Or a woman.
Or a kid…
No, that was too… had to be a dog. Or a cat. How many bones in a paw or a claw?
Too small for a cat.
A medium-sized dog, like Alf. Yeah, this might fit Alf.
He missed Alf, living in Dallas with Kathy.
Was thinking about all that when he shut the latch.
The box rattled.
Bones.
He’d do a little research on the Internet. Maybe sell the collection as antiques-like from an Indian archaeology dig. Out in… Utah. Or Colorado, Colorado sounded more… exotic.
Antique collection of exotic bones.
Stuff like that eBayed great.
CHAPTER 3
Milo had a fancy job title, courtesy the new police chief: Special Case Investigator, Lieutenant Grade.
Or as he put it: “Hoo-hah Poobah Big-Ass Sitting Mallard.”
What it came down to was he avoided most of the paper-pushing that came with his rank, kept his closet-sized office at West L.A. Division, continued to work his own homicides until Downtown called and pointed him elsewhere.
Two calls had come in over the last fourteen months, both Rampart Division gang-revenge shootings. Not even close to whodunits but the chief, still feeling his way in L.A., had heard rumors of fresh Rampart corruption and wanted liability insurance.
The rumors proved false and Milo had concentrated on not being a nuisance. When the cases closed, the chief insisted his assignee’s name be on the reports.
“Even though I was as useful as a stone-blind trapshooter. Made me real popular.”
Easy metaphor; the morning he came up with it, the two of us were blasting away at clay pigeons on a Simi Valley firing range.
Late June, dry heat, blue skies, khaki hills. Milo lumbered through all five positions of the voice-activated trap setup, hitting 80 percent without much effort. Last year he’d been the target of a shotgun-wielding psychopath, still carried pellets in his left shoulder.
I’d emptied an entire box of shells before accidentally nailing one of the bright green disks. As I racked the Browning and drank a warm soda, he said, “When you shoot, you close your left eye.”
“So?”
“So maybe you’re right-handed but left-eyed, and it’s throwing you off balance.”
He had me form a triangle with both hands, positioned my fingers so the space between them was filled by a dead tree off to the east.
“Shut the left one. Now the right. Which one makes it jump more?”
I knew the eye dominance test, had run it years ago as a psych intern, researching brain laterality in learning disabled children.
Never tried it on myself. The results were a surprise.
Milo laughed. “Sinister-eyed. Now you know what to do. Also, stop rejecting the damn thing.”
I said, “What do you mean?” but I knew exactly what he was talking about.
“You’re holding it like you can’t wait to ditch it.” Hefting the gun and handing it over. “Embrace it-lean forward-yeah, yeah, like that.”
I’ve fired pistols and rifles in ugly situations. Don’t enjoy firearms any more than going through dental work, but I appreciate the value of both.
Shotguns, with their elegant lethal simplicity, were another story. Up till today, I’d avoided them.
Twelve-gauge Remingtons had been my father’s playthings of choice. An 870 pump-action Wingmaster purchased at a police auction stood in a corner of Dad’s closet, almost always loaded.
Like Dad.
Summers-late June-he’d make me tag along on squirrel and small-bird hunts. Stalking flimsy little animals with absurd firepower because all he wanted to do was obliterate. Using me to search the bloody dust, bring back a bone fragment or a claw or a beak, because I was more obedient than a dog.
Scared of his mood swings in a way no dog could ever be.
My other assignments were keeping my mouth shut and toting his camouflage-pattern gear bag. Inside, along with his cleaning kit and boxes of ammo and the odd dog-eared
The reek of alcohol on his breath growing stronger as the day wore on.
“Ready, Dead-eye?” said Milo. “Shut the right, open the left, and lean-more-even more, make yourself part of the gun. There you go. Hold that. And don’t aim, just point.” Eyeing the bunker.
Half an hour later: “You hit more than I did, pal. I’ve created a monster.”
At ten thirty we were loading the trunk of my Seville when Milo’s cell phone beeped the first six notes of “My Way.”
He listened while following the ascent of a red-tailed hawk. His big, pale face tightened. “When… okay… an hour.” Click. “Time to head back to anti-civilization. Drive,
As we got on the 118 East, he said, “Body dumped in the Bird Marsh in Playa, some volunteer found it last night, Pacific Division’s on it.”
“But,” I said.
“Pacific’s shorthanded cause of ‘gang suppression issues.’ The only free guy is a rookie His Holiness wants ‘augmented.’ ”
“Problem child?”
“Who knows? Anyway, that’s the official story.”
“Yet, you wonder.”
He pushed a lick of black hair off a pocked brow, stretched his legs, ran his hand over his face, like washing without water.
“The marsh is political, right? And the chief’s a politician.”
As I drove back toward the city, he phoned for details, got a sketch.
Recent kill, white female, twenties, evidence of ligature strangulation.
Removal of the entire right hand by way of a surgically clean cut.
“One of those,” he said. “Time to keep both your eyes open, Doctor.”
The Bird Marsh is a two-acre triangle of uneasy compromise half a mile east of the ocean, where Culver and Jefferson and Lincoln boulevards intersect. Three sides of the triangle face multilane thoroughfares, condominium- crammed bluffs loom over the southern edge, the LAX flight plan brings in mechanical thunder.
The bulk of the wetlands occupies a bowl-like depression, well below the view of passing motorists, and as I parked across the street, all I could see was summer-brown grass and the crowns of distant willows and cottonwoods. In L.A. anything that can’t be appreciated from a speeding car doesn’t count, and federal protection for the flora and fauna sandwiched between all that progress has remained elusive.
Five years ago a film studio run by a klatch of self-proclaimed progressive billionaires had tried to buy the land for an “environmentally friendly” movie lot, funded by taxpayer money. Shielded from public exposure, the plan progressed smoothly, the usual soul kiss between big money and small minds. Then a talk-radio dyspeptic found out and latched on to the “conspiracy” like a rabid wolverine, leaving spokes-people tripping over each other in the rush
