James Patterson - Postcard killers

The air outside the terminal building was thick with exhaust fumes. He stood for a moment looking at his surroundings from the parking lot outside the rental-car office. It was such a familiar scene: the sea of private cars spreading out around him, the advertising bil boards, the voices, the sound of traffic in the streets.

The U.S. was just as he remembered it, just a bit more… unsubtle.

He rented a Chrysler with GPS. He didn't know his way around L.A. and had no desire to learn right now, not on this trip.

Programming Citrus Avenue into the wretched machine turned out to be tougher than finding the address on a map, so he gave up and drove north along Sepulveda Boulevard in heavy city traffic. God, the traffic. It was even worse than in New York.

He would never come to grips with Los Angeles, he was thinking to himself.

A sort of romantic shimmer lay over the whole city. Here was Hol ywood and the dream factory and a glamorous life in the sun. For some people, anyway.

Personal y, he could see only the crass advertisements, the elevated freeways, and the endless blocks of ugly single-story vil as.

California wasn't exactly his bag of potato chips.

He ignored the freeways and fol owed Sepulveda for miles, until he reached Santa Monica Boulevard.

He swung off right and drove on until he nearly fel asleep at a streetlight.

He'd been warned that jet lag from Scandinavia was no joke. It sure wasn't.

The time difference was nine hours. Here it was only seven in the evening, but after six months in Europe, his body thought it was four in the morning.

Exactly one day before, he had been lying in a narrow bunk in an old prison cel, feeling more alive than he had since Kimmy died.

He hadn't showered since he left her, and he could stil make out the smel of fruit from her body on his…

He pushed the confusing thought aside and parked the car near a loading bay on Beverly Drive.

Two quick coffees and a parking ticket later, he was more or less ready to go on.

Number 1338 Citrus Avenue was a fairly rundown two-story rental with a flat roof and a walkway, just a few blocks from Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hol ywood Boulevard.

Lyndon Crebbs opened the door before Jacob had time to even ring the bel.

"You old bastard!" the FBI agent said with feeling, hugging him.

"Come in, for god's sake!"

Jacob stepped into a sparsely furnished room with a deep-pile beige carpet that had seen better decades.

His mentor had aged. His hair was white and his suntanned face was covered in a network of wrinkles. But his eyes were the same, dark brown and crackling with intel igence. And suspicion.

"God, Lyndon, you look like an old man."

The FBI agent laughed hard and closed the door behind him.

"Prostate trouble, Jacob. The cancer's eating me up, slowly but surely."

Jacob let his duffel bag fal to the floor and sank down on a chair at Lyndon's round dining-room table. "So – what have you heard? Anything?"

"I got a message from Jil in New York," Lyndon said, taking out two Budweisers. "They're wondering when you're going to stop running round Europe chasing murderers. They say they've got enough of those in the Thirtysecond and could do with your help. Today, if not sooner."

Jacob laughed so loud and long that the noise almost shocked him.

"Wel," he said, "I'm certainly not planning to settle in this dump of a city."

Lyndon smiled.

"You know what they say: L.A. isn't a cat that jumps into your lap and licks your face. But with a little time and patience, it just might."

And Jacob replied the same way he had for the past twenty years whenever pets were mentioned.

"No cats for me, Kimmy's al ergic."

Lyndon Crebbs suddenly became very serious and looked much more like himself, which meant even more suspicious.

"I've got a whole lot to tel you," he said.

Copenhagen, Denmark

It was really still night, but the sun was already up.

The pretty American girl named Anna took a careful sip from the last of her margarita. She didn't usual y drink this late, but they had decided to do "crazy things" while they were traveling and "break al the rules."

She looked up at Eric and moved closer to him. Sometimes it felt like she could never get close enough.

The hip club was throbbing with music, but it was almost possible to talk in the upstairs bar. Not that anything sensible ever got said at this time of day, not in bars like this one.

"One more, then, eh?"

The guy who had bought their drinks was panting against her neck again.

He was cute, but stil…

She pressed herself against Eric, away from the other man.

"No, thanks," she said. "I've had enough."

"Go on," Eric whispered in her ear. "Just one more. We're al having fun."

Anna gulped and said, "Okay, then. To fun!"

The other guy ordered her another margarita.

Anna looked at her watch. It was late.

"Whereabouts in the States are you from?" the guy asked as he handed her the drink. The salt around the rim rained down on her fingers.

"Tucson, Arizona," Eric said. He was always so polite to everyone.

"Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some California grass…," the guy's pretty girlfriend sang, waving her glass.

"There's nothing but desert there, am I correct?"

"Not quite," Eric said.

Anna tugged at his shirtsleeve, even though she knew he didn't like it when she did that.

"I want to go back to the hotel now," she said. "Please, Eric."

"Have you been traveling long?" the girl asked, sucking on the straw in her empty glass.

"Two and a half weeks," Eric said. "We real y like Scandinavia. It's total y awesome!"

"Yeah, isn't it?" the girl said.

She moved closer to Eric and kicked off one of her sandals. Anna watched her toes climb up Eric's sneaker.

"You know what they say about men with big feet?" she said, looking up at Eric from behind her hair.

Eric smiled in that way that made his eyes twinkle. 129 Anna blinked. What the hel were they doing? Flirting with each other?

While she was standing here, right next to them?

"Eric," she said, "I real y am tired. And we're going to Tivoli tomorrow…"

Eric gave a shril laugh, as if she'd said something real y childish. The girl laughed along with him.

"I think this feels like a magical evening," the girl said. "I'd real y like a souvenir of tonight, wouldn't you, Anna?"

She draped herself against her boyfriend and kissed him softly on the lips.

The guy buying the margaritas gave a slightly forced laugh.

"This could get expensive," he said. It was almost as if he was reading a script.

"There can't be any shops open at this time of day," Eric said.

The guy stiffened. "Hel!" he said. "You're right! So let's get a bottle of champagne!"

He signaled to the bartender again.

The girl tilted her head and smiled at Eric.

"I'd real y like to drink it with the two of you," she said, "in your hotel room."

Anna felt herself tense up, but Eric raised his glass in a toast. He had drunk too much, and nothing could stop him when that happened. She'd known that before she married him. He pul ed her tight to him.

"Come on," he whispered right in her ear, his breath hitting her eardrum.

"We wanted to meet new people on our trip, didn't we? These two are great."

Anna felt like she wanted to cry.

Eric was quite right.

She real y had to stop being such a deadhead. They should go back to the hotel and party.

Lyndon put two more bottles of beer on the table. Jacob grabbed one of them.

"I didn't think my sources would have much to say about Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph, but I was wrong," he said, sitting down heavily at the table.