The Face

Neither the paleness nor the tremors troubled Ethan half as much as what he saw beneath the fingernails of his right hand. A dark substance, reddish-black.

He stared at this material for a long time, reluctant to take steps to determine if it was real or hallucinated.

Finally he used the thumbnail of his left hand to scrape out a small portion of the matter that was trapped under the nail of his right thumb. The stuff proved slightly moist, gummy.

Hesitantly, he brought the smear to his nose. He sniffed it once, twice, and though the scent was faint, he didn’t need to smell it again.

Ethan had blood under all five nails of his right hand. With a certainty seldom given to any man who understood the world to be a most uncertain place, he knew that this would prove to be his own blood.

CHAPTER 4 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)

PALOMAR LABORATORIES IN NORTH Hollywood occupied a sprawling single-story concrete-slab building with such small and widely spaced windows and with such a low and slightly pitched sheet-metal roof that it resembled a bunker in the storm.

The medical-lab division of Palomar analyzed blood samples, Pap smears, biopsies, and other organic materials. In their industrial division, they performed chemical analyses of every variety for both private-sector and government clients.

Each year, fans of the Face sent over a quarter of a million pieces of mail to him, mostly in care of his studio, which forwarded weekly batches of this correspondence to the publicity firm that responded to it in the star’s name. Among those letters were gifts, including more than a few homemade foods: cookies, cakes, fudge. Fewer than one in a thousand fans might be sufficiently deranged to send poisoned brownies, but Ethan nevertheless operated on the better-safe-than-sorry principle: All foodstuffs must be disposed of without sampling by anyone.

Occasionally, when a homemade treat from a fan arrived with a particularly suspicious letter, the edible goodie would not be at once destroyed but would be passed along to Ethan for a closer look. If he suspected contamination, he brought the item here to Palomar to be analyzed.

When a total stranger could work up sufficient hatred to attempt to poison the Face, Ethan wanted to know that the bastard existed. He subsequently cooperated with authorities in the poisoner’s hometown to bring whatever criminal charges might be sustained in court.

Now, proceeding first to the public reception lounge, he signed a form authorizing them to draw his blood. Lacking a doctor’s order for tests, he paid cash for the analyses he required.

He requested a basic DNA profile. “And I want to know if any drugs are present in my body.”

“What drugs are you taking?” the receptionist asked.

“Nothing but aspirin. But I want you to test for every possible substance, in case I’ve been drugged without my knowledge.”

Perhaps in North Hollywood they were accustomed to encounters with full-blown paranoids. The receptionist didn’t roll her eyes, raise an eyebrow, or in any other way appear to be surprised to hear him suggest that he might be the victim of a wicked conspiracy.

The medical technician who drew his sample was a petite and lovely Vietnamese woman with an angel’s touch. He never felt the needle pierce the vein.

In another reception lounge provided for the delivery of samples unrelated to standard medical tests, he filled out a second form and paid another fee. This receptionist did give him an odd look when he explained what he wanted to have analyzed.

At a lab table, under harsh fluorescent lights, a technician who resembled Britney Spears used a thin but blunt steel blade to scrape the blood from under the fingernails of his right hand, onto a square of acid-free white paper. Ethan hadn’t trimmed his nails in over a week, so she retrieved a significant number of shavings, some of which still appeared to be gummy.

His hand trembled throughout the process. She probably thought her beauty made him nervous.

The material from under his fingernails would first be tested to determine if it was indeed blood. Thereafter it would be conveyed to the medical-lab division to be typed and to have the DNA profile compared to the blood sample that the Vietnamese technician had drawn. Full toxicological results wouldn’t be ready until Wednesday afternoon.

Ethan didn’t understand how he could have his own blood under his fingernails when he had not, after all, been shot in the gut and the chest. Yet as migrating geese know south from north without the aid of a compass, he knew this blood was his.

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

IN THE PALOMAR PARKING LOT, AS THE rain and the wind painted a procession of colorless spirit shapes on the windshield of the Expedition, Ethan placed a call to Hazard Yancy’s cell phone.

Hazard had been born Lester, but he loathed his given name. He didn’t like Les any better. He thought the shortened version sounded like an insult.

“I’m not less of anything than you are,” he’d once said to Ethan, but affably.

Indeed, at six feet four and 240 pounds, with a shaved head that appeared to be as big as a basketball and a neck only slightly narrower than the span of his ears, Hazard Yancy was nobody’s idea of a poster child for minimalism.

“Fact is, I’m more of a lot of things than some people. Like more determined, more fun, more colorful, more likely to make stupid choices in women, more likely to be shot in the ass. My folks should have named me More Yancy. I could’ve lived with that.”

When he had been a teenager and a young man, his friends had called him Brick, a reference to the fact that he was built like a brick wall.

Nobody in Robbery/Homicide had called him Brick in twenty years. On the force, he was known as Hazard because working a case in tandem with him could be as hazardous as driving a dynamite truck.

Gumshoe duty in Robbery/Homicide might be more dangerous than a career as a greengrocer, but detectives were less likely to die on the job than were night clerks in convenience stores. If you wanted the thrill of being shot at on a regular basis, the Gang Activities Section, the Narcotics Division, and certainly the Strategic Weapons and Tactics teams were better bets than cleaning up after murderers.

Even just staying in uniform promised more violence than hitting the streets in a suit.

Hazard’s career was an exception to the rule. People shot at him with regularity.

He professed surprise not at the frequency with which bullets were directed at him, but at the fact that the shooters were people who didn’t know him personally. “Being a friend of mine,” he once said, “you’d think it would be the other way around, wouldn’t you?”

Hazard’s uncanny attraction for high-velocity projectiles wasn’t a consequence of either recklessness or poor investigative technique. He was a careful, first-rate detective.

In Ethan’s experience, the universe didn’t always operate like the clockwork mechanism of cause and effect that the scientists so confidently described. Anomalies abounded. Deviations from the common rule, strange conditions, incongruities.

You could make yourself a little crazy, even certifiable, if you insisted that life always proceed according to some this-because-that system of logic. Occasionally you had to accept the inexplicable.

Hazard didn’t choose his cases. Like other detectives, he fielded what fate threw at him. For reasons known only to the secret master of the universe, he caught more investigations involving perps who were trigger-happy wackos than he caught cases in which genteel elderly women served poisoned tea to their gentlemen friends.

Fortunately, most shots fired at him missed. He’d been hit just twice: both minor wounds. Two of his partners had sustained injuries more serious than Hazard’s, but neither had died or been crippled.

Ethan had worked cases with Hazard during four years of his time on the force. That period constituted the most satisfying police work he’d ever done.

Now, when Yancy answered his cell phone on the third ring, Ethan said, “You still sleeping with an inflatable woman?”

“You applying for the position?”

“Hey, Hazard, you busy right now?”

“Got my foot on a snot-wad’s neck.”

“Literally?” Ethan asked.

“Figuratively. Was it literally, I’d be stomping his windpipe, and you’d have been forwarded to voice mail.”

“If you’re about to make a collar—”

“I’m waiting for a comeback from the lab. Won’t get it until tomorrow morning.”

“How about you and I have lunch, and Channing Manheim pays?”

“As long as that doesn’t oblige me to watch any of his shitcan movies.”