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  “The marks on Dan Lee’s face,” Blake said, “does that narrow it down to Harris or Cheng?”

  “Rita is supposed to have received injections that made her stronger.”

  “But that still eliminates the Shop, right?” Blake asked.

  I thought about the strongest assassins. They might have been able to make those marks, especially in the extremity of snapping a thrashing man’s neck.

  “The only one eliminated is poor Dan Lee,” I said.

  I’d like to say that I’d already called the police about him, but I hadn’t. The longer Dan Lee stayed missing, the longer it would be before the police started hunting for me, put on my scent by his sister. With morbid luck, I would be out of Long Beach before a lackluster investigation started. What would I tell his sister? Should I even try? It upset me to think she would assume I’d killed her brother, and that she had sent me to him. I wondered if I’d become too callous toward death, worrying more what she would think about me than the poor young man who had lost his life. It was a hideous thing taking another person’s life. I still felt bad about the Shop spotter I’d had to shoot. Dan Lee would never get the chance to see if he could kick his heroin.

  “So what did you find out?” I muttered.

  Blake pushed away his croutons as a skinny waitress with amazingly large breasts set a steak before him. It was charred crispy along the sides, just the way he liked it, with huge curly fries around it.

  She set a cheeseburger before me.

  I’d been telling Blake about what had happened to me. Now I wanted to know his progress. He’d been hedging ever since he had arrived at The Nut Tree.

  “I wasn’t able to speak with the paramedics,” he said. “But I did find out that one of them has gone missing and the other is on her day off.”

  “Missing?” I asked.

  “As of two days ago,” Blake said. “The desk clerk sounded surprised telling me about it, saying the paramedic always needed money, had been begging for overtime for months already. I asked her if she had any reason to expect foul play. She said no. That “missing” was too strong of a word, really. The paramedic had left a message in the recorder saying he was going to Mexico to meet an old friend and party.”

  “What about the other paramedic?”

  “I haven’t spoken to her yet. I phoned, but there was no answer. I tried three times.”

  “Did you leave a message?”

  “I didn’t think you’d want me to,” Blake said.

  “What about the police station?”

  “I went back like you asked.” Blake set down his fork, and by the twist of his lips, he had an upset stomach.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Worry lines appeared in his forehead. “When I arrived at the police station, I happened to glance into the captain’s office. There was a tall, blond, Slavic-looking man in there with mirrored sunglasses and a blue suit.”

  “Jagiello,” I said.

  “Or his twin,” Blake said. “Whatever he was saying, the captain sat at attention, listening closely. Then a man in a black suit and with greased-back hair bumped into me. I’ve never seen eyes so cold. He made a gun with his forefinger and thumb, and pointed it at me. ‘Bang,’ he said. ‘You’re dead.’ Gavin, they know I’m your friend.”

  My gut tightened. I never should have brought Blake into this. What had I been thinking? “It’s time for you to return to San Francisco,” I said.

  “I wanted to come, remember?”

  “The Shop—you need to leave.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I can’t work efficiently if I keep worrying about you. The Chief will use anything he can to get his way. That little gesture…you’re right, it was a message to me.”

  “If I go,” Blake said, “I’ll feel like I’m running out on you.”

  “No one likes running. I always hated it in combat. But sometimes that’s the thing to do. I took off once the Shop commandos started gathering behind Neil’s Grill.”

  Blake stared at his half-finished steak.

  “Look,” I said. “If I need extra help, I’ll call for you.”

  Blake glanced at me before looking down at his steak again.

  “Do you have the address to the paramedic?” I asked.

  He dug out a folded piece of paper and gave it to me.

  “Don’t sweat this,” I said. “We’re being smart.”

  “I didn’t like him pointing his finger at me,” Blake said. “I wanted to do it to him. But those eyes…” The worry lines deepened.

  “He’s a killer, a murderer many times over.” Just like me, I told myself. Then I argued to myself: that’s why I’d gone to the Chief five years ago and told him I could no longer kill for hire.

  “Why was this Jagiello at the police station?” Blake asked.

  “Could be any of a number of reasons,” I said. “Maybe they’re there to find out what the police know, or which officers know too much.”

  “The assassin will kill those officers?”

  “He could, but that would likely create too much attention. Despite using commando kill-teams, the Shop likes to work in the dark. Police get angry and most people do too when cops are killed. The normal procedure in that case—getting rid of an unwanted officer—would be a surprise vacation to Florida or to the Bahamas. His wife might receive a call from a radio station for an all-expense paid trip, that sort of thing.”

  “That’s crafty.”

  “That’s the Shop,” I said.

  Blake’s eyes widened. “Maybe that’s what happened to the disappearing medic.”

  “Yeah, or the Shop lured him to Mexico where a drug cartel killer could silence him.”

  “They control the cartels?”

  I shook my head. “A Shop assassin kills him. A newspaper somewhere chalks it up to simply another cartel-motivated hit. End of story.”

  Blake looked queasy. “I’ll think I get started.”

