side, so Vassago kicked him again, in the head this time. The guy was
out cold, as still as the pavement on which he was sprawled.
haired blond hooker in a miniskirt and a middle-aged guy in a cheap suit
and a bad toupee. They were coming out of the nearest room. They gaped
at the man on the ground. At Vassago. He stared back at them until
they reentered their room and quietly pulled the door shut behind them.
The unconscious man was heavy, maybe two hundred pounds, but Vassago was
more than strong enough to lift him. He carried the guy around to the
passenger side and loaded him into the other front seat.
Then he got behind the wheel, started the Pontiac, and departed the Blue
Skies.
Several blocks away, he turned onto a street of tract homes built thirty
years ago and aging badly. Ancient Indian laurels and coral trees
flanked the canted sidewalks and lent a note of grace in spite of the
neighborhood’s decline. He pulled the Pontiac to the curb. He switched
off the engine and the lights.
As no streetlamps were nearby, he removed his sunglasses to search the
unconscious man. He found a loaded revolver in a shoulder holster under
the guy’s jacket. He took it for himself.
The stranger was carrying two wallets. The first, and thicker,
contained three hundred dollars in cash, which Vassago confiscated. It
also held credit cards, photographs of people he didn’t know, a receipt
from a dry cleaner, a buy-ten-get-one-free punch card from a
frozen-yogurt shop, a driver’s license that identified the man as Morton
Redlow of Anaheim, and insignificant odds and ends. The second wallet
was quite thin, and it proved to be not a real wallet at all but a
leather ID holder. In it were Redlow’s license to operate as a private
investigator and another license to carry a concealed weapon.
In the glove compartment, Vassago found only candy bars and a paperback
detective novel. In the console between seats, he found chewing gum,
breath mints, another candy bar, and a bent Thomas Brothers map book of
Orange County.
He studied the map book for a while, then started the car and pulled
away from the curb. He headed for Anaheim and the address on Redlow’s
driver’s license.
When they were more than halfway there, Redlow began to groan and
twitch, as if he might come to his senses. Driving with one hand,
Vassago picked up the revolver he had taken off the man and clubbed him
alongside the head with it. Redlow was quiet again.
really like Friday afternoons, and you know why?” He didn’t give anyone
a chance to express a lack of interest. “Because Thursday night we
always have beans and pea soup, so by Friday afternoon you can really
cut some ripefarts.”
The other kids groaned in disgust. Regina just ignored him.
Nerd or not, Carl was right: Thursday dinner at St. Thomas’s Home for
Children was always split-pea soup, ham, green beans, potatoes in herb
butter sauce, and a square of fruited Jell-O with a blob of fake whipped
cream for dessert. Sometimes the nuns got into the sherry or just went
wild from too many years in their suffocating habits, and if they lost
control on a Thursday, you might get corn instead of green beans or, if
they were really over the top, maybe a pair of vanilla cookies with the
Jell-O.
That Thursday the menu held no surprises, but Regina would not have
cared-and might not have noticed-if the fare had included filet mignon
or, conversely, cow pies. Well, she probably would have noticed a cow
pie on her plate, though she wouldn’t have cared if it was substituted
for the green beans because she didn’t like green beans. She liked ham.
She had lied when she’d told the Harrisons she was a vegetarian,
figuring they would find dietary fussiness one more reason to reject her
flat-out, at the start, instead of later when it would hurt more.
But even as she ate, her attention was not on her food and not on the
conversation of the other kids at her table, but on the meeting in Mr.