The full moon cast the palm fronds' shadows against the wall at the base of David's bed. He watched them dip and bow like distorted puppets. A horn blared up on Sunset, followed by the squeal of brakes. David listened for a crash, but there was none. Clearly, the earplugs weren't helping, so he removed them and set them by the alarm clock on his nightstand. It was 10:27 P.M.
He'd paged Yale over ten minutes ago.
He reached for the phone, dialed 411, and asked to be put through to the listing. He was surprised when he got an answer. "Healton's Drugs. Help you?"
"Yes, how late are you open?"
"Midnight."
"Can you-"
"And not a minute later. Got that? Doors lock the instant the second hand clicks."
"Yes," David said. "I understand. Can you give me your address please?"
After heaving a weighty sigh, she complied, and David jotted down the address on a notepad. A run-down part of Venice, close to the intersection of 5th and Broadway. And a few blocks away from the Pearson Home for the Developmentally Disabled.
A hefty coincidence.
The drive took less than fifteen minutes. David slowed as he neared the drugstore, taking in his surroundings. He passed several weedy lots where buildings had been torn down. In one, a group of men huddled around a burning mattress. It became increasingly evident why the police's response time to this area was so slow.
David pulled into the Healton's parking lot. Though the front of the store was well lit, he had some misgivings about leaving his Mercedes unattended. He took his cell phone with him rather than leaving it in the car.
Fourth of July drawings still decorated the building's large windows-flags and firecrackers depicted with thick, messy paint. The window Clyde had broken was backed with plywood and covered with garbage bags that sucked in the wind. The inside smelled of Clorox and Band-Aids. The tabloids at the unmanned checkout counter screamed out in vivid colors: westwood acid thrower still on loose after dr. death aids his escape! Beside it loomed a photograph of David entering the hospital, taken at paparazzi distance.
Aside from a few food aisles to the right, the drugstore featured health, cleaning, and home improvement products. David happened on a pair of heavy-duty earplugs and grabbed them, figuring he'd give them a try. He walked up the aisles until he arrived at the row of lye products. Drano, Red Devil Drain Opener, Liquid Plumr, and, there at the bottom, DrainEze. Industrial strength, the label advertised.
The harsh female voice startled him. "We're closing up. If you're gonna buy something, bring it to the register."
David turned to find an elderly woman in a hand-knit sweater, her face wrinkled and smeared with makeup. She smelled distinctly of baby powder.
"Hello, ma'am. I was hoping you could-"
"Don't you 'hello ma'am' me. I'm trying to close up now. Buy what you're gonna buy or else get out."
Pulling a copy of the police composite from his pocket, David followed her surprisingly fast hobble up to the cash registers in the front. "I'd really appreciate it if you could take a look at-"
He halted. Through the front windows clouded with the smeared decorative paint, he made out movement around his car. A shadow seemed to orient itself toward David and freeze, as if aware of David's gaze. Then the figure flashed away into the night.
David stepped out through the doors, and the old woman was there instantly behind him, locking him out. A man, stocky like Clyde, was walking up the deserted street, hands shoved into the pockets of a torn jacket, loose shoelaces trailing. Fleeing, yet trying to remain inconspicuous. He did not look back. David jogged a few paces to keep him in sight.
He followed the man at a distance of about half a block, wondering if he was, in fact, Clyde, and if so, how he had spotted David. Had he been staking out the drugstore? The pair of earplugs grew sweaty in his hand, and David realized he had inadvertently stolen them. The man turned a corner into one of the deserted lots David had noted on his way to the drugstore, and David picked up his pace, trying unsuccessfully to keep him in view. He passed a dilapidated phone booth, the black receiver dangling from its cord inside the four shattered walls. When he turned the corner, he realized the man had entered the empty lot beside the Pearson Home.
Broken bottles, gravel, weeds, and a few chunks of concrete left over from the demolition. A scorched car sat up in blocks in the middle of the lot. Nobody in sight.
Cautiously, David stepped off the street and entered the dark, deserted lot. He noticed a slat missing in the fence at the periphery and headed toward it. An opening to another street. His Brooks Brothers loafers crunched gravel underfoot as he walked slowly forward. His mind raced with all the reasons it was foolish for him to be out here in this neighborhood in the middle of the night pursuing a dangerous fugitive, but something drew him forward, a deep-seated compulsion.
Clyde had been careful so far to attack only those who couldn't effectively fight back; David hoped he was too timid to go after an able-bodied man.
