The Night Monster (27 page)

“Thank you. Take care.”

I started to back away, and Dextra held up a manicured finger.

“I get off at eight,” she said. “Maybe we could go out, get something to eat.”

I swallowed the rising lump in my throat.

“Or maybe you could invite me over to your place,” she said.

I could tell that Dextra liked to fantasize about cops. I’d met women like her over the years. I’d never understood what the attraction was, and I decided to level with her. “I don’t have a place. I got thrown off the police force last year, and I just got evicted from my apartment. All I’ve got is my fifteen-year-old car, a mean dog, and a trunk full of old clothes. Still interested in going out with me?”

Dextra shrank in her chair, her bubble burst.

“No thanks,” she managed to say.

“Have a nice night.”

I found Karl Long lying on a bed in the emergency ward. He was hooked up to every machine in the place, plus an IV drip. A cutie a few years older than his daughter sat in a chair beside his bed, holding his hand. The glazed look in Long’s eyes told me that the nurses had given him a strong narcotic to ease the pain of his wound.

“Jack …” he muttered.

I knelt down so our faces were a foot apart. I had thought about Long flying back in the chopper, knowing he’d let his daughter down. It had to have ripped him apart.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Great since they shot me up with painkillers. This is my friend Heidi.”

Heidi and I exchanged nods. She had waist-length blond hair and fake tits. Young enough to be his daughter and old enough to know that was why she was here.

“Jack and I need to talk,” Long said.

“I’ll go to the cafeteria and get a drink,” Heidi said. “Nice to meet you, Jack.”

Heidi left. I took her chair and leaned on the arm rail of Long’s bed.

“Any luck finding those guys?” Long whispered.

I shook my head.

“I heard you yelling at my pilot. We lost our chance, didn’t we?”

I nearly said yes, but bit my tongue instead. The pilot had made his choice, and talking about it was not going to change anything.

“We’ll get another,” I said optimistically.

Long nodded and shut his eyes. He looked asleep, and I considered leaving. Then his eyes snapped open, and he placed his hand on my arm. “There’s something I need to tell you about Sara,” he said. “I think it’s important.”

“Go ahead.”

“When Sara was a little girl, a man tried to kidnap her from a school playground. Sara bit him on the arm, and got away. She’s always been like that. Once my daughter sees an opportunity to get away from these guys, she’ll take it.”

I felt a sharp stabbing in my gut. Lonnie and Mouse weren’t playground perverts. They were sociopaths, and would kill Sara if she tried to escape. I needed to step up my search before that happened.

“That’s good to know,” I said.

Long eventually shut his eyes and fell asleep. Going outside to the parking lot, I took Buster for a walk on Andrews Avenue when my cell phone started to ring. It was my old pal, Sonny. Our last conversation hadn’t been friendly, and I wondered what he wanted.

“What’s up,” I answered.

“You want your room above the bar back?” Sonny asked.

I stopped walking. That was exactly what I wanted; a familiar place to rest my head, and have a burger and a beer with people that I knew. The skeptic in me held back.

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch. I talked to Ralph about it this afternoon, and he agreed.”

“What about Buster?”

“Buster, too.”

“What about the subpoena?”

“Ralph made it go away.”

Cars whizzed past me on the street. I should have been happy to get my old place back, but it didn’t feel right.

“You still haven’t told me what the deal is,” I said.

“We got held up this afternoon,” Sonny said. “A Hispanic junkie came in, and stuck a gun in my face. Made me clean out the till and give him my jewelry and then the little prick robbed the guys sitting at the bar. Then he grabbed a bottle of Jameson’s off the bar and waltzed out.”

“I’m sorry. You okay?”

“I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Went to the hospital, and they got me calmed down. Then I called Ralph, and told him what happened. I reminded him that as part of your rent, you used to sit at the bar when it got busy, and make sure the place didn’t get robbed. I told him that if he didn’t hire you back, I was going to quit.”

“And he said yes?”

“What the fuck else was he going to say? You want your room, or not?”

Buster got excited when I pulled into the Sunset’s parking lot. I popped the trunk and took my stuff back up to my room. Then I found a washed-up stick by the shoreline, and engaged in some serious quality time with my dog.

The Sunset was quiet when I entered. The Seven Dwarfs sat at the bar, nursing their drinks. Sonny sat behind the bar on a stool, channel surfing. He made eye contact with me, and nodded without speaking. He looked shook up. So did the Dwarfs.

“What are you having?” Sonny asked.

“The usual. What did this guy take besides the cash?” I asked.

Sonny pulled down the neck of his T-shirt. An ugly red line circled his throat. Sonny’s father had died when he was young, and Sonny had taken his father’s dog tags from Vietnam, and gotten them gold-plated. The junkie who’d robbed the place had ripped those tags right off Sonny’s neck.

“What about you guys?” I asked.

The Dwarfs rattled off their losses. Four gold wedding bands, three watches, a black onyx ring, and several gold class rings. Their social security checks had just come in the mail, and they’d lost all their money as well.

“I can’t do anything about the cash, but I can get your jewelry back,” I said.

Sonny nearly came over the bar. “You can?” he said.

“Yes. Write it all down so I don’t forget anything.”

The Dwarfs made a list of the stolen items on a cocktail napkin. Sonny plopped a foaming draft beer down in front of me. I raised it to my lips, and saw the Dwarfs lift their glasses in a toast.

“Here’s to Jack getting our things back,” one of them proclaimed.

“Here’s to Jack,” the others chorused.

I drove to Hollywood, and took Sonny with me. There was a pawnshop on the main drag whose owner was doing five years in the state pen for fencing stolen goods. Not long after his arrest, the owner’s son had gone down for the same crime. A second son had taken over the business, and was cut from the same cloth. I went there first.

