B Is For Burglar

"It doesn't make any difference what I believe," I said. "I'm trying to find out what's true. So far it's all speculation."

He shook his head. "I know I don't have any concrete proof, but I felt like I had to tell someone. It's been bugging the shit out of me."

"I'll tell you what's bugging me," I said. "How can you live with someone you suspect of murder?"

He stared down at the table for a moment and the smile when it came was tainted with the old arrogance. I thought he was going to answer me, but the silence stretched and finally he simply lit another cigarette and signaled for the check.

I called Jonah in the middle of the afternoon. The encounter with Aubrey Danziger had depressed me, and the two martinis at lunch had left me with a nagging pain between the eyes. I needed air and sunshine and activity.

"You want to go up to the firing range and shoot?" I said when Jonah got on the line.

"Where are you?"

"I'm at the office, but I'm on my way home to pick up some ammo."

"Swing by and pick me up too," he said.

I smiled when I hung up the phone. Good.

The clouds hung above the mountains like puffs of white smoke left in the wake of a giant old-fashioned choo-choo train. We took the old road up through the pass, my VW making high-pitched complaints until I shifted from third gear to second and finally into first. The road twisted up through sage and mountain lilac. As we approached, the dark green of the distant vegetation separated into discreet shrubs clinging obstinately to the slopes. There were very few trees. Steep expanses of California buckwheat were visible on the right, interspersed with the bright little orange faces of monkey flower and the hot pink of prickly phlox. The poison oak was thriving, its lush growth almost overwhelming the silvery leaves of the mugwort which grew alongside it and is its antidote.

As we reached the summit, I glanced to my left. The elevation here was about twenty-five hundred feet and the ocean seemed to hover in the distance like a gray haze blending into the gray of the sky. The coastline stretched as far as the eye could see and the town of Santa Teresa looked as insubstantial as an aerial photo. From this perspective, the mountain ridge seemed to plunge into the Pacific, appearing again in four rugged peaks that formed the offshore islands. The sun up here was hot and the volatile oils, exuded by the underbrush, scented the still air with camphor. There were occasional manzanita trees along the slope, still stripped down to spare, misshapen black forms by the fire that had swept through two years back. Everything that grows up here longs to burn; seed coats broken only by intense heat, germinating then when the rains come again. It's not a cycle that concedes much to human intervention.

The narrow road to the firing range veered off to the left just at the mountain's crest, climbing at an angle through huge sandstone boulders that looked as light and fake as a movie set. I pulled into the dirt and gravel parking area and Jonah and I got out of the car, taking guns and ammo from the backseat. I don't think we'd exchanged six words the entire thirty-minute trip, but the silence was restful.

We paid our fees and tucked little wads of foam in our ears to muffle the sound. I had also brought along a headset, like earmuffs, for additional protection. My hearing had already sustained some damage that I was hoping wasn't going to be permanent. With the plugs in place, I could hear the air going in and out of my own nose, a phenomenon I didn't pay much attention to ordinarily. I like the quiet. At the core of it, I could hear my own heart, like someone thumping on a plaster wall two floors below.

We moved up to the range, roof overhead like a carport extending fifteen feet on either side of us. Only one man was shooting and he had an H amp;K.45 competition pistol that Jonah coveted the minute he laid eyes on it. The two of them talked about the adjustable trigger and adjustable sights while I inserted eight rounds of reloads into the magazine of my little gun. I inherited this no-brand semiautomatic from the very proper maiden aunt who raised me after my parents died. She'd taught me to knit and crochet when I was six, and when I was eight, she'd brought me up here and taught me to target-shoot, bracing my arms on a wooden ironing board that she kept in the trunk of her car. I had fallen in love with the smell of gunpowder when I first came to live with her. I'd sit out on her concrete porch steps with a strip of caps and a hammer, patiently banging away until each snapped out its load of perfume. The porch steps would be littered afterward with bits of red paper and gray spots of burned powder the size of the buckle holes in a belt. I guess she decided after two years of my incessant hammering that she might as well school me in the real thing.

Jonah had brought both his Colts and I fired a few rounds from each, but they felt like too much gun for me. The walnut grip on the Trooper handled like big hunk of petrified wood and the four-inch barrel made sighting a bitch. The gun bucked in my hand like that quick, automatic kick when a doctor taps on your knee, and each time the gun bucked a whiff of gunpowder blew back at me. I did slightly better with the Python, but it was still a distinct and familiar treat when I took up my.32 again, like holding hands with an old friend.

At five, we packed up our gear and headed over to the old stagecoach tavern, tucked into a shady hollow not far from the range. We had beer and bread and baked beans and talked about nothing in particular.

"How's your case going?" he asked me. "You turned up anything yet?"

I shook my head. "I've got some things I may want to talk to you about at some point, but not for now."

"You sound bummed out," he said.

I smiled. "I always do this to myself. I want quick results. If I don't get things wrapped up in two days, I get depressed. What about you? Are you okay?"

He shrugged. "I miss my kids. I used to spend Saturdays with them. It was nice you called. Gave me something to do besides mope."

"Yeah, you can watch me mope," I said.

He patted my hand on the table and squeezed it lightly. The gesture was brief and compassionate and I squeezed back.

I dropped him off at his place again at 7:30 or so and went home. I was tired of worrying about Elaine Boldt so I sat on the couch and cleaned my gun, taking in the smell of oil, finding it restful to dismantle and wipe and put it all back together again. After that, I stripped my clothes off and wrapped up in my quilt, reading a book about fingerprint mechanics until I fell asleep.

Monday morning, I stopped by Santa Teresa Travel on my way into the office and talked to an agent named Lupe who looked like an interesting mix of Chicano and black, slim as a cat. She was in her twenties, with tawny skin and dark frizzy hair with a faint golden cast, cut close to the shape of her head. She wore small rectangular glasses and a smart navy blue pantsuit with a striped tie. I showed her the ticket carbon and told her what I was looking for. My guess was correct. Elaine had been a regular client of theirs for the past several years, though Lupe seemed puzzled by the carbon. She pulled the glasses down low on her nose and looked at me. Her eyes were a flat gold, like a lemur's, and it gave her face an exotic quality. Puffy mouth, small straight nose. She had fingernails that were long and curved and looked as tough as horn. Maybe she had been some kind of burrowing creature in another life. She pushed the glasses back into place again thoughtfully.

"Well, I don't know what to think," she said. "She always bought her tickets through us, but this one was purchased at the airport." She touched at one corner of the carbon, turning the ticket around so I could see the face of it. It reminded me of those teachers in grade school who somehow managed to read a picture book while holding it forward and to one side. "These numbers indicate that it was generated by the airline and paid for by credit card."