Little Dog Laughed (22 page)

“
Señor!
” Cortez-Ortiz reached for him. “The time.”

“I’ll make it,” Dave said. “I have to.”

He took the steps two at a time. Looming stoves, bread racks, counters, cupboards, rolling food carts made an obstacle course of the kitchen. Then he was on the wooden back stairs. He couldn’t take these two at a time. The spring was out of his legs. His wind was gone. His heart banged in his chest as if it wanted out. He wasn’t going to make it to the top. He had to stop and catch his breath. Cortez-Ortiz was younger, probably by ten years. He came on up.

“Are you ill?”

“Just out of shape,” Dave gasped.

“I will go,” Cortez-Ortiz said, and went.

Dave called after him, “Top floor, end of the hall, by the bathroom.” He swallowed in a dry throat, braced a hand on the wall, and began to climb again. But slowly. His legs were leaden. He reached the second floor, and Cortez-Ortiz, little more than a white blur, came down to him, fancy shoes rattling the steps. He caught a heel, almost fell.

“He broke the door,” he panted. “He is not there.”

“Good,” Dave said. “Let’s go.”

And gunfire, a lot of it, began out beyond the front of the house.

“
Madré de Dios
,” Cortez-Ortiz said. “They have come.” He looked this way, that way, panicky. “Where can we go?”

“Don’t worry,” Dave said, “it will end in a minute.”

“We have very few minutes at our disposal,
senor
.”

“Right. Come on.” Dave headed for the front staircase.

Cortez-Ortiz caught his jacket. “Not that way.”

“There’s no cover out the back,” Dave said. “We’d be clear targets for Zorn up there on the slopes.” He moved on past the open doors of the barracklike bedrooms. “There’s confusion out front. Maybe we won’t be noticed.”

Cortez-Ortiz remained planted in the hallway, hands to his head. “Is there no other choice?”

Dave turned back at the top of the stairs. “There’s one. Stay here and be blown up. Come on, general.”

Cortez-Ortiz moaned, but he moved. Dave started down the stairs, and the general’s beautiful shoes clattered on the tiles behind him. A mortar fired outside. Rifles snapped. Machine guns stammered. Flames crackled. And there came another sound. It so surprised Dave that he stopped. Cortez-Ortiz bumped into him. Dave turned his head to look into his face. “Do you hear what I think I hear?”

Cortez-Ortiz squinted. “You mean the helicopter?”

“It doesn’t fit,” Dave said. “Come on.” He turned at the jog in the stairs, took two more steps down, and jerked to a halt. Cortez-Ortiz behind him drew in his breath. One of Zorn’s
chuchos
stood in the doorway, holding an Uzi. Outside, something was burning, not in the courtyard itself but just beyond the gate. Dave couldn’t see what it was from here. Probably one of Zorn’s battered trucks. Whatever it was, it threw a strong, fitful red light. And by that light Dave saw the young man’s face, surprised, delighted, saw him aim the gun, saw his mouth spread in a laugh. He squeezed the trigger. Flame spurted from the barrel with each bullet. The bullets ricocheted, whining, off the flowered tiles of the staircase. For how long—half a second? Then they stopped. The young man toppled face forward into the entry hall, the gun clattering and spinning away from him across the tiles.

Two figures in jeans came at a run through the door. Dave knew the tall one right away, the one who shouted “Dave?” It was Cecil. He had the Sig Sauer automatic in his hand. The other was Bobby Shales. He held an Uzi. In a way that said he could use it again. “Come on, Mr. Brandstetter,” he said. Dave said, “Come on, general,” and turned. Cortez-Ortiz lay sprawled on his back on the stairs, five holes across the chest of his white jacket. His eyes were open, staring at nothing. Dave ran down the stairs. He grabbed Shales’s arm, Cecil’s arm. “Run like hell,” he said. “This place is going to blow up.”

