Lifeblood (19 page)

“True. Besides, twenty-five thousand doesn’t go all that far these days.”

“So don’t look a gift horse in the eye.”

“Goldie!”

“I just wanted to see if you were listening. Sometimes you do go on and on.” Goldie brushed the Oreo crumbs from her shirt. “So how’s my favorite hunk?”

“Hank?”

“Who else? I’ve never seen the other one. You are some woman pussyfootin’ around two guys.”

“Hank is coming down for a three-day weekend. Starting tomorrow. He wants to go to Ventura. Get a place near the beach.”

“Mmm-hmm. And of course you said no.”

“Wrong.”

Goldie gave her a narrow-eyed look. “You tell him about the arrest thing and all?”

“Not yet.”

“Mmmmm.”

“I will. It’s just not easy to do on the phone. I want to be able to see his face.”

“Well, do it early,” Goldie said. “Putting it off will just spoil the whole weekend. You gonna to put that ring back on?”

“I guess. I didn’t want to wear it when I went to see El Jefe or that banker. I didn’t want them to think there was anyone else I could ask.”

“You wanted to appear helpless.”

“No, just, you know, with my back against the wall. Which is the truth.”

Goldie let out a laugh. “You gotta wonder what that El Jefe of yours did for that banker dude that he would just write out a check for twenty-five large and give it to a complete stranger.”

“Maybe he knocked off somebody who was troubling Mr. Junipera.”

Chapter Thirty-six

Rachel was surprised by how glad she was to see Hank.

She was still half asleep the next morning and hadn’t seen his green Mustang drive up the ramp. He startled her by tapping her on the shoulder as she was bending over trying to get the keys, the jimmy, the phone numbers and everything else ready for Irene to garage-sit.

“My God! Did you come in last night and sleep in the garage?”

“What a way to greet a guy who’s been gone for weeks.”

Her brain locked on the realization that she had not restored her engagement ring to its proper place on her finger. Flustered, she said, “Has it been weeks?”

“You don’t know?” He looked so like a puzzled little boy that Rachel couldn’t help putting her arms around him. She pulled him close and kissed him on the chin. His beard was prickly. “I can’t leave till about ten. That’s when I asked Irene to be here.”

“That’ll work,” Hank said. “I just drove down from Burbank. I need to go home and pack a few more clothes. I’ll come back about ten.”

“You came down here before you went home from the airport?” Hank lived in La Crescenta. “That’s kind of the long way around from Burbank Airport.”

“I wanted to see you, you silly thing.”

She hung her head and shot him a smile.

But he was now frowning. “Did you lose it?”

“What?”

He nodded toward her left hand.

The lie just rolled right off her tongue. “Oh. No. I took it off to clean it. It’s upstairs in the bathroom.”

999

“Dear girl, it is not as hard to run this place as you seem to believe,” Irene told her. “One would think you were leaving a baby with me, not a parking garage.”

“It is my baby. You can’t imagine how I worry about it. If something goes bad here, there’s nothing…I have nothing else.”

“Don’t be silly. You have your Pa, your friends, and that estimable dear boy. Yes, estimable.” Irene smiled, admiring the word. “When are you two going to…you know, tie the knot?”

Rachel tensed. Was everyone in Los Angeles conspiring to get her married? “We’ll set a time soon.”

“I do hope so, dear girl. We’re not any of us getting any younger.”

Rachel was thinking she didn’t need to hear that right now. She finished explaining the running of the garage for the third time.

“Yes, yes.” Irene’s tone politely made it clear she remembered the first two times.

“Here’s the key to the apartment.” Rachel handed it to her. “I do wish you would just stay there till I get back.”

“I’d miss my friends in the village.”

“Village?”

“On the river front, of course.”

Rachel frowned. “The Los Angeles River?” The last she had known, Irene was spending her nights in MacArthur Park.

“Of course, dear girl. We move from the park now and again when the policemen don’t have enough to do and pester us. I do miss the greenery. I’m scouting Elysian Park these days. I think that might be quite nice.”

“By Dodger Stadium?”

“Well, not right next, you know. It’s a big park.”

“Is it safe where you are by the river? I’ve heard things are getting bad along there.”

