5

THE VOICE POKED MY SPLEEN LIKE A TRUNCHEON.

I turned and slid my shoe over the lotus, weight on my heel, careful not to crush something rarer than a gryphon’s feather or remorse from LAPD.

He wasn’t in plainclothes, but instead dressed like a cheap PI on a pulp novel’s shitty cover, complete with a stained beige raincoat that had been his father’s back in his salesman days in Oakland. Richard Dixon stood before me while the same fire trucks and ambulances that had been sent to the rocket-car disaster switched to help a horror far worse. Cigarette cocked on his left ear, his short blond hair was pure football coach. “What happened, Jimmy?”

“Made detective, Dicky?”

“Surprised?”

“Nope. You were the smart one in the neighborhood. Which is why it was such a shock you became a cop.”

“Smart mouth and a dumb ass. You’ve been a trouble magnet since Oakland Tech. Tell me what you know.”

“Someone threw a grenade in the vet hall,” I said. “My friend Cactus took the worst of it.”

“He the Indian?”

“If any of the Apache Nations are near Calcutta.”

“Christ, you know what I mean, Jimmy.”

“You mean you think he’s a no-good Indian, Dicky.”

Dixon plucked his cigarette. “Tell me details.”

A question was jarred out of my head. “Why would LAPD send a homicide detective to a protest site where things got ugly?”

Dixon tucked the cigarette into the right corner of his mouth. “Attacking vets is bad news for the department because it’s bad headlines for Mayor Yorty.”

“Can’t have friends of Nixon looking soft on the peaceniks.”

“Ain’t nothing soft about a grenade tossed into a room of old men,” Dixon fired back, then snapped out a Zippo and lit his cigarette.

“How is Traveling Sam doing, by the way? Starting to think he doesn’t like old L.A. that much. Too busy playing the banjo on The Tonight Show.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s a hell of a guy. Now stick to the point.”

“Oh, about why you’re out here? A new detective trying to make his name, slumming around a bunch of vets painted red by some unknown assailant. You got here awful quick.”

“Stop playing connect the dots in the air, Jimmy. You’re no detective. Just an idiot who bought a matchbook license for playing private dick—and you can best believe if you screw with me I’ll make sure you’re not licensed to eat the peanuts out of my shit.”

Good thing I only had a PI certificate from a matchbook authority off the mainland. “Then give me one more dot and I’ll tell you everything I saw.”

Dixon snickered.

“How many other cases are there?” I asked. The dried blood on my back had started to itch.

Wind rustled Dixon’s tiny hairs. “Don’t know what you mean.”

“Lousy liar, Dicky, just like the president. How many other cases of vets getting assaulted?”

“You’re barking up the wrong—”

My foot remained a fraction of an inch above the lotus and I prayed to old gods that I would not crush it. “How many? Or I’ll be on my merry way.”

Dixon blew out a stream of smoke that covered his face.

“Two. In June, a veteran’s picnic in Compton was ‘interrupted’ by explosions. Mailbox bombs. All the houses ringed around the park, like mortar shells. No injuries. But everyone was scared. Following month, a treasurer for one of the local legions was mugged and beaten so bad his face went from purple to black. Died of his injuries. And now a massacre.” Two yellowed fingers plucked the smoke from his mouth. “That’s escalation, those fairies—”

“Fairies?” I then realized he wasn’t talking about the nastiest critters in the nethers, pound for pound. “Oh, the peaceniks out front?”

“You think they’re so innocent,” Dixon said. “Tell me what you know. Like what kind of vehicles took them away. No one already in custody will say a goddamn word to us.”

“Yeah, since the Watts riots, it’s almost as if you guys aren’t taken seriously.”

“Don’t talk about Watts. This ain’t about race.”

“Funny how it’s only white cats like us that ever say that.”

He stepped closer. To many men, Richard Dixon would be an intimidating two hundred and twenty pounds of Oakland steel and attitude, but I’d seen him shit his pants when chased by an out-of-work longshoreman who wanted our milk money. Still, I admired the bastard’s conviction. “What do you know?”

“It was a frag grenade. Something more modern than I’ve used. Got shards in my rump if you need them.”

“Jesus,” Dixon said, pointing to an ambulance in the parking lot. “Get some medical attention.”