The big brown helicopter swung wide circles over the ragged, burning ruins of Zorn’s house. The flames leaped high. Dave could feel the heat through the curved glass of the chopper. By the light of the fire, Duke Summers, in a flak jacket, studied detail maps on his knees, an officer in uniform leaning over him. Summers wore a headset, barked orders into it, listened, cursed, barked again. Dave judged he was having the time of his life. He and Cecil and Shales stared silently out the window at the action below. It was like a scene in hell. Dante would have loved it. Zorn’s guards had been loaded into trucks that were already tilting down the narrow crooked road among the big trees. Spurts of gunfire, the swing of spotlights up the tree-grown slopes showed that Summers’s people were rounding up the rest of Zorn’s men. With a grimace, Summers pulled off the headset. Dave shouted at him over the clamor of the rotors:

“Didn’t I say you could do anything you wanted?”

“I couldn’t let Zorn kill you,” Summers said.

Dave grinned. “Not when a good-looking young man came begging for your help.”

Shales’s poker face almost cracked a smile. Summers scowled and glanced nervously at the officer and the pilot. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dave asked Cecil, “What tipped you to where I was?”

“Not where you were,” Cecil said, “but who had you. Hilda Vosper. She saw the Blazer drive off with you in the back. I got home just after that. She was walking back with her dog, and saw me, and told me. It worried her. She said you didn’t look like you were sleeping—you looked hurt. I figured she was right. El Coronel’s commandos had you, didn’t they? And what was I to do? Couldn’t locate Leppard. Out of his bailiwick anyhow. Came to me you said you knew Duke Summers, and he lived at the Grovers. Closed up tight—but not the kitchen. I was invisible, wasn’t I? Put on a white coat, picked up a bucket of ice, and went to find Mr. Duke Summers.”

“You’re young for a Grovers waiter,” Dave said.

“Bobby thought so too.” Cecil grinned at Shales, who again almost smiled. “But I sweet-talked him, didn’t I?”

“We knew how to find this place,” Shales said. “Sorry it took so long to muster troops and ordnance.”

“Not too long,” Dave said, “thank God.” He gave Summers a wry salute.

Summers grouched, “This could cost me my career.”

“Crying on your cot again?” Dave said. “You saved Washington half a million dollars. They’ll give you a medal.” He turned to Cecil. “Just as a matter of curiosity, where were you, day before yesterday? Where did you go?”

“Vegas,” Cecil said. “Somebody had to save Chrissie. She couldn’t go back to her mother’s. Brenda was going to tip her off. Ken was going to rape her. County wanted to put her in a foster home.”

Dave stared. “You married her.”

Cecil grinned. “You got it.”

Turn the page to continue reading from the Dave Brandstetter Mysteries

H
E CROSSED AIRPORT TARMAC
in the rain, and climbed a cold, wet steel staircase to a DC-8. He had been waiting for this. Six days in Fresno were plenty. The death claims division of Sequoia Life had been right in their suspicions. They had hired him to find proof that what looked like death by accident in a fire at a small printing plant had been murder. The wife had killed the husband for his insurance. But digging out the proof had been slow going.

The aircraft smelled stale inside. Freshener sprayed through the ducts was trying to dispel the spent breath and smoke and body warmth of the load of passengers who had just got off, but the crowd boarding with him was bringing new smells of rain-damp clothing. He stowed attaché case and raincoat in an overhead compartment, then settled into a window seat and buckled his belt. The seat was in the non-smoking section. He was trying to quit.

The plane sat for half an hour by the terminal, and another twenty minutes out on a runway. Dave looked up from the pages of the in-flight magazine, now and then to gaze off at the rainy outline of the Sierras looming to the east. The plane lifted off, rain hissing against the small windows, at 10:40
A.M.,
and touched down in the rain at LAX at 11:25, so there was still something left of the day. Standing, waiting, at the luggage-go-round, he forgot and lit a cigarette, then remembered and dropped it and put a foot on it.

Outside, under a massive gray concrete overhang, he stood on cement, attaché case and grip at his feet, the raincoat hung over his shoulders because it was cold and damp as a tomb here. He watched cab drivers and airport cops scream at each other, watched jitneys stop and take on hotel-bound arrivals, watched passenger cars jockey for spaces at the curbs. Finally he saw Cecil’s flame-painted van, glossy with rain, picked up the bags, jogged to where it waited for him, the horns of twenty cars clamoring behind it.

