Among the Living (11 page)

Jimmy thought he saw the old guy blink.

When he came back down to the first floor, his tails were back, the pale men who’d been at Canter’s. Today, the short one even had on a peacoat and watch cap. It was easy to make fun of them, but there wasn’t any fun in it today for Jimmy. Maybe it was all the scouts, all the innocents. He tried to make it through to the front door without them spotting him, but the tall one saw him and shot a look up at the second man on the higher flo or. The two-tone blonde came down the staircase fast and joined the other, the two of them “hiding” behind a stacked rack of bombs, a pyramid of dummies.

Jimmy went after them.
Why were Sailors interested in this?
Maybe he could shake it out of one of them. The two of them tried to get lost in the crowd. They looked bewildered. When you were tailing someone, he wasn’t supposed to come after you. They ducked behind planes, pretended to look at the shiny models of 747s and then at the mannequins of stews in pastel seventies uniforms. The Cubs had all descended from the top floor and made the two stand out all the more. Even the short one stood tall over them.

Jimmy kept coming. There was a flight simulator in one corner on the ground floor, a twenty-seater big as a bus mounted on hydraulic lifters. The two pale men cut in line, just making it through the simulator doors before they whooshed closed.

He got close enough to see the name of the ride: “Turbulence Over Tucson.” The hydraulics sighed and then went to work.

Jimmy’s ’70 Dodge Challenger, painted school bus yellow, eight coats, hand-rubbed, was parked all by itself in the last row in the lot. He got in, buckled himself in, lit it up. It had a Hemi 454 V-8 under the bulge in the hood. At idle it made a sound a little like a tiger at the zoo in the middle of the afternoon, sleepy, not all that happy. There was a four speed on the flo or. Jimmy backed around, pulled out. He eased up and over three speed bumps and moved onto the street, never spinning the tires once.

Westbound on Pico, he looked up in the mirror. Here they were, two heads in a white Ford Escort a quarter mile back. He slowed, let them close the gap. As they drew near, he pulled it down into second, punched it and hung a right.

They
tried
to keep up. Three blocks into a neighborhood of pastel Mediterranean houses with tender little yards, they stopped in the middle of the street. They’d lost him. The short one slapped the dash.

The tall one, who was driving, looked in the mirror.

The yellow Challenger was right behind them.

Jimmy pulled around the dinky Escort, looked over as he came alongside, then gunned it, leaving a perfect pair of wide black streaks.

But they came back and they caught him that night.

It started on Hollywood Boulevard. They were still in the Escort so for a minute it was still a joke. The traffic was light and Jimmy was a little down and almost glad for the company. He wasn’t going anywhere, he was just
out,
knocking around in the present, or trying to.

He let them stay close behind him for a mile or so and then took a quick right.

Where, it turned out, they
wanted
him to take a right.

When he came around the corner, the side street was blocked by a pair of black Chevys, nose to nose.

And four more Sailors. All of them had the blue edge of light around them, what you’d call
halos
if they were angels, which they decidedly weren’t. The Escort came in behind Jimmy and closed the backdoor.

The new men got out of the Chevys and started toward him at the same moment the tall pale man and the one with the bad blond hair got out of the Escort.

Jimmy turned off the engine. He opened the door, but before he could get out, they pulled him from the Dodge, rough, even though he wasn’t resisting and they knew it.

Now he resisted. He tried to break away from them but there were too many of them and they were too sure of what they were supposed to do. When Sailors were involved in anything in L.A., it wasn’t personal. They didn’t act alone. A stray single one might throw a foot out to trip you going down the sidewalk of a night, say something sour behind your back, but when three or four came after you, got in your face, it was because they
meant
something by it. It was because they’d been told to. It was because you were in violation,
busted
in the part of dark things they ran. Jimmy assumed that it was about the Kantke murders, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was about the last one. The last case. Or the one before. Unfinished business. He upset people all the time.

But not ever
Sailors,
until now. They dragged him the half block down to the Roosevelt Hotel, nobody saying anything, right into the underground parking. There was an elevator there, and nobody to stop them from going where they wanted to go.

And then they were all on the roof. Sailors had a thing about roofs. High places, lookouts.

One of the four new ones was a foot taller than the tall pale man Jimmy had made fun of and weighed twenty pounds less. This one was like a tall stick in a suit, though his suit was a better suit than what the Escort boys wore. He had red hair. He had long, long fingers. He pointed one at Jimmy. And said nothing.

“I get it,” Jimmy said. “You want me to stop.”

Two of the other new ones, big ones who wore peacoats and watch caps, took turns pushing Jimmy backwards. There was an ugly rhythm to it, almost like the three of them were dancing across the roof. They slammed him backwards into the base of an iron radio tower left over from what now seemed like a whole other age.

“You’re the Disco Antidefamation League.”

One of the big ones hit him in the face.

Long-F ingers came a few steps closer. On his cue, the two big men yanked Jimmy up off his feet and carried him over to the parapet and stood him up there and turned him around and then leaned him out over the drop, holding him by the back of his black undertaker’s suitcoat like a puppet. A wind blew up the side of the hotel, almost strong enough to hold him up if they let go. Almost.

Jimmy looked down, way down on the street, the people walking, the tour buses parked in front of the Chinese, a few cruisers out on the wrong night in their perfect lowriders, the lights. He thought of the line, from the Bible,
Cast yourself down.
But this wasn’t the pinnacle of the temple and he sure wasn’t Christ and Long-Fingers wasn’t exactly Satan.

