The Bad Place (7 page)

Half an hour later, after cruising some of the higher and even more quiet neighborhoods in fogbound Laguna, he parked on a dark side street and exchanged the Chevy’s plates for those on an Oldsmobile. With luck, the owner of the Olds would not notice the new plates for a couple of days, maybe even a week or longer; until he reported the switch, the Chevy would not match anything on a police hot sheet and would, therefore, be relatively safe to drive. In any case, Frank intended to get rid of the car by tomorrow night and either boost a new one or use some of the cash in the flight bag to buy legal wheels.

Though he was exhausted, he didn’t think it wise to check into a motel. Four-thirty in the morning was a damned odd hour for anyone to be wanting a room. Furthermore, he was unshaven, and his thick hair was matted and oily, and both his jeans and checkered blue flannel shirt were dirty and rumpled from his recent adventures. The last thing he wanted to do was call attention to himself, so he decided to catch a few hours of sleep in the car.

He drove farther south, into Laguna Niguel, where he parked on a quiet residential street, under the immense boughs of a date palm. He stretched out on the backseat, as comfortably as possible without benefit of sufficient legroom or pillows, and closed his eyes.

For the moment he was not afraid of his unknown pursuer, because he felt that the man was no longer nearby. Temporarily, at least, he had given his enemy the shake, and had no need to lie awake in fear of a hostile face suddenly appearing at the window. He was also able to put out of his mind all questions about his identity and the money in the flight bag; he was so tired—and his thought processes were so fuzzy—that any attempt to puzzle out solutions to those mysteries would be fruitless.

He was kept awake, however, by the memory of how
strange
the events in Anaheim had been, a few hours ago. The foreboding gusts of wind. The eerie flutelike music. Imploding windows, exploding tires, failed brakes, failed steering ...

Who had come into that apartment behind the blue light? Was “who” the right word ... or would it be more accurate to ask
what
had been searching for him?

During his urgent flight from Anaheim to Laguna, he’d not had the leisure to reflect upon those bizarre incidents, but now he could not turn his mind from them. He sensed that he had survived an encounter with something unnatural. Worse, he sensed that he knew what it was—and that his amnesia was self-induced by a deep desire to forget.

After a while, even the memory of those preternatural events wasn’t enough to keep him awake. The last thing that crossed his waking mind, as he slipped off on a tide of sleep, was that four-word phrase that had come to him when he had first awakened in the deserted alleyway:
Fireflies in a windstorm.
. . .

BY THE time they had cooperated with the police at the scene, made arrangements for their disabled vehicles, and talked with the three corporate officers who showed up at Decodyne, Bobby and Julie did not get home until shortly before dawn. They were dropped at their door by a police cruiser, and Bobby was glad to see the place.

They lived on the east side of Orange, in a three-bedroom, sort-of-ersatz-Spanish tract house, which they had bought new two years ago, largely for its investment potential. Even at night the relative youth of the neighborhood was apparent in the landscaping: None of the shrubbery had reached full size; the trees were still too immature to loom higher than the rain gutters on the houses.

Bobby unlocked the door. Julie went in, and he followed. The sound of their footsteps on the parquet floor of the foyer, echoing hollowly off the bare walls of the adjacent and utterly empty living room, was proof that they were not committed to the house for the long term. To save money toward the fulfillment of The Dream, they had left the living room, dining room, and two bedrooms unfurnished. They installed cheap carpet and cheaper draperies. Not a penny had been spent on other improvements. This was merely a way station en route to The Dream, so they saw no point in lavishing funds on the decor.

The Dream. That was how they thought of it—with a capital t and a capital d They kept their expenses as low as possible, in order to fund The Dream. They didn’t spend much on clothes or vacations, and they didn’t buy fancy cars. With hard work and iron determination, they were building Dakota & Dakota Investigations into a major firm that could be sold for a large capital gain, so they plowed a lot of earnings back into the business to make it grow. For The Dream.

At the back of the house, the kitchen and family room—and the small breakfast area that separated them—were furnished. This—and the master bedroom upstairs—was where they lived when at home.

