'Maybe she has nothing to do with it anymore. Maybe it's larger than her. Maybe it's about Lewis Washington and Akeem D'Muere and why five LAPD officers are so scared of this that they're living in my shorts.'
Dees nodded. Like he knew it was coming, but he wasn't especially glad to see it arrive. 'It's your call, bubba.'
Then he went back to his car and drove away.
Riggens cranked his sedan and took off after him with a lot of tire squealing. Garcia fired up the blue, and as they pulled out after Riggens, Pinkworth gave me the finger. When he gave me the finger the fat kid in the DES MOINES sweatshirt laughed and shook his dad's arm so that his dad would see.
A Kodak moment.
Thirty- five minutes later I pulled up the little road to my house and saw Pike's red Jeep Cherokee under the elm by the front steps. I had left the Farmer's Market before Pike, and I had made good time, but when I got home, there he was, as if he had been there for hours, as if he had been both here and there at the same time. He does this a lot, but I have never been able to figure out how. Teleportation, maybe.
Pike was holding the cat and the two of them were staring at something across the canyon. Looking for more cops, no doubt. I said, 'How'd you beat me?'
Pike put down the cat. 'I didn't know it was a race.' You see how he is?
I turned off the alarm and let us into the kitchen through the carport. I was uncomfortable moving into and through the house, as if I expected more cops to be hiding in a closet or behind the couch. I looked around and wondered if they had been in the house. People have been in my house before. I didn't like it then, and I liked it even less, now.
Pike said, 'We're clear.'
One minute he's across the room, the next he's right behind you. 'How do you know?'
'Went down to the end of the road. Checked the downslope and the upslope. Walked through the house before you got here.' He made a little shrug. 'We're clear.'
A six-thousand-dollar alarm, and it's nothing to Pike.
He said, 'You want to tell me about this?'
I took two Falstaffs out of the refrigerator, gave one to Pike and kept one for myself, and then I told him about Jennifer and Thurman and Eric Dees's REACT team. 'Four months ago Dees's team was involved in an arrest in which a man named Charles Lewis Washington died. Washington's family filed a suit against Dees and the city, but they dropped it when a street gang called the Eight-Deuce Gangster Boys pressed them.'
Pike took some of the Falstaff and nodded. 'So what's the connection between a street gang and Eric Dees?'
'That's the question, isn't it?'
I went upstairs, got the notes I had made on the case, and brought them down. 'You hungry?'
'Always.'
'I've got some of the venison left.'
Pike made a face. 'You got something green?' Two years ago he had gone vegetarian.
'Sure. Tuna, also, if you want.' He'll sometimes eat fish. 'Read the notes first, then we'll talk after.'
Pike took the notes, and I went into the freezer for the venison. In the fall, I had hunted the hill country of central California for blacktail deer and had harvested a nice buck. I had kept the tenderloins and chops, and had the rest turned into smoked sausage by a German butcher I know in West L.A. The tenderloins and the chops were gone, but I still had three plump sausage rings. I took two of the rings from the freezer, put them in the microwave to thaw, then went out onto the deck to build the fire. The cat was sitting out there, under the bird feeder. I said, 'Forget the birds. We're making Bambi.'
The cat blinked at me, then came over and sat by the grill. Venison is one of his favorite things.
I keep a Weber charcoal grill out on the deck, along with a circular redwood picnic table. The same woman who had given me the bird feeder had also helped me build the picnic table. Actually, she had done most of the building and I had done most of the helping, but that had probably worked out better for the table. I scraped the grill, then built a bed of mesquite coals in the pit and fired them. Mesquite charcoal takes a while, so you have to get your fire going before you do anything else.
When the coals were on their way, I went back into the kitchen.
Pike looked up from the report. 'We're squaring off against five LAPD officers, and all we're getting paid is forty bucks?'
'Nope. We're also getting forty dollars per month for the next forty-nine months.'
Pike shook his head.
'Think of it as job security, Joe. Four years of steady income.'
Pike sighed.
I opened another Falstaff, drank half of it on the way upstairs to the shower, and the other half on the way back down. When I got back down, Pike had built a large salad with tuna and garbanzo beans and tomatoes and onions. We brought the salad and the venison out onto the deck.
The sky had deepened, and as the sun settled into a purple pool in the west, the smells of budding eucalyptus and night-blooming jasmine mingled with the mesquite smoke. It was a clean, healthy smell, and made me think, as it always does, of open country and little boys and girls climbing trees and chasing fireflies. Maybe I was one of the
