Among the Living (66 page)

Blue people.

“Those are Chick Warren’s buses,” Angel said. “Tito Nava did the roll and pleat on the seats. They’re tricked out. Blue lights in the headliners.

“They’re all L.A. Sailors,” Angel said. “What are
they
doing here?”

Another group watched the new arrivals, from a distance, standing together, silent. Not blue, most of them, but on fire in their own way. San Francisco Sailors.

“Field trip, I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “It doesn’t involve us.”

He popped the clutch and roared out of there. The SFPD cop stepped out of their way with a sweeping gesture, like a wiseass matador.

There was a helicopter overhead, a news helo.

There was a line of ambulances, like a parade, lights spinning, splashing light onto the buildings that surrounded it. There were already spectators on the sidewalks.

The morgue.

“What’s this?” Angel said.

“I got a call,” Jimmy said. “They’re shipping Lucy’s body out in the morning. To Paso Robles.”

It was Angel’s turn to look like he’d been struck between the eyes.

Jimmy said, “But I don’t know what all this is.”

He parked, got out. Angel took a minute in the front seat, alone, then got out, too.

“Maybe you don’t want to do this,” Jimmy said.

Angel just shook his head.

“She’ll be dressed up and everything,” Jimmy said. “A guy here took care of her. A friend of Shop’s.”

They had to walk past the line of ambulances. There were five or six of them, waiting, engines running, lights rotating like idling helicopter blades. Every thirty seconds, the news copter came round again with that thudding Vietnam sound. It hurt the head. It felt like being inside a lawn mower.

Duncan Groner was on the loading dock. When they got closer, up to the ambulance at the head of the line, they could see the first of the bodies.

Wrapped in white, like mummies. Head to toe.

Groner waved to Jimmy. The old reporter was trying for cool and collected, but the story had him excited. The lights from all the ambulances made him look like he’d been doused in blood, standing there.

“What happened?” Jimmy said.

“Eighteen,”
Groner said. “Eighteen of them.”

“What happened?”

“A cult,” Groner said. “Over on Fulton Street. They have a house, a four-story Victorian, five bedrooms, four to a room. A flying saucer-tethering pylon on the roof, everything inside painted white, like John and Yoko.”

A wrapped body was rolled past and through the double doors. A wheel on the gurney squeaked. The body was small.

“The youngest was sixteen, the oldest twenty-eight, except for their maximum leader. He’ll be bringing up the rear. He and his lovely assistant, Rita.”

“Suicides?” Jimmy said.

“Drink the Kool-Aid,” Groner said. “The cosmos awaits.”

Jimmy looked at the spectators across the street, saw a familiar face or two. When he turned back, Angel wasn’t there.

“What are you doing here?” Groner said, but Jimmy was already headed inside.

The latest suicides had brought out the senior coroners. And deputy coroners and body probers and morticians and, already, politicians in suits. Angel stood in the middle of them, lost.

The late-shift Sailor mortician named Hugh was there, Machine Shop’s buddy. He and Jimmy saw each other. Hugh raised his hand, high, like a kid in class. Jimmy led Angel over to him.

“It’s kind of wack here, but I already had her out,” Hugh said. “I put her in the D Room.”

Angel had a freaked-out look in his eyes.

“Come on,” Jimmy said. “Then we’ll get out of here.”

There was a commotion behind them, at the pneumatic doors, which kept trying to close but never got a break. Another body had come in on a gurney. This one wasn’t skinny, but he, too, was wrapped like a mummy. And tight, as if this was some ultimate spa treatment. Some final reduction. The cult’s leader. Groner walked alongside, enjoying all this more than was becoming. Rolling in immediately behind the fat man was, just a guess, Rita. Whose wrap could not fully blunt her curves.

As Jimmy and Angel walked down the hallway, away from the action, the volume came down.

From the many to the one.

The black linoleum was shined to an absurd pitch, the way it is in prisons, that shine that can only come from people with all the time in the world. It was like walking on obsidian in some Egyptian temple.

Here was the D Room.

The door was closed but unlocked. The lights were on. It was the bar est room in the world. The room at the end of the world.

She was covered. On a wooden table.

Propped against her hip was a hand-lettered index card with her name and
vitals
, if that was the word.

Somebody had taken a calligraphy class.

 

Lucílle Estella María Valdez

Her elbow stuck out from under the covering. Her sleeve. White satin. She was dressed in white satin now. At least Jimmy wouldn’t have to look at that baby-blue dress again.

There was motion beside him, Angel crossing himself.

It was Angel who peeled down the covering sheet.

And it was Angel who said, after a second, there at the end of the world, “That’s not her.”

Think
dark
.
Darker
.

Who did this? What exactly happened?

When a big question was thrown in Jimmy’s face, his usual first response was to look for the answer in Coincidence.
Shit happens
, wasn’t that the bumper sticker? You find out something wasn’t at all the way you thought it was, and you’re scrambling to make sense of it. And you think,
Coincidence
. You think that if you pull back a little bit, go over all the pieces, see this leading to that leading to this and this, you’ll see that it was coincidence, chance, the roll of the bones that made it happen. That made this particular shit happen.

