Crashed

First things first. I pulled on the ski mask, climbed the stairs, edging past the slumbering man-eater, and went into the bedroom. I grabbed the other Paul Klee, which, I was surprised to learn, I actually liked better on second look. I gave it a third look as I took it off the wall and had one of those moments, a moment when you think you might actually be changing. I liked it even better the third time. Hmmm. Maybe I should read a little more about the moderns.

At the top of the stairs I heard a sound that froze my heart and instantly put me in statue mode, every hair on my body bristling, and the temperature of my blood dropping by ten degrees. Then I heard it again, and I started to laugh. What I’d thought was a bunch of resuscitated Rottweilers getting back into the growl state was actually snoring. All four killers were in doggie dreamland, where they were probably frolicking among daisies in gauzy slow motion and ripping kittens to tatters.

When I got downstairs, I stood the picture near the door, next to one of the torporous beasts, and gave it another look. Definitely growing on me. I even liked the colors, sort of. Then I picked up the bag and toted it up the steps to the raised living room, where I found what I assumed was a Kirghiz carpet, profusely soiled. Bunny was not going to be amused.

The box Dora was in had been sealed by some Chinese person who had probably found rich amusement at the prospect of Dora’s predictably impatient new owner discovering that it was literally impossible to open the package. It took me five minutes and two of the blades on my all-purpose knife to get her out, and when I did, I was briefly afraid I’d punctured her. I kept checking for leaks as I blew her up, but her skin, like her virtue, was intact. When I had her all plumped up, I did a couple of minutes on her hair, working from memory. Then I rolled up my computer-printed note and put it into the perfect circle of her mouth. As a final touch, I taped the color printout of the website download to her chest.

I stood back and admired the effect. She looked like she belonged here, which in a sense she did. At the bottom of my bag was a pocket digital camera, and I worked for a few minutes to get her best angles. Then I dropped the camera in the bag and grabbed the handle, left the box Dora had come in right where I’d dumped it, next to a Rottweiler deposit on the Kirghiz, went down to the entry hall, stepped over a few dogs, picked up my new Paul Klee, and let myself out into the rain.

I hadn’t gone half a block when the phone rang and Jennie said, talking very fast, “Thistle was here, and the big man who wrecked the apartment tried to catch her. Please. You have to come. You have to come now.”

42

A Funnel of whirling dervishes

“Meet me there,” I said to Louie. “They need somebody with them.”

“Gonna take me some time,” Louie grumbled. “This fuckin’ rain’s gonna slow everyone down.”

“Then get moving. I’ll be there in thirty-five, forty minutes, but I can’t stay long. I’ve got a couple of things I’ve got to do.”

“Like your life is so much more important than mine.”

“You want me to live long enough to pay you?”

Louie said, “On my way.”

“He was so big,” Wendy said. The brightness of her eyes betrayed that she’d been crying. Jennie stood behind her, both hands on her sister’s shoulders, marginally calmer but still obviously agitated. She had a welt under her left eye that looked like it was going to swell until the eye closed.

“Let him in,” Jennie commanded. “He’s getting all wet.”

Wendy stepped aside, and I went in. The place had been a mess before, but now it looked like it had been invaded by a funnel of whirling dervishes. The two chairs were on their sides, dishes, pots, and pans were all over the place, and when I turned back to look at the door, I saw that the lower right panel of glass had been broken.

“He did that with his fist,” Wendy said, her eyes absolutely enormous. “He punched our door and then reached in and opened it.”

“Whose is that?” I asked. Their eyes followed my finger to a long line of blood, left by someone on the move who’d been bleeding pretty freely.

“His,” Jennie said.

“What, when he broke the glass, he cut himself?”

“No,” she said. “Thistle had just come in, she ran in and slammed the door, and when he punched out the glass she grabbed a piece of it and sliced his hand while he was trying to turn the knob. I think she cut him three or four times. He was shouting like, I don’t know, a giant or something.”

“Okay, so he got the door open. Then what?”

“We started throwing stuff,” Jennie said. “Everything in the kitchen, everything we could get our hands on. But he didn’t even seem to notice us. He was just chasing Thistle, and every time he got near her she took a swipe at him with the piece of glass. She cut him one more time, across the arm, and then I got behind him and hit him with the frying pan.”

“He felt that,” Wendy said.

“So he turned around and punched me,” Jennie said, her hand going to the welt under her eye. “And Thistle got out the door, and Wendy had the broom and when he turned to run after her, she stuck out the broom handle and it got tangled up in his feet and he fell on his face. And by the time he got up and got out the door, Thistle was gone.”

“And he came back in and said he was going to kill us,” Wendy said. “But he didn’t.”

“Well, duh,” Jennie said.

“I mean, you know, not then.” Wendy blinked four or five times fast. “But he said he’d be back.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, and something banged on the door. The girls went straight up in the air, screaming, and came down with their arms around each other. The door opened, and Louie said, “You guys ain’t glad to see me?”

Two minutes after Louie stuck the girls in his big Detroit behemoth and took them to his house, where Alice would fuss over them until it was safe for them to go back home, I was back at the Camelot Arms. I had to check it, even though I was certain that the apartment was the last place Thistle was likely to be. The door was still leaning crazily inward, and things looked pretty much the same, although someone, probably a covetous neighbor, seemed to have nicked a couple of the vintage standing lamps.

I went through the place anyway, looking for anything to tell me whether she’d been here, and where she might have gone. I spent a few minutes wandering around in the bedroom, trying to figure out what was different, before I realized that the most recent journal, the one that had only had ten or twelve written pages, was missing.

So she had dropped by, at least. Almost certainly before she went to Jennie and Wendy’s place.

And the question remained: Was Eduardo working for Trey, or against her?

The old expression about waiting for the other shoe to drop is too vague, because it doesn’t tell you which shoe. Sometimes it’s not important which shoe drops first or second, but at other times it’s almost the only thing that matters.

I’d abandoned the horrible former police car at one of Louie’s garages and was back at the wheel of my anonymous Toyota Camry, meticulously obeying every traffic law in sight, just another sheep in the automotive flock. Since the garage was near Hollywood, I dropped by Wain’s, taking a certain amount of pleasure at his surprise that I’d survived whatever he thought I was doing, and got my deposit back. He nicked me for an extra ten bucks,