Among the Living (30 page)

There was shuffling in the shadows. A man in a peacoat and watch cap. He said nothing and barely looked at Jimmy. He finished his cigarette and dropped it at his feet and stepped back into the deeper darkness without lifting his eyes again.

Jimmy turned to look at Angel, who stood beside his truck.

“Why not?” Jimmy said.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Jack Kantke said.

The wind off the water stirred the flame-vine over the door. The night air was cool. He stood in the doorway in a white short-sleeve shirt over black beltless slacks and black oxfords. There was a cigarette in his hand. The smoke curled up his arm.

He had aged. But not enough.

“Hello,” Jean said.

“Come in.”

The view through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room was of the ocean crossed by the light of the full moon. The large room was sparsely furnished with a nautical theme. There was a loud ticking from an unseen clock.

And a real live Jolly Girl stood in the middle of the room. Or so it seemed. The hair, the eyes, the heels, the sawed off pants they used to call
Capri.
Lynn Goreck smiled politely at Jean, her hands clasped in front of her.

Jean sat in a chair.

Her father sat across from her.

Lynne leaned on the arm of Jack Kantke’s chair, her hand on his shoulder, a possessive.

“Would you like anything?” he said.

Jean shook her head.

“Could you get me some water,” he said to Lynne.

The girl gave him a flip look and stepped away.

Jean couldn’t stop staring at her father.

“You saw me someplace, didn’t you?” he said.

She realized for the first time that he was very moved at seeing her. He looked as if he was about to cry.

“A year ago,” Jean said. “I was down at Balboa Island. I saw Carey. I thought he was still living in Arizona. I followed him. I was about to go up to him—”

“And you saw me.”

Lynne came back with a glass of water, no ice. She set it down on the arm of his chair. Kantke looked at her, a look meant to send her away. She turned and left the room.

“She’s Vivian’s daughter?” Jean said when she was gone.

Kantke nodded.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come see me,” he said.

“So Vivian knows? About you?”

He shook his head. “She wouldn’t understand,” he said. “She thinks Lynne is involved with your brother. Vivian’s never seen me.” Kantke looked over at the doorway Lynne had stepped through. “I’ve found people of your generation more accepting of something like this,” he said.

He smiled that half smile.

“Or maybe she just thinks I’m insane.”

The ticking continued. Kantke looked at the source, a large ship’s clock on the wall, then back at Jean.

“I didn’t kill your mother,” he said.

They both listened to the clock. Jean didn’t let him off, offered nothing to help him.

“You look so much like her,” he said and it caught in his throat. “It’s not easy, seeing you.”

She said nothing.

He stood, stood over her for a moment. He seemed as tall, for a moment, as a father seems to a child.

“I don’t know what your investigator has told you . . .”

She waited.

He stepped over to the windows, walked toward his reflection, considering it from head to toe. It would not have surprised Jean if he had walked through the glass into the night, leaving the reflection to come forward to speak to her.

He stopped at the glass.

“How’d you find a detective who was a Sailor?”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s what we call ourselves.”

“How long have you known I had someone looking into this?”

The way he smiled—she could see his face in the glass—made her wonder what powers he might have, how much he knew, what he could do, what
they
could do.

“I saw him on the bluff, yesterday, watching the house,” he said.

“How did you know that he was—”

“We can spot each other. What has he told you?”

“Not very much. Nothing about
this.
”

“How could he, once he was in love with you?”

He still looked out at the water, like Jimmy in Malibu.

“Maybe you should explain it to me.”

He took a cigarette from one pocket and a gold lighter from the other and lit it.

“Death,” he said, with the tone of voice fathers use to explain things to their children, “doesn’t end everything. Not always. Sometimes something is unfinished in a life and this happens. Someone is left behind until the unfinished thing is finished.”

He turned to look at her.

“I was executed. They buried my body. A few days later, I was walking the streets again.”

She could walk out the door, but she didn’t. She met him where he was, continued in the scene as if he’d just said he’d been sick, been treated, rose up off his sickbed, healed. In that way she surprised herself more than he’d surprised her. She felt very strong.
So this was the kind of knowledge that made you stronger.

“Is that what’s been left unfinished,” Jean asked, “this business about Mother?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We never know what it is.”

He blew out smoke. “It’s not like we hear voices from the clouds, telling us what to do. There are rules. We just don’t know what they are.”

He smiled. But then it was gone. He walked back to his chair and picked up the glass and drank the water, all of it. He looked at the big clock again, seemed as if he had things to do, places to go. He put down the glass and stepped closer and stood over her again, casting a shadow over her, as he meant.

“You’ve inadvertently threatened some powerful people,” he said. “I’m worried about you.”

“They were responsible for Mother’s murder.”

“It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?”

“It was a long time ago, Jeanie.”

“They killed a woman who was living in the house,” Jean said. “Bill Danko’s daughter. They’re killing people
now.
”

Kantke lifted a hand to stop her.

“There are killings every day, every week, every year for a thousand years in all directions. You have to stop this, sweetheart.”

He looked at the clock again. “You should go. Go back to the house at Point Dume. You’ll be safe there. They won’t follow you out of the city. This all will be over soon.”

Jean stood, but not to leave.

“Why? What do you mean? What happens now?”

He held out his hand to her, pulled her close to him. With his touch, the
reality
of it hit her, unreal as it was. She felt as if someone had pulled the plug on her power source. She was in free fall. Maybe now the floor beneath her would open up and she’d fall through to some other unthinkable
other
world. Long seconds passed to the ticking of the ship’s clock.

“I remember your aftershave,” she said in his arms.

“Aqua Velva,” he said. “Your mother always hated it.”

