Dark Rivers of the Heart (16 page)

Leaving his men to watch over the Zelinsky family, Roy stepped out of the house and crossed the street toward his car.

The twilight had darkened from red to deep purple. The streetlamps had come on. The air was still, and for a moment the silence was almost as deep as if he had been in a country field.

They were lucky that the Zelinskys’ neighbors had not heard anything to arouse suspicion.

On the other hand, no lights showed in the houses flanking the Zelinsky place. Many families in that pleasant middle-class neighborhood were probably able to maintain their standard of living only if both husband and wife held full-time jobs. In fact, in this precarious economy, with take-home pay declining, many were holding on by their fingernails even with two breadwinners. Now, at the height of the rush hour, two-thirds of the homes on both sides of the street were dark, untenanted; their owners were battling freeway traffic, picking up their kids at sitters and day schools that they could not easily afford, and struggling to get home to enjoy a few hours of peace before climbing back on the treadmill in the morning.

Sometimes Roy was so sensitive to the plight of the average person that he was brought to tears.

Right now, however, he could not allow himself to surrender to the empathy that came so easily to him. He had to find Spencer Grant.

In the car, after starting the engine and slipping into the passenger seat, he plugged in the attaché case computer. He married the cellular telephone to it.

He called Mama and asked her to find a phone number for Spencer Grant, in the greater L.A. area, and from the center of her web in Virginia, she began the search. He hoped to get an address for Grant from the phone company, as he had gotten one for the Bettonfields.

David Davis and Nella Shire would have left the downtown office for the day, so he couldn’t call there to rail at them. In any case, the problem wasn’t their fault, though he would have liked to place the blame on Davis—and on Wertz, whose first name was probably Igor.

In a few minutes, Mama reported that no one named Spencer Grant possessed a telephone, listed or unlisted, in the Los Angeles area.

Roy didn’t believe it. He fully trusted Mama. The problem wasn’t with her. She was as faultless as his own dear, departed mother had been. But Grant was clever. Too damned clever.

Roy asked Mama to search telephone-company
billing
records for the same name. Grant might have been listed under a pseudonym, but before providing service, the phone company had surely required the signature of a real person with a good credit history.

As Mama worked, Roy watched a car cruise past and pull into a driveway a few houses farther along the street.

Night ruled the city. To the far edge of the western horizon, twilight had abdicated; no trace of its royal-purple light remained.

The display screen flashed dimly, and Roy looked down at the computer on his lap. According to Mama, Spencer Grant’s name did not appear in telephone billing records, either.

First, the guy had gone back into his employment files in the LAPD computer and inserted the Zelinsky address, evidently chosen at random, in place of his own. And now, although he still lived in the L.A. area and almost certainly had a telephone, he had expunged his name from the records of whichever company—Pacific Bell or GTE—provided his local service.

Grant seemed to be trying to make himself invisible.

“Who the hell is this guy?” Roy wondered aloud.

Because of what Nella Shire had found, Roy had been convinced that he knew the man he was seeking. Now he suddenly felt that he didn’t know Spencer Grant at all, not in any fundamental sense. He knew only generalities, superficialities—but it was in the details where his damnation might lie.

What had Grant been doing at the bungalow in Santa Monica? How was he involved with the woman? What did he know?

Getting answers to those questions was of increasing urgency.

Two more cars disappeared into garages at different houses.

Roy sensed that his chances of finding Grant were diminishing with the passage of time.

Feverishly, he considered his options, and then went through Mama to penetrate the computer at the California Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento. In moments, a picture of Grant was on his display screen, one taken by the DMV specifically for a new driver’s license. All vital statistics were provided. And a street address.

“All right,” Roy said softly, as if to speak loudly would be to undo this bit of good luck.

He ordered and received three printouts of the data on the screen, exited the DMV, said good-bye to Mama, switched off the computer, and went back across the street to the Zelinsky house.

Mary, Peter, and the daughter sat on the living room sofa. They were pale, silent, holding hands. They looked like three ghosts in a celestial waiting room, anticipating the imminent arrival of their judgment documents, more than half expecting to be served with one-way tickets to Hell.

Dormon, Johnson, and Vecchio stood guard, heavily armed and expressionless. Without comment, Roy gave them printouts of the new address for Grant that he had gotten from the DMV.

With a few questions, he established that both Mary and Peter Zelinsky were out of work and on unemployment compensation. That was why they were at home, about to have dinner, when most neighbors were still in schools of steel fish on the concrete seas of the freeway system. They had been searching the want ads in the Los Angeles
Times
every day, applying for new jobs at numerous companies, and worrying so unrelentingly about the future that the explosive arrival of Dormon, Johnson, Vecchio, and Roy had seemed, on some level, not surprising but a natural progression of their ongoing catastrophe.

Roy was prepared to flash his Drug Enforcement Administration ID and to use every technique of intimidation in his repertoire to reduce the Zelinsky family to total submission and to ensure that they never filed a complaint, either with the local police or with the federal government. However, they were obviously already so cowed by the economic turmoil that had taken their jobs—and by city life in general—that Roy did not need to provide even phony identification.

