Everything hurt so much he couldn’t even tell what part of his body was injured. They found the light switch and he saw there were three of them. His instinct was to start marking details, but before he got a chance they grabbed the bottom of the sleeping bag, pulled it straight up and dumped him onto the floor, which at least clarified his left elbow as the locus of the pain. He reached for the ladder with his other arm, hoping to pull himself to his feet, but one of them stomped his hand with a work boot. “Get this bitch outside,” another said. “They ain’t room in this drum to kick his ass.”
Waldo finally got a look: they were all in their late teens, twenty tops. One had dreadlocks dyed blond about halfway down, one was bare chested but inked all the way up his neck and even to one cheekbone, and the third had a grill and heavy gold ropes and a baseball cap on backward. All three were white.
Grill took Waldo by the back of his T-shirt and Tattoo grabbed one of his arms and they yanked him to his feet. Dreads held open the door and Grill, the biggest, kicked Waldo in the small of the back and out into the night. Waldo tumbled, rolled and scrambled far enough away to take a defensive crouch.
Grill sauntered over. “Ready to do the duggie, Grandpa?” He lowered his shoulder but Waldo came up faster with a surprise right that caught Grill in the throat. Grill sputtered, struggling for breath. Waldo couldn’t resist a jab to the mouth, knowing the jewelry would mean a lot of blood.
Tattoo came at Waldo next, swinging high but missing, letting Waldo pop him with a right and follow it with a left hook that struck home but made Waldo’s elbow howl. Waldo bulled him straight into the wheezing Grill and they stumbled over each other and both went down. These guys kind of blow, Waldo thought.
He barely had time to look around for the third when something caught him hard across the side of the head, setting him spinning and leaving white spots where the rest of the world should be. As he fell to his hands and knees he heard Tattoo call, “What you hit him wit’, yo?”
Dreads grinned and brandished Waldo’s cast-iron frying pan. “Rapunzeled him wit’ dis skizzay.”
Tattoo was getting up. “Fuck’s a skizzay?” he asked.
“Skillet,” Dreads said. “Skillet—skizzay.”
“’At ain’t a skillet, yo. ’At’s a fryin’ pan. An’ nobody talk dat Snoop shit no mo’.”
“I’m bringin’ it back,” said Dreads, adding thoughtfully, “Fryin’ pan—frizzay?”
Waldo stayed down, dumbfounded by the chatter but tired of fighting. “Fuck do you numbnuts want?”
Dreads said, “We want you to keep yo’ ass up on this muthafuckin’ mountain, ’at’s what we want. And stay away from ’at muthafuckin’ Alastair Pinch.”
“You don’t, you gonna get mo’ visits from the Palisades Posse,” added Tattoo.
The Palisades Posse. For fuck’s sake. He pictured these wannabes swagging around the toniest parts of L.A., walking badass and letting everybody at Whole Foods and Sam’s by the Beach know whose turf it is, and maybe on Saturday night getting itchy and blasting 2Pac from the Priuses their daddies paid for while they cruised past Mandeville Canyon looking to mix it up with some Brentwood Boyz.
“You could’ve saved yourself the gas money,” he said to Dreads, who seemed like the leader. “I got nothing to do with Alastair Pinch.”
“Bullshit—you’re workin’ for the network! It’s in the trades!” Dreads pulled something out of his back pocket and threw it on the ground in front of Waldo. He said to Tattoo, “Gimme ’at flizzay.” Tattoo made a dismissive cluck but handed Dreads a flashlight and he shined it downward so Waldo could read. It was an issue of Variety, with the usual hype about box office and pilot orders, but near the bottom of the front page there was a picture of Waldo—younger, cleaner Waldo—and the headline:
EX-COP PINCH HITS FOR PINCH
“What the . . . ?” Waldo started to skim the article, about how some network president named Wilson Sikorsky was more confident than ever this would get straightened out quickly for Alastair and was pleased to be adding former LAPD detective Charlie Waldo to the team. Lorena must have told them he was in.
But he didn’t get far into the article before Dreads said, “Just keep yo’ mountain ass outta L.A., bitch,” and Grill wiped the blood from his face, grabbed the frying pan and paid Waldo back for the bloody mouth with a wallop across the base of his skull. He dropped face-first on the paper.
Tattoo said “Let’s slide, yo, ’fore he gets up,” and they all made for the car. Waldo looked up, just lucid enough to see that, yeah, it was a Prius.
