He got there at twenty past five, an hour and forty minutes early, because that was what he would have done for anybody.
The old zoo sat in a fold of the hills at the back of Griffith Park, where the city had kept its animals until the 1960s and then moved them across the valley and left the cages behind. Nobody had ever pulled them down. There were picnic tables now on the flat ground where the keepers’ sheds had been, and a few families packing up their coolers. Above them, cut into the hillside in a long curve, were the grottos: concrete caves with fake rock fronts and iron bars, where bears and lions had once walked up and down for sixty years. Some of the bars had been sawn off. Kids went in with spray cans. The concrete was stained black and green.
He did not go to the grottos. He went past them on the road, unhurried, a big man out for a walk, and took a dirt trail that climbed the slope behind them. A hundred feet up there was a bend where the trail ran along the top of the old enclosures, and a stand of scrub oak with a flat rock under it. He sat down on the rock, in the shade, and waited for the light to go.
From there he could see all of it. The picnic tables. The road in. The small car park by the merry-go-round, where four cars were left, then three, then two. The open fronts of the grottos below him, one after another along the hillside like the boxes in a theatre.
He had told Delgado he would come. He had not told him where he would be standing when he did.
The last family left at a quarter to seven. A park ranger’s pickup went round once and out. The sun went down behind the hills and took the colour out of everything.
At five to seven a silver Tahoe came in on the road with its lights off and turned into the trees beyond the car park.
Thorsen sat very still.
No doors opened that he could see. He watched the place where it had gone. At seven nothing happened. At five past, nothing.
At ten past he smelled spearmint.
It came up the slope on the evening air, faint, sweet, unmistakable. The wind was coming from below and to his left. Which meant the man chewing it was below and to his left. Which meant he was not in the trees with the Tahoe at all. He was already in the grottos. He had been in them, possibly, for an hour.
Thorsen let his eyes go along the dark mouths of the cages, one by one, without moving his head.
The third one from the left. A man’s shape against the back wall, still as the concrete. In the fifth, another, crouched behind a fallen slab. And out on the path below the picnic tables, in plain sight, hands in his pockets, a third: shaved head, dark jacket, rocking gently on his heels like somebody waiting for a bus.
Vane.
So there was no frightened man from Metro with a boat in Long Beach. There never had been. There was a meeting place with one way in, and a time, and two men in the dark on either side of where a visitor would naturally walk.
He could have gone. He thought about it. Back along the trail, over the ridge, down into Glendale in the dark. They would never have seen him.
But he would have nothing. And they would only try again, somewhere he had not had an hour to look at first.
The man in the fifth grotto was furthest from the others.
He went down the slope on the far side of the scrub, slow, a foot at a time, keeping the oak between himself and the path. At the bottom the trail met the back of the grottos, where the old keepers’ passage ran behind the cages, a narrow concrete corridor with rusted doors into each one. The doors had been chained once. Most of the chains were gone.
The fifth door was half open.
He could hear the man breathing. Slow and through the mouth, a little congested. The motel. The bearded one, with the throat.
Thorsen went through the door in one movement and hit him from behind with everything he had.
It should have finished it. It nearly did. The man went face first into the fake rock and something came out of his hand and skittered across the concrete. But he was strong and frightened and he twisted as he went down, and he got an arm up and a fist into Thorsen’s ear, and then there were two of them on the floor of the bear cage in the near-dark, rolling in sixty years of dirt.
The thing on the floor was a pistol. Long, with a fat cylinder on the barrel.
They both went for it.
The bearded man got there first. Thorsen got his wrist. The gun went off between them with a noise like a heavy book dropped on a table, and something hot and stupid went across Thorsen’s left side under the arm, a line of fire from front to back, and he felt his shirt go wet.
He did not let go of the wrist. He drove it down against the concrete, once, twice, and the third time the hand opened.
Then light. A torch beam came through the bars from the path, and swung, and found them. Two shapes in a cage, locked together. Shouting. “Which one? Which one?” And from the third grotto, the second man came along the front of the bars at a run with his own pistol up, shining his own light, and he could not tell, in the swinging beams and the dark and the dust, which of the two shapes on the floor was his.
Thorsen saw what was going to happen a half second before it did. He let go and threw himself backwards against the wall.
The bearded man came up onto his knees with the dropped gun in his fist, a big dark silhouette against the torchlight, exactly the size and shape the man outside had been told to look for.
The man outside fired three times through the bars.
The bearded man sat back on his heels. He looked surprised. Then he lay down on his side on the concrete, quite gently, and did not move again.
In the silence that followed, somebody on the path said, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus, Shane.”
Thorsen was already gone. Back through the rusted door, along the keepers’ passage, up the slope on his hands and feet through the scrub, with the wet spreading down his side and his breath roaring in his ears. Torches cut the hillside below him. He did not look back. He went over the top of the ridge and lay flat in the dry grass behind it, and pressed his hand against his ribs, and listened.
They did not follow. That was what frightened him most.
After a while he raised his head.
The torches had gathered at the fifth grotto. The man who had fired was standing over the body, bent at the waist with his hands on his knees, being sick into the dirt.
Vane was standing a little apart, on the path. He had his telephone to his ear. In the stillness the voice came up the hill quite clearly, flat and level, as if he were ordering a car.
“We’ve got a man down at the old zoo. Griffith Park. Shane. No, he’s gone. We’re leaving him where he is, weapon and all. Call it in from a landline and give them the name. Thorsen. T-H-O-R-S-E-N. Tell them he was armed and he’s bleeding and he’s on foot.”
A pause.
“Yes. Tonight. Before the eleven o’clock.”
Vane put the phone away. He stood looking up at the dark hillside for a moment, directly at the place where Thorsen was lying, though he could not have seen him. Then he put a fresh piece of gum in his mouth and walked back to the Tahoe.
Thorsen stayed in the grass until the Tahoe had gone and the first sirens were coming up the valley from Los Feliz. Then he went down the far side of the ridge, the long way round, keeping to the trees, until he came out above the car park by the merry-go-round.
There was one car left in it. A small white hatchback with a park-services sticker in the window.
There was no old Buick. There was no car that any old man with a frightened friend had driven up here to meet him in.
Art Delgado had told him where to stand. He had told him when. He had told him not to bring the girl.
And then he had stayed at home in Eagle Rock with his violets, and waited for the telephone to ring.
Thorsen stood at the edge of the trees with blood running into the waistband of his trousers, and for the first time in six years he did not know who to call.