The kitchen had a Spanish-tile floor, beige counters, and dark oak cabinets. No money had been spent on decorative accessories, but the room had a cozy feeling because some necessities of a functioning kitchen were on display: a net bag filled with half a dozen onions, copper pots dangling from a ceiling rack, cooking utensils, bottles of spices. Three green tomatoes were ripening on the windowsill.

Julie leaned against the counter, as if she could not stand another moment without support, and Bobby said, “You want a drink?”

“Booze at dawn?”

“I was thinking more of milk or juice.”

“No, thanks.”

“Hungry
^?
”

She shook her head. “I just want to fall into bed. I’m beat.” He took her in his arms, held her close, cheek to cheek, with his face buried in her hair. Her arms tightened around him.

They stood that way for a while, saying nothing, letting the residual fear evaporate in the gentle heat they generated between them. Fear and love were indivisible. If you allowed yourself to care, to love, you made yourself vulnerable, and vulnerability led to fear. He found meaning in life through his relationship with her, and if she died, meaning and purpose would die too.

With Julie still in his arms, Bobby leaned back and studied her face. The smudges of dried blood had been wiped away. The skinned spot on her forehead was beginning to scab over with a thin yellow membrane. However, the imprint of their recent ordeal consisted of more than the abrasion on her forehead. With her tan complexion, she could never be said to look pale, even in moments of the most profound anxiety; a detectable grayness seeped into her face, however, at times like this, and at the moment her cinnamon-and-cream skin was underlaid with a shade of gray that made him think of headstone marble.

“It’s over,” he assured her, “and we’re okay.”

“It’s not over in my dreams. Won’t be for weeks.”

“A thing like tonight adds to the legend of Dakota and Dakota.”

“I don’t want to be a legend. Legends are all dead.”

“We’ll be
living
legends, and that’ll bring in business. The more business we build, the sooner we can sell out, grab The Dream.” He kissed her gently on each corner of her mouth. “I have to call in, leave a long message on the agency machine, so Clint will know how to handle everything when he goes to work.”

“Yeah. I don’t want the phone to start ringing only a couple of hours after I hit the sheets.”

He kissed her again and went to the wall phone beside the refrigerator. As he was dialing the office number, he heard Julie walk to the bathroom off the short hall that connected the kitchen to the laundryroom. She closed the bathroom door just as the answering machine picked up:
“Thank you for calling Dakota and Dakota. No one—
”

Clint Karaghiosis—whose Greek-American family had been fans of Clint Eastwood from the earliest days of his first television show, “Rawhide”—was Bobby and Julie’s right-hand man at the office. He could be trusted to handle any problem. Bobby left a long message for him, summarizing the events at Decodyne and noting specific tasks that had to be done to wrap up the case.

When he hung up, he stepped down into the adjoining family room, switched on the CD player, and put on a Benny Goodman disc. The first notes of “King Porter Stomp” brought the dead room to life.

In the kitchen again, he got a quart can of eggnog from the refrigerator. They had bought it two weeks ago for their quiet, at-home, New Year’s Eve celebration, but had not opened it, after all, on the holiday. He opened it now and half-filled two waterglasses.

From the bathroom he heard Julie make a tortured sound; she was finally throwing up. It was mostly just dry heaves because they had not eaten in eight or ten hours, but the spasms sounded violent. Throughout the night, Bobby had expected her to succumb to nausea, and he was surprised that she had retained control of herself this long.

He retrieved a bottle of white rum from the bar cabinet in the family room and spiked each serving of eggnog with a double shot. He was gently stirring the drinks with a spoon to blend in the rum, when Julie returned, looking even grayer than before.

When she saw what he was doing, she said, “I don’t need that.”

“I know what you need. I’m psychic. I knew you’d toss your cookies after what happened tonight. Now I know you need this. ” He stepped to the sink and rinsed off the spoon.

“No, Bobby, really, I can’t drink that.” The Goodman music didn’t seem to be energizing her.

