Dead East Read online

  Talk radio kept him company for the next three hours. He only had to pee in the large Pepsi bottle once. A little after six, a few cars on the block slid past with early risers and two joggers buzzed by, not giving him a glance. An hour later the door to the house opened and a college-aged young man, blonde and thin, came out. He backed the Toyota out and drove toward Sunset. Jarvis did not follow. Another hour passed and the door opened again. This kid was older, maybe a few years into his twenties. Dark hair, olive complexion, handsome and strong. He looked familiar, but not from the past – more recent. Jarvis couldn’t place him. The young man pulled on a helmet that didn’t cover his face and slung a backpack over his shoulder. When he gently rolled the motorcycle into the street and gunned it a little, Jarvis was pulling out of his spot.

  The motorcyclist drove as though he’d just read the DMV rule book and was getting graded. It made him easy to follow. Jarvis hit speed dial on his phone and wasn’t surprised when Rayford answered on the first ring.

  “Where’ve you been?” He sounded as if he hadn’t had a good clue on the killing since last he saw Jarvis.

  “I had to make a quick trip to Wisconsin.”

  “Why the hell did you go there? No way you’re working on another case. What’s the connection?”

  Jarvis turned left on Sunset and followed the bike along the windy road toward Pacific Palisades and the ocean. “Do you have any friends in the FBI?”

  The derisive snort was as effective as if Rayford had been in the car with him. “This isn’t some tv show where every cop has a buddy who runs the local office of a federal agency. I’m just a city detective.” Jarvis sped up a little as the guy on the bike showed the first signs of exuberance by taking the twists on Sunset with a little extra gas. Rayford ended the pause. “My wife’s sister is married to a guy in the LA field office. What the hell do you need the FBI for?”

  Jarvis kept a hundred feet back from the motorcycle. The traffic was moderate and there weren’t too many lights. If the kid turned off while he was around a curve, Jarvis would be able to see him up the side street in plenty of time. “I think the guy I visited in Racine was distributing doses of a poison. There’s a list. You always curse so much in the morning?”

  Rayford drew in his breath audibly. “You think this is some sort of home grown terrorism? Jesus, it isn’t enough that I’ve got a murder, an attempted, and some kid who blew himself up.”

  “Well, it may not be home grown.” He let that sit. “The list I’ve got is in English and Arabic.”

  “Shit. What about the guy you got it from? Is he talking”

  Jarvis laughed to himself. “Nah, he won’t be able to make any statements. I had to leave pretty quick. I’ll probably need to have a chat with your FBI buddy about that.”

  “Shit. Okay, yeah, I’m cursing a lot, but you’re bringing it on. Come on in so we can talk about this.”

  Jarvis rounded a bend and saw the motorcycle making a turn onto Amalfi Drive. He slowed and signaled, irritating the Escalade behind him that thought 65 in a 35 mph zone was not only reasonable but mandatory. “I’m in the middle of something, but I’ll swing by when done.”

  “’Something’? Is it something I should be worried about seeing a report on later?” Irritated, but also an offer of help. “Tell me where you are.”

  “I’ll be at the precinct in an hour. I’ll fill you in.” He disconnected and pulled to the side of the street as the motorcycle turned right on Pavia Rd and then left into one of the few modest houses on the street. The kid parked and walked to the front door, helmet and backpack still on. He opened the door without ringing or knocking and closed it behind him. Two minutes later he came out, helmet in his hand and no backpack. Jarvis flashed on the face. He’d seen it yesterday morning, early. Coming back from the bathroom at Jerry’s deli to his table. He pictured the half dozen cups of coffee he’d drank and the full cup he’d almost sipped before leaving. The little prick had tried to poison him. Exact same as Brin. Jarvis’ hands tightened on the steering wheel but he stayed put.

