CHAPTER 5
IN THE PALOMAR PARKING LOT, AS THE RAIN and the wind painted a procession of colorless spirit shapes on the windshield of the Expedition, Ethan placed a call to Hazard Yancy?s cell phone.
Hazard had been born Lester, but he loathed his given name. He didn?t like Les any better. He thought the shortened version sounded like an insult.
?I?m not less of anything than you are,? he?d once said to Ethan, but affably.
Indeed, at six feet four and 240 pounds, with a shaved head that appeared to be as big as a basketball and a neck only slightly narrower than the span of his ears, Hazard Yancy was nobody?s idea of a poster child for minimalism.
?Fact is, I?m more of a lot of things than some people. Like more determined, more fun, more colorful, more likely to make stupid choices in women, more likely to be shot in the ass. My folks should have named me More Yancy. I could?ve lived with that.?
When he had been a teenager and a young man, his friends had called him Brick, a reference to the fact that he was built like a brick wall.
[41] Nobody in Robbery/Homicide had called him Brick in twenty years. On the force, he was known as Hazard because working a case in tandem with him could be as hazardous as driving a dynamite truck.
Gumshoe duty in Robbery/Homicide might be more dangerous than a career as a greengrocer, but detectives were less likely to die on the job than were night clerks in convenience stores. If you wanted the thrill of being shot at on a regular basis, the Gang Activities Section, the Narcotics Division, and certainly the Strategic Weapons and Tactics teams were better bets than cleaning up after murderers.
Even just staying in uniform promised more violence than hitting the streets in a suit.
Hazard?s career was an exception to the rule. People shot at him with regularity.
He professed surprise not at the frequency with which bullets were directed at him, but at the fact that the shooters were people who didn?t know him personally. ?Being a friend of mine,? he once said, ?you?d think it would be the other way around, wouldn?t you??
Hazard?s uncanny attraction for high-velocity projectiles wasn?t a consequence of either recklessness or poor investigative technique. He was a careful, first-rate detective.
In Ethan?s experience, the universe didn?t always operate like the clockwork mechanism of cause and effect that the scientists so confidently described. Anomalies abounded. Deviations from the common rule, strange conditions, incongruities.
You could make yourself a little crazy, even certifiable, if you insisted that life always proceed according to some this-because-that system of logic. Occasionally you had to accept the inexplicable.
Hazard didn?t choose his cases. Like other detectives, he fielded what fate threw at him. For reasons known only to the secret master of the universe, he caught more investigations involving perps who were trigger-happy wackos than he caught cases in which genteel elderly women served poisoned tea to their gentlemen friends.
[42] Fortunately, most shots fired at him missed. He?d been hit just twice: both minor wounds. Two of his partners had sustained injuries more serious than Hazard?s, but neither had died or been crippled.
Ethan had worked cases with Hazard during four years of his time on the force. That period constituted the most satisfying police work he?d ever done.
Now, when Yancy answered his cell phone on the third ring, Ethan said, ?You still sleeping with an inflatable woman??
?You applying for the position??
?Hey, Hazard, you busy right now??
?Got my foot on a snot-wad?s neck.?
?Literally?? Ethan asked.
?Figuratively. Was it literally, I?d be stomping his windpipe, and you?d have been forwarded to voice mail.?
?If you?re about to make a collar-?
?I?m waiting for a comeback from the lab. Won?t get it until tomorrow morning.?
?How about you and I have lunch, and Channing Manheim pays??
?As long as that doesn?t oblige me to watch any of his shitcan movies.?
?Everyone?s a critic.? Ethan named a famous west-side restaurant where the Face had a standing reservation.
?They have real food or just interior decoration on a plate?? Hazard asked.
?There?s going to be fancy carved zucchini cups full of vegetable mousseline, baby asparagus, and patterns drawn with sauces,? Ethan admitted. ?Would you rather go Armenian??
?Do I have a tongue? Armenian at one o?clock??
?I?ll be the guy looks like an ex-cop trying to pass for smart.?
When he pressed END, terminating the call, Ethan was surprised that he had managed to sound entirely normal.
His hands no longer trembled, but cold greasy fear still crawled [43] restlessly through every turning of his guts. In the rearview mirror, his eyes weren?t entirely familiar to him.
Ethan engaged the windshield wipers. He drove out of the Palomar Laboratories parking lot.
In the witches? cauldron of the sky, late-morning light brewed into a thick gloom more suitable to a winter dusk.
Most drivers had switched on their headlights. Bright phantom serpents wriggled across the wet black pavement.
With an hour and fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, Ethan decided to pay a visit to the living dead.