Burning Man (28 page)

“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said, changing the light tone of our conversation to something more serious.

Lisbet took a read of my eyes and then a more pointed read of my scarred face. “I hope you’re not implying that this is some kind of mercy date. Yes, the first time we met I couldn’t help but notice the scarring on your face, but I stopped seeing it after that.”

“You’re doing better than me, then. Sometimes I’m still startled when I see myself in the mirror.”

“Sounds like me when I have a bad hair day.”

I didn’t have to force my smile. “I’m getting used to the new me, but I was really self-conscious when I first started going out in public and noticed all the surreptitious staring directed my way.”

“I’ll bet not as many people were staring at your scars as you thought.”

“You’d lose that bet.”

“I’m not saying that people weren’t staring, but not all of them were looking at your scars. They were staring at a hero. Your capturing the Strangler was a huge story. I still remember all those breaking news reports on how you and Sirius were doing.”

“I guess I missed all the hoopla being in the burn unit. Everything was sort of a blur the first few days. There was a TV in my room, but I couldn’t watch it because the fire had burned my eyelids and corneas, and my face was swaddled in bandages.”

“That must have been awful.”

Her sympathetic voice kept me talking. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so isolated. What made it even worse was that my doctors told me I might lose my sight. So there I was in my personal darkness with nothing to do but worry, except on those too frequent occasions when I was being tortured.”

Thinking that I’d offered up too much poor, poor, pitiful me, I finished with, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you enjoy the play?”

Lisbet had the good sense to groan.

I said, “You’d think all of that would put a few scars in perspective, wouldn’t you?”

“Didn’t it?”

I shrugged. “I wasn’t only worried about my life or my sight. I was afraid that without a full recovery I wouldn’t have a job on the force.”

“If I was fighting for my life, the last thing I’d think about was my work.”

“When Jen died, work took on a new importance for me. It gave me a reason to keep going. So even when the doctors told me I was out of the woods, I kept worrying about the department finding some medical reason that would prevent me from returning to the force. That’s why I memorized eye charts and prepared for how to best answer questions about my physical and mental health. To tell the truth, I’m still paranoid.”

“Is there a reason to be?”

Instead of answering, I did a De Niro parody straight out of
Taxi Driver
: “You talkin’ to me?”

Her smile afforded me the opportunity to echo the same bad impersonation, and the second time around it even got a laugh. That spared me from having to provide Lisbet with a real answer.

We made our way back downstairs and settled on her sofa. I asked Lisbet about her work, and afterward she asked me about mine, and I told her a little bit about the Special Cases Unit.

“I am glad the LAPD considered Moses and Rose special cases,” she said. “It wasn’t that way in the past.”

I didn’t tell her the department hadn’t had a change of heart. “I guess Moses and Rose are a little more personal to me than they would be to most other cops.”

She waited for me to elaborate. Anyone but Lisbet would have had to wait for a long time.

“I was abandoned as a newborn. It’s likely my mother was a druggie, but I don’t know for sure. The police never found out who she was, but it’s not like they looked very hard either for her or for answers.”

“I am sorry.”

“Don’t be. I had two great adoptive parents. And I’ve found some unexpected bonuses to not knowing my background.”

“And what might those be?”

“I get to celebrate every ethnic and religious holiday like it’s my very own. On Saint Patrick’s Day I’m an Irishman, on Cinco de Mayo I’m Mexican, and on Chinese New Year’s I’m Chinese.”

Lisbet looked at me skeptically. “Chinese?”

“
Gong xi fa cai
,” I said, establishing my Chinese credentials. “What’s your ancestry?”

“I’m a mongrel. I’m part English, French, German, and Italian.”

“That’s perfect. The two of us can celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day, Oktoberfest, and Ferragosto.”

“What? No Druid holiday?”

“It’s not December twenty-first without a winter solstice pagan ritual.”

“Do you sacrifice a virgin?”

