I told her about Ganesha’s murder and confirmed that Baba was telling the truth about Ozone. I also made it clear that he could not be trusted to return the boy. Even if she had been able to raise the money on such short notice, even if I was willing to use the money in the briefcase, I didn’t think it would get him back. Baba was going off his rocker, resorting all at once to murder and kidnapping. There was no telling what he might do-kill Oz to keep him quiet about the snatch, or hang on to him so that he could extort more money from Evelyn, or use the threat of harming the boy to keep her from going to the cops.

With me coaching her, Evelyn called the guru and told him that she would be at the ashram with the cash by four-thirty. She swore that she hadn’t told anyone else about the meeting and that she didn’t care about the money, only her grandson and daughter.

“Don’t hurt him, Baba,” she said. “I know you need the money for your work, and it’s worth it to me to get Kelly and Christina back.”

I hoped the phone call would be enough to put him off guard.

“We’re going to help her, aren’t we?” Mary said when Reggie and I got back in the car. In her eyes I could see our future together hanging in the balance. If I had been undecided about what to do, her attitude would have tipped the scale.

“Of course we are.”

It was 3:35 when I sparked the Northstar engine. My instinct was to charge. Go straight at the ashram, where I believed Oz was being held and take Baba by surprise while he waited complacently for Evelyn to deliver. We’d rescue the boy, find out if Baba really knew where Christina was, and then leave him incapacitated for Discenza to deal with.

“Stop by the flop,” Reggie said grimly after I explained the plan. “I got a piece there.”

“What’s wrong with Baba’s gun?”

Reggie shook his head. “Um used to mine.”

“You live in this dump?” Mary said when we pulled up in the alley.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Slide over here behind the wheel. I’m going in with Reggie. If any shit goes down, take Evelyn back to the hotel and wait for us there.”

The back door was unlocked and we went in through the kitchen, slow and careful. I had the Tomcat in my hand. As we crossed the living room toward the stairs, Budge came rushing down the hallway from his room.

“Rob!” he said, then pulled up short when he saw the pistol. “Why you got a gun?”

“There’s been some trouble. Have you seen Oz today?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking scared. “I saw Pete and Baba Raba taking him away somewhere. It looked like he didn’t want to go.”

“Why didn’t you stop them?”

“I would have, Rob,” he said. “But I saw them from upstairs and they took off before I could get out there. Where do you think they’re takin’ him?”

“What happened to your hand?” Reggie said.

“I bust it while I was drunk last night,” he said. “What’s going on, Rob? Why you guys’ rooms all tore up? Where they takin’ Oz? He ain’t gonna know how to act out there without someone to keep an eye him. He ain’t been off the beach in years.”

Tanned face puffy, hair tousled, eyes bloodshot, Budge looked hung-over and badly constipated. Viewing him in his board shorts and ratty Los Angeles Rams T-shirt, most people would have seen nothing but an over-the-hill beach bum who had drunk too much beer and wasted too much precious time to be good for much of anything, except more of the same.

I saw backup.

“Is there anyone else in the house?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Reggie, grab your pistol and a change of clothes for each of us as quick as you can.”

“Why we need clothes? I thought we were leaving everything.”

“We might get bloody.”

He nodded and jogged up the stairs.

I turned back to Budge. “Pete and Baba Raba are holding Oz for ransom. I can’t explain everything right now but they say they are going to hurt him if they don’t get the money they want in the next hour. We’re on our way to get him back. We aren’t planning on giving them any money. You can come with us if you want to.”

Budge’s fat-padded body stiffened and expanded, like Superman’s when he tears off his Clark Kent outfit. His face turned angry and hard. “Fuckin’ A,” he said. “Where are they?”

“We think they have him at Baba’s ashram over on Broadway. You have a weapon?”

“I don’t need no weapon for those two,” he said. “I’ll tear their fucking heads off if they hurt that kid.”

“I don’t doubt that,” I said. “But they are armed and a weapon might come in handy. You got a knife or a blackjack or anything like that?”

“I got a fish club in my room.”

“Grab it.”

Reggie came down the stairs at the same time Budge returned from his room, holding a smooth, hard skull splitter. It was a cross between a police billy club and a principal’s paddle, an inch thick and two inches wide, and flat, so that it wouldn’t roll on a boat. It was ash, the same kind of wood they use for baseball bats, twenty-four inches long, with a round handle at one end and a rawhide strip that slipped around the user’s wrist. Wielded edgewise by someone as powerful as Budge, it was potentially lethal.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

We went back through the stinking kitchen to the Cadillac. Mary drove. I sat next to her, with Reggie riding shotgun. Budge climbed in the back with Evelyn, who I introduced as Oz’s grandmother.

“I didn’t know he had a grandma,” Budge said, wonderingly. “Especially not one that looks like you.”

We parked on Broadway, two houses down from the Murshid Center for Enlightened Beings. The girls wanted to come in, Mary to get a piece of Baba, Evelyn to make sure no harm came to her grandson, but I convinced them to stay in the car with the motor running.

“We’ll be in and out,” I said. “I’m not fucking around with these guys.”

I sent Budge with his fish billy to the back door, warning him to stick close to the house so he couldn’t be seen from the second floor and to duck below the first-floor windows. As Reggie and I crept across the front of the house, he pulled his pistol out of his back pocket. It was a little.25-caliber automatic that most SoCal crooks would have been embarrassed to be seen with.

“When you going to get a real gun?” I asked him.

“Hah!”

That was all he needed to say. There were three notches in the plastic handle, one of them only six months old. He carved it after killing a psycho slave trader who had been about to kill me.

We went through the front door that I had broken earlier in the day. There was no one in the hall or in the rooms that opened off of it. Ganesha’s body was gone from the gift shop.

I was heading for the stairs when I heard laughter in the kitchen.

It got louder as we went down the back hall and became recognizable as Pete’s nasty cackle.

“What’s so funny?” I said as I pushed through the swinging door into the sunny room with its tall wooden cabinets that hadn’t been changed since the house was built.

Baba was sitting at the table in his Armani suit, eating cornflakes from a mixing bowl. Namo sat across from him, poking at his bandaged arm. Pete was leaning against the counter by the sink. All three froze when they saw the guns.

“I hope you’re not counting your chickens before they’re hatched,” I said.

Pete opened his mouth as if to speak but then closed it without answering. He looked frightened. I saw him glance toward the back door.

“Don’t try it,” I said. “I’ll drop you before you take two steps. Where’s Oz?”

Pete, bug-eyed, stayed silent. I looked at Baba.

He swallowed a wad of cereal pulp and spoke. “Did Evelyn send you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you bring the necklace?” The day had pared still more fullness from his face. It had a lean, haunted look, and his flesh hung more loosely on his frame. He couldn’t keep his anxiety out of his voice.