Delgado tried twice more to get him to the spare room. Thorsen said tomorrow, and meant it, and the old man wrote his address on a paper napkin as though Thorsen might have forgotten a house he had eaten Thanksgiving in.
He wanted one night with a door that only he had a key to. He needed to think, and he had never been able to think in another man’s house.
The motel was on Figueroa, two floors round a car park, sixty-two dollars cash and no questions about the name. The room was on the upper level at the far end. It had a bed, a television bolted to the wall, and a window onto the walkway with a curtain that did not quite meet in the middle. He put the van directly below, where he could see its roof through the gap.
He hung the jacket on the one hanger. He washed his face. He sat on the edge of the bed in his shirt sleeves with Brooks’s card in one hand and Delgado’s napkin in the other, and he went back through the garage one item at a time.
Gun in the left hand. Pen on the right.
If Ray did it himself, both should have been left. If someone did it for him and knew enough to use the left hand, they would not then have made a mistake with a pen. People who are that careful are careful all the way down.
So the pen had not been part of the killing. Somebody had been at that bench afterwards.
He was still looking at that, and not getting anywhere with it, when two sets of feet came up the outside stairs.
You learn footsteps. Guests are uneven: bags, keys, an argument about the ice machine. These were level and unhurried and they did not stop at any of the eleven doors between the stairs and his.
Thorsen stood up. He turned off the lamp. He took the chain off the door, quietly, because a chain only tells them you are inside and frightened, and then it breaks.
The knock was polite. Three, with a knuckle.
He opened the door wide and stepped out onto the walkway in his socks, which was not what they had planned for. It put him in the open with a rail at his back instead of in a doorway with a bed behind his knees.
There were two of them. Thirties, both, in grey polo shirts with a small shield stitched on the chest in darker grey. One was tall and rangy with a cropped beard. The other was shorter and very wide and had the patient face of a man who is used to being the last thing people argue with. Neither was the one from Ray’s yard.
“Mr. Thorsen,” the bearded one said. “Sorry to disturb you. We’ve been asked to give you a ride.”
“Where to?”
“Union Station. There’s an eleven-ten to Phoenix. It’s taken care of.” He held up a printed ticket, pleasantly, like a waiter with a bill. “Seat’s paid. We’ll bring your bag.”
“Who asked?”
“A friend of the family.”
“Popular family.”
“Sir, nobody wants this to be unpleasant. It’s been a hard day for everybody. You paid your respects. Now there’s a bus.”
“I’ve got a van.”
“We’ll see the van gets back to Mrs. Okafor.”
That was the part that did it. Not the ticket. The van. They knew about a key that had changed hands on church steps ten hours ago, and somebody cared more about a twenty-year-old Ford than about him.
“No,” Thorsen said.
The bearded one sighed through his nose. He looked at his partner. It was a small look, and it was all the warning there was.
The wide one came in low and fast for the body, the way you take a big man, to fold him and get him on the ground. It was the right idea. Thorsen had four inches of reach on him and used none of it. He stepped into the charge instead of away, took the shoulder on his hip, and brought his forearm down across the back of the man’s neck with everything from the floor up behind it. The wide one’s face met the walkway rail. The rail rang like a bell.
The bearded one had something in his hand by then, short and black, and it crackled. He was quick with it. The prongs caught Thorsen’s left forearm through the shirt and the whole arm went white and stupid to the shoulder.
He did not have time to fall down. He hit the man in the throat with his right hand, open, the web between thumb and finger. Not hard. You do not need hard, there. The stun gun went over the rail and broke on the tarmac below. The bearded one sat down against the wall of room twenty-three with both hands at his neck, making a noise like a kettle.
Nine seconds, perhaps. A dog was barking somewhere. Nobody opened a door. It was that kind of motel.
The wide one was on his hands and knees, bleeding from the eyebrow onto the concrete, trying to work out which way was up. Thorsen put a foot between his shoulder blades and pressed him flat, not roughly, and went through his pockets with the hand that still worked. A phone. A wallet he did not want. A plain grey plastic card on a retractable reel, no name, no logo, only a six-digit number printed small along one edge.
He took the phone and the card. He picked the bus ticket up off the walkway, looked at it, and tucked it into the bearded one’s shirt pocket.
“Phoenix is nice this time of year,” he said. “You should go.”
Then he went back inside for his boots, his jacket and his bag, because the room was finished now. His left arm hung off him like something borrowed. His knuckle had split across the old scar. He noticed his hands were not shaking, and noticed that he had noticed, and did not much care for what that said about the last six years.
He moved the van eleven blocks, into the back of a supermarket car park under a dead light, and sat there with the engine off until his arm started to hurt, which was an improvement.
Did you ask the van? he had said to Brooks. Being clever. He had not asked it himself.
He found the dome light switch and started at the driver’s door and worked across, the way they taught you, in strips.
The door pocket held a tyre gauge and a tin of peppermints. The ashtray was clean. Behind the visor was a registration slip and a photograph of Marcus at about nine, gap-toothed, holding a baseball glove bigger than his head.
The driver’s footwell was wrong.
Ray kept a vehicle the way he kept a murder book. But the rubber mat was caked with dried mud, and there was more ground into the pedals. Thorsen broke a piece off and rubbed it between his fingers under the light. It was pale, nearly grey, fine as flour, with a faint chemical smell he could not name. Not garden soil. Not anything from a street. There was a lot of it. More than one trip’s worth.
He climbed between the seats into the back. Ray had fitted it out, of course. Plywood racking down one side, glued and screwed, every bin labelled in black marker. A bare ply floor, swept clean. It was his garage on wheels. On the floor lay a coiled tow strap, a folded blue tarpaulin, and a pair of rubber boots crusted to the ankle with the same pale mud.
And lying against the wheel arch, a short flat steel bar with a hook at one end.
So that was where the pry bar had gone. Brooks had been right. Things get left in vans.
It should have settled him. It did not. Ray would have driven back across the city at midnight to hang that bar on its outline. He had left it out here because he was not finished using it.
Thorsen went back to the front seat and opened the glovebox.
Owner’s manual. A torch. A box of nitrile gloves, half empty, which a retired man has no use for. Under those, a small stack of paper napkins from a diner, the kind with a scalloped edge.
The top one had been written on in ballpoint. One word, block capitals, pressed hard enough to tear the tissue. The letters leaned backwards, the way they do when the hand that makes them is the left.
REYES
Thorsen sat with it in his lap for a long time.
The car park emptied. A man came out and chained the trolleys. Across the street a sign went dark, one letter at a time.
Six years ago he had put his badge on a lieutenant’s desk because of that name. He had walked out of the building and kept walking, through eleven states, and in all that time he had not said it aloud to another living person.
And Ray, who had told him to let it go, who had stood in the squad room doorway and said it’s done, Danny, leave it done, had been driving out at night with a pry bar and a pair of rubber boots, writing it on a napkin hard enough to go through.
The phone he had taken began to buzz against the seat.
He let it ring out. Then he turned the key, and the old engine caught first time.