David stumbled over a beer bottle, and it shattered against a rock with a dry, popping sound. He paused, leaning on the hood of the torched car.
Through the myriad cracks of the windshield, he saw two eyes glinting in the darkness. His mouth went instantly dry, and his voice seemed to catch in his throat on the way up. "Clyde?"
The door creaked open. David stood frozen, one hand resting on the car hood, as a rustling figure got out and slowly took shape in the darkness. The door closed with a bang, then Clyde stood over him, his face dark and shadowed.
The two men faced each other, David looking up at Clyde. Excitement mingled with fear, kicking both up a notch.
Clyde calmly drew back a large, puffy fist and struck David in the face. David's head snapped down and to the side, a splattering of blood leaving his mouth and spraying across the car's hood. The punch made a dull thud, that of a dropped orange hitting asphalt. The action was oddly matter-of-fact; the men had observed it as it occurred, as if they were both somehow detached from it. Clyde made no move to strike David again.
Slowly, David raised a hand to his mouth and pressed it to his split lip. He had felt no pain, just a sudden pressure. His stomach churned.
He turned back to Clyde, careful to keep his head lowered so as not to make eye contact. The thought of Diane's soft whimpering the first time she kissed him in the hospital room brought on a sudden, intense rage, but he fought it away. Anger did him little good here, as it did little good on the ER floor.
Only Clyde's large stomach and chest were within his view. The sickening and frighteningly familiar combination of body odor and orange candy-coating hung in the air.
It occurred to David how surreal it was to be threatened physically and how ill equipped he was to handle it. He'd been in one fight in his life-Daniel Madison in third grade over a stolen Sandy Koufax baseball card. The ass-kicking Daniel administered had convinced David subsequently to pursue other avenues of conflict resolution. And to root for the Giants.
"You don't know," Clyde said, his words a slur. "You don't know how scary I can be."
"Yes, I do," David said. Clyde might strike him at any moment. He tried to figure out where he'd hit Clyde if he had to defend himself. Neck? Crotch? "But you're in danger. I can help. I can bring you in myself, and make sure you're taken care of."
"I'm not a game." Clyde's voice, deep and raspy, was pained. "You'd better leave me alone."
"Clyde, listen to me." David's voice was shaking, though he was doing everything to keep it even. "I saw the films of the fear study. I know what they put you through when you were a kid, and how wrong it was. I understand why you're angry-you have every right to be angry." He sensed Clyde's shape relaxing slightly, shoulders starting to lower.
"No one's born with problems like mine," Clyde said. "Someone made me."
"If you come with me, we can talk to the authorities together and explain everything that's happened to you," David continued, in as calm a voice as he could muster. "But as long as you're out here and wanted, you put yourself in danger."
"I'm not in danger. They're the ones. They're the ones who are scared of me."
"Clyde, I know there's a part of you that doesn't want to do these things to people. I know there's a part of you that wants to be better." Wording the question like a statement, trying to pick up ground. David stared up at Clyde's shadowy face, framed in silhouette by the glow of a distant streetlight.
"I tried to go into a clinic," Clyde said. "To stop the feelings that were starting to come. I wanted them to make me better. To give me… things… to make me better." Fear crept into his voice. "But I got to the parking lot and saw them with their white coats and I couldn't. My hands were sweating. I dropped my orange bottle, but it was empty."
The orange bottle-for prescription drugs? Clyde's cryptic words were confirming connections David had already made. Connolly's study had left Clyde terrified of doctors. Or at least of receiving treatment. That's why he'd been trying to cure himself.
"How about if I went with you?" David asked. "To get help?"
A voice, small and defiant, like a child's. "No."
"If you won't go with me to get help, I have to believe you're not very serious about getting better."
A low humming sound broadened into a sob-stained cry. David waited silently, shocked, as Clyde wept and then fell silent. After a pause, Clyde said, "People talk at me but their voices don't have any color. They're metal and cold. They scrape my ears." His words were distorted from crying, but his tone was more gentle. Confessional. "It's like there's darkness everywhere and in my eyes until someone smiles and then it gets light." A mournful pause. "It hasn't been light in a long time."
David tried to collect his thoughts.
"I'm not filled inside," Clyde continued. "It's like straw instead of skin, and ropes instead of veins. I'm rotting. I'm rotting from the inside out, but I still move around in my body." Clyde beginning to cry again. Rocking on his feet, muttering. "Three, two, one. Back from the door." Calming himself. When he raised his head, his eyes gleamed, sharp-focused and angry. A forged connection-vulnerability followed by intense animosity.
