Vane got out of the first Tahoe. Four men got out of the two of them, and spread out behind him in a loose line, and stood.
They were not in grey polos now. Dark jackets, dark trousers, boots. Two of them had batons on their belts and one had a stun gun, yellow and black, and none of them had a pistol in his hand, because there were twenty-five construction workers standing in the light with their phones in their pockets. Thorsen noted that. Vane had come to do this in front of witnesses. He meant to do it so that it looked like something else.
Vane walked into the white circle of the work lights with his hands empty and a laminated card held up between two fingers, the way a man shows a pass at a door.
“Castellan Risk Group,” he called, in a big clear voice, for the crew. “Site security for the owner. Who’s in charge here?”
Ortega did not move from where he stood beside the open pit. “I am.”
“Then you’ve got a problem, sir. The man beside you is Daniel Thorsen. He’s wanted for the murder of two police officers and a security contractor. There’s an LAPD unit five minutes behind me to take him into custody. Until they get here my men are going to detain him, and you’re going to restart your pour, because I’ve got a client who’s paying for forty trucks of concrete that’s going off on the road while you stand there.”
A murmur went through the crew. They looked at Thorsen. They looked at the hard hat he had stolen off their hooks.
“Site’s on safety stand-down,” Ortega said. “Unconsolidated void. Nobody pours till it’s inspected.”
“It’s been inspected. Three city departments and the state.”
“Not by me.”
Vane looked at him for a moment. Then he smiled, and turned the smile on Thorsen, and the pale eyes went over him once, the borrowed vest, the dark patch spreading under the left arm where Deacon’s glue had given way on the walk.
“Five minutes,” Vane said, more quietly. “That’s all I need. And so do you, I expect. Who’s coming, Thorsen? Your little detective? She hasn’t got a badge any more. Glendale?” He shook his head gently. “Glendale isn’t coming before the captain lands, and he lands at six. I checked. By six there won’t be anything here but a nice flat floor.”
He lifted one hand without looking round.
The four men came forward.
Thorsen did not wait for them. That was the only thing he had. They expected him to back away, to the pit, to the wall of the signal box, and stand there like a bear at the end of its chain. So he went at them.
He went for the light first.
The nearest work light stood on a tall tripod ten feet to his left with its cable snaking away across the ground to the generator. He hit the tripod with his shoulder at a dead run and it went over with a crash and a shower of sparks, and that whole corner of the yard dropped into darkness. The two men coming at him from that side were suddenly blind, their eyes still full of glare. He was not. He had been looking at the dark on purpose.
The first one he hit in the knee with the tyre iron, sideways, the way you hit a fence post, and heard something give, and the man went down screaming. The second came at him with a baton, swinging, and Thorsen took it on the forearm and felt the bone ring and kept coming and put his forehead into the man’s face, and the man sat down hard in the lime and did not get up.
Two.
But the light had gone over on the wrong side. The other two came round the pump truck into the remaining light, wide apart, careful now, and the one with the stun gun had it up and out and steady. The stack of rebar mats was behind Thorsen, a waist-high pile of rusted steel grids. He went over it, scrambling, and the mats shifted under him like ice and his boot went through a gap, and he fell forward across the top of the pile with all his weight on his left side.
The wound opened. He felt it go. A long hot tearing under the arm, and then wet.
He got up anyway. He got halfway.
The stun gun took him in the back.
It was not like the motel. That had been the touch of a prod. This was the darts, two barbs through Deacon’s sweatshirt into the muscle either side of his spine, and the current came down the wires and took his whole body away from him at once. Every muscle locked. He went over sideways off the rebar onto the grey ground, rigid, his teeth clamped, the sky full of white light, unable even to close his eyes.
Five seconds. It went on for ever.
When it stopped, there were hands on him. Two men, one on each arm, hauling him up to his knees. And Vane, walking unhurriedly round the end of the pump truck, peeling the wrapper off a fresh stick of gum.
“Keys,” Vane said to Ortega.
Ortega stood by the pit with his arms folded and looked at him.
“The pickup. Keys, now. And then you tell your pump man to unfold that boom.”
“No.”
Vane’s hand went inside his jacket and came out with a pistol, and he did not point it at Ortega. He just held it, down by his leg, where the crew could see it.
The whole yard went quiet. The generators drummed. Out on the road the mixers idled, forty engines, and somebody’s horn had stopped mid-blast.
“I’m not going to ask again, sir,” Vane said. “Keys.”
Ortega took the keys out of his jacket pocket. He looked at them in his palm. He looked at Vane. Then, without any hurry at all, he turned his hand over, and let them drop into the open pit at his feet.
They landed on the soft grey fill, and lay there, and slowly sank an inch into the lime.
“Go get ’em,” Ortega said.
Someone in the crew laughed. Just one man. A short, astonished bark, quickly stifled.
Vane’s face did something Thorsen had not seen it do before. It came apart, for a fraction of a second, at the edges. He raised the pistol towards Ortega.
And Thorsen, who had been kneeling between two men with his head down and his body shaking, getting his legs back one muscle at a time, came up off the ground.
He did not go for the gun. He went for the man. He drove off both feet with everything that was left in him and hit Vane round the waist from the side, like a lineman, with the two men still hanging off his arms, and the four of them went sideways together in a tangle, and the edge of the concrete collar was there, and then it wasn’t.
Thorsen and Vane went into the pit.
It was a foot down, and then it was no floor at all.
The loose fill took them like quicksand. They went in to the thighs in the soft grey earth, and the lime came up round them in a white choking cloud, in their mouths, in their noses, in their eyes. The pistol was gone. Thorsen saw Vane’s hand open on it as they hit and then it was simply not there, swallowed somewhere in the dirt under them.