Kantke held her tightly, as if he would never see her again, breathing in her scent, his eyes on the round moon out the window, which looked like the head of a hammer.

Now
she
had a secret.

The shadows where the man in the peacoat and watch cap had been led to a canyon between buildings, a grid of alleyways, unpeopled. Jimmy and Angel walked straight ahead, not following the man, who was out of sight, but just going the only way there was to go. As they stepped past one intersecting alley suddenly there was light from above, like a spotlight, the full moon in a wedge of sky.

Ahead was an abandoned building, an old factory from the looks of it with a loading dock ramp and painted-out windows. A sliding iron door stood open.

“I guess all this is part of the plan,” Jimmy said. “
Somebody’s
plan.”

Inside the shell of the factory, five Sailors stood in a rhombus of moonlight cast onto the floor from a skylight, all of them pulsing blue, more strongly than before.

They parted.

There was Drew in his blue snowboarder’s cap, sitting on the floor. The Sailors seemed to enjoy the drama of the reveal. Others of them appeared behind Jimmy and Angel to block their exit.

It wasn’t necessary, Jimmy and Angel were already resigned to what would come next. The Sailors surrounded them and Drew, took them by the upper arms and they set out.

They went down ten steps into an underground passageway, a corridor lined on three sides with asbestos-covered pipes. As they walked—it could have been a half mile—the passageway shuddered sometimes, probably trucks passing overhead. You would have expected to see rats but there weren’t any. They would have been welcome.

“I gotta say, man,” Drew said to Jimmy as they were hustled along, “I thought you and your people were messed up, but these people are
really
messed up.”

One of the Sailors shoved him forward.

Drew yanked his arm away. “Back off! We’re going!”

He looked at Jimmy. “
Where
are we going?”

Jimmy knew but there was no reason to tell him.

They came to an elevator. Old, brass. They rode up, eight of them crammed into the space.

Drew said, “Everybody’s getting real jumpy. Something’s about to happen, right?”

Jimmy just watched the numbers.

“Yes, but not here,” he said. “This is something else.”

The elevator doors opened onto a landing. They were pushed through a pair of heavy doors.

It was a courtroom.

Jimmy and Angel had never been here but they knew about it. They were on the top flo or of the old Hall of Justice, a Gothic granite block on Spring Street across West First from the modern Criminal Justice Building that replaced it. Everywhere across L.A. Sailors were in control of abandoned places, of spaces like this, for whatever purposes. A part of the night was theirs and there were enough of them to assure its continuance.

The courtroom echoed with the sound of a dog barking incessantly, sharp, regular. Clocks covered the tall paneled walls, clocks of all sizes and shapes,
named
clocks from banks and long-closed businesses: square, round, octagonal, all running at different speeds, some backwards, some very slow, like clocks in hell, and some too fast to watch, hands spinning like knives.

Drew was scared, or just creeped out.

“Anybody know what time it is?”

Jimmy seized him by the front of his shirt. “They can’t do anything to us,” he said. “Nothing that really matters. Remember that.”

He let the kid go.

“Whoa,” Drew said.

The barking continued, unbroken, like a metronome. Drew narrowed his eyes to look into the shadows. The hanging lights high above them were dim, half of the bulbs burned out. Shutters covered the tall windows on the west wall, keeping the light in. The wooden seats had been ripped out, stacked in the back, but the high bench remained at the front of the courtroom.

A collection of Sailors, twenty or thirty of them, milled about the room or leaned against the walls. Here there were some women, too, though they wore the same clothes as the men and most of their sex had been taken from them, or let go. Their eyes bore the same open yet dead look as the men, a look that might come to the rest of us from staring at great distances for long hours.

They all pulsed blue, as blue as blue could be.

“Somebody oughta do something about that dog,” Drew said.

“It ain’t a dog,” Angel told him.

Jimmy’s eyes were on something else,
someone.
A woman, the only woman in the room in a dress, though it was a shabby one with faded roses.

Rosemary Danko
. Alive.

She stood before the high bench, looking up at it.

Jimmy started off across the room toward her.

“Who is she?” Drew said.

Angel said, “I think somebody from one of Jimmy’s cases. But she was supposed to be dead, killed a few days ago.”

“She’s one of us?”

“No. Look at her.” She
wasn’t
wrapped in the blue.

Rosemary was still staring at the judge’s bench, a smile on her face, when Jimmy touched her on the shoulder.

She turned to look at him. “I knew you’d be in on this, sooner or later,” she said. She turned her attention back to the bench and the big clock behind it, the only one in the room that showed the real time.

It was a quarter to midnight.

“Tell me what happened,” Jimmy said.

“I looked up and they were there, just like you,” she said, “a short one and a tall one. They had a lot of questions, just like you, and then they took me out of there. The tall one with red hair started that fire on our way out. We rode in a car over to Garden Grove. It was dark, after the news.”

She was still looking at the high bench. It was the old style of courtroom, the kind that still ends up in movies, though the justice system has moved on to blond Formica and low tables and “theater seating.”

There was a wooden chair beside the bench. Maybe there’d be a last-minute witness in the case, a quick wrap-up, surprising, yet the only thing that could have happened.

“What did they do to you?” Jimmy said.

“They could have killed me quick but they just kept asking questions.”

The big hand on the big clock jumped, a minute.

“I guess
now
is when they’re going to kill me,” Rosemary said.

“Nobody’s going to kill you,” Jimmy said. But he wasn’t so sure.

She stepped up and sat in the witness chair. She leaned over to look at her feet on the footrest, ran her hands over the dark worn wood of the arms.

She raised her right hand.