Waldo aroused the next morning with a stiff elbow and a thick knot at the base of his skull, cursing that he didn’t own an ice pack because he hadn’t let himself consider it part of his first aid kit instead of its own separate Thing.
He sat in his one chair and read the article in Variety twice. It referred to Waldo as “the controversial former LAPD detective” and overstated his promotion history, but at least there was no mention of Lydell Lipps. This Sikorsky character alluded to conversations they’d supposedly been having, as if Waldo had been on the case for a week. The issue was dated Friday, the same day Lorena came up the mountain.
Waldo looked up the network’s Burbank headquarters on his iPhone and got through to Sikorsky’s assistant. She said Sikorsky would return the call but Waldo had to stop her from hanging up before he could even give her his number.
The morning’s chores still undone, Waldo went online and Googled himself and Alastair Pinch together and found to his chagrin that a score of other publications had picked up the story over the weekend. The L.A. Times went a lot further, with a full rehashing of the Lipps scandal and Waldo’s meltdown, with a dozen hyperlinks to old articles. Waldo passed on these trips down memory lane but read up on the suspect.
Pinch, Waldo learned, was an English stage actor, legendary for his work at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who’d gone international with turns as a sadistic villain in a superhero movie and its sequel. For the last three seasons he’d been the center of a hit network procedural as a cantankerous southern judge with a complicated personal life, some show called Johnny’s Bench, apparently a financial windfall like nothing he’d ever see playing Iago or Lear. One of the articles linked him to the tradition of storied British thespians like Burton and Harris and O’Toole, apparently hell-bent on matching them not only role for role but drink for drink and brawl for brawl. Judging by news accounts Waldo found on YouTube, when the police discovered him in his house at nine in the morning with a blood alcohol level of 0.103 and the doors locked and the burglar alarm set and his third wife bludgeoned to death on the living room floor and he claiming not to recall how it happened, friends and neighbors were surprised, but maybe not too surprised.
Before Waldo knew it he’d been surfing for an hour and realized that even if it weren’t for half-assed Crip wannabes bashing his skull with cookware, he’d want to disassociate himself from this asshole as quickly as possible. He tried Sikorsky again, got the same assistant, and could hear her eyes roll through the phone.
He went outside and managed the chickens and the gardens and the wash, but without the serenity that had made the previous thousand days manageable. He could feel the stewing fury coming back, the pain in his elbow sharpening it, and he was ready to go at somebody, anybody, even before he heard yet another fucking car coming up the hill and before he could see it was a news van with CHANNEL 7 painted on the side.
A young and blandly attractive African-American woman stepped out of the van and into the line of fire. “Hi, I’m Tiffany Roper, Eyewitness—”
“This is private property, and I’m telling you to leave.”
“You’re Charlie Waldo, right?”
Waldo turned on the woman’s partner, a fat guy with a backward baseball cap and a beard as wild as Waldo’s who was already hoisting a camera onto his shoulder. “You’re trespassing, and I’ve politely asked you to leave. Turn that thing on, I’ll politely help you eat the lens.”
Tiffany Roper gestured to the cameraman to put it down. “We weren’t even expecting you to be in town; we were just hoping for some footage of where you live now. But as long as you’re here, could we talk about Alastair Pinch, even off camera? Do you expect him to be indicted?”
“I have nothing to do with Alastair Pinch. Put that on television.”
“We’re probably leading with the story again tonight, and I have Wilson Sikorsky telling me you’ve been on the case since last week. Why are you saying you’re not? Is it an advantage to your investigation if people don’t know you’re working on it?” She dropped the contentious approach and went for ingratiating. “This can be off the record.”
Waldo looked off into the distance and silently counted a slow ten, then took the iPhone from his pocket. “I have nothing more to say. Leave now or I’m calling the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.” He went silent and held the reporter’s eye until she turned to her cameraman and nodded him into the van.
He watched them drive off, but this wasn’t going to stop by itself, not if a network president was out there talking to the press about him. He needed to get Sikorsky to correct himself publicly, to put out a release saying Waldo had turned down the case. But he probably couldn’t talk the man into that over the phone—if he could even get him on the phone.
Waldo didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all, but there wasn’t a choice. Lorena had broken the peace and had brought on Cuppy and the punks and even the media, and the only way to restore the stillness that had made life bearable again was to go and reclaim it.
He’d have to leave his woods and go down the mountain.