Parker stepped behind Fish, hoisted him by his elbows, and manhandled him into the unit.
“I need more light,” Parker yelled.
Six squad cars and cruisers rolled into the storage facility. Conklin waved them in and organized them in a semicircle, with their headlights pointing toward Randy Fish’s storage locker.
Car radios chattered, doors opened and closed, cops leaned against their vehicles to watch what might be an extraordinary event in the history of law enforcement.
Conklin followed Parker and Fish into the locker, swept a box of pots and pans off a table. Then he began taking down cartons, putting them on the table, and ripping each one open. I joined Conklin, took out books, turned them upside down, opened them, shook them out, dropped them to the floor.
I glanced at Fish. He looked like a guest at a wedding, wearing a nice smile as he watched the proceedings. I got the feeling that even now, he was manipulating the police, manipulating me.
“I drew the map on the back of a sales slip, put it between pages in a book,” Fish said. “I think that’s what I did.”
I got into a good rhythm—opened a book, shook it out, dropped it, repeat. But I didn’t lose sight of Fish, and every time I edged near the cheap pine desk, a muscle twitched in his temple.
Conklin reached for another carton of books.
“Hang on,” I said to my partner.
I went to the desk, placed my hand on it, and said to Randy Fish, “Am I getting warm?”
“Warm doesn’t cut it, Lindsay. I’ll let you know when you’re smokin’.”
I pulled at the desk drawers, all of which opened except for the one on the lower right. That drawer was locked. I rifled through the open drawers, came up with nothing. Then Conklin went to the squad car. He brought back a short crowbar and jimmied open the locked drawer.
I went right at that file drawer. It was full of old records, songs from the fifties and sixties. I took out the records, looked at each one in the light of the high beams, peeked into the sleeves, then passed them to Conklin so that he could take another look.
Fish was watching me and he was humming a tune, one of the “oldies but goodies” that my mom used to sing when cooking dinner or driving us in the car.
Parker said, “Shut up,” and gave Fish a shot to the back of his head with the heel of his palm. Fish fell at my feet just as I put my hands on the last record in the drawer.
The old 45 was by the crooner Johnny Mathis. Fish had been humming the song—“The Twelfth of Never.”
The vinyl record was inside a sleeve. I pulled it out and a piece of paper came out with it and fluttered to the ground. I reached for the paper—a U-Store-It receipt with a rough map of the West Coast inked on the back.
As I bent down, I was eye to eye with the Fish Man. I held up the map so he could see it.
“Am I smokin’ now, Randy?”
“You’re red-hot,” said the Fish Man.
Chapter 96
FISH HADN’T GIVEN me anything, but by humming “The Twelfth of Never,” he’d let me know that the map to his dump sites was inside the record sleeve.
I felt a flutter of hope, even elation. Good, Randy. Prove to yourself that you can change.
But now, Fish was laughing. Had he taken us on another flier into his twisted mind? Was he screwing with me again?
I asked him, “What’s the joke, Randy?”
“I’m just enjoying myself,” he said. “It’s okay for me to have a few laughs, isn’t it, Lindsay? You don’t have to play bad cop with me. I’m your pal.”
Parker hauled the killer to his feet, and he wasn’t too gentle about it. Since Parker was doing a perfect bad cop, he’d left me free to wonder what that 1950s love song meant to Fish. “The Twelfth of Never” was about a man’s love for a woman. I remembered one of the first lines.
Did Fish love an actual person? Or was this psycho-killer love? Did Randy Fish “love” women so much that he had to be the last man to touch them, talk to them, own them …
I straightened out the map Fish had drawn on the back of the receipt. Conklin came up behind me and said, “So let’s take a look at the latest bullshit.”
Parker handed Fish off to one of the uniformed cops and joined us in the huddle. We scrutinized the
I was thrown to the ground, as if I’d been hit by a bus.
Everything went dark and silent and my brain flickered with a single thought: What had happened? I got onto my hands and knees, started crawling, bumping into things, like the deaf and blind thing I was.
A couple of long minutes later, someone shook my arm. I saw a blurry uniformed cop. His name was Mooney. Or Rooney. I wasn’t sure.
“Are you all right, Sergeant?”
Stars were popping behind my eyes. I could hardly breathe. I was gagging, but somehow managed to ask, “Is anyone hurt?”
“Can you see me, Sergeant?”
I fought nausea, said, “I can see you. I hear you.”
Conklin and Parker were on their feet. Conklin came over to me and said, “You okay? You okay, Lindsay?”
I grabbed his arm and stood.
Officer Michael Rooney was saying, “It was a flashbang. I saw this uniform pull the pin and lob it toward the locker. I couldn’t get to him in time.”
“Flashbang” was a descriptive nickname for a stun grenade, a nonlethal military weapon designed to knock down the occupants of a room to give the shooter the upper hand. The effective range is a five-foot radius from the point of impact, and the stunning effect lasts only a minute or two, but you still would not want to be in a room with one.
As it was, I was still dazed, but I could see.
“Tell it again, from the beginning,” I told the cop.
Rooney said, “One of ours fired that grenade. I didn’t know him. He was five six or five seven, young guy.”
“You didn’t know him? How did you know he was a cop?”
“He was in uniform. Drove a cruiser. After he threw the grenade, he grabbed Fish and pushed him into the passenger side. Then he took off.”
“It was an abduction?” Parker asked. “Or a getaway?”
“Hard to say. Fish was very wobbly.”
“When did the grenade go off?” I asked.
“It’s only been a couple of minutes,” the cop said. “The cruiser is headed west on Amador. Two of our cars are in pursuit.”
“Call dispatch and clear a channel,” I said.
Parker was moving through the semicircle of headlights toward his vehicle. I started toward ours. Conklin gave me an arm to lean on.
He dangled the keys. “I’m driving,” he said.
Chapter 97
