Silent Joe (24 page)

We crossed at a busy intersection, then headed back toward the HACF. We got a lot of stares—a beautiful woman in a yellow dress, and a scar under a hat.

"Did you know when he'd be at Lind Street?"

"Approximately. Why?"

"I need to know who knew where Will would be, and when."

She was nodding along but staring straight ahead. She seemed to be concentrating, trying to process the information while she walked.

Then she glanced quickly at me. "Yes. Okay. I knew where. I didn't know when."

"Why did you call Pearlita?"

She stopped and stared up at me, right into my eyes. "You're a professional listener, aren't you?"

"I hear and remember things."

"God."

She turned away, shaking her head, making time down the sidewalk now. I listened to the rhythm of her shoes on the cement. You can hear emotions in footsteps. Disgust. Anger. Shame.

We walked past a
joyeria
and the
discoteca
blaring music onto the street.

"She's an old friend. She came up with the Ritz and the Ritz came up with Savannah, so she thought Will owed her a favor. I called her when you got to Jaime's."

. . . Okay, okay. Yeah, right now.

"But she didn't show."

"Some things came up, she said."

"What things?"

"She didn't say."

"Why did she want to meet him?"

"Luz . . . Pearlita wanted to talk about her brother. Her brother is Felix Escobar."

And then it made sense to me. Will's good friend, DA Philip Dent, was arguing the penalty phase of Felix Escobar's double-murder trial. Escobar was a Mexican mafia soldier who'd shotgunned two men at close range during a convenience-store holdup. Dent had gotten the conviction just two weeks ago, from a jury that deliberated forty-five minutes. He was trying for a death sentence.

"Pearlita wanted to plead his case to Will," I said, "hoping Will could talk to Dent."

"She wanted leniency for him."

"Felix didn't show much leniency."

She stopped in front of a cafe window and turned to me. "Go away Joe. You're ignorant and dangerous."

"Just leave you right here on the street?"

"Get away from me."

My ears got hot. A car went down Fourth Street with music so loud rattled the window glass. I looked down at the rage in Jennifer Avila's beautiful face. I waited for the loud car to go by.

"Miss Avila, Pearlita knew some of the
when.
She knew that he was the HACF office because you called her when we got there. And later that night she knew that Will was on his way because she called him. Maybe she shared that information. Did you tell her about the money, the arrangement? The
where?"

"I don't remember every word I said. I help friends."

"Did you give Pearlita Will's number?"

"Maybe. I don't remember. What's a phone number? Anyone can get anyone else's."

"You must have known how dangerous that could be, with everything that was going on."

"I help friends."

"Maybe they took your help and burned Will with it."

She slapped me, hard, but not on the scar.

"What were you doing with the cash that Will gave you? I counted and rolled it, so I know how much and how often—it was two grand per week for the last—"

"I know how much it was!"

She opened her arms to encompass the street. I noticed the faint tattoo scar just below the shoulder, reaching all the way around the soft flesh of her underarm.

"It was for us. For them. The poor and the sick. That money was to keep the HACF open during the DA's probe. Our county money stopped when the press said we were flooding the polls with alien voters. That was a lie. So Will helped us."

She stepped toward me and hissed into my face: "You want to do something useful, Joe? You want to be like Will? Then return Jaime's calls. He's trying to help the family of Miguel Domingo. Jaime needs you just like he needed Will. You're supposed to be his son. So do what your father would do, talk to Jaime."

"Miss Avila, who were you down for? The tattoo is why I ask."

"Raitt Street."

"Pearlita's gang."

"That was a long time ago. Get away from me. I would never have hurt him. How can you even say that giving his number to a friend is the same as killing him? You don't know anything about friendship and loyalty and respect. You don't know anything but how to take orders from a man who used you to do the things he didn't have the
cojones
for. He's gone and you still take his orders. So be useful, and call Jaime."

I felt the heat come into my face. I thought about Jaime and Miguel Domingo and Luria Bias. Maybe I could honor Will by continuing something he believed in. Certainly, I could help a woman that he loved, even if she detested me.

She turned with a flash of black hair and yellow dress and pulled open the screen door of Cafe Los Ponchos.

At
10:17 p.m.
I parked at the Santa Ana Amtrak depot. I walked into station, then out to the platform and looked at the tracks narrowing back into the darkness. It was cool and cloudy again and there wasn't a star the sky.

Then the speaker announced the arrival of the Coast Starlight. I walked to the far side of the arrivals room and stood behind a potted palm. Sleepers rose from the wooden benches. A family with lots of children pressed close to the door. A minute later I felt the vibration, then the deep rhythmic rumble of the Starlight. It plowed through the dark and stopped alongside the station.

I saw him once, through the window, when he got off. Then again he walked into the station. Same as the pictures, same as the dreams; downy white hair and beard, potbelly; big head low on his shoulders like he'd been assembled without a neck.

He came into the waiting area with a duffel slung over his shoulder stepped away from the tree.

Thor stopped and looked at me. His blue eyes caught the light, shifted the duffel. He nodded.

"Joe."

"Thor."

"You didn't call the cops on me."

"I am the cops."

"Yup. Don't bust me. I can't do lockup again. It'd kill me."

His voice was high and clear. His teeth showed when he talked, you couldn't say it was a smile.