If I did, I’d lose the Black Lotus under my suspended sole. And something told me that a three-thousand-year-old flower might be a clue worthy of holding on to. “I’m standing under my own power, most of those guys can’t. Let them have first dibs.” Then I summed up the points I was willing to share with him: there were protesters, there was an award ceremony, someone threw a brick to break the window, a grenade dropped, I tackled a woman, took shrapnel in the rump, and then ran out here when Cactus ordered I find the monsters who did this.

Nothing about the gentle giant with the ticking hand and the rabid biker, or the handful of kids with skateboards who had vanished before I started joyriding. Nothing about the magic underfoot.

“And then?” Dixon said. His notepad was crinkled, black and white.

“And then I started looking for anyone who might be responsible.”

Dixon glared.

“And I tripped on my own feet and boom, you appeared like a genie.”

“The woman you covered?”

“Wife of one of the vets.”

“These people have names?”

“Yeah, Carruthers.” He kept talking notes, but his jowls shifted slightly. Good on Dixon for trying to hide his “tell,” but I’d been reading card players and scamming marks longer than he’d been a member of The Thin Blue Line. I wasn’t as good a lie detector as Edgar, but he had trained me to con and see cons in every walk of life. Most of the sheep of this world are liars who, at once, think themselves cleverer than all, and also want to be caught and punished by Mummy and Daddy. I shivered, hating how much of Edgar was still with me, denying me the total freedom I’d hoped faking his death would provide.

Dixon clearly didn’t want me to know who they were, and playing dumb is so much easier when your interrogator holds you in contempt . . . and can’t rip your fingernails or eyelids off in public without getting fired. “What about who you were running after here?”

“Nothing. All the activity I saw was at the transformer station that looked like it got nuked. Could that be the same people as the mailbox bombers?” I said and waited.

Dixon shrugged as if he couldn’t give a shit. “That’s for the beat squad. I’ll look into it, though.” Good. He didn’t know yours truly was responsible. Not yet, anywho. “Anything else?”

There wasn’t. But if I moved with his eyes on me I’d never get the Black Lotus from underfoot. He needed to leave of his own accord. Time for the simple art of deception and distraction. “Dicky, I’ve got shrapnel in my tush, a five-alarm headache from a grenade, and my best friend is keeping death’s door open with one toe. Worse, my new wingtips are ruined and—goddamn laces.” I kneeled, the storm of sick in my guts rolling with the fast drop, which surely made me look even more haggard. Dixon’s gaze followed me down as my peripheral vision caught sight of Alan Carruthers and his wife beside the ambulance. I yanked my laces loose with frustration. “What about the guy in the wheelchair?”

Dixon turned, but not as fast my hands, which had been shuffling decks and rolling coins since we were rolling our own smokes outside the Oakland Public Library. I cup-palmed the ancient petals as soft as I could, but they still bit my skin like razors.

“Him? Just some vet who served his country.” I was amazed at how poorly Dixon lied. He must know. “God, what a shitpile. Starting to think we should pull a Canada. Those Mounties are sending troops into that French capital of theirs to catch a bunch of ratbag terrorists. I don’t like their prime minister much, but at least he has guts to get things done.”

The newspapers had been running banner headlines about those actions from our friends to the north. Some French separatist group had kidnapped a couple of politicians and were now on the run. “I heard. Trudeau just declared Baby’s First Martial Law. No habeas corpus. No reasonable doubt. Pick up anyone who looks guilty. If that’s your bag, Dicky, why not follow the Soviet model, say, Hungary in fifty-six? Perhaps Prague sixty-eight?”

Slow as a last kiss, Dixon turned to me, face a shade paler than scarlet. “Don’t even try to pull that liberal shit on me. You calling me a KGB thug? On my salary? Trying to find who blasted your friend into pieces? You think I’m still some ignorant runt from Oakland who joined the PD because I got mommy issues and need to beat people up because my old man beat her and I couldn’t stop it? You think, for one second, that I ain’t actually a cop because I want to help people, that I’m just a goon squad captain with a couple more letters near his name because I go to the library? How fucking dare you toss that commie shit my way, when I’m hunting for the guys who did this to not only those vets, but their wives and children, and even hurt those protestors, who, by the way, I think are cowards and idiots and full of shit but are still my responsibility.” He exhaled so hard I thought I saw steam. “You get to call me these things, Jimmy, because you pretend to be doing my job. Only you do it alone, unaccountable, and can cast aspersions on me from the safety of your privileged position. Now fuck off. I’m sick of listening to your smarmy act. Go check on your Apache buddy, get the scrap out of your backside, and let the professionals get to goddamn work.”

