The Blue Hour

Fifteen

“We got a hit from CAL–ID, Hess,” said Merci Rayborn. “Those must have been some damned good parameters you and the witch doctor worked up.”

She couldn’t control the excitement in her voice. “Creep named Lee LaLonde, car thief, meth freak, nice healthy sheet — mostly Riverside County. Get this, he lives out in Elsinore now, just off the Ortega. I let Riverside know we’re coming in. I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”

She could hear a lamp click on, then the sound of the old man breathing. Her bedside clock said 4:56.

“Get some backup?” he asked in a calm, clear voice.

“No. The shitbird is still on parole. We can do what we want with him. Don’t worry.”

She felt presumptuous telling a superior officer not to worry but Hess wasn’t superior anymore, she reminded herself. It made her feel powerful. The adrenaline was jumping through her now and she couldn’t stop it if she wanted to. She didn’t want to.

This was what it was all about, life made vivid and death made close by force of arms. It was better than being in love.

He gave her directions to his apartment, told her he’d be out front, and hung up.

Merci had already hit the coffee maker, which she set up before bed each night in case something like this broke. Hot cup now in hand, heart pounding good and solid but not too fast, she went back to the bedroom where she turned the radio on her dresser to the news and the radio in the bathroom to a rock station.

She tied her hair back in a scrunchie, pulled on trousers and boots, cinched her SpectraFlex Point Blank armor vest over a T-shirt and holstered up. The old shoulder rig fit like silk but the snap came loose sometimes: time for a visit to the leathersmith, or maybe to get a new one. The Point Blank was a composite formulated to take multiple hits, angled impacts and high-velocity ammo. Five pounds, black. It ran her $650 from a catalog because the county wouldn’t spring for anything but the old Kevlar lls. Another beef with accounting, she thought, Damned bean counters anyway. No Sig-alerts according to the news from the dresser — good. The bathroom radio was playing something fast and brainless. Her dad had always played jazz. She tossed one extra clip on the bed and put the other in the front pocket of her pants. Badge holder in the rear right. Flashlight, handcuffs and mace onto the duty belt. Finished off with the Sheriff Department windbreaker. She got the clip off the bed and put it in the left jacket pocket. She made sure the double-barreled .40 caliber derringer in her purse was loaded, even though she wouldn’t carry the purse into Lee LaLonde’s domicile. She realized she needed a calf holster for the little cannon, made a note to price them at a store where she could find hunter’s cleaning kits, ropes, pulleys for sale. She made sure the stiletto was in her purse, too, for reasons no more clear in her mind than general notions of security and excitement.

Purse Snatcher, dirtbag, shitbird, she thought: try getting this stuff away from me.

Eight minutes and fifteen seconds from the time the call came through. Down from her last one, which was just over nine, but that had just been her weekly drill to stay loose.

She left on the radios and living room light and slammed the front door behind her.

One single thought about Phil Kemp entered her mind and she banished it like a sick dog.

Hess got in with two mugs of coffee and shut the door without spilling any. With the interior light on she could see his hair was brushed back as always with the little white wave out front and she wondered if it just grew that way. His face looked old and lined and tired. But the blue eyes, which he trained on her for the first time as he quietly closed the door with his right hand while offering her a cup of coffee with the other, were clear and bright as the moon.

“My heart’s really going,” she said.

“Mine, too. This is great.”

Merci gunned the car down the empty avenue and heard the tires swish through a sprinkler slick.

“You still feel that way, Hess? That this is great?”

“Absolutely.”

She hit sixty and looked for a speed sign: thirty-five, the coffee jacking her up a notch, Hess telling her to make a U-turn at the next stop.

“What about the ferry?”

“It quit running five hours ago.”

“Right. Hey, I’ll settle in, don’t worry. I know this old guy named Francisco? Used to live near me. I mean, he’s really old. When I look at him I realize I shouldn’t get all worked up like I do. I should try to step back and settle in. Just go with it.”

