the Viking Funeral (2001) Read online

  Suddenly, Jody floored the dust-covered Charger, shooting ahead, changing lanes around a slow-moving truck.

  "No!" Shane's voice was a strangled plea. "Don't go! Not again!"

  Shane pushed the pedal all the way to the floor, but Alexa's Subaru was underpowered, winding up slowly like a twenty-year-old airraid siren, taking its time to reach full power, its thin whine lost behind the Charger's four-barrel roar. Finally, Shane was going almost a hundred, chasing the vanishing muscle car between semis and soccer moms, businessmen and airport taxis, weaving dangerously in and out amid a chorus of blaring horns and unheard curses.

  The Charger was ahead, gaining ground, its loose but empty chrome license-plate holder winking morning sunlight back at him.

  Suddenly, Jody cut off a Ryder van and the top-heavy rent-a-truck, with its inexperienced driver, started pinwheeling across all four lanes. In seconds, it was directly in front of the Subaru. Shane had a scary two seconds as he tried to avoid death at a hundred miles an hour. Alexa's car, broke loose, swapping ends. Then he was carouseling wildly down the freeway: the landscape strobing past his windshield--dangerous, disembodied glimpses of trees, guardrails, and concrete abutments. A kaleidoscope of images on spin cycle... Around and around the Subaru went, metal lint on the busy L. A. freeway, until he saw the end coming. A bridge abutment spun into view like a huge concrete iceberg.

  Shane fed the little Japanese car some gas, trying to straighten out the spin. He caught some traction, and the car made a try at straightening out, but he was still crooked and sliding sideways when he hit the wall of concrete, slamming into it hard. He felt the whole right side of Alexa's car explode, as door handles, side mirrors and paint all disintegrated or flew free, followed a second later by the whole left door--all of this accompanied by the scream of tortured metal. Shane was staring at blurred concrete graffiti and tagger art grinding and Strobing past the doorless opening like the scenery wheel in an eighth-grade play.

  The Subaru finally shuddered to a halt, and then it was over. He was sitting in the car, stuck in the fast lane, facing the wrong way, his heart jackhammering in his chest.

  Shane spun around and looked out the back window. The black and orange Charger was nowhere to be found.

  Jody Dean was gone as suddenly as he had reappeared.

  Chapter 3.

  YOU'RE QUTTA THERE

  OKAY, so HOW do I bullshit my way out of this one? I'm a police officer, trained to make split-second observations but also regarded by the department as something of a head case. I'm forced to sit in a cracked vinyl La-Z-Boy three times a week while an overweight, balding therapist looks across at me over templed fingers, saying> "Uh-huh, " "I see, " and "How does that make you feel?"

  His career was already in big trouble. This little story about seeing a dead man on the 405 Freeway would make him look as though he'd started carrying his shit around in a sock.

  Shane sat in the office of the towing company, waiting for the cab he'd called, looking out the window at a crumpled gallery of traffic mistakes, the latest of which was Alexa's little Subaru. Aside from the destroyed right side, the car looked badly torqued to him. If the frame was bent, it was a total. Right on top of this sobering realization, his cell phone rang. He dug it out.

  "Shane, where are you? Bud just called, and nobody was at the airport. He had to take a cab." Alexa sounded annoyed.

  Shane had completely forgotten about Bud, the breakfast-food salesman. Shane had never met Bud but had talked to him once or twice on the phone. His booming "Hey, pal" voice always seemed jovial while still managing to convey displeasure.

  "I'm sorry, honey. I hate to tell you this, but I had an accident in the Subaru."

  "Are you okay?" Instant concern.

  "Yeah, I'm fine." But of course, he wasn't. He was close to hysteria, his whole body shaking, his nerves buzzing like a desert power line. "I'm great," he lied, then added, "I need to talk to you. We need to sit down. I'm taking a cab over to the Glass House. I should be there in half an hour."

  "Shane, I--"

  "Look, I'm sorry about Buddy and the car. I'm afraid I really boxed it."

  "I don't care about the car, Shane. As long as you're okay, that's all that matters."