For a fifth of a fifth of moment, I was stunned, but played it off as if this was the kind of reaction I expected and gave a smug sneer in return before I let my shoes march toward the ambulances.

Dixon’s words slapped my back.

“Just remember, Jimmy. You’re in my house now. Best tread light. Especially in those wingtips, especially when they magically un-tie themselves.” This war of words ended with Dix taking a victory lap, and me getting schooled on underestimating Detective R. Dixon—and how easy it is to do that with people that you hate. A temptation I’ve used to my own advantage more times than a rube loses his pennies at a five-and-dime.

I passed the paddy wagon, the back doors open as they hustled in another hippie, two lines of scraggly kids already inside, all of them shouting with hands restrained behind their back.

“This is a set up!”

“Fucking pigs fixed us!”

“I want my lawyer!”

The doors slammed. But the muffled voices still punched through as I passed them by and found myself in the circle of cops and medics. Reporters would be next, so I had to get busy quick. Last thing I needed was some crime-beat nobody shadowing my every move.

“James?” Alan said. He waved me over and I approached him and his wife, who was dabbing his face with alcohol and cotton, a first aid kit sitting on his lap. He sat next to an ambulance with its doors open wide, parked at the entry of the hall so they could ferry out the wounded. They’d leave the dead for the cops and, eventually, the morgue.

“Can someone help me get the scrap out of my keister?”

A tough old tank of a woman with face gaunt and monstrous stalked toward me, bandage and scissors clamped in her hand. “Let’s see the damage, hero.”

I presented my rear. “OW!”

“Stand still, princess. Now, drop your pants so I can bandage the boo-boo.”

I did, but before I could cover the awkward silence by saying something clever, she grunted. “Rookie, I served in Sicily before joining the Peace Corps. Save the smooth talk for someone who gives a shit. Now stand still or so help me I’ll nail this bandage in with a hammer.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good.”

Seconds later she was done, my pants were up, and she’d returned to her buddies in the ambulance pool, laughing at what I can only presume was my pathetic nature. “Just hold your ass!” she said over the laughter. “Bleeding will stop soon.”

Outside of some cuts to the face and bandages on his numb legs, Alan looked the same. His wife’s countenance, however, was altered—and strangely. Still carried the stiff and sharp presence of a former Connecticut debutante, but with runs in her stockings and disheveled hair, she looked like she’d finished filming a “roughie.”

“You two okay?”

“Yes,” Alan said, face taut. “Thanks to you. I . . . can’t thank you enough for saving Veronica’s life.” For the second time today, a man with more courage and who’d faced more challenges than I had stuck out his hand and offered me a sign of respect, while I inhaled the scent of his wife’s freshly spritzed perfume without making eye contact. I took his hand, and again felt his iron-clad grip.

“Some reflexes never die,” I said, and instantly the iron turned to clay as Alan drew back his hand. I’d just told a man who could not save his wife that what I’d done was something all of us could do. “What I mean to say is—”

He waved away my awkward retraction. “I’m grateful, James.”

“Yes,” Veronica said, bringing her eyes up to meet mine. The ice had melted in those brown orbs, as had the serrated edge in her voice. “So grateful. I had no idea you were a veteran.”

“Given the relaxed nature of my attire, I don’t blame you. I was running late and god, I’m just glad I was able to make it.”

“Me too,” Veronica said. “James, your hand is bleeding.”

Wounded by a petal, not a grenade. I quickly shoved the Black Lotus in my pocket. “Could have sworn I had a handkerchief.” I removed my bloody hand and Veronica dropped to her knees, stretching her ripped stockings, and grabbed a bandage from the first aid kit before rising back up in a single, well-executed motion from someone who probably visited Montauk and had finishing lessons and probably kissed a girl in her college days, just so she had material for her class on short stories inspired by John Cheever. “Give me your hand.”

“What? It’s just dried paint from the horror show,” I said.

“Let her help,” Alan said. “It makes her feel useful.”

She fired a look back at him that would have frozen gasoline. “We can all do our bit.”

