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  He shook his head. “Not if you can stand a little mourning.”

  She smiled sadly. “I lost my first man in Vietnam. There’s nothing you can teach me about mourning.”

  “You didn’t tell me about that.”

  “There wasn’t no need. I don’t know nothing about you, and you don’t know nothing about me, and that was the way we were meant to be.”

  Mack laid his hand on her bare shoulder, and leaned forward and kissed her. “You’re very good for me. You know that?”

  “Yes,” she smiled, her eyes glittering.

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I guess I’ll go out. Maybe get some beer and some food. We could have Dick and Lois around later, if you like.”

  “Come to bed first,” she said. Her beaded black hair rattled as she shook her head.

  “I just got up.”

  “This is therapy.”

  “What kind of therapy?”

  “Forget-your-sadness therapy. Come on.”

  She took his wrist and led him back into the bedroom. He stood silent while she tugged his Snoqualmie T-shirt over his head and then unzippered his Levi’s. She knelt on the bedroom floor and pulled the pants down his legs.

  He felt as if he couldn’t catch his breath; the way you feel in a high wind. Olive’s perfume was strong and flowery, and there was something about the way her long fingernails grazed over his skin that he found intensely arousing. She guided him toward the bed and gently pushed him backward onto the red satin sheet. He looked up at her, and the muted flare of the sun that shone through the blind behind her made her appear darker and more mysterious than ever.

  He wondered if her first lover had been black or white. He wondered how he had died.

  She unwrapped her sarong. It fell to the floor, pure silk, silent as a shadow. The soft sunlight gleamed on the brown skin of her impossibly huge breasts, nippled with black. She climbed onto the bed, and her breasts swayed.

  “You have to forget everything,” she whispered. He wasn’t sure if her voice was far or near. The room was dim and warm and funky from their night of love. He felt her tongue run along the sole of his foot, and her teeth nip at his heel. Then she began to lick and kiss him all the way up the inside of his left leg, pausing every now and then to trace with the tip of her tongue a more elaborate pattern, like the shape of a butterfly, or a star. He had thought that last night was enough, but now he could feel himself hardening again, and a deep pulse between his legs.

  Olive’s searching mouth at last reached his thigh, and then her wet tongue was burrowing between the cheeks of his ass and licking around his tightened balls. He let out a short, tight breath. Thoughts of Sherry still crowded his mind. Sherry standing in that same bedroom doorway.

  Sherry lying asleep on that pillow beside him. The unhappiness in him began to overwhelm him, and he could feel himself soften.

  But to Olive, achieving this moment of oblivion was vital. Mack had to know that he could turn to her for forgetfulness when his sadness for Sherry was too much to bear. He had to know that she could blot out his grief.

  She held him in her hand, her long fingernails gently digging into the flesh of his penis, and she licked his shaft until it stiffened again. Then she kissed and nuzzled the head with her lips, and probed the salty, secret crevice. She felt his thigh muscles tense up, heard him groan.

  Olive took him deep into her mouth. Dark lips enclosed white flesh. Her head moved up and down, faster and faster, until her dreadlocks sounded like maracas. Her mind was a jumble of thoughts. Her eyes were tight closed. All she knew was that she wanted to suck out of him all the love she could. She felt his strong, thin fingers clutching at her breast, pulling at her nipple.

  There was a long minute of tension. The world had closed its doors to memory, to Sherry, to Hollywood, to everything but one rising and irresistible sensation.

  Then Mack said, “Ah,” quite softly, and flooded Olive’s mouth.

  Olive, after a short while, sat up. Her lips shone in the shaded bedroom sun. “How was it?” she asked him, and she wasn’t surprised to see tears in his eyes.

  CHAPTER NINE

  If his wife Nora hadn’t given him sliced onion in his liverwurst sandwiches that morning, patrolman Ed Russo wouldn’t have died. But the onion had given him heartburn, and he asked his partner Phil Massey to pull the car into the curb at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland so that he could buy himself a pack of Rolaids.

  It was four minutes after eleven. Sergeant Skrolnik was just leaving Mack Holt’s apartment building on Franklin Avenue. Olive Nesmith was just saying: “Forget-your-sad-ness therapy.

