Among the Living (21 page)

Jimmy and Angel went first to Jean’s apartment.

Angel waited behind the wheel of his truck, the one with the blue moon over the city and the woman’s eyes airbrushed on the tailgate.

There was no answer. Jimmy came back and got in.

“She wasn’t there?” Angel said.

Jimmy shook his head. Angel pulled out.

“She had a phone,” Jimmy said after a minute. “She probably had somebody come get her.”

He called her office. She was in a meeting.

Jimmy tossed the phone onto the seat between them. Angel looked at him.

“She’s all right.”

Angel stopped at the bottom of the hill. “Where do you want to go?”

“Home. I’ll get a car.”

They rode along in silence another four or five blocks, then Jimmy said, “Maybe you can run down the Dodge, take it to the shop, see if you can put it right. I guess the cops towed it.”

Angel nodded. “How bad is it?”

“Bad.”

Angel turned right. “You might want to get cleaned up a little, too.”

Jimmy dropped the visor on his side and got his first look at himself in the mirror. He flipped the visor back up. It was better not to know.

“So what’s happening with this lady?” Angel said.

“I hadn’t talked to her since that night we picked up the kid,” he said. “She was spooked then. I don’t know what she’s thinking now. Maybe she’s figured it out.”

“I doubt that,” Angel said. “She’s still around.”

Jimmy fell silent.

“It was the same Sailors?” Angel said.

“The goofy guys and the leader from the thing up on the roof of the Roosevelt. And there’s something else going on. There’s a man in the middle of it, too, not a Sailor but maybe a kindred spirit.”

“Who?”

“His name is Harry Turner. The lawyer behind the scenes in the murder trial. He put a tail on me. He might have been there last night.”

Jimmy wished again he’d gotten a better look at him, at the big man in the backseat of the Lincoln.
If I could be sure.
It was how Jimmy knew he had passed over into the land of the secret, the territory of the unknown that always came in the middle of the case, when he heard himself saying, again and again,
If I could be sure.

“She was there, the tail. In a 745 BMW. She’s German. She’s not a Sailor either. Neither of them are.”

“She’s the one ran you into a tree?”

“No, I did that all by myself.”

“How do you know this guy hired her?”

“I saw him in the morning and she was there the same night. Up in Idyllwild.”

“Tailing you?”

After a moment, Jimmy said, “Yeah, very close.”

Jimmy thought about her lips, about the way she’d put her hands over his eyes when she kissed him. He didn’t have to wonder what he’d said to her, what he might have revealed. He hadn’t said much of anything. And neither had she. She was good. In that bad kind of way.

Harry Turner had read him right. Jimmy remembered Rosemary Danko’s line,
They knew his weakness.

“Why does this guy still care about some old settled murder case?”

“That I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

They rode along another block.

“God had his hand on you,” Angel said.

Jimmy nodded, never looking at him. They were on Sunset now, going past Tower Records yellow and red and then The Whisky and then the Hustler store full of tourist shoppers. In daylight.
Was there any more secular place on the face of the earth?

Jimmy had a decision to make, to go toward it or away from it.

“So what are you going to do now?” Angel said, just as Jimmy was wondering the same thing.

Some things look like what they are. Jimmy and Jean were heading north on California 1, the coast road, approaching the southern end of Big Sur. This was the edge of a continent and it looked it. The road was just now climbing into the high section, coming up off of the grasslands and cattle ranches past Hearst Castle and Cambria. The massive mountains, long and brown and only crowned with evergreens at the highest reaches where the fog was, broke off jagged into the ocean, ending big.

It had cooled off as soon as they’d rolled over the mountain from Thousand Oaks into Camarillo, Oxnard, and then Ventura. They had the windows down. If you knew what to listen for, what to separate out, you could hear the wind off the ocean, singing, constant, blowing through the dull leaves and the slick red trunks of the manzanita covering the foothills.

Jimmy dropped it down into second as he steered into the first tight climbing curve. They were in the Mustang. He went in hotter than he could have, the C-force snugging him into the bucket seat. At the first switchback, there was already a hundred-foot drop-off to the rocks below and the very blue water.

Jean looked over at him for a long moment, as if the look and the time were needed before she said something, but she didn’t say anything, she just studied him. When he’d come to her office just before noon, he’d told her that she should get away, that she should go off to hide someplace. She’d said no. Then he called it something else and she’d said yes. In the end, it turned into this, going north with no set destination, no time frame, the two of them. She’d come straight from the office. She was wearing a suit.

He was wearing a clean white shirt and a clean white splint over his ring finger on his right hand, the hand resting on the gearshift. He was bruised and butterfly-bandaged, now with two cuts on his head, over his eyes.

She was still looking at him. Anyone else would have turned to look at her.

“It’s good to get out of the city,” she said.

“What do you want me to tell you?” Jimmy said.

Now he looked over at her.

He kept surprising her. Being with him meant things moving at odd speeds, sometimes coming out of nowhere, sometimes
not
coming when they were expected. And only now was she beginning to be able to read his tone. His abruptness meant only that he was ahead of her.

She could have asked him what she really wanted to know, what she
suspected
about him, about this, but she didn’t. The answer, if he’d given it, would have brought her all the way into it, into an idea she thought she might not be able to accept. Not yet. Do you ask a question when the answer might be that the world is not what you’ve always thought it to be, that everyone else thinks it to be? That there is something in between what you believed were two absolutes,
the
two absolutes, that the dead, some of them, are somehow here?