David took a small step back. "There are people who can talk to you." He made sure not to mention psychologists or psychiatrists. "Make you feel better. Plus your wounds-your wounds from the alkali-those need to be treated as well."
Clyde turned and spat. "I can taste my rot. It's like there's a dead rat in my throat and it's melting."
"That's a side effect," David said, "and another reason you need help. You've been poisoning yourself with the drugs you're taking."
Clyde's shadow stiffened, rearing back, and David realized he'd made a terrible mistake.
"I don't take drugs." The fist drew back calmly again, like a piston, and drove down into David's face.
David came to with gravel in his mouth. Using the front bumper of the car, he pulled himself to his feet and spit out the gravel on the hood. His mouth was warm and salty; when he studied the gob of spit in the moonlight, he saw it was dark, lined with blood.
The vice-grip of a headache seized him suddenly and intensely, pulsed three times, then dissipated. He slid up on the hood, careful to miss his spit, and sat with his feet on the front bumper. His pants were ripped and bloody at one knee. He caught his breath slowly, blotting his split lip with a sleeve and going through a neuro checklist. He didn't have any weakness or altered sensations, and there seemed to be no clouding of his mental facilities. He thought about getting himself to the ER to be checked out, but continued toward the missing slat in the fence on the far side of the lot. Halfway there, he noticed another slat that had been shoved aside, farther down the fence. This one appeared to lead not to a street but an alley. David was fairly certain the slat had been in place before his confrontation with Clyde.
He headed over and stepped through the fence without first scanning the alley. He was tired, aching, pissed off, and no longer cared to slow down for the sake of taking precautions. A homeless man shuffled from behind a Dumpster, approaching David in threatening fashion, but David lowered his hand from his bloody lip and froze him with a glare.
He trudged out from the alley and found himself on an empty street of run-down apartments. Dilapidated cars were parked along the curbs-Chevettes with tinted windows, El Dorados on sunken shocks, trucks with soil scattered in the beds. On the apartments, screens hung off windows by single pegs; clean patches of wood were visible where decorative shutters had recently fallen off. David walked along the torn-up strips of grass intended to decorate the sidewalks, not really sure for what he was looking. He paused at the corner of the street, staring at the row of quiet, decaying buildings. Insects chirped somewhere nearby, though there was little vegetation.
The realities of the situation struck him. He was alone, in a bad part of town at night, searching the streets for an assailant.
David turned purposefully and began the long walk back to his car. Beside an overturned Healton's shopping cart, a man slept on the sidewalk, drawing deep, shuddering breaths. David circled him, passing beside a car.
A parking permit hanging from the car's rearview mirror caught his eye: UCLA MEDICAL CENTER. Expired in May, three months ago. The month Clyde was fired.
David froze, peering at the car. A chipped brown Crown Victoria. On the dash sat an empty box of Nobleman's Zinc Lozenges and a loose twenty-gauge needle, still in its plastic sheath. Wrappers and soda cans covered the backseat.
Carefully sidestepping the homeless man, David headed for the run-down apartment building closest to the car. He ran his finger down the list of names on the mailboxes, searching for Clyde's to no avail. He did the same at the apartment building next door. And the one next door to that. He was just about to give up when a name caught his eye. Slade Douglas. Apartment 203.
The lobby featured a circular couch with the stuffing showing and a large dead fern. The carpet covering the stairs was worn through in the middle. A shattered lightbulb littered the landing between the floors.
A bare flickering bulb was all that lit the second floor. Maroon carpets and brown peeling wallpaper made the hall seem darker than it was.
David paused outside the door to Apartment 203, then slowly drew his eye close to the peephole. A large form, coming directly at him.
He sprang back, nearly tripping over his feet, and darted for the alcoved doorway to Apartment 202. As Clyde's door swung open, David pressed himself flat against the neighboring door. He heard three dead bolts lock, one after another, then Clyde swept past him, banging into a wall. Clyde stumbled down the hall toward the stairs, pulling on a torn jacket and muttering under his breath.
Loud footsteps on the stairs, then all was still. David realized he'd been holding his breath, and he let it out in a rush. He felt light-headed.
Walking back outside, he headed out of view along the side of the building, in case Clyde returned. He paged Yale again, this time to his cell number, then switched his phone over to vibrate mode. Peering up the street, he wondered where Clyde had gone. Probably to spy on David again, to make sure he'd left the area.
