The Good Guy

The Pacific Coast Highway offered the most direct route from the Lamplighter Tavern to this street in Laguna Beach. Even on a Monday evening, traffic could be unpredictable. Door to door, the trip might take forty minutes.

In addition to a detachable emergency beacon, maybe the unmarked sedan had a siren. In the last few miles of approach, the siren would not be used; they would never hear the killer coming.

Turning away from the sink, Linda saw the knife in Tim’s fist. She did not misinterpret the moment or need an explanation.

She said, “How long do we have?”

“Can you pack a suitcase in five minutes?”

“Quicker.”

“Do it.”

She glanced at the ’39 Ford.

“It’s too attention-getting,” Tim said. “You should leave it.”

“It’s my only car.”

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

Her green gaze was as sharp as a shard of bottle glass. “What’s in this for you? Now you’ve told me, you could split.”

“This guy—he’ll want to waste me, too. If he gets my name.”

“And you think I’ll spill it, when he finds me.”

“Whether you spill it or not, he’ll get it. I need to know who he is, but more important, I need to know who hired him. Maybe when you’ve had more time to think about it, you’ll figure it out.”

She shook her head. “There’s nobody. If the only thing in this for you is the chance I’ll figure who wants me dead, then there’s nothing in this for you.”

“There’s something,” he disagreed. “Come on, pack what you need.”

She glanced at the ’39 Ford again. “I’ll be back for it.”

“When this is done.”

“I’m going to drive it all over, to wherever there’s something left from those days, something you can still see that they haven’t torn down yet or desecrated.”

Tim said, “The good old days.”

“They were good and they were bad. But they were different.” She hurried away to pack.

Tim turned off the kitchen lights. He went down the hall to the living room, and he switched off those lights, too.

At a window, he pulled back a sheer curtain and stood watching a scene that had gone as still as a miniature village in a glass paperweight.

He, too, had been glassed-in for a long time, by choice. Now and then he had lifted a hammer to shatter through to something, but he had never struck the blow because he didn’t know what he wanted on the other side of the glass.

Having strayed from a nearby canyon, perhaps emboldened by the round risen moon, a coyote climbed the gently sloping street. When it passed through lamplight, its eyes shone silver as if cataracted, but in shadows its gaze was luminous and red, and blind to nothing.

Six (#u65e7b131-c2e7-55e0-bb92-b6c31e1b1967)

As if following the spoor of the now vanished coyote, Tim drove north. He turned left at the stop sign and headed downhill toward the Pacific Coast Highway.

He repeatedly checked the rearview mirror. No one followed them.

“Where do you want to stay?” he asked.

“I’ll figure that out later.”

Still in blue jeans and a midnight-blue sweater, she had added a camel-colored corduroy jacket. She held her purse on her lap, and her carryall was in the backseat.

“Later when?”

“After we’ve seen the guy you can trust, the one who can trace that license-plate number.”

“I figured to go to him alone.”

“Aren’t I presentable?”

She was not as pretty as she had been in the photo, yet she struck him as somehow better looking. Her hair, such a dark brown that it seemed black, had been shorter than this, and calculatedly shaggy, when she had stood before the DMV camera.

“Totally presentable,” he assured her. “But with you there, he’ll be uneasy. He’ll want to know more of what it’s about.”

“So we tell him whatever sounds good.”

“This isn’t a guy that I lie to.”

“Is there one?”

“One what?”

“Never mind. Leave it to me. I’ll shine him up something he’ll like.”

“Not you, either,” Tim said. “We walk the line with this guy.”

“Who is he—your dad or something?”

“I owe him a lot. He’s solid. Pedro Santo. Pete. He’s a robbery-homicide detective.”

“So we’re going to the cops, after all?”

“Unofficially.”

They headed north along the coast. Southbound traffic was light. A few cars rocketed past them in excess of the speed limit, but none featured an emergency beacon.

To the west, the house-crowded bluffs descended to unpopulated lowlands. Beyond coastal scrub and wide beaches, the Pacific folded the sky down to itself at a black horizon.