I stuck out my right and she took it. Almond-shaped nails on hands that were as delicate as the pink of her nail polish, but strong. My callus, the healed bullet mark in the dead of my palm, was an ugly rock cradled by her slender fingers. And I could almost hear her wondering, based on what she was now seeing, who the hell I was. She looked up. I quickly gave Alan all my focus because Veronica was now undressing me with her eyes right in front of her crippled husband.

“You okay, Alan?”

He nodded. “I was out of the kill zone, and the nicks I took didn’t cut anything I was using.” He smiled against the irony. “Cactus is still inside. They’re moving him now. Sent in more medics than they know what to do with. They’re being real gentle—”

A war cry that skinned a year off my life blasted from the building’s doors.

Into the maw, my nose filled with the iron sharpness of fresh blood, bright and wet. I ran into a battleground nightmare, as two ambulance attendants hit the ground from one massive hammer strike. Cactus was sitting bolt upright on a gurney, streaked in red, dress uniform shredded, hair wild. There was only one thing animating his eyes: the warrior spirit of the Apache.

“Subdue him!” a medic screamed before eating a fist.

“Bad idea!” I yelled.

Five ambulance attendants and one plainclothes cop were slipping across the bloodied floor, dodging Cactus’s bricklike fists as they protected him from the scourge of the white man who had taken his people and brutalized their elders and women and children, tried to break them from their past and stick them in the all-American blender so they could not resist what Uncle Sam and Company had to offer. The man before us had endured spits, fists, sticks, and guns on three continents—and come back to become a success despite the white man’s hate by using the white man’s weaknesses against him. Economic guerrilla warfare that would have done his family proud.

Of course, that didn’t soften the blows he threw, one after the other, dropping the descendants of Custer and Cooke one by one. In the growl and froth of his mouth you could also tell this was the lineage of his Mexican roots, of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata and their cadre causing havoc for maximum impact, of fighting giants with a smile, knowing they will lose and still charging into the fray.

On my best day, I might be able to flip Cactus on his back, giving me enough time to run the hell out of Dodge and take the first ticket to the Black Hole of Calcutta and hope he never finds me.

On Cactus’s last day, which might very well be now, no one man could stop him without a bullet.

So, I would have to go with Plan C.

“Cactus!” I yelled as I approached the ring of blood and fallen medics.

He had one in his hand, held up off the ground, his teeth bared and eyes so narrow you couldn’t wedge them open with a dime.

“Cactus, this is Private Brimstone! Reporting!”

He snarled. Which, all things considered, was a good sign.

“We need an evac, Sarge! Ridgeway bought Easy Company time to cross the Chosin. They got artillery on this position, but we have to move. Now!”

The ambulance attendant dropped from his grip. “Brimstone?” Cactus said, wet and red.

“It’s coming in hot here, Sarge. I’ve done the recce and we need out of this kill zone before they light it up.”

“Brimstone, you contrarian shitbird.” He lurched forward. “I can’t . . . Brimstone, I can’t move my legs!”

“Roger that. On it!” I ran behind him, and when the blond medic tried to stand I dropped an ax kick that gave him a broken nose and a first-class nap. “I got you on the gurney, Cactus,” I said.

Then I saw Cactus’s back.

Death by a thousand cuts. Blood was leaking out of wounds that should have been far wider than they were . . . until I tasted electric sand . . . magic . . . the kind that leaks between worlds when a warrior is headed toward the other places. Cactus was holding himself between life and death, past and present, and if he didn’t get medical help soon, he’d leak into oblivion.

I pushed and Cactus’s voice screamed, “Brimstone, you can’t push a gurney by yourself, you fucking idiot!” The blood ran fresh . . . as if my lie was coming apart and forcing Cactus’s wounds to burst, too. Given his people’s religion, beliefs, and more, I asked myself: “What would Coyote do?”

He’d make a lie bigger so that it would hold and change the world.

“Arrows!” I yelled, then kicked another medic, a black-haired fella with two front teeth missing, out of the way.

“Screw you, man!” he yelled as I passed, so I looked at the farthest guy, a rail-thin fella with glasses and red hair. “Arrows! You racist, no-account shitbag, grab the gurney or when we die I’m coming back to life just to feed your corpse to the Devil himself!” I winked, hoping to soften the blow and keep the con alive and, thank Glycon, the fake god of the ancient world and his love of luck and hijinks, the redhead figured out I meant him and found the mana in himself to stand up and grab the rails of the gurney while the others moaned around us.

“About time!” Cactus yelled. “Now, hustle, you goons! We ain’t keeping Ridgeway waiting.”

