Royal Flush (26 page)

I leaned back in my chair and sighed. So much for moving on with my life—I couldn't escape these people. But at least Jojia would get what was coming to her, and maybe she'd rat out Kent in the process. Even if I couldn't prove they had anything to do with Melanie's murder, they might still get some form of rough justice.

Bored, I decided to head out on foot into the ninety-three-degree afternoon heat and headed over to the Fashion Show Mall to return a handbag at Nordstrom, where I was a regular in the returns department. As long as the item wasn't damaged, they never asked any questions, which I took as a tacit endorsement of my hobby of impulse-buying expensive accessories and then returning them after my infatuation had lapsed. When I finished returning the bag, I was (naturally) unable to avoid browsing a bit in the shoe department, and that was where I spotted a familiar face. For the life of me, I couldn't place him, and then as soon as I glanced at him again he was gone, up the escalator. It was one of those familiar
where do I know him from
moments, and for some reason it bothered me. In fact, it was annoying enough to distract me from shoe shopping, which was kind of like trying to distract a man during sex.

I rallied and managed to shrug it off as I headed over to the handbag section to see if anything new had arrived. Not being very bright, my mind eventually became fully occupied by the battle between the tan Coach bag, which would be very practical, and the pink and red Dolce & Gabbana clutch, which would be a lot more fun. I punted, buying them both. After all, I could always return one of them, no questions asked.

I meandered back home, clutching my prized Nordstrom bag in my hand, secretly monitoring the expressions on the faces of all the women as they passed by, walking in the opposite direction. Were they jealous? I wondered. Or was
I
the jealous one? At least
they
had meaningful relationships, I reasoned, whereas I was trying to fill a gaping void in my life with shoes and handbags. This whole line of thought was quickly becoming unproductive, and so when I felt a twinge of gloom coming on, I shook myself out of it and vowed to stop judging other people for the rest of the day. Or at least the rest of the walk home.

Sunday morning had my butt in the pew at St. Christopher's nine o'clock mass, where the homily was about balance and priorities, two concepts I understood in the abstract but which had eluded me in practice.

Not wanting to go back home afterward, I headed to the outlet malls and then drove downtown to check in on my office and pick up the mail. Almost all of my communication was digital now, but going to the office was a ritual I had picked up as a kid, accompanying my accountant father on weekend mornings to "help" him with his work, which usually meant I would be given a stack of what I later learned was junk mail to open and file away.

I walked up the steps and turned the corner on the landing, and that was when I knew my day would be shot. Propped up against my office door was a lifeless body. I raced up, two steps at a time, and found the man's face was covered in blood, his left eye a sickly purple-black color, puffy almost beyond recognition as a part of the human anatomy. I kneeled down and felt his forehead, which was still warm. His pulse was faint, but still present. I shook him, and then for some reason I tried pinching his arm. His hand was clutching something, and when I pried it open I recognized it as a silver detective's badge.

He roused, ever so slightly—then his good eye opened a crack. He tried to clear his throat, but it was too painful, and he convulsed and wheezed out the sickly breath of a dead man.

"Raven," he whispered. "You were right."

"About what?"

"It wasn't a horse. It was a…" he stopped to wheeze again. "It was a zebra." With that, he collapsed onto me, the surprisingly warm weight of his torso pressing onto my arms. I cringed under his mass and tried to ease him onto the ground as gently as I could. And then I dialed 9-1-1.

The operator told me to check Detective Weakland's pulse again. I couldn't feel it in his left wrist, but I noticed a tiny bump throbbing on his neck. He was alive, but barely.

"He's a cop," I said, for no apparent reason. I guess I thought maybe they'd give him special treatment and step on it.

Since his heart was still beating, the dispatcher told me there wasn't much I could do but inspect him for bleeding wounds and wait. She speculated that the wounds could be internal, given the lack of blood anywhere.

The ten minutes I spent waiting for the ambulance with Weakland were even slower than one of Fr. Skowronski's homilies.
Where were they?
I realized it was a Sunday morning, but still. The fire station was probably only a mile and a half away, and there was no traffic.

