Michael Prescott - Blind Pursuit

Behind the wheel again. At the rear of the building he executed a wide U-turn, the captured Ford rattling and jouncing, and then he was back on Houghton Road, heading north, punching the accelerator pedal, speeding away from the scene.

Deputies Davis and Smoke arrived at the Exxon station at precisely eleven o’clock.

They found the lights on, a situation unusual but hardly unheard of. Foster Tuttle, the station’s owner, was getting on in years. He was known to be absent-minded about such details.

The pay phone had been torn apart. The handset and cord lay in the dirt.

Davis beamed his flashlight at the phone assembly and saw fresh graffiti scrawled over its metal casing.

COPS SUK ME.

He worked up a goodly mouthful of saliva with the help of the wad of Bubblicious he was chewing, then threw back his head and hawked a shining gob of spit into the night.

“Kids,” he said in disgust.

Deputy Smoke nodded. “Kids.”

For no particular reason Davis retrieved the handset. The armored cord dangled from his hand like a dead snake, the plating bright in the starlight.

“This damn town’s getting more like L.A. every damn day,” Davis muttered.

“More like.” Smoke had learned never to argue with his partner. Besides, it was true, what with the gangs and the drugs and the Mexicans.

“Every damn day,” Davis said for emphasis as they sauntered back to their car.

Before pulling away to resume patrol. Deputy Davis added another stick of Bubblicious to his growing wad, and Deputy Smoke got on the radio to report an act of vandalism and a phony 911 call.

The pianist was playing “For Sentimental Reasons,” the rippling chords occasionally overlaid with his hacking smoker’s cough. Behind the bar a color TV, volume muted, showed basketball highlights; a game-winning three-point shot elicited a listless sigh of approval from a row of patrons nursing drinks.

Walker leaned back in the corner booth, settling into the imitation-leather banquette, and checked his watch.

Eleven o’clock. Gary should arrive at any minute.

Sipping his scotch, letting his gaze wander from the TV to the pianist and back, he thought about Annie Reilly.

Her sister obviously had left town on a whim. No doubt she’d get in touch with Annie before long, clear everything up. None of that was what preoccupied him.

It was the small glitch in their conversation, the moment when she said, “Lydia’s husband… died.”

Why the hesitation?

She’d asked if he had ever heard of Lydia Connor. Peculiar thing for her to say. There was no reason for him to have heard of her. So what if she had been a local resident? The population of the Tucson metropolitan area was roughly three-quarters of a million the last time he checked.

No, Annie was hiding something. The mystery intrigued him.

Then he smiled at himself, amused by his self-deception. Impersonal curiosity alone would hardly have prompted him to call Gary with a request for information, or to respond so eagerly to his friend’s invitation, a half hour ago, to meet at this tavern and review what he’d learned.

He was… interested in Annie Reilly. True, he barely knew her, had hardly seen her at her best, and probably hadn’t come off too well in her eyes, either. Even so, he was interested.

The date of birth in her M.V.D. file was March 12, 1966. She had just turned thirty. Could pass for twenty-five.

Walker himself was thirty-five, and he was aware that he came off as older than his age; cops often did.

No particular reason to think it could work between them.

Still…

In the photo portrait she had been smiling. She did have a lovely smile. And her green eyes, mischievous and alert-he much preferred them to Erin’s cool gray gaze.

He supposed he’d agreed to look into Erin’s disappearance a little more deeply for the simple reason that he wanted to see Annie again.

Most cops were extroverts, but he had always been rather shy around women, especially women he found attractive. Shy and slow to act. Sometimes too slow.

Rotating his glass, watching chips of ice twirl like glass fragments in a kaleidoscope, he thought back to a party he’d attended last year. In the crush of people, mostly strangers to him, he’d bumped into a dark-haired woman with a quick smile and an intensely perceptive gaze. Her name was Caroline.

They talked for a while, first shouting above the din of conversation, then retreating to a quieter part of the house. Walker was reasonably sure she wanted him to ask her out, but something made him hesitate. Then they got separated, and later in the evening she left with another man.

He heard nothing further of her for months, until the friend who’d thrown the party reported casually that Caroline- You remember her, don’t you, Mike? — had gotten married. She meets the guy at my party, and next thing I know, I’m watching them exchange vows at the altar. Go figure.

Sometimes in the lonely post-midnight hours, Walker thought of Caroline. He wondered what would have happened if he’d been quicker to act on his feelings that night.

Nothing, probably. It was ridiculously romantic, an adolescent delusion, to think that if she’d left the party with him, she would be his wife today.

But how many similar opportunities had he missed? How many relationships had failed because he hadn’t stated his feelings, hadn’t risked intimacy, hadn’t said I love you when the words were clearly called for?

He didn’t want to make that mistake with Annie. Didn’t want to add her name to the roll of lost chances and might-have-beens. Didn’t want to think of her, with regret, on sleepless nights alone.

“Hey, Mike.”

He looked up from his drink and saw Gary Kendall slide into the banquette opposite him.

“Gary.” Walker reached across the table to shake hands. “Hope this hasn’t inconvenienced you too much.”

A sunny shrug. “No problem, my man.”

As usual, Gary looked like a recent arrival from L.A.-chinos, baggy Lakers T-shirt, mirrored sunglasses tipped back on his forehead. People sometimes mistook him for a tourist.

In fact, however, he had never lived in L.A.-or anywhere outside of Tucson, for that matter. He talked of relocating to The Coast, as he called it, but there was no chance of that; he liked his job too much to leave it.

For the past two years he had been associate metro editor of the Tucson Standard, and though the stories he covered rarely involved more than car accidents and labor disputes and the endless controversy over the quality of the city’s water supply, he seemed to regard himself as a true journalistic crusader, some mythical amalgam of Woodward and Bernstein or, better yet, Redford and Hoffman.

“Truth is,” Walker said, “it’s probably not that important. I’m not even sure why I thought it was worth pursuing.”

“A hunch, maybe? The kind that TV cops are known for?”

“Could be.”

“Well, if so, good buddy, you just may have qualified for your very own series.”

Walker blinked at him. He was about to ask what that meant when the waitress stopped at the table.

“Get you something?” she asked Gary.

“Beer.”

“We got Bud, Coors, Heineken, Amstel Light-”

“Corona.” He’d heard they drank a lot of that in L.A.

When the waitress was gone. Walker leaned forward. “You were telling me my hunch paid off.”

“Big-time.” Gary removed two folded sheets of paper from his pants pocket. “I visited the morgue, looked up the relevant articles. All that stuff is on microfilm, natch. I mean, we’re going back a long way.”

“How long?”

“Nineteen sixty-eight. That’s when Lincoln Connor offed himself.”