Martin Gaul stood on the private balcony outside his office. He had his phone in his hand. He was holding it tightly enough that he could hear its glass display stressing.
The balcony faced south from the top floor of the building, overlooking Los Angeles from Sunset Boulevard. Gaul stared down on the nighttime expanse of the city—a thousand square miles of lighted gridwork, crisscrossed with freeways like the fiber-optic veins of an electronic life form.
He shut his eyes and tried to steady his breathing. Tried to choke the anxiety that had arrived with a phone call three minutes earlier.
Curren’s team had lost the girl.
Gaul turned from the rail. He paced to a table near the sliding door and set the phone on it, willing the damned thing to ring again, this time with news that everything was taken care of. He stared at it a moment longer and then went back to the view.
There was a taste in his mouth—a mix of low-burning fear and tension. He had experienced it before, thirty years back, the summer between college and the army, when he lived in Boston. He’d gone to a Sox game with friends and hit a bar outside Fenway afterward, and a lot of shots later he’d come out alone, vaguely aware that his friends had already gone. There’d been a girl he thought he was doing pretty well with, but then she left without saying good-bye, which put him in a rough mood. He remembered wandering outside and walking toward what he thought was the bus stop, and much later ending up down by the river, near Harvard Bridge. He was looking for a spot to take a piss when the trouble happened.
All this time later, he couldn’t remember much of how it had started. There’d been a guy there. Maybe a homeless guy, he’d thought at the time. Maybe just another drunk coming from a bar. They had argued. Gaul might have started it—he could admit that to himself now. He’d been in that mood, after all. He’d started lots of arguments because of moods like that, and given people no choice but to argue back.
This time it had become more than an argument. There had been shoves and punches, and one of his had connected just right and dropped the guy at the edge of the river, and Gaul had gotten out of there. It’d only occurred to him later, ten minutes and ten blocks away, to wonder if the guy had landed with his head in the water. Something had splashed, but in the moment he’d ignored it. He got a bus home and lay awake for over an hour, convincing himself he’d imagined that splash—the mind could invent all kinds of things to color in its fears.
The story had led the local newscast, noon the following day. Grad student dead in the Charles, foul play suspected, police asking for tips. Gaul’s mind had filled up with what-ifs. How many outdoor security cameras had he stumbled past, going to and from the river? How many cabbies and bouncers and late-shift bus drivers had seen him out there, well enough to describe him to the police?
All summer long, that taste in his mouth, just like right now. Like your throat had some chemical it only made when you were in deep trouble—the kind of trouble that left you with nothing to do but wait.
The phone rang. He snapped it up as if it were prey.
“Tell me you got her,” he said.
“I left the bulk of the team searching,” Curren said. “They’ll report when they’ve got something. Clay and I are inside Sam Dryden’s residence now. He’s not here.”
“You haven’t made your presence there obvious, have you? If he and the girl are still en route to the place—”
“They wouldn’t see us. Drapes are closed. No lights on that weren’t already on. I don’t expect them to show, though. They should’ve been here by now if they were coming. Maybe Dryden noticed the wallet missing and got spooked.”
“If he’s helping her, where does it put us?”
“In trouble, I would say.”
Gaul felt a vein behind his ear begin to throb against the band of his glasses. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
Curren recited a summary of Dryden’s bio, no doubt reading it off a handheld unit. “Sam Dryden. Army right out of high school, Rangers, then Delta for three years. Generalized training along the way, multirole stuff: rotorcraft pilot certification, HALO jumps, like that. Then he resigns from Delta and the record goes black for the next six years.”
“There’s no such thing as black,” Gaul said.
“That’s above my pay scale. Officially, he disappears off the planet from age twenty-four to thirty. When he appears again, he’s out of the military, living here in El Sedero. Marries at thirty-one, has a kid, goes to school to get a teaching certificate. He’s a year into that when the wife and kid die in a car crash, at which point he gives up on the teaching thing. That’s five years ago now. File’s pretty thin since then. Some income from private security work, consulting for small companies. Nothing special.”
It took a moment for Gaul to reply. His free hand was gripping the balcony rail. The sodium-lit tundra of the city lay hard and clear in his vision. He hadn’t blinked in all the time Curren had been talking.