“You know what I meant.”
“Yeah. Like, it’s no secret anymore what she does for a living, so I gave her a call, she gave me all kinds of great quotes. I made her promise not to tell you, ’cause I knew you and Mom would freak if you knew I was going out to see her.”
“No,” I said defensively, “we’d have understood.”
“She’s actually a very nice person,” Angie said.
“Yeah, for sure. She is.”
“It’s not the sort of thing I’d like to do for a living, though, you know?”
I nodded. “Well, I don’t like to judge.”
Angie smiled. “I hope you’re not pissed.”
It was my turn to smile. “I’ll get over it. Listen, you really should get checked out.”
She turned and there was Trevor, trying hard to look nonchalant in his long black coat, but you could see it in his eyes, that he was rattled, that he’d been through a night like no other. Morpheus seemed a bit drained, too, standing at Trevor’s side, leaning into him, his long tongue hanging in front of him.
Angie approached Trevor, smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She leaned in and gave him a light kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for being there. I guess I’ll give you shit later about how you happened to know where we were.”
He said, “Nothing I ever did was meant to hurt you. It was meant to protect you.”
“Yeah, well, I think you got lucky on that one.”
“I wasn’t the only one,” he said, as if to remind her that her good fortune was linked to him in some small way. “I think this is one of those defining moments.”
“What?” Angie said.
“A moment that defines who you and I are, what we mean to each other. We’ve been caught together in a confluence. I don’t see how either one of us can ignore that.”
The attendants were closing the ambulance door, leaving Angie with nothing else to say, but she waved her fingers at me and mouthed, “I love you.” I waved back and watched her face through the window as the ambulance pulled away.
I got out my cell and phoned home. It was going to be hard to explain to Sarah that Angie being at the hospital, in the overall scheme of things, was actually the best news I’d had to share all evening.
“Hello?” she said tiredly.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Hey, what time is it? Oh my God, do you know what time it is?”
“It’s late, yeah, sorry.”
“It’s the middle of the night. Wait, I’m going to see if Angie’s back.”
“Just listen a sec. The first thing I have to tell you is, everybody’s fine, we’re all okay.”
You just know, when someone starts off the conversation that way, everything you’re about to hear is going to be bad.
The cops kept me, and Trevor, for hours. I guess they had others interviewing Trevor, but me they put in a car so that we could all take a trip to Bullock’s place, where I showed them the haul from the Brentwood’s heist, the room where Angie’d been held, Pockmark and the Barbies shot. Pockmark wasn’t there, but was picked up early in the morning in the ER at Mercy General. There was blood on the garage floor, presumably from where Blondie had shot Trimble before putting his body into the Annihilator.
I told them Bullock, or possibly one of his two henchmen, had put Lawrence Jones into the hospital and killed the Metropolitan photographer Stan Wannaker. Not to get back his film, but to get even for the incident at the auction.
I told them about how I’d bought a car at a government auction that had supposedly, at one time, been loaded with drugs, and how Eddie Mayhew had hoped to pull a fast one on Lenny Indigo’s people by sneaking the drugs out and selling them to a rival organization. About how the only cop I felt I could trust was the last one in the world I should have called, and how Trimble’s apparent moves toward redemption had come too late to make a difference.
There were lots of other details to fill in, but I gave them the broad strokes. And then I called the city desk and said that, after I’d gone home and had a bit of sleep, I’d be coming in.
I had a story to write.
A couple of days later, we had a few people over to the house. Sarah made a chocolate cake. A Betty Crocker mix, with icing out of the can. Angie’s favorite. I wore some more of my new clothes.