False Conception Read online

  When he had me where he wanted me, he rolled me onto my back again. There was enough moonlight falling through the fog for me to see that he was tall and lean and handsome, more of “Gunsmoke” or “Bonanza” than Unforgiven. The grin on his face told me he was enjoying his work; the bandanna in his hand indicated he wasn’t finished.

  “Do I need to use this?” he asked when he was certain I was helpless. “Or are you going to be sensible?”

  “I’m going to be whatever you want me to be,” I said.

  “Good.” He stuffed the bandanna in his back pocket. “Let’s go where we can talk.”

  “How about the police station?”

  His lips didn’t stretch a millimeter. “I suppose that’s funny.”

  “It is in this neighborhood.”

  “I don’t like funny.”

  “I’ll curb my impulses.”

  With the ease that comes with strength and experience, he grabbed a wrist and jerked me to my feet—my arms threatened to pop off my shoulders. When I was standing at his side, he gave me a shove. “The F-one fifty.”

  I banged against a tree to keep upright. “What?”

  He gestured. “The pickup. Get in it. We’re going for a ride.”

  I considered the situation. “How do I get there’?”

  “Hop.”

  And I did, making like Christopher Rabbit as I was shanghaied off a city street within screaming distance of my home. The wiry wrangler herding me along and the rusty pickup that was my destination gave the scene an air of silliness that allowed me to be less intimidated than I should have been.

  He opened the dented door and shoved me inside the truck. “Where are we going?” I asked as he lifted my feet into the cab. “Laramie?”

  Ignoring my quip, he went to the other door and got in beside me. The engine fired with a noise loud enough to provoke calls to 911 on any street north of Market.

  The first bad sign was geographical—he drove in the wrong direction, not north or west, toward civilization, but south down Third, toward the abandoned hulks of industry and the eager menace of gangland. When we were someplace south of Potrero Hill and west of Candlestick Park, he took some turns on streets that lacked visible names or lights and I lost my bearings in the dodge. When we pulled to a stop a few blocks later, we could have been in Hiroshima in the summer of ’45.

  The air smelled of salt and fish and something tar more fetid; the sounds were of speeding vehicles and climbing jets, which put us near the Bayshore and the airport. Somewhere someone was playing riffs and runs on a trumpet. I hoped his repertoire didn’t include taps.

  The cowboy leaned against the door and looked at me. In the feeble light from the dashboard, his features were clean-cut and seamless, his eyes hooded and wary beneath the brim of his brown hat. His mouth was curled down in petulance, as if he were a TV star I’d failed to recognize even though his series had just been picked up for a second season.

  “Know who I am?” he asked, a faint twang adding to the filmic aura he projected.

  “I’d say you were Luke Drummond.”

  “Right.”

  “What can I do for you, Luke? Give you some tips on rustling?”

  “I told you I don’t like funny. What you can do is stop messing with my life.”

  “I wasn’t aware that I was.”

  “We had everything fixed up, then you come along and get everyone all excited and turn everything upside down. So now I’m telling you to quit. Just back off and wheel your horse around and go the other way. Leave us the hell alone.”

  “I’m not sure I can do that, Luke. The situation on Santa Ana has been ignored for too long already—it’s time for the truth to come out. Plus, I have a contract.”

  His smile was thin and nerveless. “So do I.”

  “Really? Who with?”

  “Never mind. But if the money don’t start up again real soon, it’s gonna be your ass.”

  “It would help if I knew what money you were talking about. Is it the money Stuart was paying your mother? Or the money Ethan Brennan embezzled?”

  “You don’t need to know about any of that. All you need to know is that the Colberts are none of your affair anymore.”

  “Even if I quit, it doesn’t mean things will be back the way they were.”

  “They’ll get there in due time. Just so you keep out of it.”

  “Who are you working for, Luke? Rutherford Colbert?”

  “I’m just keeping things straight, like always. Which is what they were till you came along.”

