“Hey! I didn’t get you into this. I’m getting you out of it.”
“Boys,” Edna mediated, “Thank you, Mister Stein.”
Stein’s attention was arrested by the TV at the front desk. Celebrity mourners were being interviewed like it was the red carpet at the Emmy Awards and again there was the aggrieved face of Paul Vane on screen. The pain behind his soulful eyes still looked real. Was he that good an actor to feign such innocent grief? And why wasn’t he at the Ivy, which was where he was sending chief Bayliss? Stein tried to peer behind Vane in the camera’s shot to see if Angie and Lila were with him in the limo. But its windows were tinted. He yelled to the chief to wait a second, but the cordon of commandos was clattering up the stairs to the roof.
He jumped back into Bayliss’s office and used his phone to call Mattingly at the warehouse. He was actually glad to hear the familiar nasal, wheedling tones.
“Mrs. Higgit. This is Harry Stein.”
“Why are you calling from the police station?”
The caller ID thing still freaked him out but he brushed past it. “This is very important. I need to know if Michael Esposito is there.”
“I have no dealings with that area of the company,” she said even more officiously than usual. “I work strictly with Mister Mat-tingly.”
“I know who you work for. But I want-”
She would not yield him conversational right-of-way but plowed straight through the verbal intersection. “Whatever goes on behind closed doors, and I’m not saying anything does, it’s not my business.”
“Mrs. Higgit.”
“I don’t judge. What other people choose for themselves-”
“Stop talking!” he commanded.
She allowed herself to be interrupted long enough to hear his question and to reply that although she had neither the time nor inclin-a-shee-on to keep tabs on anyone else’s business, she had noticed in passing that Mr. Esposito had two visitors today. She described Lila in fastidious detail and the “wild and unruly” teenage girl with her.
Stein smarted under the indictment of his permissive child-raising. “Listen to me carefully. Your office looks down onto the visitor’s parking lot. Is there a white Acura?”
“I don’t know brands.”
“Look out your window.”
“Is there a white car? With a sunroof?”
“It would appear to be so, yes.”
“Do not let them leave.”
Watson was barking excitedly in the car when Stein ran out into the parking lot. A cordon of police had surrounded Stein’s Camry. Stein looked with disbelief at his rear tire. It had been booted.
“Real sorry,” the fat desk sergeant said looking with ironic concern at the piece of heavy metal machinery locking the wheel in place. “I had no idea it was you.” He made a show of examining his key ring, then pronounced with great dole. “Oh I seem to have misplaced the key.”
The chopper had lifted off and was vectoring off toward the canyon. Stein was crazed enough to grab non O’Bladovich by the shirtsleeve. “Listen to me. You’ve got to radio the chief and bring him back.” He looked deeply into his face for a sign of intelligent recognition. From the far side of the complex, Morty Greene’s red pickup truck had gotten out of impound and was heading down the driveway.
Stein released his hold and unlocked his own car door, grabbed Watson out of the front seat and chased after Morty’s truck, which had now driven past. He waved his free arm wildly, trying to put himself into the reflection of his rearview mirror. The truck slowed by degrees, allowing Stein to catch up.
“They booted my car,” Stein heaved, out of breath. “We’ve got to get to the warehouse.”
“I don’t think so,” Morty said and he popped the clutch and began to accelerate.
“Duluth. Where are your manners? You do as the man asks.”
“Mama.”
Morty slowed the truck down. Edna opened the passenger-side door and slid into the nest between the two front seats to make room for Stein. “No, please. I’ll sit there,” Stein insisted and climbed over her into the metal creche alongside Morty so she could have the cushioned seat. “They have my daughter,” Stein said looking straight ahead and shrinking the volume of his body so Morty would have room to drive.” They tore ass down Topanga Canyon. At Pacific Coast Highway they hit a dead stop. Nicholette’s funeral cortege, inching its way up the coast, was endless. Police scrutinized the credentials of every driver and passenger; the Paparazzi long since having learned the trick of turning on their headlights and pretending to be part of a funeral procession.
The tinted window of a silver Mercedes sedan opened. As the glass slid down, the reflection of the helmeted CHP officer yielded to the face of the driver inside the car. Stein leaned forward and wiped away grime from the inside of the Ford’s windshield. He could not see the driver but the passenger alongside him was Michael Esposito. That took some brass balls! Coming to the funeral of the person you’d killed. He couldn’t see into the back seat and was suddenly possessed by the possibility that Angie and Lila might be tied up there.
The woman in the Escalade directly in front of them was conducting an animated conversation on her cell phone. Stein looked desperately to the right of the Escalade. There was narrow shoulder and to the right of it, a ditch that in winter was a creek.
“Don’t even think about it,” Morty said, preempting Stein’s next thought. “There’d be two funerals.”
“You’re right.”
In the moment Morty relaxed, Stein stamped his left foot down onto Morty’s colossal right boot, jamming it down onto the accelerator. The truck lurched forward. Stein yanked the wheel to the right and they darted around the big tank and careened precariously along the shoulder. The grade was too steep to pull back onto the road and the line of cars was unbroken. They could see the horrified looks on people’s faces in the other cars.
“We’re gonna be dead like Butch and Sundance,” Morty howled.
“And Sundance’s mother,” Edna Greene added.
Morty threw Stein’s foot off his own, but there was nothing to do now but fly and hope that none of the six regiments of cops noticed them; and that the phalanx of sirens and motorcycles and patrol cars hot in their pursuit was a coincidence.
“It’s ok. I know these people. Keep going.”
“You know these people?” Edna repeated. “I feel really confident, now.”
In the next moment the truck was enveloped by police vehicles. A voice boomed out of a bullhorn. “STOP THE VEHICLE. PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE DASH WHERE I CAN SEE THEM.” Rifles were pointed at them from every direction, including from above, where Bayliss, having observed the chase and overheard the radio transmissions, had swooped down from the sky and landed in front of them. Dressed in his fatigues, Bayliss leaped out in a Prime Time news pose. When he saw that his quarry was Stein and Morty Greene, the catch he had already thrown back, he was furious that he had been diddled again and made a fool of.
“I swear to God you have fucked with me for the very last time in your life.”
Up ahead, the Mercedes followed the rest of the procession up the hill and was now gone from sight. “Coach!” Stein yelled, then, humbly, “Chief. The killers are getting away.”
With the door to freedom open, Watson sprang from Edna Greene’s arms and bolted out of the truck and up the hill. “Watson!” Stein vaulted around to the driver’s side of the truck and with the adrenaline rush of a pregnant woman, he shoved Morty to the passenger side and jumped in. He rammed the truck into gear, popped the clutch and held on. The rear wheels sprayed mud and grass and gravel, caught traction, and the truck shot forward up the hill.
Morty wrested the wheel away. “They’re gonna kill us.”
“They won’t even chase us. They think it’s a dead end.”
Indeed, as Morty peered cautiously back, he saw that the police were exercising uncharacteristic restraint. The truck jounced up the rutted road, its smooth tires spinning them ass-left and ass-right as it tried to gain traction. A small turnoff to an unpaved road loomed ahead.
“Take it,” Stein yelled. “Go right!”
Together they hauled the wheel right. Thistles and hedge whapped against both sides of the chassis.
“It’s cool. I used to take Watson here when he was a pup a million years ago, before the mortuary bought the
