The Intruders Page 10

  That guy’s spot had been taken by a young semi-couple. The girl had dressed nicely and applied makeup with enthusiasm and yet remained irrevocably homely. Her stubbled companion had good cheekbones and olive skin and was dressed in denim and a battered red leather jacket, with sideburns that came to a sharp point. He was wearing a red bandanna, too. I’d hated him on sight, naturally.

  “I could never be angry with you,” the girl was saying. He nodded with the randomness that comes from possessing a significantly lower comprehension of the language than you’ve led everyone to believe.

  The conversation meandered on, the girl doing all the talking, the guy occasionally speaking with a clumsy deliberation that conferred half-assed profundity to gnomic gems along the lines of “Yes, I think that is so.” The fact that he was harmless and possibly even almost charming simply made him all the more punchable. The girl leaned toward him often and covertly moved her stool a couple of inches his way. He endured this stoically, and suddenly I understood their situation as if I were perched outside their reality and watching it critically, some drunken god assigned to monitor their progress. In the end I was leaning so far in their direction that she noticed and turned to look at me.

  And then suddenly I was talking.

  “Honey,” I said, “I’m going to save you time and unhappiness here. What young Carlos is trying to say—without actually saying it—is that he’s enjoyed screwing you the last several weeks but is now going back to Europe, where he will return to screwing somebody else, probably the hometown girl whose letters he’s been stashing under the bed all the while he’s been here.”

  The girl blinked.

  I shrugged. “How can this surprise you? Check out the fucking sideburns. Bottom line is, Pedro here is not a poet or bullfighter. He’ll spend his glory years driving a delivery truck for his uncle’s restaurant, sleeping around while he’s still got it, and then getting exponentially fatter and more baggy-eyed. Accept that this guy’s memory is who you’re going to be unfaithful with for the rest of your life, and go back to Plan A and find yourself some nice local M.B.A. with a commitment to shaving and regular gym attendance.”

  Both were looking at me by now, him with utter incomprehension, smiling a little, thinking how friendly these Americans were—they just strike up conversations in bars, it’s so great. The girl blinked twice more, however, and I realized I still hadn’t nailed it.

  “Though, actually…” I said as it dawned on me, “he hasn’t been screwing you, right? But he’s going home tomorrow, and so you hope tonight’s going to be the night. Sorry, honey. Not going to happen. You’ve really just been friends all this time—except that he has, in some amphibian way, always known that you wanted it.”

  The girl was staring at me now, her mouth wide. I shook my head slowly, sharing her pain, compassionate for her essence and being in a moment of bonding with her flawed and yet honest human soul.

  And then she hit me in the face with an ashtray.

  I left Tillie’s under something of a cloud. I tried explaining myself to the waitress but was hampered by the nosebleed, and she got a huge black guy from the kitchen to motivate me the hell out of their bar. He was good. I felt very motivated.

  I made it out onto the sidewalk largely unassisted, to be confronted with traffic and steady drizzle. I wandered up and down Fourth for a while, smoking heroically and snarling at trees. I had already called the house three more times and received no answer. I knew I had gotten drunk to avoid thinking clearly about what these things implied, but this knowledge didn’t help. I still didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t find anywhere else apart from the Malo and another hotel’s lounge bar, and I sensed I wouldn’t be welcome there either. So I took a right down a street called Madison, thinking I’d head toward the waterfront. I discovered that Madison is not a street but a mountainside. I was okay for a couple of blocks, but when I got to Second Avenue and looked down the next stretch, I seriously considered just staying where I was and waiting until someone opened a bar nearby. I decided that this would somehow be a sign of weakness, however—being a man is riddled with that kind of bullshit—and persisted on my way. They’d replaced the concrete paving alongside the Federal Building with serrated bricks, which helped a little, but after a few steps I simply lost my footing. I crashed onto my elbow and ass and slid ten feet down the street, clanging resoundingly into a garbage can.

  As I hauled myself back up, I was passed by a middle-aged couple methodically trekking in the other direction, bundled up in identical fleeces.

  “Slippery, huh,” one of them said. They looked like a double-headed grub.

  “Fuck off,” I replied. At the junction with First, I found a minimart and lurched in to buy more cigarettes. The Chinese woman behind the counter looked like she didn’t want to get involved, but I gave her The Look and she did what I wanted. I bought a bottle of water, too, and used my reflection in the beverage cooler to make sure my face was clean of blood. Afterward I stood outside on the corner and spotted the glow of a bar on the other side. I limped over. It was a nice place, loosely attached to yet another hotel but dark enough inside that the welt on my cheek wouldn’t be immediately obvious.

  I ordered a glass of weaker light beer and sat in the corner, out of danger’s way. That was the idea, at any rate. If I’d still been in active charge of the evening, I’d have realized that any beer was a bad idea now, or any bar. The problem is that the guy who means me the most harm seems to live inside my own head.

  The first thing I did was check Amy’s phone to make sure it hadn’t been smashed to pieces. Luckily, it seemed fine. The shock of my collision with the ground seemed to have sobered me up a little, too, unless I’d merely entered that Indian summer of clarity you get when your nervous system is warning it’s about to wash its hands of you and is giving you one last chance to get the hell home before it pulls the plug and drops you bonelessly to the floor.