Cecil leaned across, opened the door, grabbed the bags, dumped them into the back of the van. Dave climbed in and slammed the door. Cecil gave him a kiss, put the van in gear, they moved on, and the honking stopped—most of it. They inched along for a time in bumper-to-bumper traffic, then were on a broad, curving stretch of roadway swinging past looming glass and metal buildings, office complexes, hotels. Then they were on a boulevard and pointed northward. And Cecil said, “I was glad to get your call. Those taxi drivers, from what I hear, they’ll take you for every dime before they let you out at home. Drive you to Northridge, just to run up the meter.”

“Tell me about it,” Dave said. “Thanks for coming.”

Cecil stared ahead past the swinging windshield wipers that pushed aside the rain, pushed aside the rain, pushed aside the rain. Red traffic lights glowed at a broad intersection. He braked the van, glanced at Dave, and said, “I’ll come anytime you ask, anywhere. You know that.”

Dave nodded curtly. “I know that.”

“All you have to do”—Cecil moved the gearshift lever—“is ask.” The signal switched to go. He moved the van on across the intersection, and started it up a long slope ’tween green hills where abandoned oil pumps rusted in the rain. “I keep waiting for you to ask.”

He was a tall, gangly, good-looking black who worked as a field reporter in television news. He was twenty-five years old. Dave had met him on a case up the central coast a few years back. Later they had settled in together in Dave’s house. And worked together. Until Cecil had been shot almost to death, until Cecil had been forced to kill a man to save Dave’s life. After that he had gone back to the newsroom. Tried. But another case had forced him to help out again. He was smart and resourceful and had got Dave out of trouble. But he had made trouble for himself. It was still not over.

“You want to come back?” Dave said. “Come back. You were the one who left. It wasn’t my idea.”

“It was your idea to take Chrissie in,” Cecil said.”

“It was your idea to marry her.” Dave lit a cigarette with shaking hands. “I only wanted to shelter her till things could be worked out by the courts.”

“The courts.” Cecil stopped himself, pressed his mouth tight, drew in air through his nose. The van topped the long rise, and below lay the west side of the city, stretching miles in the rain, under tattered clouds, mountains off to the north, shrouded in mist. Cecil said, keeping tight control over his voice, “Did anybody ever tell you, you have ice water in your veins?”

“Several people.” Dave blew away smoke, groped for and found the ashtray in the blue dash. “On several occasions. Always when they knew I was right and they were wrong. Emotions doesn’t change facts. And they hated believing that.”

“I’ve told you from the start, it wasn’t emotion,” Cecil said. “Her father was dead, murdered, the only one who loved and cared for her. Her grandmother wouldn’t have let her come to harm, but she was dead too. Her damned mother wanted to control her so she could control all that money Chrissie had coming. You know what her mother is. Her mother’s boyfriend tried to rape Chrissie. The County wanted to put her in a foster home. Somebody had to do something.”

“You’ve told me,” Dave said.

“It was a cool, calculated decision,” Cecil said. “No emotion involved. Except yours. It only took a day to drive her to Las Vegas and marry her, so she’d be her own boss, and nobody could rip her off. She’s blind, Dave. She’s only seventeen years old, for Christ sake.”

“And that day,” Dave said, “was the first day of the rest of your life—right?”

“No way.” Cecil shook his head hard. “Dave, she’ll get over it. It’s a teen-age infatuation. She’ll get tired of me and ask out.” He braked the van behind a long line of rain-washed cars at the foot of the grade. “Not the rest of my life—no.”

“Yes—unless you tell her. You should never have let her take you to bed. You’ve got brains that absolutely stagger me. How could you be so stupid?”

“She was sad and lost and alone in the dark,” Cecil said. “She needed somebody to hold her.”

“And you think she’s going to get tired of that?”

“You did,” Cecil said. “You shut me right out.”

“It was your decision, not mine,” Dave said. “You are the dearest thing in life to me. You’re bright and funny and gentle and decent and full of life. And I will never get tired of you, and neither will Chrissie. It’s not up to her anyway. You’re the adult. Tell her the truth—that it was an act of kindness that got out of hand.”