Stalking the Angel Read Online Free Page B

around the deck, sat on the edge, and opened the first Falstaff. From my deck you can see across a long twisting canyon that widens and spreads into Hollywood. I like to sit there with my feet hanging down and drink and think about things. It’s about thirty feet from the deck to the slope below, but that’s okay. I like the height. Sometimes the hawks come and float above the canyon and above the smog. They like the height, too.
    I drank some of the beer and thought about Bradley and Sheila and Jillian Becker and Malcolm Denning. Bradley would be sitting comfortably in first class, dictating important business notes to Jillian Becker, who would be writing them down and nodding. Sheila would be out on her tennis court, bending over to show Hatcher her rear end, and squealing,
Ooo, these darnlaces!
Malcolm Denning would be staring at the pictures of his wife and his boys and his Little League team and wondering when it would all go to hell.
    “You ever notice,” I said to the cat, “that sometimes the bad guys are better people than the good guys?”
    The cat crept out from beneath the Weber, walked over, and sniffed at my beer. I poured a little out onto the deck for him and touched his back as he drank. It was soft.
    Sometimes he bites, but not always.

4

    The next morning it was warm and bright in my loft, with the summer sun slanting in through the big glass
A
that is the back of my house. The cat was curled on the bed next to me, bits of leaf and dust in his fur, smelling of eucalyptus.
    I rolled out of bed and pulled on some shorts and went downstairs. I opened the glass sliding doors for the breeze, then went back into the living room and turned on the TV. News. I changed channels. Rocky and Bullwinkle. There was a thump upstairs and then the cat came down. Bullwinkle said, “Nothing up my sleeve!” and ripped off his sleeve to prove it. Rocky said, “Oh, no, not again!” and flew around in a circle. The cat hopped up on the couch and stared at them.
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle
is his favorite show.
    I went back out onto the deck and did twelve sun salutes to stretch out the kinks. I did neck rolls andshoulder rolls and the spine rock and the cobra and the locust, and I began to sweat. Inside, Mr. Peabody and Sherman were setting the Way Back Machine for the Early Mesopotamian Age. I put myself into the peacock posture with my legs straight out behind me and I held it like that until my back screamed and the sweat left dark splatters on the deck, and then I went into the Dragon
kata
from the tae kwon do, and then the Crane
kata
, driving myself until the sweat ran in my eyes and my muscles failed and my nerves refused to carry another signal and I sat on the deck and felt like a million bucks. Endorphin heaven. So clients weren’t perfect. So being a private cop wasn’t perfect. So life wasn’t perfect. I could always get new cards printed up. They would say:
Elvis Cole, Perfect Detective
.
    Forty minutes later I was on the Hollywood Freeway heading southeast toward downtown Los Angeles and Little Tokyo and feeling pretty good about myself. Ah, perfection. It lends comfort in troubled times.
    I stayed with the Hollywood past the Pasadena interchange, then took the Broadway exit into downtown L.A. Downtown Los Angeles features dirty inner-city streets, close-packed inner-city skyscrapers, and aromatic inner-city street life. The men who work there wear suits and the women wear heels and you see people carrying umbrellas as if it might rain. Downtown Los Angeles does not feel like Los Angeles. It is Boston or Chicago or Detroit or Manhattan. It feels like someplace else that had come out to visit and decided to stay. Maybe one day they’ll put a dome over it and charge admission. They could call it Banal-land.
    I took Broadway down to First Street, hung a left, and two blocks later I was in Little Tokyo.
    The buildings were old, mostly brick or stone facade,but they had been kept up and the streets