take the boy and disappear the way Spicer had. It didn’t satisfy Fallon because it didn’t explain why her Toyota was still parked at McCarran International, but he clung to it anyway. The other alternative, that they were both dead, he refused to consider.
San Diego.
Another land-gobbling urban creature, its concrete arteries bloated with morning commuters. Speed up, slow down, stop and go, crawling toward the city’s heart-to be pumped out again in eight or nine hours, then pumped back in tomorrow in an endless loop. Early sunlight already beating down on the segmented lines of metal bodies, throwing off laserlike glints and flashes that stabbed the eyes. Highway 95 might have been one of the freeways in L.A. and he might be on his way to work at Unidyne, as on every weekday morning for the past dozen years. One of the faceless multitudes, robbed of his identity for the duration of the ride. No longer free. Engulfed by noise.
Engines. L.A., Vegas, here-all the same. Vast humming, throbbing, roaring man-made turbines composed of millions of interchangeable moving parts. Running in perpetual motion, never still.
This was when he heard them loudest, when he was one of those moving parts. This was when his hunger for escape was the greatest.
Confidential Investigative Services was in the North Park section of San Diego, between University Avenue and the upper corner of Balboa Park. The building, three stories, nondescript, housed a mix of a dozen small professional services-personal injury and family lawyers, certified public accountants, and the like. Ulbrich’s office was on the third floor, front. And closed up tight when Fallon arrived there a little after nine. The lettering on the door gave no hours, just the agency’s and Ulbrich’s names.
The office across the hall housed a firm of CPAs. He tried that door, found it open, and walked in. Behind a desk in the anteroom a middle-aged woman sat making an appointment with somebody on the phone. When she finished, Fallon told her he was looking for Sam Ulbrich and asked what time he opened for business.
“Well, I don’t believe he has set hours,” the woman said. “Catch as catch can. Have you tried reaching him by phone?”
“Not yet. Would you know if he’s been in his office the past couple of days?”
“No, I’m sorry. I haven’t seen him, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in.”
“Do you have a phone book I can look at?”
She did. There was a small ad for Confidential Investigative Services in the yellow pages, and a white pages listing for Ulbrich, S., on Descanto Street in National City. Fallon wrote down both numbers and the address.
Before he went downstairs, he spoke to people in two other third-floor offices. No one could tell him anything about the detective’s business hours, or remembered seeing Ulbrich on Monday or Tuesday.
A call to the detective’s home number got him an answering machine. That could mean Ulbrich was in transit. Fallon went to a nearby coffee shop, forced himself to take his time eating a light breakfast-the first food other than the packaged sandwich he’d had in nearly twenty hours. Half an hour later, he was back at the door to Confidential Investigative Services.
Still locked.
He couldn’t keep hanging around here, on the chance that Ulbrich would show up. Better try to press it. Back in the lobby he called the Confidential number-another answering machine-and then Ulbrich’s home number again. He left brief messages on both machines, giving a made-up name and asking for a callback and an appointment ASAP to discuss a professional matter.
As tired as he was from the long drive, he was too keyed up to sit in one place. He let the Jeep’s GPS guide him to National City and Ulbrich’s home address, an apartment building just below the San Diego line. Lower middle- class, racially mixed neighborhood, the building a three-story walkup and as nondescript as the one where Ulbrich had his office. So his business couldn’t be all that profitable. Scraping by, probably, on domestic and insurance work. The kind of small-timer who’d overcharge a client if he thought he could get away with it, even though he’d been exonerated on the one charge five years ago. Who’d be inclined to cross the line into blackmail if the situation looked ripe enough.
Fallon rang Ulbrich’s bell, got nothing for the effort. Two other tenants answered their bells, but neither would talk to him about Ulbrich. On the same block were a small grocery store and a dry-cleaning place. Better cooperation there, but no information. The merchants knew Ulbrich, but not well enough to remember seeing him recently or to describe his habits. Evidently he didn’t spend much time in the neighborhood, kept pretty much to himself when he was there.
North Park and the Confidential office again. Running around in zigzag loops, going over and over the same ground the way he had in Vegas when he was hunting Bobby J. But what else could he do?
When he walked into the lobby this time, a fat, tired-looking man in overalls was perched on a tall ladder replacing a burned-out fluorescent ceiling tube. Fallon rode the elevator to the third floor. Ulbrich’s office was still closed tight. He rode back down to the lobby, where the overalled man was just coming down off his ladder. Fallon asked him if he worked here regularly. Affirmative; he was the building’s maintenance superintendent.
“So then you must know Sam Ulbrich.”
“Oh sure, I know Mr. Ulbrich. Been here almost as long as I have.”
“Last time you saw him?”
“Couple of days ago.”
“Monday?”
The super’s face screwed up in thought. “No, it wasn’t Monday. Must’ve been last Friday. That’s right, last Friday around noon. He was on his way out to lunch at O’Finn’s.”
“A place he goes regularly?”
“When he’s here. He’s away a lot on business. I guess you know Mr. Ul-brich’s a private eye. He doesn’t like you to call him that, but that’s what he-”
“Where is it, this restaurant?”
“Not a restaurant,” the super said. “They serve food, but it’s a pub, Irish pub. I go there myself sometimes. Great corned beef and cabbage.” He glanced at his watch. “Almost noon. Some of that corned beef and cabbage would go good today, now I think of it.”
“O’Finn’s. Where?”
“Up on University, half a block east.”
Fallon found it easily enough. Typical urban Irish pub, with shamrock-and-shillelagh decor inside and out. Long, brass-railed bar, clusters of tables covered by Kelly green cloths, a row of high-backed wooden booths parallel to the bar. Most of the lunch trade hadn’t come in yet; the score or so of customers were either grouped at the bar or occupying the booths.
He bellied up to the plank. When the bearded bartender came his way, he said, “You know Sam Ulbrich? Has an office over on Chenango Street, comes in regularly for lunch.”
“Sure, I know him.”
“Seen him recently?”
“That I have.”
“When?”
“Oh, about three seconds ago.”
“… What?”
The bartender laughed. “Right behind you. Third booth from the front.”
TWO
FALLON TURNED TO PEER across the room. He hadn’t expected anything walking over here, but he’d finally caught a piece of luck. He hesitated, watching the man in the booth hoist a pint of Guinness. Brace him here and now? Or wait until he was finished and then follow him and brace him when he was somewhere
