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“Too late for that,” he said. “What you gonna do? Go home?”
“I don’t know yet. But not that.”
“But you want me to?”
I looked him over. He was smiling, but his eyes showed the hurt again. It might be true what he said, that he was already marked by this thing. If that was true, then the only thing he could do to salvage his career would be to make sure I took Doyle down.
Besides that, the killings had hurt him, hurt the things he believed in, from the hope Hector had made him feel all the way down to his bedrock, the LAPD. He wanted in on the end of this, one way or the other.
The only problem with that was that I still didn’t have a clue what I was going to do.
“All right, Ed,” I said. “But drop me at the hotel anyhow. I need to think.”
“Sounds dangerous,” said Ed. “Considering how you done so far.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I put my clothes in a plastic bag I found in the closet and threw them into the trash. Then I took the longest shower I can ever remember taking. After the first ten minutes I no longer felt like things were growing on me. The next ten minutes took most of the knots, bumps, and dead spots out of my muscles. The final ten minutes were just because it felt good.
Then I sat on the bed and picked up the telephone. I’d done an awful lot of thinking over the weekend, especially considering that I’d been surrounded by a group that was louder than the average college fraternity party and smelled even worse than the next morning at the
same frat.
I’d thought mostly about two things: first, Doyle, and how to bring him down. I hadn’t come up with a whole lot. He seemed to have all the chips and all the cards. On the other hand, I had moral superiority. I would have traded it for one thumbprint.
The other thing I had thought about might be a little easier if I could do it right. So I called.
“Hello?” Nancy said when the receptionist at the clinic put her on. Hearing her voice sent a wave of goose bumps over my skin.
“Hi,” I said.
There was a pause. “I’m not sure I want to talk to you,” she said finally.
“I know,” I said, “and this sounds really stupid, but I can explain.”
“Boy, I’ll just bet you can.”
“Nancy, listen, I’m sorry. I got caught up in something, and I couldn’t call.”
“Couldn’t call? Really? And there were no telephones anywhere around?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’m sure the telephone company would love to know where you were so they can rush over and put in a pay phone,” she said, and I could hear in her voice that she thought that was a pretty good line to hang up on.
“I was in jail,” I said, as fast and clear as I could.
Another pause, a long one. Then that wonderful throaty laugh started and rose to a middle A before it stopped again. I realized I was holding the phone in a death grip, shoving the receiver hard against my head, so I wouldn’t miss a note of it.
“It figures,” she said at last. “All right, Billy. You got one explain coming to you. What were you in for?”
“Drunk and disorderly,” I said. “But I was innocent.”
“This just gets better,” she said.
“I know how that sounds.”
“Uh-huh.”
