Angels (Nevada James #3) (Nevada James Mysteries) (3 page)

“You
were saying you’d be more careful in the future and I was saying I’d appreciate
that. Why don’t we leave it there?”

“Yeah,”
I said. “Good call.”

We sat
there in silence for a moment. I’d never have admitted it, but I kind of liked
the company. I really didn’t have a lot of friends. “Oh,” he finally said.
“There was something else I wanted to tell you. One of your old informants
called your line.”

I
frowned. What line had that been? “Are you bugging my house?” I wouldn’t have
put it past him to be keeping tabs on my land line. The Laughing Man had called
there before. He seemed to enjoy the occasional late-night chat. But bugging my
cell phone would have been next to impossible due to some modifications I’d had
made to it. That was a long story Dan didn’t know about yet, and I didn’t want
to tell him.

“Of
course not,” he said. “Your office line.”

It took
me longer than it should have to figure out what he was talking about. “At the
station? That number still works?”

“We
never turned it off. Someone answers it if it rings.”

“It’s
been years, though.”

“Yeah,
well.” He shrugged. “You never know. Deputy Chief is still on the table when
you decide to come back, by the way.”

That
offer had been on the table for a while. Deputy Chief was a political
appointment and would mean next to nothing, but it would put me back behind a
desk at the police department, which was exactly where Dan wanted me. He
figured I might stay out of trouble that way. It didn’t seem likely, but I
suppose he had to hold on to some kind of hope for me. “I’m still thinking
about it.”

“No,
you’re not. Anyway, nobody calls that line very often, but it rang the other
day. Someone who called herself ‘Blueberry.’ Said she’d only talk to you.” He
reached into his pocket and fished out a folded slip of paper. “Here.”

I took
the paper and looked at the number. It was local, but I didn’t recognize it. I
had no idea who Blueberry was. I didn’t normally give my informants code names,
and if I did, I’d have been more creative than that. “Did she say anything
else?”

“No. You
going to call her?”

“I don’t
know. I don’t even know who she is.” I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“You
should. It’s not like you’ve got anything else to do.”

“Not
until the Laughing Man comes for me,” I said. “Then I’ll have a lot to do. For
a few minutes, anyway.”

“Don’t,
Nevada,” Dan said. There was a weariness in his voice. “Just don’t.”

I rolled
my eyes at him. “Fine. I’ll be serious for the next thirty seconds or so.” I
looked at the paper. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to call and at least see what
she wants.”

“So do
it, then. You want me to wait here with you while you do?”

I stared
daggers at him. “Yes. Could you also hold my hand in case I get nervous on the
phone? Maybe I should put you on speaker so you can take over if I can’t figure
out what to say.”

I’d
meant that mostly as a joke, but it came out sounding meaner than I was happy
with. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t deserve that,” Dan said.

“No. You
didn’t. I’m sorry.” I put the paper in my jacket pocket. “I’ll call her later.
You got anything else for me?”

“No,” he
said. “I do want you to stop by the station sometime. We should talk about the
position.”

“Yeah. Deputy
Chief. I’d love to be your boss.”

“Only in
name, Nevada. You know you’d still be working for me.”

“I don’t
know. Deputy Chief? I’m pretty sure a chief outranks a captain.”

“Then I
guess I’ll have to be the subordinate, and you’ll have to try to keep
me
under control. That would be a nice change.”

I stood
up. “Thanks for coming,” I said. “I think I’ve had all the hospital I can take
for one day, though. Hey, did you drive here?”

“Yeah.”

“You
mind taking me back to La Jolla? My car’s still there.”

“Sure,”
he said. “It’ll give me the chance to yell at you some more.”

“You
really didn’t yell this time.”

“Maybe I
was working up to it.” He gave me a curious look. “What were you doing at an
art gallery, anyway? You don’t care anything about art.”

I’d been
waiting for that question. “I was thinking about getting something for my
walls,” I said. “I still haven’t bought any decorations. I thought maybe a
painting would be nice; make the new house look like more of a home.”