Pacing impatiently beneath a fire escape, David waited for Yale's return call. None came. He'd just decided to page Yale again when the muffled cries of a woman caught his attention. Looking up the side of the building, he saw he was standing beneath Clyde's window. The muffled cries were in all likelihood coming from Clyde's apartment.
David's face went slick with sweat. The breeze kicked up, and he lost the sound of the cries momentarily, before it died down. Ed had pointed out that police response time to this area was slow. Clyde could return and resume torturing, or even kill, whoever was up in his apartment before a 911 call could be responded to. And Yale hadn't even called back.
David walked back and forth beneath the fire escape, the cries overhead driving him to a near-panic. His mind stumbled through terms-suppressed evidence, search warrants, unlawful entry-searching for something to guide him, but he was forced to acknowledge that his legal expertise was derived almost entirely from bad movies. A pained, stomach-deep grunt overhead drove him to action.
David pulled on a pair of latex gloves from his back pocket, then jumped up, grabbing the fire escape ladder and yanking it down. He climbed to the first landing, then the second, the structure creaking beneath him.
Peering through Clyde's filthy, cracked window, he saw little more than an unmade bed. The reflection of the glowing Healton's Drugstore sign shined in the glass, and David turned to look at the store, visible beyond the empty lot. In front of the store, bathed in a cone of light, sat his Mercedes, in clear view from Clyde's window. David grimaced at the distinctive tilt of the headlights-his car stuck out glaringly from the surroundings. Clyde must have recognized it pulling up, and realized David had come looking for him. The Pearson Home was also distinctly observable from Clyde's apartment. It struck David as noteworthy that Clyde had never left the vicinity of the Happy Horizons home in which he'd spent part of his childhood. Clearly, he derived some comfort from being nearby.
The woman's cries brought David's attention back to the dark apartment. He carefully removed a long shard of glass from the cracked window and reached through, lifting the catch. He pushed the window up and slid inside, resting the shard on the sill.
The first thing to catch his attention was the odor of decay-nearly unbearable. Thousands of motes swirled in the artificial light filtering through the window.
The woman's muffled screams continued, rising in pitch and frequency. David felt an overwhelming sense of embarrassment as he crossed to the moaning mound of clothes and pulled away a crusted sweatshirt to reveal the amorphous, static-bathed shapes of a couple fornicating on an overturned television set. The riddle of the cries was solved. David closed his eyes, feeling himself flush. He could not help but picture Freud's somber, astute face.
He started for the open window, but then paused. He was inside now. Whatever laws he may have violated were already broken. He might as well look around and see what he could glean about Clyde Slade, aka Douglas DaVella, aka Slade Douglas, while he waited for Yale's call. He ran through a quick checklist in his mind of what he should look for. DrainEze. Lithium. Evidence.
He stepped farther into the apartment, surveying it. Clyde obviously had been removed from normal socialization for some time. Burnt and cracked pots and pans covered the small counter that served as the kitchen. Among them sat hardened clumps of bread that Clyde had molded into sculptures. They resembled decaying gingerbread men. Toothpicks protruded from the sculptures, decorative flags or voodoo pins.
David almost tripped over the cat bowl, overflowing with mush and teeming with flies. The odor was riper here, more fresh. He turned and saw, sprawled along the top of the kitchen pantry, a partially decayed cat. It had been dead for weeks, and the flies and maggots were at it.
With a nervous stare at the door, David quickly entered the bathroom. On the interior doorknob hung a child's hospital gown that looked to be the one Clyde had worn during Connolly's study. David stared at the filthy mirror, dotted with bits of pus from popped zits. The toilet was splattered with stains. Diarrhea-an early side effect of lithium toxicity. The medicine cabinet was empty, except for a massive bottle of generic aspirin. Aspirin meant more trouble; when taken with lithium, it raised the lithium blood level and thus the likelihood of toxicity. If Clyde did indeed suffer from migraines, that would explain why he kept so much aspirin on hand. David briskly searched around the sink, but was unable to find where Clyde stored his stolen lithium.
He pulled aside the frayed shower curtain. The entire bottom of the tub was lined with jam jars, lids screwed on tight, stacked five or six jars high. David raised one to the light and saw the yellow liquid inside. Urine. Clyde was saving his urine. The date and time was etched on a label on the side in black pen. David looked over the jars with increasing amazement. Clyde had been saving his urine, off and on, for months. A few jars were filled with clusters of hair, and others with fingernail and toenail clippings. One held a collection of scabs. David tried to swallow, but his throat clicked dryly.
