“Do you know who that was?” I asked.
“No,” said Frank, but I could see that, like me, he had taken a good look at the license plate. Once Jack and Paul had walked off, I reached into my purse and jotted the number down twice. I tore the paper in half and handed a copy to Frank.
“Thanks. I’ll have to give this to Pete.”
Just as we got into the backseat of Pete’s car, it started to really rain. I felt that numbness that I feel after funerals settle over me. We rode in silence, though Pete kept looking at Frank in the rearview mirror. Frank held my hand tightly and looked out the car window with an unseeing gaze.
As we pulled up to the curb in front of the shelter, where the mourners were gathering, Frank turned to Pete and said, “I’ll be okay, Baird.”
“I know you will, Harriman, ‘cause you’ve got so many guardian angels.”
19
“NO, OTHER THAN TELLING ME that Frank saved his hide, Pete hasn’t said a word about what happened at that warehouse.”
Rachel and I sat on a sofa at the shelter, comparing notes.
“When are you going to move out here?”
“Who said I will? It wasn’t so easy to make detective in Phoenix, and I’m not ready to come here and be a meter maid just to warm my bones next to Pete.”
“A meter maid. Sure.”
“Well, I’d be back in uniform. No doubt about it. Look what happened to Frank. Even though he had made detective in Bakersfield, he had to go back to being in uniform here. Every department is like that. Frank managed to make detective here in record time, but that’s rare — I can’t depend on the same thing happening for me.”
Frank walked up to us just then. “You’d get there just as quickly, Rachel.”
“No, Boy Wonder, I don’t think so,” she said glumly.
Frank leaned down toward my ear and whispered, “Excuse us for a moment, ancient one — police business.”
I rolled my eyes, but let him drag Rachel off toward Pete, because Sarah had just plopped down next to me. She sighed with all the weight of the world on her.
“Everybody worth a crap is gone from here now.”
“It’s stopped raining; let’s go outside and talk,” I said. “We can sit under the patio roof — in case it starts up again.”
“Okay, I could use a cigarette anyway.”
We made our way out to the backyard, and away from the crowd inside. She lit a cigarette and took three or four drags off it.
“Why are you living here, Sarah?”
“‘Cause my old man thinks that if he slaps me around hard enough, I’ll listen to him. But he hasn’t said anything worthwhile since my mom died. He fell into a bottle five years ago and hasn’t crawled out since. I just got tired of it, that’s all. What’s
“Someone left a heart and a lot of blood all over my front porch last night.”
Her eyes widened. “No shit?”
“No shit. I need your help, Sarah. But first — this is important — you’ve got to find somewhere else to stay. Is there anywhere else you can go?”
“Oh, I get it. You read the journal. Listen, Sammy is paranoid. Comes from reading all that hoodoo jive she’s into.”
“Please think about it.”
She took a few more drags off the cigarette, watching me through half-closed eyes. “Man, I guess if I was you, I’d be pretty freaked out, too. I got an aunt in San Diego. My mom’s sister. Maybe I’ll give her a call. What kind of help you need?”
“For starters — the initials.”
“Wasn’t that just too dumb? I mean, like we’re not going to figure it out. Gee, ‘my roommate, SL’ — who would ever guess that stood for Sarah Landry? Big secret code. That Sammy sure can be a dumb shit.”
“I don’t know the cast of characters like you do. To me, it is a code.”
She gave me a look that said I ranked right up there with Sammy in her estimation, and ground out her cigarette. She reached in her jacket and pulled out another one. I waited while she lit up and got it going.
“Well, let’s see. RM is Jacob Henderson and JC is Julie Montgomery. God knows why she decided to give them phony initials. It’s still obvious who she’s talking about. RA is Raney Adams and DM is Devon Morris.”
“Heckle and Jeckle,” I said.
“Who the hell are Heckle and Jeckle?”
“Old cartoon characters — before your time. Couple of crows with a bad attitude.”
“Oh. Yeah, Devon and Raney do look like they’re auditioning for ‘The Raven’ — you know, the poem by Edgar Allen Poe?”