“What happened after you put me out of the car?”

“I crashed, went home.” He enjoyed his joke even if she couldn’t.

The two-l ane road was rising so steeply Jimmy double-clutched and downshifted into first. The engine and the gearbox sang a warm low note. On the shoulder on the opposite lane was the first of the Big Sur hikers, shorts, tanned legs with braided calf muscles, a day pack, a wide floppy hat. He was in his sixties. He carried a gnarled walking stick that came up to his chest and he kept his pace even as the path angled up under him.

“I came by, where the car was,” Jean said. “My assistant came and got me. We drove on down. I saw your car smashed against the tree. There was a police car there and a tow truck and a man on a horse, but nobody else.”

He didn’t say anything.

“The men in the two cars came right past me. They must have been there when you crashed.”

“They pulled me out.”

“What’d they do?”

“Dumped me in another part of the park.”

“Who were they?” she said.

He looked at her. “It’s probably about another case, something out of the past.”

He wasn’t going to say anything else about who they were. Jean rolled up her window. It was almost cold.

She waited a beat.

“Why didn’t they kill you?” she said.

Jimmy looked at her. Maybe she
was
going to ask it. She’d seen Drew walking away from the turned-over Accord. Maybe she’d also seen his bloodied crushed body in the backseat as they drove away on down the hill. Maybe she’d read the papers the next day. That night and afterward she hadn’t asked the right questions.

And she was afraid, but not as afraid as she should be.

She knew more than she was letting on.

“They were just trying to scare me off,” Jimmy said.

“Did they?” she asked.

It was a good question.

“I think
I
know enough right now,” he said.

It was a good answer.

After a minute, she said, “We seem to take turns trying to talk each other out of this.”

He didn’t say anything for another five minutes as the road climbed higher and then leveled off, tracing with every turn and switchback the fingers of land that broke off above the ocean.

That was another way he was different. He could say nothing.

There was a gas station, a pull-off right after a blind turn. The gas was thirty cents a gallon more than it had been twenty miles behind them but everyone stopped anyway. It was the first place to get out, stretch, and let the full view fill your head. There was a sleek tour bus four shades of purple, with a glass front, top to bottom. Germans. All of them were out of the bus, smoking. Gulls floated overhead, facing out to sea, staying in the same spot by riding the updraft off the cliff face, angled heads watching the tourists below, occasionally calling with a cry that sounded unset tlingly like screeching tires.

Jimmy topped off the tank and cleaned the windshield. He kept an overnight bag in the back, one in every car. He unzipped it and took out a soft Patagonia shell, a pullover. He put it on. The heat of L.A. was far behind.

One of the Germans came over to admire the Mustang. He walked around it, careful to keep a respectful distance. He nodded at the hatchback vents high on the rear quarter panel, the “gills,” then went to the front and squatted before the shark’s mouth grill, as if to see what it would look like swallowing you whole.

He stood up.
“Bullitt,”
he said.

Jimmy nodded.

The man smiled and made an up and down motion with his hand, like a porpoise diving and surfacing in the surf, the “Bullitt” Mustang flying up and over the streets of San Francisco.

Jimmy nodded.
“Ich versuche zu, zu mein Mustang auf dem Boden behalten,”
he said. “
I try to keep
my
Mustang on the ground.
”

Jean was in the little store. She took a Martinelli’s sparkling apple juice from the cooler, twisted it open and drank it while she walked the aisles. She picked up a bag of trail mix called “Big Sur Sunshine” and a candy bar, looked through the rack of T-shirts and sweats and found a hooded sweatshirt with a minimum of decoration. She got a few more things and went to the register. On a shelf behind the clerk was a flock of souvenir ceramic seagulls floating over redwood blocks on wire stalks. When the door opened, the draft made them dance.

Jimmy came in to pay for the gas.

“Do you want anything?” Jean said.

Jimmy saw her things on the counter. There was a toothbrush and toothpaste.

“No.”

“And the gas,” Jean said to the woman behind the register and handed her a credit card.

“And this,” Jimmy said. He took an atomic fireball from the bowl on the counter.

They drove on through the afternoon. Another fifty miles and they passed into the first of the massive trees the drive was also famous for. Orange poppies flashed in bright sunny patches where the road cuts were. A rocky creek ran alongside the road, glimpsed now and then through breaks in the green. The air had that evergreen smell that made the whole day seem like morning. The trees grew taller, closing in on the swath of bright blue overhead.

Then the light began to change, and quickly.

Just in time, the road broke back out into the open, to the coastline, and they stopped at the first motel.

The room was paneled with redwood, diagonal. Jimmy came in alone, left the door open behind him. He tossed the overnight bag onto the bed. He opened the drapes, slid open the sliding glass door. The wing of rooms was on a pad high above the surf, a hundred yards above the rocks and the water, but the glass door was still grayed with ocean spray. There was an hour or so of daylight left.

In among the trees, it would already be dark.

Jimmy cracked the seal on a bottle of water and lay on the bed with his head against the bag. He looked at the redwood ceiling, the redwood beams, the redwood walls. People came here for the big, tall, indomitable redwoods, to literally put their arms around them, put their cheeks against them, and they also wanted their rooms and their restaurants paneled with rough-sawn dead redwood.

He looked out the open sliding door. There was a patch of grass and a pair of white plastic chairs and then a row of cypresses at the cliff’s edge.