He walked south down the middle of the river for an hour, slowly, because it was the one place in Los Angeles where nobody would think to look for a man.
The water was a black thread down the low-flow channel, ankle deep, warm as a bath. Herons stood in it on one leg and watched him go past. Above him on both banks the city went about its Saturday night: headlights on the parkway, music from a party somewhere in Atwater, a police helicopter turning slow circles a mile to the north over Griffith Park with its searchlight down. Looking for him. He watched it for a while and kept walking.
His side had stopped bleeding through the gauze and started to throb instead, a deep hot pulse in time with his heart. Each step pulled at it. He counted steps to have something to do with his mind other than the obvious.
Art Delgado in a cardigan, pouring the good whiskey.
Who ran that for you? She’s pulling the old book too, I suppose.
The telephone through the wall at midnight. I’ll make a call. I’ll make it loud.
He made himself stop. He would need it later, all of it. Not now.
The Glendale Freeway crosses the river on tall concrete legs at the north end of Frogtown, and in the dark under it, where the bank widens out into a shelf of packed dirt, there was a town.
Thirty tents, perhaps. Tarps strung between shopping trolleys. A sofa with no legs. Somebody’s cooking fire in a cut-down oil drum, and the smell of onions. Most of the tents were dark. A dog lifted its head as he came up the bank and decided he was not worth the trouble.
By the fire, on an upturned crate, sat a lean black man of about sixty in a navy watch cap and a quilted vest, reading a paperback by the light of a head torch. A small transistor radio beside him was turned down low. He did not look up until Thorsen was close.
“You’re bleeding on my floor,” he said.
Thorsen looked down. He was. A dark spot on the dirt, then another.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Sit down before you fall down. I don’t lift.” The man closed the book on his finger. “Let me guess. You walked into a door.”
“Something like that.”
“Uh huh.” He nodded at the radio. “Door’s been on KNX every half hour since eleven. Six-three, heavyset, former police, armed and dangerous.” He looked Thorsen up and down in the firelight, slowly, without fear. “I see the six-three. I see the heavyset. I don’t see the armed.”
“I’m not.”
“Didn’t think so. Armed men don’t walk down the river at one in the morning holding their ribs like a pregnant woman.” He got up, stiffly, and went into the nearest tent, and came out with a tackle box. “Take that jacket off. And the shirt. Lord.”
His name was Deacon. That was all he gave and all Thorsen asked. He had been a hospital corpsman in the Navy for twenty-two years, two of them with a Marine battalion in places he did not name, and he handled the wound the way Denise handled a teaspoon. He peeled the pharmacy gauze off in one long pull. He looked at the gash in the head-torch light and said, “Huh,” without any particular emotion.
“Bullet?”
“Bullet.”
“It’s a good one. Took the scenic route.” He cleaned it with something from a brown bottle that made the night go white for a second. Then he took a small tube out of the box. “Now, they’ll tell you this is for model aeroplanes. We used it in the Gulf. Hold still, and don’t breathe in my face.”
He pinched the edges of the wound together with his thumb and finger, an inch at a time, and ran a bead of superglue along each inch, and held it, and blew on it, and moved on. It took twenty minutes. Thorsen looked at the underside of the freeway and counted the concrete joints. When it was done Deacon taped a clean pad over it and wound a strip of elastic bandage twice round his chest, firmly, like a man wrapping a parcel he expected to survive the post.
“Keep it dry. Don’t go swimming in that river, whatever you do. Don’t fight nobody for a week.”
“I’ll try.”
“No, you won’t.” Deacon packed the tackle box. “I seen your kind. You got that look like you’re owed something.”
He gave him a grey hooded sweatshirt with a faded college crest on it, two sizes too small, and a Dodgers cap, and a tin cup of coffee boiled black on the drum. He did not ask where Thorsen was going, or why the radio wanted him, or whether he had done it. He went back to his crate and his paperback. After a while he turned the radio off altogether.
“There’s a spare mat in the blue tent,” he said, without looking up. “Fella that had it don’t need it no more. Sleep. Nobody comes down here at night. Not even them.”
The mat smelled of someone else and the tent was too short, so his feet stuck out into the night. He lay on his right side with his arm over his eyes, and the freeway hummed in the concrete above him like a great engine, and he did not sleep.
He took the number out and looked at it instead. He did not need to push up the sleeve; he had it by heart.
SR 1-2844177.
Not a DR number. Brooks had said so. Not a booking, not property. Not a badge or a locker or a safe-deposit box. Not a bank. Not a plate. Not any case number he had ever seen in nineteen years.
Ray had hidden it where only Thorsen would look. So Ray had thought Thorsen would know it, or know how to find out. Something from their work, then. Something from the Reyes book.
He went back through the book again, slowly, the way he had gone back through it so many times in the last six years without knowing he was doing it. The scene log. The property. The canvass. The kitchen time cards. The phone. Sixty pages of numbers and his ruler running down them. Her mother. Her friends. A study group. A boy who didn’t call back. The short calls, over and over, to a city line.
She was always writing to the city.
He opened his eyes.
There is a thing for it, on the telephone. You take a picture and you send it and they give you a number. She would show me the numbers like they were grades.
He lay very still under the freeway.
It was not a police number at all. That was why he had not known it. It was the other kind. The kind the city gave to a nineteen-year-old girl who reported a broken streetlight. A receipt for a complaint.
He did not know which complaint. He did not know where to look it up with eleven dollars and no telephone and his face on the radio.
But he knew somebody who would.
He looked at the gap between the tent flaps, where the dark was turning grey over the river, and thought about the shelf on the cinder-block wall a mile downstream, and the candle that got lit there every single morning.
Then he got up, quietly, and put Deacon’s cap on, and went to find out who lit it on a Sunday.