Dark Horse (A Jim Knighthorse Novel) (9 page)

“And how am I supposed to find her here at
UCI if you don’t know her name?”

“I know her last name is Peterson. Or at
least I assume it to be. The other two daughters’ names both
started with an A. So I would begin there. Perhaps an Alicia
Peterson, or an Antoinette Peterson.”

“You realize this isn’t part of your job
description, at least not on this case, resolving domestic
violence.”

“I know.”

“And what if she confirms your suspicions of
abuse?”

“Then Dick Peterson and I are going to have a
talk.”

22.

“So why is God dressed like a bum?” I asked.
“Isn’t that a little cliché?”

“I invented cliché,” said Jack.

I rolled my eyes. He continued.

“But to answer your question: This is how you
perceive me.”

“As a bum?”

“Not exactly. You figure that if God came to
earth, he would do so in a nondescript way.”

“So as not to attract attention.”

“Perhaps.”

“So you appeared in just such a way.”

“Yes.”

“Or maybe you are just a bum, after all.”

“Maybe. Either way, you are getting something
out of this, am I right?”

I looked at the man. We were sitting opposite
each other at the back of the restaurant. At the moment, we were
the only two people in McDonald’s.

“Yeah, I’m getting something out of it,
although I’m not sure what, and I still don’t know why you’ve come
into my life.”

“You asked me into your life.”

“When?”

“The day I first arrived.”

I was shaking my head, but then I remembered
that day: The twentieth anniversary of my mother’s murder. I had
spent a good deal of that day cursing God.

“You asked me to come down and face you,”
said Jack. “I believe you wanted to fight me.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was very angry.”

“And so I came down not to fight you, but to
love you, Jim Knighthorse.”

“You do this for everybody?”

“Not so dramatically, but often, yes.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“Why not?”

I was drinking a Coke. Big, bubbly Coke that
was the perfect combination of carbonation, ice and cola. Damn. I
love Coke.

“I miss my mother,” I said.

“I know, but she has been with you every day
of your life.”

I suspected that, but didn’t say anything
about it now.

“You know who killed her?” I asked.

The man in front of me—the bum in front of
me—nodded once.

“Her case is unsolved,” I said.

He watched me carefully.

“And I’m going to solve it,” I said.
“Someday.”

“Yes,” he said, “you will.”

“And when I do, I’m going to kill whoever
killed her.”

Jack said nothing, although he did look
away.

23.

I was sitting with my hands behind my head
and feet up on one corner of my desk. This is a classic detective
pose, and I struck it as often as I could. Mostly because it was a
good way to take a nap without appearing to do so. I did my best to
keep my shoes off the desktop’s gold tooled leather.

There was a knock on my office door. Thanks
to Fuck Nut, I kept the door locked these days. I took out my
Browning, held it at my hip and opened the door.

The man I found standing before me was
perhaps the last person I expected to see. Hell, I hadn’t seen or
spoken to him in two years. It was my father. His name was Cooper
Knighthorse.

* * *

He studied me for a few seconds, then looked
coolly at the gun in my hand. “You could scare off clients with
that thing.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not a client, and
someone’s sicced a hitman on my ass.”

He stood easily six inches shorter than me,
which put him around five ten. His shoulders were wider than mine,
and he had freakishly large hands, hands which had pummeled my
backside more than once. But it was his eyes that drew one’s
attention. Ice cold and blue. Calculating and fearless. Devoid of
anything living. Eyes of a corpse.

He smiled slowly, the lips curling up
languidly. When most people smile their eyes crinkle, giving them
crow’s feet over time. My father would never have to worry about
crow’s feet. His eyes didn’t crinkle. Hell, they didn’t know how to
crinkle. When he smiled, as he did now, it was only with the
corners of his mouth. Needless to say, the smile radiated little
warmth.

“Well,” he said. “Are you going to invite me
in?”