Like some live version of a horror-show rendition of The Three Stooges, we hustled our wounded leader through the minefield of blood from old soldiers and new vets, slipping and sliding and holding steady while Cactus chastised us like we were shavetails straight out of Basic.

In the glare of L.A.’s afternoon sun, Cactus came alive. His gooey red fist grabbed my lapels and pulled me close, his breath like death and fire. “Brimstone, you find them. You find the no-good commie bastards who snuck up on us. I don’t care if you’re out in the mountains for a month eating grubs and dirt. You find them, and you kill them.”

I’d been ordered to kill before. By Edgar, my mentor. By Cactus, my NCO. I’d killed to save myself more times than most. I hated it. Every. Time. Because I knew enough about the netherworld to be scared of what happened when we weren’t in charge of our fleshbags and brains. I possessed a deeper fear of what happened to those of us who filled those spaces with the spirits of the living, nightmare gods, and creatures of supreme darkness who flitter into our world for shits and giggles to remind us we are not only alone, but also insignificant. I knew the need to kill, but I was damn sure clear the price was almost never worth the cost. But Cactus had saved my life as part of his own code of honor and sense of responsibility to me—a guy he thought so little of he wouldn’t want to be seen with me if he was driving his Rolls. Mother had given me life. Cactus had been the only person I’d met who would save it. And he was dying before my eyes.

“I’ll do my best.”

His fist clenched, and his breath was like dying coals. “Chickenshit answer. Kill them, or I will haunt you until the end of time.”

“I’ll do it.” I pressed two more words past the gaps in my teeth, ones I loathed to offer. “I promise.”

He nodded, then fell back on the gurney as we closed in on the ambulance where Alan and Veronica stood. When the redhead pulled Cactus away, I was dragged along. His fist held my lapel in a death grip. When I finally pulled free, my jacket was torn and bloodied.

The doors closed and that fierce taste of magic died. Cactus’s people and culture had kept him from crossing over. Now, it was up to Western medicine to patch him back. There was a sick sense of mutation in the idea that made my stomach twist.

“Will he be all right?”

Veronica had walked within flight-or-fight distance and I’d barely noticed. I chalked it up to the fact of being so goddamn close to magic. The taste of the other worlds of this universe could sometimes startle me, which was a great way to leave our world by slipping on the banana peels of the mundane around me.

“James?” Alan’s voice shattered the fantasy as he rolled up beside his wife. “Are you okay?”

I adjusted my jacket, surprised the rip was so minimal. The pattern even disguised most of the bloodstains. Quality polyester. “No. I’m not. Somebody just tried to ace my friend and killed or injured a bunch of old men and women. Nothing about this is okay.”

And nothing made sense. It was a mess. Jagged pieces. One biker. Peaceniks with grenades. Strange kids with skateboards. Big men who vanished. A rise in violence against soldiers and veterans. Blaming the longhairs. But the trail seemed to go to bikers. This was strange. Just like the Black Lotus in my pocket.

“James,” Alan said again, and his voice was strong. “Cactus mentioned you were a private investigator.”

I smiled. “He did?”

“Well,” Alan grinned. “He said you were just starting out.”

That was code for “stunk up the joint” when it came to my skills, at least compared to a guy who held tracking as a sacred art and was among the most feared members of the Counter Intelligence Corps. “That was kind of him.”

“This was a senseless act, and if those who are responsible are left to roam, we’ll never get justice.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a checkbook and a black pen with a gold circle around the body. It was engraved with the initials AJC. He wrote as he spoke. “I’d like to hire you on retainer. I want you to find the man who did this. And I want to give you all the resources you’ll need.”

He tore off the check, handed it to me.

I let it hang.

That check was a link in a chain to the rich, the mighty, the powerful. The people I didn’t serve. The people whom Edgar wined and dined and plotted with, the power brokers and senior operators of avarice who made the conditions for a rotting underclass whom they played like pawns and worse.

Alan was not a bad guy at all. Everything I’d seen or heard seemed to say the opposite. But he was man of wealth and influence and had likely been trained at prep school and elite Ivy League trust-fund vacation schools to view a little guy from Oakland like me as a tool, a servant, a serf without land and a slave without chains.

I tried not to hate Alan. But Veronica’s eyes were hungry for me to take the check. To be beholden.

