Fire Angel (31 page)

Kate broke from him only at the final call. He gave her his business card, scrawled his cell phone number on the back. She took it, but she didn't give him hers.

“I think we should keep this a one-time deal,” she said.

He was astonished. “This? What we've had? Just once? You're kidding me.”

“I'm not kidding you,” she said, giving him her best steely-eyed cop look.

“That's not working. That expression. You're not fooling me. You're not that hard, not that cold. I know you're not. I know — ” he was saying, even as she walked away.

“Call me!” he shouted. “Call me tonight, and I'll take you to dinner. Okay? Call me!”

She didn't call of course. And she never told him her last name or that she worked downtown out of Parker Center, in fact she led him to believe her office was in the Valley, where she'd worked vice when she first made the move to L.A. So even if he wanted to call her — but he'd probably changed his mind, the way guys did anyway, he was probably even married or something, that was the way guys were, she'd certainly discovered that firsthand — he couldn't have found her easily. Sure, there was a small part of her that hoped he would find her, though. But it was just a very small part.

They had fun all right, but intense sexual attraction and a shared sense of humor were not things to build a relationship on. She didn't think so, anyway. And she certainly didn't even want a relationship, not with a guy she met less than twenty-four hours after a judge granted her a divorce from her cheating, lying husband.

Still, she did think about him, the way she was thinking of him now. That smile. Those eyes. Months later, she tried to call him. Andy Wallace. His cell phone was out of service. The
Times
said he didn't work there anymore. He wasn't listed when she called 411. Sure, she was a cop, she could've tried harder, but by then, even though she still thought of him — the way she was still thinking of him now, a year later — she was much more certain that she'd sworn off all men for all time.

She was so focused on her work, she didn't have time for a guy anyway. He'd almost have to be a suspect in some case she was working for her to even notice he was alive.

It was getting on toward full dark now, and Kate picked up her pace. Through the smog and the clouds she could just make out Venus; the moon would be rising except that it was a new moon tonight, nothing to rise. A night bird let out a lonely song.

Kate's route climbed upward now, on a slender dirt trail through scruffy brush, toward Observatory parking lot.

It was the same spot where Arnold Schwarzenegger, stark naked, stole some punk's clothes when he first time traveled in
Terminator 1
, where James Dean chased Natalie Wood around in
Rebel Without a Cause
.

For a cool down, she'd turn back around and power walk downhill again to her condo off Western Avenue.

A little out of breath, Kate was about to crest the hill into that parking lot when she saw something, something small, shiny and black almost buried in the bushes. It was about halfway down the hill, to the right of the path she was taking.

There was a part of Kate that just wanted to ignore the thing, whatever it was. She was almost through her run, she was tired, sweaty, thirsty, she'd put in a ten-hour day devoted mainly to paperwork.

Then there was the other part of Kate, the part that got her locked into a job that caused ten-hour paperwork days in the first place. It was also the kind of job that in the best of times allowed Kate to sort through the general detritus of life until she could right a wrong or two, unravel a tangled skein of crime here and there, and sometimes, in her most satisfying moments, save a life or two. Deep down, she supposed her job was how she saved herself.

Her ex called her “Kate Crusader,” at first, in a loving kind of way, when he'd coached at Rutgers and they'd met in a Jersey shore bar. Toward the end, out here in the Golden State, when it was his crimes she was unraveling, the wrongs against herself she was trying to right, he said it a lot less kindly.

And it was with the memory of Ron's deprecation goading her that she veered downhill again, off the trail, scratching her calves in the brush, hoping there was no poison oak around, to investigate that shiny black thing. It might after all be someone's lost or stolen wallet.

Or it might be, as it turned out, someone's abandoned shoe. A shiny black loafer, a very good black loafer, a Guillermo Ferramo.

She got a funny feeling just from looking at that shoe. It was not the sort of shoe you'd throw in the brush. Not the sort of shoe you'd toss out a car window for a laugh, or in a fit of passion.