“I’ll drive if you want.”

She looked at him in the passing bars of light cast by the streetlamps. “I’ll drive.”

“Stay inside.”

“Inside what?”

“Yourself.”

She looked at him with a little more offense than she actually took, but he wasn’t looking at her so it didn’t matter.

“Hess, I don’t need pithy aphorisms all the time. How to drive my car. How to feel what goddamned Ed Izma is feeling. I mean, I appreciate it, but I’m really not a six-year-old.”

“Ignore me. I mean that.”

“I know you’re coming from the right place.”

“It’s just part of getting old. I want to blab everything I think I know to someone I think might use it. Like giving away your hunting gun or your first baseball mitt or something. You’ll do it too someday.”

“I hope so,” she muttered, feeling the V-8 downshift and gather force as she guided them down the Newport peninsula. When she got past city hall she flogged it and set the flasher up on the hood. She had never given her life expectancy more than a moment’s thought, and she didn’t feel like giving it any more than that now.

It was after five-thirty and the first blush of light was in the sky. When she got onto the freeway she used the carpool lane and held the Impala at ninety. The airport whizzed by then the strawberry fields covered with plastic that shone like water then the Santa Ana Mountains then the marine base. She felt just exactly right at this moment, speeding forward through the blue hour in her unmarked with a good partner beside her and a suspect to engage.

“Yeah, okay, Hess. I’m going to stay inside myself.”

“I told you to ignore me and I meant it.”

“No, I wasn’t chewing on you. I meant it — and thanks for a good word. I may be kind of a bitch sometimes but I’m not too dumb to take good advice.”

She was aware of him studying her. She glanced up at the rearview to change lanes and could see his face in the periphery.

“You say what’s on your mind and that’s mostly good.”

“But?”

“Nice to hide your cards sometimes.”

“It’s more cunning, I know.”

“Well, it gives you more time to figure things out. Like yesterday, if you’d have kept cool at Izma he’d have heated up more. He might have given us something. He needed to get a rise out of you. And you knew it. But you gave it to him too easy.”

“It goes against my principles to watch some gigantic moron drag his balls all over the room and try to make me watch.”

“Leave your principles at home.”

Even with guys like Kemp? “You don’t.”

“I do. A lot. It works.”

“Explain that one.”

“Let other people do the talking. Then, when you understand what they’re doing, take them down. Or out. Or up, or any place you want to take them.”

“Thanks, dad.”

“It’s like...” Hess lifted both his hands out in front of him, one with the coffee cup still hooked on a finger, the other with the fingers open in a gesture of emphasis.

Merci looked at him. She’d never seen him animated before. His raptor’s face had something puzzled in it.

“... It’s like you’re a fort,” he continued, “and your head’s the tower and your eyes are the holes for sharpshooters and your ears are where the spies live. You’re this... this... living...”

“Fort?”

“Yeah. See? You stay inside yourself and look out of yourself, like looking out of a fort.”

“I can see it. If I look real hard.”

“You’re right. That’s not very good. Cancel it.”

She could feel the coffee and adrenaline working to make an odd joy in her heart. “I do see it, though. It’s not exactly elegant, but I see it.”

“I’ll shut up. I’m feeling pretty good right now, for being full of chemicals and radiation.”

She made the Ortega Highway turnoff and headed inland. She looked in the rearview again and noted that Hess was staring out the window while the gas station lights colored his face.

Then he turned to her and she wondered if he knew she was looking at him in the mirror.

“Tell me about Lee LaLonde,” he said.

“A speed freak and a car thief,” she said. “Down twice for grand theft auto, twice for selling stolen parts. Four years, two bounces — Honor Farm and Riverside County. Released and paroled two years ago.”

“A thief, not a carjacker?”

“Just a thief, so far.”

“No sex crimes?”

“None.”

Hess said nothing.