That was
plausible. Dan appeared to think it over. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’d have
thought maybe you’d buy a couch first…”

“You
said I never do anything the easy way. Why should decorating be any different?”

He
sighed. “One of these days,” he said. “One of these days, Nevada.”

Chapter 3

I’d been
lying about why I’d gone to La Jolla in the first place. My investigation into
the Laughing Man’s identity had stalled out a long time ago. He was into art,
though, and I didn’t know anything about art. I’d thought maybe going to look
at some pieces at the gallery might give me some insight into his brain. It had
been a long shot, of course, but it had been the best idea I’d come up with in
weeks. After I’d jumped through the gallery’s window, though, I doubted they
were going to welcome another visit from me. Maybe I’d get a book or something
instead. Was there an
Art for Dummies
book? There had to be. They had
those books for every subject I’d ever heard of.

Dan
didn’t need to know any of that. He’d just worry. There had been a point last
year when he’d somehow changed the rotation of city patrol cars so I had cops
going by my place every twenty minutes. I had no idea whose arm he’d twisted
into making that happen, but I didn’t need it to start up again.

I was
back at my house in Ocean Beach an hour after we left the hospital. It was my
new
house, to be precise. My old house had been on exactly the same spot, but I’d
been renting it from an older retired couple who didn’t need the space anymore.
I’d figured I’d stay there until I managed to drink myself to death, but then
two people were killed there in the span of a week. One of them had been by my
hand, and the other by the Laughing Man’s. After that, there was no way I could
stay there. Knowing that it would never be fit for renting again, I’d bought it
with money I’d made working on a job that had been…quite lucrative, if
questionably legal. A gangster had paid me a great deal of money to find his
missing daughter. I’d taken a portion of that money to buy the house, tear it
down, and have a new one built on the same spot.

My front
door had two deadbolts and a keypad lock, as did the back. Each were reinforced
and could withstand any blunt force up to a police battering ram, and even that
was going to have its work cut out for it. Each of the windows were bulletproof
and didn’t open. Security cameras covered every angle of approach and provided
a wide field of view; if I wanted I could sit at my computer and watch the
neighborhood goings on for hours. Every now and then I did, if I couldn’t find
something on television to keep me entertained.

My
bedroom sealed up like a bank vault and had a security keypad that activated
motion sensors everywhere else inside the house. Rolling over in my sleep
wouldn’t set the alarm off, but when I’d first set the system up a spider
crawling across the ceiling would. I’d eventually had to adjust the sensitivity
so I could sleep through the night, but there was no way a person was getting
inside without me knowing about it.

And if
someone did get in, I was more than ready. Shotguns were placed at the front
and back doors, and I had a number of smaller pieces secreted away in places
that one wouldn’t readily see them. A 9mm Beretta sat in the silverware drawer
in the kitchen. A .38 revolver waited under the air mattress in my bedroom. I’d
put a .45 inside a Ziploc bag and hidden it in the toilet tank. It wasn’t the
most accessible gun in the world, but you never knew when it might come in
handy. And my Glock was rarely out of arm’s reach. I hadn’t left the house
without it in longer than I could remember, and I usually wore it in the house,
as well. When I slept I kept it under my pillow.

To any
rational person that would have sounded like extreme paranoia, maybe the kind a
person would need therapy for. And that was probably fair. But my paranoia had
a very serious justification. The Laughing Man had been keeping a close eye on
me for years. He sent me birthday and Christmas cards, and he’d had flowers
delivered on more than one occasion. He’d also sworn to kill me. He just wanted
to play first. Our previous “game,” which had ended four years ago, had been a
resounding loss for me, ending with him beating me within an inch of my life.
In the end he’d stood over me with his straight razor ready to finish me off,
but then he’d just walked away instead. Later he’d told me it had been because
he hadn’t wanted the game to be over. He wanted to play again. Nobody else was
any fun for him. But the game I’d been waiting for him to start still hadn’t
begun, and somehow that had been making me even
more
paranoid. What was
he waiting for? Had he just not come up with anything he thought would be
satisfying for him yet? That hardly seemed likely. But other than that and the
possibility that he had died in some completely unrelated manner, I couldn’t
come up with anything to explain it. And if he’d gone and dropped dead of a
heart attack, I’d probably just stay this paranoid for the rest of my very
short life.

