When we reached my house, Pike let me out at the mouth of my carport. He spoke for the first time since we had left Venice.
He said, "It was the word, sad. Sad has an ugly weight."
I knew right away what he was saying, and knew he was right.
"Yes. It was when Golden said Faustina seemed sad. He wasn't just a stiff on a slab anymore. He was real, and what he felt was real. You're right about that word."
"You want to go grab a beer or something?"
"No, I'm good," I said.
"We could go back to Golden's. Put two in his head for using that word."
"Let's quit while we're ahead."
I got out, closed his door, but didn't watch Pike drive away.
My house was quiet, and empty. For the first time that day, I thought about Lucy. I wanted to hear her voice. I wanted to say something funny, and be rewarded with her laugh. I wanted to tell her about Herbert Faustina, and let her help me carry the weight of that word-sad. I wanted everything to be as it had been between us because if only I had her then maybe this business about Faustina wouldn't feel so important.
But Lucy and Ben weren't inside and they weren't down the hill in their apartment. They were two thousand miles away, building a new life.
I checked the phone, but no one had left a message. I washed my hands, took a Falstaff from the fridge, then put out fresh food for the cat. I called him.
"Hey, buddy. You here?"
I opened the French doors to the deck and called him again, but he did not appear.
I leaned against the kitchen counter. The phone was three feet away. I went into the living room and turned on the tube. Maybe the Red Light Assassin had racked up another score. I went back to the phone, dialed most of Lucy's number, then stopped, not because I was scared but because I didn't want her to hurt and that was the way she wanted it. It should have been easy; just stop pretending that she wanted to hear my voice as much as I wanted to hear hers.
After a while, I opened another Falstaff, then decided to take care of the unfinished business.
Carol Starkey
It was almost ten that night when Starkey idled past Elvis Cole's house, trying to work up the nerve to stop. His car was in its usual place, his house was lit, and her palms were as damp as the first time she faced down a bomb when she was a rookie tech with LAPD's Bomb Squad.
Starkey, pissed at herself, said, "Jesus Christ, moron, just stop for Christ's sake. He's home. You drove all the way up here."
The entire drive up from Mar Vista, Starkey had badgered herself as to what she would do and how she would do it: She would knock on his door, bring him over to the couch, and sit his ass down. She was gonna say, Hey, listen to me, I'm being serious-I like you and I think you think I'm cool, too, so let's stop pretending we're only friends and act like adults, okay?-and then she would kiss him and hope to hell he didn't toss her out on her ass.
Starkey said, "All you gotta do is stop, go to the door, and do if."
Starkey didn't stop. She crept past his house on the crappy little road, turned around in a gravel drive, then eased back with her lights off like some kind of lunatic stalker pervert, talking to herself the entire time because-her shrink said-hearing another human voice was better than hearing no voice at all, even if it was your own.
Touchy-feely bullshit.
Starkey parked up the street from Cole's house so she could keep an eye on things while she got herself together. If he came out he probably wouldn't recognize her car. Jesus, if Cole caught her sitting out here she would drive right off the cliff, no shit, just flat out punch the gas and pull a hard left straight down to the center of the earth and never come back.
"Cole," she said. "You must be the densest man in Los Angeles and I am certainly the most pathetic female, so why can't we just get on with this?"
Starkey felt around for her cigarettes and was disgusted to find she had only eight or nine left. They wouldn't last long. She lit one, sucked down half with