The Crime Writer

Chapter 11

Chic dropped me off, nodding and touching the brim of his cap. "Will that be all, Miss Daisy?"

"You people are so well mannered." I hopped out.

My trash can had been upended beside the house, garbage strewn along the side run. My sneakers crackled across the bits of glass in the entry. Two nights home, two intrusions. In my head I replayed the groggy house search after I'd awakened with the cut on my foot. Had my assailant been in the house with me? Or had he already slipped away? Had he approached from the street or hiked up the slope? I examined the sliding glass door for smudges that I might have overlooked in the darkness, then walked out onto the deck and peered over the railing as if I could distinguish lightly trampled ivy from untrampled ivy. Back inside, I followed the washed-out blood footprints upstairs. The tape was of course missing from my newly cracked digital camcorder, a disappointment since I'd wanted to preserve for posterity my oh-shit face the instant before I'd been proned out by ninety-seven SWAT members. I guess future Danners would have to content themselves with late-night reruns of Hunter Pray.

In my office the cops had left the drawers open, files and bills crammed back out of place or tossed on the floor. My mound of unread mail had been re-sorted, and they'd helpfully opened the items I hadn't gotten to yet.

I took a steaming shower, the jets doing their best to blast Kasey Broach's pallid face from my memory. Her curled hands, like fleshy claws. Her exposed arms spotted with insect bites. What would she have thought if someone had pulled her aside in third grade, or tenth, and told her that someday she'd wind up dumped under a freeway in Rampart? I thought about my so-called tough morning compared to the morning her family was still having, and it became startlingly clear that I had little to bitch about. I thought about the hot water I could still feel, the air I could still breathe. About Chic and Angela and Preston. How I had the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney and a jury that intelligently weighed my culpability. I was alive. I was free. I was healthy. What I felt was not guilt no, not that but, oddly, gratitude. And the inkling that from gratitude, not from anger or even guilt, could I pull myself out of where I'd landed.

I toweled off. A Post-it note on my mirror, written in Chic's childish scrawl, quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give. Chic had sent me home from my newcomers' meeting with it. It had fallen off and been retaped countless times.

Face everything. One day at a time. I could do that. I could do better than that.

The purloined crime-scene photos, rescued from my pants, sat on the counter beside my toothpaste tube. As I'd pointed out to Preston, I had no official leverage. But I had something in place of that, beyond my peculiar skill at thinking through mayhem, beyond my friends from various bizarre walks of life, beyond my list of contacts oddly suited for… well, this.

I had a story. Or at least the beginning of one.

But as I'd asked myself last night where to go from here? I stared at those pictures of Kasey Broach, dimpled from their illicit journey, and wanted to know why her corpse had intersected with my life. I clicked through my PalmPilot's consultants list, compiled over the course of Derek Chainer's career Navy SEALs, cops, deputy marshals, assistant DAs, coroners, hard-boiled PIs, soft-boiled security guards, firemen, criminalists. Grabbing a pad from my night-stand drawer, I wrote down those who could bring relevant knowledge to bear. Beneath it I made a list of all the people who hated me or might want to do me harm. The Bertrands. Genevieve's fictional lover. Kaden and Delveckio. A thought interrupted the scribbling: I'd arrived in this unenviable position because I'd cut a corner. I'd cut plenty of other corners in my life. The question was, which ones could be catching up with me now?

The doorbell rang. In my towel I greeted the messenger from my lawyers' office, who bore my case files. Amazing the service a quarter mil will buy you.

The discovery process entitled me to the murder book LAPD had assembled in preparation for my trial full insider evidence for Genevieve's case. I set it on the kitchen table, which wobbled its appreciation, and flipped through.

The inserts were familiar and foreign at the same time. They seemed from another phase of my life, though my final verdict had been handed down just the day before yesterday.

Dragging his considerable haunches across the deck, Gus paused to point his black marble eyes at me. He disappeared into the ivy an instant before a swooping hawk aborted its dive to land on the deck rail. One squirrel step ahead of the reaper.

You impact the plot. Or the plot impacts you.

I pulled one of my novels of suitable thickness from my vanity shelf and rammed it beneath the kitchen table to even out the legs. I dressed in sweatpants and a ripped T-shirt I'd had since college, picked up the trash that LAPD had left alongside the house, swept up the entry, taped over the shattered panes in the front door, and vacuumed up the broken glass.

I circled my desk, sat down, shoved the armrests of my chair out a click, grabbed a Bic pen and slid it behind my left ear. My notepad I placed to my left. I set the murder book to my right, beyond the mouse pad, and removed the lab records, police reports, investigative notes, and coroner's report and spaced them evenly across my desktop.

Dirk Chincleft ain't got shit on me.

I'd done the first wave of research. I knew the characters. I had a premise. I'd unearthed a few leads. So I pulled up to my desk and did the only damn thing I'd ever done passably.

I wrote.

I woke up with IVs taped to my arms, a feeding tube shoved through my nose, and my tongue pushed against my teeth, dead and thick as a sock. My mouth was hot and tasted of copper, and my molars felt loose, jogged in their beds from grinding. I blinked against the harsh light and squinted into a haze of face, too close for casual a man straddling a backward chair, strong forearms overlapped, a sheet of paper drooping from one square fist. Another guy behind him, dressed the same rumpled sport coat, loose tie offset from open collar, glint at the hip. Downgraded to bystander, a doctor stood by the door, ignoring the electronic blips and bleeps. I was in a hospital room.

With consciousness came pain.