CHAPTER SEVEN
When I went out to Sunset Grove the next morning, I found O’Brien and the Iron Maiden standing ten feet apart in front of the office, looking like they were waiting for a bus. He was carrying two plastic shopping bags from Safeway and she had on her frozen, surgically implanted smile. Both were trying to pretend the other wasn’t there.
As soon as I got out of the car, she scurried up. “I understand Mr. O’Brien will be staying with you for a few days?”
Huh? I looked at O’Bee.
“Uh, Jake, I thought it might be easier if I stayed with you until we got this taken care of.” He raised his eyebrows and nodded his head encouragingly.
“Sure, okay. Yes,” I said to the woman, “Mr. O’Brien will be staying with me.”
Her expression didn’t change. I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed that I’d gone along with O’Brien’s story, or relieved that he’d be away for a while.
“You be sure that he takes his medicine. We wouldn’t want him to get sick, would we?” she smiled.
“No, we certainly wouldn’t.”
O’Brien got in the car. She bent down to the level of the window. Still smiling, and without unclenching her teeth, she said, “I hope something heavy falls on you.”
Before O’Brien could reply, she executed an abrupt about-face and marched quickly away.
O’Brien smiled benignly at her retreating figure. “She’s probably off to change a catheter. That always cheers her up.” He turned to me. “Hey, Jake! Here we go!”
He slapped me on the leg with a thwack. I winced, certain I had a large red hand-print on ray thigh. I was beginning to feel like the much-battered Al Tracker.
Back at my place, O’Brien looked around, nodding his head. He hadn’t been there for years. “Nice,” he said.
“Nice?”
“Yeah. It’s yours, it doesn’t have orange and purple fire-retarding curtains, and it doesn’t smell of Lysol and mortality. Nice.” He looked at the couch and then looked at it again. “I know it’s been a long time, but does this look like what I think it does?” He indicated the nearly obscene orchid on the center cushion.
“Yeah.”
He grinned, sat down heavily, and wriggled his large rear.
“You want a drink?” I said.
“Nah.”
“No?”
“No. We got work to do. Boy! Do we ever have work!”
He reached in one of the shopping bags and pulled out a thick sheaf of computer paper.
“Shit!”
He nodded and handed it to me. It was all neat and clear. Each line had a license number, a car make, model, and color, and a name and address. It started at AAM 700 and ended with ZAM 796. They were separated by what looked to be something over twenty-two hundred entries.
“Shit.”
I only glanced through it quickly, but none of the licenses seemed to be designated as belonging to armed robbers, associates of kidnappers, or short psychopaths with funny voices.
“Shit.”
O’Brien laughed. “What’d you expect? A three-by-five card?”
“I didn’t really think about it. If I had, I guess this is what I would’ve expected. Still... Shit.”
O’Bee and I divided the list and sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table, crossing out anything that didn’t fit the vague requirements of new, big, and dark. Because the line had to be drawn somewhere, I arbitrarily decided to eliminate any car older than two years.
We hadn’t gone very far before we realized that we had no idea what kind of cars belonged to names like Cordoba, Cutlass, Cougar, and a whole lot of other European cities, offensive weapons, and predatory animals. Almost no models were still around from the days when we’d been consumers, and it gave us a sort of uneasy feeling. This was the kind of thing that took you by surprise:, you went along, thinking you were keeping up pretty well, when suddenly something happened and you discovered you had lost touch with whole huge areas of experience, that without being aware it had happened, you found you were standing in the middle of an alien landscape.
O’Brien offered to call his sixteen-year-old grandson, but I didn’t want to involve the lieutenant any further, even indirectly. Using newspapers and magazines I had lying around, we managed to connect images with most of the names, at least enough to see how things went. If the name was something young, cute, or cuddly, it was small; something vicious was fast; and if the name felt heavy, the car probably was as well.
It took us about three hours to eliminate two-thirds of the list. Not nearly enough. Another arbitrary decision and another forty-five minutes, and we had it down to cars in the vicinity of L.A. To do so didn’t strike me as unreasonable. More to the point, reasonable or not, there didn’t seem to be much choice. The problem was that we were still left with around two hundred possibilities, spread between San Bernadino and Oxnard, Newport, and Newhall. That was still way too many, but I couldn’t see any way to narrow it further.
“Shit,” I said for about the twentieth time, as I flipped through the list. “If time wasn’t a factor, we could do it.”
“But it is.”
“Yeah. We need help.”
“You’re not thinking about asking the lieutenant again?”
“No. I think we pushed our welcome about to the limit, don’t you?”
“Just about. Poor old Dad might be good for a bit of computer time, but running a check on two hundred citizens is a whole other thing. Especially since you don’t want to tell him why.”
“Exactly.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“Hell, I don’t know. What about your place? Anybody there who could lend a hand?”
“You kidding? Most of ‘em can’t raise a hand, much less lend one. Besides, their serum porcelain levels are too high.”
“Their what?”
“Nursing-home joke. They’re all crocks.”
“Oh.”
We fell silent, trying to think of people who could help us, trying to recall who was still alive and who was living in a trailer in Florida. Then we both looked up at the same time and simultaneously said, “The Tar Pits.”
“Of course!” O’Brien said. “It was too obvious.”
“You think they’ll go along?”
“Hell, I’d be surprised if they didn’t. I heard that last month they rented two buses and went down to that nude beach.”
“You’re kidding. To observe?”
“What do you think? To participate.”
“Jesus! That’s a staggering thought.”
“Isn’t it? Imagine all those wrinkles exposed in one place at one time. Like a convention of raisin producers.”
“Christ, what a crew. Our thing’ll probably seem too tame for them.”
O’Brien and I set about sorting the possibilities by area, so they could be checked out as efficiently as possible, assuming our anticipated help came through. It turned out that there were two hundred and eleven vehicles. My only hope was that a lot of them would be eliminated as soon as they were seen, because either the color was not dark enough or the owner was obviously inappropriate.
As we were working, O’Brien said, “You know this is a really thin operation.”
“I know.”
“Based on a lot of dubious assumptions.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“It surely is.” O’Bee starting counting them off on his fingers. “That the partial license we’re working with was correct to begin with.”
“Yep.”
“That neither the car nor the plate was stolen.”
“Yep.”
“That the right car is one of the ones we’ve decided to focus on.”
“Right.”
“That we’ll be able to figure out which is the one we want.”
“Right.”
“That if we find the right guy, he’ll still have the money.”
“Yeah.”
“And that if he does, we’ll be able to get it back.” O’Brien was onto his sixth finger. “That’s more than a handful of assumptions, Jake Spanner.”
I nodded. I’d been aware of all that stuff, but laid out like that, it certainly did look, as O’Brien said, thin.
“O’Bee, you play bridge?”
“No. Crib.”
“Well, in bridge sometimes you end up with tough contracts that’ll be set unless the cards lay one particular way. However unlikely that might be, that’s your only chance, so you play based on the assumption that the cards do, in fact, lay just that way. If you get lucky, you win. If not, well, you were going to lose anyway, and you at least gave yourself the possibility of success. This looks like the same kind of deal. All we’ve got are two faint, fuzzy lines, and all we can do is see if they’ll intersect somewhere.”
O’Brien eloquently raised his eyebrows.
I sighed and nodded. “Damn right.”