  I shrugged as best I could. “It would help if I knew exactly what you want.”

  “Money.”

  “What money?”

  “The money we been promised.”

  “What for?”

  “For what we did for them. Where’s Clara?”

  “Clara who?”

  “You know damned well.”

  “I don’t know where she is. I was hoping you did.”

  “Well, I don’t. They think I do, but I don’t. I’m about to find her, though; you can bet on it.”

  “What are you going to do when you do?”

  “That’s none of your concern. Where is she?”

  “I told you I don’t know. Who is it that thinks you know where she is? Cynthia?”

  He didn’t acknowledge the question. “Get out of the truck.”

  When I didn’t move, he got out of his side and trotted around to mine and opened the door and dragged me onto the street. When I was standing beside him he reached into the truck bed and pulled out another length of rope, this one coiled as if it had been slung from a saddle.

  “Guess I got to jog your memory,” he said as he flipped out a length of ten feet or so.

  “I don’t know where she is, Luke. I’ve been looking for her myself. Ask anyone. Ask your mother-in-law.”

  I might as well have been talking with Trigger. With practiced ease, Luke threaded the second rope around my chest and under my arms, then formed a loop and cinched it tight above my sternum. “You see many cowboy movies, mister?” he asked as he worked.

  “Double feature every Saturday for a dime,” I said.

  “Who’s your favorite?”

  “Of the old guys? Hopalong Cassidy.”

  “Who else?”

  “Rex Allen.”

  “Who else?”

  “Johnny Mack Brown.”

  “Bullshit. Nobody liked Johnny Mack Brown.”

  “I did,” I objected. “How about you?”

  “Lash LaRue,” he said. “He had the best outfit.”

  He tugged on the end of the rope and towed me toward the rear of the pickup. I was still searching madly for an escape route when Luke leaned down and tied his end around the trailer hitch. Suddenly I started to sweat.

  “You don’t need to do this,” I said.

  “Mom says I do.”

  “You’ll end up in jail.”

  “Not if you learn your lesson.”

  He got back in the truck and started it up. As I yelled for him to stop, he rammed the truck in gear, popped the clutch, and spun the wheels to get purchase on the dusty pavement. An instant later I was jerked off my feet and dragged down the street just the way they used to do in the movies, when the guy being towed behind the horse usually ended up dead.

  I was too frightened to feel pain, too desperate to do anything but twist and writhe to keep from being pulverized by the pitted slabs of concrete on which I bounced like a tin can being towed behind a limo with JUST MARRIED on the window.

  The cement tore at my clothes like the fingers of a frenzied mob. Rocks stabbed my chest like a dozen pointed darts. The dirt and dust were blinding, clogging my nose and mouth, stinging my eyes, creating the sensation of drowning in a vat of evaporated milk. Bit by bit my clothes wore away at the hip and calf, and then my shoes were gone and my flesh was scraped away as well. I rolled from belly to back to belly, trying to minimize contact with the pavement, trying to stave off concus
sion as the fumes from the exhaust pipe threatened to kill me more quickly than the road.

  As the truck turned a corner I skidded across an impromptu shortcut until I was knocked back to the center wake by a collision with a fire hydrant; I figured I’d be lucky if only my leg was broken. In the aftermath, I traveled for half a block on my elbow and hip. About then I switched my focus from trying to stay alive to trying to escape before I collided with something that would render me senseless.

  The principles of martial arts advise you to use your opponent’s strength against him. At the moment, my opponent was a rock-hard expanse of concrete. Clearly the thing to do was use its roughhewn surface to tear away something besides epidermis. Didn’t it all seem simple?

  The effort was all-consuming. I used muscles I didn’t know I had, muscles that hadn’t been summoned to full force in years, muscles that burned and knotted and screamed against me. Fueled by fear and instructed by pain, when the truck slowed at the next intersection I managed to twist to my side, then roll a half-turn up the tow rope and hook it with my legs, so that the strand that attached me to the truck was between my shoulder and the roadway.

