The Face

As Corky wadded up the candy wrapper and stuffed it into the trash bag, he wished that he could dispose of Reynerd as easily.

Suddenly rain fell more heavily than at any previous moment of the storm. The deluge knocked stubborn acorns from the oak under which he had parked, and cast them across the BMW. They rattled off the paint work and surely marred it, snapped off the windshield but did not crack it.

He didn’t have to sit here, in a danger of acorns, plotting Reynerd’s demise, until a rotting thousand-pound limb broke free, fell on the car, and crushed him for his trouble. He could get on with his day and mentally draw up blueprints for the murder while he attended to other business.

Corky drove a few miles to a popular upscale shopping mall and parked in the underground garage.

He got out of the BMW, stripped off his slicker and his droopy rain hat, which he tossed onto the floor of the car. He shrugged into a tweed sports coat that complemented his sweater and jeans.

An elevator carried him from subterranean realms to the highest of two floors of shops, restaurants, and attractions. The arcade was on this top level.

With school out, kids crowded around the arcade games. Most were in their early teens.

The machines beeped, rang, tolled, chimed, bleated, tweedled, whistled, rattattooed, boomed, shrieked, squealed, ululated, roared like gunning engines, emitted scraps of bombastic music, the screams of virtual victims, twinkled, flashed, strobed, and scintillated in all known colors, and swallowed quarters, dollars, more voraciously even than the iconic Pac-Man had once gobbled cookies off a million arcade screens in an era now quaint if not unknown to the current crowd.

Wandering among the machines, Corky distributed free drugs to the kids.

These small plastic bags each contained eight doses of Ecstasy—or Extasy, if you’d gone to a public school—with a block-lettered label that promised FREE X, and then suggested, JUST REMEMBER WHO YOUR FRIEND IS.

He was pretending to be a dealer drumming up business. He never expected to see any of these brats again.

Some kids accepted the packets, thought it was cool.

Others showed no interest. Of those who declined, none made an effort to report him to anyone; nobody liked a rat.

In a few instances, Corky slipped the bags into kids’ jacket pockets without their knowledge. Let them find it later, be amazed.

Some would take the stuff. Some would throw it away or give it away. In the end, he would have succeeded in contaminating a few more brains.

Truth: He wasn’t interested in creating addicts. He would have given away heroin or even crack cocaine if that had been his goal.

Scientific studies of Ecstasy revealed that five years after taking just a single dose, the user continued to exhibit lingering changes in brain chemistry. After regular use, permanent brain damage could ensue.

Some oncologists and neurologists suggested that in the decades to come, the current high incidence of Ecstasy use would produce a dramatic increase in early-onset cancerous brain tumors, as well as a decrease in the cognitive abilities of hundreds of thousands if not millions of citizens.

Eight-dose giveaways like this would not facilitate the collapse of civilization overnight. Corky was committed to long-term effect.

He never carried more than fifteen bags, and once he started to hand them out, he made a point of ridding himself of them quickly. Too clever to get caught holding, he was in and out of the arcade in three minutes.

Because he didn’t need to pause to make a sale, the staff didn’t have an opportunity to notice him. By the time he left the arcade, he was just another shopper: nothing incriminating in his pockets.

At a Starbucks, he bought a double latte, and sipped it at one of their tables on the promenade, watching the parade of humanity in all its absurdity.

After finishing the coffee, he went to a department store. He needed socks.

CHAPTER 12 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)

THE TREES, A GROVE OF EIGHT, ROSE ON beautifully gnarled trunks, lifted high their exquisitely twisted branches, shook their graceful gray-green tresses in the wet wind, seeming both to defy the storm and to celebrate it. Fruitless in this season, they cast off no olives, only leaves, upon the cobbled walkway.

Twining through the branches, Christmas lights were unlit at this hour, bulbs of dull color waiting to brighten in the night.

This five-story Westwood condominium, less than one block from Wilshire Boulevard, was neither as grand as some in the neighborhood nor large enough to require a doorman. Nevertheless, the purchase price of an apartment here would gag a sword swallower.

Ethan trod the leaves of peace, passed under the extinguished lights of Christmas, and entered a marble-floored and marble-paneled public foyer. He used a key to let himself through the inner security door.

Past the foyer, the secure lobby was small but cozy, with an area rug to soften the marble, two Art Deco armchairs, and a table with a faux Tiffany lamp in red, amber, and green stained glass.

Although stairs served the five-story building, Ethan took the slow-moving elevator. Dunny Whistler lived—had lived—on the fifth floor.

Each of the first four floors held four large apartments, but the highest was divided into only two penthouse units.

A faint unpleasant odor lingered in the elevator from a recent passenger. Complex and subtle, the scent teased memory, but Ethan could not quite identify it.

As he ascended past the second floor, the elevator cab suddenly impressed him as being smaller than he remembered from previous visits. The ceiling loomed low, like a lid on a cook pot.

Passing the third floor, he realized that he was breathing faster than he should be, as though he were a man on a brisk walk. The air seemed to have grown thin, inadequate.

By the time he reached the fourth floor, he became convinced that he detected a wrongness in the sound of the elevator motor, in the hum of cables drawn through guide wheels. This creak, that tick, this squeak might be the sound of a linchpin pulling loose in the heart of the machinery.

The air grew thinner still, the walls closer, the ceiling lower, the machinery more suspect.

Perhaps the doors wouldn’t open. The emergency phone might be out of order. His cell phone might not work in here.

In an earthquake, the shaft might collapse, crushing the cab to the dimensions of a coffin.

Nearing the fifth floor, he realized that these symptoms of claustrophobia, which he had never previously experienced, were a mask that concealed another fear, to which he, being a rational man, was loath to admit.

He half expected Rolf Reynerd to be waiting on the fifth floor.

How Reynerd would have known about Dunny or where Dunny lived, how he would have known when Ethan intended to come here—these were questions unanswerable without extensive investigation and perhaps without the abandonment of logic.

Nevertheless, Ethan stepped to the side of the cab, to make a smaller target of himself. He drew his pistol.

The elevator doors opened on a ten-by-twelve foyer paneled in honey-toned, figured anigre. Deserted.

Ethan didn’t holster his weapon. Identical doors served two penthouse units, and he went directly to the Whistler apartment.

With the key provided by Dunny’s attorney, he unlocked the door, eased it open, and entered cautiously.

The security alarm was not engaged. On his most recent visit, eight days ago, Ethan had set the alarm when he’d left.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Hernandez, had visited in the interim. Before Dunny landed in a hospital, in a coma, she had worked here three days a week; but now she came only on Wednesday.

In all likelihood, Mrs. Hernandez had forgotten to enter the alarm code when she’d departed last week. Yet as likely as this explanation might be, Ethan didn’t believe it. Juanita Hernandez was a responsible woman, methodically attentive to detail.

Just inside the threshold, he stood listening. He left the door open at his back.

Rain drummed on the roof, a distant rumble like the marching feet of legions gone to war in some far, hollow kingdom.