Dead Irish (14 page)

“I don’t notice much on you. Move over.”

Nika looked at her husband with approval. He didn’t have a great body, but he was hung like a peeing horse. And for an old guy, he sure wanted to use it a lot. Well, as long as he didn’t try to pull any more of that holding out her allowance he’d tried last week. Two could play the holding-out game. As she’d taught him.

She reached over and touched the cut on his arm. “What happened?”

She ran her finger along the cut.

“A lamp got broken. Linda tripped on a cord.”

“What was she doing here, anyway?” Nika asked.

Sam shrugged. “I forgot to sign some checks, that’s all. She’s gone.”

“Does it hurt?” She moved next to him, thigh to thigh. He felt a hand come to rest above his knee.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Can’t even feel it.”

16

HARDY HAD NEVER heard of the town of Gonzalez. His first inclination after he got the call was to think that for some reason Cruz had wanted him out of Dodge and had asked one of his workers to call him.

But that would have made no sense coming from Cruz. After he hung up, Hardy went to his map and found the place—south of Salinas on 101. It was a real place.

On the way down, he thought he should have made some calls before getting in his car. He almost pulled over in Redwood City, but then thought it would be better not to worry anybody needlessly. What if it wasn’t what he thought it was?

Also, he was reasonably certain that someone—possibly Cavanaugh, especially after their heart-to-heart yesterday—would have tried to reach him earlier.

He hadn’t been down the Peninsula in nearly a year, and it hadn’t changed. What was left to change? The whole thing had been developed so the only possibility of something new was a face-lift on a business park, a Tastee Freeze turning into a Burger King, Astro-turfing a gas station.

Around Palo Alto, the Bay and the flats struggled for the natural look for a few miles along the freeway before widening out into Moffett Field, with its airplane hangars so big that it rained inside them, and then the other Santa Clara fun parks—the minigolf courses, batting cages, go-kart tracks.

Hardy kept his eyes on the road. His head hurt just slightly from too much beer. Really from getting up too early, he had told himself. Really from too much beer. The old not-enough-sleep routine as the reason for his hangovers was wearing thin, even to himself.

South of San Jose the countryside began to open up, the foothills still green from the spring rains, the scrub oaks starting to bud. Man, he thought, when California doesn’t screw with itself, it is some kind of beautiful place.

He was speeding and knew it, but didn’t care. The road was all but empty, and he had always had a knack for spotting the Highway Patrol. Besides, he would say he was on a summons from Sheriff Munoz of Gonzalez and probably get off with a warning anyway.

But for some reason—maybe the thickness in his head—he found he couldn’t concentrate for long on the reason for the trip. It made his headache worse.

Getting into Steinbeck country, he rolled down the car window to Gilroy and the smell of garlic. The sun was higher now, though there were still wisps of mist over the occasional patch of water. It was getting on toward ten o’clock.

A sign at the town limits told Hardy that Gonzalez was the home of the Tigers. “They sure kept the move from Detroit a secret,” he thought as he passed the one-story high school with its faded billboard.

His destination was a square concrete emergency clinic painted an institutional yellow, set two streets back behind what passed for downtown.

Sheriff Munoz greeted him at the door. With a head of balding gray hair and a deep soft-spoken voice, he had all the authority of the small-town cop with, apparently, none of the arrogance. Maybe he’d been in the job a long time. His uniform was lived in, his body solid and big but with no flab. The face was square, clean-shaven and worried. “Is this your card?”

Hardy nodded.

“It’s the only thing we had tying him to anything.”

“No wallet?”

Munoz just looked at Hardy—not glared, looked—but his eyes were saying that they’d already covered that.

“Is he still alive?”

“Physically. He hasn’t come up yet. He’ll come around. Now he’s sedated.”

There were only two rooms behind the open reception area. Steven Cochran was in the second one.

Hardy swallowed hard, remembering the vision of the brother, Eddie, less than a week ago, on a similar gurney. Jesus, they look alike, he thought. He hadn’t noticed it before—Steven had initially struck him as much thinner. He forced himself to look. Maybe because the damage appeared so similar. The right side of Steven’s face was covered with a bandage, his right arm in a sling with a bandaged hand sticking out of it.

“What happened?”

“Do you recognize him?”

First things first. Munoz was right. “We gotta call his folks,” Hardy said.

“If you don’t mind, sir, what’s your connection to this boy?”

