It’s as easy as that, Will thought. He never saw the gun until Gutman fired and he felt the bullet tear into his chest.
HE DIDN’T KNOW how long he’d been unconscious. He awoke in a hospital room, with Tim Press and Sadie at his side. “You’re going to be all right,” Sadie assured him.
“She phoned to tell me you were going to the loft,” Press said. “I was coming up the stairs when I heard the shot. I got him before he could finish you off.”
“That badge — ”
“We’ll talk about that later.”
Sadie touched his arm where an IV tube was attached. “The doctor says the bullet went right through without hitting a vital organ. He says you were awfully lucky.”
Will tried to smile. “Maybe my Friday night luck is changing at last.”
The Fool
By Laurie R. King
Sergeant Mendez, there’s some nutcase on line two. Can you figure out what he wants?”
Bonita Mendez did not reply, so deep in the maddening details of the Rivas/Escobedo case that she didn’t notice the uniformed officer in her doorway. For the twentieth time that morning, she read the note: 8:35 p.m., March 2, Mrs. Claudia Padilla (821 Pacific Circle) hears a bang and, a few minutes later, a car accelerating. She picked up the second page, torn from her notebook, to read: 8:49 p.m., 911 call. Young, panicky voice reporting shooting at 814 Pacific Circle (cell phone/Mrs. Adriana Torres/used by daughter, Jasmina, 13). Stuck on to this page were two Post-it notes with related information: Jasmina (Mina) says phone was lost the week before (phone records requested). Then, added the day before: Calls thru March 1 match usual pattern — ask? The two pages lay on either side of the laconic Patrol car arr 9:04 — Gloria Rivas (16) babysitter 814 Pacific, doa/gsw.
“Sergeant Mendez?”
It was shaping up to be one of those cases, the kind that brought you in on your days off and sat at the front of your mind when three a.m. came around on the bedside clock. What haven’t I seen? Sixteen-year-old babysitter Gloria Rivas, dead on arrival, of a gunshot wound to the neck. Twelve-year-old Enrique Escobedo, her charge, missing. Here on Sergeant Mendez’s desk, a sheet of lined paper with a series of apparently random notes: Friends of EE absent March 3 incl. Jasmina Torres, Ernesto Garcia, Todd Stevens, Crystal Pihalak, Gilberto Oliveras. The name “Jasmina Torres” is underlined, simply because it has come up twice. 11:14 p.m., Joseph “Taco” Alvarez $500 Shell ATM at the Shell station north of town — gas, gone. In translation, this means that local gangbanger Taco Alvarez withdrew money from the Shell station ATM, filled his tank with the same ATM card, and drove off into the night. This note was included because Mendez learned from two witnesses that Taco had threatened Gloria Rivas not only because she had refused to go out with him but because she was going out with his younger brother, and she had further compounded her insult by talking the brother into not going through with the gang initiation he was supposed to face.
The entrance of Taco Alvarez onto the scene had reduced the uncomfortable possibility that Enrique — twelve, a good student, with no record — had shot his babysitter and fled.
“Um, Sergeant Mendez? The telephone?”
Sergeant Mendez knew the name Taco Alvarez; she’d even arrested him once for tagging, back when he was a smart-mouthed fifteen-year-old headed toward his own gang initiation. She wasn’t surprised that he’d shot someone or that he’d successfully fallen off the map — Taco had a brain. What did surprise her was that he’d apparently snatched up Gloria’s charge, Enrique, as a hostage.
“Sergeant?”
“What?”
“There’s some wackjob on line two. I hung up on him once, but he called back. I thought maybe you could tell what he wants.”
Mendez stared at him for a moment, then flicked her eyes to the phone that lay half-buried by the Post-its, notebook pages, refolded California maps, and scraps of paper that covered her desk. The phone’s light was blinking, which meant the caller was safely on hold and couldn’t have overheard Danny Scarlotti’s insulting remark: it had happened before. She scowled at the uniformed boy in the doorway. “Why give it to me?” she asked, although as she said it, she knew it was a stupid question. She was the only detective dumb enough, or obsessed enough, to hang around the station on a Saturday morning.
