CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hans grabbed a bottle of Stella Artois from my minibar and stepped over to the window that looked out over the Hollywood Hills. I checked my watch and saw that I had another thirty-five minutes before I needed to place my next call to Rex Blackwood.

“What did it feel like when you did it, Mike?”

He had spoken so softly that it took me a moment to realize he had addressed his question to me.

“What are we talking about?”

“I’ve never given much thought to what I would do when I left the job and retired.”

He hadn’t turned away from the window. The low angle of the autumn sun cast the contours of his face in thin yellow light.

“My father was career air force. Did I ever tell you that? He was a tough sonofabitch, but he was a good father. He didn’t hand out beatings or discipline without good reason. We moved a lot; every couple years, whenever he was reassigned. He taught me how to fight when I was eight or nine. We were stationed in Germany at the time. I’d gotten my ass whipped by a couple of older kids at the American school, came home with a busted tooth, a black eye, and a purple bruise on my eyebrow that swelled to the size of an egg. He died two days before my twenty-first birthday.”

“Don’t allow other men to make your choices for you, Hans.”

“I’ve lived in seven countries. This one’s the best. Even when it’s fucked up, it’s still the best there is.”

He took a pull from the bottle and ran his fingers through his hair.

My cell phone rang and I slipped it from my pocket. It was Valden.

“Where are you?” he asked me when I flipped it open.

“At the hotel. In my room.”

“You’ve got to get up here. Now.”

We took the fire stairs rather than wait for the elevator.

My brother had taken a suite on the top floor of the Mandalay Plaza, four flights up from mine. But his opened onto an expansive view that, on a clear day like this one had become, allowed you to see all the way to the coast, to the Malibu castles that were occupied by Hollywood actors and professional athletes. After sunset, the neon colors of the Ferris wheel twinkled at the foot of the pier, and the contrails of private jets inbound to Santa Monica would streak the sky with shades of orange and pink.

Valden pulled open the door and gestured toward a laptop that sat open on the coffee table, without uttering a word. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows and the fabric deeply creased with wrinkles. His expression looked as though it had folded in on itself, and he gave off an energy that reminded me of a guitar string that had been wound to the point of snapping.

“What’s he doing here?” Valden asked, jabbing a finger in Hans’s direction while avoiding contact with his eyes.

“You might want to show him some respect,” I said. “He’s here of his own accord.”

“You said you would keep this quiet.”

Hans registered no emotion as he moved across the room and took a seat on one of the stools that fronted Valden’s bar.

“When you’ve got zero time on the clock, Valden,” I said, “you need all the help you can trust. You’d rather I start busting down doors and kicking over tables by myself? You get one shot with a strategy like that and you’d better be 100 percent right. If you’re not, you just telegraphed your only punch.”

Valden shot a glance in Hans’s direction and turned back to me. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his slacks and resumed pacing.

“I just received an e-mail,” Valden said, his back to me. “It’s got a video attachment.”

“How bad is it?”

“Bad.”

I sat on the sofa and cued up the video. It lasted about ninety seconds, but that was more than enough to make its point. It had been taped from inside Valden’s room.

“You’ve swept the room since this video was taken?” I asked.

“Of course. I had it done while you were on the plane on the way over.”

“You might want to start sweeping your hotel rooms before you sleep in them,” Hans said from his seat at the bar.

“Thank you, Detective Yamaguchi,” Valden replied.

“They found the transmitters?” I asked.

“Three of them.”

“Show them to me.”

“My security people took them when they left. I didn’t think you’d need them.”

The room was silent, but for the whisper of the air-­conditioning as it cycled on. My brother’s eyes looked as though they were vibrating inside of his skull. I took my notepad from the breast pocket of my jacket and wrote down the e-mail address from which the video had been sent to Valden. There had been no further message other than the attachment.

“The girl was underage,” I said. “She may or may not have been a pro, but she was seventeen years old. You lied to me.”

“I didn’t know.”

I pulled a handkerchief from my back pocket and tossed it to Valden. “You’ve got a little bullshit there at the corner of your mouth.”

It was coming up on three o’clock and we still hadn’t heard back from Hans’s partner regarding any background we could gather on the seven hotel employees not scheduled to work on Sunday.

“Not to look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said, “but where the hell is Gaines?”

Hans shook his head and leaned heavily against the wall as we waited in the elevator lobby.

“I gave him your cell number.”

“I’ve got to make a landline call,” I said. “Let’s see how the Bengal Room operates on a Saturday afternoon.”

“Why not,” he said. “I’ve tried sitting on my ass and that hasn’t worked.”

As we waited for the elevator, I felt the weight of a million small choices; the ones we’d each made that put us where we were. One or two small changes and Hans would still be at his desk in Homicide, I’d be on my yacht in Kona bay, and Valden would still be playing politics-for-hire and concealing his assignations from his wife.

A bell rang softly and we stepped into the empty car. When the doors sighed closed, the space grew crowded with troubles that had no solutions and the sound of time ticking away.

The Bengal Room hummed with an energy that was both manic and somehow perceptively desperate. Women with expensive shoes and high-maintenance hairdos sat in knots of two and three, while the men wore too much jewelry and spoke of business matters in voices that were far too loud. A lone blonde at the far end of the bar pretended to ignore the rest of the room, toying with the ice that floated in her cocktail glass, while some kind of formless European lounge music filled the empty spaces.

Hans and I took two low-back stools at the corner of the bar opposite the apathetic blonde, and well away from everyone else. The bartender, a different one than Hans had interviewed earlier, straightened his black bow tie and sidled over to us, flashing a courteous, insincere smile. We each ordered a Kirin and I asked to use the phone that was tucked against the back shelf beside the cash register.