“He’s a little creep of a guy — perfect size for the backseat of a car. Five-eight, one-twenty, blond and blue. Twenty-five years old. Last scrape with Riverside Sheriffs was a year ago — questioned in a burglary of a plant where he worked. Nothing filed. They fired him.”

“What’s the plant make?”

“Irrigation supplies. Cloudburst is the name of the outfit. His jacket says he runs his own business now — retail sales at the weekly swap meet here at the lake.”

“Sales of what?”

“Doesn’t even say what. Anyway, that’s the last thing in his file. He’s got a barb-wire chain tattooed around his left biceps and knife puncture scar on his stomach. Grew up in Northern California, Oakland.”

They were past the city and the big houses now and the highway was dark and beginning to climb. The traffic was light now, still early for the commuters who worked in Riverside County.

“Who stabbed him?” Hess asked.

“His dad.”

When she looked at him he was already nodding, as if he’d expected the answer. Maybe he saw it ahead of time, Merci thought. She was about to ask him how he saw things in advance, but she didn’t and she didn’t know why.

She reached into the folder on the seat and handed Hess the artist’s sketch. Hess took it and angled the lamp on the dash over, clicking it on.

“It’s lifelike,” he said.

“Whose life is the question.”

“How come you waited so long to show it to me?”

“I not sure how solid it is. See, this Kamala Petersen lives on TV and fashion magazines. Everybody looks like somebody she’s seen before. I had to hypnotize her to cut through all her bullshit. And get a load of this — she’s seen the guy twice. Once the night Janet Kane disappeared, and once the week before, at a mall, walking around, checking things out.”

“Checking out Kamala?”

“Correct. She’d stuffed that down deep. That’s what we got through to.”

“This is valuable. This is good.”

“Unfortunately, I lost a court witness. Hess, I’m praying it’s worth the trade. I spent the last two days worrying about that sketch. Is it close? Is Kamala reliable? I’m not going to go public with something that’s way off — gets people confused. But I’m going to release it to Press Information when I go in today. I took the gamble, now I’m going to stick with it. I’m trusting me.”

Hess continued to stare down at the paper. Merci saw the light in his face, the uncluttered intensity of his gaze.

Hess, again: “LaLonde doesn’t fit the profile. Page says he’ll be a known sex offender.”

“So. What’s a profile really mean anyway?” she asked.

“Dalton’s good. What do you think of them?”

“I’ve only had first-hand experience with two. One was right on, the other was pretty far off. Dalton did the one that was off. The Bureau did the one that worked. In general, I prefer evidence that’s actual evidence. I don’t like trying to figure out if something applies or not.”

“Well, we’d all take a blood sample or a fingerprint over a piece of speculative thinking.”

“You asked what I thought.”

No reply. She guided the Impala up the grade and through the swerving turns of the Ortega. She thought of all the wrecks on this highway, a bloody stretch of road if there ever was one. A prime dump site, too — the Purse Snatcher wasn’t the first creep to bring his victims out here. She looked out at the sycamores now just barely visible on the hillsides, the way their branches jagged out like dislocated arms and gave the trees a look of eternal agony.

They were near the top of the grade now and Merci could see the oaks in profile against the blue-black sky.

“I always thought this was a spooky old highway,” she said.

She looked at his face in the rearview again and thought it looked pale, but maybe it was just the parsimonious light offered by the east. He looked old and tired, but that’s exactly what he was. She wondered what it felt like to sit there with cancer growing in your lung, watching the sky get light. She had no idea because she wasn’t used to figuring what other people were thinking. Hess was right about that. So she tried to feel what he might feel, pretending she had the cancer too and she was heading down into Lake Elsinore to interview a speed freak who might be a murderer. But it was hard to feel what Hess felt because what she felt was already there. It was right in the way. So she sent her thoughts out around her own feelings, like birds flying around trees.

What she came up with was, if she was in the same position, every waking moment would scare the living piss out of her.

“Me too,” he said. “A spooky old highway.”