He arrived twenty minutes later. Too-blue jeans, a new three-quarter-length leather jacket. Short hair, sturdy and anonymous bone structure. I’d started to see guys like this arriving in L.A. a year or two before we left. The workhorses of the new millennium, young men who would stack shelves, sell contraband on street corners, toil like dogs in regular modes of employment or smack heads in the dead of night, all with a steady, glacial determination that seemed to elude the local populace.
And, of course, drive cabs. I indicated who I was with an upward nod. He came over and sat on the opposite side of the table, glanced at my beer.
“You want one?”
“Please,” he said.
“But you’re working, right?”
He just looked at me. I held my hand up, got us both a drink. The waitress was fast and had them back by the time I’d lit another cigarette.
When Georj had taken a long swallow, he nodded. “Good,” he said. “So?”
“Thanks for taking the phone to the hotel.”
He shrugged. “Thank you for the money. I think probably it not be there. So?”
“I just wanted to see if you remembered anything else.”
He glanced at his hands like someone used to not remembering things and not remembering them on demand. “I drive all day. All over. They get in, they get out.”
I clicked a couple buttons on my cell phone, held it up to him across the table. “That’s her,” I said.
He leaned forward, peered at the picture on the screen. It was the one that Amy had been using as her background until recently.
“She’s my wife,” I said. “That’s me there with her, right? I’m not a cop. I’m just trying to find her.”
He took the phone from me, angled it against the dim light. “Okay,” he said finally. “I remember.”
My heart started beating faster, but I had many years’ experience of this kind of inquiry. “She’s pretty tall,” I said. “Around five ten?”
He shook his head immediately. “Then not her. Woman I think of, more like five feet and a half feet.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s her.”
He looked at me, raised an eyebrow sardonically. “Not a cop, right. I not Russian either. I from Disney World.”
“You got me. I was once a cop. I’m guessing you’re someone who’s used to talking to the police, too. So let’s not jerk each other around. When did you see her?”
He considered. “Early in the night. Pick up downtown. Drop in Belltown somewhere, I think.”
I shook my head, not knowing where he was talking about. He pointed right. “Up, past fish market. She tip too much, is how I remember.”
Score two for recognizable characteristics. “You recall anything else?”
“Not so much.” He took a cigarette from my pack, lit it. “It was rain. I watch the road. They talk. I—”
“Wait a minute. They?”
“Her, a man.”
My stomach felt sour. “What did the man look like?”
“Suit, I think. Dark hair. I don’t remember.”
“Did they get in the car together?”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. Just talk, you know.”
“What were they talking about?”
“How do I know? I have radio playing.”
“Come on, Georj. Did they look serious? Were they laughing? What?”
I realized he was staring at me and that my volume level was getting out of control. Took a breath.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. You picked two people up. Drove them someplace, up in Belltown, wherever. She pays, you drive away. That’s it?”
He swallowed the rest of his beer. He was ready to leave. In desperation I took Amy’s phone from the table. Found the final picture. Passed it over to him.
“Could that have been the man?”
He looked at it for barely a second, shook his head, stood up. “I don’t know. Bad picture. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. You got a job to go on to?”
He hesitated. “No.”
“You do now.”
I walked behind him into the drizzle. I didn’t even know if the Malo would have any rooms, or if they’d rent one this late to someone like me. But I knew that being in a public place would not be good for me, and the Malo was the last known address I had for Amy, however spurious that had turned out to be.
The driver took a right off First, walking ahead. Why hadn’t he parked directly outside the bar?
“Why didn’t you park directly outside the bar?” I asked truculently. I had begun to slur my words, just a little, and the boundary between the inside and the outside of my head was starting to fade.
“In case police,” he said patiently, not bothering to turn around. “They see from bar to car, not so good.”
I followed him around a couple more corners and suddenly realized we weren’t far from the end of Post Alley. This made me think of Todd Crane. Who had dark hair. Who was the kind of guy who wore suits. He’d seemed convincing in his ignorance of Amy’s whereabouts.
But…
We turned into another side street, narrow and cobbled, lined with the backs of old warehouses, a red cab parked on one side. Georj was twenty or thirty feet ahead of me now, and as he stopped to get his keys out, I saw something.
A couple of figures were approaching from the deep shadows farther up the alley. They were too far away to see clearly at first, but both wore dark clothing and were headed purposefully toward the cab.
“Georj,” I said.
He looked around at me, confused, saw I had started to run. He turned to look back the other way and froze.
The figures were running now, too. Both heading in my direction, evidently having realized I was going to be their first cause of trouble. The men’s faces were pale and calm. One was tall, blond; the other shorter, with red hair. Out of long habit, I reached to my belt, but there was nothing there.
I met the first man with my right elbow held up high and rigid, ducking low to catch him at the base of the throat. He flipped over backward onto the wet sidewalk, crashing down hard. Georj and the other guy had a hold of each other already—and before I could get to him, the stranger had whipped his forehead down to butt Georj in the middle of his face. Georj fell back, sliding down the side of the cab.
I felt a hand grab me on the right shoulder and dropped low again as I turned hard left, the opposite to what most people would do. By the time I’d twisted quickly around, the guy was pulled off balance, and I planted my fist hard into his side. Our faces were close enough for his coughed exhale to spatter over my face.
I slammed my kneecap into the side of his thigh just above the knee, trapping the nerve, and felt him drop again as the other assailant stopped hitting Georj and grabbed me around the throat with both hands.
He was stronger and more focused than the other guy and slung me back against the hood of the car. I bounced off it awkwardly and slid to crash onto the cobbles—but he stepped in toward me too fast.
I kicked my leg in a wide, low arc, catching him around the back of the calf. He stumbled, dropping enough that I could meet his face with my shoulder as I came back up. He went over on his side, and I lowered my foot hard onto the fingers of his right hand.
The other guy was reaching into his coat now, and I turned toward him, wanting him to put himself in a position where it had to play out. I don’t think I even remembered I didn’t have a weapon of my own. I don’t believe I was thinking at all. I had just become the man who was doing this thing, powered by anger, fueled by the need to hurt someone for the sudden and inexplicable hole in the center of my life.
“No,” the guy I’d taken down said, but not to me.
The other man hesitated. Took his hand back out of his coat. Then the two of them ran quickly and quietly up the street.
Georj was crouched by the side of his cab, hands over his face. I squatted in front of him, panting hard, and pried his hands away. There was a lot of blood under his nose, down his chin, over his jacket. Before he could stop me, I felt on either side of his nose. He swore hard, tried to shove my hand away.
“You’re okay,” I said. “It’s not broken.”
I stood up. Looked back up the street. The two men had disappeared. “Who were they?”
“What?” The driver was standing now, sorting through his keys with trembling hands. He was looking at me like I was something that had just crawled in out of the bay, some animal with dripping teeth.
“You heard. Who were they?”
He shook his head, as if in disbelief.
“What the fuck is your problem?” I said, grabbing the door as he climbed into the car. “I just saved your ass. Who were those men?”
“How you think I know?”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “They didn’t get you this time, but they’re going to come back. You play dumb and—”
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “I am not criminal. Not here, not there. I have degree in biochemistry.”
“But—”
“You right, wise guy. I do spend time talk to police. My sister was journalist in St. Petersburg. Was murdered three year ago. That’s how I talk them.” He stabbed a finger up at my face. “What about you, huh? What you do?”
He spit at my feet, slammed the door, and drove away.
I was left standing in the middle of the alley. It suddenly seemed very quiet, the city silent but for the distant honks and sirens of life going on elsewhere. I did not feel like myself, and my fists hurt.
I turned and looked back up the street.