Once I
got inside the house I reactivated the portion of the security system that
controlled the doors. It was sensitive enough that it had gone off once when an
overly enthusiastic Jehovah’s Witness had tried to rattle my front door. It
didn’t rattle, of course, but a siren loud enough to knock the dead out of
their graves had gone off. The poor guy hadn’t stuck around to apologize. He’d
dropped three copies of his
Watchtower
magazine on the ground and
hightailed it back to his car. I’d watched him go from the front window. Poor
guy. But then again, maybe the experience had taught him that it’s rude to try
to rattle people’s doors.

My
living room was devoid of furniture. I’d stacked the boxes that contained my old
Laughing Man case files against one wall, and every now and then I sat on the
carpet and went through them, but I hadn’t done that in months. I had them
virtually memorized at this point, and I hadn’t come up with anything new.
Whatever insight I’d been hoping to find wasn’t in there.

In my
kitchen I had a small folding table and two chairs. I sat at the table and read
the news on my laptop as I ate a microwave dinner. I had pots and pans in the
cupboard, but I hadn’t actually cooked anything in as long as I could remember.

Also in
the kitchen, in a cabinet above the stove, was an unopened bottle of Grey Goose
vodka. I hadn’t had a drink in over a year, and had no intention of starting up
again, but having the bottle on hand provided a strange kind of security that
I’d have been hard pressed to explain to anyone else. I wasn’t tempted to drink
it, but not having it around would have sat on my mind like an itch I couldn’t
scratch. Some people needed security blankets. I needed security vodka. There
are things that defy explanation.

I’d
never bought a bed; I slept on an air mattress that had basic sheets and one
blanket. That was where I spent most of the next three days, trying to stay off
my feet as much as possible. Every time I tried standing up for more than a few
minutes my ankle began throbbing. I unwrapped it once, marveled at the impressive
bruising that had developed there, and then wrapped it back up. By the third
day I could hobble around at a pretty good clip, but I was also popping Advil
every four hours.

My stitches
gave me a nightmarish Frankenstein’s monster appearance, but I didn’t have much
of a social life and I had enough food in the house that I didn’t need to go
out. At the hospital I’d been told it was too early to tell if there would be
much scarring, but scars didn’t really bother me all that much. I had plenty of
them already. They say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and a lot
of things had tried to kill me over the years. Some of them had left marks,
though, and I wore those like badges of honor.

On the
fourth night after my encounter with the art gallery window I was sitting at my
kitchen table watching Netflix and eating a cup of instant noodles when I
remembered the phone number Dan had given me. I found the paper it was on in my
jacket pocket and looked at it again. Who the hell was
Blueberry
? I thought
about throwing the paper in the trash, but unanswered questions had a way of
keeping me up at night. That was the last thing I needed. It should be an easy
enough question to answer, anyway. I went to a kitchen drawer that held a half
dozen prepaid cell phones I’d picked up at a convenience store and opened one
of the packages with a pair of kitchen shears. I plugged it in and waited for
it to acquire a signal, then went through its activation sequence. I checked
the clock. It was 10:35 pm. Late, but anyone who had been trying to reach me
probably wasn’t in a position to complain about the hour.

I dialed
the number. After three rings someone picked up and a woman’s voice said, “Who
is this?” The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Who is
this
?”
I asked. “You called me. Well, not right this second, you didn’t. I called you.
But you called my line at the police station.”

There
was a brief pause and then I heard a deep sigh that sounded like relief. “Oh,
god,” the woman said. “Nevada. You’re my angel, Nevada.”

That
seemed excessive. I was pretty certain I knew the voice now, though. “Is that
Krystal Harris?”

“Yeah,”
she said. “Didn’t you know from before? I told them my name was Blueberry.”