I stepped aside and he moved past me
smoothly, carrying himself easily and lightly. He stepped into my
four hundred square foot office which paled in comparison to the
monster he oversaw in L.A. He stood in the middle of the room,
surveying it slowly, taking in the pint-sized refrigerator on one
wall, the well-stocked trophy case adjacent to it, my sofa, the
sink, and finally the desk.

His assessment was over embarrassingly quick.
He turned to face me with no emotion on his face. Did he approve of
the place? Or not? Was he proud of his only son, or disappointed?
Impossible to tell. Did I need his approval? Impossible to tell.
But probably, and it galled me to admit it.

He was wearing a western-style denim shirt
and khaki carpenter pants with a hammer loop. There was no hammer
in the loop. His evenly-distributed silver hair was perfectly
parted to one side. He was the picture of fitness and vitality,
health and ruggedness. Just don’t look at the eyes.

“So,” he said, “who wants you dead?”

I stepped around him, slipped into my leather
seat and motioned toward the Mr. Coffee. He shook his head and
eased himself down carefully into one of the three client chairs.
The chair, which usually creaked, didn’t creak this time.

“Someone wants me to back off a case.”

“Any idea who that someone is?”

“Not yet.”

“Would be good to know that. Better for your
health. Who’s the hitman?”

“Older guy, wears a hoop earring. Hell of a
shooter. Eyes like a shark.” I neglected to say: eyes like
yours.

My father leaned back a little and allowed
his cold eyes to spill across my face. They settled on my damaged
ear. “He do your ear?”

“Yes.”

“He’s one sick motherfucker.”

“You know him?”

“Runs a kiddie porn magazine. Would be good
for society if he disappeared.” He paused. “I can take care of
him.”

“No.”

He studied me for a moment. I refused to turn
away from his gaze. “Is he a better shooter than you?” he
asked.

“We’ll find out.”

“Or you can just drop the case,” said my
father. “And he’ll leave you alone.”

“Or not.”

He smiled. “Or not.”

We sat together in silence. Muted street
sounds came through the closed window. My refrigerator kicked on
and hummed away. My father lifted his gaze without moving his head
and scanned the wall behind me. He was looking at the pictures, the
articles, the bullet holes in the wall. I could kiss my security
deposit goodbye.

“I watched every game,” he said.

This was news to me, but I remained
silent.

“I was there for every game. At least every
home game. I always sat in the back rows. How did you get so
goddamn good?”

“Must have been all those special moments we
spent playing catch in the park on Sunday afternoons.”

“There are some things I regret in this
life,” he said. “Not being a father to you is one of them.” He
reached inside his pocket and removed a pouch of photographs.
“These were taken on the last day your mother was alive.”

Something froze within me, as if my stomach
had suddenly been dropped into a bucket of ice. My father, the
great Cooper Knighthorse, detective extraordinaire, set the packet
on the table.

“I loved her the best way I could, Jim.”

“Why are you giving me these pictures?” I
asked.

“Because I want you to see her happy. I want
you to see us happy. We were trying, Jim. I was trying.”

“You were trying to fuck anything you could
get your hands on.”

If I shook him, he didn’t show it, although
the corners of his lips quivered slightly. His pale eyes stared at
me.

“We’ve all made mistakes, Jim. There’s
something else in the pictures.”

“What?”

But he didn’t answer me. Didn’t even
acknowledge my simple question. He simply looked at me a moment
longer, stood, then walked out of my office. He shut the door
carefully behind him.

I stared at the closed door for a long, long
time.

24.

I didn’t worry about locking the office door
after my father left. I could give a shit about the hitman. I had
my Browning on the desk in front of me. Woe to anyone who walked
unannounced into my office at that moment.

The packet of photographs was yellowing, the
flap torn. On it was a little boy blowing soap bubbles with the
word KODAK inside a particularly large bubble. The packet wasn’t
very thick, containing perhaps twenty-four pictures in all. I had
never seen these pictures, and, in fact, did not know of their
existence.

