Gregg Hurwitz - The Crime Writer

"Thank you very much, Brontell. I can't tell you "

"Hang on." Then he shouted across the phone. "Get the four-points and the Haldol!" Back to me: "Gotta run, Drew-Drew. My girth is required on the psych unit."

He disconnected, and I folded the phone and set it on the passenger seat.

When I looked up, Lloyd was at my window.

Lloyd signaled me with one hand to roll down the window. His other arm was out of view, since he was standing half on the curb, bent beneath a wayward bough of the pepper tree. As I hit the switch, I kept my eyes on that hidden hand. From the flex of his arm, he was holding something. The cell phone was sleek and hard in my fist.

"Hey, Lloyd."

A dated weave belt pinched his tan Dockers at the waist. His brickred Polo shirt he wore tucked in, though it had tugged free at one side from recent exertion. His wavy blond hair sparkled with sweat where it met his forehead and temples. "Hello. What do you need?"

I gestured at the manuscript pages in my lap, giving myself an extra beat so my voice wouldn't reveal the adrenaline pounding through my veins. "I came by to give it one more shot, see if you'd take a look at some pages for me. I was just reviewing "

He shifted, his arm moving, and I came within an instant of smashing his face with a Motorola-fortified fist. What swung into view, though, was not a weapon but a roll of silver electrical tape, which he spun absentmindedly around a finger.

"Drew, I'm just too overwhelmed right now. I can't help you. Or see you. This is a really bad time. An impossible time."

For all the heinousness of his actions, he was speaking the truth. He certainly looked overwhelmed, worn down by grief and dismay. As if his panic bell had been rung so often so he no longer registered the clangor inside his head. Like me he'd arrived here by desperation, choosing the less awful of two scenarios. From his face I'd say he'd had his share of second thoughts.

"Right. Okay. Sorry to bug you." I tugged the gearshift into drive. "See you later."

"See you, Drew," he said softly.

I pulled away, watching him in the rearview. He stood on the curb, staring after me, then started for the house, his shoulders stooped as though his thoughts were pulling him downward.

I turned the corner, pulled over, and dialed. "Detective Unger, please."

A few moments later, Cal picked up.

"It's Drew. I'm around the corner from Lloyd Wagner's house. I need you to get here now and bring the guns. Lloyd's got a Volvo with the right dent, repainted in brown. His wife has leukemia. There are only two matches for her marrow type in Los Angeles. One of them was Kasey Broach."

I heard wood creak as Cal sat down. "Was the other match Genevieve?"

"No," I said. "Some girl named Sissy Ballantine."

"Did you say Sissy Ballantine?"

"Yeah. Why?"

Cal's voice got tight. "An Amber Alert just hit my desk. Ballantine was snatched outside her house in Culver City a few hours ago. Neighbor saw a guy wrestle her into a white van."

I threw the Highlander into park, turned off the engine.

Cal said, "Stay put. Do not approach that house. We're on our way."

"Get over here."

"Stay out of the house. Promise me, Drew."

I snapped the phone shut, grabbed the tire iron from the trunk, and headed back down the street.

As silently as possible, I approached through the neighboring hedges. The garage door had been lowered, and I could hear from behind it the screech of tape being stripped from a roll. Slowing my breathing, I eased up on the window at the side of the garage, wading through a scented hedge of juniper. A dusty set of venetians guarded the glass, but where the stiff blinds had been tweaked down, I could see into the dim interior.

Lloyd's waist and legs protruded from the back of the van. At his feet a heap of plastic drop cloth. He emerged, roll of tape in his mouth, X-acto knife in his hand. Judging from the unused material, he was on the tail end of the job.

I withdrew, peering over my shoulder at intervals. He'd left the kitchen door unlocked, and I slipped inside. Dirty dishes, crumbs, and empty jars had overtaken the counters I'd cleaned just days before, a half-eaten burrito resting atop the rubber guard of the garbage disposal Lloyd doing his best to keep doing.

Tire iron swinging at my side, I squared off with the dark hall and the seam of light under the bedroom door at the end. Beneath the nervous ticking of the kitchen clock and the grandfather's stately tocking from the living room, I could make out the wheeze of medical equipment. I started back, the photos of Lloyd and Janice hung at intervals providing a journey through their married lives. The wedding picture, the two of them beaming and clutching like prom dates. The bumper of their Gremlin, trailing toilet paper and tin cans, Best of Luck! frosted in cursive on the rear window. Poolside in Hawaii, paperbacks splayed on lounge chairs, fruit-bedecked cocktails raised. I was aware of my footfall on the slightly warped floorboards, my breath firing in my chest, that strip of light growing ever closer. Threads of gray had crept into Janice's hair by the time they were snapped before El Capitan in Yosemite. Jovial smile lines textured their faces as they held hands across a wrought-iron patio table in a Venetian piazza. Most of the pictures had caught them looking at each other rather than at the lens, as if they couldn't help themselves, as if they had a secret from the rest of the lonely world.

I reached the bedroom door and set my hand on the bulbous antique knob, the white-noise hum of the medical equipment beyond drowning out the clocks, my thoughts. In hackneyed narrative tradition, I couldn't help but recall standing outside another door, fearful of entering.

Before I lost my nerve, I pushed through into the room.

The bed was across the wide space, raised unreasonably on a box spring and penned in by metal guardrails. It had been angled toward the window so Janice could take in the downward-sloping stretch of trees. The room smelled of sitting food, sweat-laced linen, and residual human waste, not quite scoured from bedpans and fabric. The overlay of antiseptic cleaner and the various monitors and IV poles sprouting up like electronic growth brought me back to the room in which I'd awakened four months earlier to discover Genevieve's blood beneath my nails.

Janice looked soft and fleshy, her baldness making her head appear unusually round. She had no eyelashes or eyebrows, her blue eyes pronounced and burning from the depths to which they'd sunk. A terry gown had fallen open at the chest, revealing bone ridges above her breasts. Her lips were moist, slack cheeks folded in on them like an infant's. A bag of crimson, frothed lightly at the top, dangled from a metal pole, transfusing what I imagined was fresh bone marrow into her veins. Syringes, pill bottles, and vials overloaded one of the metal trays pushed to the wall. From the labels, potent names jumped out at me in officious pharmaceutical print. cytoxin. busuLfan. cyclosporin. To the right, a draft sucked at a closed door.

She raised a wasted arm, dripping a sheet of loose skin, as if to fend me off, her mouth opening slowly, repetitively, shaping a word. Her voice was depleted and her lips stiff with the great effort, hiding her teeth, turning her mouth into a wavering black hole, a parody of yelling. Passing her by ignored was unthinkable. I approached, owing some respect to the deathbed. To my great horror, I realized she was trying to call her husband's name. I became suddenly, horrifically aware of the tire iron hanging by my knee.

"No," I whispered, "I'm not going to hurt you."

A rasp, so dry as to be nearly inaudible. "Make… him… stop."