  Since I had made no progress with a positive explanation for Amy’s collection of text messages, I went back to one of them. I’d realized earlier in the afternoon that there was a direct approach to finding out whom they were from. I hadn’t wanted to go that far then, and I hadn’t been drunk. Now I was.

  I hit the green button and called the number.

  After a few seconds of silence, I got an out-of-ser vice recording. I cut the connection, feeling relieved and disturbed. Where the hell was Amy? Was she okay? If so, why didn’t she call? How much longer should I leave it before going to the cops? I knew their likely response to a man with as little evidence as I had, but I was worried about her. The only other avenue I could think of was trying to find our car. I could try to check all the downtown parking lots, which would be a long-shot endeavor, but I suddenly found the idea compelling. At least I’d be doing something, the kind of legwork that had to lead somewhere. At the moment it was pouring rain outside. But maybe when it slacked off…

  In the meantime I called home yet again. Still no reply, and it was now well after nine. I did the math and worked out that it had been about forty-six hours since we’d last spoken, a record in seven years. This forced me to believe that something was wrong and simultaneously made me want to believe it wasn’t—like seeing the doctor wince on reading your blood tests, even though you’ve spent the last six months wanting to know why you feel like shit.

  As a distraction I went back to the phone to see if there was anything else I could find. The picture section had four files. Over the last year, Amy had developed a weird resistance to photographs. She dealt with them all day at work, of course, glistening product shots and endless casting pictures, but didn’t like being in them or seem to have much enthusiasm for taking them of anyone else. The first picture was the one she had previously used as the general wallpaper on her phone. It showed the two of us, heads together, laughing. I’d taken it with my phone a year and a half ago, at the end of the Santa Monica Pier. It was a good picture, and I didn’t like the fact that she’d
evidently stopped using it. The next two were called Photo–76.jpg and Photo–113.jpg. Both were dark and grainy, and on such a small screen I couldn’t make anything out. The final picture was lighter, and while it still looked as if it had been taken in twilight, its subject was more evident. A man’s head and shoulders, shot from a distance of about six feet away. His face was shadowed. He wasn’t looking at the camera but turned away, as if unaware he was being photographed. This picture didn’t seem to have a title as much as an attached message:

  Confirmed. Apologies for quality. You’ll be happy, though.

  The number it had come from was not the same as that on the text messages. I laid the phone back on the table and took a swallow of beer. Going back to drinking Mack & Jack’s was beginning to seem like a good idea. I knew it wasn’t. I also knew that wasn’t likely to stop me. When the drinks waitress came into view, I looked up at her but then turned back as I heard my phone ring.

  I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?” I said. “Is that you?”

  It wasn’t Amy. It was the cabdriver.

  chapter

  TWELVE

  He arrived twenty minutes later. Too-blue jeans, a new three-quarter-length leather jacket. Short hair, sturdy and anonymous bone structure. I’d started to see guys like this arriving in L.A. a year or two before we left. The workhorses of the new millennium, young men who would stack shelves, sell contraband on street corners, toil like dogs in regular modes of employment or smack heads in the dead of night, all with a steady, glacial determination that seemed to elude the local populace.

  And, of course, drive cabs. I indicated who I was with an upward nod. He came over and sat on the opposite side of the table, glanced at my beer.

  “You want one?”

  “Please,” he said.

  “But you’re working, right?”

  He just looked at me. I held my hand up, got us both a drink. The waitress was fast and had them back by the time I’d lit another cigarette.

  When Georj had taken a long swallow, he nodded. “Good,” he said. “So?”

  “Thanks for taking the phone to the hotel.”

  He shrugged. “Thank you for the money. I think probably it not be there. So?”

  “I just wanted to see if you remembered anything else.”

  He glanced at his hands like someone used to not remembering things and not remembering them on demand. “I drive all day. All over. They get in, they get out.”

  I clicked a couple buttons on my cell phone, held it up to him across the table. “That’s her,” I said.

  He leaned forward, peered at the picture on the screen. It was the one that Amy had been using as her background until recently.

  “She’s my wife,” I said. “That’s me there with her, right? I’m not a cop. I’m just trying to find her.”

  He took the phone from me, angled it against the dim light. “Okay,” he said finally. “I remember.”

  My heart started beating faster, but I had many years’ experience of this kind of inquiry. “She’s pretty tall,” I said. “Around five ten?”

  He shook his head immediately. “Then not her. Woman I think of, more like five feet and a half feet.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s her.”

  He looked at me, raised an eyebrow sardonically. “Not a cop, right. I not Russian either. I from Disney World.”

  “You got me. I was once a cop. I’m guessing you’re someone who’s used to talking to the police, too. So let’s not jerk each other around. When did you see her?”

  He considered. “Early in the night. Pick up downtown. Drop in Belltown somewhere, I think.”

  I shook my head, not knowing where he was talking about. He pointed right. “Up, past fish market. She tip too much, is how I remember.”

