20
As the plane turned to come in over the Santa Barbara airport, Jane looked down and tried to imagine Harry living here. She had been here once before, when she had left a client in Los Angeles and wanted to spend a few days out of sight. It was a beautiful, quiet place, but there was something about it that had never seemed quite right to her—like a graveyard with flowers that grew in too lush and luxuriant not to be a sign of a haunting.
It was a place where lots of people had died for no reason at all. Father Junipero Serra stopped here in the 1780s and founded a mission for the Chumash Indians. The Chumash had lived along the coast and done a little fishing in the kelp beds and a lot of gathering in the tidal pools, and hunted in the hills that ran along the coast a couple of miles inland. It had been an easy, unchanging life, and they hadn’t prepared themselves for the arrival of the Europeans by generations of fighting as the Iroquois had. They were easily enslaved, and forced to build stone buildings and aqueducts and work in the fields for the priests. She had seen virtually all that was left of the Chumash years ago: a cave in the hills painted with mystical figures and a few intricate baskets behind glass in the little museum up the road from the mission. The coast of California was a sad place for Indians: Chumash, Gabrieleno, Cupeno, Tataviam, Luiseno, Costanoan, Miwok, Ipa, Salinan, Esselen—all either exterminated by 1900 or down to 1 percent of the 300,000 people the priests had counted when they took their first inventory of souls.
Jane had brought Harry to Lew Feng, walked out of the shop, and taken the next flight out of Vancouver. She had insisted that she never be told where Lew Feng sent him. She had not wanted to have that piece of information in her mind, waiting to come out as soon as somebody inflicted enough pain. But Santa Barbara should have been a shrewd place for Lew Feng to put Harry. If she had known, she would have agreed with it. There were lots of people in their fifties and sixties wandering around town doing nothing. They played golf, walked on the beaches, and sauntered around State Street looking in store windows. It was the sort of town where all you needed was the money to pay the rent and a dull, plausible story that would explain why you had chosen to pay it there. To the sort of people who were looking for Harry, Santa Barbara would have been invisible, just another cluster of exits on the freeway up the coast.
Jake noticed the change in Jane as they walked to the car-rental desk at the airport. Until now she had been held in a rigid immobility by the simple fact that airplanes traveled faster than girls did, but now she was eager, ready to move. She was very good at standing there, the young woman waiting for old grandpops to rent the car, but her eyes were always in motion, never settling on anything for more than a second or two.
As soon as he had the keys, she picked up her bag and set off. She took the keys out of his hand without speaking and got in on the driver’s side. She maneuvered the car along Sandspit Road to the freeway and took it through the town to the Salinas Street exit, then swung up the first street. 'Why is it called Ocean View?' Jake asked. All he could see was tall apartment buildings and long, skinny palm trees.
'It’s California real estate language,' she said. 'If it’s called a view or vista of something, it means it’s not near it.'
'But view means you can see it. I can’t see it.'
'You could if you were eighty feet tall. They’re not responsible for your shortcomings. Ninety-two. That must be it up there. The big white building on the left.'
'What do we do?'
'I go in, you stay inconspicuous and watch.'
'What am I watching for? Your friend?'
'John isn’t likely to come in daylight. If you do see him, whatever you do, don’t let him get away. Talk to him. Ask directions or something. And remember, he’s got a lot to be scared of. Until he sees me, he’s as dangerous as the others.'
She closed the door, slipped her shoulder into her purse strap, and walked across the street to the apartment buildings. Jake couldn’t see anybody to watch, so he watched the buildings. He had considered coming to a place like this to wait out his last few years. It was pretty, a lot of palm trees and stucco buildings you couldn’t see the ocean from, but it was just the front door of a nursing home, really, and those weren’t much different anywhere. At least in Deganawida there was a chance that somebody might visit.
Jane came back smiling and sat in the driver’s seat. 'We’re in luck. I rented the apartment next door to Harry’s. We move in before dark.'
'It just happened to be vacant?'
'There was a murder. People always move out in droves. But next door is better than I had hoped.'
Jake wondered how a person came to know things like that, but she seemed to know a lot of them. She started the car and drove back down the street, turned right, then left, and went down a long, straight residential street with houses that looked like cottages.
'Where are we going?'
Jane seemed to be pulled back reluctantly from whatever she had been thinking. 'There are homicide detectives in there right now. They never work nights except the first one, when the body’s on the ground and they still have some hope of catching somebody. The fact that they’re still in there after a couple of days is great news.'
'It is?'
'It means they still have it sealed, and John probably hasn’t come in yet.'
'Are you sure that’s what he’ll do?'
'No,' she said. 'I’m guessing. But he’ll feel the way I do, which is that we killed Harry. He and I did. He might not find anything by looking at the apartment, but he has nothing else to look at. And if he’s thinking like a cop, then seeing what the other cops looked at might tell him a lot.'
'So where are we going now?'
'You’re going to drop me off downtown. Then you’re going to pick up a few essentials.'
'Such as?'
'Food that we can eat without a lot of cooking. There’s a refrigerator in there, so get whatever you want. Two shotguns, short-barrel-something like a Winchester Defender or a Remington 840. One box of double-ought buckshot—make that the little boxes that hold five each. Get six. Two blankets, a pillow if you need one. An electric baby monitor. There are lots of kinds, but Fisher-Price makes a good one. No, two of those, and batteries for them. And a roll of electrical tape.'
'What are you going to be doing?'
'I’m going to the library to see if there was anything in the local papers that the wire services didn’t pick up. Then to the police station to see if John is hanging around trying to strike up a conversation. That kind of thing.'
She pulled over on Figueroa Street. 'Can you remember all that stuff?'
'Sure,' he said. 'When do you want me to pick you up?'
'I don’t. See you later.'
The supplies didn’t take much thought. It seemed to Jake that the differences between places had virtually disappeared during his lifetime. If you blindfolded somebody, put him on a plane, and set him loose on the main drag of any decent-size town in the country, he would be hard-pressed to say where he was. If there were palm trees or snow, all he’d really know was a list of places where he wasn’t. The supermarkets just had different names.
The shotguns took some thought. He kept himself from ruminating on the implications of them by concentrating on composing some small talk that would carry him through if there was some custom out here that required him to answer any questions. He decided he had no choice but to be Jake, the retired codger from Deganawida, since he suspected you couldn’t make this kind of transaction without showing somebody some identification. He decided that buying double-ought in May was highly suspicious, since as far as he knew, deer season anywhere on earth had to be in the fall, to give the does and fawns a fighting chance. He finally hit on the idea that he was buying the guns as a gift for a friend who had a ranch up near—he studied the map—New Cuyama.
