paraffin test.

Poitras said, “Hound Dog?”

“Yeah?”

“When you knew for certain, you shoulda come to me. O’Bannon or no O’Bannon, downtown or not, I woulda moved on it. It’s my job. I woulda done it.”

“I know.”

“I don’t like any goddamned cowboys thinking they can go off half-cocked, goddamned Pike running down the street with a goddamned HK-91.”

I felt very tired, the sort of deep, bled-to-the-bone tired you feel when you’ve tried very hard to keep something dear to you only to lose it. I said, “Are we going to be charged with anything?”

“Baishe has already been with the D.A. O’Bannon got there first, but Baishe thinks we might be able to square it. I don’t know about Pike. He gets picked up, they say what’s your occupation, he says mercenary, goddamned paint all over his face like he’s still in the jungle. Nobody likes that. Nobody on the department likes Pike anyway.”

“If the department kept more guys like Pike, they’d have less guys like O’Bannon.”

Poitras didn’t say anything.

“If you charge Joe, you charge me.”

Poitras took a deep breath, sighed. He needed a shave. “I want you to come in. We gotta get a statement.”

“Can you wait?”

He stared at me for a while, then nodded. “No later than noon tomorrow.”

We shook hands. “Tell Baishe thanks,” I said.

Poitras nodded again.

I took off the little brace and started for the door. The nurse had left her station with a tall black orderly who looked like Julius Erving. Good looking. Neat moustache. He’d said something funny and she’d laughed. Screw him.

Poitras said, “Hound Dog?”

I stopped.

“At least it wasn’t a buy-off. That’s something.”

“Sure.”

I found Ellen and Perry Lang sitting alone at a big table in the back of the cafeteria. I went up behind them, put my good hand on Ellen’s shoulder, and said, “Come on. It’s time to go home.”

She looked back at me silently for a moment, then nodded. She had cleaned the lipstick off, leaving her face pink and fresh from the scrubbing. “I should get the things I left at your house.”

We picked up Pike’s Cherokee from a cop out front and took the drive west to Fairfax, then north up Laurel and into the hills. It was almost six when we got there. The cloud cover had broken, and the air had a fresh, scrubbed smell. Nice. A red-winged hawk rode the wind pushing up the canyon above my house. I could see his head turn, looking for mice.

When Ellen got out, Perry got out with her. He had made her sit in the backseat with him, and he wasn’t about to let her get out of reach now.

The cat was sitting in the middle of the floor, waiting, when we walked in. He hissed when he saw Perry and crept under the couch, ears down. Ever the gracious host.

While Ellen and Perry were upstairs, I went into the kitchen, drank two glasses of water, then called the hospital and asked after Pike. A woman with a very direct voice told me he was out of surgery now, in serious but stable condition, with a good prognosis. He would be fine. I thanked her and hung up.

When Ellen and Perry came back, she was carrying the Ralph’s bag I’d brought from her house. She had taken off my sweat shirt and the dirty jeans and replaced them with a pretty pink top and cotton pants. Pike was right. A year from now, she would not remember the smell of gunpowder or ferocious red marks on her face. At the bottom of the stairs, Perry Lang asked her about his father.

She went white and looked at me, but I did not help her with the decision. She had to do what she thought she could do. After a while, she took Perry into the living room, sat him on the couch, and told him that his father was dead.

They sat together a very long time. Perry cried, then grew quiet, then cried again until he fell asleep in her lap. At ten minutes before eight, she said, “We can go now,” and stood up with her nine-year-old son cradled in her arms like a baby.

We put him, groggy and whimpering, into the back of the Cherokee, then took the long drive to Encino. Coming down off the mountain into the valley, the lights were like brilliant crystal jewels in the rain-washed air. Better than that. It was as if the stars had fallen from the sky and lay stewn along the desert.

“I can do this,” she said.

“Yep.”

“I can pull us together, and keep us together, and go back to school maybe, and go forward.”

“Never any doubt.”

She looked at me. “I won’t back up.”

I nodded.

“Not ever,” she said.

I exited the freeway and rolled down the cool silent Encino streets to Janet Simon’s house. It was brightly lit, inside and out. The older daughter, Cindy, passed by the front window as we pulled into the drive. “Would you like me to be there when you tell them?” I said.

She sat silently, chewing her lip, staring at the house. “No. If I need help there, let it come from Perry.”

I nodded. A car passed, washing her with light and revealing something ageless in her face. A sort of maturity and life that hadn’t been there before, and that you never see in most people. The look of someone who has assumed responsibility.

We got out. I liked it that she didn’t expect me to open the door for her.

“You didn’t throw away your life with Mort,” I said.

She stared up at me.

“Mort wasn’t kidnapped and Mort wasn’t dealing with these people. Duran’s goons took the boy and Mort went after them. That’s where the . 32 was. Maybe Mort wasn’t there for you anymore, but he tried to be there for Perry. He died trying to save his boy.”

Her eyes looked deep in the night. “How do you know?”

“Poitras ran a paraffin test. The test says Mort fired a gun. He wouldn’t have had to do any shooting unless he was trying to get his son back.”

She took a very deep breath, let it out, and stared down the street. Then she nodded, raised up on her toes, and kissed me. “Thank you.”

The front door opened and Janet Simon appeared in the light. We didn’t move toward her and she didn’t move out toward us.

“There’s more to bring away from this than firing a pistol,” I said.

“I know.”

“You’re different now.”

She looked at Janet Simon. “They’ll have to get used to that, won’t they?”

I helped her lift Perry out. His face was puffy and pale and he clung to her even in sleep. She said, “Would you like to come in?”

I shook my head. “Not if you don’t need me. If you need me, I’ll stay. If you don’t, I’ll go sit with Joe.”

She smiled and told me she’d come see Joe tomorrow, then she kissed my cheek once more and walked up to the house. Janet Simon stepped aside to let them in, then shut the door.