I stared down at the place where his body had been and imagined them facing each other against the Dumpsters. The gun came out, the victim resisted-
– bang-
I closed my eyes and saw it, the withered dead man suddenly alive and on his feet, facing an assailant hidden by shadows-
– bang-
– one shot pounded home low to the right of his sternum, missing his heart but ripping his arteries and lungs. The kinetic energy dumped into his body staggered him. A hydrostatic shock wave pulsed through his tissues along the wound channel, rupturing the cells nearest the wound and surfing the blood in his arteries straight to his brain. The spike of pressure blew out capillaries and shorted his senses; he went blind, deaf, and unconscious in a heartbeat, and he dropped in his tracks like a boxer stepping into a powerhouse hook. A larger gun-a.45 or.44-would have killed him instantly by rupturing the vessels in his brain with a hundred simultaneous strokes, but with the smaller gun, his consciousness slowly returned as Diaz found the alley. Pain and fear would have boiled up with his returning senses, and he had screamed and thrashed as she described. His vision and hearing returned. He was able to think again, and speak, even though he was dying. Someone had shot him, and then he was dying, but he hadn't told her who, or why-the most important thing in the world to him was to tell her he was my father and that he was trying to find me. To make up the lost years.
I bent to touch the ground.
Why me?
I searched the ground around the Dumpsters. The cops had been over it, but I looked again, searching a few feet in one direction, then the other, then along the far wall, trying to remember if the police had recovered a shell casing. I searched the sills of the delivery doors opposite the Dumpsters, found nothing, then worked my way back across the alley, looking into the cracks and pocks in the tarmac. The detectives and the criminalist had searched these same areas, but I looked anyway. Chipped tarmac, jagged brown glass that had once been a beer bottle, and weathered paper were spread evenly where the criminalist had left them. I let myself down into a push-up position to look under the first Dumpster, and saw a bright rectangle partially wedged between the Dumpster's left rear wheel and the wall. It seemed too obvious a thing for the police to have missed, but maybe the cleaning crews had dislodged it from a less obvious place when they sprayed down the area.
I pushed the Dumpster aside, then picked up the card at its edges. It was a plain blue plastic card with a white triangle pointing off one end beneath the words INSERT HERE. A magnetic strip ran the length of the card on the opposite side. I was pretty sure it was a key card like they use in hotels. The name of the hotel and the room number weren't printed on the card because you don't want a stranger knowing which room the key opens, but I thought the information might be readable on the magnetic strip. There might even be fingerprints.
I could have brought the card to Central Station and left it for Pardy and Diaz, but I didn't want to wait three days for results. I phoned an LAPD criminalist named John Chen. John and I had worked together in the past, but when I reached his office at the Scientific Investigations Division, they told me he had the day off. Perfect. I hung up, then phoned a detective I knew on the Hollywood Station Juvenile Section named Carol Starkey. Starkey had been a bomb technician with LAPD's Bomb Squad until some bad breaks made her change jobs, so she knew almost as much technical stuff as Chen.
When Starkey answered, she said, "You finally calling to ask me out?"
"No, I'm calling to see if you can recover information off a key card for me."
I explained about the card, the body, and what I was doing.
She said, "No shit? You think this guy is your father?"
"No, I don't think he's my father. I just want to find out what's on the card."
"Call Chen. Chen knows how to do that."
"Chen has the day off."
"Hang on."
She put me on hold. While I waited, I stacked the garbage bags the man in the pink shirt had