We Know

Chapter 39

Homer was right where I might have guessed-in front of Hacmed's, sucking on a pint of Beam. I looked around before climbing out of the Jag, my wrists still tender from the cuffs.

He was halfway gone, lying on his side, his eyes pink, his lips-barely visible through the tangle of beard-twitching. On the ground next to his cheek was a small puddle of puke. Tracking my approach, he tipped up the empty bottle, letting the last drops fall. Then he threw it toward the Dumpster. It fell short, shattered with a pop.

He scooted himself back until he hit the wall and used it to shimmy up to a more or less seated posture. I crouched in front of him.

"You came in," he said. "For me. You came back." He shook his head in disbelief. "Why'd you'd do something so stupid?"

I started to answer, but he cut me off.

"I was scared, Nick." He continued to shake his head. "They were talking so hard. I didn't… I can't do much anymore. It was a lot of questions and people. I gave you up." A tear cut a track through the dirt of his cheek. "I gave you up."

"You didn't tell them anything they didn't already know, Homer. They were using you to get to me. It's my fault for dragging you into this."

"You didn't drag me into this. I got dragged." His crow's-feet deepened-a hint of amusement. "There's a difference."

"I involved you in this. Without giving you all the facts."

"We can't know. How and when. What we do. The fallout. We can't." A film came over his eyes. He wiped his nose from the bottom, shoving it up piggy style with a ragged sleeve. "You can't live without hurting people."

"I guess not."

"That's why I don't recommend it."

"Recommend what?"

"Living."

I thought of Homer in the park, jumping on the back of that red-eyed schizo, or at least trying to. I'd always thought it revealed some hidden reserve of courage. But maybe he just didn't give a shit anymore whether he lived or died. Here we were, two refugees from God knew what, defined by what we'd lived through and tried desperately not to acknowledge. I regarded those half-mast eyes. Losing traction, he slid down the wall a few inches.

I looked away at the street, half expecting to find Sever screeching up in a sedan. "We have to get you out of here. Can you stay underground for a few days?"

"Please. I live underground."

"Come on, I'll give you a lift to the tunnel."

I took his arm and tugged him up, staggering under his weight. The odor was fierce, overpowering. His layers of tattered sleeve, damp with something I didn't want to identify, clamped across my shoulders, the bare skin of my neck. The reek of booze pushing through his pores made my eyes water. It was messy business, but I finally got him on his feet, propped against the wall. The low-sitting globe of his belly swayed. I started for the car.

"Buy me a bottle?" he said.

"You sure you need another?"

"Yes, I'm fucking sure."

I held up my hands, conceding defeat, and went inside.

Behind the counter Hacmed was all cranked up. "Get him out of here, Nicolas. I will have to call cops. He vomit everywhere, scare off two customer. I cannot run business with drunk man in doorway."

I said, "The honeymoon's over, huh?"

"I am very glad he is well. That he is safe. But let us be honest, Nicolas. No one wants man like that around."

I pointed at a pint of Jim Beam behind the counter, then pulled the last prepaid cell phone from the rack and set it beside the bottle.

Hacmed waved me off-an unprecedented act of generosity. "For whatever you did to get him free." As I turned away, he wagged a finger at me and said, "And for whatever you do to get him now gone."

Pocketing the items, I walked out. It took some doing to get Homer across the parking lot and into the passenger seat. He sat in silence on the drive to the beach, looking out his window. I had to keep mine rolled down to cut the smell. At one point his shoulders shook, and I wondered if he was crying.

I pulled over by the concrete steps leading down to the tunnel. It looked different now. More mundane and sadly municipal. The damp air tasted of the sea and car exhaust. Overhead, cars whined by on PCH. He directed his pink eyes at the dashboard. I handed him the pint bottle. He didn't take it. I pressed it to his arm, and finally he reached over and closed a dirt-crusted hand around the glass.

"You came back." His voice was gruff, cracked with dehydration. He got out and slammed the door, angrily. A dirt imprint remained behind on the leather seat. He stumbled past the headlights, pausing by my window, his gaze on the freeway and the maw of the tunnel below. His eyes were moist.

I knew so little about him. His past was all over him, like a pack of dogs, but I'd learned nothing of it. He was all present tense. Jim Beam. Corner-mart parking space. Shower every Thursday. He hadn't been married. He hadn't been a dentist. Those were lies invented by Kim Kendall. Or maybe they were truths that Homer no longer acknowledged. I didn't know what he'd fled or why. I didn't know if he'd lost friends. I didn't know if he'd left behind a wife or a son or an elderly parent. I knew only that it was no business of mine.