They would be grateful to escape from this encounter with their lives. They would meekly repair their front door, clean up the mess, and probably conclude that they had been terrorized by drug dealers who had burst into the wrong house in search of a hated competitor.

No one filed complaints against drug dealers. Drug dealers in modern America were akin to a force of nature. It made as much sense—and was far safer—to file an angry complaint about a hurricane, a tornado, a lightning storm.

Adopting the imperious manner of a cocaine king, Roy warned them: “Unless you want to see what it’s like having your brains blown out, better sit still for ten minutes after we leave. Zelinsky, you have a watch. You think you can count off ten minutes?”

“Yes, sir,” Peter Zelinsky said.

Mary would not look at Roy. She kept her head down. He could not see much of her splendid nose.

“You know I’m serious?” Roy asked the husband, and was answered with a nod. “Are you going to be a good boy?”

“We don’t want any trouble.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

The reflexive meekness of these people was a sorry comment on the brutalization of American society. It depressed Roy.

On the other hand, their pliability made his job a hell of a lot easier than it otherwise might have been.

He followed Dormon, Johnson, and Vecchio outside, and he was the last to drive away. He glanced repeatedly at the house, but no faces appeared at the door or at any of the windows.

A disaster had been narrowly averted.

Roy, who prided himself on his generally even temper, could not remember being as angry with anyone in a long time as he was with Spencer Grant. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the guy.

Spencer packed a canvas satchel with several cans of dog food, a box of biscuit treats, a new rawhide bone, Rocky’s water and food bowls, and a rubber toy that looked convincingly like a cheeseburger in a sesame-seed bun. He stood the satchel beside his own suitcase, near the front door.

The dog was still checking the windows from time to time, but not as obsessively as before. For the most part, he had overcome the nameless terror that propelled him out of his dream. Now his fear was of a more mundane and quieter variety: the anxiety that always possessed him when he sensed that they were about to do something out of their daily routine, a wariness of change. He padded after Spencer to see if any alarming actions were being taken, returned repeatedly to the suitcase to sniff it, and visited his favorite corners of the house to sigh over them as though he suspected that he might never have the chance to enjoy their comforts again.

Spencer removed a laptop computer from a storage shelf above his desk and put it beside the satchel and suitcase. He’d purchased it in September, so he could develop his own programs while sitting on the porch, enjoying the fresh air and the soothing susurration of autumn breezes stirring the eucalyptus grove. Now it would keep him wired into the great American info network during his travels.

He returned to his desk and switched on the larger computer. He made floppy-disk copies of some of the programs he had designed, including the one that could detect the faint electronic signature of an eavesdropper on a phone line being used for a computer-to-computer dialogue. Another would warn him if, while he was hacking, someone began hunting him down with sophisticated trace-back technology.

Rocky was at a window again, alternately grumbling and whining softly at the night.

At the west end of the San Fernando Valley, Roy drove into hills and across canyons. He was not yet beyond the web of interlocking cities, but there were pockets of primordial blackness between the clustered lights of the suburban blaze.

This time, he would proceed with more caution than he had shown previously. If the address from the DMV proved to be the home of another family who, like the Zelinskys, had never heard of Spencer Grant, Roy preferred to find that out
before
he smashed down their door, terrorized them with guns, ruined the spaghetti sauce that was on the stove, and risked being shot by an irate homeowner who perhaps also happened to be a heavily armed fanatic of one kind or another.

In this age of impending social chaos, breaking into a private home—whether behind the authority of a genuine badge or not—was a riskier business than it had once been. The residents might be anything from child-molesting worshipers of Satan to cohabiting serial killers with cannibalistic tendencies, refrigerators full of body parts, and eating utensils prettily hand-carved out of human bones. On the cusp of the millennium, some damned strange people were loose out there in fun-house America.

Following a two-lane road into a dark hollow that was threaded with gossamer fog, Roy began to suspect he wouldn’t be confronted with an ordinary suburban house or with the simple question of whether or not it was occupied by Spencer Grant. Something else awaited him.

The blacktop became one lane of loose gravel, flanked by sickly palms that had not been trimmed in years and that sported long ruffs of dead fronds. At last it came to a gate in a chain-link fence.

The phony pizza-shop truck was already there; its red taillights were refracted by the thin mist. Roy checked his rearview mirror and saw headlights a hundred yards behind him: Johnson and Vecchio.

He walked to the gate. Cal Dormon was waiting for him.

Beyond the chain-link, in the headlight-silvered fog, strange machines moved rhythmically, in counterpoint to one another, like giant prehistoric birds bobbing for worms in the soil. Wellhead pumps. It was a producing oil field, of which many were scattered throughout southern California.

Johnson and Vecchio joined Roy and Dormon at the gate.

“Oil wells,” Vecchio said.

“Goddamned oil wells,” Johnson said.

“Just a bunch of goddamned oil wells,” Vecchio said.

At Roy’s direction, Dormon went to the van to get flashlights and a bolt cutter. It was not just a fake pizza-delivery truck, but a well-equipped support unit with all the tools and electronic gear that might be needed in a field operation.