The river had long ago been paved into a concrete ditch that worked more like a storm sewer than a river, carrying water only after a heavy rainfall. Rachel often jogged along it. The so-called river’s banks were sometimes dotted with clusters of cardboard boxes and supermarket carts. The clusters belonged to every type of group from transvestites to octogenarians. The boxes and carts always magically disappeared about half an hour before the cops made one of their infrequent sweeps through the area.

“Of course, it’s safe, dear girl! I am with the Gray Panther settlement. One doesn’t mess with the Gray Panthers, you know. Why once a thief who saw what I had in my purse took it upon himself to follow me to the village. My friends saw him coming. They knew him. One of them, Donald his name is, about eighty I do believe. Donald picked up one of our tables, tore off a leg and knocked the stranger out cold.

“The fellow bled only a little, but dead to the world, he was. We put him in a cart, pushed him down to the courthouse, and laid him by the flowers. He never bothered us again.”

“No one saw an unconscious man in a grocery cart and stopped whoever was pushing it?” Rachel asked.

“Of course not.”

It always amazed Rachel that the business people who frequented the downtown area could look right through the street people with a sort of selective blindness.

“Well, please feel free to use the apartment,” she was saying when Hank’s Mustang appeared at the garage entrance.

He stopped at the booth. “I have an idea,” he said. “If you don’t like it, we won’t do it.”

Chapter Thirty-seven

“You want to what?”

“Camp,” Hank said.

“In a pup tent?”

“Not a pup tent, a pop-up tent. I haven’t used it in ages, but it’s a good one. It’s bigger than a pup tent, and easy to put up and take down.” A suggestion of a dimple twinkled at the side of his mouth.

Irene’s eyes were moving from Hank’s face to Rachel’s, but in a rare moment of silence, she said nothing.

“But it’s October. Almost November. Nights are getting chilly if not downright cold.”

“We can stop at Sport Chalet in La Cañada and get you a sleeping bag. Down, like mine. If anything it’ll be too warm.”

“Too warm. Sleeping outside. In October.”

“Not outside. In a tent.”

“I haven’t been camping since I was a kid. A little kid. Like seven or eight. I don’t know how to camp.”

“I have all the stuff. Lantern. Stove. All I need is you.”

“And some food might be a good idea.” Rachel’s laugh made her realize how tense she had been lately and how long it was since she had felt the deep cleansing rush that laughter can bring.

“I have a cooler,” Hank said. “We can stop at a grocery store.”

“There won’t be room in the car for me.”

“Maybe we should take your car. It’s a hatch. Probably does hold more.”

She clapped her hands. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

“Good girl!” Irene smiled approvingly.

“But where?” Rachel asked. “We can’t camp in LA. And we only have three days. Really only two and a half by the time we get out of here. I don’t want to spend it all on the road.”

Irene eyed Hank attentively. Apparently this was something she didn’t know the answer to.

999

Hank had a couple ideas. There was the beach at Point Magu near Ventura, but he wasn’t sure you could actually camp on the beach and wasn’t sure whether being there, but away from the beach, would be worthwhile. The other possibility was to take Angeles Crest Road north out of La Cañada into the mountains that overlooked the Los Angeles basin. Rachel had been working six days a week since arriving in Southern California and had never been to either place.

They still hadn’t decided where to go when Hank drove Rachel’s Honda Civic into the parking lot at Ralph’s supermarket in La Crescenta. He filled their shopping cart with steaks, bread, cheese, and cold cuts.

“We couldn’t eat that much in a week,” Rachel said as he added bacon, eggs, and coffee.

“If you haven’t camped lately, you obviously have forgotten how hungry fresh air makes you. And how good brewing coffee and sizzling bacon smells outdoors in the morning. Must be the extra oxygen or something.”

“You have a coffee pot? Pans?”

“I told you, I’ve got the works.”

At Sports Chalet, they decided where to spend the weekend.

Examining half a dozen sleeping bags, Rachel gazed longingly at a maroon bag on sale for ninety dollars.

“That’s a helluva buy!” Hank turned the tag and read: “…to fifteen degrees. See? I said you wouldn’t be cold. You won’t be cold anyway, my dear,” he leered.

Rachel laughed and clapped her hands like a child. “Let’s go to the mountains then.”

