Stalking the Angel Read online

  I said, “That’s it, Eddie.” I picked up the Dan Wesson, then edged forward and pulled the girl toward me. She tried to jerk away, but she didn’t try very hard. Maybe she was tired.

  Eddie’s face was dark. “Don’t touch her, dude.”

  I pointed the gun at him. “Get out of the way.”

  Eddie put himself in the center of the door and shook his head. “You want the Hagakure, take it, but Mimi stays with me.”

  I looked at Pike. His glasses caught the light and showered it around the room.

  “Make your brain work and think about this, Eddie. I’m going to see that she gets help. I’m going to see that she’s made right.”

  Eddie Tang shook his head. “No.” He took a step toward us. Me with the Dan Wesson, and Pike with the High Standard, and he took a step toward us.

  I aimed the Dan Wesson at his forehead. “Eddie. Get real.”

  Eddie’s shirt was wet and sticking to his skin. He yanked off the tie, and most of the shirt came with it. The tattoos writhed and glistened like living things. They crawled up his biceps, over his shoulders, and down across his chest and abdomen. Dragons roared and tigers leaped and samurai warriors locked swords in combat. Red, white, green, yellow, blue. Brilliant primary colors that made him look feral and monstrous and of the earth. He went down low and stared at us.

  Pike’s mouth twitched.

  I said, “Joe. Not you, too?”

  Joe Pike raised the High Standard level with Eddie’s heart. “Your call.”

  Some days. I pushed Mimi to the side and put down the Dan Wesson and Pike dropped the High Standard and Eddie Tang launched two spin kicks so quickly that they were impossible to see. Mimi screamed. Pike rolled under the first kick and I pushed myself sideways and hit Eddie’s back. Pike came up and snapped a roundhouse kick to the side of Eddie’s head and punched him in the back of the neck and the kidneys. Eddie’s body tightened like a single flexed muscle and he shook it off. I’d seen Pike crack boards with that kick.

  Mimi screamed again and ran forward, scratching and hitting, and Pike pushed her down hard. She stayed there, holding the crumbling Hagakure to her breasts and watching with wide eyes.

  We kept Eddie between us, moving on our toes and staying out of reach. Eddie was big and strong and knew the moves from a thousand tournaments, but tournaments weren’t real. Real is different. If it wasn’t, maybe we’d be dead.

  Outside, there were no more shots and no more cars racing away. Voices came through the house and then faded and there was nothing. Maybe everyone was gone and we were all that was left, men alone in a dark wood, fighting.

  We moved so that Eddie could never long face either of us. If he turned toward one, the other had his back. Pike would strike, and then me, and both of us worked to stay away from his hands and feet. He was faster than a big man was supposed to be, but having to work against two of us took away his timing. He couldn’t get off the way you can get off one-on-one, and after a while he began to slow. We hit the big muscles in his back and his thighs and his shoulders, and he slowed still more. The certainty that had been in his eyes began to fade. It made me think of King Kong, fighting the little men for the woman he loved.

  Far away, maybe on the other side of the lake, there were sirens. Something flickered on Eddies face when he heard them, and he glanced at the girl. When the cops got here, she would go back, and he would go back, but they wouldn’t go back together. He made a deep grunt and he tried to end it. He turned his back to Joe Pike and came at me. I backpedaled and Pike came in fast. Eddie ran me back against the doorjamb. He snapped a fist out and the fist hit the jamb and shattered wood and plaster. I rammed the heel of my hand up into the base of his nose and something cracked and blood spurted out and he grabbed me. Pike wrapped his hands around Eddie’s face and dug his fingers into his eyes and pulled. Eddie let go and jerked an elbow back and you could hear Pike’s ribs snap. I hit Eddie with two quick punches to the ear and followed them with another roundhouse kick that again snapped his head to the side. He staggered, but stayed up, and I said, “Shit.”