I was holding Weakland's head on my thigh, watching his slow, labored breaths. He smelled awful, which was a mean thing to notice but something I couldn't ignore.
What the hell had happened?
And why was he on
my
doorstep?

Finally, the whine of the sirens eased its way into the stairwell, where the sound echoed eerily. At the noise, Weakland seemed to flinch, ever so slightly. I wanted to go outside and flag them down, but I didn't want to drop his head down to the ground.

I heard the noisy brakes of a fire truck as it parked out front, and within seconds I heard my building's door open. The first one up the stairs was a chubby, red-faced guy in a yellow getup, clutching a medical kit in his left hand as he took the stairs two at a time. Tailing behind him was a fortyish woman with close-cropped brown hair. She had an all-business air about her, and, without a word, she relieved me of my head-holding duties.

They made short work of it. After ascertaining that I knew nothing about what happened to Weakland, they placed him on a gurney and carefully walked him down the steps. I sat on the top step and began to cry. A cop marched in and took my statement, but I didn't have anything to tell him. He took my name and number and told me he might be in touch. It wasn't often that a detective wound up beaten within an inch of his life, even in Vegas.

What had Weakland meant, I wondered, by his comment about a zebra? Was he delusional, or did it actually mean something? It had triggered some vague wisp of familiarity in the nether reaches of my brain, but I couldn't quite put two and two together.

It hit me as I was driving home. Weakland had said that, in police work, if it looks like a horse, it almost always
is
a horse, not something exotic like a zebra. His point was that overdoses happen all the time, and that there was no reason to think there was anything unusual about what happened to Melanie. But now he was saying the opposite, which to me meant she had been murdered.

I was still in a trance when the light turned green, which elicited an unsporting honk from behind me. My chest got tight when I checked the mirror and saw the distinctive grill of a white Range Rover. I gunned it and began checking my mirror every two seconds, but the Rover seemed to be in no hurry. It turned out to be nothing but a Sunday driver who happened not to like waiting at green lights. In my jumpy state I chalked it up to a false alarm and forced myself to calm down.

But how do you occupy the rest of your Sunday when you've discovered a detective—a
real
detective, not some cut-rate, night school wannabe—dying at the foot of your office door? I couldn't see myself going to the mall, and I definitely didn't want to go home.

Not being a people person, it was hard to recognize it as one of those rare moments when I actually
wanted
some human companionship, even if it meant imperfect companionship. It took me a few minutes, but once again Carlos popped into my mind, a more frequent occurrence in recent days. It definitely had something to do with his eighteen-inch (he claimed) biceps, and the fact that I was feeling vulnerable.

I pulled over and called him. He was at the driving range, but said there was plenty of room for me. To save face and not appear desperate, I hemmed and hawed for a minute and then agreed to meet him there, doing my best to seem reluctant. It was a trick I learned from him.

I punched the driving range into my GPS and followed the directions out to the sticks, trying to come up with some plausible reason for wanting to hang out at a driving range with Carlos on a Sunday morning. Calling him meant I was exposing myself, cracking out of the shell I had built up over the last three years, as I had consistently rebuffed, with prejudice, all of his advances and innuendos. It meant I was losing the upper hand. But maybe, I admitted, that was a good thing.

I wasn't an introspective person by nature, and so it wasn't surprising that such deep thoughts had completely distracted me from my route, landing me on an industrial road in a part of town I'd never ventured into. From my map, it looked as though I had overshot a turn a half a mile earlier, so I pulled over and made a U-turn.

It didn't work.

As I began to wheel the car around, something huge, loud, and fast rammed into the left rear of my car, spinning me around 180 degrees and wrenching my neck in the process. I clung like death to the steering wheel and stomped on the brakes, but I was still moving, not forward but sideways, being pushed by whatever it was that had crashed into me.