The best he could come up with to assess the contents of the tub was a weak parallel to Freud's anal stage, and to the fetishizing nature of recently toilet-trained two-year-olds. Flushing the toilet and becoming upset at where it all went. Fixation at an early stage of development. Maybe Clyde was holding on to some part of himself. Himself at an earlier age? David shook his head, irritated. Too facile an explanation.
Stepping back into the main room, David approached the large wooden table. Several books were stacked to one side, and he noticed the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library stamp on the fore edges-Clyde had stolen them from the hospital. David laid the books side by side. A Merck Manual, a DSM-IV, a Physician's Desk Reference, a dictionary, and several psych textbooks. One of the pages of the PDR was dog-eared, and David flipped to it.
Not surprisingly, it was the section on lithium. Several bullet points detailed its possible uses: to control mood swings and explosive outbursts, and to help patients combat aggressiveness and self-mutilation. One phrase, "may also help control violent outbursts," had been circled in red. Clyde must have mistaken violent outbursts to mean outbursts of violence rather than intense, brief tantrums. Certain words were underlined, and David flipped through the dictionary and found them marked there correspondingly.
Driven by senseless compulsions that he didn't understand, Clyde was-with some degree of sincerity-trying to prevent himself from committing acts of violence, and poisoning himself in the process. It was, above all else, a display of wish fulfillment, a desperate hope that magical pills could heal him and dissolve his violent urges. Clyde had managed to galvanize some of his few and pathetic resources to this misguided end.
Beside the books, stubbed-out cigarettes lay clustered on a small plate, a few wayward butts scattered across the table like shriveled white worms. Most of them were mashed together in twos, as if they'd been smoked that way. Clyde had probably developed a heavy dependence on nicotine to reduce his anxiety and improve his concentration. Two cigarettes at a time would certainly maximize those effects.
David leaned over a sheet of notes that Clyde had scrawled, most of it phrases he'd evidently culled from the med textbooks. Clearly, much of the reading was above his level; Clyde had drawn up lists of words he didn't understand. David studied his writing, considering whether Clyde was dyslexic. At the bottom of the page were several phrases. Nic wether toda. Helo ther. Hav a nice dae. Variant spellings of dae were written beneath-day, daye, da.
Clyde's desperate attempt to wear a mask of sanity.
Beneath the table was a large metal footlocker. David shook it, and it gave off a metallic jingle. There was a smudge of blue liquid near one of the built-in locks, which David took to be alkali. He hadn't sighted DrainEze in the kitchen or bathroom; Clyde probably kept it secured in the footlocker. Searching for the footlocker key in the messy apartment would be hopeless. Instead, David pulled a toothpick from one of the bread sculptures on the kitchen counter, jammed it in the footlocker keyhole, and snapped it off. That should be enough to keep Clyde away from the alkali until the police arrived.
Near Clyde's bed, on an upended orange crate that served as a nightstand, David found a rusted numeral-the 1 he'd noticed missing from the Pearson Home's address. It served as a paperweight, pinning down a yellowed, damaged photograph of Happy Horizons. The house had not been significantly altered over the years. These fetishized objects from Clyde's childhood home-how did they fit into his psychopathology?
Taped to the wall by the bed, a headline torn from the LA Times proclaimed fear courses through ucla medical center. Clyde's goal accomplished. Staring at the headline, David wondered how sincere Clyde's attempts to cure himself were.
The longer David was in the apartment, the more acutely he sensed his own approaching panic. He was breathing hard, glancing at the door every few seconds, and feeling an immense urgency to leave, but the information he was uncovering was riveting and invaluable. He had no idea when Clyde was coming back; he shouldn't push his luck.
He turned, regarding the rest of the room to see if there was anything else he might have missed. In the corner, a desiccated snapdragon leaned from an ice-cream carton, soil spilled around its base. Something seemed odd about it, and it took David a moment to figure out what. The stalks and leaves were angled toward the kitchen rather than the window. The plant should have been leaning in the direction of its sunlight source, not toward the dark apartment interior. It must have been recently moved.
David walked over and crouched above the plant, pulling it away from the wall. It hid a heating vent set into the crumbling plaster. The vent cover tilted from the hole easily, revealing an orange bottle of pills. Falling to his knees, David reached inside and removed it. He lined the arrows and popped the white top. It was full of pale yellow pills. Eskalith. 450 mg.
Clyde's self-consciousness about taking meds was so great, he hid them even within his own apartment. As if he couldn't bear to have them in plain view.