  Come on.” In West Los Angeles Mrs. Eva Crowley was staring at her face in the mirror and trying to keep herself from throwing up, and Sherry Cantor had been dead for slightly more than twenty-seven hours.

  Ed Russo, a slim, soft-spoken man with a heavy brown mustache, walked through the cold air-conditioned drugstore until he found the shelves he wanted. He bought two packs of Rolaids, one to keep in his locker and one for the car. He wouldn’t need either of them.

  The strawberry-rinsed woman behind the pharmaceutical counter said, “How are you doing?”

  Russo held up the Rolaids. “My wife gave me onions today. I love onions, but onions sure hate me.”

  “Doesn’t anybody or anything like cops?” asked the woman. “Even onions?”

  Russo smiled, although the gripes in his stomach had twisted up his sense of humor as well. He walked back toward the checkout, juggling the indigestion tablets in his hand.

  Through the ad-plastered window of the drugstore, Russo had a view of the traffic signals at the intersection outside. He watched a souped-up Dodge Charger brake at the line as the lights on Hollywood changed to red. The Charger was a pretty slick job, in crimson metallic-flake paint with chromed exhausts. Ed Russo could have done with a car like that himself. He was only twenty-four, and he still hankered after beach parties and custom cars and big waves at Malibu. But somehow, after he’d married Nora, he’d settled down to a routine of brown-bag lunches, garage auctions, drive-in movies, and washing the car on the weekend. In subtle, unnoticeable stages, in ways that Russo could never quite recall, Nora had altered in three years of married life from a skinny, suntanned, nineteen-year-old nymphct, pretty and shy, into a talkative, opinionated, intolerant young housewife in a lurex headscarf and rollers, organizer of the local church social club, the La Mirada PTA, and a never-ending ten-ring circus of coffee-and-cake mornings, baby showers, and lectures by white-haired evangelists who stank of tobacco.

  When Russo looked at Nora over the battlements of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Post Toasties in the morning, he sometimes wondered if God was punishing him for some sin he couldn’t remember committing.

  Russo’s change clattered into the tray of the change-maker. But as he reached for it, a squittering sound of tires made him look back out of the drugstore window. A dark blue van was driving straight through the red light, swerving to avoid a white Lincoln, and then turning north up Highland Avenue in a cloud of burned rubber.

  Russo grabbed his change, pocketed his Rolaids, and ran for the sidewalk. He wrenched open the police car door and yelled to Phil Massey, “Let’s get going!”

  Their siren whooped as they U-turned on Hollywood, bucking on their suspension. Then they squealed left on Highland, and the V-8 motor roared.

  “Did you see that?” asked Massey. He was young and gingery, with a face splattered with freckles. “He could’ve killed somebody, coming round that corner like that.”

  “There he is,” said Russo.

  The van was speeding round the S-curve by the Hughes supermarket. It shot the lights and kept on north toward the Hollywood Freeway, swaying from one side to the other as it overtook cars, trucks, and a northbound bus. The police siren warbled and howled as Russo and Massey chased after it. They flashed through light, shadow, flickering sunshine.

  Weaving through the traffic, the van sped ahe
ad of them onto the glaring concrete of the freeway. But Massey put his foot flat down, and as they sped through the Hollywood hills, they gradually began to overtake the van, coming up on its left side.

  Russo wound down his window and unfastened his holster. Then he put his arm out the window and flagged the van down, pointing to the hard shoulder.

  At first, the van driver hesitated. But then Russo pointed to the hard shoulder again, fiercely, and the van driver put on his right-hand indicator and began to slow down. Massey slowed the police car, too, and nosed in behind the van as it pulled off the freeway and gradually came to a stop. Through his loudspeaker, Russo ordered: ‘‘ Get out of the van slowly and put your hands on the side panels where we can see them.”

  Then he said to Massey, “Run a check on his plate, will you?” It was a Florida license. “And see if the Highway Patrol has any backup around.”

  Russo climbed out of the car and walked toward the van, putting on his cap. It was hot and dusty on the freeway, and he unhooked his sunglasses from his uniform pocket and put them on.