They were in the other, empty, examination room, drinking 7-Eleven coffee brought in by the nurse receptionist. Hardy’s headache was gone. He explained how Steven had come to get his card.

“Funny that’s all he had.” It was a statement, not meant to be accusatory.

“Where was it?”

“Front pocket.”

“Maybe he lost his wallet.”

The sheriff nodded. “Maybe.”

“Listen,” Hardy said, “I’m not any kind of official, but you mind if we talk about it? I’ve got a reference you might . . .”

Munoz struck Hardy as a thorough cop, so it didn’t surprise him much when he got up to make the call to Glitsky’s home number. When the sheriff returned, he seemed satisfied. “Okay,” he said, “you think this is related to what you’re working on?”

Hardy drank some coffee and asked him what exactly had happened.

Munoz had his elbows on his knees, hands out in front of him holding the nearly full cup. His black sunken eyes focused unblinking on the wall over Hardy’s head. Hardy thought they were about the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.

The sheriff said, “Lady named Hafner grows ’chokes maybe six miles south. She and the family were on their way up to the farmers’ market in Salinas. They usually leave before dawn and try to get a good place, you know. So they’re turning onto 101 and one of the kids sees what he thinks might be a deer by the road. Anyway, that’s food, you know, so Momma stops and it’s . . . Steven’s the name, huh?”

“Steven.”

“So she got here and the doc called me.” There was a long pause, as though Munoz was trying to fathom how things like this could happen. “I figure—and the doc says it makes sense—he was thrown from the vehicle already unconscious. That’s probably why he lived, he was so loose. Just pretty much peeled the right side of his body, broke his arm, collarbone, couple of foot bones.”

“Could he have just fallen? Bounced out of the back of an open pickup maybe?”

“Yeah, he could’ve. He didn’t, though.”

Hardy waited.

“He was,” Munoz paused, “sexually molested. Maybe the rest of the injuries—that look a hell of a lot like a beating—maybe they could have come from the impact hitting the ground at sixty, but the one . . .”

“Got it,” Hardy said.

“Just once I’d like to catch up with somebody does something like this. Not after a trial or anything, but catch ’em red-handed.”

“It would be a great joy,” Hardy agreed.

“Your friend Glitsky in the city, he gonna call missing persons, you think? Let ’em know?”

Hardy thought that he probably would—Glitsky believed in following through, but Hardy didn’t feel right making the commitment for him. After all, Glitsky dealt in homicides. Lost and found children were not his problem, and if somebody in San Francisco had the bad grace to get killed on this fine Saturday morning, it’s possible he might forget.

“It wouldn’t hurt if we called,” he said, though he let Munoz do it officially.

Warm and drowsy. Smell of fresh linen. Had Mom finally made his bed?

Steven tried to open his eyes. They didn’t seem to work. The eyelids were too heavy, his whole body too weak.

Well, just a few more hours’ sleep. Can’t hurt. It’s the summer, after all.

But that jarred some memory. Leaving the house, striking out on his own, riding in the truck with those two guys heading for L.A., but in no real hurry. Mostly, they’d said, into partying, into cruising. That sounded okay.

It began to come flooding back, and involuntarily he groaned. They’d accepted him right away, including him when they stopped for a few road beers before they’d left the city. The beers didn’t taste very good, but Steven wasn’t about to let on. This was part of being an adult, and he was tired of being treated like a kid, or, worse, a nothing. So he’d act like an adult, go along, be cool.

He got a little more worried when the joints came out, but knew he was just being uptight. Lots of guys in school smoked dope all the time. It just hadn’t been his thing. But it wasn’t as though it was any big deal, or really wrong. It did make him cough, though, and the guys had laughed at him a little, but he could tell it was all in fun. They coughed, too, only not so much.

After that, in this blurry haze, they’d stopped for something to eat—maybe in Gilroy?—some really fantastic burgers that they took to this “special spot” for a picnic. And then things got scary kind of, with the two guys starting to tickle him and other stuff. Then really rough.

If he hadn’t been so dizzy and messed up, he probably could have outrun them, but when he pulled loose and tried that, his coordination was gone. And after they caught him, he thought he remembered other things, but the drowsiness was still there, and it was too hard to think about.

And where was Mom, then, if the bed was made? Just in the other room probably. God, it’d be great to see Mom. He called out for her.

That was a sound. Hardy, waiting for Munoz to return from his phone call, ran around the corner to Steven’s room.

