“What’s his name?”
“His name is mud,” I said.
My last meal had been breakfast in Oakland. I grabbed a tortilla and a slice of yellow cheese out of the refrigerator. I flicked some mold off the cheese, and rolled what was left of the slice inside the tortilla.
“I would’ve made you something,” Savannah said, “but I didn’t know when you’d be back. Plus, I checked the ’frig. You don’t really have anything to make.”
“I think you’d better leave,” I said, wolfing down the tortilla.
“Logan, didn’t you hear what I said? I’m scared.”
“You’ve got plenty of money. Hire a bodyguard. Hell, hire ten bodyguards, for all I care.”
She was slack-jawed. How could I be so callous?
“Don’t make me go, Logan. Please. Not tonight.”
“I’m tired, Savannah. I need to get some sleep. Now, if it’s not too inconvenient, take that six-shooter of yours and get out of my bed.”
She exhaled resignedly, picked up Kiddiot who meowed in complaint, and set him aside, then slid out from under my sheets. She was wearing a sheer blue satin robe that came midway down her thighs and what appeared to be nothing underneath. Not that I would’ve ever looked, mind you.
“It’s one-thirty in the morning,” she said, lashing the robe tightly around her. “Where do you expect me to go?”
“Lots of hotels in town.”
“You don’t think I tried that first? There are no vacancies. There’s some big festival going on.”
There was always some big festival going on in Rancho Bonita. If it wasn’t the Sand Castle Building Festival, it was the Guacamole Eating Festival, or the International Film Watching Festival, or the Greek Salad Festival. There was even a festival, replete with a giant parade of half-naked, fully inebriated people, commemorating Summer Solstice. Every week, another festival, another excuse for local hoteliers to jack up room rates and sock it to the out-of-towners.
“Logan, please. Just for the night.”
I was too tired to fight her and too conflicted. I wadded up my upper sheet, lobbed it to her and pointed to my purple Naugahyde couch.
“Thank you.” She lay down on the couch and tucked the sheet in around her. Kiddiot jumped up and snuggled in once more on top of her.
I pulled my shirt over my head, tossed it on the floor and turned off the light, got out of my jeans and swung into bed. The wool cover was scratchy without a top sheet, but the bottom sheet was warm where Savannah had been seconds earlier. I tried not to think about how good it felt. My life had been perfectly tolerable before she reappeared unannounced and uninvited — OK, maybe not perfectly tolerable, but tolerable enough. I wanted her to leave. I wanted to make love to her. Hell, I didn’t know what I wanted. Except maybe a little loyalty from my cat. I could hear him purring clear across the garage.
“Someone keeps calling me,” Savannah said, “a private number. They call and hang up. Last night, there was a car outside my house. Just sitting there. For over two hours. I called the police. They never came.”
“What kind of car?”
“Small. White. With tinted windows.”
“And a spoiler on the back.”
“A spoiler?”
“A wing.”
I could see Savannah prop herself up on one elbow in the darkness. “How’d you know that?”
The same car that chased me. The same car Mrs. Schmulowitz saw outside her house.
“Lucky guess,” I said.
Savannah tried to get comfortable on the couch. The Naugahyde squeaked every time she shifted her weight. With every squeak, I felt like a bigger jerk. Real Buddhists are supposed to demonstrate compassion toward all beings, including ex-wives. Yet, here I was, making mine spend the night sticking to fake leather. I exhaled and threw off my covers.
“Get in. I’ll take the couch.”
“I’m fine right here.”
“Get in the goddamn bed, Savannah.”
“I said I’m fine.”
We would’ve been there another hour arguing about it had I not proposed a compromise.
“OK, look. How about this: we both take the bed? Your side, my side. Berlin Wall down the middle. No monkey business. Just sleep.”
She thought about it a minute. Then she said, “Deal.”
We remade the bed with the top sheet under the blanket and climbed in like two prize fighters, each on our respective side of the squared circle.
“I really appreciate this, Logan.”
She was asleep within five minutes.
I lay there for more than an hour, listening to her breathing softly, afraid to move, afraid I might touch her. According to Mrs. Schmulowitz, Dr. Phil says the best thing to do when you can’t sleep is not try. So I didn’t. I got out of bed as quietly as I could, careful not to disturb her, sat down at the card table that doubled as my home office, fired up my laptop, turned the sound down low, and signed on to YouTube, that video repository of all topics inane and amazing. Ten seconds later, there was Micah Echevarria, sitting on his living room sofa, staring out at me. His face, captured in low light on what I assumed was his girlfriend’s camera phone, was fuzzy and handheld shaky, but I could still make out the tendrils of marijuana smoke wafting behind him.
“My father fucking sucked at the job,” he began, “but he was still my father. So I suppose I owe him something. This poem’s for him.”
I’m on firm literary footing when I say Micah Echevarria was no Alfred Lord Tennyson. His poem, recited from a spiral note-book, was vitriolic and peppered with forced, clunky rhymes like “deserted and perverted” and “hate and berate.” It was all about how his father had abandoned him as a child.
“And now you are dead and dead means forever,” he intoned, “and more than a few would say, well, better late than never. But there are days when I feel that you being killed is really nothing more than a nightmare fulfilled. Because now I will wonder for the rest of my life if we couldn’t have been friends without anger or strife. So, goodbye, old man, wherever you are. In purgatory or hell, or on some shining star. If you’ll still be my dad, I’ll still be your son, and maybe someday, we can still have some fun.”
The last line caught in Micah’s throat. He nodded off-camera and the screen went blank. Bad meter aside, it was a poignant reading.
Kids murder their parents. Ride little Timmy about taking out the trash and, instead of calling Child Protective Services to complain about how abused he is, Timmy takes matters into his own tiny hands and smokes you with the Luger that Gramps brought back from the war; the one you told him never to touch, the one you kept “hidden” in your nightstand with one round in the chamber because it’s every American’s inalienable right to keep a fully loaded, semi-automatic weapon within easy reach at bedtime, because you never know when the Krauts might decide to start another war. Or maybe Daddy walks out on little Timmy and Timmy’s mom. Resentments fester over the years. Little Timmy grows up. One night, he decides it’s finally time for a little payback, and puts three slugs in Daddy’s chest. It happens. But I doubted Micah Echevarria was little Timmy. If I’d learned anything in too many years hunting sociopaths in bad places, it’s that the culpable don’t usually post poems about their victims on YouTube.
I turned off the laptop and got back in bed. Savannah never stirred. Somewhere around four a.m., I drifted off. I don’t remember what I dreamed about.
There was a cocktail lounge in West Hollywood called the Wet Spot I remembered from my operational days, a sultry, intimate haunt with red-leather booths, where former apparatchiks mixed indistinguishably with Russian organized crime and Israeli mafia types, blowhards all with unbuttoned silk shirts and bulging crotches, who eagerly ordered $100 shots of Stoli if it meant impressing the Eurotrash starlet they were hoping to bang that night. The bar’s owner was a charming, heavyset thug named Gennady Bondarenko who, before seeking asylum at the U.S. embassy in Madrid, worked diplomatic cover for the main intelligence directorate of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff. He also happened to be related by marriage to Laz, my old shooting instructor from Alpha, which is how I first met him. Bondarenko was seemingly on a first-name basis with just about every disaffected former Soviet citizen living on the West Coast. I decided to drive down that afternoon from Rancho Bonita to see what, if anything, he could tell me of Pavel Tarasov.