  The sirens howled closer and closer until the sound seemed to come from every direction, and then they were at the front of the house. Eddie was in the middle of the room, sucking air, with Pike and me on either side. Back where we started. Only now there was sweat and blood and cops at the door. Eddie looked from me to Pike to the girl, then lowered his hands and stood up out of his crouch as if someone had called time out. The girl said, “Eddie?”

  He shook his head. There were tears coming down his face, working into the blood. He had given it his best, but it hadn’t been enough.

  I said, “It’s over, Eddie.”

  Eddie looked at me. “Not yet.” When he said it, he looked old.

  Eddie Tang stepped over the fat guy and pulled Joe’s shotgun from beneath the Mustache Man. He looked at it and then he looked at Joe Pike. There were more voices outside and somebody yelled for somebody else to watch himself. Mimi said, “Shoot them, Eddie. Shoot them now.”

  Eddie said, “I love her, man.” Then he tossed the gun to Joe, bared his teeth like something crazed and primal, and charged straight ahead with a series of power kicks that could knock down a wall. Joe Pike fired four rounds so quickly they might have been one. The 12-gauge blasts in the small room made my ears ring and the buckshot load carried Eddie Tang backward through the French doors and out into the night. The four spent shells bounced off the ceiling and hit the floor and spun like little tops, and outside a cop voice shouted, “Holy shit!”

  When the shell casings stopped spinning there was silence.

  For the longest time, Mimi Warren did not move, then she looked at me and said, “I don’t feel anything.”

  I said, “Kid, you’ve had so much done to you that the part that feels went dead a long time ago.” Maybe Carol Hillegas could fix it.

  Mimi cocked her head the way a bird will, as if I’d said something curious, and smiled. “Is that what you think?”

  I didn’t move.

  She said, “I’m such a liar. I make up stuff all the time.”

  I went to her, then, and put my arms around her, and she started to scream, flailing and thrashing and trying to get to Eddie, or maybe just trying to get away from me. I held on tight, and said, “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

  I said it softly, and many times, but I don’t think she heard me.

  36

  The mountain cops were pretty good about it. The sheriff was a guy in his forties who had put in some time with the Staties and knew he was in over his head when he saw the mess. His partner was a jumpy kid maybe twenty-one, twenty-two, and after enough gun-waving the sheriff told him to put it away and go get an extra pair of cuffs out of the cruiser.

  They found some clothes for Mimi, then cuffed us and drove us down to the State Police substation in Crestline, about a thousand feet lower on the mountain. The Crestline doc got pulled out of bed to check us over and tape Pike’s ribs. Mostly, he looked at Mimi and shook his head.

  When the doctor was finished, a state cop named Clemmons took Pike’s statement first, and then mine, all the while sucking on Pall Mall cigarettes and saying, “Then what?” as if he’d heard it a million times.

  After I had gone through it, Clemmons sucked a double lungful of Pall Mall and blew it at me. “You knew the girl was in there, how come you didn’t just call us?”

  “Phone line was busy,” I said.

  He sucked more Pall Mall and blew that at me, too.

  The jail was a very small building with two tiny holding cells, one for men and one for women, and from Clemmons’s desk I watched Mimi. She sat and she stared and I wondered if she’d do that the rest of her life.

  Clemmons called L.A. and got Charlie Griggs pulling a late tour. They stayed on the phone about twenty minutes, Clemmons giving Griggs a lot of detail. One of the Staties brought in the Hagakure and Clemmons waved him to put it on a stack of Field & Stream in the corne
r. Evidence. When Clemmons hung up he came over and took the cuffs off me and then went to the holding cell and did the same for Pike. “You guys sit tight for a while and have some coffee. We got some people coming up.”

  “What about the girl?” I said. Clemmons hadn’t taken the cuffs off her.

  “Let’s just let her sit.” He went back to his desk and got on the phone and called the San Bernardino County coroner.

  I went over to the coffee urn and poured two cups and brought them to Mimi’s cell. I said, “How about it?” I held out the cup but she did not look at me nor in any way respond, so I put it on the crossbar and stood there until long after the coffee was cold.