So some other Lucy-looking girl with a 1978 baby-blue Buick Skylark convertible just happened to plow into the flat face of Pier 35 right around the time the real Lucy, Lucille Estella Maria Valdez of Paso Robles, was getting suicidal?

What’s next?

Think dark.
When
Coincidence
isn’t the answer, look next for a human explanation. Skullduggery. Conspiracy. Men in shadows pulling strings for dark purposes. Jimmy Miles probably had a lower opinion of the human animal than most people, men in or out of shadows, pulling strings or dancing on the ends of them, but it didn’t wash. Why? How? Who? For what purpose? If this wasn’t Lucy, the Lucy he’d followed here all the way from her house in L.A., who was it?
Why
wasn’t it Lucy? Who would it profit? How would they do it?

Coincidence. Conspiracy.

Too many questions, you went to
Cosmic
. Some cosmic Somebody is working out His (or Her) will, moving chess pieces on a whole other plane. You only thought that was Lucy you were seeing on the slab in the morgue in the baby-blue dress, her face smashed in. It was just a trick of the gods, a bit in a skit that amuses them ever so slightly. Part of the plan. What they wanted you to see and think about and act upon, for some reason. There was a time when Jimmy’s mother went religious, Angelus Temple religious. Jimmy was ten or eleven. She dragged him down there with her to Echo Park for three-hour Sunday services for the half year it lasted. He remembered some of the songs, the old rawboned hillbilly hymns. One of them said,

But Jimmy didn’t have the luxury of waiting for it all to make sense later. This was way too here and now. And human. On
this
plane.

Think
darker
. Darker than dark.

Who set this up? Why? Who would it profit? What would he gain?

“Look, you’re sure?” Jimmy said. “I mean—”

“She looks a little like her,” Angel said. “But not enough.” He pointed at her face, with two fin gers together, almost touching her forehead and then her cheek. It was a gesture that looked like he was blessing the girl. “Her eyes, her nose. It’s not her. This one’s older, for one thing. Ten years, maybe. She’s also more mestizo. She’s also probably Salvadoran. Lucy was Mexican.”

Jimmy hadn’t really looked at the girl on the table until now. And now when he looked at her . . . But how could you know? What do you go by? She’d gone into the wall face-first. Her skull had been smashed. Who knew what mortician skills Hugh had. Maybe he just wasn’t any good at this. It
didn’t
look like Lucy. But what did Jimmy know? How close had he ever really been to her? Ten feet away in the café in Saugus?

“This is somebody else,” Angel said. “Lucy is still alive out there somewhere. I know it . . .”

Jimmy covered the body. The face.

“So who’s this Hugh?” Angel said. “The one who sent us down here.”

Jimmy knew what Angel meant. Start at what’s right in front of you and backtrack. Go from man to man to man until it started making sense. New sense.

“He’s a Sailor,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I know. I got that. That can mean a couple of things.”

“Friend of Machine Shop’s. He works nights here.”

Angel said, “So lay it out for me.”

“Machine Shop was right there, Pier 35,” Jimmy said. “He didn’t see it happen, but he was on the scene right after, saw them load the body. She was wearing the blue dress.”

“Did
anybody
actually see it happen?”

“I don’t know. I guess. It must have been crowded down there.”

“Then what?”

“They brought her here. Shop and me came here, after we’d gone back down to the waterfront together.”

“And this girl is the one you saw that night? That same night. Here.”

“Her face was crushed in,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know.”

Angel said, “I never
knew
Lucy was dead. You know what I mean? I never felt it.”

The intensity was still there, but his anger was gone. And Jimmy knew why.

“She’s alive out there somewhere,” Angel said. “Her and her brother.”

Angel wasn’t even three feet from the car when he put a Sailor on his back in the parking lot with a single shot to the face. Angel wasn’t that big, so a good part of what knocked the man down was just surprise.

“Sorry,” Angel said. “Don’t come at me like that.”

They were on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was three in the morning. The tourists were long gone, but there were two or three hundred Sailors between the Porsche and the warehouse building. And no Black Moses to part the Red Sea this time.

Whatever tension, noise that had been in the air before, it had been cranked up a few notches. The waterfront Sailors saw Jimmy and Angel for what they were, two guys looking for trouble, or for something on the other side of trouble, and most of them backed out of the way.

But not the guard at the door. It was Red Boots, the blond, pouty Billy Idol in the peacoat and navy watch cap who’d tailed Jimmy his first night in town.

“Hold up there, mate,” he said, putting a hand on Jimmy’s chest.

Jimmy slammed his face into the metal door, something of an overreaction.

But effective. It knocked the door ajar.

Jimmy and Angel came down the same corridor as before, but this time it opened out onto a dock, inside the huge, unlit warehouse space.

They got their first look at the exterior of the ship.

It was painted black, or some dark color that looked black in this gloom. It was big, a refitted oceangoing trawler. With its three-deck-high square windowless cabin, it came off looking like a missile cruiser.

“What’s the difference between a boat and a ship?” Angel said.

“This is a ship,” Jimmy said.

There was a gangway that was level with the dock, a double-wide hatch at the end of it on the other side. It was probably where they’d been led in the other night for their audience with Wayne Whitehead. Jimmy snatched up a three-foot wrench propped against a mooring winch and went aboard, Angel behind him.