I raised both my hands. “Thanks, Alan. I appreciate it. But I’m afraid I’ve already been hired for this case.” I reached into my inside pocket and took out one of the five business cards Starla had made me when she wasn’t on stage at the Thump & Grind Burlesque Club, which housed my office and apartment. She wrote out the details in an art-deco style:

ODD JOB SQUAD DETECTIVE AGENCY: NO CASE TOO WEIRD.

J. Brimstone, Founder and Lead Investigator.

Alan pocketed the check and took the card. I hated to make him feel small in front of his wife for the second time that day, but I needed to let these two leaders of today and tomorrow know I wasn’t their toy. “I’d like to enlist your aid in my investigation. You know the veteran scene. These old soldiers trust you. All the places you canvassed makes you the right man to ask questions. About anything strange. About anything out of the ordinary.”

“Like hippies assaulting our veterans?” Veronica said, voice as smooth as aged brandy.

“That’s one angle I’m trying to square,” I said. “But we don’t know what happened. And I plan to find out.”

“You mean hunting through the longhairs?” Veronica said with the same tone of condescension.

“Why?” I asked. “Do you have enemies among the peaceniks?”

She smirked. “More like occult dropouts than drugged-out communist sympathizers. Right, Alan?”

Alan held my card in his lap. “I hardly see how this is relevant.”

“It is now,” I said. “Alan?”

“Veronica is just being jealous.”

“Ha!” Her arms crossed with practiced power. She daggered one heel down and twisted it in a way I liked. “Of what? A runaway suburban nobody?”

“Just because Lorraine wasn’t from our circles didn’t make her a nobody,” Alan said with the soft strength of a man trying to control an anger that made him uncomfortable.

“I believe she goes by ‘Rain’ now,” Veronica said to me. “Be on the lookout for a dirty blonde who puts out and fears soap.”

“That’s enough!” Alan slammed his first into his dead leg. “She has nothing to do with this.”

“Than what does she have to do with?” I said. “Alan, if she is any way connected to what happened today—”

He shook his head, then relaxed his fist before looking up at me. “Veronica? Can you give us a minute?”

“To discuss that wench? Happy to be absent,” she said, and made sure her heels hit the ground hard with each step she took toward an ambulance.

“As bad as that was,” Alan said, “it would have been worse if she stayed.”

“A little pain now, a lot less pain later? I know that math, Alan. Now, about Rain?”

“Veronica hates her because . . . well, it’s hard to say without sounding stupid.”

“From what you both shared, I suppose Rain didn’t join you all at the cotillions.”

He smirked. “I hate it, James. The arrogance. The snobbery. The elitism. That’s why I liked Lorraine.”

I stifled a reaction I often have with the rich—gagging when I hear of their adventures slumming with their societal “inferiors.” But Alan wasn’t my enemy, not today.

“Rain’s a local girl?”

“From Modesto.” Hardly bragging rights, but, if I was being fair, Alan would be an incredible catch for someone trying to escape the long shadows of a desert town. “She was living in Long Beach, where her friends lived. I met her at an anti-war rally.”

“Ah,” I said. “And she took to a man in uniform.”

“No,” he said, rubbing the knuckles of his right fist in his left hand. “I took to the beautiful peace-and-love gal with dirty-blond hair. Sweetest person I’d ever met.” I had no image of comparison beyond a panorama of braless ladies in headbands. My own “aesthetic” was wider than Playboy, Marilyn, and Ann-Margaret. Being a road kid with the Electric Magic Circus, where one sees beauty so wild and different that pin-up girls are but one variation on a theme, I had no single vision of beauty. But damn, it was hard to wipe the standard of Veronica from my mind, which made me think this Lorraine was a natural beauty, a desert rose Alan saw and had to pluck.

“So, how did you screw it up?”

He blinked. “What makes you think I screwed it up?”

“Relax, Al. You’re among your own tribe. We always screw it up.”

He smiled. “It’s more like what I wouldn’t screw up.” The smile twitched. “I’m a modern guy, and I loved Rain, but she had a far more . . . open view of love and marriage than I did back then.”

“Love of the free variety?”

He sighed. “It was both ways. I don’t want you to think it wasn’t both ways. But the idea of another man having her, even if I could have someone else . . . this sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, but I only wanted her. Sounds young and stupid, doesn’t it?”

Damn. I was actually starting to like this rich bastard. “She stayed in the Land of Golden Copulations and you signed up?”