A bell rang as we entered. The shop was jammed with electronic equipment and wide-screen TVs. Electric guitars hung from the ceiling that looked like throwbacks to the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Behind a glass-topped counter filled with Rolex watches and glittering diamond rings sat son #2. His name was Burton, and he was eating a big wet sandwich wrapped in wax paper. His sleeveless shirt was unbuttoned to his naval, and was dotted with mustard and bits of cabbage.

“What can I do for you gents?” Burton asked.

“We’re looking for some jewelry,” I replied.

Burton spread his arms to indicate the assortment of items for sale. Sonny stuck his face to the glass in search of his father’s dog tags. Burton couldn’t watch us at the same time, and I turned around, and stared at the surveillance camera above the door.

“Something wrong?” Burton asked.

“Your surveillance camera is unplugged.” I turned back around.

“Learn that trick from your old man? Or did your brother teach you?”

Burton put his hand under the counter. “You want trouble? I’ll give you trouble.”

“Your father used to keep a Smith and Wesson back there. Ever have it cleaned?”

“That’s none of your business.”

I drew my Colt and aimed it at his chest. He quickly brought his hand up.

“Please don’t shoot me,” Burton said.

I put my Colt away. “A junkie came in here and pawned some jewelry he stole from my friends. By law, you’re supposed to record all sales on a video camera. You get around the law by unplugging the camera whenever you want to fence something.”

“You want the stuff back?” Burton asked.

“Yes. Then we can all go back to being friends.”

Burton opened the store safe. From it, a black felt bag was produced, its contents poured on the counter. “That’s all of it,” he said. I took out the napkin, and checked off the stolen items. Everything that had been stolen from the Sunset was accounted for, except Sonny’s father’s dog tags.

“Where are the dog tags?” I asked.

“I threw them out. They were garbage.”

Sonny leapt over the counter and laid a punch on Burton’s chin.

“I want my fucking tags,” Sonny said.

Burton pulled himself off the floor and led us outside. Four garbage pails sat by the back door. Burton said, “I threw the tags into one of these pails.”

Sonny kicked him in the ass and lifted him off the ground. “Find them.”

Burton pulled off the lids and started looking. It took awhile, but he eventually found the tags stuffed inside a wad of receipts. He wiped the tags on his shirt, and gave them to Sonny, then tried to shake Sonny’s hand to show there were no hard feelings. Sonny growled at him, and Burton lowered his arm.

“See you around,” I said.

awoke the next morning feeling like I’d stepped back twenty years. My rented room above the Sunset looked like my old college dorm room. A few sickly pieces of furniture, and a mattress on the floor. Buster lay beside me, head resting on my chest.

I hit the beach and took my dog for a long run, followed by a hard twenty-minute swim. I was sucking down my second cup of java when my cell phone rang. Sonny moved down the bar, and I took the call.

“I thought we were having dinner last night,” Burrell said, sounding pissed.

“I’m sorry. I had to help a friend recover some stolen goods.”

“How many times did you hit the guy?”

“I didn’t lay a hand on him, Your Honor.”

“I’ve heard that line out of you before.”

An elderly couple came into the bar and inquired about breakfast. Seven in the morning and they were both dressed like they were going to church. I was soaking wet from my swim, and saw them stare at me. I headed outside.

I stood in the building’s cool shade. The tide was up, the crash of waves as loud as a passing train. I lifted the phone to my face. “Sorry about that. How did your search for the file on Daybreak go?”

“Not good,” Burrell said.

My spirits sagged. If I couldn’t identify Lonnie and Mouse outside of their first names, I’d never find Sara. “What happened?”

“I went to the police stockade like you suggested. The Daybreak file was stored in a box from 1990. It’s pretty thick—maybe a hundred pages long. I took it home, and read through it over cold Chinese.”

I made a mental footnote to take Burrell out to dinner someday soon. Otherwise, she’d probably never speak a civil word to me again.

“What did the file say?” I asked.

“I couldn’t read half of it. The pages were blacked out with Magic Marker. There was a memo in the front of the file that said the information had been censored from the file to protect the rights of the patients.”

“Was there a roster of patients’ names?”

“Yes. It had been blacked out as well. I took the page to the lab, and had a tech scan it with ultraviolet light. Unfortunately, the Magic Marker had wiped out the writing. The tech said it was hopeless.”

I leaned against the building.
Hopeless
. It was a word that rarely slipped into my vocabulary, yet it was exactly how I felt right now.

“I scanned the pages that were legible into my computer, and e-mailed them to you,” Burrell said. “Maybe there’s a clue hidden somewhere in those pages.”

“How many pages did you send?”

“All of them.”

That had probably taken Burrell a few hours. I felt like a real heel.

“I’ll go look at them right now,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back last night. I owe you dinner.”

“Yes, you do,” Burrell said.

She was gone before I could say good-bye.

Dogs do not know failure, at least not any I’d been around. They treated each day like a new adventure, their spirits never wavering. This was especially true for Buster. He rode to my office with his tail
wagging, ready for whatever challenges the day held. I wanted to share his enthusiasm, but it was hard. I was running out of road.

I parked by Tugboat Louie’s front door. Thirty seconds later, I was in my office, booting up my computer. I went into e-mail, and opened Burrell’s missive. The pages she’d sent to me were hard to read, but that didn’t stop me. I was determined to read every line on every page, no matter how long it took.

Several hours later my cell phone rang. I had a splitting headache from staring at the computer screen, and I pulled myself away and looked at the face of my phone. It was Jessie, the light of my life. I turned away from the computer to speak with her.

“Hey honey, how’s it going?” I answered.

“I’m okay. How are you? I hadn’t talked to you in awhile, and wanted to see how things were going. Mom called me this morning, and I filled her in. I thought you were going to call her. You said you would.”