  “Sure. Drive safe,” I said, standing.

  “Good luck,” he said, as he stood, shaking my hand. “Call if you need me.”

  “You got it.”

  ***

  The trouble with getting answers was you also got lies. Some people told them, often for reasons that had little to do with what you were after. Half-truths were often as damaging as lies. The trick was sifting through the lies and half-truths as you searched for the golden nugget. One of the keys to doing this was recognizing the unvarnished truth. As a preacher once told me, “The truth is a lion. It can defend itself. All you have to do is proclaim it.” Or in a detective’s case, hear it.

  That meant asking hundreds of questions to as many pertinent people as possible. Somewhere, someone told the truth. If you were a good hound, you sniffed out the validity of it and used the truth to chase down a new trail, looking for the right one.

  Another key to people was remembering their imperfection. None of us was perfect. Or put another way, everyone made mistakes. Killers always made mistakes during a murder. The mistake might be minute, but it was always there, or it was ninety-nine out of one hundred times.

  A good detective kept sniffing, asking, probing until finally he uncovered one of those mistakes, one of the golden nuggets of truth.

  I drove through Alamitos Heights, a Long Beach neighborhood in the southeast portion of the city. The Pacific Coast Highway was to my north.

  Blake had phoned the paramedic, but no one had answered. Her name was Lois Cage, which is about all I knew about her.

  Soon, I pulled up before her home, an older house with two large fruitless mulberry trees in the front yard. Their branches had grown so the entire yard was in shade.

  I walked up a cracked sidewalk and onto an old creaky veranda. There I spied an orange cat sitting in an old plastic chair. It flicked its tail, watching me, but otherwise seemed unconcerned.

  I pressed the doorbell, listening closely, and I heard it ring inside. I glanced around. There was a wooden Madonna on the ve
randa wall and several ashtrays filled with ancient cigarette butts. It didn’t seem like the home of a paramedic.

  I rang the doorbell again. The cat lashed its tail more vigorously, but nothing else occurred.

  Had Shop killers already been to the house? Or had Cheng sent Mike Stone to cheek on matters?

  I bent down and tried to peer through the curtains, but they were in place. All I saw was the edge of a recliner in what appeared to be a living room.

  I glanced at the cat. It still watched me. Then I walked down the creaking steps. With a sudden exhale of breath, I headed for the back, opening a weather-beaten gate a little taller than I could see over. Another cracked sidewalk greeted me, and thick green grass to the sides of the cement. An old fence protected a large yard with a swing and slide set, a doughboy pool and a small porch. A large plastic table with an open umbrella held two more ashtrays, these made of thick glass. They were full of butts like those in front.

  I went to a screen door, creaked it open, stepped inside an enclosed porch and spied three pairs of boots beside a rubber mat. I knocked on the door, but no one answered.

  I tried the knob, and it turned. Slowly, I opened the door. I heard a click then, and saw that a woman aimed a twenty-gauge shotgun at my face. She had brunette hair in pins, wore a man’s shirt and had nice although rather short legs. She wore white socks and squinted at me angrily down the barrel of her shotgun.

  “Lois Cage?” I asked.

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t blow your head off,” she said in a smoker’s voice.

  “I’m here to ask you several questions about the lady you picked up outside a movie theater on Center Street. She was hit by a laundry truck—”

  “That’s not a reason.”

  I smiled in a placating manner. “Ah…if you shoot, I’ll never get my answers.”

  “You’re not going to get any answers because you’re going to move your ass out of my house or I’m going to kill you.”

  “Why haven’t you been answering the telephone?” I asked.

  Her frown became a hardened scowl. “You’re the one ringing my phone off the hook?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know about it?”

  “My friend phoned you.”

  Her hands tightened on the shotgun. I noticed the nearer hand was badly bruised on the back. The bruising looked as if it had happened several days ago. It was a rich, dark color.

  “What happened to your hand?” I asked.

  “You don’t listen too good, do you?”

  “I’m a friend of the woman you picked up the other night,” I said.

  A hint of fear bled into her eyes. “Get out of here. Go!”

  “What happened that night?” I asked.

  “I’m going to count to three,” she said. “If you’re still standing here, I’m shooting.”

  “I think someone pushed my friend into traffic,” I said.

  “One!”

  “Do you remember anything unusual about her?”

  “Two!” she said, her voice louder than before.

  I backed up, moving past the boots and down the steps. Lois followed, and her barrel lowered to keep me lined up as I stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “I’m out of your house,” I told her.

  “You get off my property now,” she said, and there was a glimmer of tears in her eyes.

  “Has anyone threatened you, Ms. Cage?”

  “It’s Mrs. Cage,” she said. “And no one’s been stupid enough to threaten me. You want to try it?”

  “No. I want to know what happened that night.”

  “I’m done counting, and I’m done talking to you.”

  “Polarity Magnetics experimented on my friend. They changed her and I think it caused her death.”

  “Mister, you can shove whatever you said up your—”

  “I’ll pay you,” I said.

