I spend all of six seconds wondering if I should go home. Then I kick the bike on and head back to Beverly Hills.
Which is pointless. I can’t get within a block of Burgess’s house. LAPD and rent-a-cops are all over the neighborhood. It looks like D-Day with palm trees. For a minute, I consider throwing some hoodoo at one of the cars. Maybe set it on fire. But I can’t take those kinds of chances with a kid around. I can burn something later if Abbot or Julie’s cops don’t come through.
I turn the bike around and head back to Max Overdrive.
AT HOME, CANDY sits up with me, waiting for a call from Julie. She even left practice early on account of me. Around two, I carry her into the bedroom and cover her up. Back in the living room, I have a smoke and a drink.
Why am I so twitchy about a kid I don’t know or care about? The privileged sprog of some show-biz or corporate master of the universe. Maybe because I’ve seen what Wormwood and the Burgess family can do to innocents. Lucius Burgess, Geoff’s recently deceased father, used to run ghost bum fights in a warehouse off Sixth Street. Innocent idiots who’d signed blue sky contracts to keep their souls working on Earth were tortured and beaten in front of dogfight audiences. The place was run by a particularly lunatic bunch of Nazi fuckwits and all the profits went through Burgess to Wormwood.
What’s a bastard like that doing with a missing kid?
Or is there a slim chance I’m reading this all wrong? What if this isn’t sinister and is just some kind of Magnificent Ambersons family spat? The Burgess family are a bunch of bourgeois pricks, but even they must take breaks from being pure evil to have dinner. I mean, Nick didn’t look freaked out. He didn’t scream or pound the window. And he waved to me. I had on Geoff Burgess’s face and he acted like it was the most normal thing in the world to see him.
Goddammit, I hate this Mike Hammer stuff. Trying to figure out people’s dirty little secrets. It’s worse when they don’t have any good ones. I mean this is L.A., where everyone has a skeleton in the closet. But that doesn’t make them all Mr. Hyde. Most people are just idiots, getting bounced around like pinballs by bosses and lousy marriages. They’re quiet desperation types, not backyard cannibals cooking the Little League team over mesquite chips.
What if I’m wrong about Burgess? I’ve been known to make mistakes. I’ve always been best at hoodoo and hitting things, not at pondering the deep mysteries of life. Maybe I’m just on edge about what I saw Downtown. What if I dragged all that horror back home in my head?
Great. I’m going to end up a hermit like Howard Hughes, sealed up in the apartment with six-inch fingernails and my feet in Kleenex boxes, afraid of people, germs, and my own shadow.
I have another drink and another cigarette and wander downstairs.
Kasabian is counting the money in the till. The final credits for Until the End of the World are running on the store monitor, so I switch to the news.
A truck jackknifed on the 405. A gangbanger was shot in a drive-by near Compton. Before the show cuts to a commercial, the newscaster teases a story about an attempted kidnapping in Beverly Hills. I recognize the street. I recognize the tangle of cops and private security cars. I turn off the monitor and go back upstairs. Put on Them. James Arness fights giant ants in the L.A. sewer system with machine guns and flamethrowers.
Finally. Something I can identify with.
I fall asleep on the sofa.
I SPEND THE next day locked in the apartment waiting for a call from Abbot, Julie, or Candy. It’s a long wait for nothing at all. I watch movies. Alternate spaghetti westerns with old-school Japanese horror and science fiction. Death Rides a Horse, then Matango, Curse of the Mushroom People. The Great Silence, then Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell. No one calls. I drink Aqua Regia, smoke, and sleep all day. By the time I think about eating something, my stomach feels like it’s full of battery acid and eels.
In the afternoon, I wander downstairs when there are no customers in the store and ask Kasabian about borrowing the peeper again.
All he says is “Don’t make me get the bucket.”
I go back upstairs with Keoma and The Human Vapor under my arm.
Around seven, Candy calls.
“Have you been out of the apartment today?”
“What about the thing last night?” I say, ignoring her question.
“Julie says the kid is fine. She’s chasing down leads, trying to find out where he’s been and who knew about it.”
I take a sip of Aqua Regia.
“It’s just like when I worked for her. I solve her case and she’s still mad at me.”
“She’s not mad at you for finding Nick. And she wasn’t mad about you solving Vincent’s murder last winter. She gets upset about how you do things.”
“I solved the case.”
“You solved it your way, by breaking in, scaring the neighbors, and getting all of Beverly Hills up in arms about roving packs of baby snatchers. Julie was a U.S. marshal. She’s a bit more procedurally minded than you are.”
“And what about Abbot? I haven’t heard from him either.”
“I can’t help you there. Why don’t we do something tonight? Want to go to a movie?”