The Watchman

24

PIKE STOPPED for takeout from an Indian restaurant in Silver Lake even though Cole dropped off food earlier that day. He bought a spinach and cheese dish called saag paneer, vegetable jalfrezi, and garlic naan, thinking the girl would like them, and a quart of a sweet yogurt drink called lassi. The lassi was rich like a milk shake, and flavored with mango. Pike enjoyed smelling the strong spices-the garlic and garam masala; the coriander and cardamom. They reminded him of the rocky villages and jungle basins where he had first eaten these things. Pike was starving. A queasy hunger had grown in him as the stress burned from his system.

The sun was long down by the time Pike arrived at their house and turned into the drive. Everything looked fine. The door was closed and the shades glowed from the light within the house. In the abrupt silence when he turned off the car, his ears still whined, though less now than before. Pike was not going to tell the girl about Luis and Jorge, but he would tell her he had made progress, and thought that might make her feel better about things.

Pike locked the car, went to the door, and let himself in. He remembered how his silent appearances frightened her, so this time he announced himself. He knocked twice, then opened the door.

“It’s me.”

Pike felt the silence as he stepped inside. Cole’s iPod was on the coffee table beside an open bottle of water. Her magazines were on the floor. The house was bright with light, but Pike heard nothing. He concentrated, listening past the whine, thinking she might be playing with him because she hated the way he always surprised her, but he knew it was wrong. The silence of an empty house is like no other silence.

Pike lowered the bag of food to the floor. He drew the Kimber and held it down along his leg.

“Larkin?”

Pike moved, and was at her bedroom. He moved again, checking the second bedroom, the bath, and the kitchen. Larkin was not in the house. The rooms and their things were in order and in place, and showed no sign of a struggle. The windows were intact. The back door was locked, but he opened it, checked the backyard, then moved back through the house. The doors had not been jimmied or broken.

Pike looked for a note. No note.

Her purse and other bags were still in her bedroom. If she ran away she had not taken them.

Pike let himself out the front door and stood in the darkness on the tiny porch. He listened, feeling the neighborhood-the streetlight above its pool of silver, the open houses with golden windows, the movement of the neighbors on their porches and within their homes. Life was normal. Men with guns had not come here. No one had carried a struggling girl out to a car or heard a woman screaming. Larkin had likely walked away.

Pike stepped off the porch and went to the street, trying to decide which way she would go, and why. She had credit cards and some cash, but no phone with which to call her friends or a car. Pike decided she had probably walked down to Sunset Boulevard to find a phone, but then a woman on the porch across the street laughed. They were an older couple, and had been on their porch every night, listening to the Dodgers. Tonight their radio played music, but Pike could hear their voices clearly.

He stepped between the cars through the pool of silver light.

He said, “Excuse me.”

Their porch was lit only by the light coming from within their house. The red tips of their cigarettes floated in the dark like fireflies.

The man drew on his cigarette, and the coal flared. He lowered the volume on the radio.

He said, “Good evening.”

He spoke in a formal manner with a Russian accent.

Pike said, “I’m from across the street.”

The woman waved her cigarette.

“We know this. We see you and the young lady.”

“Did you see the young lady today?”

Neither of them answered. They sat in cheap aluminum lawn chairs, shadowed in the dim light. The old man drew on his cigarette again.

Pike said, “I think she went for a walk. Did you see which way she went?”

The old man grunted, but with a spin that gave it meaning.

Pike said, “What?”

The woman said, “This is your wife?”

Pike read the weight in her question and took sex off the table.

“My sister.”

The old man said, “Ah.”

Something played on the woman’s face that suggested she didn’t believe him, and she seemed to be thinking about how to answer. She finally decided and waved her cigarette toward the street.

“She go with the boys.”

The old man said, “Armenians.”

The woman nodded, as if that said it all.

“She talk with them, the way they stand there all the time, them and their car, and she go with them.”

Pike said, “When was this?”

“Not so long. We had just come out with the tea.”

An hour ago. No more than an hour.

Pike said, “The Armenians. Where do they live?”

The woman jabbed her cigarette to the side.

“Next door, there. They are all cousins, they say, cousins and brothers. Armenians all say they are cousins, but you never know.”

