Michael Connelly - Chasing the Dime

"Did you change the number at my apartment?"

"Yes, you told me to. It was supposed to start yesterday."

"I think it did."

He knew that when he had been talking Monica into making the call to All American Mail on Saturday that he had told her to change the number on Monday. At the time he guessed he meant it. But now he felt strangely unsettled about losing the number. It was a connection to another world, to Lilly and Lucy.

"Henry? Are you still there?"

"Yes. What's my new number?"

"I have to look it up. Are you out of the hospital?"

"Yes, I'm out. Just look it up, please."

"I am, I am. I was going to give it to you yesterday but when I went in your room you had that visitor."

"I understand."

"Okay, here it is."

She gave him the number and he grabbed a pen off the bed table and wrote it on his wrist because he didn't have a notebook handy.

"Is there a forwarding on the last number?"

"No, because then I thought all of those guys would be still calling you."

"Exactly. Good work."

"Um, Henry, are you coming in today? Charlie was asking about your schedule."

He thought about this before answering. The day was already half shot. Charlie probably wanted to talk and then overtalk about the Proteus demonstration still scheduled for the next day with Maurice Goddard despite Pierce's urging to delay it.

"I don't know if I'm going to make it in," Pierce told Monica. "The doctor wants me to take it easy. If Charlie wants to talk, tell him I'm at home and give him the new number."

"Okay, Henry."

"Thank you, Monica. I'll see you later."

He waited for her to say good-bye but she didn't. He was about to hang up when she spoke.

"Henry, are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I just don't want to come in and scare everybody with this face. Like I scared you yesterday."

"I wasn't -"

"Yes, you were but that's okay. And thanks for asking how I'm doing, Monica. That was nice. I've gotta go now. Oh, listen, the man who was in my room when you came by?"

"Yes?"

"He's a detective named Renner. From the LAPD. He will probably be calling you to ask about me."

"About what?"

"About what I had you do for me. You know, making that call as Lilly Quinlan. Things like that."

There was a short silence and then Monica's voice sounded different, nervous.

"Henry, am I in trouble?"

"Not at all, Monica. He's investigating her disappearance. And he's investigating me. Not you. He's just backtracking on what I did. So if he calls you, just tell him the truth and everything will be fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. Don't worry about it. I should go now."

They hung up. Pierce got a fresh dial tone and called Lucy LaPorte's number, knowing it now by heart. Once again he got her voice mail but the greeting was now different. It was her voice but the message was that she was taking a vacation and would not be accepting clients until mid-November.

More than a month, Pierce thought. He felt his insides constrict as he thought about what Renner had intimated and about Wentz and his goon and what they could've done to her.

He left a message regardless of what she had said in her greeting.

"Lucy, it's Henry Pierce. It's important. Call me back. I don't care what happened or what they did to you, call me. I can help you. I've got a new number now, so write it down."

He read the number off his wrist and then hung up. He held the phone on his lap for a few moments, half expecting, half hoping she would immediately call back. She didn't. After a while he got up and left the bedroom.

In the kitchen Pierce found the empty laundry basket on the counter. He remembered he had been using it to carry grocery bags up from the car when he first encountered Wentz and Six-Eight by the elevator. He remembered dropping the laundry basket when he was pushed out of the elevator. Now the basket was here. He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Everything he had been carrying up -except the eggs, which had probably broken -had been placed inside. He wondered who had done this. Nicole? The police? A neighbor he did not even know?

The question made him think of Detective Renner's statement about the Good Samaritan complex. If such a theory and complex were true, then Pierce felt sorry for all the true dogooders and volunteers out there in the world. The idea that their efforts might be viewed cynically by members of law enforcement depressed him.

Pierce remembered that he still had several bags of groceries in the trunk of his BMW.

He picked up the laundry basket and decided to go get them because he was hungry and the pretzels and sodas and other snacks he had bought were in the trunk.

Still feeling weak from the assault and surgery, he did not overload the basket once he went down to the garage. He decided on two trips and after he got back into the apartment with the second basketful he checked the phone again and learned he had missed a call. He had a message.

Pierce cursed himself for missing the call and then quickly went through the process of setting up a voice mail access code again. Soon he was listening to the message. It was from Lucy LaPorte.

"Help me? You already helped me enough, Henry. They hurt me. I'm all black and blue and nobody can see me like this. I want you to stop calling me and wanting to help me.

I'm not talking to you again after this. Stop calling here, you understand?"

The message clicked off. Pierce continued to hold the phone to his ear, his mind repeating parts of the message like a scratched old record. They hurt me. I'm all black and blue. He felt himself getting light-headed and reached out to the wall for balance. He then turned his back into the wall and slid down until he was sitting on the floor, the phone on his lap again.

He did not move for several seconds and then raised the receiver and started calling her number. Halfway through, he stopped and hung up.

"Okay," he said out loud.

He closed his eyes. He thought about calling Janis Langwiser to tell her that he had received a message from Lucy, that at the very least she was alive. He could then ask her if she had learned anything new since their meeting at the hospital that morning.

Before he could act on the idea, the phone rang while he was still holding it. He answered immediately. He thought it might be Lucy again -who else had the new number? -and his hello was tinged with a tone of hurried desperation.

But it wasn't Lucy. It was Monica.

"I forgot to tell you, between Monday and Tuesday your friend Cody Zeller left three messages for you on your private line. I guess he really wants you to call him."

"Thank you, Monica."

Pierce could not call Zeller back directly. His friend accepted no direct calls. To contact him, Pierce had to call his pager and put in a return number. If Zeller was familiar with the number, he would return the call. Because Pierce had a new number that Zeller would not recognize, he added a prefix of three sevens, which was a code that let Zeller know it was a friend or associate who was attempting to contact him from an unfamiliar number.

It was a sometimes cumbersome and always annoying way to conduct life and business but Zeller was a paranoid's paranoid and Pierce had to play it his way.

He settled in to wait for the callback but his page was promptly returned. Unusual for Zeller.

"Jesus, man, when are you going to get a cell phone? I've been trying to reach you for three days."

"I don't like cell phones. What's up?"

"You can get them with a scramble chip, you know."

"I know. What's up?"

"What's up is that on Saturday you sure wanted this stuff in a goddamn hurry. Then you don't call me back for three days. I was starting to think you -"