Robert Crais - The Watchman

“This is tied in with Eagle Rock and Malibu?”

“Yes.”

Chen stared down at the guns again.

“The firearms analysts are specialists, man. What they do, it isn’t just science-it’s an art. She’s already gone home.”

“First thing tomorrow.”

“I can’t just walk in, here’s two guns. I need a case number.”

“Use the Eagle Rock number.”

“She knows the feds took those guns. She’s the one who told me.”

“Tell her you got them back. Make up something, John. It’s important.”

Chen knew it was important. Everything Pike and Cole brought to him had been important.

He looked into the backpack again.

“What are the glasses, the fingerprints? Or you want me to print the guns?”

“The men who used these guns will end up with the coroner, but the coroner won’t be able to identify them. You will.”

Chen shook his head.

“I can lift the prints and run them, but it’s all the same database. Live Scan is Live Scan. If the coroner didn’t pull a hit, neither will I.”

“These people aren’t in the database. They came from Ecuador.”

Chen glanced at the glasses again. A standard NCIC/Live Scan search was not a worldwide search. An international search required a special request, and even then you pretty much had to request each search by country. No single worldwide database existed, so if you didn’t know where to look, you were shit out of luck.

Pike said, “Can you do that, John?”

“This is something big, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Big, and getting bigger.”

Chen chewed at his upper lip as he thought through what he would have to do, both for the guns and the prints. He was pretty sure he could get LaMolla to run the guns; she was still bat-shit furious with the feds for taking her toys, and doubly furious that neither Harriet nor Parker would tell her why. LaMolla would run the guns just to fuck them over.

Chen said, “I can do this. I’ll take care of it.”

Pike got out and walked away.

Chen stared after him, thinking Pike wasn’t so bad when you got to know him. Not so scary, even though, well, you know, he was scary.

You’re my friend, John.

Chen lifted out the glasses. He held them up, one by one, and saw the clean definition of fingerprint smudges even through the plastic wrappers. Chen smiled. The coroner had five unidentified stiffs, and now he would have two more. Everyone would be scratching their heads, wondering who in hell these guys were, but they wouldn’t know-

– until John Chen told them.

Chen smiled even wider.

The guns would keep until tomorrow, but now was the best time for the glasses. The lab crew was reduced, Harriet was gone, and no one would ask what he was doing. Chen stuffed the guns under his seat, locked his car, and hurried inside with the glasses.

Chen wanted to identify these guys, not only for himself and what he would get from it, but for Pike. He did not want to let down his friend Joe Pike.

Pike stopped for takeout from an Indian restaurant in Silver Lake even though Cole dropped off food earlier that day. He bought a spinach and cheese dish called saag paneer, vegetable jalfrezi, and garlic naan, thinking the girl would like them, and a quart of a sweet yogurt drink called lassi. The lassi was rich like a milk shake, and flavored with mango. Pike enjoyed smelling the strong spices-the garlic and garam masala; the coriander and cardamom. They reminded him of the rocky villages and jungle basins where he had first eaten these things. Pike was starving. A queasy hunger had grown in him as the stress burned from his system.

The sun was long down by the time Pike arrived at their house and turned into the drive. Everything looked fine. The door was closed and the shades glowed from the light within the house. In the abrupt silence when he turned off the car, his ears still whined, though less now than before. Pike was not going to tell the girl about Luis and Jorge, but he would tell her he had made progress, and thought that might make her feel better about things.

Pike locked the car, went to the door, and let himself in. He remembered how his silent appearances frightened her, so this time he announced himself. He knocked twice, then opened the door.

“It’s me.”

Pike felt the silence as he stepped inside. Cole’s iPod was on the coffee table beside an open bottle of water. Her magazines were on the floor. The house was bright with light, but Pike heard nothing. He concentrated, listening past the whine, thinking she might be playing with him because she hated the way he always surprised her, but he knew it was wrong. The silence of an empty house is like no other silence.

Pike lowered the bag of food to the floor. He drew the Kimber and held it down along his leg.

“Larkin?”

Pike moved, and was at her bedroom. He moved again, checking the second bedroom, the bath, and the kitchen. Larkin was not in the house. The rooms and their things were in order and in place, and showed no sign of a struggle. The windows were intact. The back door was locked, but he opened it, checked the backyard, then moved back through the house. The doors had not been jimmied or broken.

Pike looked for a note. No note.

Her purse and other bags were still in her bedroom. If she ran away she had not taken them.

Pike let himself out the front door and stood in the darkness on the tiny porch. He listened, feeling the neighborhood-the streetlight above its pool of silver, the open houses with golden windows, the movement of the neighbors on their porches and within their homes. Life was normal. Men with guns had not come here. No one had carried a struggling girl out to a car or heard a woman screaming. Larkin had likely walked away.

Pike stepped off the porch and went to the street, trying to decide which way she would go, and why. She had credit cards and some cash, but no phone with which to call her friends or a car. Pike decided she had probably walked down to Sunset Boulevard to find a phone, but then a woman on the porch across the street laughed. They were an older couple, and had been on their porch every night, listening to the Dodgers. Tonight their radio played music, but Pike could hear their voices clearly.

He stepped between the cars through the pool of silver light.

He said, “Excuse me.”

Their porch was lit only by the light coming from within their house. The red tips of their cigarettes floated in the dark like fireflies.

The man drew on his cigarette, and the coal flared. He lowered the volume on the radio.

He said, “Good evening.”

He spoke in a formal manner with a Russian accent.

Pike said, “I’m from across the street.”

The woman waved her cigarette.

“We know this. We see you and the young lady.”

“Did you see the young lady today?”

Neither of them answered. They sat in cheap aluminum lawn chairs, shadowed in the dim light. The old man drew on his cigarette again.

Pike said, “I think she went for a walk. Did you see which way she went?”

The old man grunted, but with a spin that gave it meaning.

Pike said, “What?”

The woman said, “This is your wife?”

Pike read the weight in her question and took sex off the table.

“My sister.”

The old man said, “Ah.”

Something played on the woman’s face that suggested she didn’t believe him, and she seemed to be thinking about how to answer. She finally decided and waved her cigarette toward the street.

“She go with the boys.”

The old man said, “Armenians.”

The woman nodded, as if that said it all.

“She talk with them, the way they stand there all the time, them and their car, and she go with them.”