“It’ll settle your stomach. And if you don’t drink it, you’re not going to sleep.” Taking her by the arm, crossing the breakfast area, and stepping down into the family room, he said, “You’ll lie awake worrying about me, about Thomas”—Thomas was her brother—“about the world and everyone in it.”

They sat on the sofa, and he did not turn on any lamps. The only light was what reached them from the kitchen.

She drew her legs under her and turned slightly to face him. Her eyes shone with a soft, reflected light. She sipped the eggnog.

The room was now filled with the strains of “One Sweet Letter From You,” one of Goodman’s most beautiful thematic statements, with a vocal by Louise Tobin.

They sat and listened for a while.

Then Julie said, “I’m tough, Bobby, I really am.”

“I know you are.”

“I don’t want you thinking I’m lame.”

“Never.”

“It wasn’t the shooting that made me sick, or using the Toyota to run that guy down, or even the thought of almost losing you—”

“I know. It was what you had to do to Rasmussen.”

“He’s a slimy little weasel-faced bastard, but even he doesn’t deserve to be broken like that. What I did to him stank.”

“It was the only way to crack the case, because it wasn’t near cracked till we’d found out who hired him.”

She drank more eggnog. She frowned down at the milky contents of her glass, as if the answer to some mystery could be found there.

Following Tobin’s vocal, Ziggy Elman came in with a lusty trumpet solo, followed by Goodman’s clarinet. The sweet sounds made that boxy, tract-house room seem like the most romantic place in the world.

“What I did... I did for The Dream. Giving Decodyne Rasmussen’s employer will please them. But breaking him was somehow . . . worse than wasting a man in a fair gunfight.”

Bobby put one hand on her knee. It was a nice knee. After all these years, he was still sometimes surprised by her slenderness and the delicacy of her bone structure, for he always thought of her as being strong for her size, solid, indomitable. “If you hadn’t put Rasmussen in that vise and squeezed him, I would’ve done it.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. You’re scrappy, Bobby, and you’re smart and you’re tough, but there’re certain things you can never do. This was one of them. Don’t jive me just to make me feel good.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it. But I’m glad you did. Decodyne’s very big time, and this could’ve set us back years if we’d flubbed it.”

“Is there anything we won’t do for The Dream?”

Bobby said, “Sure. We wouldn’t torture small children with red-hot knives, and we wouldn’t shove innocent old ladies down long flights of stairs, and we wouldn’t club a basketful of newborn puppies to death with an iron bar—at least not without good reason.”

Her laughter lacked a full measure of humor.

“Listen,” he said, “you’re a good person. You’ve got a good heart, and nothing you did to Rasmussen blackens it at all.”

“I hope you’re right. It’s a hard world sometimes.”

“Another drink will soften it a little.”

“You know the calories in these? I’ll be fat as a hippo.”

“Hippos are cute,” he said, taking her glass and heading back toward the kitchen to pour another drink. “I love hippos.”

“You won’t want to
make
love to one.”

“Sure. More to hold, more to love.”

“You’ll be crushed.”

“Well, of course, I’ll always insist on taking the top.”

CANDY WAS going to kill. He stood in the dark living room of a stranger’s house, shaking with need. Blood. He needed blood.

Candy was going to kill, and there was nothing he could do to stop himself. Not even thinking of his mother could shame him into controlling his hunger.

His given name was James, but his mother—an unselfish soul, exceedingly kind, brimming with love, a saint—always said he was her little candy boy. Never James. Never Jim or Jimmy. She’d said he was sweeter than anything on earth, and “little candy boy” eventually had become “candy boy,” and by the time he was six the sobriquet had been shortened and capitalized, and he had become Candy for good. Now, at twenty-nine, that was the only name to which he would answer.

Many people thought murder was a sin. He knew otherwise. Some were born with a taste for blood. God had made them what they were and expected them to kill chosen victims. It was all part of His mysterious plan.

The only sin was to kill when God and your mother did not approve of the victim, which was exactly what he was about to do. He was ashamed. But he was also in need.