Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

Another way would be to go through the L.A. Times for the last year and find anything with his name on it that popped up. Or maybe I could call Miami—I had one friend there in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

But probably the best way to start was with routine surveillance. That way I could get a feel for Tanner right off. And I’m good at surveillance; I was pretty sure he wouldn’t know I was on his tail. He might go somewhere, do something, meet somebody he shouldn’t. I might catch him picking up his Klan robes from the dry cleaners.

I got out the phone book. There were a column and a half of Tanners listed. D.J. Tanner had an address in Eagle Rock. I figured he was my man.

I drove over on the freeway. Most of the traffic was going in the other direction, so it took only about thirty minutes to drive the seven miles to Eagle Rock.

Eagle Rock is a kind of bastard child of Glendale and Pasadena. There are some very nice areas, and there are some pretty tough neighborhoods, too. Sometimes they’re right next door to each other.

I couldn’t tell from Tanner’s address which kind of area he lived in. When I got there, I was mildly surprised to see it was one of the border areas: nice houses, racially mixed neighborhood.

In fact, as I drove slowly past Tanner’s house, a woman yelled something out of what looked like Tanner’s kitchen window at the house next door. I heard a loud caw of laughter and a black woman leaned out the side door of the house next to Tanner’s and yelled something back with a big smile.

Three kids raced past her as she stood there, two black and one white. The kids ran into Tanner’s house and disappeared. There was more yelling, most of it good-humored.

Okay. It didn’t mean anything. It might be a clever cover. Probably lots of racists lived next door to black people. Probably once you lived next to them, you had to let their kids run in and out of your house, just to avoid confrontation. And hey, maybe the murders had nothing to do with race. Maybe Tanner was in love with Lin Park.

I drove once around the block and didn’t really convince myself. But I still pulled in about a half a block down and waited, watching the house.

In about five minutes Tanner came out with a big smile. He was pulling at his jacket. The three kids were pulling on the other side of it. They were shouting and laughing and wouldn’t let him go.

After twenty or thirty seconds of this, Tanner did a pretty good King Kong imitation and the kids let go, squealing and running for cover.

Still smiling, Tanner walked to the curb, smoothing his jacket down over the soft roll of fat at his waist. He didn’t look like the kind of super-strong guy Spider had described. He didn’t even look like a cop. Tanner got into a year-old Lexus and headed for work. I followed.

The traffic was a lot worse in that direction. It took forty-five minutes to get to Parker Center. I watched Tanner pull into the parking garage, and then I kept driving around the block.

I stopped and bought a newspaper, a bag of doughnuts, and a cup of coffee. I expected to get something to eat later, when Tanner went out for lunch, but I wanted to have something in the car in case I was sitting there for a while.

I drove back and parked down the block from Parker Center, where I could watch the parking garage. I had decided that Tanner would not do anything incriminating at his desk in police headquarters. I just had to follow him if he left the building.

So I read the paper, glancing up from time to time to make sure Tanner didn’t sneak out to a Nazi rally while I was reading about Darryl Strawberry’s back problems.

I finished the paper. I ate one of the doughnuts. It tasted like somebody had deep-fried a wad of old newspaper and dipped it in a solution of lightly sweetened paraffin. There was some red goo in the middle that might have been jelly. It might have been melted crayon, too.

I fiddled with the radio for a while. You can find almost anything on the radio in Los Angeles. I listened to some Haitian rock and roll, some Japanese ceremonial drumming, a Bach guitar piece and “Spoonful” by Cream. Lunchtime came.

Lunchtime passed. Maybe Tanner was eating at his desk. If he was as hungry as I was getting, maybe he just ate the desk. I had a couple more doughnuts. They didn’t taste any better than the desk might have.

By three o’clock I was hungry enough to eat the rest of the doughnuts. But as I took one out of the white paper bag and stared at it, I decided I was already above and beyond the call of duty. I threw the doughnut into the gutter and drove the three blocks to the nearest convenience mart. I got a couple of sandwiches, a bottle of apple juice, and used the rest room.

Fifteen minutes later I was watching the garage again, from a slightly different spot. A tour bus had pulled into the parking place I’d been in before, but I got one almost as good.

I ate one of the sandwiches. I decided it had been made by the same person who made the doughnuts, except with yellow crayons instead of red.

Tanner didn’t come out until after six. The guy was starting to annoy me: he worked straight through lunch and then stayed late, too. There was such a thing as too much devotion to duty.

I followed him home through the miserable, honking, crawling, tire-biting traffic and watched from a half-block away as he went in the front door. I thought I could hear somebody shouting, “Daddy!” but maybe I imagined it.

And that was it. I sat there until almost midnight and there were no muffled gunshots, no burning crosses, no unusual hole-digging—nothing. Tanner went in. It got dark and the lights came on. The purple glow of television filled the front window. The purple glow went out. The lights went out.

I had plenty of time to think about all kinds of things. I thought about Darryl Strawberry’s back problems. I thought about the Burrito King down on Eagle Rock Boulevard. I thought about that voice yelling “Daddy” when Tanner went in the house. That took me in directions I didn’t want to go. But I thought about it for a while anyway.

At 11:47 the last light went out. I waited a few more minutes to be sure Tanner didn’t sneak out wrapped in a Nazi flag. Then I started the car and left.

I drove slowly down to Eagle Rock Boulevard and found the Burrito King. I had two beef burritos and a bottle of Corona from the liquor store next door. I barely made it back to the hotel, where I fell onto the bed and slept the night through.

Chapter Twenty