“If I remember right, the views from the road are spectacular,” Hank said as he tossed the sleeping bag into the back seat. “We could run into a little snow this time of year. Are your tires in good shape?”

“New this spring,” she said. “I don’t do bald tires.”

“Then we’ll be fine.”

Every inch of the Honda’s back seat and hatch space was loaded. “Okay. We’re off to see the wizard,” he said as they got in the car.

The metropolis stretched to the horizon behind them until the road curved again and there was nothing but cliffs and scrub forest and the road snaking upward.

“I had no idea we could “get out of Dodge” so fast,” Rachel said. “It’s like being beamed up to a different planet.”

“I used to camp up here about a hundred years ago when I was a kid,” Hank said. “To tell the truth, I haven’t been back since. This road is a hell of a lot better than it used to be.”

They passed a sign that read Ranger, but when they drove into the parking area, the building looked empty. “Maybe there are some maps.” Hank got out of the car and returned with a small brochure. “It doesn’t say much, but it’s better than nothing. The way they’ve cut funding and outsourced everything for the National Forests is criminal.”

Rachel rolled down her window as they got back on the road, enjoying the wind in her face, ruffling her hair.

“I used to have a dog who did that,” Hank laughed, and she punched his arm.

He hit the brakes. “That may be where my mom and I used to camp.”

“Your mother taught you to camp?”

“Yep. I told you my dad went out to get some root beer and ice cream one Saturday night when I was six and never came back.”

He turned onto a narrow lane, more trail than road, that cut through the scrub and pines. The Honda bounced hard and Hank slowed it to a crawl.

A gray cloud rose behind them. Rachel rolled her window up. “It’s sure dry up here.”

They reached what seemed like a natural turn-out for parking. “Yeah. This is it,” Hank said.

A small weathered sign, that had once been blue but now had only a few traces of color left, read Sugar Loaf.

“The name may not be original,” Hank said, “but I used to think this was the neatest place on earth. Let’s walk up the trail a bit and see how it looks.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

They wandered through a broad grassy area, then followed the path around a rock and into a canyon. Yellow-brown rock rose on both sides. A few determined shrubs clung here and there to the walls. The afternoon sky was deep blue. A few very white clouds peeked over the cliffs.

A little farther, the bottom fell away and they found themselves on a ledge. “Jesus,” Rachel said peering down. They were suspended halfway between the top of the rocky canyon wall and the ground below. A few scrubby pines straggled up from the bottom.

Hank swung around a curve in the ledge. “I hope you don’t have acrophobia.”

“I don’t think so. But I’ve never tried hanging right off the side of a cliff before.”

“If I remember right, the perfect place to camp is just a little farther.”

The ledge curled around a rock corner and a huge, spreading California oak appeared in a hollow below.

“Wow,” Rachel said.

Hank swept aside a brittle shrub and she saw the trail. It was overgrown, and barely traversable, but it wound down to the hollow.

The oak tree’s gnarled roots rode the top of the hard soil but there was a level place, and just beyond it, a small pit dug into the earth. Inside the pit were the whitish ashes of past fires. Two grayish birds strode along the ground pecking for seeds. A scrub jay landed and squawked at them.

Rachel sniffed the air. “This must be how the world smelled when it was young.”

“Depends on what the meaning of fresh is.” A grin cut across Hank’s face.

Laughter percolated up inside Rachel. The muscles it stirred seemed surprised and she realized, for the second time that day, that she hadn’t been laughing much recently.

Hank pointed to the flat spot. “So we camp here?”

“Are you sure? The car’s jam-packed and at least a mile away. To say nothing of that ledge a million feet above the canyon.”

“So we make several trips. We’ve got backpacks.” He pointed at her cargo pants. “And you could probably carry half the entire load in those pockets.”

Rachel was gazing at the huge tree. A breeze rattled its leaves. Its spreading limbs seemed to offer a sort of primal sense of security. “It’s like we’re the first white people to see this place.”

“And we’re only fifty or so miles from LA.”

“You sure it’s okay to camp here?”

Hank reached out and ruffled her hair. “Who’s gonna know?”

It was nearly four by the time they stowed the last items in their backpacks. Rachel turned to Hank. “There’s one more thing I want to take.” She reached under the driver’s seat and brought out the old thirty-eight.