The Night Detectives

38

In the ensuing days, the FBI made a dozen more arrests and confiscated more weapons and explosives. It was being called the biggest domestic terror conspiracy in modern American history. Peralta gained major cred with the bureau, which promised it would lead to business for us.

The house on Cypress was back to something resembling normal. Did I dare trust it? Lindsey was reclaiming the gardens, fighting against the rising heat. I was cooking and reading. At the moment, we were both naked in the bedroom and sipping martinis. Coleman Hawkins was on the stereo with perfect synchronicity, Cocktails for Two. Among the things Lindsey had purchased on her shopping trip were two sets of garter belts and sheer stockings: bad-girl black and virginal white. She was wearing the black and draping one leg over me.

“Are you going to stay?” I asked the question that had been metastasizing inside me, fearful of the answer.

She held out her glass. “If you’ll take me back, History Shamus.”

I clinked my glass against hers. “Gladly.”

Oscar Peterson came on. The Maharajah of the Keyboard, as Duke Ellington called him, sealed the deal.

“You’re crying.” She held my face close and wiped my wet cheeks. “Are they good tears?”

I nodded. But they were, in fact, a mixed bag.

“Happy that you’re back,” I said. “I want to do everything I can to put us back together…”

“Me, too.”

“And I’m sad for all the ones we lost. At least some could have been saved if we’d been faster or smarter. I can’t say we covered ourselves in glory on our first case. Grace, Felix, Tim, Larry Zip, Bob Hunter, his wife, all dead. We might have stopped some of it.”

“Dave, you can’t take all that on yourself.”

“The only one who got away was Addison.”

Lindsey cocked her head.

“Grace’s friend,” I explained. “Aside from Tim’s parent’s, she was the only one Grace and Tim had contact with while they were hiding out in O.B. She left school and went home to Oklahoma they tell me. A good thing. But I can’t forget holding that baby after I changed him. Now he’s in some hole out in the desert. What a shitty thing.”

And I cried.

Lindsey held me close for a long time.

Finally, she said, “Addison is a really bad name.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Mind if I try a hunch?”