I poured myself a cup of coffee with extra
cream and sugar.

Heat seeped through the porcelain cup and
scalded my palms, but I kept them there, feeling the heat, ignoring
the heat, unaware of the heat.

Lifting both hands, I took a sip. Tasted the
coffee, but didn’t really taste it. Same fucking routine.

I was ten years old when I found her dead.
She had bled to death all over her new bedroom set. My father and I
had gone to pick up a pizza and rent a movie. I was the first
through the front door, carrying the pizza box, excited because my
father was in a particularly good mood.

Once inside I called her name, told her the
pizza was here and to get it while it was hot. The light was on in
her bedroom, but there was no movement, no sound. I set the pizza
box down on our dining room table, was about to open it when my
father told me to get my mother first.

I headed down the hallway separating the
dining room from the master bedroom, calling her name. There was no
response. I slowed my pace when I saw her hand lying on the floor.
Her hand was completely covered in something red. At first I
thought it was a red glove. A wet, gleaming glove, although it
wasn’t entirely wet. Only parts of it were. It was blood, and it
was drying rapidly, congealing over her hand.

I stepped through the doorway and into a
nightmare. Blood was everywhere, sprayed across the entire room. It
reached everything, touched everything, infused everything. She was
lying on the wooden floor in a great puddle of it. Her pink
nightgown was soaked. Face-down, her head turned away, looking
beneath the bed. The last thing she had seen in the world was a box
of my childhood clothing. She kept the box because she always
wanted another baby. The box read: Jimmy’s Stuff.

There was a bloodied hand print on the box
where she had reached for it.

25.

I opened the packet and removed the small
pile of pictures. A quick count gave me twenty-two in all.

On the last day of my mother’s life, I had
been at Pop Warner football practice, and then later at a friend’s
house for a pool party. I know now my parents had used the
opportunity to renew their marriage and spend some quality time
together. My mother wanted us to be a happy family. She wanted my
father to take an interest in me, rather than viewing me as an
obligation. She had gotten pregnant at a young age, and they had
married in their late teens. They were not in love.

Early in the marriage, my father joined the
military and spent much of that time fighting in secret wars. I
would learn later that he was an expert sniper. Expert and deadly.
Apparently, my own marksman skills with a gun had been inherited
from him. When he came home from his various assignments, flush
from his recent kills, he was never really home. He was restless
and horny as hell. I had caught him in various parts of town with
different women, once in the backseat of our car parked around the
corner of our house. I had thrown a brick through the window and
scared the hell out of them. I stood there defiantly as he looked
up at me through the window. He never said a word about it, never
apologized, and had the window replaced the next day.

At first glance, you would never believe that
the smiling couple in the picture were unhappy, or that the man
with the pale blue eyes was a trained killer or that the woman
would only have hours more to live. They were both happy and
carefree, hugging and waving. They could have been on a
honeymoon.

The majority of the pictures were at the
Huntington Beach pier, just a hop skip and jump from my condo. In
one picture my mother was sticking her slender backside out
seductively toward the camera. My father zoomed in on it tightly. I
found myself smiling. They were flirting with each other, and it
was nice to see. It was perhaps the most fun I had ever seen them
have with each other. For that alone, I was thankful my father had
given me the pictures.

He was wearing jeans, carpenter’s boots and a
yellow T-shirt that said JEEP across it. My mother had on a red
blouse, jean shorts and leather sandals. Her legs were slender and
naturally tan. Her hair was dark brown and cut short. Her features
were slender and sharp. Full red lips and deep brown eyes. She
looked like Audrey Hepburn, only prettier.

There were pictures of them along the pier,
next to a statue I didn’t recognize, standing next to two young
men, one of whom was holding a freshly caught sand shark. In that
picture, my mother secretly giving my father rabbit ears behind his
back.