“Because you’re here,” Scarlotti answered, sounding like a teenager — although he had enough sense not to roll his eyes while he was in the room with her. She wondered if uniforms were this casual in a big-city police department or if it was just her.
“I’m busy. And Paul’s the one on call today. Can’t you figure out how to transfer it to him?” She looked down at the stray scrap of paper in her hand, on which she’d noted: March 2, p.m., Mrs. Escobedo hysterical; March 3, phoned five times; March 4, not answering phone.
“Well, he’s at his daughter’s tournament today, and I sort of thought . . .” Scarlotti’s voice trailed off, and Mendez knew that the answer was no, he couldn’t figure out how to transfer the call. She sighed, knowing she was going to regret this, wondering why on earth they’d hired a kid who couldn’t speak Spanish and therefore interpreted the language as a lunatic’s ravings.
“Sergeant Mendez,” she snapped, in English, to see if she could unsettle the caller, maybe make whoever it was just hang up.
Instead, the voice that came into her ear was real English — the kind from England, like you heard on the television, and not the hard-edged regional accents either. A man; an older man; a voice deep and oddly melodic, as if its owner were reciting on a stage. “What am I? An infant crying in the night,” it said. Then it stopped.
Her head snapped up and her eyes grew wide, then narrowed. Danny boy’s diagnosis of “nutcase” might not be far off. “Sir, you have reached the Rio Linda Police Department. Do you have a crime to report?”
“Man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”
It was what her English teacher would have called a non sequitur, and what most people would call lunatic ramblings, but something in his voice, some pressing intelligence, kept her from hanging up the phone and going back to her fruitless perusal of the material related to the death of Gloria Rivas and the disappearance of Enrique Escobedo. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.”
She pinched her fingertips hard into the inner corners of her tired eyes. When did she last have a solid eight hours? The Rivas/Escobedo case had crashed down on them on the second, and it was now the fifteenth, with no arrest and no sign of the boy. Going on two weeks of gathering evidence; interviewing family, friends, and neighbors; getting alone with one after another of Gloria’s high school friends and trying to find a wedge to drive under those blank walls. Long, fruitless conversations with the police of Chiapas, where Taco Alvarez was from and therefore where he might be headed, and of Oaxaca, where the Escobedos had lived before they came north in the seventies. Dead ends for the murder, a complete puzzle for the boy’s disappearance, the weight of it settling heavily on all their shoulders. Hang up on this guy, Mendez. You’d do everyone a lot more good if you went home and got some sleep. But the caller’s voice had none of the slurred consonants of drink or the edginess of drugs. His brief statements, though nonsensical (and now rhyming), did not resemble the ravings of any lunatic Sergeant Mendez had met. He sounded polite and calm. Determined, almost. Maybe the English accent was deceiving her, but he sounded like a professor, one trying to deliver a particularly challenging lesson. Okay, see how he dealt with a bright student.
“Well, sir, you called me. If you want me to pick up the fruit of sense, you’ll have to drop it where I can find it.”
“Truth can never be told so as to be understood.”
“Yeah, ain’t that the pits? So, if you can’t tell me the truth, why are you calling?”
“For now we see throu
gh a glass, darkly, but then face-to-face.”
This, anyway, was something she recognized, although what First Corinthians had to do with anything, she hadn’t a clue. “Sir, if you want to discuss the Bible, why don’t you go down to St. Patrick’s and have a nice chat with Father — ”
The man broke in, his voice forceful as he repeated his first words: “An infant crying in the night.”
Detective Bonita Mendez sat and thought about that for a minute. “Are you telling me that a child is in danger?”
The voice boomed into her ear, rotund with approval: “It needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!”
Something about that final word set off a tiny twitch in the back of Sergeant Mendez’s mind, a pulse of recognition, or apprehension. But a tiny twitch was all, little more than a faint aroma in the air, and it was gone. She looped back to her own beginnings: “I think you ought to come into the department and tell me all about it, sir.”
“So near, and yet so far.” He sounded wistful.