  “Pay me for what?”

  “If you answer several questions, I’ll give you one hundred bucks apiece.”

  She squinted at me. “Make it two hundred.”

  I nodded.

  “Ask,” she said.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “When she was lying in the ambulance, your friend squeezed it, is what happened. I barely got my hand away from her. It was like a vise. I’m surprised no bones were broken. Now let’s see if you got the cash before I answer anything more.”

  I pulled out my wallet and took out two one hundred dollar bills.

  “Go ahead, mister, put all your money on the steps.” She grinned at me. “Otherwise, I’m going to blow your head off and say you were trying to rape me.”

  I put two bills on a cement step before asking, “Did she say anything during the ride to the hospital?”

  She glared at me. “You got a lot of balls, you know that?”

  I waited.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Lois Cage said. “Your friend talked about a guy named Dave. She talked like he was her husband. She loved him, said she was sorry. She said it was up to…to somebody I can’t remember to fix things.”

  “Someone named Harris, Cheng or Kiel?” I asked.

  “I said I can’t remember. And that’s another four hundred, by the way.”

  I put two hundred more down.

  “I just answered two more questions,” she said. “That makes it six hundred bucks total and I only see four hundred.”

  “How badly was she bruised?” I asked.

  Mrs. Cage’s eyes narrowed. “Okay. I’ll give you a free one. The laundry trunk broke some bones, but I don’t think it killed her. Her throat was half-crushed as if someone had choked her. We both saw fingermarks there.”

  By both I assumed she meant the other paramedic. I wasn’t going to ask to find out. I did say, “That wasn’t in the police report.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I showed the officer, though.”

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  “You got enough money for me to answer that?”

  I showed her I did.

  “Officer Blount; he was a young fool still thinking he could change the world. He can’t. None of us can. It’s all gone to pot. I’m surprised he didn’t write that in his report. Not about the world, but the woman’s throat.”

  “So am I,” I said, as I put the remaining bills on the steps.

  “Those are real?” she asked.

  “Were your answers?”

  “Mister, I’m not a lair.”

  “And I’m not a counterfeiter,” I said.

  “Good. Now take off. I’m done talking to you.”

  I put an empty wallet in my back pocket. I was going to need more money. Without another word, I headed for the front and my rental. Kay had been stronger than an ordinary human, and someone likely stronger than she was had crushed her throat before pushing her in front of Dan Lee’s laundry truck. That someone also probably owned an armored limousine.

  -17-

  I was in my Ford, driving back to the marina when I remembered to turn on my cell. It rang at our prearranged time. It was Blake.

  I glanced around, but couldn’t spot any police cars. “Blake,” I said.

  “I have information.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  “Meet me at Dairy Queen, the one on East 7th Street.”

  “You have a number for that?” I asked.

  “Five thousand seven hundred and eight,” he said.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot. As I turned off the ignition, Blake stepped outside. He glanced both ways and then hurried near as I stepped outside.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He had a worried look. “As I was on the freeway, heading home, I kept thinking about the Shop assassin, how he said ‘bang’ to me. He was trying to frighten me, and he did, and I ran, or I was running home. I didn’t like that.”

  “This isn’t a game,” I said
.

  “I know,” Blake said. “I’m as nervous as can be standing out here in the open. I keep looking over my shoulder, thinking I’m going to see him. If I do—” He scowled. “I need to start carrying a gun.”

  “No. I think you should head back to San Francisco.”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “The man is a professional and I’m just a regular guy.”

  “You’re hardly regular.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I nodded.

  “Anyway,” Blake said, “that doesn’t matter right this instant. I found out where Kay’s corpse is. That’s why I called you here.”

  “Where is it?” I asked. “And how do you know?”

  “I went back to the source: the hospital. I asked around and found out who had transported the body. I went there—the company office—and asked for Lawrence McDougal. He was the driver, the transporter. I asked if he could help me, as I couldn’t locate my fiancé’s body.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Are you ready for this?” Blake asked.

  “Start talking,” I said.

  “McDougal never took it to the airport. His orders read to take the corpse to Polarity Magnetics.”

  “What?” I asked. “You’re absolutely sure about this?”

  “That’s what I asked him. He shrugged, took me to his hearse and showed me the order form. It was Polarity Magnetics. Stone signed the receipt. That means Doctor Cheng has Kay’s corpse, not the Shop. Of course, just because it’s there, doesn’t mean they killed her. Maybe they’re hunting for the killer just like us and are searching for clues.”

  “Either that,” I said, “or they’re hiding what they did to her.”

  “There’s that, too,” Blake said.

  Polarity Magnetics had her body…this complicated things again. The way the Shop had gone after Harris, and by sending her body to Geneva—I had to rethink things.

  “Somebody must have put the wrong destination on the hospital’s computers,” I said. “It’s reasonable to believe that it was done on purpose.”

  “Do you think this someone was trying to cover their tracks?”

  “Or trying to lay a false trail,” I said.