  The van driver was Japanese. He was standing beside his vehicle with his hands pressed against the dark-blue paneling, and he was watching Russo guardedly.

  Russo walked around him and glanced in the driving compartment. It looked empty, except for a tartan holdall with a vacuum flask sticking out of it. He turned back to the driver. Five foot five or six. Late thirties. Dressed in a black satin windbreaker and cheap gray slacks. Cropped black hair, and a slight white scar on the left eyebrow.

  Russo said, “Take out your license with one hand. Slowly. And hand it over.”

  The Japanese reached cautiously into his windbreaker pocket and took out his license. He held it out, six inches from Russo’s outstretched hand.

  Russo snatched it and stared intently at the Japanese for a moment before he opened it.

  “Eric Yoshikazu? Of Emelita Street, Van Nuys?” asked Russo.

  The Japanese nodded.

  Russo inspected the license closely, and then folded it. “I’m going to have to book you for a serious traffic offense. And for failing to stop when requested to do so by a police officer.’’

  Yoshikazu shrugged.

  “You have anything to say about that?” asked Russo.

  “I see my lawyer,” said Yoshikazu.

  Russo took out his citation book. “You can see as many lawyers as you like. That’s your right.

  But it doesn’t alter the fact that you ran a red light on Hollywood Boulevard and made an illegal turn and endangered the lives of yourself and innocent people.’’

  “I don’t say nothing,” said Yoshikazu.

  “That’s your right,” said Russo. He paced round the van and stood at the back for a while, noting down the license number in his book. Yoshikazu watched him all the time. The freeway traffic swished past them, and the air was sparkling with sunlight and grit and fumes.

  Russo lifted his pencil and pointed toward the back of the van. “What you got inside there, Mr.

  Yoshikazu?”

  Yoshikazu looked at Russo for a long time. “I don’t carry nothing,” he said at last.

  “Your rear end is well down,” commented Russo.

  “I get fixed.”

  “Supposing it doesn’t need fixing, Mr. Yoshikazu? Supposing you’re carrying something heavy in the back of this van?”

  “I don’t carry nothing.”

  “Well, why don’t you open it up and let’s take a locfk?”

  Yoshikazu thought about that. He wiped sweat away from his upper lip with the back of his hand. “I don’t think I want to open,” he said.

  Russo put away his pencil. “Mr. Yoshikazu, I have the legal right to demand that you open your van. If you fail to do so, then I’m going to arrest you, and your van will be impounded.”

  “That’s not possible,” said Yoshikazu. “This van is not mine. I have no entitlement to open.”

  Russo adjusted his cap. The headband was sweaty. “If you don’t open up this van, Mr.

  Yoshikazu, then I’m going to open it up for you.”

  “No!” shouted Yoshikazu, with unexpected vehemence. “You not open! I don’t carry nothing!

  You not open

  At that moment, Massey came up with his notebook in his hand. “You having trouble here?” he asked.

  “Guy refuses to open the van,” said Russo. “What you got?”

  Massey held up the notebook. “It’s a legitimate vehicle, not reported as stolen or missing. It belongs to the Florida office of the Willis Candy Corporation. Their head office is in Century City.”

  “You have candy in there?” Russo asked Yoshikazu.

  Yoshikazu nodded. “Just gum. That’s all. Just five cases gum.”

  “Good,” said Russo. “In that case, you won’t mind us taking a look.”

  There was a tense silence. Yoshikazu looked at the police officers wide-eyed. Russo could almost see the word desperation hovering over his head like a bubble in a cartoon. Whatever Yoshikazu was carrying inside this van, he was scared shitless about letting the police take a look at it.

  “It’s better you don’t open,” said Yoshikazu breathlessly. “I think I appeal to better nature.

  Here–I pay you money. You not open. Here–I pay you fifty dollars.”

  “Keep your hands in sight,” snapped Massey, as Yoshikazu reached inside his windbreaker for his billfold. Yoshikazu paused, and then lifted his hands again. “It’s an orfense to attempt to bribe a police officer,” said Russo. “If you carry on this way, Mr.

  Yoshikazu, you’re going to wind up doing three to five. Now, let’s cut the crap and open this van up.”

