FIFTEEN
The sun was just up, the air smoky with a warm fog.
Jimmy was backed against a tree, sitting in the eucalyptus leaves and brown grass. It looked like deep woods. You couldn’t see the road from here, or anything else. It was like he was in Australia, or wherever it was that eucalyptus trees came from.
There was blood, dry and almost black, all around him, so much of it that he wondered how it could all be his.
He thought of Jean. He got to his feet.
Everything ached. One eye was sealed shut some way he didn’t want to see. A finger was broken. A few teeth felt loose.
“Let me ask you something,” Drew said. “Can I die? I mean, again?”
“You can get hurt,” Jimmy said, “bad, but you won’t die.”
“Even if like a bullet went through my head, I wouldn’t die.”
“No.”
“If I was shredding down a mountain and pulled a full-on Sonny Bono, I wouldn’t die.”
“No. You could get messed up, bad, but you wouldn’t die.”
They’d pulled him out of the car and dragged him away and worked him over, Lon and Vince and maybe even the German woman, hoping for maximum mayhem, hoping to mess him up good, to try to make their point another way.
Or maybe they did it just because they enjoyed it.
He came out of the trees and found the straightaway road and then the scarred trunk that told him where he’d crashed, the skidmarks on the pavement and the furrows in the leaf-covered ground of the bridle path.
The yellow Dodge was long gone, but his shoe was there.
And the scars from the hooves of the trail horses.
He thought maybe he’d dreamed them.
He found the tracks where the black Lincoln had stopped and then turned around to go back up the straightaway. Somewhere in the fog, he’d decided the big familiar man glimpsed in the backseat had to be Harry Turner.
But maybe he’d dreamed him.
029
Jimmy and Angel went first to Jean’s apartment.
Angel waited behind the wheel of his truck, the one with the blue moon over the city and the woman’s eyes airbrushed on the tailgate.
There was no answer. Jimmy came back and got in.
“She wasn’t there?” Angel said.
Jimmy shook his head. Angel pulled out.
“She had a phone,” Jimmy said after a minute. “She probably had somebody come get her.”
He called her office. She was in a meeting.
Jimmy tossed the phone onto the seat between them. Angel looked at him.
“She’s all right.”
Angel stopped at the bottom of the hill. “Where do you want to go?”
“Home. I’ll get a car.”
They rode along in silence another four or five blocks, then Jimmy said, “Maybe you can run down the Dodge, take it to the shop, see if you can put it right. I guess the cops towed it.”
Angel nodded. “How bad is it?”
“Bad.”
Angel turned right. “You might want to get cleaned up a little, too.”
Jimmy dropped the visor on his side and got his first look at himself in the mirror. He flipped the visor back up. It was better not to know.
“So what’s happening with this lady?” Angel said.
“I hadn’t talked to her since that night we picked up the kid,” he said. “She was spooked then. I don’t know what she’s thinking now. Maybe she’s figured it out.”
“I doubt that,” Angel said. “She’s still around.”
Jimmy fell silent.
“It was the same Sailors?” Angel said.
“The goofy guys and the leader from the thing up on the roof of the Roosevelt. And there’s something else going on. There’s a man in the middle of it, too, not a Sailor but maybe a kindred spirit.”
“Who?”
“His name is Harry Turner. The lawyer behind the scenes in the murder trial. He put a tail on me. He might have been there last night.”
Jimmy wished again he’d gotten a better look at him, at the big man in the backseat of the Lincoln. If I could be sure. It was how Jimmy knew he had passed over into the land of the secret, the territory of the unknown that always came in the middle of the case, when he heard himself saying, again and again, If I could be sure.
“She was there, the tail. In a 745 BMW. She’s German. She’s not a Sailor either. Neither of them are.”
“She’s the one ran you into a tree?”
“No, I did that all by myself.”
“How do you know this guy hired her?”
“I saw him in the morning and she was there the same night. Up in Idyllwild.”
“Tailing you?”
After a moment, Jimmy said, “Yeah, very close.”
Jimmy thought about her lips, about the way she’d put her hands over his eyes when she kissed him. He didn’t have to wonder what he’d said to her, what he might have revealed. He hadn’t said much of anything. And neither had she. She was good. In that bad kind of way.
Harry Turner had read him right. Jimmy remembered Rosemary Danko’s line, They knew his weakness.
“Why does this guy still care about some old settled murder case?”
“That I don’t know,” Jimmy said.
They rode along another block.
“God had his hand on you,” Angel said.
Jimmy nodded, never looking at him. They were on Sunset now, going past Tower Records yellow and red and then The Whisky and then the Hustler store full of tourist shoppers. In daylight. Was there any more secular place on the face of the earth?
Jimmy had a decision to make, to go toward it or away from it.
“So what are you going to do now?” Angel said, just as Jimmy was wondering the same thing.