The Watchman Read Online Free PDF

building.”
    “Where?”
    “Downtown. It’s in this great industrial area.”
    “That where they came for you the first time they tried to kill you?”
    “I was with my father. In Beverly Hills.”
    “When was that?”
    “I don’t know. Jesus!”
    “Think.”
    “A week. Not even. Six days, maybe.”
    “Who is Alex Meesh?”
    She sank back, her angry confidence gone.
    “The man who’s trying to kill me.”
    Pike had already heard it from her father and Bud, but now he wanted it from her.
    “Why does he want you dead?”
    She stared out the windshield at oncoming nothingness and shook her head.
    “I don’t know. Because I saw him that night with the Kings. When I had my accident. I’m cooperating with the Justice Department.”
    Pike fingered through her credit cards, reading their faces between glances at the road. The cards had all been issued to Larkin Barkley, sometimes with the middle name and sometimes not. Pike pulled out an American Express card and a Visa. The AmEx was one of those special black cards, which indicated she charged at least two hundred fifty thousand dollars every year. He tossed her wallet back onto the floorboard at her feet, but kept the two credit cards and her driver’s license. He wedged them under his leg along with the gun.
    Pike knew what Bud and her father had told him, but now he wanted to identify the players and find out for himself what was true. He would need help to find out those things, so he dialed another number.
    Larkin glanced over, but this time her heart wasn’t in it. She made a weak smile.
    “I hope you’re calling for reservations.”
    “I’m calling someone who can help us.”
    The phone rang twice, and then a man answered.
    “Elvis Cole Detective Agency. We can do anything.”
    “I’m coming up.”
    Pike closed the phone and turned toward the mountains.
     
     
     

5
     
     
    THIRTY-TWO HOURS earlier, on the morning it began, Ocean Avenue was lit with smoky gold light from the street lamps and apartment buildings that lined Santa Monica at the edge of the sea. Joe Pike ran along the center of the street with a coyote pacing him in the shadows bunched on the bluff. It was three fifty-two A. M. That early, the Pacific was hidden by night and the earth ended at the crumbling edge of the bluff, swallowed by a black emptiness. Pike enjoyed the peace during that quiet time, running on the crown of the empty street in a way he could not when light stole the darkness.
    Pike glanced again into the shadows and saw the coyote pacing him without effort, sometimes visible, other times not as it loped between the palms. It was an old male, its mask white and scarred, come down from the canyons to forage. Every time Pike glanced over, the coyote was watching him, full-on staring even as it ran. The coyote probably found him curious. Coyotes had rules for living among men, which was how they flourished in Los Angeles. One of their rules was that they only came out at night. Coyotes probably believed the night belonged to wild things. This coyote probably thought Pike was breaking the rules.
    Pike hitched up his backpack and pushed himself faster. A second coyote joined with the first.
    Joe Pike ran this route often: west on Washington from his condo, north on Ocean to San Vicente, then east to Fourth Street, where steep concrete steps dropped down the bluff like jagged teeth. One hundred eighty-nine steps, stacked up the bluff, interrupted four times by small pads built to catch the people who fell. Without the pads, anyone who stumbled could be killed. One hundred eighty-nine steps is as tall as a nine-story building. Running the steps was like running up nine flights of stairs.
    This morning, Pike was wearing a surplus rucksack loaded with four ten-pound bags of Gold Medal flour. Pike would run the steps twenty times, down and up, before turning for home. Around his waist, he wore a fanny pack with his cell phone, his ID, his keys, and a .25-caliber Beretta