Moments later, he returned with two frosted pilsner glasses and our two bottles of beer, and placed the phone in front of me.

“Dial nine for an outside line,” he said, and stepped discreetly away.

I punched in the number Rex had given me earlier, and watched the waitress work the room. She was a tall, elegant Asian girl dressed in a tight black dress with a mandarin neckline. Her face was bathed in reflected yellow lamplight and jet black hair which had been pulled into a tight knot at the back of her head. Watching her glide between the lamp-lit tables made it easy to imagine a scene much like this one, in Shanghai or Mandalay, perhaps, at the turn of an earlier century.

As he had before, Rex picked up on the third ring.

“Who’s calling?” he said.

“It’s me,” I answered. “What’ve you got?”

“Making progress. But he needs more time.”

“I’ve got an e-mail address for you,” I said, and spelled it for him to make sure he got it right.

He repeated it back.

“How much longer do you need?”

“I don’t know. They’re bouncing servers through China, Russia and the Maldives. Now that he’s identified the route, the e-mail should help.”

“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful here—”

“He’s working on his own,” Rex said. “Without access to all the toys. I’ll call you when I’ve got something.”

“I don’t know if I can tell you where I’ll be.”

“I’ll call your cell. The next time you hear from me, it’ll be with a name and address. Short and sweet. What happens after that is up to you.”

It sounded like he had something else to say, but had edited himself. I wondered again how much of Rex Blackwood’s official file had been permanently redacted.

“Something else?” I asked.

“I’m going to tell you two things you already know.”

“Go.”

“You’ve been skeet shooting before?”

“Sure.”

“Then you know that you don’t shoot where they are, you shoot where they’re going to be.”

“And what’s the second thing?”

“Don’t let the bad guys get behind you.”

Hans waited silently while I passed the phone back to the bartender. He raised his glass and drank, but I could see my former partner took little pleasure from it. I took a long pull from mine and sat my glass on the bar top. Hans was about to speak when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket.

I flipped it open, still expecting Roger Gaines. It wasn’t. It was my brother.

“I’ve thought about it,” Valden said without preamble.

“I’ve already lost the thread of this conversation, Valden.”

Long seconds contained only the sound of his breathing, the rattle of ice against crystal.

“I’m not doing it,” he said finally. “They can go to hell.”

“You are in a dangerous state of mind.”

“I could say the video’s a fake. That it’s been doctored.”

“Get some sleep, Valden,” I said. “Scotch makes a poor partner in a strategy session.”

“I can get out front of this thing, make a preemptive statement to the press.”

“If you try that, they’ll be sponging pieces of you off the walls.”

“Mike, just listen . . .”

“Don’t even think about it,” I said again. “The girl is underage. At a minimum, that’s statutory rape.”

“She was a hooker, for God’s sake.”

“I’m not having this conversation.”

There was heavy silence on my phone and a trill of phony laughter from a table in the back of the Bengal Room.

“Good-bye, Valden.”

I snapped the phone shut and watched a man in a well-tailored suit crash and burn in his attempt to charm a pair of young women who were seated in the shadow of a potted palm along the wall. His skin was so salon tanned he was nearly purple. Hans tossed down the rest of his beer and pushed the bottle to the edge of the table. The Bengal Room was beginning to fill with the afternoon crowd, so I signaled the bartender for our tab.

On the way out the door, my phone rang again. This time it was Gaines, but I was tired of talking. I handed the phone to Hans.

I drove Hans back to his house.

I pulled up and parked behind a gray sedan that was parked across the street. A pack of school-aged kids on bicycles pumped down the sidewalk, dodging in and out of the pinkish pools cast by the sodium lights. Hans pushed open the car door, and hesitated as he got out. He turned after a moment and invited me in for dinner.

I watched the kids until they turned the corner, and followed Hans across the street and into his house.

It was a little past nine thirty in LA by the time we finished, which put it around seven thirty in Kona. I dialed Lani’s number and waited through a recorded greeting. I hated leaving personal messages on her answering machine, so I kept it short.

I joined Hans outside on a lawn chair while Mie did the dinner dishes, wanting to leave us to ourselves for a while longer. I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my jacket as Hans lit a cigar and stared up into the stars. Warm light glowed inside yellow windows, and the muted sounds of running water and the ring of silverware being placed into the machine was domestic and uncomplicated and made me feel even farther from home.

“What time tomorrow?” Hans asked.

“Noon. But you should be set up no later than ten or so, take your position before the guests start to arrive.”

The night sounds of crickets and a distant barking dog mingled with a faint murmur from a neighbor’s TV. We both leaned back into our chairs, neither of us speaking for what seemed like a very long time.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

An errant gust carried with it the scent of chimney smoke and fallen leaves and tore at the plume rising from Hans’s cigar. My mind drifted back to Kona, to Lani, and I felt a momentary stab of something that might have been envy at the life Hans had built for himself.

“Hang on to this for me, will you?” I said, and slipped the Stoeger he had lent me out of the holster at my hip. “Keep it in the car with you.”

I stood and said good night to Hans, who followed me into the kitchen. Mie dried her hands on a dish towel and offered her cheek for a kiss. She smiled, and in spite of my former partner’s disquiet, I thought I saw gratitude there.

They walked me to the door and saw me out, stood together on the front porch as I got into my car. Hans laid a protective arm across Mie’s shoulders, and she tossed me a little wave. A translucent cloud of autumn fog glowed inside the halo of the streetlight as I pulled away, to the empty hotel suite that waited for me.