A Wild and Lonely Place Read online

  “This is a surprise,” he said. “I take it you want something.”

  Greg’s and my relationship has always been abrasive, even when—eons ago—we were lovers. Something about our personalities, which doesn’t allow us to blend our strengths and dilute our weaknesses. With us there’s always a competitive edge—and not the sort that allows us to be the best we can. Over the years we’ve both mellowed, but I still don’t know how things will go when I contact him.

  That night we must’ve both been in a very mellow phase; his voice was playful, and the remark simply amused me. “Yes,” I said. “I want to buy you a drink.”

  He laughed. “As I recall, you buying me a drink usually leads to me doing you a favor. Where are you? Your office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll see you at the Remedy. Half an hour, max.”

  I closed up the office, stowed my briefcase in the MG, and walked downhill to Mission Street. The usual Friday-night crowds were out; the usual sex and drug deals were going down. I spotted one of my informants, Frankie Cordova, leaning against an iron-grated storefront, beer in hand, his arm draped across the shoulders of a stoned young Latina. When I nodded, he toasted me with his bottle.

  The Mission had long ago lost its charm for me. Years before, when I lived in a tiny studio apartment near Twenty-second Street on Guerrero, it was a hospitable area, if a little rough at the edges. I had good neighbors in the building good neighbors across the street at Ellen T’s, my favorite bar-and-grill. But then one of the tenants on the floor above me was murdered and my investigation into her death showed me the ugly underside of the district. As soon as I could afford to, I bought my house and moved away. In the intervening years gangs and pushers had moved in. Ellen T’s husband, Stanley, was shot to death in a holdup, and Ellen sold the bar and moved back to Nebraska. Now parts of the Mission came close to being war zones. Drug dealers terrorized residents on their own front steps; gunshots were commonplace. Parents were afraid to let their children walk to school alone; the ever present gang members looked nothing like the highly romanticized figures I’d cynically viewed during a recent rerun of West Side Story.

  Some of the Mission’s residents hadn’t caved in to the criminal element. Frustrated by the lack of police protection, they banded together with merchants to organize and fund citizen patrols. Women and men stood guard at such trouble spots as the Sixteenth-and-Mission BART station. Armed only with nerve and wits, they were determined to take back their neighborhood. I wished I could believe they’d succeed. The McCone who had inhabited that tiny apartment on Guerrero would have naturally assumed so, and probably joined in. But she was someone I hardly knew anymore, distanced by a number of eye-opening years.

  Noise greeted me as I pushed through the door of the Remedy Lounge; patrons crowded around the bar and jammed the booths and tables. When I finally got to the bar, I ordered an espresso from Brian, the owner, then settled down in a booth that had just been vacated.

  After twenty minutes the crowd began to thin. I went back to the bar, got another espresso to fortify myself against the long drive ahead, and ordered a glass of red wine for Greg. I’d just sat down again when he came through the door—a big man with sandy blond hair that was now shot with white and a body that as yet showed few signs of middle-age spread. He grinned when he spotted me, quirked one dark blond eyebrow when he saw his drink was already on the table.

  “Service with a smile, even,” he said, planting a kiss in the vicinity of my right ear. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “It’s about the only service you’ll get in this place.” The Remedy has never been able to keep a waitress or waiter longer than a week, and Brian refuses to extend table service to anyone but Rae, who reminds him of his dead sister.

  Greg sat opposite me, took a sip of wine, and said, “You’re looking as good as ever.”

  “What, did you think I’d fallen apart in the last few months?”

  “You never know, in your business. You still seeing that terrorist with the airplane?”

  “Hy specializes in counter-terrorism, and you know it. You still seeing the fry cook?”

  “Lynda’s a chef at a four-star restaurant—and you know it.”

  We smiled, the seals of our friendship intact.

  “So what do you want this time?” he asked.

  “First of all, confidentiality.”

  “I’m not your lawyer. Or your priest.”

