looking for a police surveillance team in one of the parked cars or for
a school of anchovies in a passing vehicle.
As he stepped inside and I closed the door behind him, I said, “Bitchin’
shirt.” He was wearing a red and gray volcanic-beach scene with blue
ferns, which looked totally cool over a long-sleeve black pullover.
“Made by Iolani, ” I said. “Coconut-husk buttons, 1955.” Instead of
commenting on my erudition with even as little as a roll of the eyes, he
headed for the kitchen, saying, “I saw Charlie Dai again.” The kitchen
was brightened only by the ashen face of the day pressed to the window
blinds, by the digital clocks on the ovens, and by two fat candles on
the table.
“Another kid is gone, ” Bobby said.
I felt a tremor in my hands once more, and I put the Glock on the
kitchen table. “Who, when? ” Snatching a Mountain Dew from the
refrigerator, where the standard light had been replaced with a
lower-wattage, pink-tinted bulb, Bobby said, “Wendy Dulcinea.”
“Oh, ” I said, and wanted to say more but couldn’t speak.
Wendy’s mother, Mary, is six years older than I am, when I was thirteen,
my parents paid her to give me piano lessons, and I had a devastating
crush on her. At that time, I was functioning under the delusion that I
would one day play rock-‘n’-roll piano as well as Jerry Lee Lewis, be a
keyboard-banging maniac who could make those ivories smoke. Eventually
my parents and Mary concluded and persuaded me that the likelihood of my
becoming a competent pianist was immeasurably less than the likelihood
of me levitating and flying like a bird.
“Wendy’s seven.” Bobby said. “Mary was taking her to school.
Backed the car out of the driveway. Then realized she’d forgotten
something in the house, went in to get it. When she came back two
minutes later, the car was gone. With Wendy.”
“No one saw anything? ” Bobby chugged the Mountain Dew, enough sugar to
induce in him a diabetic coma, enough caffeine to keep a long-haul
trucker awake through a five-hundred-mile run. He was legally wiring
himself for the ordeal ahead.
“No one saw or heard anything, ” he confirmed. “Neighborhood of the
blind and deaf. Sometimes I think there’s something going around more
contagious than your mom’s bug. We’ve got an epidemic of the shut-up
hunker-down-see-hear-smell-speak-no-evil influenza. Anyway, the cops
found Mary’s car abandoned in the service lane behind the Nine Palms
Plaza.” Nine Palms was a shopping center that lost all the tenants when
Fort Wyvern closed and took with it the billion dollars a year that it
had pumped into the county economy. These days the shop windows at Nine
Palms are boarded over, weeds bristle from cracks in the blacktop
parking lot, and six of the namesake palms are withered, brown, and so
dead that they have been abandoned by tree rats.
The chamber of commerce likes to call Moonlight Bay the Jewel of the
Central Coast. The town remains charming, graced with fine architecture
and lovely tree-lined streets, but the economic scars of Wyvern’s
closure are visible everywhere. The jewel is not as bright as it once
was.
“They searched all the empty shops in Nine Palms, ” Bobby said, “afraid
they’d find Wendy’s body, but she wasn’t there.”
“She’s alive, ” I said.
Bobby looked at me pityingly.
“They’re all alive, ” I insisted. “They have to be.” I wasn’t speaking
from reason now. I was speaking from my belief in miracles.
“Another crow, ” Bobby said. “Mary called it a blackbird. It was left on
the car seat. In the drawing, the bird is diving for prey.”
“Message? ”
” George Dulcinea will be my servant in Hell.” Mary’s husband was Frank
Dulcinea. “Who the hell is George? ”
“Frank’s grandfather. He’s dead now. Used to be a judge in the county
court system.”
“Dead how long? ”
“Fifteen years.” I was baffled and frustrated. “If this abb is
kidnapping for vengeance, what’s the point of nabbing Wendy to get even
with a man who’s been dead fifteen years? Wendy’s great-grandfather was
gone long before she was even born. He never knew her. How could you get