There was no room. The pit was three feet square. They were face to face and chest to chest, sunk to the waist, and there was nothing for it but hands and heads and teeth.
Vane was strong. He was ten years younger and he had not been shot or glued or electrocuted that week, and he knew exactly how to hurt a man in a small space. He put his thumb into the wound under Thorsen’s arm and pressed, and the world went white again, and Thorsen heard himself make a sound he had never made before.
But the lime was in Vane’s eyes.
Thorsen saw it. The pale eyes were streaming and screwed half shut, red-rimmed, blinking furiously. Quicklime and water. Vane was crying it out and it was burning him and he could not see.
Thorsen let go of everything else and got both his hands on Vane’s head, one on each side, and held it. And put his forehead into the middle of Vane’s face. Once. Twice. A third time, with his eyes shut, because he did not want to see it.
Vane went slack.
Thorsen did not stop holding him. He pushed him back, down, until Vane was half lying against the side of the pit with his head and shoulders above the dirt, gasping through a nose that was no longer the shape it had been, and Thorsen leaned on him with all his weight, a forearm across his chest, and stayed there.
They were both sunk to the waist in the soft grey fill. Thorsen could feel it settling round his legs. Shifting. As if there were something under it, not far down, that had room for nothing else.
Vane opened his streaming eyes and looked at him from six inches away. He was still chewing. Even now.
“You know what you’re standing on,” Vane said thickly, through blood.
“Yes.”
“Six years we left him there,” Vane said. “You don’t dig a man up to move him. That’s how you get filmed.” He coughed, and spat blood and lime. “He was a thief, you know. Tommy. Same as the rest of us.”
“Maybe he was,” Thorsen said. “She wasn’t. She was nineteen.”
He heard the sirens before he saw anything.
Not many. Two, three. A high whoop and a lower wail, coming up San Fernando Road from the north, from Glendale, getting louder, and under them the sound of forty mixer trucks pulling over onto the kerb to let them by.
Then light. Red and blue, strobing across the graded ground, across the pump truck and the stacked rebar and the faces of the crew. Two black-and-white Glendale cruisers came through the gate side by side, and a third behind, and behind that a dusty green Subaru with a child seat in the back, and behind that a white county pickup with a camper shell on the bed and SHERIFF K9 stencilled on the side.
The Glendale cars stopped in a fan around the north end and the doors opened. The first officer out was a woman in her early thirties with sergeant’s stripes, short and square, with her hand on her holster and her torch up.
“Glendale PD! Everybody stay exactly where you are! Hands where I can see them!”
The two Castellan men still standing put their hands up. They did it slowly, looking at each other, and then at the pit, and then at the crew, as though somebody might tell them what had gone wrong.
Brooks came out of the Subaru with an envelope in one hand and nothing in the other. No badge on her chest. She walked straight across the yard into the light, past the cruisers, past the men with their hands up, and stopped at the edge of the pit, and looked down at the two men sunk to the waist in the grey earth.
She did not say anything for a moment.
Then she held up the envelope, so that the crew and the Glendale sergeant and the whole lit yard could see it.
“Order of the Superior Court of the County of Los Angeles,” she said, loud and clear, “directing the search and excavation of this site. Signed by Judge Adele Park at ten-forty last night. Nobody pours anything.”
She looked at Thorsen.
“Twenty-one minutes late,” she said, much more quietly. “Sorry.”
“You’re early,” he said. “You said half an hour.”
The Glendale sergeant pulled Vane out of the pit herself, by the collar, and cuffed him face down on the concrete collar with lime streaming off him and blood all down his chin. Then she looked at Thorsen.
“Dana Whitfield,” she said. “I drove a kid called Marcus Okafor home one night when I was two months on the job. I’ve wondered about it ever since.” She held out a hand down into the pit. “Come on out of there, Detective. You’re standing on somebody.”
He took the hand. It took her and Ortega both to get him out.
He sat on the edge of the collar with his legs hanging down into the pit and Ortega’s jacket pressed against his side, and watched the county truck back up to the north end. A broad, unhurried man in a Sheriff’s uniform got down and went round to the back of the camper shell and opened it.
A dog jumped down.
It was a Belgian shepherd, a Malinois, lean and fine-boned and quick, with a coat the colour of rust in the work lights. One of its front feet was white, as though it had stepped in paint.
The handler said a word and the dog went to work. It went fast, nose down, along the stakes and the string, in wide quartering loops across the grey ground, past the pump truck and the stack of rebar, past the crew who stood very still and watched it go. Out to the fence and back. Round the old signal box once.
Then it came to the pit.
It stopped. It put its nose down to the soft grey fill, an inch from Thorsen’s boots, and drew in a long breath, and held it.
Then it sat. Very straight. Facing the hollow in the middle of the earth, with its ears up and its white foot placed neatly in front of it, the way they are taught.
And stayed there.
Nobody in the yard said anything. The generators drummed. Somewhere out on San Fernando Road a mixer driver switched off his engine, and then another, and then another, all the way down the line, until the only sound was the generators and the river.
They left Thorsen where he sat. Whitfield’s officers took the Castellan men away one by one, and Brooks walked back and forth to her car with the phone at her ear, and men from the county came and strung yellow tape round the pit, and somebody put a foil blanket round Thorsen’s shoulders. He did not move, and nobody asked him to.
The sky over the hills behind the yard had turned from black to grey to a thin clean gold. The first of the sun came up over Glassell Park and lay along the river, along the concrete and the black thread of water and the herons standing in it, and across the yard, and touched the red dog sitting by the pit, and the big man beside it with his head down and his eyes closed.
It was eight minutes past seven on Tuesday morning. Somewhere downtown, in about three hours, fifteen people would sit down in a room.
Thorsen did not think about that. He sat on the edge of the pit in the first sun, with the dog beside him, and kept the place.