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Neither the paleness nor the tremors troubled Ethan half as much as what he saw beneath the fingernails of his right hand. A dark substance, reddish-black.
He stared at this material for a long time, reluctant to take steps to determine if it was real or hallucinated.
Finally he used the thumbnail of his left hand to scrape out a small portion of the matter that was trapped under the nail of his right thumb. The stuff proved slightly moist, gummy.
Hesitantly, he brought the smear to his nose. He sniffed it once, twice, and though the scent was faint, he didn’t need to smell it again.
Ethan had blood under all five nails of his right hand. With a certainty seldom given to any man who understood the world to be a most uncertain place, he knew that this would prove to be his own blood.
CHAPTER 4 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)
PALOMAR LABORATORIES IN NORTH Hollywood occupied a sprawling single-story concrete-slab building with such small and widely spaced windows and with such a low and slightly pitched sheet-metal roof that it resembled a bunker in the storm.
The medical-lab division of Palomar analyzed blood samples, Pap smears, biopsies, and other organic materials. In their industrial division, they performed chemical analyses of every variety for both private-sector and government clients.
Each year, fans of the Face sent over a quarter of a million pieces of mail to him, mostly in care of his studio, which forwarded weekly batches of this correspondence to the publicity firm that responded to it in the star’s name. Among those letters were gifts, including more than a few homemade foods: cookies, cakes, fudge. Fewer than one in a thousand fans might be sufficiently deranged to send poisoned brownies, but Ethan nevertheless operated on the better-safe-than-sorry principle: All foodstuffs must be disposed of without sampling by anyone.
Occasionally, when a homemade treat from a fan arrived with a particularly suspicious letter, the edible goodie would not be at once destroyed but would be passed along to Ethan for a closer look. If he suspected contamination, he brought the item here to Palomar to be analyzed.
When a total stranger could work up sufficient hatred to attempt to poison the Face, Ethan wanted to know that the bastard existed. He subsequently cooperated with authorities in the poisoner’s hometown to bring whatever criminal charges might be sustained in court.
Now, proceeding first to the public reception lounge, he signed a form authorizing them to draw his blood. Lacking a doctor’s order for tests, he paid cash for the analyses he required.
He requested a basic DNA profile. “And I want to know if any drugs are present in my body.”
“What drugs are you taking?” the receptionist asked.
“Nothing but aspirin. But I want you to test for every possible substance, in case I’ve been drugged without my knowledge.”
Perhaps in North Hollywood they were accustomed to encounters with full-blown paranoids. The receptionist didn’t roll her eyes, raise an eyebrow, or in any other way appear to be surprised to hear him suggest that he might be the victim of a wicked conspiracy.
The medical technician who drew his sample was a petite and lovely Vietnamese woman with an angel’s touch. He never felt the needle pierce the vein.
In another reception lounge provided for the delivery of samples unrelated to standard medical tests, he filled out a second form and paid another fee. This receptionist did give him an odd look when he explained what he wanted to have analyzed.
At a lab table, under harsh fluorescent lights, a technician who resembled Britney Spears used a thin but blunt steel blade to scrape the blood from under the fingernails of his right hand, onto a square of acid-free white paper. Ethan hadn’t trimmed his nails in over a week, so she retrieved a significant number of shavings, some of which still appeared to be gummy.
His hand trembled throughout the process. She probably thought her beauty made him nervous.
The material from under his fingernails would first be tested to determine if it was indeed blood. Thereafter it would be conveyed to the medical-lab division to be typed and to have the DNA profile compared to the blood sample that the Vietnamese technician had drawn. Full toxicological results wouldn’t be ready until Wednesday afternoon.
Ethan didn’t understand how he could have his own blood under his fingernails when he had not, after all, been shot in the gut and the chest. Yet as migrating geese know south from north without the aid of a compass, he knew this blood was his.
CHAPTER 5 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)
IN THE PALOMAR PARKING LOT, AS THE rain and the wind painted a procession of colorless spirit shapes on the windshield of the Expedition, Ethan placed a call to Hazard Yancy’s cell phone.
Hazard had been born Lester, but he loathed his given name. He didn’t like Les any better. He thought the shortened version sounded like an insult.
“I’m not less of anything than you are,” he’d once said to Ethan, but affably.
Indeed, at six feet four and 240 pounds, with a shaved head that appeared to be as big as a basketball and a neck only slightly narrower than the span of his ears, Hazard Yancy was nobody’s idea of a poster child for minimalism.
“Fact is, I’m more of a lot of things than some people. Like more determined, more fun, more colorful, more likely to make stupid choices in women, more likely to be shot in the ass. My folks should have named me More Yancy. I could’ve lived with that.”
When he had been a teenager and a young man, his friends had called him Brick, a reference to the fact that he was built like a brick wall.