  “This is serious. Can I count on you?”

  He ran his hand over his stubbled chin, eyes thoughtful—probably remembering the other times he’d trusted me and I hadn’t disappointed him. After a moment he nodded.

  “I’ve been working with Adah Joslyn on the Diplo-bomber case. She’s out of control.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  I’d suspected word of Joslyn’s uncharacteristic behavior had gotten back to the department. “How bad do they say it is?”

  “She’s riding for a fall.”

  “That’s why I can’t ask her for what I need—access to NCIC and CJIS. There’re a couple of other ways I could get it, but I’d rather go through official channels.”

  “Right. Your nephew’s a nice kid, you don’t want him in trouble. But then there’s RKI; they abuse the system all the time. Tell me, Sharon, what’s it like to be in bed with them?”

  I didn’t flare up because I sensed a real concern for me behind the question. “I use RKI. They don’t use me.”

  “Yet.”

  “Ever.”

  “Your boyfriend’s one of them.”

  “But cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth.”

  “So you tell yourself.”

  “So I know.”

  “I’ve never heard you sound so sure about anyone. Certainly you never did about me.” He thought for a moment, turning his wineglass round and round on the table. “Okay, I guess I should let it go. Can’t help feeling protective toward you, though. So tell me what you need.”

  I repeated the mental list I’d made back at the office. Greg jotted down items on a notepad. When I finished he said, “I’ll get started on it first thing tomorrow. Where can I reach you?”

  I gave him my phone number at the cottage, then asked, “What else are they saying about Joslyn?”

  “She’s going to crash and burn, and it’s a damned shame.”

  “But if she gets it together and collars the bomber—”

  “You going to do her work for her again?”

  So the departmental brass was aware of that, too. I shrugged.

  Greg finished his wine. I asked, “Where’re you off to now?”

  “The fry cook’s. You?”

  “The home I share with the terrorist.”

  He looked surprised at the mention of a shared home, but only said, “Give him my regards.”

  * * *

  The two-lane road through the Anderson Valley was dark but well paved and easy. I sped past the closed-up wineries and through the little hamlets. Toward the coast the pavement narrowed and snaked through heavily forested hills. I felt wired from the espresso and pushed the MG to its limits, downshifting at the ends of the straightaways, accelerating on the curves. Then I glided down the coast highway and turned north to where our cottage sat on the cliff above Bootlegger’s Cove.

  Soon I could see our security lights across the rocky land between the road and the sea cliffs. The cottage itself was dark. I followed the blacktop past the place where our friends’ home once stood, reminding myself that someday Hy’s and mine would rise on the site. My headlights washed over the little stone-and-timber structure nestled in a cypress grove at the land’s edge. When I got out of the car, the sea wind assaulted me, the sea smell stung my nostrils.

  I stood there for a moment listening to the surf, feeling the serenity. Tonight I sensed none of the violent ripples beneath its surface, heard no sounds of grief and loss in the waves. This was not a gentle land; its edges were jagged and sharp. But it was a land of strength
, vitality, and resilience, and it suited Hy and me. We’d renamed the property Touchstone, after the siliceous rock used by metallurgists to test the purity of silver and gold. Hy and I were one another’s touchstones, each continually testing the purity of our actions, motives, and decisions. Like the land, the interface between us was often jagged and sharp, but we always meshed.

  I went to the door, disarmed the security system, and stepped inside. Rearmed the system. Embers glowed on the hearth, but the two rooms were silent. I looked through the bedroom door and saw my lover lying long-limbed beneath the down comforter. He had wrapped his arms around his pillow, and his dark blond hair was tousled. Quickly I slipped into the bathroom, weariness overcoming my caffeine rush. I shed my clothes, gave my teeth a cursory brush, my face an even more cursory wash.

  Sleep, I thought. Hours and hours of blissful sleep.