  The task was to stay there long enough for the street to serve as a scalpel. Which it did, eventually, although this particular scalpel was blunt and dull, so it seemed to take forever to make its cut. But as my muscles were about to break down under the strain, and I was about to yield to my fate and let my predicament have its way with me, the rope was severed with a sigh and I rolled to a stop somewhere in the middle of a mine-dark block of loading docks in the nether reaches of a city that seemed as alien as Mars. The only stars I could see were inside my head.

  I don’t know if Luke knew or cared that I’d escaped, but no brake lights flashed and no gear ground into reverse and eventually the truck swerved left and disappeared. I was alone with my heaving lungs and scalded flesh and a cascade of pain the like of which I hadn’t experienced since I’d been gut-shot and left for dead in an alley south of Broadway some dozen years before.

  I had problems other than pain to deal with: my hands and feet were bound; my clothing was more a net than a garment; my eyes were filled with grit. I tugged against the leather thongs without result, then scraped my ankles against the curb to slide the hobbles off them. The latter process was the more productive and in less than five minutes my feet were free and I could stand, but it was not a painless process.

  I was staggering down the block, working at the tangle of wrists and leather behind my back and looking for an edge sharp enough to cut my bonds, when a car turned the corner and crawled my way like a panther downwind of fresh blood. The car was a black Infiniti, lowered, chromed, and tinted, its occupants a blur behind the smoky windshield. When it got to my flank, it stopped; the window wound down with a whine.

  “Hey, dude. What’s happening?” he asked with exaggerated friendliness, his eyes whipping left and right to make certain we were alone. With no rescuers in sight, he focused on my clothing. “Taking the grunge thing too far, dude.”

  I wanted to laugh but decided I shouldn’t.

  He was Asian, as were his three associates, his eyes as bright as his black satin shirt, his Giants cap backward on his head, the hands on the wheel shoved into gloves with no tips on the fingers.

  “Just a stroll in the moonlight,” I said. “But I appreciate the fashion tip.”

  “You’re fucked up, man. Got blood all over you.”

  “I’m a little fucked up,” I agreed.

  “Tied up, too. Who rattled you, man?”

  “Some cowboy.”

  His eyes flipped left. “A crip? Where is he?”

  I gestured south with my chin. “Try the Cow Palace.”

  He paused to think it over. One of his buddies gave him some advice in a language I didn’t understand.

  He reached for something on the seat beside him, then held it out the window and flipped it open for me to see. “You probably like to make a call. For a cab, or something.” The cellular phone fit in his hand like a sap.

  “A call would be nice.”

  “Yeah, well, the thing is, this is a pay phone.”

  “I thought it might be. What’s the toll?”

  “All you got.”

  I looked at my ragged pants. “I’m not sure I have anything anymore.”

  “Tommy will check it out.”

  The passenger door opened and Tommy got out. He was a clone of the driver except his shirt was a numbered pullover and it hung below his knees. He frisked me quickly and I didn’t resist. As his hands roamed my hip and ribs, it felt like I’d been boiled.

  When he found my wallet, he got out a knife and cut it out of my pants. He took out all the currency, then looked for credit cards. “Where’s the plastic, man?”

  “Don’t use it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too many pay phones in the world.”

  Tommy was pissed enough to cut me but the driver called him off. “Too many cowboys, too, looks like. Here. You bought it.” As Tommy climbed back in the car, the driver tossed the phone at me. As it hit my chest and clattered to the pavement, he buzzed up the window and eased down the street as efficiently as an eel.

  I flipped the phone on its back with my stockinged foot, then got down on my knees and used my nose to call an ambulance.

