The bullet had not gone in. He established that first, standing in the dark behind a dumpster on Los Feliz Boulevard with his shirt pulled up and Ray’s torch in his teeth. It had gone along the outside of his ribs under the left arm, front to back, and taken a strip of skin and some of what was under it with it. Five inches long. Deep enough to see things he did not want to see. It was bleeding steadily but not badly. Nothing grated when he breathed.
He had been lucky. He knew exactly how lucky, because a man called Shane had been less so.
He went into an all-night pharmacy with his jacket zipped to the chin and bought gauze pads, a roll of tape, a bottle of water and a packet of ibuprofen, and paid cash, and the boy at the till did not look up from his phone. In the pharmacy toilet he cleaned the wound with the water and the hand soap and packed it, and taped it, round and round his chest, and put the jacket back on over the wet shirt. In the mirror he looked like a man who had been sleeping rough for a week. That was no longer much of a disguise.
It was ten forty. His hands had stopped shaking. Everything else had not.
The bar was on Glendale Boulevard in Atwater, an old place with a neon horseshoe in the window, the kind that had survived the neighbourhood changing round it by refusing to notice. Dark wood. A pool table nobody was using. Eight or nine people along the counter, all of them looking at their own drinks. A television high in the corner, sound low.
He sat at the end of the bar nearest the back door and ordered a whiskey he could not afford, and drank half of it in one go for the pain, and held the rest.
He needed somewhere warm to think, and he needed to be among people for an hour so that his body would believe it was not still on the floor of a bear cage. And he needed to see what was coming. Vane had said before the eleven o’clock. Vane was a man who kept his appointments.
At eleven the news came on.
The first story was a fire in Palmdale. The second was Tuesday’s vote. A reporter on the City Hall steps, then a clip of Walter Brandt, in shirtsleeves this time, at a community meeting in a school gym somewhere, leaning on a lectern and making a room full of people laugh. He looked like a man you could trust with your children.
The third story began with a photograph of Ray.
Thorsen set his glass down.
It was Ray’s retirement portrait, in dress blues, with the flag behind. Then a shot of the house in Highland Park, the blinds down. Then the outside of Northeast station at night, under television lights, and a deputy chief Thorsen did not know standing at a lectern on the steps, reading from a sheet of paper.
The bartender had turned the sound up a notch. People do, for a murdered cop.
“…following new forensic findings,” the deputy chief was saying, “the department has tonight reclassified the death of retired Detective Raymond Okafor as a homicide. I want to stress that this reclassification is the result of diligent and continuing work by the investigating detective, and the department is grateful to her.”
The camera pulled out a little. Behind him, one step down, in a dark suit with her hands clasped in front of her, stood Imani Brooks.
Her face was a closed door. She looked straight ahead into the lights. She did not move once while he spoke.
“We are seeking to speak with a person of interest,” the deputy chief said, “a former partner of Detective Okafor’s who left this department under difficult circumstances some years ago, and who has since been living a transient lifestyle. We believe he was in the Los Angeles area at the time of Detective Okafor’s death. Physical evidence places him at the scene. He has been seen at the victim’s home on more than one occasion, including in the early hours of this morning. His name is Daniel Thorsen.”
And there he was.
Not a photograph from this week. His department ID, six years old, the one they took every three years against a blue screen. Shorter hair. No grey. The nose already broken twice. He looked heavier in the face and harder round the eyes than he remembered being. He looked like a man who would do it.
Then grainy colour, from a doorbell across a street: a big man in a bad suit with a duffel bag, standing at a side gate in the early sun, lifting the latch with one finger. Then the same man, later, his hands cupped against a garage window.
His hands cupped against the glass. He had stood there and thought about which hand Ray used for his coffee. He had not thought about his own.
“Mr. Thorsen is six feet three inches tall and heavily built,” the deputy chief said. “He should not be approached.”
The picture cut back to the studio. The anchor’s voice changed gear.
“And this just in. LAPD are also responding tonight to a fatal shooting in Griffith Park, near the old zoo picnic area. Sources tell us the victim is a thirty-four-year-old private security contractor. Police are not yet confirming a link, but we understand they want to speak to the same man in connection with this incident. He is believed to be armed, and may be injured.”
The ID photograph came up again, larger, in the corner of the screen. It stayed there.
Thorsen looked at it for perhaps two seconds. Then he looked down at the bar.
Nobody had turned round. Not yet. The man on the stool beside him was reading something on his phone. A couple by the pool table were arguing quietly about money.
The bartender had stopped wiping the glass in his hand.
He was a heavy, slow man of about sixty with a grey ponytail. He looked at the television. He looked down the bar at the big man in the stained work jacket at the end. He looked at the television again, at the department photograph, the shape of the nose. He put the glass down very carefully on the shelf behind him, as though it were full.
They looked at each other.
The bartender did not reach for the phone. Not yet. He was, Thorsen thought, a man who had stood behind that counter for a long time and seen a great many things on that television, and who had learned that what it said and what was true were often different shapes. He was making up his mind.
Thorsen took two twenties from his pocket, which was most of what he had left, and laid them flat on the wood. He finished the whiskey.
“For the trouble,” he said quietly. “I didn’t kill him.”
“Which one?”
“Either.”
The bartender looked at the money and did not touch it.
“Back door goes to the alley,” he said. “Alley goes to the river. I’m going to count to a hundred and then I’m going to do what I have to do. I’m a slow counter.”
The alley was dark and smelled of fryer oil. He went down it fast, holding his side.
The cheap phone buzzed in his pocket as he reached the end. A text, from a number he did not know.
Not my words. They wrote it and stood me there. They have this number. Lose it. B.
He read it twice. Then he took the battery cover off, pulled the SIM card out with his thumbnail, snapped it, and dropped the pieces and the phone through the grating of a storm drain. He heard them hit water a long way down.
He still had the other one, switched off, in a tin that smelled of peppermint. It belonged to Curtis Vane’s company, and he had not yet worked out what it was for.
At the end of the alley there was a chain-link fence, and a cycle path, and beyond it, in the dark, the long pale concrete bed of the Los Angeles River, with a thread of black water running down the middle towards the sea.
Three days ago he had got off a bus with one bag and a ticket out.
Now he had no bag, no van, no telephone he dared use, eleven dollars, a hole in his side, and his face on every screen in the city. The police wanted him for killing his partner. A man he had never met was lying dead in a bear cage with Thorsen’s name already written on him. The one person in the department who believed him had been made to stand on a step and help them say it. The old man who had given him a bed had sent him to be killed.
And somewhere in the city, in a house with a good view, Walter Brandt was going to sleep tonight on the far side of three days.
Thorsen climbed the fence, slowly, favouring his left side, and went down the bank into the river.