Kate squinted into the brush. She pulled a flashlight key from the pocket of her running shorts. She shone the light into the bushes. Nothing.

She turned the light uphill, in the direction of the parking lot. Also nothing.

She turned the light again, downhill now, toward the zoo, and there, sure enough, was another black shiny thing sticking out of a bush.

She scuffled down toward it. Something bit her, probably a lyme disease ridden insect. There were metal signs posted all over the park about such insects being “observed” in the “vicinity,” though how it was possible to tell from observing whether a pest was a lyme disease perp or not, Kate didn't know.

It was so dark now that she almost lost sight of the second shoe. But her little beam of bright blue light caught the shine of it again, and she bent down to pick it up. This shoe was for some reason heavier, a lot heavier than the other. Probably it was heavier because inside the shoe was a foot. A foot in a sleek, dark silk sock.

Kate dropped the shoe fast. She bent down on her haunches and peered into the underbrush. The blue light showed the outline of a man's body. A somewhat tall man in a classy designer pin-striped suit, a man that wasn't moving. A man, who, in fact, appeared to be sprawled, face down with a suspicious blood-like liquid seeping out around his neck.

Kate felt a sick feeling rising up in her stomach. Some of it was the fact that here she was in the dark, in the park, next to a dead guy. It was a situation that, to be absolutely honest, was not completely out of the norm for Kate, but was nevertheless an unpleasant realization given that she was by herself there, unarmed, in the dark with the dead guy.

And now she had more to add to her case load.

And on top of that, there was the unassailable fact that here she was in a jogging bra and shorts and she was going to have to call this in, and she was going to have to stand around with a bunch of guys she knew and a bunch of guys she didn't know, in that jogging bra for hours. A wind sprang up from somewhere, it was a cool wind, and Kate shivered. She felt goosebumps rising on her sweat-damp skin.

One part of Kate looked longingly down the hill, where the lights of the city, like the inside of some elaborate, futuristic computer grid were sprawled out, an intricate circuit of life and light. Somewhere in that grid was her Los Feliz condo, her hot shower, her Moroccan Mint iced tea, her microwavable three-cheese gourmet lasagna. And clothes. Real adult clothes, jeans and tee shirts, not to mention the impressive Loehman's bargain rack suits she scored at this sale or that sale and wore to work. How bad would it be, really, to run on home and change, call in her macabre find in the proper attire? Maybe in the meantime somebody else would discover the body, and she wouldn't have to spend her evening handling the situation at all.

Of course she meant some other cop, not some crazed Santeria-practicing voodoo witch who'd dissect it, not some gang-banger who'd rifle it, not some necrophiliac or cannibal who'd —

And so, on that pleasant thought, Crusader Kate scored a victory. She trudged wearily up the hill to the Observatory and a pay phone.

The indignity of using the pay phone served her right, as she had deliberately left her cell back in her apartment because the last incoming call she'd received was from her friend Anise, trying to convince her to come out on a blind double date — like that was going to happen. Of course if she'd gone, she wouldn't be about to report a body and launch an investigation clad in something only slightly less revealing than her underwear.

As she hustled to the graffiti-scarred pay phone, Kate thought again of Arnold in
T-1
. Maybe she should follow his example and just hijack a leather jacket and a pair of army pants from the first passerby she met.

Of course she didn't meet a single passerby.

But at least there was a dial tone when she picked up the phone and punched in 911.

• • •

It was a sea breeze, cool and stiff and clean, blowing in off the ocean. Andy Wallace pulled up the hood on his sweat jacket as he ran along the sand just below Grand Avenue.

Dockweiler Beach was dead empty this evening, but then it almost always was, unless there was some kind of county sponsored Junior Lifeguard event or a bunch of senior citizens RV camping.

Dockweiler was a beautifully broad, flat stretch of white sand only marginally littered with trash, with not much of a wave break, but at low tide it was tolerable for boogie boarding. It had ample parking, fire pits, semi-working toilets, and at one end, RV hook ups.

