Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

Unable to make outside contact, I concentrated on the internal. I opened a file on the laptop and pulled out my hard-copy notes. I started writing a narrative summarizing the moves of the day. It took me well over an hour to complete the project but when I was done I had thirty solid inches of story. And it was good story. Maybe my best in years.

After reading it over and making some editing improvements, I realized that the work had made me hungry. So I counted my money once again and left the room, making sure the door was locked behind me. I walked through the gaming hall and into a bar by the dollar slots. I ordered a beer and a steak sandwich and sat at a corner table with an open view of the mechanical money takers.

Looking around, I saw that the place had an aura of second-rate desperation, and the idea of another twelve hours there depressed me. But I wasn’t looking at a lot of choices. I was stuck and was going to stay stuck until the morning.

I checked my cash stash again and decided I had enough for another beer and a roll of quarters for the cheap slots. I set up in a row near the lobby entrance and started feeding my money into an electronic poker machine. I lost my first seven hands before hitting on a full house. I followed that with a flush and a straight. Pretty soon I was thinking about being able to afford a third beer.

Another gambler took a seat two machines over from me. I barely noticed him until he decided he liked the comfort of conversation while he lost his money.

“You here for the pussy?” he asked cheerily.

I looked over at him. He was about thirty and had large muttonchop sideburns. He wore a dusty cowboy hat over dirty blond hair, leather driving gloves and mirrored sunglasses, even though we were inside.

“Excuse me?”

“Supposed to be a couple brothels outside of town. I was wondering which one’s got the best-looking pussy. I just blew in on a stretch from Salt Lake.”

“I wouldn’t know, man.”

I went back to my machine and tried to concentrate on what to hold and what to drop. I had the ace, three, four and nine of spades along with the ace of hearts. Do I go for the flush or stay conservative, take the pair and hope for a third ace or another pair?

“Birds in hand, man,” said Sideburns.

I looked over at him and he nodded as if to say no charge for the sage advice. I could see the reflection of my screen in his mirrored glasses. All I needed was somebody coaching me on quarter poker. I held the spades, dropped the ace of hearts and hit the draw button. The machine god delivered. I got the jack of spades and a seven-to-one payoff on the flush. Too bad I was only betting quarters.

I hit the cash-out button and listened as a whopping fourteen dollars in quarters dropped into the tin tray. I scooped it into a plastic change cup and got up, leaving Sideburns behind.

I took my quarters to the cage and asked to cash out. I no longer had an appetite for gambling with small change. I was going to invest my winnings in two more beers and take them back to my room. There was more writing I could be doing, as well as preparing for the next morning’s interview. I was going to talk to a man who’d been in prison for more than a year for a murder I was convinced he hadn’t committed. It was going to be a wonderful day, the goddamn start of every journalist’s dream to free an innocent man from an unjust imprisonment.

While waiting for the elevator in the lobby I carried the bottles down by my side in case I was breaking some sort of house rule. I stepped in, pushed the button and moved to the back corner. The doors started to come together but then a gloved hand poked in and hit the infrared beam and the doors reopened.

My pal Sideburns stepped in. He raised a finger to push a button but then pulled it back.

“Hey, we’ve got the same floor,” he said.

“Wonderful,” I said.

He went to the opposite corner. I knew he was going to say something and there was no place for me to go. I just waited for it and I wasn’t disappointed.

“Hey, buddy, I didn’t mean to mess up your mojo down there. My ex-wife used to say I talked too much. Maybe that’s why she’s my ex-wife.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I have to get some work done anyway.”

“So you’re here on work, huh? What kind of business would take you to this godforsaken part of the world?”

Here we go again, I thought. The elevator was moving so slowly that it would’ve been faster taking the stairs.

“I have an appointment tomorrow at the prison.”

“Gotcha. You a lawyer for one of them guys?”

“No. Journalist.”

“Hmm, a writer, huh? Well, good luck. At least you’ll get to go home after, not like them other fellas in there.”

“Yeah, lucky me.”

I moved toward the door as we reached the fourth floor, a clear signal that I was finished with the conversation and wanted to get to my room. The elevator stopped moving and it seemed an interminable amount of time before the doors finally began to open.

“Have a good night,” I said.

I stepped quickly out of the elevator and to the left. My room was the third door down.

“You, too, partner,” Sideburns called after me.

I had to switch the two beer bottles to my other hand to get my room key out. As I stood in front of the door, pulling it out of my pocket, I saw Sideburns coming down the hallway toward me. I turned and looked to my right. There were only three more rooms going down and then the exit to the stairwell. I had a bad feeling that this guy would eventually come knocking on my door during the night, wanting to go down for a beer or out to get some pussy. The first thing I planned to do was pack up, call the desk and change my room. He didn’t know my name and wouldn’t be able to find me.

I finally got the key into the lock and pushed the door open. I looked back at Sideburns and gave him a final nod. His face broke into a strange smile as he got closer.

“Hi, Jack,” a voice said from inside my room.

I abruptly turned to see a woman getting up from the chair by the window in my room. And I immediately recognized her as Rachel Walling. She had an all-business look on her face. I felt the presence of Sideburns go by my back on his way to his room.

“Rachel?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Why don’t you come in and close the door?”

Still stunned by the surprise, I did as instructed. I closed the door behind me. From out in the hallway I heard another door close loudly. Sideburns had entered his room.

Cautiously, I stepped farther into my room.

“How’d you get in here?”

“Just sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Twelve years earlier I’d had a short, intense and, some would say, improper relationship with Rachel Walling. While I had seen photos of her in the papers a few years ago when she helped the LAPD run down and kill a wanted man in Echo Park, I had not been in her presence since we had sat in a hearing room nearly a decade earlier. Still, not many days went by in those ten years that I didn’t think about her. She was one reason-perhaps the biggest reason-that I have always considered that time the high point of my life.

She showed little wear and tear from the years that had passed, even though I knew it had been a tough time. She paid for her relationship with me with a five-year stint in a one-person office in South Dakota. She went from profiling and chasing serial killers to investigating bar stabbings on Indian reservations.

But she had climbed out of that pit and had been posted in L.A. for the past five years, working for some sort of a secretive intelligence unit. I had called her when I’d found out, gotten through to her but been rebuffed. Since then I had kept tabs on her, when I could, from afar. And now she was standing in front of me in my hotel room in the middle of nowhere. It was strange, sometimes, how life worked out.