He started to trudge off, then halted, his shoulders hitching as if the momentum break had caught them by surprise. Still he didn't look back. But I heard his voice clearly, even over the traffic and the rush of distant waves. "If it happens again," he said, "just leave me."

I watched him descend the stairs and fade into the mouth of the tunnel.

I was driving to drive, unsure of where I should land. I took San Vicente away from the beach, the coral trees rising out of the lawned median, catching fog in their twisted branches. Then I hooked up to Sunset and rode the turns past the northern edge of UCLA, the campus I used to daydream about during high-school classes. North through a canyon run, passing Bel Air mansions with their Gothic fences, Tudor gables, and Santa Barbara-sandstone driveways, the confused architecture mirroring my own fragmented thoughts. I reached perilous Mulholland, blinking into headlights around the tight turns, a craggy rise to the side and then suddenly gone like a dropped curtain, revealing the breathless stretch of the Valley at night, glowing under a pollution haze.

The radio recycled Caruthers's afternoon chatfest with Sean Hannity. Caruthers: "Back to family values, are we?"

The talk-show host's quick reply: "You're the one who trotted out the discussion on the campaign trail."

"That worked out well, didn't it?" Caruthers matched Hannity's chuckle, and then his tone took on a note of subdued outrage. "When President Bilton talks about family values, what does that mean? Are we interested in phrases or reality? For instance, there are those of us who are pro-life and those of us who are pro-choice. But none of us are proabortion. And there have been more abortions during President Bilton's three and a half years in the White House than under any administration since Reagan's. Look at what actually impacts those figures. The economy. This president has consistently chosen image and hypocrisy over substance and effectiveness. There's a clear choice at hand. We can beat our chests and lecture sanctimoniously about values, or we can talk about the root causes and find solutions that actually make a difference."

"I like chest-beating."

"I've heard that about you."

"Where to today?"

"Ohio."

"Why?"

"Because it's a swing state. Where have you been?"

Hannity laughed. "Another straight answer from the man with the transparent campaign. I was worried you were gonna kowtow to midwesterners, praise the Buckeyes and Cincinnati's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, pull a Hillary with a chocolate-chip cookie recipe."

"The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland. And June does the cooking in our house."

"What's her favorite thing to make?"

"Reservations."

It was an old joke, sure, but the delivery made me smile anyway. The senator always hit the marks, giving great press without sounding coached. Probably because he wasn't. He famously didn't rehearse. You got the sense that he didn't watch polls, though of course he did, and that he didn't choose sound bites the night before with a bunch of world-weary spitballers slurping bad coffee and chewing Rolaids. What voters would be betting on-or against-was his personality, which he was unafraid to present in relatively unfiltered fashion.

I veered off onto an unpayed apron, watched the dirt billow up from the tires and drift away like a dusty ghost, like Homer. I looked at the view, marveling at how I was embroiled in something that could affect matters discussed on radio shows and TV broadcasts and front pages around the world. I thought about how I'd sat beside Caruthers in his conference room, so close I could have rested a hand on his shoulder. How he was turned away so the midday light from the window had caught his silhouette. I pictured his shaving nick, that tiny mole on his forearm. He was just a man, like Frank. But, like Frank, he seemed as if he were more.

In the distance a twinkle dipped through the haze, heading for the Burbank Airport. I watched until it merged with the pinprick lights of the Valley.

The crappy cell showed a surprising three bars. I called Induma on the phone I'd left there. When she picked up, I said, "I'm okay."

She was silent for a long time, and I wondered about the expression on her face. Her voice was slightly uneven when she spoke. "Come over?"

The customary fears stirred in me. "Bilton knows I know now. It's in the open. This is a whole new level of exposure. I shouldn't be near you."

"That's not just your decision to make."

"This is life and death, Induma."

"Everything is life and death."

"Not like this. Look at what happened to Homer."

"Exactly; " she said. "Look at what happened to Homer."

And she hung up.

Holding the phone in my lap, I tried to spot the plane down below, but I'd lost the points of reference to pick it up. There were no cars in earshot, and I could hear crickets sawing away down the hill. I pulled out onto the lonely road, and then I dialed again.

Steve answered on the first ring and recognized my hello.

"Nick? " I could hear the relief in how he said my name.

"I'm alive," I said.

"Then you'd better get over here."

"Why?"

"I tracked down Jane Everett. She was murdered eleven days after Frank was killed. They found her body in a lot."

The static over the line matched the thrum of ragged road meeting tire, a dazed, inadvertent composition. For an instant I felt suspended, separate from the car, hurtling around dark turns three feet off the ground.

From a great distance, I heard myself say, "Baby Everett?"

Steve cleared his throat once, hard, like it was bothering him. "Two weeks old. I'm afraid they found her, too."