Nobody in Robbery/Homicide had called him Brick in twenty years. On the force, he was known as Hazard because working a case in tandem with him could be as hazardous as driving a dynamite truck.
Gumshoe duty in Robbery/Homicide might be more dangerous than a career as a greengrocer, but detectives were less likely to die on the job than were night clerks in convenience stores. If you wanted the thrill of being shot at on a regular basis, the Gang Activities Section, the Narcotics Division, and certainly the Strategic Weapons and Tactics teams were better bets than cleaning up after murderers.
Even just staying in uniform promised more violence than hitting the streets in a suit.
Hazard’s career was an exception to the rule. People shot at him with regularity.
He professed surprise not at the frequency with which bullets were directed at him, but at the fact that the shooters were people who didn’t know him personally. “Being a friend of mine,” he once said, “you’d think it would be the other way around, wouldn’t you?”
Hazard’s uncanny attraction for high-velocity projectiles wasn’t a consequence of either recklessness or poor investigative technique. He was a careful, first-rate detective.
In Ethan’s experience, the universe didn’t always operate like the clockwork mechanism of cause and effect that the scientists so confidently described. Anomalies abounded. Deviations from the common rule, strange conditions, incongruities.
You could make yourself a little crazy, even certifiable, if you insisted that life always proceed according to some this-because-that system of logic. Occasionally you had to accept the inexplicable.
Hazard didn’t choose his cases. Like other detectives, he fielded what fate threw at him. For reasons known only to the secret master of the universe, he caught more investigations involving perps who were trigger-happy wackos than he caught cases in which genteel elderly women served poisoned tea to their gentlemen friends.
Fortunately, most shots fired at him missed. He’d been hit just twice: both minor wounds. Two of his partners had sustained injuries more serious than Hazard’s, but neither had died or been crippled.
Ethan had worked cases with Hazard during four years of his time on the force. That period constituted the most satisfying police work he’d ever done.
Now, when Yancy answered his cell phone on the third ring, Ethan said, “You still sleeping with an inflatable woman?”
“You applying for the position?”
“Hey, Hazard, you busy right now?”
“Got my foot on a snot-wad’s neck.”
“Literally?” Ethan asked.
“Figuratively. Was it literally, I’d be stomping his windpipe, and you’d have been forwarded to voice mail.”
“If you’re about to make a collar—”
“I’m waiting for a comeback from the lab. Won’t get it until tomorrow morning.”
“How about you and I have lunch, and Channing Manheim pays?”
“As long as that doesn’t oblige me to watch any of his shitcan movies.”
“Everyone’s a critic.” Ethan named a famous west-side restaurant where the Face had a standing reservation.
“They have real food or just interior decoration on a plate?” Hazard asked.
“There’s going to be fancy carved zucchini cups full of vegetable mousseline, baby asparagus, and patterns drawn with sauces,” Ethan admitted. “Would you rather go Armenian?”
“Do I have a tongue? Armenian at one o’clock?”
“I’ll be the guy looks like an ex-cop trying to pass for smart.”
When he pressed end, terminating the call, Ethan was surprised that he had managed to sound entirely normal.
His hands no longer trembled, but cold greasy fear still crawled restlessly through every turning of his guts. In the rearview mirror, his eyes weren’t entirely familiar to him.
Ethan engaged the windshield wipers. He drove out of the Palomar Laboratories parking lot.
In the witches’ cauldron of the sky, late-morning light brewed into a thick gloom more suitable to a winter dusk.
Most drivers had switched on their headlights. Bright phantom serpents wriggled across the wet black pavement.
With an hour and fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, Ethan decided to pay a visit to the living dead.
CHAPTER 6 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)
OUR LADY OF ANGELS HOSPITAL WAS A tall white structure with ziggurat-style step-backs in its higher floors, crowned with a series of diminishing plinths that supported a final column. Aglow in the storm, a dome light capped the high column and was itself surmounted by a radio mast with a winking red aircraft-warning beacon.
The hospital seemed to signal mercy to sick souls across the Angelean hills and into the densely populated flatlands. Its tapered shape suggested a rocket ship that might carry to Heaven those whose lives could not be saved either by medicine or by prayer.
Ethan first stopped in the men’s lavatory off the ground-floor lobby, where he washed his hands vigorously at one of the sinks. The lab technician had not scraped every trace of blood from under his fingernails.
The liquid soap in the dispenser proved to have a strong orange fragrance. The lavatory smelled like a citrus orchard by the time that he finished.
Much hot water and much rubbing left his skin a boiled red. He could see no slightest stain remaining. Nevertheless Ethan felt that his hands were still unclean.
He was troubled by the disturbing notion that as long as even a few molecules of that stigmatic residue of his foretold death clung to his hands, the Reaper would track him down by smell and cancel the reprieve that had been granted to him.