“Druids don’t appreciate that stereotype. Solstice Day finds me and my brethren imbibing in potent Druid fluid and dancing around oak trees.”

“It sounds like you have a full dance card. Is there any holiday you don’t celebrate?”

“I haven’t celebrated Valentine’s Day in a long time.”

My announcement made for a prelude to a kiss. It was a long time before we came up for air.

“Valentine’s Day is still three weeks off,” Lisbet said.

“I believe in precelebrations.” We kissed again.

“That’s why I never did one of those DNA ancestry searches,” I said. “I prefer being an international man of mystery.”

“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Lisbet said. She raised her wine glass and said, “
L’chaim
.”

We clinked and drank.

“Were you really considering doing one of those DNA tests?” she asked.

I nodded. “I think what stopped me is that I was afraid of opening Pandora’s box.”

“It’s better to not know some things?”

“Something like that.”

“Did you ever consider trying to track down your birth mother?”

I was already shaking my head halfway into her question. “In my book my birth mother is guilty of a lot more than child abandonment. It was only by luck that I didn’t end up like Rose. Even if she is still alive, why would I want to establish a relationship with a woman that discarded me and left me to die?”

“You have good reason to be angry with her, but you don’t know the circumstances of her life.”

“And I don’t want to know. There are some crimes that aren’t forgivable.”

“You are sounding like judge, jury, and executioner.”

“I wouldn’t mind being all three.”

“Have you considered there might have been extenuating conditions? What if your mother was mentally ill, like Moses’s mother?”

“Being sick in the head doesn’t give you a free pass to kill your child. Moses’s mother went off her meds. That was her choice, and her son died because of it.”

“So you think she should have gone to jail?”

“Damned right,” I said. Because of her schizophrenia, Moses’s mother had skated on any jail time, and that still rankled.

“You don’t see any circumstances where you could forgive these mothers?”

“I’m a cop, Lisbet, and my job is to enforce the laws of our fair city.”

“Enforcement is one thing but exacting vengeance is another.”

“And just how am I exacting vengeance?”

“It sounds as if your own abandonment comes into play.”

“If that’s part of my motivation, why is it a bad thing? You don’t want to see justice handed out to these women?”

“I don’t think all these cases are the same, and I don’t think there is any one punishment that fits the crime.”

“I guess we don’t see eye to eye then.”

“Or eye for an eye?”

“There’s that, too.”

We sipped our wine. With anyone else I probably could have been assured of my self-righteousness, but not with Lisbet. She might not have been abandoned herself, but she dealt with the consequences of abandoned babies, making her more than entitled to her opinion. Besides, she didn’t let me pout for long. My high dander was interrupted by her stretching out her bare foot and tickling me in the ribs.

I grabbed said foot while taking note of its shapely toes and high arch, and began tickling it in turn. After our squirming and laughing was done we were in each other’s arms again, where the only thing we were tickling was each other’s fancy. Our touching became more urgent until Lisbet gave herself some space from my hands.

“You and the wine are making me dizzy.”

“Clear thinking is overrated.”

“You really should spend the night so I don’t have to worry about you.”

“I think you’d have more to worry about if I spent the night.”

“The sofa bed really is comfortable.”

“If that’s the extent of my options, I should probably hit the road.”

Lisbet bit her lip and then opened her mouth to say something, but I interrupted her before she could speak. “I have to be leaving anyway. The last twenty-four hours have been a roller coaster, and tomorrow I have a ton of work waiting for me.”

She nodded, and I was glad to see that Lisbet looked disappointed, or at least that’s how I wanted to interpret it. “Promise me you’ll be careful tonight.”

“I promise.”

We sealed the promise with a kiss.

Lisbet walked me to the door, where we did a little more canoodling, and where I told her, “I could canoodle with you all night.”

That made her laugh and ask, “Are you sure you have to go?”

Her eyes made their offer to me, and it was one I wanted to take up, but I said, “I think I better.”