  The kid burned just a little rubber coming up the street and passed Jarvis without a glance. Jarvis didn’t give a single thought to following him, though fantasized about ripping his head off. He knew where to find him, and he would. Later. Five minutes passed and the front door opened again. A large, unpleasant man emerged. He wore khaki pants and a familiar shirt, black with a logo, and Jarvis couldn’t place it. The backpack rested on his shoulder. He took a beaten up ten speed that had been leaning against the side of the house and swung a leg over. He pedaled the twenty feet down Pavia and then right on Amalfi, not passing Jarvis’ car. His head was shaved and Jarvis could count the folds where his neck bunched. If he’d been a phrenologist, Jarvis could have read the bumps. The bicyclist was probably no more than 30 years old, but exuded the spite and anger of a much older, more cynical man. As he turned onto Amalfi and came within twenty feet of Jarvis, the logo on his shirt was easy to read. He worked at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. He pedaled down Amalfi and Jarvis followed from 100 feet away, watching him turn right onto Sunset and toward the affluent beach town of Pacific Palisades. It was a small city that catered to tourists and locals, with plenty of antique shops, fancy restaurants, and coffee houses. Including a Coffee Bean. Jarvis waited until the bike was far enough away that he could get up to full speed when he passed. When the barista arrived and parked his bike on a newly painted rack on the sidewalk, Jarvis was already in the coffee shop holding a large Colombian drip.

  Larry had clipped a black badge with gold lettering onto his chest – letting the waiting customers know they should call him Larry and confirming to Jarvis that the brooding thug was a douchebag. He was holding the backpack in both hands and pushed through the swinging door into the back, returning a minute later without the pack and carrying a carton of powdered vanilla flavoring favored by the Coffee Bean cognoscenti. Peete’s used real vanilla and Jarvis scoffed at the substitute Larry put on a shelf below the prep counter. He also noticed Larry seemed a little excited to be getting ready to take orders from a bunch of sixteen year olds whose allowance was probably double his monthly wage. He tapped a tall black guy on the shoulder and replaced him as the drink maker. Larry watched the guy head out the front door, hauling a bag of trash and pulling a cigarette out of his pocket. The girl at the register called out a few orders and Larry unintentionally ignored her because he was looking at the clock above the door so hard. Jarvis followed his gaze. It was quarter to eight. He watched Larry glare at the girl when she scolded him with her tone in repeating the order and he began to mix the drinks. A couple of hot, complicated lattes and three large drips. One blended frapped thing and then a few hot chocolates and Jarvis lost track. Larry kept looking at the clock. It finally turned eight and Larry’s gazed lowered from above the door to the sidewalk outside. As if on cue, a gaggle of pre-teens, five or six –it was hard to count, they moved and reconfigured so quickly – swept into the coffee shop. They giggled and laughed and Jarvis knew in Larry’s mind every snicker or whoop was directed at him, was taunting him, even though they probably didn’t even notice he existed. At least two of the girls ordered simultaneously, spitting out more than a dozen drinks, and Larry had already set up the four-cups-each carry-all cartons. They were regulars. He started steaming milk and gathering ice and coffee. Hot and cold drinks, for themselves and probably a couple of friends at school and maybe a mom or two car-pooling. One girl pulled a credit card from the pocket of her uniform and handed it to the girl while still giggling and managing to text with the other hand. Jarvis watched Larry. While steam was rising and blenders whirring, he passed over the glass container of off-white vanilla powder in front of him and bent down to the shelf underneath. He came back up with a large scoop, full to the brim, and started to distribute some into most of the cups and into the blender. Jarvis stiffened. Larry emptied the scoop and returned it under the counter, wiping his hands off on the green apron and rinsing them quickly but vigoro
usly under running water in the sink next to the blender. With a series of flourishes that belied his otherwise hulking posture, he put dollops of foam where they belonged, poured frozen frappe into plastic cups, and lidded them all rapidly. He transferred the drinks to the cartons and lined them up on the pick-up counter. The girls collected them, continuing to ignore Larry as they inhabited a universe of their own making, and waltzed in pairs and triples out the door. The entire operation took under two minutes.