The boy lay still, unmoving. This was the hostility kid, he remembered—switchblade, fuzzed-out television and all. He shook his head. Talk about a bad week for the Cochrans.

Had Ed’s death somehow precipitated this, driven him over the edge of his own despair? Or was there some more immediate link? Like, might Steven have known something he shouldn’t have?

Hell, he’d find out when Steven came to if he had known his assailants. Or, more particularly, if Hardy knew them.

Big Ed looked anything but big.

Staring down at his bandaged youngest son, he was a shell of the man in the old but elegant suit Hardy had met at the funeral reception. Now a very worn green USF sweatshirt hung loosely over work pants and boots. Everything hung too loose. One bootlace wasn’t tied.

He stared as long as he could, then squeezed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes.

Munoz stood next to him. “Are you all right, sir?”

Big Ed nodded. “Long night,” he said. “We thought, we thought . . .”

“Sure. But he’s not. Not even close.”

“He’s not close,” he repeated. And suddenly a shudder went through him and he was crying.

Hardy went out to the reception area, where a small boy with the beginnings of a shiner and a large red knot on his forehead sat stoically as his mother explained to the receptionist how he’d stepped on the tines of a rake and the handle had popped up and hit him in the face.

Hardy walked outside into the bright sun. He was hungry. The place on Gonzalez’s main street sold burritos the size of a suitcase for $2.49, and Hardy bought three, chewing on one while he carried the other two, wrapped, back to the clinic.

Munoz and Ed, talking by the sheriff ’s car, took the food. Big Ed seemed a little better.

“Sorry I didn’t recognize you in there,” he said to Hardy.

“How’s the boy?”

“Still sleeping. You have any idea who did this?”

“I wish,” Hardy said. “You reported him missing. Did he run away, or what?”

“What’s the other option?” Munoz asked.

Hardy shrugged. “It’s unlikely, but he might have been kidnapped.”

“That’s crazy,” Ed said. “We don’t have any money.”

“It might have been to keep him quiet. Maybe he knew something.” The two men chewed their burritos. “About Ed, I mean.”

That stopped Big Ed. “What do you mean? They say Eddie killed himself.” He swallowed hard.

“I doubt it, I doubt it very much.”

“Well, then, what . . .”

Hardy could see it was almost too much for the man. His hand went up to his eyes again. He shook his head as though trying to clear it.

The receptionist came to the door. “The boy’s awake,” she said.

At least he wants to be home, Big Ed was thinking. That’s something. Being back home. He’d said it. Daddy, take me home. Daddy. Nobody’d called him that in ten years. It was always either Dad, Pop or Ed. Well, if Steven wanted Daddy now, Daddy was taking him home. There he and Erin might be able to figure out if and where they’d screwed up so he wouldn’t want to run away again.

He looked around to the backseat where Steven lay, sleeping again, strapped down by the seat belts.

“He okay?” Hardy asked.

Ed nodded.

Munoz and Hardy had thought it’d be better if Ed didn’t have to drive back alone with his son, so they arranged that the sheriff ’s one deputy would drive Hardy’s car back to the city later.

Ed again glanced into the backseat. He couldn’t look enough at his son, couldn’t really believe yet—after the fears of last night sitting up with Erin, his daughter, Jodie, and Frannie—that Steven, along with Eddie, wasn’t dead and gone forever. Whatever had happened, whatever he’d been through, at least he was still with them, breathing. He must’ve sighed with relief, because Hardy looked over at him.

This guy Hardy was driving well—slow and careful. No bumps on the kid. And it was a good thing he was driving—Ed was pretty sure he couldn’t have kept his mind on the road.

They were up to San Mateo. The sun was behind the mountains already. Where had the hours gone to? In another half hour they’d be home.

Maybe sometime today Erin had gotten some sleep. He hoped so. She hadn’t slept now in almost a week.

Erin. His thoughts, as always, were never far from his wife. He didn’t know how they were ever going to get over this time, though something told him they would. Well, almost. They’d never be the same, of course. The wound—losing Eddie—was too deep to ever heal completely, but there would be something—some new challenge that would get things into a new perspective. At least, he hoped so.

Why had his boy run away?

“You have any proof somebody killed Eddie?” he asked suddenly.

“Nope.” But then Hardy told him what Cavanaugh had said about Sam Polk—the drug thing.

“That’s something,” Ed said. “I knew something was going on with Polk. Eddie and I kind of argued about it.”