Among the Living (14 page)

“It’s Terry,” Drew said. “My mother’s—” He didn’t finish it.

The front door of Drew’s house opened, throwing an angle of light onto the lawn, and a man from inside stepped out of the doorway and opened his arms to the man coming up the walk.

The front door closed. Shadows crossed on the drapes.

“You could look in the window,” Jimmy said, “but you don’t want to carry that around with you, seeing them this way. You could walk in, but they wouldn’t know you and it would only add to their pain.”

Drew looked at him. “I look the same. How can that be?”

“They wouldn’t know you. To their eyes you have a different face. It’s something that happens inside their heads, the people you leave behind. They have their boy. They’re going to put him in the ground in a day or two.”

Jimmy could hear the breath catch in Drew’s throat.

“But you’re here, in the flesh,” Jimmy said. “With us. To be this second version of yourself.”

“This is wack,” Drew said, his eyes on the house.

“It’s just the way it is,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t design this. I don’t know who did.”

Now Drew was crying.

“You’re here for as long as you’re here, until whatever unfinished business you have is finished. You can try to do some good—or you can be one of those people we saw on the street back there, on Sunset, here to do wrong.”

He didn’t tell the boy that there was a
third
thing you could be.
A Walker.
Dead to the world, this world and the other.

“You have a new family now,” Jimmy said, flat and unsentimental, looking straight ahead at the grayed-out trees in the next block.

He heard the door open as Drew bolted from the car.

Jimmy went after him, as once somebody had gone after him.

He caught up to him on the lawn, on the black grass.

“Leave me alone!”

“I’m telling you, there’s nothing you can do,” Jimmy said, loud enough to wake the neighbors. “I know.”

Drew had stopped.

“Come on,” Jimmy said.

The door opened. The man, Terry, had heard the noise, the voices. He came out onto the front step. He tried to make sense of two strangers standing there ten feet away.

“Don’t say his name,” Jimmy said.

Drew turned toward the man. With the door open, there was light on the boy’s face.

“Don’t,” Jimmy said.

“What are you doing?” Terry said.

A woman stepped into view behind him in the doorway.

“Who is it?” she said with the saddest kind of hope.

As the sky turned pink, Jimmy yanked close the blackout drapes in the bedroom at the end of the hallway in his house. Behind him Drew was on his back on the black covering on the bed, eyes open.

In the morning paper there was an article about last night’s accident, a picture of the overturned Honda, a headline:

There was a school picture of Drew, probably from two or three grades ago, a straight-faced, trying-to-look-older pose. His last name was Hastings. The other dead boy had been a runner, had held some state record so he got more ink. And a
smiling
picture, taken from the sports pages of the Notre Dame High School paper.

An adjacent article showed the same photo they were using of the young Latino boy lost in the brown hills out in what they called the Inland Empire and, now, a picture of a man in handcuffs, a Mexican man who looked as if he’d never smiled.

“The news is always the same,” Jimmy said. “It just happens to different people.”

Angel came into the dining room from the kitchen with a cup of coffee.

“I almost drove him down to The Pipe last night,” Jimmy said. “Maybe he should see that
first.
”

“He’ll know about it soon enough,” Angel said.

Jimmy picked up a phone and dialed the number for Jean’s office. She wasn’t expected in all day. Jimmy called her apartment. After three rings, the machine picked up. Jimmy hung up.

“She was with you?” Angel said.

Jimmy nodded.

“What’s her name?”

“Jean.”

“What’s her last name?”

“I told you, Kantke.”

“What did she see?”

“A car wreck,” Jimmy said.

Angel took a sip of his coffee, waited for Jimmy to remember who he was talking to.

“I don’t know what she thought,” Jimmy said. “She didn’t say anything. I took her back to her office to get her car and then followed her home.”

Jimmy went into the study. Angel followed him.

“So she’s the Long Beach thing. The murders.”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s more than the case. With her. For you.”

“I guess it was getting to be. I don’t know what it’s going to be now.”

Jimmy sat behind the desk and pulled the keyboard closer and rewound the digital machines that recorded output from the security cameras that ringed his property. Between midnight and one, the pale men and the big men from the other night on the hotel roof had made an appearance at the back gate, testing the iron bars, hanging out for twenty minutes.

Jimmy put the picture onto a flat screen monitor on the wall.

“You know these guys?”

Angel looked at the screen and shook his head. Jimmy froze the image and clicked a few keys and the printer printed out a hard copy.

“Maybe they were selling magazines,” Angel said.

“I played a little road tag with the two on the left the other day. They were in an Escort.”

Angel got the joke.

“Lon and Vince,” Jimmy said, looking at their pale faces. “And then the other night I met the other two and a leader, a guy close to seven foot. They showed me the view from the Roosevelt.”

“And that has to do with
this
?” Angel said.

Jimmy didn’t know. Or wasn’t ready to say. He shrugged.

Drew was in the game room playing pinball, a bottle of Dos Equis sitting on top of the glass. A TV was on, big screen, street luge skaters ripping down a too steep canyon road somewhere, crisscrossing, losing it, spinning out, crashing into hay bales. Drew apparently didn’t get the connection or he would have turned it off.