“Look down there,” Long-Fingers said. “Can you see them?”

He didn’t mean the tourists or the cruisers. He meant what was in the shadows, in the alleyways, behind the buildings.
Who.

“Can you see them?”

“Yeah, I see them,” Jimmy said.

“
You
want to walk around forever?” He said it again, the same words, as if he’d been told to say them, this time so loud the people down on the boulevard could have heard him. “You want to walk around forever?”

There was another kind of Sailor.
Walkers.
You’ve seen them on your streets, or at least in parts of your town. You’ve thought it was drugs or alcohol and maybe it
began
there. You’ve wondered why they keep moving, shuffling, how they went dead in the eye, where they could be going, where they sleep, where they go in the daytime. You wonder that, until the light changes, until your husband says something and you go back to your life, or you think of your wife and what’s for dinner in the regular world, leaving them behind, like on the street below the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

“What do you want me not to do?” Jimmy said. “Give me a clue . . .”

The two big men received another silent signal from the tall bony one and they shoved their charge out over the abyss and then yanked him back, like this was a school bully’s prank.

Jimmy didn’t let them see the fear they wanted to see. But they saw something and the very tall one turned his back and started away, which meant they were finished, that
it
was finished. The two lifted him down. They didn’t look at Jimmy again, just fell in behind the red-haired one with the long, long fingers.

It was late afternoon but the light wasn’t golden, just yellow, as it angled through the high windows of the lab at Jean’s perfume company. It was a longroomwithblack-topped tables and real-life blue flame Bunsen burners. Technicians in white smocks worked over chemical analyzers and beakers of liquids, swirling them, holding them up to the light, making notations, conferring with too-serious looks, like scientists in TV commercials.

Jimmy sneezed. One of the white coats looked over, annoyed. Jimmy waved his apology.

Jean stepped toward him from the end of the room.

They took his car, left hers in the lot. They went first to Ike’s for a drink. It was Jimmy’s hangout, a nouveau-
something
cave on a Hollywood street called Argyle. The light was blue light from the flying saucer fixtures suspended over the bar. There was a Rockola jukebox and it was playing Marvin Gaye, “Come Get to This,” the dead man’s song still rocking, somehow
new
again, like the light of a burned-out star just reaching earth. It was early yet.

The bartender, Scott, brought Jean a cosmopolitan and then set
two
drinks in front of Jimmy, a martini and a manhattan. The drinks waited, spotlighted, on the bar, like something about to be beamed up into the UFO light fixtures.

Jimmy picked up the martini, took a sip.

“Has Krisha been in?”

Scott shook his head. He looked like he could have been an actor waiting for his break, too, tall enough and still young enough and good-looking in an obvious, immediate way, but Scott didn’t want to act. He hadn’t come to California for its show business.

“I guess you’re still looking for her.”

“I just haven’t seen her lately,” Jimmy said.

Jean wondered who she was, tried not to show it.

Scott stepped away to talk to a customer at the end of the bar.

Jean smiled at Jimmy. She didn’t ask him about the case, his work. He wondered why. She had another cosmo and he had another martini and they talked about nothing, about the music and a solitary dancer on the floor.

And then they got up to go. She picked up her little purse on the bar. The manhattan was still there, untouched in its perfect circle of light.

It was almost nine by the time they got to the Long Beach Yacht Club. They’d driven by another place closer to downtown where her car was but the restaurant parking lot was too crowded for Jimmy and he changed his mind and waved to the valet parkers and made a loop through the lot and drove south. There wasn’t any boat traffic in and out of the marina so the lights were left to reflect clean and still on the black water. The club was quiet. The early crowd had finished and left. The late crowd was still drinking somewhere else.

Jean ordered a steak. The waiter took her menu.

Jimmy handed him his. “I’d just like a plate of tomatoes,” he said. “Bring it when you bring her steak. And another bottle of water.”

The waiter nodded and stepped away.

“I don’t think I know any women who still eat steaks,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I’m strange all right,” Jean said. She was making fun of him. She took a sip of her drink.

“What happened to your eye?” she said. He had a cut over his right eye from the business with the men on the roof on the Roosevelt Hotel, a little bandage.

“I got falling down drunk last night,” he said.

An older couple was shown to the next table. The man held his wife’s chair and she smiled at him as he sat down to her right instead of across from her.

Jean watched them. She wondered what her parents would look like if they were still alive.
What would be left of the young faces in the old pictures?
She looked around, the yacht clubbers, the polished brass ship’s fittings, the photos on the walls, the hurricane flags hung over the long bar.

She wondered how much like her mother she was.

“Is it all right, being here?” Jimmy said.

“Of course,” Jean said. “I’m not sentimental . . . and I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Your parents aren’t in any of the pictures.”

She wondered if he knew
everything
she was thinking.

“You’ve already been here,” she said, not as a question. She moved her drink so the light from the candle floating in the bowl lit it up, made it even prettier.

“You wanted to know how I worked. This is how I work.”

“Tell me what that means,” she said.

“Everything carries its own history with it,” he said. “You do. I do. Objects do. Places. Whatever happened in this room is still here in a way. If you want to see it. If you let yourself see it.”

He didn’t look away from her. “So there
are
ghosts,” he said.

“Are they sentimental?” she said and smiled.