Chapter Thirty-eight

I sat on the same thick tree branch and watched the crime lord's regal estate. Just a giant black raptor with a love for cute shoes.

The massive island home was ablaze with lights as Jerry Blum did his personal best to accelerate global warming. Activity had picked up since the last time I was here a few days ago. Now there were more guys with big guns, more beautiful women, and more cars coming and going. The cars looked armor plated. Once, a man and a woman strolled beneath the very tree I was perched in. The man lit a cigarette. The woman was wearing a blouse cut so low that I could see straight down it to her belly button. Probably a good thing neither of them thought to look up.

As I watched them, sitting motionless and squatting on the thick branch, I wondered if I emitted an odor of some sort. I had read years ago that Bigfoot sightings were often preceded first by a horrific stench. Well, I had showered just a few hours earlier, thank you very much. Granted, I had showered as a human. Either way, neither crinkled their noses and looked at each other and asked, "Do you smell a giant vampire bat?"

Again, probably a good thing.

The man finished his cigarette and mentioned something about being off in a few hours and why didn't she come up to his room then? She said sure.

He nodded and flicked his cigarette away, and Mr. Romantic and Slutty McSlutbag drifted off over the grounds, to disappear in the controlled mayhem of the estate house. Something seemed to be up, but I didn't know what. I caught snatches of conversation, but couldn't piece anything together. Once I saw Jerry Blum himself, surrounded by a large entourage of men. Big men. Dark-haired men. They moved purposely through the house, and I watched them going from window to window, until they slipped deeper into the house and out of view.

Jerry was going to be hard to get alone. But I was a patient hulking monster.

As the wind picked up and the tree swayed slightly, I adjusted my clawed feet, stretched my wings a little, and hunkered down for the night.

Chapter Thirty-nine

I turned off Carbon Canyon Road, which wound through the Chino foothills, and onto a barely noticeable service road.

Stuart Young, my beautifully bald client who was sitting in the passenger seat next to me, looked over at me nervously. I grinned and winked at him.

"Um, you sure you know where you're going?" he asked.

"No clue," I said.

"Of course not," he said good-naturedly. "Why should you? We're only driving through the deep dark forest in the dark of night."

"Fun, isn't it?"

I doubted we would get lost since there was only about a quarter mile of wilderness between the road and the grass-covered hill before us. Even a soccer mom could get her bearings here. We had been driving down the twisty Carbon Canyon Road, a road some think of as a sort of shortcut from Orange County to Riverside County, but, if you ask me, it's just a more scenic way to fight even more dense traffic.

The van probably wasn't made for dirt roads, but it handled this one well enough. We bounced and scraped through shrubbery until we came across a metal gate that consisted of two horizontal poles.

"It looks locked," said Stuart.

"Hang on," I said.

I put the van in park and hopped out, brushing aside a thorn covered branch with my bare hand. A thorn or two snagged my skin and drew blood. By the time I reached the gate, my hand was already healed.

Cool beans.

A thick chain was wrapped around a rusted pole driven deep into the ground. The chain was padlocked with a heavy-duty lock. I often wondered who carried keys to these random city and county locks. Somewhere out there was a guy standing in front of some obscure park gate with a big wad of keys and going crazy.

This lock was a big one, and heavy, too. As I picked it up, the chain clanked around it. I turned my back to Stuart. I hooked my finger inside the lock's rusted loop and with one quick yank, I snapped the lock open.

"We're in luck," I yelled, letting the lock drop. "It's open."

* * *

We were now in a clearing at the edge of a ravine, where a small river flowed twenty feet below. The gurgling sound of it was pleasant. The chirping of the birds was even more pleasant. Darkness was settling over what passed as woods in southern California, which amounted to a small grove of scraggly elderberry trees, deformed evergreens, beavertail cactus, and thick clumps of sagebrush and gooseberry, and other stuff that wasn't taught in my junior college environmental biology course.

We were in a sort of clearing, surrounded by a wall of trees. My sixth sense told me that this place had been used before, for something else, for something physically painful, but I didn't know what. My sixth sense was sketchy at best. Still, I heard the crack of something breaking, perhaps bone, and I heard the crash of a car. I walked over to the edge of the ravine and looked down. Sure enough, deep within the soft soil around the lip, I saw deep tire tracks. Someone, at sometime, had taken a nose-dive off the edge here and down into the river below.

I turned and faced Stuart. "This is where I will bring him."

Stuart had walked to the center of the clearing, and was taking in the area, perhaps envisioning himself fighting a crime lord to the death in this very spot. Like gladiators in an arena.

"It's a good place," he said, nodding. He looked slightly sick.

A bluejay shot through the clearing, flashing through the shadows and half light, disappearing in the branch high overhead, reminding me of the old George Harrison song, "Blue Jay Way", about fogs and L.A. and friends who had lost their way.