A family came up behind him and split into two parts as they walked past. The dad had a kid on his shoulders and the boy towered over Thor. I'd never realized how short he was, though I remembered his height from the intake records I'd gotten from Corcoran: 5'6".

"You going to let me stay at your place?"

"No."

"I already know where it is."

"Don't show up without an invite."

He sighed like he was disappointed. "You sure?"

"Extremely."

"Yeah, well, I really don't blame you. I'd be pressed out of shape, too."

Some of the people were watching us now. Thor looked at them and seemed to be smiling. A girl in a pink dress and shiny shoes stopped and looked up at me, then made a face and backed away. Her mother gathered her up and I heard the muffled words, but I hardly paid attention to them.

I watched Thor. I had no memory of seeing him. I was ready to feel like I was in the presence of something evil and eternal. But with all his stage time in my nightmares, in the flesh he seemed mortal and matter-of- fact.

"You've been on the TV and papers a lot, Joe. All the way up in Seattle, even. They find that girl and her brother yet?"

"No."

"Crazy world."

"You'd know."

"Yeah." He took two steps toward me and lowered his duffel to the ground. "Shake my hand."

I shook it. My scar flared hot and my bones felt frozen. I could barely grip his hard, rough hand. It seemed like every bad emotion was roaring inside of me, every single bad feeling a person could have, all at once. No order or logic to them at all.

I saw his blue eyes studying me in the light from the station. "It don't really look that bad, Joe. Hurt?"

"Sometimes."

"You look good in the hat and suit. Expensive, I can tell."

"I shop the sales."

He eyed me. "Well, look now. I'm sorry for what I did and I need you to forgive me. I've checked out a bunch of religions. And any one that's got any kind of hell, a guy like me goes right to it."

"You should have picked a religion without one."

"No. I wanted a God with some teeth in Him. These touchy-feely ones don't get through to me. The Bible says I ought to square things with you and I believe it. Eye for an eye, and all that. I got some acid in a peanut butter jar, right there in my duffel. You can pour it on me if that will get you to forgive. It's more than got poured on you. Then you could tell it's okay, what happened. You could see there's more to your old man than the worst thing that happened in his life."

"I forgive you," I said. It surprised me. "But if I ever see you again I'm going to empty my gun in your heart. From this second on, you don't exist."

With shaking hands I got out my wallet and found three hundreds. I handed them to him.

"Good luck, old man. That ought to be enough to get you home."

"Thank you, son. Great to see you. Good luck to you, too."

I drove the 241 Toll Road fast, up over a hundred and thirty as I whizzed past the Windy Ridge toll plaza, windows down and sunroof open and wind slamming into my face.

Then a high-velocity merge onto the 91 and a tire-screeching exit Green River, where I turned around and roared back the way I came.

Sometimes you just can't go fast enough to get away. Because it's inside you and the speed doesn't matter.

I needed a baptism but couldn't get one this late, close to midnight. I drove down to Diver's Cove in Laguna, where I'd gone snorkeling with Mom when I was little, and I walked out into the water with all my clothes on except shoes, guns and wallet, and went under and held my breath. I drove my fingers into the hard bottom sand and felt the surge try to draw me in and out. Like a piece of driftwood or a big snarl of kelp. I came and got another big breath and went down again. I wished I could hit one-thirty under water because I thought that would rub it all off—the scar, past, the fear—everything, polish me clean and shiny like a shell. Then I got so cold it was worse than shaking hands with Thor so I pushed off the surface and dove into a breaking wave that carried me to shore.

Back home I broke down both my .45s—one of them, a replacements for the weapon that Dr. Zussman had taken—then cleaned and oiled them. Next the .32. Nervous activity is all it was, because the guns were already clean and oiled and perfect. I thought about Thor and cleaned them all again. Then I cleaned and oiled the shells before loading them into the clips.

I called Jaime Medina. He'd been sleeping, but his mood cheered when I told him I was ready to help him. I made a date to talk to him and Enrique Domingo, brother to the slain Miguel.

"You're doing the right thing, Joe," he said. "Just like your father always tried to do. You'll see, Miguel Domingo was a hero, not an insane criminal, like the cops made him out to be."

"The media said that, sir. Not the cops."

"You will see."

"I hope so, sir."

Melissa had called so I called her back. She said the fingerprints on the transmitter belonged to Del Pritchard, a pay-grade three automobile and bus mechanic employed by the Orange County Transportation Authority. She'd done a check on him as a favor to me, and Del had come back clean.

I took a long hot shower, then got into bed. I stared up at the ceiling. I'd tacked a picture from a magazine up there, just like Sammy had taped his picture of Bernadette. It showed a huge oak tree on a gentle, summer-tan central California hillside. The tree cast a dark blue shadow on the dry grass. High up in the oak tree the leaves were so dark and dense you couldn't see anything behind them, not even sky. And there in that dark canopy was my quiet spot, the place I could go and see but not be seen, hear and not be heard. I went there. My eagle friend was there, too. He moved over and made room for me. I looked down at the tawny hills and the golden grass and the smooth dirt road leading around a bend. The big bird pushed off from the branch and sailed away. I could feel the branch jiggle, lighten. So I pushed off too, unfurled my arms and followed.

D
el Pritchard? My name is Joe Trona."

"I know who you are."

"Can we talk a minute?"

"I got to punch in. Then I got a job to do."