His jaw clenched. “Before I got my draft notice. And married Veronica before I shipped out. Her family, the Weathers?” The name hung to allow me time to fill in the blank, but I played ignorant, though I damn well knew the Candy Barons of the West Coast. “They’re longtime friends of my family. We’d known each other since childhood and there was always the assumption . . . Well, we were seen as a good fit. I shipped off a week later.”

Old story, going to war to avoid the pain of love. Alan really was an old soul. And Veronica seemed so hard and prudish that she was the warped mirror image of Rain: controlled, not free; hard, not soft; austere, not easy. And today shook her up hard. “The folks who were here today? The protestors of many colors? Were these Rain’s people?”

“They might be. They seemed, I don’t know, stranger? Everything in the city seems stranger since I got back.”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

We chatted more about Rain’s appearance. Her one identifying mark: a missing canine tooth in the right side of her mouth. “But it made her even prettier.”

I grinned. “You still have a soft spot, huh?”

“For our first true love, don’t we all?”

Izzy came to my mind like a hot blast of jungle air, my beautiful Filipina who had killed more fascists by the time she could legally drink than most American GIs, and who had kicked away my proposal as the childish whim of the young of heart before vanishing into America. “Veronica’s not a fan?”

“Of anything,” he chortled. “I’m being rude. Veronica has every right to her feelings.”

“So, you didn’t invite Rain here? She didn’t know you were going to be here?”

“I haven’t had any contact with her since I . . . came back. Besides, her group wasn’t radical. Except about sex, and, well, skateboarding.” He started laughing. “Can you believe that? What’s next, a gang of kids on mopeds? Armed with sticks?”

I logged the detail in the honeycombs of my mind, filed under “skateboards,” a category with nothing else in it, and carried on. “This group have a name?”

He closed his eyes, searching, then muttered. “Tumbledown. They had a ratty crashpad in Dogtown on the border of Santa Monica and Venice Beach called Tumbledown. They always rode along the Boardwalk, picking up pot and trying to recruit people to the cause.”

“What cause was that?”

The approaching sound of Veronica’s tip-taps tickled my spine.

“None that I saw or knew,” he said. “Beside getting their founder laid.” Veronica closed in as Alan added, “Blond asshole called Sonny Ray.”

“Alan, Foster sent the car,” Veronica said, placing her hands on the handles of his wheelchair. He didn’t turn to look at her.

A black limo pulled into the still-chaotic Legion Hall parking lot and took the space that had last held the ambulance that carted away Cactus. A hulking fellow emerged from the driver’s side, walked around the car, and opened a back door with tick-tock precision, then moved toward us. Framed like a linebacker, it was clear he was security, driver, and a spare pair of arms for his disabled patron. “Are you ready to go, Mr. Carruthers?” he said without a trace of urgency.

“Give us a moment, Dexter,” Veronica said. Like a dutiful dog that knows it will get a snack or smack if it doesn’t follow doctrine, Dexter turned around and waited by the car like a Beefeater guarding the Tower of London.

“We can’t thank you enough, James,” Veronica said, enjoying the chew of my name on her lip. “I’m sure Alan will help with your investigation, but we have another engagement.”

I didn’t exactly ignore her, but it was obvious my attention was solely on her husband. “Please, see what you can gather from the vets and their families, Alan. Call me as soon as you have anything that seems out of the ordinary, no matter how insignificant.” I considered the Black Lotus in my pocket. “Even the smallest thing can mean everything.”

“You got it,” Alan said. “Be safe.”

Veronica pushed his chair toward the limo. “Take care,” she said, letting her eyes linger on mine.

Dexter hoisted Alan out of his wheelchair like a ventriloquist lifting his dummy into a trunk, legs hanging limp as wet noodles, and gently deposited him in the back seat. Veronica rounded the back of the car and looked at me, lips pursed, then breathlessly open as she mouthed, “Call me.”

The Carruthers pulled away from the mess of the massacre and I realized I was now working pro bono to find the shithooks who’d brutalized good men for no good reason . . . and my only clues were a sex gang in Dogtown and the Black Lotus in my pocket.

It was time to hit the Boardwalk, so I turned to the lot where I’d parked Lilith before the madness began, hoping the tear in my tush wasn’t fatal . . . when my guts sank beneath the last dungeon of hell.

Lilith was gone.