In that same instant, his hand reached under the seat and found the Weight Watchers box with the Beretta inside.
He put the car into gear and drove up slowly along the curb until he was just short of the Liberty Firing Range parking lot. Then, leaving it in gear, the door half-open, he walked casually into the lot. Stopping at the Hummer, he looked around, saw no one, and then, with the butt of the gun, tapped, hard, on the driver’s-side window.
The horn started bleating, the headlights flashing.
Even though there was no way the glass in this Hummer would be the same bulletproof and shock-resistant consistency of the ones in Iraq, it had still withstood that first tap. Greer stepped back, and this time took a harder swing. The glass splintered, but held again. Shit. He bent his elbow back and really whacked it this time, right on the fracture, and the window dissolved into a thousand tiny blue pebbles, some spilling into the leather interior, some raining onto the concrete.
But now that he had the right method, he strolled around to the other side and took that window out, too. That blaring horn was deafening.
Then he stuck the gun back in his belt, ducked back into his idling Mustang, and—after carefully checking in his side mirror for passing traffic—pulled away.
As he sailed through the green light at the corner, he could hear angry voices spilling into the Liberty parking lot, and whether it was from the pills or the sheer joy, his leg already felt better.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CARTER HATED SECRETS, and right now his house felt like it was filled with them. Beth was in the shower, and he was putting Joey back in his crib. But his thoughts kept returning to the same secret things—the bizarre job that he had undertaken on the al-Kalli estate, the astonishing bestiary that he now supervised there, the bones that had gone missing from his basement lab at the museum. Normally, Beth would be the first person he’d turn to; she’d be the first—and possibly the only—one in whom he’d confide. There was nobody he relied on more, nobody whose judgment he valued more highly, nobody to whom he poured out his doubts and fears and quandaries more trustingly. But now he couldn’t. Al-Kalli had sworn him to secrecy—and Carter even had the feeling that to tell Beth anything might be to endanger her somehow. As for the stolen bones, well, he felt as though he had made some colossal blunder, and that it was his responsibility to figure out what to do next. That, plus he was embarrassed. He couldn’t imagine anything under Beth’s supervision—especially something so irreplaceable—ever getting lost or damaged.
Joey looked up at him with those clear gray-blue eyes, his feet kicking merrily in the air, and Carter couldn’t help but think of all the secrets and mysteries that would always attend him, too. The doctors had told Carter, in no uncertain terms, that he would not be able to father a child, but here was Joey. And though Carter and Beth had thought that by leaving New York, they could also leave behind the terrible ordeal with Arius, who had stalked them for months, he now suspected (or
knew
? did he know and was he just denying it to himself?) that he had been wrong about that, too. He wondered if that was what life was like—that everything you ever did, everything that ever happened to you, every decision you ever made haunted you the rest of your days? Los Angeles was supposed to be a fresh start, but were fresh starts even possible?
Joey burbled something that sounded suspiciously like “Dada,” and Carter laughed. “You talkin’ to me?” he said, in his best De Niro. “You talkin’ to me?”
Joey laughed and batted his arms against the mattress. But he didn’t repeat the experiment.
Carter leaned down into the crib and, with his eyes closed, kissed him on his smooth, untroubled brow. The skin was cool and dry and fragrant, and for a few seconds Carter just stayed as he was, bent down like a crane fishing in a pool of water, feeling Joey’s little mitts pull at his hair and his earlobes. This, he told himself, is all that matters. This . . . and Beth. He focused entirely on the moment, banishing all other thoughts. This . . . and Beth. This . . . and Beth, until, for one split second, he suddenly flashed on a green forest, fragrant with rain.
“Did you have to change him?” Beth asked from the doorway.
Carter opened his eyes and turned around. Beth was in her blue robe, toweling her hair dry. “Change him?” Carter said, the image of the forest fading fast. “No. He’s fine.”
Beth came to his side and gazed down into the crib. “He is, isn’t he?” she said.
But something in her tone didn’t sound right. “You say that like you’re not completely sure.”
Beth shook her head—was she just shaking her hair dry?—and said, “Of course I’m sure. What a thing to say!”
Carter, chastised, remained silent. But he still thought he’d heard a discordant note. And neither he nor Beth moved for a few seconds, as if by standing there they could dispel any doubt.
Finally, Carter said, “Where’s Champ?” Outside, the long summer day was finally drawing to a close and it was nearly dark.
“I think he’s in the yard,” Beth said. “Maybe you should bring him in.” She didn’t have to say anything about the coyotes for Carter to know what was in her mind.
He nodded and left the room. He went down the stairs of the house where he felt, despite the many months that they’d been there, a bit like an intruder. Everything was nice—well appointed, freshly painted, plushly carpeted—but it wasn’t his, and it wasn’t even decorated with his stuff. His old rocking chair, his scarred coffee table, his cinder-block bookcases—they’d all, quite reasonably, been left behind. It was hardly worth the cost of shipping them, much less to a fully furnished place. And that, too, had been part of their plan for a fresh start. Get rid of the old stuff, with all its scratches and dents and memories, and begin again with new and foreign and unencumbered belongings.