The beach's under use was caused solely by its proximity to the airport, and its even closer proximity to the flight path of planes taking off from and landing at the airport. Jets roared back and forth every ten to 15 minutes from 6
A.M.
to 11
P.M.
looking so low you'd think you could jump up and touch them; rattling your teeth, your bones. You could smell jet fuel on the breeze along with the salt spray.

Of course none of this bothered Andy. He was used to it. He lived only a few blocks away and whenever he opened his apartment window he breathed in the same odor of exhaust and sea air; the passing planes shook his windows, vibrated his bed, splashed water out of the sink. Still, he was able to say he lived just a few blocks from the beach, he was able to easily indulge in his surfer-dude, wave-rat habits, habits which had persisted since puberty; and his rent was almost affordable.

Well actually, it was affordable. Affordable for anyone who had a job, which wasn't Andy.

Nope, Andy had quit his job working as a crime reporter on the South Bay/Santa Monica/Westside beat, tired of witnessing and recording firsthand every negative facet of human behavior imaginable, and began his new job, unemployment, and the completion of a long side-lined project: the writing of what he viewed as the next Great American Novel.

It really was a great book; everybody said so. His old agent, the editors at major publishing houses, his new agent, the editors at small presses. They also said it was unclassifiable. Not really literary fiction. Too heavily plotted. Not exactly a thriller either, or a crime novel — Andy cringed at that one — although it had certain dark noir elements.

Apparently, it crossed genres. On top of that, it was too long, did Andy have any idea what it cost publishers just to print an average 85,000-word book, not to mention one that weighed in at 320,000 words?

Andy wondered if the publishers had any idea what it cost him to print and send out a manuscript that weighed that much in the first place.

The manuscript was also single-spaced, an amazing no-no, because it was tough to read. Foolishly, he'd spaced it that way on purpose because of how much more it would've cost him to send the thing out if it was double-spaced. He assumed that once anyone read the first page, they'd be so hooked it wouldn't matter how it was spaced, it wouldn't even matter if he'd written it in Cyrillic. But, it did matter. It also mattered that it was satiric in parts, which no one got, and had a character that was wrong for the audience, if such a book had an audience at all.

And now unemployment had run out, Andy's last credit card was maxed, and his second agent had given up and told him firmly to just “put it aside and write something else.” Write something else? It had taken Andy two years of weekends and late nights, then a full year of working virtually around the clock to write this book.

He was broke. He couldn't work full-time on another book. Not without starving. Not without giving up his apartment. Not without bumming quarters for Starbucks coffee and nursing a single espresso, and writing with the smell of coffee beans oozing out of his pores, writing until the Starbucks closed for the night, and then going to sleep on a park bench, where someone would steal his laptop.

Of course maybe somewhere there was a 24-hour Starbucks, but he'd still have to sleep sometime. Although, if he drank a lot of their coffee and he wrote really, really fast, and if somehow magically that next book sold really, really fast —

Nope, it was out of the question. And yet there he was considering the idea. Maybe he was just plain nuts. When he worked for the
Times
and he was following the murder trial of some Hollywood screenwriter type, he'd heard a neurologist testify that the brain scans of creative people, especially writers, were closer to psychotics than to normal people, something about brain-chemical-related conditions that seemed to be overly abundant.

No matter what his psychotic brain chemicals were telling him, the bitter truth was that the Great American Novel he wrote was never going to sell, and that was it, his one shot, it was over. That he ever thought the book would sell, and for big bucks, too, the kind that would have made his ex-girlfriend not leave him and his bills get magically paid, now struck Andy as deeply ludicrous and a distant memory.

It was on a fishing trip to Tahoe just about a year earlier that he'd decided to go for it, pedal to the metal, finish the damn book. Enough of dragging through the muck of urban crime reporting, enough of hoping he'd make the editorial desk someday; his then rather recently ex-girlfriend was right. Instead of
talking
about writing the book, instead of devoting weekends he could've been devoting to her writing at the pace, she said, “of a perfectionist snail,” he should just get on with it.