Studying his reflection in the mirror, he half expected to see through his body, as through a sheer curtain, but he was solid.
Sensing in himself the potential for obsession, concerned that he might wash his hands without surcease, until they were scrubbed raw, he quickly dried them on paper towels and left the men’s room.
He shared an elevator with a solemn young couple holding hands for mutual strength. “She’ll be all right,” the man murmured, and the woman nodded, eyes bright with repressed tears.
When Ethan got off at the seventh floor, the young couple rode farther up to higher misery.
Duncan “Dunny” Whistler had been abed here on the seventh floor for three months. Between confinements to the intensive care unit—also on this floor—he was assigned to different rooms. During the five weeks since his most recent crisis, he’d been in Room 742.
A nun with a kind Irish face made eye contact with Ethan, smiled, and passed by with nary a swish of her voluminous habit.
The order of sisters that operated Our Lady of Angels rejected the modern garb of many nuns, which resembled the uniforms of airline flight attendants. They favored instead the traditional floor-length habits with commodious sleeves, guimpes, and winged wimples.
Their habits were radiant white, rather than white and black. When Ethan saw them gliding ethereally along these halls, seeming less to walk than to drift like spirits, he could almost believe that the hospital did not occupy only Los Angeles real estate, but bridged this world and the next.
Dunny had existed in a limbo of sorts, between worlds, ever since four angry men shoved his head in a toilet bowl once too often and held him under too long. The paramedics had pumped the water out of his lungs, but the doctors hadn’t been able to stir him from his coma.
When Ethan arrived at Room 742, he found it in deep shadow. An old man rested in the bed nearest the door: unconscious, hooked to a ventilator that pumped air into him with a rhythmic wheeze.
The bed nearest the window, where Dunny had spent the past five weeks, stood unoccupied. The sheets were crisp, fresh, luminous in the gloom.
Drowned daylight projected vague gray images of ameboid rain tracks from the window glass onto the bed. The sheets appeared to be acrawl with transparent spiders.
When he saw that the patient’s chart was missing, Ethan figured that Dunny had been moved to another room or transferred to the ICU yet again.
At the seventh-floor nurses’ station, when he inquired as to where he might find Duncan Whistler, a young nurse asked him to wait for the shift supervisor, whom she paged.
Ethan knew the supervisor, Nurse Jordan, from previous visits. A black woman with a drill sergeant’s purposeful carriage and the soft smoky voice of a chanteuse, she arrived at the nurses’ station with the news that Dunny had passed away that morning.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Truman, but I called both numbers you gave us and left voice-mail messages.”
“When would this have been?” he asked.
“He passed away at ten-twenty this morning. I phoned you about fifteen or twenty minutes later.”
At approximately ten-forty, Ethan had been at Rolf Reynerd’s apartment door, trembling with the memory of his foreseen death, pretending to be looking for the nonexistent Jim Briscoe. He’d left his cell phone in the Expedition.
“I know you weren’t that close to Mr. Whistler,” said Nurse Jordan, “but it’s still something of a shock, I’m sure. Sorry you had to learn this way—the empty bed.”
“Was the body taken down to the hospital garden room?” Ethan asked.
Nurse Jordan regarded him with new respect. “I didn’t realize you were a police officer, Mr. Truman.”
Garden room was cop lingo for morgue. All those corpses waiting to be planted.
“Robbery/Homicide,” he replied, not bothering to explain that he had left the force, or why.
“My husband’s worn out enough uniforms to retire in March. I’m workin’ overtime so I don’t go crazy.”
Ethan understood. Cops often went through long law-enforcement careers without worrying much about the dust-to-dust-ashes-to-ashes business, only to tighten with tension so much in the last months before retirement that they needed to eat Metamucil by the pound to stop retaining. The worry could be even worse for spouses.
“The doctor signed a certification of death,” Nurse Jordan said, “and Mr. Whistler went down to cold holding pending mortuary pickup. Oh … actually, it won’t be a mortuary, will it?”
“It’s a murder now,” Ethan said. “The medical examiner’s office will want him for an autopsy.”
“Then they’ll have been called. We’ve got a foolproof system.” Checking her watch, she said, “But they probably haven’t had time to take custody of the body yet, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Ethan rode the elevator all the way down to the dead. The garden room was in the third and lowest level of the basement, adjacent to the ambulance garage.
Descending, he was serenaded by an orchestrated version of an old Sheryl Crow tune with all the sex squeezed out of it and with a perkiness squeezed in, retaining only the skin of the melody to wrap a different and less tasty variety of sausage. In this fallen world, even the most insignificant things, like pop tunes, were inevitably corrupted.
He and Dunny, both thirty-seven now, had been each other’s best friends from the age of five until they were twenty. Raised in the same worn-down neighborhood of crumbling stucco bungalows, each had been an only child, and they’d been as close as brothers.