A hot, dry wind was blowing again, and the short grass in the yard crackled under Carter’s feet. The canyon below was bathed in moonlight, the far slope of the Santa Monica Mountains outlined against a starry sky. New York has nothing like this, Carter reflected, though that didn’t mean he missed his view of the Washington Square Arch any less. He sometimes wondered if it had something to do with his work—spending so much of his time in the study and contemplation of long-dead things, did he need the fix of human activity at the end of the day? Did he need to rub elbows with the crowd, to feel the pulse of life around him? To exchange the dry bones (the question of what he was going to do about the missing bones of La Brea Woman coursed through his mind for the zillionth time) for warm flesh?
Off in the distance, he could hear the sudden burst of backyard fireworks, one day early. He knew that the police and fire departments were on high alert; there had been nothing but warnings all week about the drought-dry tinder, and the dangers of setting off a wildfire. Carter had never been anywhere near such a blaze, but he’d seen the news footage of previous blazes on CNN. And the sad interviews afterward, with people who had struggled to save whatever they could—their pets, their photo albums, their family silver—from the devouring flames. One guy had narrowly escaped on a bicycle, clutching, of all things, a massive bowling trophy.
He looked around the small, fenced yard, and heard Champ before he spotted him. Most of his body was under a bush, apparently trying to root something out. All Carter could see was his bushy blond tail.
“Champ!”
The dog’s tail wagged, but he was still intent on what he was doing.
“Come on, Champ. Time to go inside.”
Carter went closer, but all he could see was the dog’s arched back and wagging tail. “What are you doing?”
Carter put his hands on Champ’s haunches and gently dragged the dog out of the brush. Champ didn’t resist, but he didn’t cooperate, either. He just allowed himself to be pulled, like a statue, backward on the patchy grass. In his jaws, Carter could now see his prize—it looked like the bones and carcass of a recently deceased squirrel—and Champ was clearly not planning to let go.
“Oh, man, what do you want that for?” Carter said. “Don’t we feed you better than that?”
Champ glanced at him, but appeared to be utterly unpersuaded.
“Come on, boy, let go,” Carter said, squatting down and trying to dislodge the remains. But Champ growled, and Carter let go, wiping his fingers in the dirt.
What was the best way to win this war? Carter wondered. Should he go inside, get something the dog liked—maybe a big wad of peanut butter?—and get him to drop this treat for an even more appealing one?
Champ shook the desiccated carcass, as if making sure there wasn’t any life left in it, and that’s when it suddenly occurred to Carter—Champ might be the answer to at least one of his problems. Why didn’t he think of it sooner?
He jumped to his feet, ran into the kitchen, got the peanut butter—he just brought the whole jar outside—and let Champ bury his face in it. With the toe of his sneaker, Carter kicked the now neglected squirrel over the edge of the yard and down into the ravine below.
“You want to go for a ride?” Carter said to Champ, who was too busy with the Skippy to pay any attention. When the dog took a break, Carter put the leash on him and went back inside. He bounded up the stairs to the bedroom, where he found Beth propped up against a stack of pillows, with her nose in a sheaf of papers. “I’m going to go out for a little while,” he said.
“Out?” she said. “Now?”
“There’s something I forgot at work.”
“At the Page? Why can’t it wait till tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow it’s closed, for the Fourth.”
“It’ll be closed now, for the night.”
“I know the guard; he’ll let me in.”
“This really can’t wait?” Beth said, though she knew her husband well enough to know that whatever it was, it couldn’t.
“Be back in no time,” he said, before adding, “and, by the way, I’m taking Champ with me.”
He was thumping back down the stairs before she could even think to ask why he’d want the dog along.
Fortunately, Champ loved going for a ride; Carter had only to open the side door of his Jeep and Champ leapt up onto the front seat, ready for anything.
And would he be ready for what Carter wanted him to do? Carter put the car into gear, backed out of the driveway, and hoped that this wasn’t the craziest idea he’d had yet.
At the museum, the parking lots were closed, so he had to leave the car on Wilshire. He had a plastic passkey to the employee entrance, and he led Champ inside. He knew Hector would be on duty somewhere, and he didn’t want to give the poor guy a heart attack by coming upon him unexpectedly.
“Hector?” he called out. “It’s Carter. Carter Cox.”
There was no answer.
“Hector? You here?”
Champ was fascinated by all the smells from all the feet that had trampled over the museum floor that day, and Carter was encouraged to see his head down, nose fixed. Maybe this would work, after all.
He led the dog toward the rear elevators, past the lighted display of the dire wolf skulls, past the open lab, past the entrance to the lush atrium garden where Geronimo used to like to wander, and tried calling out again. “Hector? You around?”
He heard the jangling of a key ring, and a tentative voice saying “Who’s there? Don’t move!”
“Hector, it’s me—Carter. Don’t freak out.”
Hector, breathing a sigh of relief, emerged from behind the life-size replica of the giant sloth being attacked by a saber-toothed cat.