  More Staties came and a couple of Feds from the San Bernardino office and they gave back our guns and let us go at a quarter after two that morning. I said, “What about the girl?”

  Clemmons said, “A couple of our people are going to drive her back to L.A. in the morning. She’s going to be arraigned for the murder of her father.”

  “Maybe I should stay,” I said.

  “Bubba,” Clemmons said, “that ain’t one of the options. Get your ass outta here.”

  A young kid with a double-starched uniform and a baleful stare drove us back up to Arrowhead Village and dropped us off by Pike’s Jeep. It was cool in the high mountain air, and quiet, and very very dark, the way no city can ever know dark.

  The McDonald’s was lit from inside, but that was the only light in the village, and the Jeep was the only car in the parking lot. We stood beside it for a while, breathing the good air. Pike took off his glasses and looked up. It was too dark to see his eyes. “Milky Way,” he said. “Can’t see it from L.A.”

  There were crickets from the edge of the forest and sounds from the lake lapping at the boat slips.

  Pike said, “What’s wrong?”

  “It wasn’t the way I thought it was. Eddie loved her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She wanted to stay with him. She hadn’t been kidnapped. She wasn’t going to be killed.”

  He nodded.

  Something splashed near the shore. I took a deep slow breath and felt empty. “I assumed a lot of things that were wrong. I needed her to be a victim, so that’s the way I saw her.” I looked at Joe. “Maybe she wasn’t.” I’m such a liar.

  Pike slipped on the glasses. “Bradley.”

  My throat was tight and raw and the empty place burned. “She made up so damn much. Maybe she made that part up, too. Maybe he never touched her. I needed a reason for it all, and she gave me that. Maybe I helped her kill him.”

  Joe Pike thought about that for a long time. Centuries. Then he said, “Someone had to bring her back.”

  “Sure.”

  “Whatever she did, she did because she’s sick. That hasn’t changed. She needs help.”

  I nodded. “Joe. Once you had the gun you could have wounded him.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He didn’t move for a time, as if the answer required a complete deliberation, then he went to the Jeep. When he came back he had the translation of the Hagakure. He held it respectfully. “This isn’t just a book, Elvis. It’s a way of life.”

  Tashiro had said that.

  Pike said, “Eddie Tang was yakuza, but he killed Ishida for the girl. He committed himself to getting her to Japan, but we stopped him. He loved her, yet he was going to lose her. He had failed the yakuza and he had failed the girl and he had failed himself. He had nothing left.”

  I remembered the way Eddie Tang had looked at Joe Pike. Pike, and not me. “The way of the warrior is death.”

  A cool breeze came in off the lake. Something moved in the water and a light plane appeared in the sky past the McDonald’s roofline, its red anti-collision light flashing. Pike put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You got her,” he said. “You got her safe. Don’t think about anything else.”

  We climbed into the Jeep and took the long drive back to Los Angeles.

  37

  I spent most of the next day on the phone. I called Lou Poitras and found out that they would be holding Mimi at the L.A. County Correctional Medical Facility for an evaluation. I called Carol Hillegas and asked her to pay Mimi a visit and make sure Mimi had good people assigned to her. The black Fed Reese called me more than once, and so did the woman from the L.A. County district attorney’s office. There’d been a lot of conference calling between L.A. and San Bernardino and Sacramento, but nobody was going to bring charges. Nobody was sure what the charges would be. Illegal rescue?

  Terry Ito stopped by that evening and said he hoped he wasn’t disturbing me. I said no and asked him in. He stood in my living room with a brown paper bag in his left hand and said, “Is the kid going to be okay?”

  I said, “Maybe.”

  He nodded. “We heard somebody nailed Yuki Torobuni.”

  “Yeah. That happened.”

  He nodded again and put out his right hand. “Thanks.”

  We shook.

  He opened the bag and took out a bottle of Glenlivet scotch and we drank some and then he left. By eight o’clock that night I had finished the bottle and fallen asleep on the couch. A couple of hours later I was awake again and sleep would not return.