  Jarvis watched the girls gather on the sidewalk and begin to move as a herd toward a waiting minivan. He looked back at the counter. Larry watched the girls too, an almost hungry look in his eyes though not leering or yearning. It was more of anticipation. His gazed shifted for a moment and involuntarily swept the coffee shop and as he passed Jarvis their eyes locked. There was a visceral, electric instant of recognition – not that he knew Jarvis or his face, as the first kid and the dealer in Racine had, but the kind of recognition a child makes when he has a hand in the cookie jar and an adult walks in. Or the gut-wrenching moment when a shoplifter realizes a security guard is looking directly at the cashmere sweater he’s stuffed in his pants. Larry, already starting to take his apron off in preparation for a planned escape now that he’d played his final part in some plan of which he was a minor but deadly player, bolted for the back door. Jarvis was up before Larry’d made it halfway and he took a step toward the counter, but stopped and looked outside. The girls had resumed their movement to the van. One girl, the chattiest one during the ordering and waiting phase, was pulling a cold drink from one of the cardboard trays. She wrestled with it, tightly squeezed into a space too small for it. Jarvis changed his forward movement and hit the door hard, spilling onto the sidewalk and running the dozen steps to the girls. With a boxer’s precision he punched the carriers from the hands of two of the girls, sending the drinks flying away from them and spilling mid-air before slamming against the closed door of the minivan. In one continuous motion, he slapped the drink from the hand of the girl who’d managed to get it from the carrier a second earlier and was bringing the straw to her lips. Shrieks arose and Jarvis was hit with a mix of icy cold frappe and droplets of steaming espresso as his momentum carried him into the mix of airborne liquids.

  “Call the cops, now!” Jarvis shouted. The mother driving the van had more sense than the girls and was halfway out the driver’s seat. Instead of panicking or berating the lunatic who’d accosted the girls – whose shrieks were more of excitement than fear and who were already calling Jarvis a variety of colorful euphemisms that seemed to come from a dialect he didn’t speak – the woman pulled out her cell phone. She recognized the authority in his voice.

  Jarvis turned back to the coffee shop and looked for the bike. It was still there. Larry was on foot. Jarvis ran quickly, efficiently around the back of the shop and could see Larry rumbling through the parking lot toward the grocery store on the far side. He was almost a hundred feet ahead. Jarvis adjusted his angle and put on some speed. His arms pumped and he established the rhythm of a sprint. If Larry got inside the large Ralph’s he’d be harder to find and might be the kind of moron to take a hostage. Jarvis raced along a line of parked cars and imagined slamming Larry to the ground, grinding his face into the tar surface and beating the shit out of him until the cops arrived. He gained on him. Without warning the bumper of a car was blocking Jarvis’ way. The silent electric motor in the hybrid gave no aural warning before cutting him off. He rolled to his left in a flash, hitting the back window and losing some speed but not his balance. He could hear the shouts of surprise and anger from inside the tiny Prius. Larry had picked up a few steps and Jarvis had to regain his speed. He was closing in and Larry looked back; the hairs on his neck must have stood up, like the prey in a National Geographic show feeling the approach of a hungry carnivore. He saw Jarvis and looked in front to gauge whether he’d make the grocery store door twenty feet away. His chances were good. Larry didn’t bother to check both ways before crossing the nearly empty lane in front of the store. So he didn’t see the motorcycle approaching slowly from his right. The driver gunned the engine and Jarvis was still thirty feet away when he saw it buzzing toward Larry, who got halfway across the lane. Six more feet to the sidewalk and the safety of the produce section. The rider on the motorcycle swung a baseball bat he was carrying while accelerating from twenty to forty miles per hour with the help of every horse in the 750cc engine. Jarvis heard the thud of the bat on Larry’s skull and knew the thug was brain dead before the signals could reach there and scream in protest. Larry spun briefly to his left and crumpled to the ground, coming to a rest as the motorcycle whipped through a stop sign and grazed an elderly man carrying a single, heavy bag of groceries. It was the same motorcycle Jarvis had followed that morning. The driver was the kid he’d recognized from Jerry’s Deli.