  Through the fly-specked office window, Shane saw the Yellow Cab pull into the tow company's parking lot. A round-shouldered Melrose cowboy, wearing a plaid shirt and a silver buckle the size of an ashtray, got out and started looking around for his fare. Shane motioned to him.

  "Cab's here. I'll be there in forty minutes."

  "Shane, you know I'm swamped getting this financial review finished."

  "I need help. Something just came up. I can't go into it on the phone."

  "Okay, then let's try meeting at the Peking Duck. It's fast. We can grab something while we talk, but gimme at least an hour."

  "Okay," he said, and closed the phone. He heaved himself up and walked on stringy, oxygen-starved muscles out of the tow-service waiting room, then got into the Yellow Cab.

  They were on the 405 heading back to L. A., Shane sitting quietly in the backseat behind the driver, looking for his bridge abutment, finally seeing the crash site sliding by across six lanes of traffic at Howard Hughes Parkway. A pound of rubber and a powder-blue slash of paint. His accident, like a thousand others, was now immortalized on freeway concrete, insignificant as a sauna-room butt mark.

  A block from Parker Center was the Peking Duck, which was actually now called Kim Young's. It had been sold by the original owners after an armed robbery attempt, but the old sign was still hanging out front. Kim Young had bought the restaurant from his cousin, who retired, giving up his American Dream after four dust bunnies in ski masks had tried to take the place, unaware that half the LAPD Glass House Day Watch lunched there. This criminal brain trust of highwaymen had just pulled their breakdowns out from under cool street dusters when they were surprised to hear half a dozen automatics trombone loudly behind them. They spun around and in seconds ate enough lead to qualify as the second-largest metal deposit in California. It took a crane to lift them into the coroner's van.

  Shane took a booth in the back. The restaurant had linoleum floors and was always noisy.

  He sat alone, waving at a few friends who came in but not over.

  He thought about Jody--or more correctly, how he would explain what he had seen to Alexa. His mind was already hunting for a way out: shifting details to make them seem more acceptable, eliminating facts, pulling them this way and that. Piece by piece, he was trying to arrange the event so that it would become at least digestible, removing one crumb at a time, working to make it disappear, his thoughts like ants struggling to carry away a picnic. However, this was too big. He had to deal with it. But how? What should he do? How could he explain it?

  Ten minutes later Alexa entered the place, and Shane heard the volume of conversation dip as forty or fifty guys whispered her arrival across tables stacked with egg rolls and dim sum. Then again, maybe that was just his jealous imagination--he wasn't sure. She walked toward him, her hips swaying slightly, her slender calves flexing.

  She slid in, reached across the table, and squeezed his hand. "You sure you're okay? No whiplash?" she asked, concerned.

  "Yeah, but your car is junk. A sea anchor."

  "If it saved your life, it did its job." She smiled. "I'll cash the insurance and get a red one. I was tired of powder blue anyway."

  Then, almost without knowing how he started, he was telling her, talking about seeing the Charger, seeing Jody Dean looking back at him across a lane of traffic, the heart-stopping moment of recognition... And then, Jody, taking off, leaving Shane in the dust; the Ryder van pinwheeling in front of him until the Subaru finally ground to a halt under the bridge on the Howard Hughes Parkway.

  Alexa didn't say anything while he was telling it. "Shane," she said after he had finished. "Jody is dead. We talked about it last night. What is it? Why do you insist on?..." She didn't finish, but instead, let go of hi
s hand.

  "His suicide never made sense to me.... I couldn't believe he'd kill himself," Shane said. "He wasn't the kind of guy who eats his gun."

  "Yet cops who seem normal do it all the time When it's a good friend, it's just harder to accept."

  "Alexa, I may be going through a psychiatric review, but I'm not a psycho."

  "Jody is dead," she repeated. "You carried his box to the furnace--gave his ashes to his wife. You know he's gone."

  "Then who did I see on the freeway? He ran, Alexa. Took off. I crashed because he cut off a truck and it almost hit me. Why would he run if it wasn't Jody?"