  The next day I watched TV and read and lay on the couch and stared at my high-vaulted ceiling. Just after noon I showered and shaved and dressed and took a drive over to the County Medical Facility and asked them if I could see Mimi. They said no. I left the front and went around back and tried to sneak in, but a seventy-five-year-old security guard with narrow shoulders and a wide butt caught me and raised hell. It goes like that sometimes.

  I bought groceries and a couple of new books and went home to the couch and the staring and the feeling that it was not over. I thought about Traci Louise Fishman and I thought about what Mimi had said. I make up stuff all the time. Maybe it couldn’t be over until I knew what was real and what wasn’t. Some hero. I had brought Mimi back, but I hadn’t saved her.

  At a little after four that afternoon, the doorbell rang again, and this time it was Jillian Becker. She was wearing a loose Hawaiian top and tight Guess jeans and pink Reebok high-tops. She smelled of mint. It was the first time I had seen her in casual clothes. I stood in the door and stared at her, and she stared back. I said, “Would you like to come in?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  I said not at all. I asked if she would like something to drink. She said some wine would be nice. I went into the kitchen and poured her a glass of wine and a glass of water for myself. She said, “I tried your office but I guess you haven’t been in.”

  “Nope.”

  “Or checking your answering machine.”

  “Nope.”

  She sipped her wine. “You look tired.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She sipped the wine again. “The police spoke with me, and so did Carol Hillegas. They told me what you had to do to get Mimi. It must have been awful.”

  I said, “How’s Sheila?”

  Shrug. “Her family has come here to be with her. I’ve been talking to her, and so have the doctors who’ve seen Mimi. She’s going to join Mimi in therapy. She’ll probably enter into therapy on her own, too.”

  “Have you seen Mimi?”

  She shook her head. “No. I heard you tried.”

  I spread my hands.

  Jillian put her wineglass down and said, “Is it always this hard?”

  I stared out through the glass to the canyon and shook my head.

  Jillian Becker sat quietly for a moment, swirling her wine and watching it move in the glass. Then she said, “Carol Hillegas agreed with me.”

  “What?”

  “If the one who makes the pain stop is the one who loves them, then that’s you.”

  I finished the water and put down the glass and looked out at the canyon some more. The cat door clacked and the cat came in from the kitchen. When he saw Jillian he growled, deep and warlike. I said, “Beat it.”


  The cat sprinted back into the kitchen and through his door. Jillian said, “What a nice cat.”

  I laughed then, and Jillian Becker laughed, too. She had a good, clear laugh. When the laughter faded, she looked at me. “I wanted to tell you that I’m leaving Los Angeles. There is no more Warren Investments. Even if there were, I would leave. I’m going to find a position back east.”

  Part of me felt small, and growing smaller.

  “But I’m going to stay here in L.A. for another couple of weeks before I go. I wanted to tell you that, too.”

  “Why are you going to hang around?”

  She looked at me steadily. “I thought I might spend some time with you.”

  We sat like that, me on the couch and Jillian on the chair, and then she put out her hand. I took it.

  Outside, a red hawk floated high over the canyon, and was warm in the sun.

  ROBERT CRAIS is the bestselling author of eleven suspense novels, including The Monkeys Raincoat, Stalking the Angel, Lullaby Town, and Free Fall, all available from Bantam Books. He has written for such award-winning television shows as L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues, and he lives in Los Angeles.

  Visit his website at www.robertcrais.com.

  If you enjoyed STALKING THE ANGEL, you’ll want to read Robert Crais’s LULLABY TOWN, an Elvis Cole adventure available now!

  Patricia Kyle said, “Is this Elvis Cole, the world’s greatest detective?”

  “Yes, it is.” I was lying on the leather couch across from my desk, enjoying the view that I have of the Channel Islands. I used to have chairs, but a couch is much better to relieve one of the rigors of world-class detecting.

  She said, “Were you sleeping?”