  CHAPTER 26

  My leg wasn’t broken; nothing was fractured but my pride. My skin was scraped and scabbed, my joints strained and hyperextended, my muscles cramped and pulled, my tendons stretched, my ligaments torn. But I was whole, if warped and wounded, and I was cleaned and disinfected and stitched and bandaged, and I was allowed to go home even though I had sustained a mild concussion. I told the nurse I’d fallen off my bicycle, but she didn’t believe me for a minute.

  I didn’t confront a mirror till I got to my apartment. When I did, I thought I was looking at a Christmas tree with too much flocking and too many felt bows and red ornaments. Forbidden Scotch because of the pain pills they’d given me for my contusions, I made do with a cup of hot chocolate and a bag of Fig Newtons as pacifiers. Since there was no way I was going to be able to sleep, I scanned the TV listings to see what they offered as an anesthetic at 2 A.M.

  My home number is listed. Most private eyes don’t do that, for the same reason cops and lawyers don’t do it, but I figure it’s more important to be available when someone needs me than to avoid the occasional jolt of jeopardy that comes from a dissatisfied customer on the other end of the line. People who need help generally need it now, and people with a bone-deep grudge won’t let an unlisted number keep them from extracting a pound of flesh in atonement.

  All of which is to say, when the phone rang as I was in my pajamas and settling in to a reprise of Touch of Evil on AMC, I almost didn’t answer it. I figured it was Betty, in one of her bouts with insomnia, and although my initial reaction was to hope she was calling to suggest that our new relationship might have room in it for some recreational sex, in the next instant I knew that, at most, she just wanted more talk. To tell me what and why I did what I did, which of my childhood traumas were pivotal and what they forecast for my future, and why men are such layabouts and louts when they’re not cuddly teddy bears in the interim.

  I answered anyway; it wasn’t Betty.

  “Mr. Tanner?”

  “Speaking.”

  “The detective?”

  “During normal business hours.”

  “It’s late; I know. I’m sorry. This is—”

  “How are you, Ms. Hammond?” I interrupted. “Or are you back to Brennan these days?”

  “I understand you’ve been looking for me.” Her tone would have drilled through tooth enamel.

  I put the phone in the hand that wasn’t bandaged. “Among other people,” I said.

  “You mean you’re looking for someone else as well?”

  “I mean other people are looking for you.”

  “Oh? Who?”

  “The entire population of
Santa Ana Way, for one. Your ex-husband, for another.”

  “I see.”

  “I hope you’re not surprised. Given what you’ve done.”

  “No. I suppose not.” Her tone turned hostile. “The only thing I’m surprised about is you.”

  “How so?” I asked, though of course I knew the answer.

  “When you found me before, you were checking me out for Stuart, right? Just taking care of Colbert business.”

  My face reddened and my skin prickled even through the pain pills. “I … sort of, I admit. At first. But I wasn’t—”

  Her voice was as cold as my nurse’s hands. “You had a job to do and you did it. I understand completely. I’m sure your employer was titillated by the details.”

  “He didn’t get that kind of detail. It wasn’t part of the job.”

  Somewhere in the background, a siren wailed. Which meant she could be anywhere in the world.

  “It would be nice to believe that, I suppose,” she said softly. “Less humiliating, at least.”

  “That night wasn’t anything close to humiliation. Not as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Well that’s neither here nor there. Is it?”

  “I’d say it’s wherever we want to put it. So how are you?” I asked when she didn’t respond to my prompt.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I guess what I’m asking is whether you left Kirkham Street on your own.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “No one kidnaped you?”

  “What? Why would they?”

  It seemed pointless to list reasons. “No one’s listening to this conversation? No one’s telling you what to say?”

  “Does it sound like it?”

  “No, as a matter of fact.”

  She paused. “Well you sound kind of funny, come to think of it.”

  “I had a meeting with Luke this evening.”

  “What about?”

  “Your whereabouts, among other things.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Everything I knew. Which is nothing.” The final word fell victim to the recalcitrance of my swollen lips.