  She sat there quietly, looking at him, for a long time, trying to find the right thing to say. Then she lowered her voice and leaned toward him. "I want you to let this go. Okay? I want you to keep quiet about it and let it go."

  "Don't think it'll look good in my package? Help dress up my psychiatric review?" he said sarcastically.

  She smiled a tight smile. "I'm sure there's some explanation. Jody's body was identified by his wife and by his commander at Detective Services Group... Who was it back then?"

  "Captain Medwick."

  "Right. Carl Medwick. He and Lauren wouldn't identify the body if Jody wasn't dead."

  "Yeah... Yeah... Of course. Probably not." The conversation stopped, but these ideas lay between them, festering malignantly.

  "You just saw somebody who looked like Jody," she added.

  Ants working hard, tugging at crumbs, still trying to make this untidy idea go away.

  "Of course, you're right," he said, with more enthusiasm. "That's gotta be it. Gotta be. And he ran because... Because..." He looked up for help.

  "Because, sometimes, Shane, when you stare at people, you can look very ferocious. The driver of that Charger just got scared."

  A big piece, an important piece, dragged... Hauled, actually, to the edge of the blanket, but not gone... not quite yet.

  "You're right," he said. "Shit, I probably scared the poor guy, whoever he was, half to death."

  "I've seen you do it."

  "He probably thought I was some lane-change killer about to pull a gun and start blasting."

  They both sat there anxiously, trying to buy it, hoping for the best, like family members waiting for a biopsy.

  "Yeah... God, what was I thinking? The guy sure looked like Jody, but it wasn't him. Couldn't've been," Shane said.

  Alexa nodded.

  But as he sat there in the Peking Duck trying to convince himself, he remembered that look again--Jody's look. In his memory he saw little ten-year-old Jody, standing on the mound, shaking off signs in frustration, sending Shane his own brand of telepathy... Jody-thoughts coming in on their special frequency. With this realization, the self-deception ended. It was Jody in that Charger, talking to Shane without having to speak, just like in Little League. Stop screwing around, manUrn gonna throw the heater. Rearing back, going into his windup, burning it in there... Shane, knowing the pitch without even flashing the sign. Cowhide slapping leather. Fastball. Right down the old pipe.

  Strike three, asshole.... You're outta there!

  Chapter 4.

  QUESTIONS

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT made no sense at all.

  Since Shane had missed his psychiatric appointment because of the accident, he decided to kill the early afternoon pursuing this dilemma. He'd promised Alexa that he'd forget about Jody, forget about seeing his dead best friend tooling along on the San Diego Freeway instead of doing what he was supposed to be doing--gathering dust in an antique urn.

  Shane broke his promise to Alexa because he had to. He got Jody's old commanding officer's address from the department newsletter mailing roster, then cabbed home to Venice and picked up his black Acura. Chooch's last spring practice wouldn't finish until six P. M., and Alexa had agreed to pick him up in a department car. Shane had lied, telling her that his shrink appointment had been pushed back and that he'd be late getting out of the psychiatrist's, freeing himself to go see Jody's old captain.

  Captain Carl Medwick lived in a Leave It to Beaver neighborhood in the West Valley: maple trees, picket fences, tricycles parked unattended in the driveways, as if L. A. hadn't become the bike-theft capital of the world, not counting Miami and Singapore.

  Shane parked out front and looked at the wood-frame house painted a light blue-- Subaru blue. He was beginning to loathe that color.

  He rang the front doorbell and then, after the door opened, found himself staring into the bloodshot, tear-filled eyes of a handsome middle-aged woman wearing a loose-fitting cotton-print dress and comfortable shoes.

  "Excuse me, ma'am. Is Carl Medwick home?" he asked. The question caused the woman to bring a lace handkerchief up to her eyes. It fluttered there and landed hesitantly, like a delicate white butterfly. She didn't answer. He tried again.

  "I'm looking for Carl Medwick."

  "We all are," she said, her voice weak, almost a whisper. "He's not here. He didn't come home last night."

  "Didn't come home?"

