He ate in the van, sitting on the bunk with the side door shut, a carton of rice and beans going cold on his knee.
Cleaners. He turned it over and over. It was the sensible answer and it took the legs out from under him, and he was honest enough to see that the second thing was why he did not like the first.
So he left it. He went back to what he could stand on.
Ray had a little book. Rosa had seen it. He wrote in it with the wrong hand. It was not in the van. It had not been on the bench in the photographs. Brooks had not mentioned one, and Brooks mentioned everything.
And somebody had been through a murder book six years ago and taken out whatever argued. People like that would not leave a retired detective’s notes lying in his garage.
So anything written down was gone. Ray would have known it would be. He had known he was followed. He had told a seventeen-year-old not to go near the truck.
What does a careful man do, when he knows the people who are coming will take every piece of paper he owns?
Thorsen looked up at the racking. Bin after bin, each with its label. A place for everything.
The pegboard.
It had been in his head for three days. One empty outline. He had seen it on Wednesday and been pleased with himself. Brooks had seen it a week earlier and been told it was nothing. Then the bar turned up in the van, and the empty shape explained itself, and everybody stopped looking at it.
But Ray had been driving out at night for a month. For a month that outline had been empty, in a garage belonging to a man who once went back to Pomona for a can opener. He could have hung the bar up each morning. He had chosen not to.
It was not a gap. It was the one thing in that room Ray had deliberately left wrong.
He went at midnight. He left the van on a side street two blocks uphill, facing down, and he took with him what he would not want to lose: the napkin, Brooks’s card, the cheap telephone, the peppermint tin with the other one in it. Ray’s torch from the glovebox. He put them in the deep pockets of the chore jacket and felt, for a moment, like a man with a house to lock.
There was no Tahoe on the street. He stood in the shadow of a jacaranda for ten minutes to be sure. Nine days of courtesy watch, and tonight nothing.
He did not care for that. He went in anyway.
The gate latch lifted with one finger. The house was dark, a single lamp at the back where Denise slept with her fan running. The garage side door was unlocked. The door’s unlocked, Danny. She had said it like a woman telling him where the bathroom was. He wondered now whether she had meant only that afternoon.
He shut it behind him and did not touch the light. He cupped the torch in his hand so that it leaked red between his fingers.
The pegboard was quarter-inch hardboard, four feet by eight, standing off the wall on timber battens. Ray had painted it white and screwed it at nine-inch intervals. Thorsen ran the light along the bottom edge. Every screw head was filled with paint, twenty years of it, the slots soft and blind.
Except one. Bottom right corner, below the outline of the pry bar. The slot was bright. There were fine scratches in the paint round it, the kind a screwdriver leaves when it has been in and out a number of times.
He took the right driver off the board, from its outline, and backed the screw out. He put it in his pocket. Then he worked his fingers behind the corner of the hardboard and flexed it gently away from the batten, an inch, an inch and a half, and put the torch to the gap.
On the back of the board, directly behind the empty outline, was a strip of masking tape as long as his hand.
Block capitals. Ballpoint, pressed hard. The letters leaning backwards.
SR 1-2844177
That was all. No name. No word. Two letters and eight numbers.
He read it three times. It meant nothing to him. It was not a case number, not a booking number, not a badge or a plate or a telephone. He did not know what kind of thing it was.
But Ray had put it where only one sort of person would ever look. Someone who knew that he would not leave a tool off its hook for a month.
Thorsen did not peel it. He looked round for something to write with, and the torch found the bench, and the pen, lying square at the right-hand end.
He picked it up. He pushed back his left cuff and wrote the number on the inside of his forearm, above the two burns, and checked it against the tape digit by digit. Then he put the pen back exactly as it had been, let the board spring home, and set the screw.
He was hanging the screwdriver on its outline when light came under the roll-up door.
Headlights, swinging in off the street. Then a second pair. Engines idling, not cut. Doors, four of them, closing softly, by people who had been told to close them softly.
So that was why there had been no truck outside. They had not stopped watching the house. They had stepped back from it and waited for him to walk in.
He killed the torch. He heard the gate latch lift.
There were two ways out of the garage and they were covering both. That left the yard.
He went out of the side door low and fast and did not look towards the gate. He heard “There!” behind him, and feet. He went straight down the row of tomato stakes, put one boot on the hose bracket, and took the back fence in a single ugly movement that tore the knee out of his new trousers.
He landed in somebody’s vegetable patch, and ran.
The hill helped. Highland Park falls away to the west in terraces, yard below yard, and a big man going downhill in the dark is a hard thing to stop. He went through a gap in a hedge, across a patio, past a lit window where a woman looked up from a sink. Over a chain-link fence. A dog went off, a real one. Behind him he could hear at least two men coming down the same way, and above, on the street, an engine winding up to go round.
He came out on Figueroa, crossed it at a dead run between a bus and a taxi, and kept going down. A side street. A dead end. A footpath between two apartment blocks. Then trees, and a slope of ivy, and a long pale gap in the city with the parkway roaring on the far side of it.
The Arroyo.
It had been a river once. Now it was a concrete trench thirty feet deep and sixty across, with sloping walls and a thread of water down a slot in the middle. He went over the rail and down the wall on his heels and one hand, and hit the bottom hard enough to feel it in his teeth.
It was quiet down there. The traffic was a long way overhead. He stood getting his breath and thought, for the space of about four seconds, that he had done it.
Then, a quarter of a mile upstream, a pair of headlights tipped over the lip of a maintenance ramp and came down into the channel.
He ran.
There is nowhere to go in a flood channel. That is the purpose of it. The walls are too steep to climb in a hurry and there is no cover of any kind. The Tahoe came down the flat concrete with its lights on full and its tyres hissing on the wet, not hurrying, forty yards back, then thirty. They did not need to catch him. They only needed him to get tired.
His own shadow ran ahead of him, enormous, all the way down the channel.
He saw the outfall at the last moment. A square black mouth in the left-hand wall, five feet high, with a trickle running out of its lip. Storm drain. He went into it bent double and kept going.
Behind him the lights swung and stopped. Doors. Torches.
The drain ran straight for fifty yards and then forked. He took the smaller branch, a round pipe barely four feet across, and went up it on his hands and knees in six inches of cold water until the dark was complete. He turned the last bend. He put his back against the curve of the pipe and his boots against the other side, and he made himself breathe through his nose.
Torchlight came and went on the wet wall at the fork. Voices, flattened by the concrete.
“…not going up there after him.”
“He said bring him.”
“Then he can come and get him.”
A long pause. Water dripping. Then a third voice, closer than the others, unhurried, speaking into the pipe as though the pipe were a telephone.
“Mr. Thorsen. I asked you nicely.”
Spearmint, faintly, even here.
“Tuesday,” the voice said. “It was a real offer. I’m withdrawing it.”
Then the light went away.
He gave it an hour by the count. He came out through a manhole in a side street off Avenue 43, wet to the thighs, shaking with cold, and walked back uphill by a different way.
He saw it from the corner and did not go any nearer.
A flatbed tow truck was double-parked on the side street with its amber lights turning. The blue van was already up on the bed, chained at all four wheels. A silver Tahoe sat behind. A man in a grey polo was signing something on a clipboard for the driver, as calmly as if he were taking delivery of a fridge.
The bunk. The blanket. The water can. The suit on its hanger. Ray’s boots, Ray’s tarpaulin, Ray’s labelled bins.
For two days he had owned something.
Thorsen stood in a doorway and watched the truck pull away. He had the clothes he stood in, two telephones, a napkin, and eight numbers in ballpoint on the inside of his arm.
He pulled his cuff down over them and started walking.