arranged, but I couldn’t find the context. I wrote them out eight or ten times, rearranged them, reversed them, listed them vertically and horizontally. I was so tired that I was repeating patterns without noticing it, but it didn’t matter; they were a mess in any order. I called Schultz but got a busy signal. Ten minutes later, I got another busy signal. Four twenty-eight.
I climbed out onto the deck and paced, staring at the mountains as they rippled through the heat and going through everything he’d said. Firemen and Alpha Centauri, Thomas Aquinas and Charlie Company. It was as though something were knocking on the inside of my skull, demanding to be let out.
At 4:43 I called Schultz again. Still busy. “Well, Jesus,” I said to the phone, “I sure hope it’s nothing important.” I slammed it down and it rang.
“He got them,” Schultz said. He sounded as though he’d just run a marathon.
“Got who?”
“Mommy and Daddy. He got them somehow.”
“You mean he burned them?”
“No. They’re gone. Not there. Missing.”
“How do you know?”
“We had a couple of men there. At the entrance to the street.”
“You shitheel,” I said. “Privileged communication, my ass. On behalf of my client, I want a refund.”
“After everything you told me, we were afraid he’d go after them.”
“Well, you did a terrific job of preventing it,” I said. “And you probably let him know I’m talking to the cops.”
“So what?” Schultz said. “At this point, who cares? Did he give you the third clue?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What was it?”
“Norbert, old friend,” I said. “I don’t think I’m talking to you any more.”
The phone rang fifty-eight times before it stopped. I ignored it and concentrated on making a nice long chain out of safety pins. A minute after the phone quit, it started again. By then I was in the bedroom, putting on a pair of swimming trunks and a T-shirt. Then I unchained my safety pins, put them into a Ziploc bag, and rolled it up in the center of my poor little suit of armor, moving on automatic, thinking only about 127C3. It was beginning to sound like a football pass pattern by the time the phone shut up. A mocking bird filled the silence in 6/8 time, and then the ringing resumed.
I picked it up. “I want information,” I snapped before Schultz could speak.
“So dial four-one-one.”
“Give it or good-bye. How’d he get them out?”
“We don’t know.”
“Tell me everything your idiots saw.”
“They were there all night,” Schultz said. “Nothing moved till eight, when Mommy came out in the Bentley. Alone. She came back, also alone, about eleven-fifty. Then the team changed. Total overlap, not a minute that no one was watching. Daddy never left the house. Couple of cars cruised the street, no one of Junior’s description, looking at the houses for sale. Some business in and out of the other houses. The Lewises have some construction going on, but the workmen parked in the street and walked down to their cars. None of them was Wilton. We’ve been calling the house every couple of hours, just to get the busy signal or do the wrong number act. The phone was busy from twelve-twenty on, which felt too long. The guys rang the buzzer at two-thirty, got nothing, and went in. Place was a mess.”
“What time did the workmen leave?”
“Two.”
“All of them alone?”
“Like I said, they parked on the street.”
“Swell,” I said. “Obviously, somebody missed something. You’ve converted me. I now share my client’s opinion of the LAPD.”
Schultz ignored the rudeness. “What did he say?”
“He said three. He said three is where it would happen, and three hours from now is when it would happen.”
“Three hours from now?” Schultz sounded panicked.
“Worse than that,” I said. “Three hours from four o’clock.”
“One-twenty-seven-C-three,” Schultz said. “I thought you said it would be clear.”
“You chew on it for a while,” I said. “My jaws are sore.”
After I’d gnawed my cheeks for twenty minutes, I dialed Schultz again.
“No other ways to get into that street,” I said.
“You were there,” he said, sounding frustrated. “It’s a cul-de-sac.”
“Maybe something runs real close behind it.”
“It doesn’t.”
“God damn it, Schultz, check. They didn’t go up the chimney.”
“All right,” he said a trifle sulkily. “Let me get a Thomas.” The phone clattered to the table.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” I said. That’s all it took, a two-by-four between the eyes. I fidgeted from one foot to another, not knowing who could get to it more quickly, Schultz or I. Mine was just down at the foot of the driveway, in Alice’s glove compartment.
Then I came to my senses, hung up the phone, jogged down to Alice, and opened the Thomas Brothers map book. The hell with Schultz; what I absolutely didn’t need was thirty-seven squad cars, three or four swat teams, and a battery of heavy artillery. ‘Bye-bye Wilton, at the first siren’s squeal. Anyway, they hadn’t been invited.
Page 127, Row C, Square 3, was a blank brown stretch surrounded by urban clutter. I finally located the legend. In print small enough to prove that I was getting farsighted, it said, San Bernardino County Fairground.
I left the Uzi up in the house; it didn’t seem like the kind of hardware I’d be able to get into the fairgrounds.
Ten minutes later, I climbed out of Alice, leaving my suit of armor rolled up on the seat next to me, ran into the Fernwood Market, and tore open an L.A. Times. There it was on page 5 of the Calendar section, right out in the open for any fool to see, filling the San Bernardino County Fairgrounds with adventure and merriment for all.
The Chivalry Faire.
20
At quarter to seven, daylight saving time, the sun was still floating comfortably above the horizon, roasting everything within reach. I was rolling along unfamiliar surface streets in the tinder-dry hills of San Bernardino, trying to figure out where the hell I was.
The freeway had slowed and then stopped, jammed full of patient, happy weekenders on their way to a bracing dip into the fifteenth century, ready to encounter jugglers, jesters, troubadours, knights in armor, castles, and fair maidens. Maybe even a dragon.
When I hit the clog of traffic, I skated Alice along the freeway’s shoulder to the first offramp, inviting and receiving stares of indignation from drivers who still believed in fair play. Once I coasted down the ramp and off the freeway grid, I was in terra incognita. I don’t know much about San Bernardino, and I’ve tried for years to keep it that way.
The Thomas Brothers were no help. I knew I was somewhere in the two-dimensional cartographic fiction called C2, and I was pretty sure that I was heading toward C3, but that was only because C3 was east of C2, and the setting sun was grilling the back of my neck. Even stripped for preaction, in nothing but a T-shirt and swimming trunks, I felt like a four-minute egg.
The road, a two-lane unmarked tarmac, wound between sere, rolling hills that were stiff with weeds and
