said. “Until we understand more of this, what this is about.”
Angel shook his head. “I don’t care what it’s about,” he said. He set out back toward the waterfront and all the Sailors.
Jimmy crossed the empty foyer of the Mark.
There it was again. Hope. It was all over Angel. He was walking with it like it was his new best friend. Jimmy hadn’t run after Les Paul because he wouldn’t have known what to say to him if he caught him. He saw the look on the boy’s face when Angel had said his sister was alive.
The kid knew she was dead. He knew. He was her brother. He knew.
And now Jimmy was back to knowing it, too. Lucy was dead. Angel had talked himself into something.
Angel had hope. Sometimes it gives you perfect vision, sometimes it blinds you.
It all made Jimmy’s head hurt. It made him want to lie down. Sleep. He looked over at the first-floor sitting room as he went past, the big pink divans. He had tried all night, through all the death and death talk, through the gathering storm, not to think about Mary, to keep it in some safe spot, the way when something is really good you don’t want to connect it to the world, you don’t want to dirty it, you want to leave it where it is, perfect. He wanted to let a day or two go by, to think on all of it. To think of her. Of them. He wanted it to be waiting for him, whenever he got through with this, whatever this was.
The last thing he wanted was to see her again now.
But there she was.
Mary stood in the corner of the sitting room. The far corner. She had changed her clothes from what she wore on the dock, the last time he saw her. She was wearing black pants and a long coat, a coat that seemed too heavy for the night, for the season. She looked severe.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
She took his hand but then let it go a second later, self-conscious. Even if there was no one there to see anything.
“Can I stay with you?” she said. It was a line she’d never said to him.
But if she wanted rescue, she came to the right guy.
He didn’t ask any questions. He took her hand and led her away, across the lobby, toward the elevator.
They got in. He didn’t want her to say anything else. He didn’t want to know what it was. At least not out here, not now.
But she said it anyway. “He knows about you,” she said, as the elevator doors closed.
Jimmy just pushed the button for the fifteenth floor.
“When I came home—”
Before anything happened, the doors opened again, as if he’d pushed the wrong button.
Four men. In dark suits.
The biggest one was Red Steadman. Walter E. C. “Red” Steadman. He flashed blue, strong blue. It made Jimmy take a step back and take Mary with him, though he knew she wouldn’t have seen what he saw. The blue.
Steadman. From the deck behind the house in Angeles Forest that night. From other nights.
At Steadman’s side was a portly man with a briefcase in hand, a short man as far around as he was tall. (Who had also been on the deck that night.) On the other side was an average man of average size. He wore a hat, or carried it in his hand, a gentleman, if one out of another time. He nodded to Jimmy, all polite, familiar. As if they were all just fellow guests of the Mark. The fourth was a thug of some kind, but a well-dressed one.
They stepped forward into the elevator. The thug made it one too many. The average man flicked his hand, and the thug stepped out again. The doors closed.
It was Steadman who reached across and pushed the button for the sixteenth floor.
“We’re just above you,” he said.
Jimmy had let go of Mary’s hand, but he could feel her trembling beside him. Staring straight ahead.
Steadman seemed to catch the scent of her perfume but never looked at her directly.
“Did you get your flo wers?” Steadman said. He slowly turned to look at Jimmy. “Did we all get them?”
Jimmy shrugged.
“Interesting gesture,” Steadman said, looking forward again. “What do we think of it?”
“I don’t think anything.”
“Must be . . . new management,” Steadman said.
It was a long few silent seconds before the doors opened again. At fifteen. The men moved aside to let Jimmy