She looked at the number on the display, saw it was local in both area code and prefix, and knew he couldn’t be too far away. Maybe he was disabled somehow. Other than mentally, that is.
“You want me to come to you?”
“Come before his presence with singing.”
She hoped this didn’t indicate that her caller thought of himself as God; she really didn’t have time to get involved with a psychiatric hold. The paperwork alone would sink her little boat. Damn it, she wasn’t even on call today. “So where are you located?”
“Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”
Her cop’s mind snagged for a moment on the word “pain” before it moved on to the possibility that “tell my story” might be where the man’s emphasis lay. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think . . .” She stopped, only half-hearing the sounds coming down the line: the faint crackle; the build and fade of a diesel engine in the background; the voice of a child giving forth a long, unintelligible Spanish monologue. When she was a child, not much older than the owner of that piping voice, she’d had an aunt who lost both sons to a drunk driver and who responded to her agony by joining a church. The aunt’s church was one of those that lived and breathed the Bible, that consulted Proverbs and Job for advice and to make sense of daily life, that referenced any decision, from ethical action to what to have for breakfast, by summoning a verse. Some verses were strikingly apt — the Bible is, after all, a large and diverse book — but for other references, meaning was stretched past the snapping point, leaving the aunt and her audience staring at one another, dumbfounded. Rather as she felt with this man on the telephone, in fact. “Are you by any chance talking about Felicia? The elementary school?”
“My library was dukedom large enough,” he responded, with faint stress on the second word.
“You’re at the Felicia library?”
“I give you a wise and understanding heart,” the Englishman said, in an approving voice that made her feel oddly warm.
“Okay, it’ll take me maybe fifteen, twenty minutes to get there. Will you wait for me?”
The phone went dead, which she guessed meant yes.
She sat for a minute, tapping her middle fingernail on the desk, wondering what the hell she’d just been listening to. There remained the tiny, faraway sense of familiarity in the back of her mind, but for the life of her, she couldn’t tease it forward. Something years back and not here, but an echo . . . The Bible, snippets of poetry, Shakespeare — she’d caught both Hamlet and The Tempest there — it was an odd conversational form, to be sure. But conversation it appeared to be, albeit of a convoluted and inadequate style. She felt a stir of interest at this welcome distraction from frustration — and then caught herself.
She had to be careful. This thespian-voiced Englishman could be some honest-to-God nutcase setting a trap for a cop. A small backwater town like Rio Linda might not shelter as many purely vicious individuals as a big city, but that didn’t rule viciousness out.
When in doubt, take backup.
And always be in doubt.
Mendez closed the Escobedo file on her computer and hunted down the location of the number the Englishman had been calling from. Yes, a public phone, located at the little Felicia Public Library, as he’d said. Or sort of said.
She shut down the computer and began shoveling the stray papers back into their file. “Scarlotti!” she shouted.
“Yeah?” came the formal answer.
“Yes, Sergeant Mendez,” she muttered, locking up her desk.
“What?”
“Nothing. Who’s on patrol down in Felicia?”
“What, you mean now?”
She looked at him from the doorway where she was standing, adjusting her gun for comfort.
“Yes, I mean now,” she told him.
“Um, let me see.” He pawed through the mess before him, came up with the right piece of paper, and read from it. “Torres and Wong.”
“Patch me through to them, will you?”
It took him only two tries to do so, and when she had Jaime Torres on the line, she asked if the two patrolmen could swing by the front of the library in fifteen minutes, just to provide a little backup, in case.
There was a pause before the puzzled voice responded, “That’s where we are now.”
“What, at the library? Why?”
“Someone called in a report of a suspected terrorist in Arab robes hanging around out front.”
“An Arab terrorist? In Felicia, for God’s sake? Hey — I don’t suppose it’s a guy with an English accent?”
“Don’t know about the accent. We just pulled up, but there’s an older white-haired male sitting on the bench near the phones. He’s got a knapsack on the ground next to him, but I’d have to say he looks more like a monk than an Arab. Doesn’t have a turban or anything.”
