Michael Connelly - Lost Light

“No, he can’t. He’s paralyzed. Most of the time I think he just sits there staring at the TV.”

“Any pets?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So the only time there is real movement in the room is when the caregiver comes in, and that’s who you want to watch. Am I right?”

“Right.”

“No problem then. This will work. We put a motion sensor on it and a two-gig memory card and you’ll probably stretch it out a couple days.”

“That’ll work.”

I nodded and looked at Burnett. I was impressed with his son. Andre looked like he should be out breaking quarterbacks in half. But he had found a specialty in life dealing with circuits and microprocessors. I could see the pride in Burnett’s eyes.

“Give me fifteen minutes to put it together and then I’ll come show you how to install it and how to switch out the memory card.”

“Sounds good.”

I sat with Burnett in his office and we talked about the department and a couple of the cases that we had worked together. One case had involved a hired killer who had murdered both the intended target in South L.A. and then his employer in Hollywood when the employer failed to pay the second half of the agreed-upon fee. We had worked it together for a month, my team and Biggar and his partner, who was named Miles Manley. We broke it when Big and Manley, as the pair were called, came up with a witness in the target victim’s neighborhood who remembered seeing a white man on the day of the shooting and could describe his car, a black Corvette with red leather interior. The car matched the vehicle used by the second victim’s next-door neighbor. He confessed after a lengthy interrogation conducted alternately by Biggar and me.

“It’s always something small like that,” Biggar said while leaning back behind his desk. “That’s what I loved best about it. Not knowing where that little break was going to come from.”

“I know what you mean.”

“So you miss it?”

“Yeah. But I’ll get it back. I’m starting to now.”

“You mean the feeling, not the job.”

“Right. How about you, you still missing it?”

“I’m making more money than I need here but, yeah, I miss the juice. The job gave me the juice and I don’t get it shuffling rent-a-cops around and setting up cameras. Be careful what you do, Harry. You might end up successful like me and then you sit around remembering the old days, thinking they were a lot better than they were.”

“I’ll be careful, Big.”

Biggar nodded, pleased that he had dispensed his dose of advice for the day.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, Harry, but I’m guessing this guy in the chair is Lawton Cross, huh?”

I hesitated but decided it didn’t matter.

“Yeah, it’s him. I’m working something else and it crossed his path. I went to see him and he said some stuff. I just want to make sure. You know.”

“Good luck with it. I remember his wife, saw her a couple times at things. She was a nice lady.”

I nodded. I knew what he was saying, that he hoped Cross wasn’t being victimized by his wife.

“People can change,” I said. “I’m going to find out.”

Andre Biggar came in a few minutes later carrying a toolbox, a laptop computer and the camera clock in a box. He took me to school on electronic surveillance. The clock was rigged and ready. All I needed to do was mount it on a wall and plug it in. When I adjusted the time, I would activate the surveillance by pushing the dial all the way in. To switch out the memory card I just had to remove the backing of the clock and pop the card out of the camera. Easy.

“Okay, so once I take the card out, how do I look at what I’ve got?”

Andre nodded and showed me how to plug the memory card into the side of the laptop computer. He then went through the keyboard commands that would bring up the surveillance recording on the computer’s screen.

“It’s simple. Just take care of the equipment and bring it all back. We’ve got a lot of bread invested in it.”

I didn’t want to tell him that it wasn’t simple enough for me. I seized on the financial side of the equation as a way of avoiding revealing my technical shortcomings.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I think I’ll leave your laptop here and just come back with the memory card when I want to look at it. I don’t want to risk all your equipment. I like to travel light, anyway.”

“Whatever suits you. But the beauty of this setup is the immediacy. You can pull the card and watch it in your car right outside the guy’s house if you want. Why come all the way back here?”

“I don’t think there’s that kind of urgency. I’ll leave the laptop and bring you back the card, okay?”

“Whatever.”

Andre put the clock back in its cushioned box, then shook my hand and left the office, taking the laptop with him but leaving me the toolbox along with the clock. I looked at Burnett. It was time to go.

“He looks like he’s more than helping you.”

“Andre’s the heart of this place.”

He gestured toward the wall of framed memorabilia.

“I bring the clients in, impress them, sign them up. Andre’s the one who gets it done. He figures out the needs and gets it done.”

I nodded and stood up.

“You want to charge me something for this?” I said, holding up the box with the clock in it.

Biggar smiled.

“Not if you bring it back.”

Then his face turned serious.

“It’s the least I can do for Lawton Cross.”

“Yeah,” I said, knowing the feeling.

We shook hands and I went out, carrying the clock and the toolbox, hoping the hidden camera would be the piece of equipment that would show me the world wasn’t as bad as I thought it could be.

From Biggar amp; Biggar I drove back to the Valley, taking the Sepulveda Pass and catching the first brutal wave of rush hour. It took me almost an hour just to get to Mulholland Drive. At that point I jumped off the freeway and drove west along the crest of the mountains. I watched the sun drop behind Malibu and leave a burning sky in its trail. At the low angles the sun often reflected off the smog caught in the bowl of the Valley and turned it brilliant shades of orange and pink and purple. It was like some sort of reward for putting up with having to breathe the poisoned air every day. This evening it was mostly a smooth orange color with wisps of white mixed in. It was what my ex-wife used to call a Creamsicle sky when she watched sunsets off the back deck of the house. She had a descriptive label for each one and that always made me smile.

The memory of her on the deck seemed like such a long time ago and such a different part of my life. I thought about what Roy Lindell had said about seeing her in Las Vegas. He knew I had been asking about her even though I told him I hadn’t. If not a day then at least not a week went by that I didn’t think about going out there, finding her and asking for another chance. A chance of making a go of it on her terms. I had no job holding me to L.A. anymore. I could go where I wanted. This time I could go to her and we could live there together in the city of sin. She could still be free to find what she needed on the blue felt poker tables of the city’s casinos. And at the end of each day she could come home to me. I could do whatever came up. There would always be something in Vegas for a person with my skills.

One time I had packed a box, put it in the back of the Benz and had gotten as far as Riverside before the familiar fears started rising in my chest and I pulled off the freeway. I ate a hamburger at an In-N-Out and then headed back home. I didn’t bother unpacking the box when I got there. I put it on the floor in the bedroom and took out the clothes I had packed as I needed them over the next two weeks. The empty box was still there on the floor, ready for the next time I wanted to pack it and make that drive.