I took my leave with a last kiss. What Lisbet didn’t know was that what stopped me from staying more than anything else was the prospect of my dreams. It was too late to explain about them and me. I didn’t want to venture into her bed and then wake up screaming and burning. I was more afraid of that than the two of us sharing our bodies for the very first time.

I should have told her, I thought. It’s not good to start a relationship with a lie, and that’s what it felt like I had done.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I said, the echo reverberating around the parking garage. It seemed an appropriate rhyme, and I remembered the next line: “Hanging from a telephone wire.”

Ever since the fire I had been hanging. My burning had never stopped, and I hadn’t yet found a way to get beyond that.

“You got a stupid partner,” I told Sirius.

He didn’t argue.

CHAPTER 17:
THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

It had been a hell of a day. I was hoping it wouldn’t be a hell of a night. My burning dreams had been working overtime lately. When they occur two or three times a week, I try to tell myself that’s manageable. Of late, though, it had been a nightly event. My cases seemed to be stirring up my subconscious and the end result was me burning.

The next day was Sunday, I told myself. I could sleep in.

I remembered when Jen had shared my bed. We always held one another before turning in. If Jenny kissed me on the lips, that meant she wasn’t ready for sleep. A kiss on the nose was another matter. That meant it was time to snooze. That kiss on my nose always brought a smile to my lips, and the next thing I knew it was morning.

I touched my nose for luck. Within seconds I fell asleep. You’d think I would have been too exhausted to have had one of my dreams. My subconscious begged to differ. As usual, hell broke loose in the middle of the night. Most people drool if they’re sleeping deeply. I am into combustion.

The fiery blast furnace, pushed by the swirling winds, blew into my face. I recoiled from it, but too late. The fire was being blown
every which way and there was no escaping it. We staggered away from the worst of the heat and paused to catch our breath. With so much smoke in the air, there seemed to be a great divide between me and the Strangler, but there was only the length of a dying dog that separated us.

The light from the burning fires allowed me to see his face. His features were almost totally black from all the smoke and soot. The Strangler’s eyebrows had been singed away along with much of his hair, and I knew the flames had exacted the same toll on me. His eyes were red and enflamed, and they were so deep within his sockets they looked like burning embers. But he could still see well enough to plot.

I watched him take a quick peek over his head and sensed he was ready to make a run for it. The Strangler knew how hobbled I was, knew that every step hurt like hell.

“You can’t outrun a bullet,” I croaked. “Before you get two steps away I’ll empty my gun into you.”

He reconsidered his flight, if not his plight. “The dog’s dead,” he said. “We have to think of ourselves.”

I forced myself to look at Sirius. If the Strangler was right, I knew what I’d have to do. “Put him down,” I said, “carefully.”

We lowered Sirius to the ground. As I dropped to one knee I kept my gun pointed at the Strangler.

“See,” the Strangler said. “He’s not breathing.”

Earlier Sirius had been panting wildly, but now he was still. My heart started pounding, and the static inside my head made it impossible for me to hear anything other than my surging blood pressure. With my free hand I reached out and touched Sirius’s chest.

Nothing.

The Strangler looked hopeful. He wanted Sirius to be dead. He thought that not having to carry a heavy dog around would be a good thing for him. He was wrong. My trigger finger tightened, but at that moment Sirius’s paw moved and then his chest rose.

“He’s alive,” I said.

“We can’t...”

I moved my Glock no more than half an inch; I wasn’t going to miss. The way I was feeling, it didn’t really matter to me whether the Strangler cooperated or not.

“We’ll lift him on three,” I said.

“We have a chance to live if we leave him. We’re dead if we don’t.”

“One.”

“If we find a way out of here we can send help for him.”

“Two.”

The Strangler’s head jerked in my direction. He could hear the intent in my voice and he suddenly realized that there were two counts going on, and that one of those counts was going to end very badly for him. He dropped down and placed his hands underneath Sirius, and it took me a moment to realize what I was feeling: disappointment. Now I would have to keep going.