“I’ve
never called you Blueberry in my life, Krystal. I’ve never called
anyone
Blueberry.”

“That
story I told you about when I was little, I crushed blueberries between my
fingers and tried to use them as lipstick?”

I had no
idea what she was talking about, but I didn’t really want to admit it. It must
have meant something to her. “Sure,” I said. “Blueberries. What is it you need,
Krystal?”

“Hang
on,” she said. “I need to make sure I’m alone.” I heard her cover the phone’s
mouthpiece with her hand. A moment later she was back. “I’ve got something you
need to know.”

Krystal
had been a very low-level member of a very low-level gang that had a very
low-level business selling meth to bikers. I’d worked homicide and couldn’t
have given a shit about drugs, but Krystal was considered so pathetic by her own
peer group that nobody thought twice about talking in front of her. She also
spent a lot of time in drug houses and bars frequented by very unsavory people
who talked more than they should have. That made her valuable to me. Tips
solved a lot of crimes, and every now and then she overheard some tidbit that
she knew would be useful to me. I’d paid her out of a fund the police
department had set aside for exactly that purpose. All told, she’d been one of
maybe a dozen informants I’d had around San Diego while I’d been a cop. It
wasn’t an unusual situation. A lot of detectives had similar networks.

In the
end Krystal’s gang had been busted, a feat on the part of the narcotics
department that wouldn’t have exactly required Encyclopedia Brown-level work to
take care of. Krystal had received word of the raid half an hour before it took
place from a certain homicide detective that believed in taking care of her people.
The guys in narcotics didn’t care. She really was that unimportant.

After
that I’d lost track of her. I’d assumed she must be dead by now; Krystal liked
the meth her gang had sold as much as the bikers they sold it to did. Nobody
with a taste for that junk lasted long.

“Tell me
why you called, Krystal.”

“I said
I know something. Can you pay me for it?”

“I’m not
a cop anymore. If you watched the news you’d probably know that.” I’d been
listening to the tone of her voice and didn’t like the note of desperation I
heard in it. I’d heard it before. “You trying to get a fix?”

“No,”
she said. “I mean, not right now. Sometimes I am.”

“You’re
just a casual meth addict? Great. I’m sure that’s not a problem, then.”

“Look,”
she said. “What I know is big. It’ll be worth something to someone you know,
but I need money.”

“I don’t
really feel comfortable supporting your drug habit,” I said. “I mean, I’m not
judging you, but I don’t want to contribute to it, either.”

“I need
the money to get out of here,” Krystal said. “I have to get as far away from
here as I can.”

Now I
was less sure the desperation I was hearing was about drugs. “Has someone
threatened you?”

She
didn’t say anything at first, but her breathing sounded almost panicked. “I
screwed up, Nevada. I was trying to…blackmail, I guess…I guess it’s
blackmail…but I got greedy and now there’s a target on me.”

I wasn’t
sure what to make of this. It was possible Krystal was paranoid because she’d
been drugged out of her head for the last several years. But then again, maybe
there really was more to it than that. “Krystal, if someone is after you then
you need to go to the police. It’s what they’re there for.”

Krystal
made a high-pitched noise like a caged bird. “Do you really think they’d take
me seriously?” she screeched. “I know what I look like to other people, Nevada,
but you always believed me. My angel, Nevada. You always believed in me.”

I
wouldn’t have gone that far, but I got the point. “You never lied to me,” I
said. “That meant something to me.”

“I’m not
lying now.” She grunted. “Bring me enough money to get out of here and I’ll
tell you everything. You can go to the cops. They’ll believe you. You’re their
golden girl. You’re their shining golden girl.”

If I’d
been wondering if she was high right now, after that last sentence, I didn’t
need to wonder anymore. She was messed up out of her damn
mind
. “You
have to give me something first,” I said. “What is it you know about?”

“Come
see me.”

“Tell me
what we’re dealing with first.”

She went
silent again, save for the heavy breathing, and I waited. Krystal had always
liked to do things in her own way. I could tolerate it for another few minutes.
All I had on my agenda for the evening was Netflix and bed.