It was a crash that didn't stop. Instead of a discrete impact followed by the squealing of brakes, it was almost as if the driver of the other vehicle was revving his engine even more,
trying
to ram me into something. As my car spun, everything seemed to slow down. A squat, painted concrete structure flashed in front of me, and then in an instant the car turned again and had me face-to-face with a mailbox. And then it all stopped.

The
crunch
of metal on metal was unmistakable, and so was the impact, a grating and jarring series of reverberations that shook me so hard I thought my teeth would fall out. My car was being pushed and dragged against the side of a building, with the sickly scraping sound of metal on concrete rattling everywhere and echoing even outside the car. And then, before I saw what I'd hit, the airbags exploded into my face and side, sending my head jolting backward and thumping into the headrest. The noise kept coming, though, that horrible throaty sound of an engine that was revving up rather than easing off. A survival instinct inside me shook me out of my stupor, telling me to get the hell out of there before the other driver came at me again. With a direct hit, no airbag in the world would save me.

My driver's side door wouldn't open, and the passenger door was mangled into a single piece of twisted metal that looked more like abstract art than a functional portal. I was trapped in a steel coffin, and the only saving grace was that the deflating airbags prevented me from seeing what was coming at me from outside. And then an odd thought crept into my head:
why is that engine so loud
? After wiggling about frantically, I looked up and noticed that the crash had jarred the sunroof out of its frame, leaving a small opening that was allowing the outside noise inside. I could get through it if I could knock the window all the way out.

I pushed up with both hands, but the airbags had knocked the wind out of me, depriving me of any real strength. I squirmed back and forth, to no avail, but then I noticed the engine noise growing a little more distant. Was he backing away? Had someone seen us?

I wasn't going to stick around and find out.

I took several deep breaths, trying to regain my strength. And then the engine started revving again. My reprieve over, the reality of the situation finally set in. I squeezed my lower body upward so my feet were on the seat, and with all my strength I pushed up, popping the sunroof out of its holder. Another deep breath. I stood up and wedged myself through the sunroof, gripping the edges of the frame for support. When I turned around I found myself face-to-face with the man driving the truck.

It wasn't a white SUV, as I'd kind of expected, but a mid-sized gray Ford pickup, and it was coming directly at me with alarming speed. The impact was simultaneous with my jump, which I somehow managed to time at the last possible second before I would have been turned into mush. The problem was that there was no surface to jump
to
except for the truck that had just crashed into my former car. I landed on the hood, surprising the driver, then barrel-rolled down the left side and fell painfully on my right hip. I sprang up and tried to run away, but my hip wouldn't let me. It was more of a fast, desperate shuffle, and I had no idea where I was going. We were surrounded by industrial buildings and warehouses, and it looked like a ghost town that Sunday.

As I lurched toward the nearest street, I couldn't resist looking back. The truck was trying to go in reverse, but it had become entangled with my car, which served as a kind of anchor keeping the truck from moving.
Nice work, old friend.
But then the driver's door opened, and he climbed down. Even from a distance I could see blood tricking down his neck, and I could tell he was angry.

It was the man I'd seen at Nordstrom. My mind was racing, but I still couldn't place him. My only thought was to try to get out of there as fast as I could, to get somewhere where there were people other than a guy trying to kill me. I was outside the door of a place called Pacific Refinishing, whose heavy steel door didn't give even a millimeter when I tugged at it. Across the street lay RGL Metalworks, which also looked deserted. All I could do was keep shuffling in the direction opposite from the man who was trying to kill me.

The man was gaining on me.
Damn this hip
, I thought, searching around desperately. Why did it have to be a Sunday? On any other day this industrial park would be hopping with activity,
but today it was as lifeless and lonesome as the desert itself, a feeling somehow made even more acute by the stark-bright sunlight that bathed the concrete and aluminum buildings in a whitewashed sickly relief. My mind was now reviewing the hand-to-hand combat skills I'd picked up in PI school, which amounted to a few cheap tricks for disarming inexperienced fighters. I didn't have high hopes.