  "He went to the store and didn't come back. We talked to the police, called all his friends, checked the places he goes, we even checked the hospitals." Rambling all this at Shane, not even knowing who he was but needing to say it to somebody ... To anybody... Ticking off the details of her search to convince them both that nothing had been forgotten.

  "I'm Shane Scully, a sergeant in the department," he said, stretching the truth. He was really suspended Sergeant Scully. Psychiatrically disoriented and temporarily unassigned Sergeant Scully. But the fib worked, because the woman reached out and clutched his hand. "I'm Doris Medwick, his wife. Please tell me you found him."

  Shane held her hand, looked into her bloodshot eyes, and shook his head sadly. "I'm afraid I'm not a part of the Missing Persons Bureau," he said.

  "Oh..." She hesitated, then went on. "He... He was in his woodshop, working... Building a birdhouse for our granddaughter. He said he needed some materials and would be back in twenty minutes. Then he drove to the store. They found his car in the parking lot at the Hardware Center, but he didn't... He wasn't..." The handkerchief came up again, fluttering around her face, wiping her eyes, blowing her nose. She was a stout but attractive gray-haired woman in her late sixties with almost translucent white skin.

  According to information Shane had collected from several of Medwick's friends, the captain had retired, having pulled the pin two months ago.

  "Could I take a look at his shop?" Shane asked.

  "What possible good could that do?"

  "I'm a detective," he fudged. "Sometimes I find it's a good idea to study the events that occurred just prior to an incident."

  "Oh," she said. "The other policemen didn't ask about that." She led him through a house filled with discount furniture. Despite her husband's disappearance, the room was freshly vacuum-tracked and dusted. Shane had witnessed this behavior before. The families of a victim often busied themselves with chores, as if the mere performance of those everyday acts restored order and normalcy. Look how nice the carpet looks for when he gets home, and I've polished the furniture. Everything is all right.

  Doris Medwick turned on the garage lights and left him alone. Shane found himself looking at a very professional woodshop area. He moved to Captain Medwick's workbench and glanced down at the skill saws and jigs, the power sanders and drills. In the corner, vise-clamped to the bench, was an almost completed prefab birdhouse. The box it came in called it a Squirrel-Proof Robin's Roost and Feeder. The sides were glued and the screws countersunk. The roof had been assembled but not attached, and a plastic water dish was fitted into a wooden feeding tray. It was made of fresh-smelling, unpainted pine and was about two feet square, not counting the pitched roof. It was easy to confirm what had happened: Carl had run out of brass screws. The empty box was on the bench, and two drilled holes in the underside of the bird-house remained empty. The project lined up with Doris Medwick's story.

  Shane stood there, looking down at
the unfinished birdhouse while a feeling of deep-seated unease swept over him. Carl Medwick had been Jody's commander at Detective Services Group. Carl had identified Jody's body. He'd finished his tour on the LAPD, pulled the pin, and, thirty-four months after Jody's suicide, had started his retirement. Then yesterday, the day before Shane saw Jody on the San Diego Freeway, Carl runs out of screws, goes to the hardware store, and mysteriously disappears.

  The timing of these two events, like the unfinished Robin's Roost, was for the birds. He turned off the lights and left, pausing at the back door to say good-bye.

  "You will call if there's anything, anything at all?..." the distraught woman pleaded, still not registering the fact that Shane was not part of her husband's missing-persons investigation. He had a strong feeling that Carl Medwick was going to stay lost.

  "Absolutely," he said, adding, "who did you talk to at the Missing Persons Bureau?"

  "A woman, Detective Bosterman."

  "Thanks. If I get anything, I'll be in touch."

  He left, in a hurry to get away from there, lickety-splitting down the trimmed driveway, past the gardening shack by the garage with its neatly stored rakes and hoes and top-folded bag of Lawn-Grow. Mrs. Medwick tracked him from the back porch until he got around the corner. He could feel her bloodshot eyes on him, steady as government radar, pinpointing a spot directly between his shoulders.

  It took Shane half an hour to get Lauren Dean's new address, finally finding it through his old Homicide Division, getting Sergeant Bill Hoskins to grab it off the computer for him.