  Score two for recognizable characteristics. “You recall anything else?”

  “Not so much.” He took a cigarette from my pack, lit it. “It was rain. I watch the road. They talk. I—”

  “Wait a minute. They?”

  “Her, a man.”

  My stomach felt sour. “What did the man look like?”

  “Suit, I think. Dark hair. I don’t remember.”

  “Did they get in the car together?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know. Just talk, you know.”

  “What were they talking about?”

  “How do I know? I have radio playing.”

  “Come on, Georj. Did they look serious? Were they laughing? What?”

  I realized he was staring at me and that my volume level was getting out of control. Took a breath.

  “Okay,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. You picked two people up. Drove them someplace, up in Belltown, wherever. She pays, you drive away. That’s it?”

  He swallowed the rest of his beer. He was ready to leave. In desperation I took Amy’s phone from the table. Found the final picture. Passed it over to him.

  “Could that have been the man?”

  He looked at it for barely a second, shook his head, stood up. “I don’t know. Bad picture. Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thank you. You got a job to go on to?”

  He hesitated. “No.”

  “You do now.”

  I walked behind him into the drizzle. I didn’t even know if the Malo would have any rooms, or if they’d rent one this late to someone like me. But I knew that being in a public place would not be good for me, and the Malo was the last known address I had for Amy, however spurious that had turned out to be.

  The driver took a right off First, walking ahead. Why hadn’t he parked directly outside the bar?

  “Why didn’t you park directly outside the bar?” I asked truculently. I had begun to slur my words, just a little, and the boundary between the inside and the outside of my head was starting to fade.

  “In case police,” he said patiently, not bothering to turn around. “They see from bar to car, not so good.”

  I followed him around a couple more corners and suddenly realized we weren’t far from the end of Post Alley. This made me think of Todd Crane. Who had dark hair. Who was the kind of guy who wore suits. He’d seemed convincing in his ignorance of Amy’s whereabouts.

  But…

  We turned into another side street, narrow and cobbled, lined with the backs of old warehouses, a red cab parked on one side. Georj was twenty or thirty feet ahead of me now, and as he stopped to get his keys out, I saw something.

  A couple of figures were approaching from the deep shadows farther up the alley. They were too far away to see clearly at first, but both wore dark clothing and were headed purposefully toward the cab.

  “Georj,” I said.

  He looked around at me, confused, saw I had started to run. He turned to look back the other way and froze.

  The figures were running now, too. Both heading in my direction, evidently having realized I was going to be their first cause of trouble. The men’s faces were pale and calm. One was tall, blond; the other shorter, with red hair. Out of long habit, I reached to my belt, but there was nothing there.

  I met the first man with my right elbow held up high and rigid, ducking low to catch him at the base of the throat. He flipped over backward onto the wet sidewalk, crashing down hard. Georj and the other guy had a hold of each other already—and before I could get to him, the stranger had whipped his forehead down to butt Georj in the middle of his face. Georj fell back, sliding down the side of the cab.

  I felt a hand grab me on the right shoulder and dropped low again as I turned hard left, the opposite to what most people would do. By the time I’d twisted quickly around, the guy was pulled off balance, and I planted my fist hard into his side. Our faces were close enough for his coughed exhale to spatter over my face.

  I slammed my kneecap into the side of his thigh just above the knee, trapping the nerve, and felt him drop again as the other assailant stopped hitting Georj and grabbed me around the thro
at with both hands.

  He was stronger and more focused than the other guy and slung me back against the hood of the car. I bounced off it awkwardly and slid to crash onto the cobbles—but he stepped in toward me too fast.

  I kicked my leg in a wide, low arc, catching him around the back of the calf. He stumbled, dropping enough that I could meet his face with my shoulder as I came back up. He went over on his side, and I lowered my foot hard onto the fingers of his right hand.

  The other guy was reaching into his coat now, and I turned toward him, wanting him to put himself in a position where it had to play out. I don’t think I even remembered I didn’t have a weapon of my own. I don’t believe I was thinking at all. I had just become the man who was doing this thing, powered by anger, fueled by the need to hurt someone for the sudden and inexplicable hole in the center of my life.

  “No,” the guy I’d taken down said, but not to me.

  The other man hesitated. Took his hand back out of his coat. Then the two of them ran quickly and quietly up the street.

  Georj was crouched by the side of his cab, hands over his face. I squatted in front of him, panting hard, and pried his hands away. There was a lot of blood under his nose, down his chin, over his jacket. Before he could stop me, I felt on either side of his nose. He swore hard, tried to shove my hand away.

  “You’re okay,” I said. “It’s not broken.”

  I stood up. Looked back up the street. The two men had disappeared. “Who were they?”

  “What?” The driver was standing now, sorting through his keys with trembling hands. He was looking at me like I was something that had just crawled in out of the bay, some animal with dripping teeth.

  “You heard. Who were they?”

  He shook his head, as if in disbelief.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” I said, grabbing the door as he climbed into the car. “I just saved your ass. Who were those men?”

  “How you think I know?”