Jimmy stepped into the doorway.

“I have to go somewhere. You want to go with me?”

“Go where?”

“I’m an investigator. I’m working on something.”

“A what?”

“An investigator.”

“What’s the point?”

“You’ll feel better if you do something, if you go out there and try to find some answers to the questions that there are answers for. Like I said, there are two ways to go.”

“Yeah, I know,” Drew said. “Everybody’s gotta believe in something. I believe I’ll have another beer . . .”

Jimmy turned to go.

“Let me ask you something,” Drew said to stop him, not looking up from his game. “Can I die? I mean,
again
?” Maybe he
did
get the connection between the crashing luge skaters and what had happened to him on the canyon road.

“You can get hurt,” Jimmy said, “
bad,
but you won’t die.” Here was another chance to tell the kid about the
third
thing that could happen, about how your spirit could die and you’d be left with even less, how they could take your spirit away, the thing they’d hauled him up to the roof for, just so he’d remember it. “You’re here until it’s time for you to go—”

“Yeah, I know . . .”

“But you can’t bring it on yourself and nobody else can bring it on you.”

Drew threw his weight against the machine to force the steel ball uphill.

“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, but you wouldn’t die.”

The pinball machine clattered wildly. Something had happened.

“The pathetic thing is I don’t know if that’s good news or bad,” Drew said.

Jimmy said, “That’s why there are—”

“Yeah, ‘two ways to go . . .’ ” Drew said. “ ‘Use The Force, Luke.’ ”

Jimmy knew most of the story and a phone call to a friend in politics brought the rest. Harry Turner was a “kingmaker,” one of the men—or, depending on whom you talked to,
the
man—you went to if you wanted to be governor or a federal judge. Or, if you believed everything you heard, the anchorman on the local news in Santa Barbara where one of Harry Turner’s five big houses was. It was one of those stories that over the years got better and better. To run things in California, you had to wait in line. The man at the head of the line, hand on the gate, for the last twenty years anyway, was Harry Turner. He’d been the real lawyer who ran Jack Kantke’s defense, behind the scenes, behind
Upland
or
Overland
or
Upchurch
or whatever his name was, the Long Beach lawyer whose name nobody could remember but who had to sit at the table next to defendant Kantke and take the loss when it came. When Harry Turner stopped practicing law himself, “retired” in the nineties, he still kept his firm open with a half dozen lawyers angling to be his favorite, his heir, the son he never had. He went even further behind the curtain. He was on a dozen boards of directors. He owned car dealerships. He owned a chain of smog inspection stations. He owned billboard companies. He held patents for devices he couldn’t point to on a table, for “processes” he couldn’t begin to explain. He owned a restaurant. He owned
airports.
He made money while he slept.

And twenty years ago, with a new dogleg in the aqueduct to bring in water from the Colorado, he became one of the “visionaries” turning green the Coachella Valley out past Palm Springs and Indian Wells. Desert into farmland. He had a thousand acres of winter lettuce and another five hundred in table grapes.

He was eleven feet tall, on the back of his horse.

He rode, not that fast but steady, out of a block of date palms planted in rows and then along the edge of a fie ld of something so green it clashed with the sky. He rode without changing his pace right straight at the black pickup with the ranch logo on the door, came up fast enough to make them all turn their heads aside. He wore chinos and short brown Wellington boots and a long-sleeve white shirt. He stayed in the saddle, all eleven feet of him.

Jimmy had been hand-delivered by a pair of robust cowboys who made the Sailors on the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel look anorexic. These men were Basque, real cowboys. They’d stopped Jimmy even before he made it to the gates of the ranch, sixty seconds after a black helicopter had overflown him in the Mustang on the mile-long road in off of the highway. They’d shown him where to leave his car in front of one of the very clean outbuildings. One of them nodded toward the front seat of the black truck and then got behind the wheel and the other man climbed in back and sat against the tailgate and rode that way all the way out into the fields.

They were strong and their suspiciousness was industrial-strength, but they weren’t smart. Jimmy had told them he was the mayor of Rancho Cucamonga.

Harry Turner looked him over, looked at his sissy shoes, his Prada suit, and smiled a little sourly.

“Mr. Mayor,”
he said. He had a walkie-talkie hanging off his wide brown belt. They’d called ahead.

Turner climbed down out of the saddle and took off his hat, a flat-brim Stetson that made him look like a mounted cop. His hand came out and Jimmy thought it might be the start of a handshake but Turner was just reaching for a kerchief he kept tucked up his left sleeve. He wiped off his forehead, even though he wasn’t sweating.

Jimmy still hadn’t said a word. It was the right thing not to say.

“You had lunch?” Turner said.

He didn’t wait for an answer, just walked past Jimmy toward a black flagship Mercedes S600 that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago. Another Basque man now stood beside the pickup. Mexican men in jobs like these always looked at the ground when you weren’t talking to them. These men looked at
you.
One of them retrieved an automatic rifle from the trunk of the Mercedes before Turner got behind the wheel and they left.