The old man said, “Armenians.”

The house the old woman pointed to was dark, and the BMW was not on the street. She seemed to read Pike’s thoughts.

“No one is home there. They all drive away.”

“You hear them say where they were going?”

The woman tipped her chair back and craned her head toward the open window.

“Rolo! Rolo, come here!”

A boy wearing a Lakers jersey pushed through the screen door. He was tall and skinny, and Pike figured him for fourteen or fifteen.

“Yes, Gramma?”

“The Armenians, what is that place where they go?”

“I don’t know.”

The old man seemed irritated and flipped his hand in a little wave, saying stop kidding around.

“The Armenians. That club where you must never go.”

The old woman cocked a brow at Pike.

“He knows. He talks with those Armenian boys. The young one. They have this club.”

Rolo looked embarrassed, but described what sounded like a dance club not far away in Los Feliz. Rolo didn’t remember the name, but described it well enough-an older building north of Sunset that had been freshly whitewashed and had a single word on its side. Rolo didn’t remember the word, but thought it was something with a “Y.”

Pike found the building twenty minutes later, just north of Sunset where it was wedged between an Armenian bookstore and a Vietnamese-French bakery. The sign across the top of the building read CLUB YEREVAN. Beneath it, a red leather door was wedged open. Three heavy men stood on the sidewalk outside the door, talking and smoking, two in short-sleeved dress shirts and one in a gleaming leather jacket. A smaller sign above the door read PARKING IN REAR.

Pike turned at the corner. An alley behind the storefronts led to a parking lot, where a parking valet in a tiny kiosk guarded the entrance. It was still early, but already the lot was filling, with one valet waiting at the kiosk while another parked a car. A small group of people was gathered at the club’s back door.

Pike didn’t waste time with the parking lot or attempt to find the BMW. She would be here or she wouldn’t, and if she wasn’t he would move fast to continue his search. Pike pulled over behind the Vietnamese bakery and got out of his car. The valet at the kiosk saw him and hurried across the alley, waving his hands.

“You cannot park there. Parking there is not allowed.”

Pike ignored him and pushed through the crowd. The whine was back, and louder than ever, but Pike didn’t notice. He shoved past young women with brown cigarettes and smiling men whose eyes never left the women. He stepped into a long narrow hall where more people lined the walls, shouting at each other over a booming hip-hop dance mix that still could not drown out the whine. He shoved open the men’s room door, looked, then shoved open the women’s room. The people around him laughed or stared, but Pike moved on without paying attention.

The hall turned, then turned again. More and more people were packed in the hall as Pike neared its end, and the music grew louder with a throbbing bass beat, only now the beat was underscored by the crowd. The people were chanting, their palms overhead, pushing with the beat as they raised the roof, chanting-

GO baybee, GO baybee, GO baybee, GO-!

Pike threaded between the sweating bodies that spilled into the main room, and saw her. Larkin was up on the bar, peeled to her bra, playing the crowd like a stripper as she rocked her ass with the chant. She made a slow turn, running her hands from her hair to her crotch as she squatted toward the bar, making the nasty smile, and all Pike saw was the dolphin, jumping free over her hips, screaming to be recognized.

The girl saw him as he reached the bar, and stopped dancing as abruptly as if she were a child caught being naughty. She straightened and stared down at him, looking guilty and scared. Pike stopped at her feet, and in that moment they were the only two people not raising the roof.

Pike shouted over the pounding bass.

“Get down.”

She didn’t move. Her face was sad in a way he found confusing. He didn’t tell her a second time. He wasn’t sure she had heard him.

Larkin did not resist when he pulled her off the bar.

Pike turned away with the girl, and the crowd did not know what to make of it, some laughing, others booing; but then the two oldest cousins and a thick man with a large belly fronted him, the oldest cousin stepping close to block Pike’s way as the thick man grabbed Pike’s arm. Pike caught the man’s thumb even as it touched him, peeling away his hand, rolling the hand like water turned by a rock, snapping the man face-first into the floor like a wave exploding on shore.

The people around them pulled back.

Pike had not looked away from the oldest cousin, and did not look away now.

The crowd surrounding them edged farther away. No one moved. Finally, when Pike felt they understood, he led the girl out of that place.