Sole Survivor

dysfunctional and antisocial, an illness from which he himself was only beginning to recover with great difficulty, and he feared for a society in which such gloom was widespread.

“Strange times,” Fittich said, as Joe had said weird times to Barbara a short while ago. “They scare me.” He went to his chair, put his feet on the desk, and stared at the ball game on television. “Better go now.”

With the flesh on the nape of his neck as crinkled as crepe paper, Joe walked outside to the yellow Subaru.

Across the street, the man at the bus stop looked impatiently left and right, as though disgruntled about the unreliability of public transportation.

The engine of the Subaru turned over at once, but it sounded tinny. The steering wheel vibrated slightly. The upholstery was worn, and pine-fragrant solvents didn’t quite mask the sour scent of cigarette smoke that over the years had saturated the vinyl and the carpet.

Without looking at the man in the bus-stop shelter, Joe drove out of the lot. He turned right and headed up the street past his abandoned Honda.

The pickup with the camper shell was still parked in front of the untenanted industrial building.

When Joe reached the intersection just past the camper truck, there was no cross-traffic. He slowed, did not come to a full stop, and instead put his foot down heavily on the accelerator.

In the rearview mirror, he saw the man from the bus stop hurrying toward the camper, which was already backing into the street. Without the transponder to guide them, they would have to maintain visual contact and risk following him close enough to blow their cover — which they thought they still enjoyed.

Within four miles Joe lost them at a major intersection when he sped through a yellow traffic signal that was changing to red. When the camper tried to follow him, it was thwarted by the surging cross-traffic. Even over the whine and rattle of the Subaru engine, he heard the sharp bark of their brakes as they slid to a halt inches short of a collision.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, he abandoned the Subaru on Hilgarde Street near the UCLA campus, as far as he dared from the address where he was to meet Demi. He walked fast to Westwood Boulevard, trying not to break into a run and draw attention to himself.

Not long ago Westwood Village had been an island of quaint charm in the more turbulent sea of the city around it, a mecca for shoppers and theatergoers. Amidst some of the most interesting small-scale architecture of any Los Angeles commercial district and along the tree-lined streets had thrived trendy clothing stores, galleries, restaurants, prosperous theaters featuring the latest cutting-edge dramas and comedies, and popular movie houses. It was a place to have fun, people-watch, and be seen.

Then, during a period when the city’s ruling elite was in one of its periodic moods to view certain forms of sociopathic behavior as a legitimate protest, vagrancy increased, gang members began to loiter in groups, and open drug dealing commenced. A few shootings occurred in turf disputes, and many of the fun lovers and shoppers decided that the scene was too colorful and that to be seen here was to be marked as a victim.

Now Westwood was struggling back from the precipice. The streets were safer than they had been for a while. Many shops and galleries had closed, however, and new businesses had not moved into all of the empty storefronts. The lingering atmosphere of despair might take years to dissipate entirely. Built at the solemn pace of coral reefs, civilization could be destroyed with frightening swiftness, even by a blast of good intentions, and all that was lost could be regained, if ever, only with determination.

The gourmet coffeehouse was busy. From the open door came the delicious aromas of several exotic brews and the music of a lone guitarist playing a New Age tune that was mellow and relaxing though filled with tediously repetitive chords.

Joe intended to scout the meeting place from across the street and farther along the block, but he arrived too late to do so. At two minutes past six o’clock, he stood outside the coffeehouse as instructed, to the right of the entrance, and waited to be contacted.

Over the noise of the street traffic and the guitar, he heard a soft tuneless jangling-tinkling. The sound instantly alarmed him, for reasons he could not explain, and he looked around nervously for the source.

Above the door were wind chimes crafted from at least twenty spoons of various sizes and materials. They clinked together in the light breeze.

Like a mischievous childhood playmate, memory taunted him from hiding place after hiding place in a deep garden of the past dappled by light and shadow. Then suddenly he recalled the ceiling-mounted rack of copper pots and pans in the Delmanns’ kitchen.

Returning from Charlie Delmann’s bedroom, in answer to Lisa’s scream, Joe had heard the cookware clinking and softly clanging as he had hurried along the downstairs hall. Coming through the door into the kitchen, he saw the pots and pans swinging like pendulums from their hooks.

By the time he reached Lisa and saw Georgine’s corpse on the floor, the cookware had settled into silence. But what set those items in motion in the first place? Lisa and Georgine were at the far end of the long room, nowhere near the dangling pots.

Like the flashing green numbers on the digital clock at Charlie Delmann’s bedside, like the swelling of flames in the three oil lamps on the kitchen table, this coppery music was important.

He felt as though a hard rap of insight was about to crack the egg of his ignorance.

Holding his breath, mentally reaching for the elusive connection that would make sense of these things, Joe realized that the shell-cracking insight was receding. He strained to bring it back. Then, maddeningly, it was gone.

Perhaps none of these things was important: not the oil lamps, not the digital clock, not the jangling cookware. In a world viewed through lenses of paranoia — a pair of distorting spectacles that he had been wearing with good reason for the past day and a half — every falling leaf, every whisper of wind, and every fretwork of shadows was invested with a portentous meaning that, in reality, it did not possess. He was not merely a neutral observer, not merely a reporter this time, but a victim, central to his own story, so maybe he could not trust his journalistic instincts when he saw significance in these small, if admittedly strange, details.

Along the sidewalk came a tall black kid, college age, wearing shorts and a UCLA T-shirt, gliding on Rollerblades. Joe, puzzling over clues that might not be clues at all, paid little attention to the skater, until the kid spun to a stop in front of him and handed him a cellular phone.

“You’ll need this,” said the skater, in a bass voice that would have been pure gold to any fifties doo-wop group.

Before Joe could respond, the skater rolled away with powerful pushes of his muscular legs.

The phone rang in Joe’s hand.

He surveyed the street, searching for the surveillance post from which he was being watched, but it was not obvious.

The phone rang again, and he answered it. “Yeah?”

“What’s your name?” a man asked.

“Joe Carpenter.”

“Who’re you waiting for?”

“I don’t know her name.”

“What do you call her?”

“Demi.”

“Walk a block and a half south. Turn right at the corner and keep going until you come to a bookstore. It’s still open. Go in, find the biography section.”

The caller hung up.

After all, there wasn’t going to be a pleasant get-acquainted chat over coffee.

* * *

According to the business hours posted on the glass door, the bookstore closed on Sundays at six o’clock. It was a quarter past six. Through the big display windows, Joe saw that the fluorescent panels toward the front of the store were dark; only a few at the back were lighted, but when he tried the door, it was unlocked.

Inside, a single clerk waited at the cashiers’ counter. He was black, in his late thirties, as small and wiry as a