I stood in the clearing with a man who had lost his way, too, his life completely derailed by pain and grief and the burning need for revenge. He stared up into the darkening sky, which filled the scattered spaces above the tangle of trees. His bald head gleamed dully in the muted light.

We all lose our way, I thought. Some of us just for longer than others.

Perhaps even for all eternity.

"A part of me doesn't believe you can get him here," said Stuart, still looking up, his voice carrying up to the highest, twisted branches.

I said nothing.

"But another part of me believes you can. It's a small part, granted, but it believes that you can somehow, someway, deliver Orange County's biggest son-of-a-bitch to me."

I was quiet, leaning my hip on the fender of the minivan, my hands folded under my chest. A small, hot wind blew through the clearing.

"So then I ask myself, 'What will you do if he does show up? What will you do if Samantha Moon really can deliver him?'" He lowered his head and looked over at me, his face partially hidden in shadows. I could mostly see through shadows, but I doubted he could. I'm sure to him I was nothing more than a silhouette. A cute silhouette, granted. "But that's the easy part, Sam. If you deliver him to me, I will hurt him. I will do everything within my power to make him feel the pain he has made me feel. But first I will play my wife's last message to him. I want him to hear her voice. I want my wife's voice to be the last thing that son-of-a-bitch hears."

A single prop airplane flew low overhead, its engine droning steadily and peacefully. A bug alighted on my arm. A mosquito. Now there's irony for you. I flicked it off before I inadvertently created a mutant strain of immortal mosquitoes, impervious to bug spray or squishing.

Stuart went on. "But I'm going to give him a fighting chance, more than he gave my wife, the fucking coward. I'm not sure what sort of fighting chance I will give him, but I will think of something."

We were quiet. The woods itself wasn't so quiet. Tree branches swished in the hot wind, and birds twittered and sung and squawked. A quiet hum of life and energy seemed to emanate from everywhere, a gentle combination of every little thing moving and breathing and existing. Sometimes a leaf crunched. Sometimes something fast and little scurried up a trunk. A bird or two flashed overhead, through the tangle of branches. Insects buzzed in and out of the faint, slanting half-light.

Stuart was looking down. A bug had alighted on his bald head, threatening its perfection. He casually reached up and slapped his head, then wiped his palm. Whew! Disaster averted. Stuart, I saw, was crying gently, nearly imperceptively.

I waited by the van. He cried some more, then nodded and wiped his eyes. His whole bald head was gleaming red.

"Let's do this," he said, nodding some more.

"You don't have to do this," I said.

"No, this is the best answer. This is the only answer, Sam. I want justice, but the courts won't give it to me."

"Jerry Blum is a professional killer. He's going to know how to fight. And he's going to kill you the first chance he gets."

"I have been taking boxing lessons these past few weeks, since our last talk."

"Boxing lessons where?" I asked.

"A little Irish guy. Says he knows you. Says you're a freak of nature."

"Jacky's always exaggerating," I said.

"Says you knocked out a top-ranked Marine boxer."

"The top-ranked Marine boxer had it coming to him."

Stuart looked at me. The red blotches that had covered his head were dissipating. He looked so gentle and kind and little. I couldn't imagine him taking on a crime lord single-handedly. "You are a fascinating woman, Ms. Moon."

"So they say," I said, and decided to change the subject, especially since the subject was me. "Stuart, there's a very real chance you aren't walking out of this grove alive in a few days."

That seemed to hit him. He thought about it. "Well, this is a good place to die, then, isn't it?"

"You don't have to die, Stuart," I said.

"No," he said. "I suppose I could always just shoot him before he knows what hits him. Or have a whole array of weapons at my disposal."

I said nothing. I was liking this plan less and less.

"But he killed my wife, Sam. He put fear in her. He put terror in her. He made the woman I love feel terror. Think about that. He made the woman I loved, the woman I had committed my life to, the woman I was going to start a family with, die in a fiery crash. I hate him. I hate him more than you could ever know. Yes, I suppose I should just step out of the shadows with a gun. I suppose I should just level it at him, and blow his fucking brains out. Maybe I still will. I don't know. But I want to beat him, Sam. With my fists. I want to hear his nose break. I want to see his blood flow. I want to punch him harder than I have ever punched anything in my life. I want to see the terror in his eyes when he realizes he will never get up again, that he will die in that moment."

"And when you kill him?" I asked. "What then?"

Stuart turned to me and looked perplexed by the question. He hadn't, of course, thought much beyond this. A red welt was blistering on the side of his head, where the mosquito had gotten to him a fraction before he had gotten to the mosquito. The blood-sucking little bastard.

"I don't know, Sam. I don't know." He paused, then looked me directly in the eye. "Will you still help me?"