  Jarvis got to Larry’s body but did not slow down. He turned left toward the motorcycle. The kid tossed the bat off to the side. He goosed the gas and took one look back at Jarvis. Jarvis couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or fearful. It didn’t matter, as whatever look he wore disappeared when the SUV slammed into him. The woman behind the wheel looked up from the text she was reading, unaware she’d been going through the parking lot at 25 miles an hour, or that she’d ignored the stop sign gating traffic leaving the lot. Her initial irritation at bumping into the rear of a car was replaced by the horror of a body sprawled on her hood. Blood mixed with the drops of water from her recent car wash. Jarvis got there as she finally managed to parse the scene and turn the engine off. He rolled the guy off the hood, unconcerned about any permanent spinal injury – he just needed the guy alive and able to talk. The first part looked pretty good; the second was up in the air.

  The faint whine of a police siren wafted over the sounds of people gasping and the motorcycle’s engine still growling. The kid was out cold. Jarvis pulled out his phone and hit the last number dialed.

  “I think I’ve got something. Maybe you should swing by Pacific Palisades’ quaint little police station.”

  Rayford covered the 12 miles in fourteen minutes, heavy traffic offering no obstacle.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jarvis was having coffee with the duty cop, sitting in an office much nicer than anything in downtown LA. There was no detective squad in the Palisades, just some good cops who liked to serve a population that didn’t see a lot of murders or major felonies. For some inexplicable reason they had a state-of-the-art forensics collection department. The technicians were back at the scene, scraping samples of coffee and frappucino off the sidewalk while tourists looked on. Larry the poisoner was on a gurney in the back of one ambulance and the kid who’d smashed Larry’s head in was in another heading toward Cedars Sinai. When Jarvis had left, it wasn’t looking too good.

  Rayford came into the office aggressively. “I’ve got a couple of detectives on their way, and a guy meeting the ambulance at the hospital. Wanna tell me what the hell happened?” The question was meant for Jarvis and the local cop didn’t mind letting him answer. He blew into the mug emblazoned with Best Dad Ever.

  “The dead guy tried to poison a pack of young girls, probably the same stuff they used on Brin. The kid on the motorcycle provided it. I saw him take it to the guy this morning.”

  Rayford’s face got a little redder. “And you’re telling me this now? Any reason we didn’t have this conversation a couple of hours ago?”

  Jarvis got up, holding the mug they’d let him use. It said Best Cop Ever. “Yeah, let’s go have a chat with your FBI friend. He’ll want to hear this.” He looked Rayford over, unimpressed by the fury but sympathetic. “There’s a good chance you could get your gold shield with this.” He sipped from the cup and put it on the edge of the desk. “I just want to find who did this to Brin.”

  He shook the local cop’s hand. “Hey, Bill, thanks for the coffee. Let me know if you need anything else. Just call.” The cop nodded. He didn’t argue about wanting to be in on the case
more than just doing clean-up on Larry and the guy who’d killed him. That was plenty of excitement.

  Rayford looked at the cop. A couple of breaths calmed him down. “ Sergeant, my guys’ll be here soon. They’ll work with you on the details.” Another nod from the cop and Jarvis and Rayford left.

  They were silent until the parking lot. Jarvis understood the detective’s frustration. The death of the woman at the grocery store, Brin’s near murder, the exploding house, and now the mess in the Palisades parking lot all reflected on him. Jarvis felt sorry for him, which he hid. “I found a list when I was in Racine. Things got complicated before I found it.” He gave Rayford a minute to ask what was meant by “complicated” and the detective passed. “Part of it was in English, the rest in Arabic.” They arrived at Jarvis’ car. “It was in code. A buddy of mine broke it.”

  “That’s a lot going on in less than 24 hours.”

  “Yeah. The kid who blew himself up yesterday was on the list. And the guy on the motorcycle.” Jarvis reached into the car and pulled out an unopened envelope. “Here’s a copy of the list.”

  Rayford didn’t take it. “A copy?”

  “It’s got all the information. I think your brother-in-law will want to take a look. I can probably get hold of the original if he needs it.” Jarvis smiled, unreturned by Rayford.