  At that instant, there was a loud, hollow, metallic beating noise from inside the van. Yoshikazu went pale. Russo frowned at Massey, and then demanded of Yoshikazu, “What was that? What the hell have you got in there?”

  “Waking up,” babbled Yoshikazu. “That’s why I hurry. That’s why I run light. Waking up.”

  “Waking up? What’s waking up?”

  In reply, there was another burst of ferocious knocking from inside the van. Someone or something rattled and kicked at the doors, and thundered at the panels. Massey held Russo’s arm and pointed to the side of the van. Bulges were appearing in the sheet metal as if the van were being slugged from the inside with a ten-pound hammer. In moments, the whole side of the vehicle was pimpled with them.

  Russo took out his revolver.

  “All right, Mr. Yoshikazu, I want that van open.”

  “I not do it!”

  “I said open it–and move

  Yoshikazu dropped to his knees on the concrete.

  Russo ordered Massey, “Go get the pump shotgun.” Massey ran back toward the patrol car, one hand holding his hat on, as if all the dogs of hell were snapping at his heels.

  Russo edged up to the back of the van, his pistol raised, and cautiously put his ear to the panel.

  “Is there anyone in there?” he shouted.

  There was silence.

  “I said, Is there anyone in there?”

  There was an ear-splitting bang, and the door of the van was punched out into a huge bulge. He jumped back and stood with his gun in both hands ready to fire. But the lock on the van doors held, and whatever it was inside the van shuffled off toward the front end. Russo could see the vehicle swaying as it made its way forward.

  Massey came panting back with the shotgun. Russo said, “Give me some cover. I’m going to see if I can get those doors open.”

  Massey asked, “What is it in there? Some kind of wild animal?”

  “I’m not sure. And Emperor Hirohito here isn’t about to tell us.”

  “Maybe I should call the zoo.”

  “Maybe we should just find out what the hell we’re dealing with. Did you ask for backup?”

  “Sure,” said Massey. “A couple of minutes, they said. There’s been a multiple pileup on the Ventura Freeway.”

  “Okay,” said Russo, sweat
ing. “Then let’s do it.”

  Russo advanced toward the doors again, his revolver held out in front of him. The van was motionless, silent. Russo coughed. Behind him, Massey raised his gun and clicked off the safety.

  Russo reached the van. He glanced sideways at Yoshikazu, but Yoshikazu was still on his knees on the concrete, his face white and rigid. Russo waited for a short while, and then tapped on the van doors with the butt of his gun.

  Massey said tightly, “It could have gone back to sleep again.”

  Russo turned to Yoshikazu. “That possible?” he asked.

  Yoshikazu shook his head.

  “You have one last chance to tell me what it is,” said Russo.

  Yoshikazu whispered, “You not open. I appeal to better nature. Easy thing, you let me go, say nothing, forget.”

  The Japanese was shaking, and his face was jeweled with sweat.

  Russo looked back at Massey. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

  Massey grinned. “You have to admire his...”

  The rear doors of the van burst open with a devastating crash, and Russo was hurtled backward across the concrete. Massey fired his shotgun out of nervous reaction, but his shot went wide.

  A short, heavily built man in a glaring white mask swung from the back of the van and threw himself on Russo. Russo felt as if a whole bag of cement had been dropped on him from a second-floor window. He pressed the muzzle of his gun against the man’s side and screamed,

  “Get off, or I’ll blow your guts out!” But the man seized Russo by the neck with mad, unstoppable ferocity and began to twist.

  Russo saw scarlet. Nothing but scarlet. He didn’t know where he was or what was happening. He fired his gun and felt the shock of the recoil and the thump of the bullet entering his attacker’s body. But the pain didn’t stop, and the viselike grip on his neck didn’t let up, and he dropped his pistol–a numbness as agonizing and overwhelming as an electric shock stunned his reflexes.

  Massey fired again, hitting the masked man in the muscle of the right shoulder. The shot turfed up a bloody lump of flesh, but the man kept on wrenching wildly at Russo’s prostrate body as if nothing had happened. Massey ran two or three paces nearer, knelt down, aimed, and fired at pointblank range. There was a deafening report, and he saw the yellow cotton of the man’s clothes scorch black where the bullet entered his, side.