Help?
Help?
“I need quiet. A quiet moment, is all. Please.”
The voices grew silent. Across the park, coyotes sang and yipped and yodeled.
Jared fell asleep again, but his sleep was plagued by terrible dreams and did not last.
PART TWO
The Boy in the Box
11
Elvis Cole
A thin mist filled the canyon the next morning. The cat was in the kitchen when I went down. He was lying on his side in the middle of the floor with the hindquarters of a gopher nearby. He often brought home bits of squirrels, birds, and snakes. Once he showed up with an eighteen-inch rattlesnake. The snake’s head was missing, but the body coiled and uncoiled as it died. The cat dropped it at my feet and seemed proud. He was a generous cat.
I got a couple of paper towels and picked up the gopher.
“Yum. Thank you.”
The cat rolled onto his back and looked at me upside down.
I said, “Listen. Lucy and Ben are coming. I want you on good behavior, okay? No growling or hissing.”
He rolled right-side up and stretched.
“No body parts.”
I tossed the gopher, cleaned the floor, and went onto the deck. I warmed myself with twelve sun salutes, then knocked out a hundred push-ups, two hundred crunches, and two sets of sixty dips. The deck’s corners where the rails met were perfect dip bars. The PT left me tight, so I stretched again and worked through a series of tae kwon do katas, kicking and punching and spinning from one end of the deck to the other, back and forth until my muscles burned and sweat speckled the deck. The physical effort was intense, focused, and left me rippling with energy. The endorphin rush was excellent.
I showered and dressed, put on a pot of coffee, and inspected the guest room. After my last guest, I had stripped the bed, vacuumed the room, and put fresh sheets and pillowcases on the bed. The bed had not been touched since, but I stripped it again. When I was in Ranger School, a sergeant named Zim inspected our area with microscope eyes. If he found a thread out of place, he upended our bunks, raked our belongings out of our lockers, and screamed like a maniac as we scrambled to make our area Ranger Ready and Good to Go. I put on fresh linen, squared the corners, and tightened the spread. The spread was so taut when I finished an ant could have used it as a trampoline. Sergeant Zim would have been proud.
I tackled their bathroom next. When the bath was good to go, I shut the light and checked the guest room again. The room didn’t need to be checked, but I found myself in the door. A framed photo of Ben and me at Lake Arrowhead stood on a chest. I used to keep it on a shelf in the living room, but I had moved it. In the picture, Ben was still small. We were standing in shallow water at the edge of the lake with me holding Ben overhead, both of us laughing. Lucy had taken the photograph. I wondered if the picture would make her uncomfortable. I thought about moving it back to the living room, but after a while I told myself I was being silly and left it.
I needed to tell Joe. Joe and Lucy and Ben were close. I wandered back to the kitchen, poured a fresh coffee, and called him.
Pike answered on the first ring. I’ve never called Joe Pike when he didn’t answer the first ring. Pike would have to be dead in a ditch not to answer the first ring, and then he’d probably answer the second ring.
I said, “Guess what?”
Pike didn’t respond. If you asked Pike “guess what?”， this was what you got.
I said, “Lucy and Ben are coming. They’ll be here tonight.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me.”
“When did she tell you?”
“Last night.”
Amazing.
“In other headlines, we have a job. Or did you know this, too?”
“Need help?”
“Not yet.”
“Whenever.”
Pike hung up. Didn’t ask what. Didn’t ask who. Hung up.
Breakfast was the last of the squid and ginger rice. I ate standing in the kitchen and opened the In Your Face site on my phone. Josh had included a link to ClaudeSpace Gallery, along with a photo of Skylar and the gallery’s owner, a tall, thin woman named E. Claude Sidney, and a pitch for purchasing Skylar’s work. If Skylar maintained an ongoing business relationship with the gallery, it stood to reason Ms. Sidney might be able to reach her. I headed downtown to find out.
ClaudeSpace occupied the ground floor of a renovated industrial space south of the 101 between Little Tokyo and the river. The gallery’s glass front let people see the art on the walls before they entered. E. Claude Sidney and a younger man were talking in front of an enormous red painting. The painting had to be eight feet on a side, and was solid red except for a single black dot in the upper right corner. E. Claude looked exactly like her photograph, only taller.