“My own mother wouldn’t recognize you,” Ed declared.
“Your mother never knew me.”
“Exactly.”
With Ed in the front passenger seat, whistling a tune that he identified as from Mozart’s concerto K. 453, Michelle drove her Ford Explorer into town and slotted it in an automated two-story parking structure a block off Pacific Coast Highway. She fed a few dollar bills into the permit machine and placed the printout prominently on the dashboard. If when they ported back to this timeline they needed to make a quick getaway, she didn’t want to discover that her SUV had been towed.
In an alleyway alongside the building, Ed dared to take the key to everything from his coat and activate it. This early in the day, when most people would not head to work for another hour or two and when tourists were still sleeping off the previous night’s excesses, the chance was slim that someone would happen on them in the instant when they vanished from this
sad timeline where Jeffy and Amity had died seven years ago.
The onshore flow was scented with cinnamon and warm pastry dough from a bakery just opening for the day. The breeze chased scraps of litter along the alley and rolled before it a ball of red yarn. Such was Michelle’s state of mind that the unraveling scarlet filament, so vivid against the blacktop, seemed to be an ominous symbol, a thin spill of blood or a lit fuse burning toward her.
“Where do we go when we get there?” she asked.
“Are there people in town who were friends with you and Jeffy back in the day, people that he might have remained friends with in that world, after you walked out on him and Amity?”
“Not me. I never did. That was the other Michelle. Yeah, I can think of a few friends from then who’re still in this town and maybe still in the one we’re going to. Jeffy was true blue. He never gave up on anyone.”
“Then we’ll check them out and hope that he and your girl have gone into hiding at one of their houses.”
He pressed Return, and after passing through a blizzard of light, they arrived in the world where there was hope, however fragile, of a family reunion.
72
No sooner had Duke spoken one last time with Andy Taylor and left the hotel than his cell phone rang. He paused at the crosswalk on the west side of the highway and took the call as light morning traffic grumbled past.
Chief Phil Esterhaus said, “I’m not even to the beach yet to start my run, I get a call about Falkirk. He was shot five times.”
“Dead?”
“No. He was wearing Kevlar. Four rounds were stopped, but one took him in the left thigh. He’s in the hospital, no doubt making the entire staff wish they’d never pursued a career in medicine. You know who shot him?”
“Not me.”
“I didn’t think you. If I thought you, the first thing I’d have said is, I’ll pay for dinner, after all.”
“So who shot him?”
“Two hulks in his goon squad were stationed across the street from where it happened. They’re raising hell with my people, as if they never told us to back off. They want arrests made yesterday. Anyway, it was dark, but they had night-vision gear, so they saw a little. They say it was this traitor Harkenbach and some woman. The perps got away, which makes no sense to me, with Falkirk’s crew of numbnuts right there and armed to the teeth.”
“Who do they want you to arrest?”
“Well, Harkenbach and the woman—”
“What woman?”
“They don’t know. The kind of law these guys enforce, any woman might work for them, plus they want the guy who owns the house.”
“Who owns the house?”
“Well, that’s the thing I find most interesting. It’s a guy named Jeffrey Coltrane, lives there with his daughter, Amity. Would those be the friends of yours you mentioned, the ones who live on Shadow Canyon Lane and got ‘caught up in this through no fault of their own’?”
“I’ve heard of them,” Duke conceded.
“Is Coltrane a killer?”
“Is Mary Poppins?”