unable to stifle the reflex to flinch. His right forearm jerked up to sweep the cop’s arm away from his chest, while his body turned and his head moved to the side to avoid the punch. The cop’s hand clutched Walker’s coat, so Walker’s sudden dodge kept the cop with him. The blow glanced off the back of Walker’s head, and Walker saw bright red and green blotches explode into his field of vision and then float to the periphery.
Walker scrambled a few feet on the ground, then turned. Stillman had left his own opponent, and now he was advancing on Walker’s. Walker was at once terrified and amazed. He expected the cop to do what cops did, which was to pull out his gun and kill Stillman.
Each instant that he didn’t made Walker more frightened, because it meant it was certain to happen in the next. But the cop on the ground stirred, pushing himself to his feet. Maybe he would be the one.
Walker panicked. He had to stop him from firing. He picked up a fist-sized rock from the ground beside him and hurled it at the cop, then reached for another, sprang to his feet, and threw it at the one who had tried to arrest him.
Nothing seemed to have the effect he had expected. The two cops ran in different directions, then disappeared into the black spaces between buildings.
Stillman took Walker’s arm and pulled him down the alley. “No time to hang around here,” he muttered.
Walker stumbled along with him, slowly regaining his breath and letting his heartbeat slow. He felt a swelling of anger at Stillman. “Why would you do that?” He walked a few paces, faster, then turned. “We’re going to jail.” Then he added, “We’re lucky we’re not dead.”
“Were you under the impression that those were police officers?” Stillman asked calmly.
Walker took in a breath to shout “Yes!” but he stopped. There was absolutely nothing about what they had done that any police officer he’d ever heard of would do. He changed his next words to “They scared the hell out of me.”
Stillman nodded. “You knew you were guilty, so you figured, ‘Sure. Of course they’re cops. I deserve it, so they must be.’ That’s why they pulled that on us.” He looked ahead up the alley. “Now you can compare.”
“What?”
The squad car seemed to fill the alley like a train in a tunnel, leaving little space on either side. Its lights shot up into the sky as it bumped over the incline at the end of the alley, then settled firmly and steadily, growing brighter as the vehicle accelerated toward Stillman and Walker. The car stopped a few feet from them, then eased forward slowly until the window was beside them. The cop in the passenger seat was a young black man. He said, “Good evening, sirs.”
The construction struck Walker as odd, mildly sarcastic. He said, “Good evening.”
“We got a call that there was a disturbance in this alley,” said the cop. “Know anything about that?”
Stillman said, “We did happen to run into two men a few minutes ago. They seemed to be interested in robbing us, but we managed to frighten them off, I guess.”
The policeman opened his door and got out, sliding his billy club into a rung on his belt. Walker noticed that his hand lingered there, between the club and the gun. He stood close to them. “Someone said there was a fight. Shouting and so on.”
“That’s kind of an exaggeration,” said Stillman. “It was just two guys about six feet tall, about thirty years old. They were getting ready to jump us, but when we got close, I think we were bigger than they expected, so they ran.”
“May I ask what you’re doing in the alley?”
He was staring at Walker, but Stillman spoke. “We’re visitors in town, and we parked over there on the street”—he turned to point in roughly the right direction—“and we figured this was a good shortcut.”
The cop kept his eyes on Walker. “And two men just came along at the same time?”
Walker knew he had to be the one to answer. “They seemed to be waiting here for whoever showed up.”
The policeman nodded. “Would you mind showing me some identification?”
Stillman pulled out his wallet and handed the cop his driver’s license, so Walker did the same. The cop handed the two licenses to his partner in the car, and the partner punched some numbers into the computer terminal mounted beside him. The cop returned his attention to Walker and Stillman. “What brings you to Pasadena?”
Stillman was supremely calm and friendly. “We work for McClaren’s, the insurance company. There’s a girl—a lady my friend here knew from his training school days, and he asked me if we could stop by and see her. No luck. We missed her at the office, and now she’s not at home, either.”
“I see.” His partner muttered something and the cop leaned into the window to confer with him. He came back with the licenses. “Here you go.” He looked up and down the alley, then said, “We’ll make a report of this, but I’m not sure what good it’s going to do you. They’re long gone by now.”
Stillman nodded. “I understand. They didn’t get any money from us, so I guess there’s not much harm done.”
The policeman sat in the car seat again, but before he pulled his leg in, he said, “Even in San Francisco, walking down dark alleys probably isn’t the best idea.”
“I’ve had better,” Stillman said.
“Take care,” said the cop. He shut the door and the car drifted down the alley. Now and then the bright beam of the spotlight shot out to the side and played about a row of garbage cans, a narrow space between buildings. Then the police car turned and disappeared.
Stillman stepped into the nearest passage toward the street. “Well, now that was a rotten piece of timing,” he said. “I had hoped to get a couple of names out of their wallets, not give mine to a cop.” He stopped and let Walker catch up. “What we need is dinner.”
“It is?”
“Otherwise we’ll have to drink on an empty stomach.”
5
The Coast of Borneo was a relic of a period that Walker had missed, and he calculated that even Stillman had to be too young to have seen anything but strange little outposts cut off and isolated by flanking movements of change. The big bare-beamed dining room had outrigger canoes hanging from the ceiling, and drinks served in ceramic mugs that were effigies of somebody’s gods. As he followed Stillman deeper into the place, he gazed at a man in a chef’s hat behind glass prodding a huge slab of sizzling meat over flames that threatened to flare up and engulf them both, then waited while an Oriental waiter in a tuxedo tucked two gigantic menus under his arm and conducted them across an unused dance floor and up onto the tiered gallery of tables.
Stillman sat down and squinted up at the waiter for a few seconds as though the two of them were in a poker game and the waiter had just raised. The waiter held a tiny pad in the palm of his hand with a pen poised over it. Stillman said, “Can your bartender make a real mai tai?”
“Old-fashioned kind?” asked the waiter, now assessing Stillman with veiled interest.
“That’s right,” said Stillman. “The old-fashioned kind.”
“Two mai tai old-fashioned kind,” the waiter announced, and put a strike mark on his pad that could not have been a Chinese character, then spun on his heel and went off. It seemed to Walker that the pad must be for appraising the customers, and Stillman had scored high.
“What’s changed about mai tais?”
Stillman shrugged. “Beats me. It’s pretty clear they’ve gone to hell like everything else.”
The waiter returned with two large glasses filled with liquid the color of liver. Stillman sipped his, then said, “Perfect.”
Walker tasted his, and guessed that “old-fashioned kind” must mean that the quantity of rum was up to the standard in force when driving drunk was still legal in Los Angeles. He tasted it again, and decided those days would be missed.
A few minutes later the waiter reappeared, his tiny pad in his hand and his eyebrow raised expectantly. Stillman nodded to Walker.
Walker replied, “Should we have what Mr. Fo ordered in 1949?”