“Look, would you mind not approaching him until I get there? Unless he’s actively causing problems, that is. I’m just at the station.”
“Sure, he’s just sitting there, looking pretty harmless. You want us to watch him from the car or from the café across the street? There’s a clear line of surveillance from there.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and take your break, sit where you can keep an eye on him? I’ll be there in twelve minutes if I make both signals.”
“Take your time. Wong’s got the prostrate trouble — he’s happy to piss for a while.”
The line cut off but not before she heard the beginnings of an outraged partner’s voice. She smiled, figuring that Wong had no “prostrate trouble” at all but that Torres had heard that Detective Mendez was unattached again, and was pulling his unmarried partner’s leg.
The Felicia library was a tiny building with a few thousand books, two computer terminals, and one part-time librarian. It survived on the goodwill of a small army of largely Hispanic volunteers and had to argue its budget to the city almost every year. But since the Felicia District of Rio Linda, surrounded by fields of strawberries and lettuce, was the kind of neighborhood where few houses had computers (or books, for that matter), and the only other forms of entertainment in walking distance were the roadside bar a mile south and the dusty general store/café across from the library, it made the Felicia Public Library the place to go for homework, after-school gatherings, job searches, ESL classes, and visiting-nurse clinics. It also made for some great numbers to show the state auditors, and the low-income patrons had justified a regular trickle of state and federal grants. Without a doubt, the people here adored the place and kept it both busy and spotless.
Which might explain why some concerned patron had called in a stranger hanging around the public phone out front. As Mendez pulled into the pitted surface of the small parking area, a young mother and her two young kids were coming out the door, and all three patrons gave the man a wary look. He lifted one hand, two fingers pointing skyward like a benediction; when the woman came down the s
teps, she was smiling.
Mendez got out of her car and could understand why the woman had smiled. The figure in the brown robe — which was no more Arab than the shirt and khaki pants she was wearing — resembled a tall, thin, brown-clad Father Christmas, down to the twinkle in his eye. There was, as Torres had told her, a battered blue nylon backpack tucked under the front edge of the bench, and a walking stick, tall as a man, leaning against the far armrest. His skin was weathered, although he was clearly Anglo. A pair of nearly white running shoes peeked out from the hem of his robe.
The man saw her, and he made her instantly for a cop, but he watched her watching him with no indication of the wary or defiant manner that brought a cop’s reflexes to attention. She half-turned to look over her shoulder, wondering if Torres and Wong had been paying as much attention as the skinny Father Christmas had.
In perhaps thirty seconds, the two uniforms came out of the onetime garage that was now plastered with neatly painted signs advertising strong hot coffee, breakfast burritos all day, and menudo thursdays. The two men hitched up their heavy belts as they crossed the deserted side street, not needing to look for traffic. They joined her at the car, taking their eyes off the man for only the brief moment necessary to greet her.
Torres, she had known for years, and she’d met Wong (who couldn’t have been more than thirty, further marks against the prostate story) a couple of times, although she’d never worked with him.
“He’s just been sitting there,” Torres told her. “Occasionally says hi to someone going in or out, but otherwise just cooling it.”
“Okay, I don’t think there’ll be a problem here, you might as well go back to work.”
“We’ll hang on for a minute,” Torres said firmly. Jaime Torres was a few years older than she was, and she’d been friends with his sister in high school: this was a brotherly thing. She wouldn’t even try to argue him out of it.
“Okay,” she agreed, and led the way up the library’s walk.
The bearded monk rose as she approached, not like a wary suspect but like her maternal grandfather, who’d been incapable of sitting when a lady entered the room. The resemblance ended there: her grandfather had been shaped by a lifetime of work in the fields, but even if he’d lived a life of leisure, he wouldn’t have been much more than five and a half feet. This man was well over six feet and of a willowy build that wasn’t far from gaunt, creating hollows in the cheeks above his beard. She figured him for a homeless man, what with being a stranger in the area and carrying that worn knapsack, but if so, he was a very clean and tidy homeless man. He reminded her of a portrait of a saint in church school.