Vick sighed, “All I ever wanted to do was street work.” He looked out the window and sighed again.
“I’d like to look at the paintings from Landman’s Malibu house,” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Just a gut feeling. I won’t take long, Vick. And I’m not interfering.”
He squinted at me with one eye, like Popeye. “You find anything, you share, okay?”
“Deal.”
We went to the evidence room and against the far wall were the paintings. Vick left a deputy with me so they wouldn’t have to explain an unguarded civilian loose in the bowels of the Department. I went through them all and then started with the half-finished painting of Landman as a Border Patrol Agent standing at the bluff. I studied it for several minutes, but didn’t see anything I hadn’t seen before. I went through the remaining paintings and studied them one by one, hoping something would jump out at me, but nothing did. After half an hour, I stepped back and rested against a shelf. I had all the paintings lined up and facing me. I went down them one by one from left to right. Something was nagging at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I closed my eyes and thought through everything, then let my mind go where it wanted.
For some reason I began to see myself as a kid, sitting at the kitchen table with my parents and putting together one of those thousand-piece puzzles. I let my mind go with it, watching my younger self take two pieces out of the pile and link them together before putting them in the puzzle.
My eyes opened and I looked at the canvases. I moved one canvas beside the painting of Landman on the bluff. It was a continuation of the painting, showing a long canyon. I looked at the remaining paintings and found a third. In it, the canyon extended, and at the far end was a small cave, with several figures in the entrance. The figures all had strawberry blond hair.
**
I thanked Vick and said I wasn’t sure that I had found anything, but would keep him advised. He shooed me out and returned to writing his speech.
I drove Shamu through increasing traffic toward the Caspian Diamond, eager to talk to Hondo about the paintings. It took me almost an hour to get there. A Lexus was exiting as I entered, and it squealed tires as it hit the highway. Hondo wasn’t in his Mercedes. Heavy rock music seeped through the walls of the Diamond and I could hear it through my closed windows. I had a funny feeling in my stomach and parked beside Hondo’s convertible. I didn’t walk, I trotted toward the door. The deafening sounds of a Guns N Roses oldie, Welcome to the Jungle vibrated the building and the air around it.
When I was ten feet away, the door burst open and Hondo staggered out with two feet of slim, shining blade protruding from his chest. I caught Hondo as he fell and saw the silver hilt of the sword cane hard against his back, like a pushpin stuck into cardboard.
There was commotion and angry yells growing louder from the darkness of the doorway. Music throbbed the air as Axl scream-sang, “Welcome to the jungle, welcome to the...nah-nah nah-nah nah-nah naaah...” I pulled my magnum and pointed it at the door as I put the other arm around Hondo’s chest and drug him to my truck.
A man appeared, the one whose eyes I had soaped, and he raised his pistol. I fired three fast shots and he yelped and fell back into the dark. I felt behind me, found the door handle and opened the passenger door.
Hondo said, “I can make it.” I don’t know how, but he stood on his feet and pulled himself into the cab. I kept the magnum on the door and went to the driver’s side, got in and started the engine.
When we started moving, several others came out of the door and one had a shotgun. I snapped off two shots and made them duck, but they fired from hunched positions and I heard the buckshot and bullets thunk into the side of the truck. I whipped the wheel and squealed through the other cars and was on the road headed for the hospital before they fired another shot.
CHAPTER TEN
Hondo groaned. He used an index finger to touch the needle-sharp point of the sword, whispering in a pain-filled voice, “Sticky situation.”
The guy is making jokes. “Can’t leave you alone for a minute,” I said. “So what happened, was there a sign on the door saying, ‘Free Shishkebab’ and you just had to have some?” I glanced at him as I snaked through the heavy traffic. Flecks of bright blood dappled his lips.
“You’re...you’re like a thorn in my side.” Hondo said.
The traffic slowed to a stall and I could see the dust from a collision maybe two hundred yards ahead. I turned the wheel and drove Shamu over the curb and into a strip mall lot and powered over curbs, across streets and over landscaped areas where I demolished a dozen small trees and shrubs. The hospital was four blocks away, so I continued overland. At the end of another strip mall, I roared over the curb, crossed a side street, and then slid into a paint store parking lot.
I glanced at Hondo and his head rested against the window, his eyes closed. A long mound of dirt and gravel blocked the way to the hospital. I glanced at the highway. Still no movement. A construction crew readied to rebuild the side road, and safety signs lined the top of the mounds and on both ends. Men in hard hats waited for heavy machinery to do their magic.
“This might be bumpy,” I said to Hondo, but he didn’t hear. I put Shamu in four-wheel drive, held Hondo’s shoulder and drove over the ten-foot high mound as men yelled at me from both sides.
I crossed several more store parking lots and then raced across manicured grass to the hospital. As I pulled into the Emergency Entrance, Hondo touched my arm. “Accident,” he said.
“You sure?”
“No police. Fell on it...” and he passed out again.
The people in emergency are fast and good. They looked at me when I said it was an accident, but they focused on their patient and ignored my story.
I called Hunter and sat in the waiting room. She came down the hall and sat by me. A half dozen other people waiting on injured loved ones waited in chairs and leaned against the wall.
“How is he?” Hunter asked.