I was never much for vigilante justice. I had taken an oath years ago to uphold the law. This was very much outside the law. This was also crazy.

These are crazy times, I thought.

"Yes," I said. "Of course."

"Thank you, Sam."

And when he said those words, a dull tingling sensation rippled through me, and something very strange happened to the air around Stuart. A very faint, darkish halo briefly surrounded his body. The black halo flared once, twice, and then disappeared.

Chapter Forty

There was a knock on my hotel door.

Monica, who had been lying on her side and reading, snapped her head around and looked at me.

I stepped away from my laptop and moved over to the bedside table. I quietly pulled open the top drawer and removed my small handgun from its shoulder holster. Then I slipped quietly over and stood to one side of the door. Never directly in front.

"Who's there?" I asked.

"Detective Sherbet."

I grinned. I was quite fond of the detective, who was an aging homicide investigator here in Fullerton. A few months back, Sherbet had helped me solve Kingsley's attempted murder case. And spending long nights sitting together in the rain on stakeouts had gotten us close. But not so close that I had revealed to him my super-secret identity.

I unlocked and opened the door to find the big detective standing there holding a greasy bag of donuts. He was also breathing loudly through his open mouth, and I realized just the effort of walking down the hallway had been a bit much for the old guy. The donuts didn't help.

"Got a minute?" he asked.

"Do I have a choice?" I asked.

"Not really."

"In that case, come in, detective."

He came in, nodded at me, spotted Monica on the bed, and went straight over to her. He took both her hands in his one free hand. The other, of course, was holding the donuts. Monica sat up immediately when she saw him, and now she looked a bit like a teenage girl talking to her grandfather.

"Hello, Monica," he said warmly. "Are you keeping Samantha out of trouble?"

She smiled - or tried to smile - and then she burst into tears. Detective Sherbet calmly set the greasy bag on the night table, then sat next to her and put an arm around her. He made small, comforting noises to her, and they sat like this for a few minutes.

Sherbet squeezed her shoulders one more time, patted her hands, and then stood. He grabbed the bag of donuts and led me out onto the balcony. He closed the sliding glass door behind me. He then sat on one of the dusty, cushioned chairs, calmly opened the oily bag, peered inside, and selected a bright pink donut.

"I thought you didn't like the color pink," I said. "Or, for that matter, pink anything."

"I'm coming around," he said, and held up the effeminate-looking donut.

"Speaking of pink," I said. "How's your son?"

Sherbet paused mid-chew, breathing loudly through his nose. He finished the bite and looked at me sideways. "That was a low blow, Ms. Moon."

"You know I adore your son."

"I do, too," he said. "The kid's fine. I caught him trying on his mother's pantyhose the other day. Pantyhose."

"What did you do?" I asked, suppressing a giggle.

"Honestly? I went into my bedroom, shut the door, and sat in the dark for an hour or two."

"So you took it well."

"About as well as any dad would."

"You love him, though."

Sherbet reached inside the bag again. "In a weird way, I think I love him more."

"Oh?"

He pulled out an apple fritter. Remnants of the pink frosting donut were smeared on the fritter. Sherbet licked the remnants off.

He said, "The kid's going to have it tough in school, and everywhere else, for that matter. He's going to need someone strong by his side."

I patted his roundish knee, hidden beneath slacks that were stretched tight. I think Sherbet had gained 10 or 15 pounds since I'd last seen him. He didn't sound very healthy, either. As he ate the donut, I reached over and gently took the greasy bag from him. He watched in mild shock as I held my hand over the balcony railing.

"Sam, don't," he said.

"You're gaining weight, detective. And you sound like you need a respirator. These things aren't helping."

"You sound like my wife."

"You should listen to her."

I let the bag go. Five seconds later, I heard it splat nine floors below.

Sherbet winced. "I should give you a ticket for littering."

"Then give me a ticket."

He went to work on the rest of the fritter. "My hands are too sticky to write. Besides, I've got some news for you."

"Go ahead."

"We got a call from a guest staying here at the hotel."

Sherbet licked his fingers. I waited.

"She reported that a strange man had been watching the hotel for a few days now. So we sent one of our guys around and talked to him. The guy's story didn't sound kosher, and so we picked him up for questioning."

"And did he answer your questions?"

"Not at first, but, believe it or not, I can play bad cop pretty damn well."

"Bad cop? You? Never!"

Sherbet grinned. There was pink frosting in his cop mustache. I should have told him there was pink frosting in his cop mustache, but he looked so damn cute that I decided not to. "So I shake this guy down and he finally tells me his story."

"He's a hired killer," I said.

"You know the story?"

"I can guess some of it."

"So what else can you guess, Sam?"

"He was hired by Ira Lang."

Sherbet raised his thick finger and shot me. The finger glistened stickily. "Bingo."

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