  In the bedroom I moved cautiously, sliding beneath the comforter with extreme care. Hy’s wake-up mechanism had a hair trigger; while it had been many years since he slept with a gun under the pillow, any sudden movement would make him reach for the .44 he kept in the nightstand.

  In spite of my caution he stirred. Pushed the pillow away and reached for me instead of the gun. “McCone,” he said, “about time.”

  No blissful sleep—for a while, anyway.

  But who was complaining?

  Seven

  Except for a long walk on the fog-shrouded beach we spent Saturday lounging in front of the fire. Hy lay on the couch studying reports on the military situation in Haiti; with his dark-rimmed reading glasses perched on the bridge of his hawk nose he looked more the college professor than a specialist assessing the feasibility of bringing a Haitian dissident over the frontier into the Dominican Republic. Word of the well-financed one-man crusade he’d embarked upon last fall had spread quickly among human-rights organizations; this was the second rescue attempt referred to him by a group in Miami.

  I curled in the big cushioned rattan chair reading through the printout of Mick’s research. Every now and then Hy would mutter something and I’d look up and see he was making notes. When I burst out laughing, though, he stopped and took off his glasses. “What’s so funny?”

  “Mick. Whenever he does a complicated report for me, he goes overboard with the prose. I swear that if he falls out of love with investigation he could become one of those terribly snide and irreverent columnists. Listen to this: he’s writing about the emir of Azad, Sheik Zayid bin Muhammad al-Hamid.

  “‘The sheik is a real piece of work. His thing is flowers, and he’s blown millions trying to grow an English garden in the middle of the desert. When his old man died, his brother was first in line to take over, and Zayid wasn’t too happy about that. So what does he do? He invites the bro over to look at his new rose bushes and shoots him in the back. I guess afterwards he felt guilty, because he turned into a born-again; they’ve got them there, too—Islam style. He’s big on morals and family values, has reinstated the death-by-stoning penalty for rape and murder. They say he’s trying to take Azad back into the nineteenth century, which is probably why a lot of Azadis like to live abroad. Frankly, it sounds like a pretty boring place.

  “‘The sheik’s life is anything but boring, though. In the seventies his father built up the capital city, Djara, in a major way. Only the old man was cheap and always took the lowest bids, and now everything’s falling down—including the sheik’s palaces, so he keeps having to move. He’s got this family you wouldn’t believe, they make ours look normal. There’s this brother he keeps having to ship off to a nuthouse in Switzerland. Another brother gets off on hanging his servants when they piss him off. So far none of them have died because the bro doesn’t know his knots. Zayid’s daughter is rough on servants, too—she’s always trying to lay them, and if they don’t cooperate she drops them off in the desert, naked. No wonder the royal family can’t get decent help these days. Zayid’s wife is hooked on tranquilizers—who wouldn’t be? And they all drink on the sly, except for the sheik. The whole country drinks. The capital city’s got a pop of fifty thousand, and ten thousand are certified alcoholics. And a lot of the men prefer their poker buddies over their wives as bed partners. All this came out of a report commissioned by their ministry of health and welfare. The Azadis are so dim they actually published the thing.’”

  Hy was laughing and shaking his head. “Jesus, the kid’s good.”

  “How much of this d’you suppose is true?”

  “Well, the stuff about the royal family may or may not be an exaggeration—he couldn’t’ve gotten that out of a government report—but the rest fits with the Middle East that I remember.”

  “Oh?” He’d mentioned flying in supplies for the oil fields when he worked for Dan Kessell’s air-charter service.

  “Uh-huh. Repression pushes them over the edge into sheer insanity, and alcoholism really is that common. Back in the mid-seventies one of our people—hotdog pilot named Ralston—got his ass thrown in jail in Qatar. The son of a bitch was importing alcohol on the side, and the natives were making him rich, but when he got caught it was a potential life sentence. Dan and I flew in, delivered a load of pipe fittings, and then spread a lot of U.S. dollars around to the jailers. When we left we had Ralston in the skin of the plane. That was when we more or less developed that method.”

