'I was, yeah.'
'Penny and I are going to put some stuff in storage,' he said. 'I think I'll walk down to Yitzhak's. I suppose he sells storage boxes. And while I'm there, I'll browse their notice board.'
That's Carlos for you. He didn't get to be supervisory investigator by being slow.
After Carlos left, I recalled Indian telling about the Gnostie staff member writing down our license number. I thought I knew why. Tuuli had a Finnish-flag bumper sticker, with 'Suomi' written on it. It's unlikely he knew that Suomi meant Finland, and even less likely that he recognized Finnish when he heard it. But we'd been talking a foreign language, and he could easily have recognized the sticker as a flag. Flag stickers aren't rare with a generation that's gotten interested in their ethnic roots.
And if they'd questioned Nerisa about us, she might have said that ordinarily when we came in, we spoke English. Even Tuuli doesn't have much accent.
All in all I didn't feel too comfortable.
16
WRONG TARGET
That was on Friday. On Sunday I slept in, and Tuuli and I had breakfast together. We figured that after we'd eaten, we'd go to the L.A. Zoo. It's in Griffith Park, built against the foot of the Hollywood Hills, and if the winter rains have come through, the hills are exceptionally beautiful in spring. The zoo itself is sort of overgrown with tropical and subtropical plants, its paved paths leading around through them. Just for starters, there are albino tigers, pens with goats that children can get in with and pet, and an African bull elephant that dwarfs the Asian elephants. He wears a huge leg chain bolted to a steel post set god knows how deep in concrete.
Our plans got altered though. We had the TV news on for breakfast, something we seldom do. It's bad for the digestion. Maybe Tuuli's psychic power was operating subliminally. She's the one who turned it on.
The feature story was a bombing the evening before, and the building bombed was the apartment house she used to live in. Worse, the specific apartment bombed was on the southwest corner of the second floor, the one that used to be hers. It killed an Armenian immigrant family: Barkev Boghosian, his wife Sophie, their two children, and Boghosian's mother. It also killed a person in the apartment below. A still picture showed Boghosian as a husky, thirtyish guy who worked for an import-export firm.
A neighbor reported having seen a man, with a package 'as big as a suitcase,' ringing the Boghosian's doorbell a few minutes ealier. The man had worn a brown shirt and trousers like a deliveryman's uniform. Apparently the package had held the bomb.
It could have been a coincidence, of course, but right from the start, neither of us had any doubt that the bomb had been meant for us. For me specifically and for Tuuli by association. I put it together for her this way: The Gnostie that took her license number had then reported seeing us at Pie Are Square. Maybe he'd even been sitting in his car watching, and saw us come out and drive away. We'd been speaking a foreign language, but according to Nerisa were able to speak perfectly good English.
Tuuli admitted that she hadn't sent her change of address to the Department of Motor Vehicles after we got married, and she hadn't had to reregister her car yet, so their records still showed the old Hollywood Boulevard address. Someone in the church either hacked or bought their way into the DMV's computer and got that address; not an easy thing to do. The guy who delivered the bomb would even have been met at the door by a burly guy with a foreign accent, though presumably that made no difference in what happened.
Thomas would have watched this morning's news, or maybe last night's, and read the morning paper. And he'd know from the DMV records that Tuuli's car wasn't registered to any Boghosian. Besides, except for the build, Boghosian's picture didn't look like me. He'd know they'd hit the wrong target.
When I'd run through it, we sat looking at each other over our coffee. 'How'd you like to take a vacation in Arizona?' I asked her.
'If you'll come with me.'
'Honey, I can't; I've got a case. This is the best lead I've had on it, and if I solve it, I'll have the people who want to kill me. This is real evidence, circumstantial but real, that the church is behind Christman's disappearance.'
'Let Carlos handle it.'
'Honey, Carlos is good, very good, but he's not as good as I am. The firm will rent me a room somewhere; maybe a series of rooms. You can go stay at Diacono's. I'll bet the firm will cover the cost. If they won't, we'll cover it ourselves.'
She looked thoughtful. I could almost see the wheels turning: she was thinking about studying or whatever with a guru. She'd already told me that Bhiksu was psychically very advanced, and had done some remarkable things that evening at the Merlins', after I'd fogged out and gone to sleep.
I remembered the dream that maybe hadn't been a dream.
She'd also told me that Mikki was a psychic whose powers had been expanded and stabilized by Tory and Vic.
A lot of people, Tuuli said, had occasional psychic moments, probably most people. With some of them, these were explicit, but mostly they were vague, like a notion with no apparent source. With her, they were only occasional, unless she deliberately looked for one. Then she'd often get something, often sharp and clear.
And one of the things they did at Diacono's Spirit Lodge, she said, was train people in that sort of thing—people with a talent for it. My natural tendency was to be skeptical, but if believing would get Tuuli out of L.A. for a while, great. Besides, I couldn't doubt that Vic had some sort of power, not after what he'd done for me. And apparently Tory did too.
After a minute, Tuuli nodded. 'All right. I have appointments with clients on Monday and Tuesday. Surely the people that want to kill us won't have our new address by then, will they?'
'I've assumed they got your name and old address from DMV. And now that they know the address was wrong . . .'
Suddenly I realized there was something I needed to do. Right away! I got up from the table and called GTE. Had them remove both of us from directory assistance—Tuuli's business listing as well as our residential listings. I used my investigator's credentials to have it done immediately. In fact I didn't disconnect till it was done. The big question was, had it been in time?