David replaced the meds, set the vent cover back into its hole, slid the plant into place, and headed for the window. He heard a key hit the lock of the front door and felt his gut go slack. One bolt turned, followed by another slide of the key, and then the second. David was halfway to the window before it hit him that he didn't have nearly enough time to get out. There was nothing big enough to conceal him, so he flattened himself against the wall behind the bed, in the shadowed corner beside the window. Save the darkness, David was in clear view.
The third dead bolt slid with a thunk and the door swung open. Clyde's outline filled the doorway, a few swirling locks of hair framing his head like a halo set afire. He swayed a moment on his feet, then stepped inside.
David remained completely inert, afraid even to exhale.
Clyde shuffled in, slamming the door behind him and throwing a dead bolt, and headed directly for David. If he turned on a light, David would be completely exposed. Clyde's pace quickened as he neared David, then he lunged forward. David fought the urge to draw his arms up protectively, but Clyde fell to the bed, face pressed to the mattress, and lay still. After a few moments, he began to draw ragged, uneven breaths.
David remained in a panic freeze, head drawn back to the wall. A bit of light from the distant Healton's sign fell across Clyde's back, making the chain around his neck glint. David eased out a breath.
With painstakingly slow movements, David took a step toward the window. Then another. He was just lowering his foot when his cell phone vibrated.
Clyde rolled over, his head rising lazily from the mattress. David sprinted for the front door, rather than risk scrambling out the nearby window. Sensing Clyde's struggle to rise from the bed behind him, David turned the three dead bolts furiously, trying to find the correct combination to unlock the door. Several times, he twisted the bolts and yanked the door, but it wouldn't open. He heard pounding footsteps-Clyde charging him with a roar-and he ducked to the side, Clyde's weighty body smashing into the door and splintering several panels. Clyde collapsed on the floor, stunned. The door dangled lamely, jarred loose from the hinges, though the dead bolt remained buried in the frame on the other side. David grabbed the hinge side of the door and yanked it farther open. He leapt through the gap into the hall as Clyde stirred and snatched at his ankle, missing it.
David flew down the hall, hearing Clyde crash through the wreck of the door, and took the stairs two at a time. He sprinted through the lobby, Clyde bellowing behind him. Though David knew he was faster, he sprinted with a blind, panicked speed. Through the gap in the fence, across the empty lot, tripping and fumbling for his car keys in his pocket. He did not hear Clyde pursuing him.
David reached the light-bathed parking lot of Healton's, his Mercedes sitting out like a showcase vehicle, and unlocked the doors with his key's remote control. He slid into the car and squealed out onto the street, banking a hard left over the curb. He could not resist a look out the window as he passed the abandoned lot, and there, halfway across and pulling to a halt near the scorched car, was the shadowy form of Clyde.
Something glinted in his hand-maybe a gun, maybe not-and then Clyde stopped, standing frozen in the dark lot like a misplaced statue, watching the car speed away. David would be haunted by that image-Clyde's quiet form in the lot staring out at him with something calmer than anger, something like interest newly kindled.
He did not let up on the accelerator until he was several blocks away, then he realized his cell phone was vibrating in his pocket. He fumbled for it and flipped it open. "Where the hell have you been?"
Yale's voice was calm as always. "Take a deep breath. I was in an interrogation. What's going on?"
"I tracked down Clyde… to his apartment… he came home.. chased me… 1501 Brecken Street, Apartment 203." David knew he sounded frantic, but he couldn't get his breathing back in control.
"You tracked him yourself?" The sounds of Yale moving on the other end of the line. "Is he at that location now?"
"No. I don't know. He knows I know where he lives. He chased me, but stopped a few blocks from his house."
"I've got the area Clyde's bedded down," Yale yelled to someone else. "Get me Pacific on the line. Let's move, let's move!" Mouth back to the receiver. "Where are you?"
"I'm in my car. Driving."
"Is he chasing you now?" The beat of Yale's shoes on the floor quickened.
"No. He stopped."
"All right. We're moving in. Clear out of the area immediately."
David's heart was racing, and he felt a line of sweat working its way down the inside of his biceps. "Check the area around Clyde's apartment, including Healton's, the Pearson Home, and the empty lot beside it. I'll call the hospital, alert security, and have someone get upstairs with Diane and Nancy in case Clyde's heading over there. I'll go to the hospital now. I'll be in Diane's room."
"Fine. I'll send a unit upstairs too. Don't leave there. Keep your phone on. And Spier? You're in deep shit if this goes sour. You broke our deal."
"How can I break a deal you never accepted?"
Yale hung up without responding.