  The skin-of-the-plane method involved wrapping an individual in as much insulating material as possible and hiding him between the inner cabin wall and the outer wall of the aircraft, where he would escape detection by police and customs authorities. At high altitudes for prolonged times, temperatures in that space can cause frostbite or death, and even with the best of precautions things can go wrong—as Hy had found out after a mission in Laos.

  Momentarily I was silent, remembering the pain in his eyes when he told me about finding the frozen bodies of the Laotian government official and his young family whom he was transporting to Hong Kong. They hadn’t understood his instructions, had removed their protective layers once aboard and weren’t able to put them back on in the confined space.

  Hy said, “Hey, McCone, it’s okay. I’ve come to terms with all that old garbage.”

  I nodded and set Mick’s report on the floor. “Look, do you want to take a break? I need to run some things by you.”

  “Sure.” He got up and closed the blinds against the darkening bank of fog outside the seaward windows. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a beer.”

  “Red wine, please.”

  He went to the tiny kitchen area and returned with our drinks. I moved to the couch, nestling in a corner, my stockinged feet against his blue-jeaned thigh.

  “So what’s the problem?” he asked.

  “My approach to this case isn’t working. The task force has been concentrating on the bomber—profiling him, trying to get people who may know something to come forward. They’ve also put together profiles of the victims, as well as the diplomatic missions that were hit and the countries they represent, but they haven’t had time to do more than scratch the surface. So first I did a more in-depth profile of each, then looked for commonalities among them. There weren’t any.”

  “And now because of what Gage told you, you’ve shifted your focus to the Azadis.”

  “For a while I thought I was really onto something, but none of it hangs together.”

  “Well, you haven’t gotten the information you asked your friend Greg for yet.”

  “No, and that probably means he hasn’t come up with anything, since he said he’d get on it first thing this morning. NCIC used to take a long time to reply to requests for information, but they’re fully automated and on-line now; you can access their criminal history database in a matter of minutes.”

  “Strange, since one of the people you asked him to check out is supposed to’ve been involved in organized gambling.”

  “Yes, but there’s a hitch with that. I thought of it last night and asked Mick to check it out—that’s what the inform
ation he faxed here was about.”

  “And?”

  “The hitch is diplomatic immunity.”

  “Aha!”

  I reached for Mick’s fax and read, “‘According to Article Thirty-one of the international treaty adopted by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of nineteen sixty-one, ambassadors and other diplomatic agents and their direct families have complete immunity from all criminal prosecution and civil suits in the host country. Courts have ruled that the direct family includes both spouses and children. Although these rulings have been challenged in specific cases, they’ve generally been upheld.’ That means that Dawud Hamid could’ve been caught red-handed running the biggest gambling operation in the country, and he’d’ve walked within the hour. So there isn’t going to be any criminal history on him.”

  “Above the law, all the way.”

  “Dammit!” I tossed the fax on the floor. “There’s got to be some way of finding out what he was involved in. I’m pretty sure he had at least one run-in with the police; Mavis Hamid said her mother-in-law wouldn’t call them in when he disappeared because it was ‘too soon after…’ And then she said that—whatever it was—couldn’t’ve had anything to do with it, and changed the subject. Too soon after what? And how the hell can I find out?”

  Hy sipped beer silently, stroked his droopy mustache. I nibbled on my lower lip, reviewing the possibilities. Then, at the same time, we said, “The newspapers!”

  Of course. Diplomats are granted immunity from prosecution, but not from media coverage. “God, I must’ve been in brain stall not to think of this earlier,” I said.

  Hy was still looking thoughtful. “When did you say Hamid disappeared?”

  “February of ninety.”

  “A month before the first bombing. You ever think he might be the bomber?”

  “I’ve thought of it. I’m going to try to get a photo of him to see how closely he fits the physical profile.”