Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [52]
He was growing impressed with this quick logic when the back door to the house slammed shut. Ben spun around just in time to see a shadow streak through the security light’s halo and out the side gate. The hedge clippers forgotten, Ben took off after the guy.
By the time Ben reached the sidewalk, the stranger was a block away, moving at a steady clip with his shoulders hunched forward and a backpack jostling against a puffy waffle-print coat that was too heavy for the spring evening.
The stranger somehow sensed that he was being pursued and whirled around. Ben threw himself behind a sycamore tree before he could be seen. He listened to the man’s frenzied whispers, tried to make out his words but couldn’t. After surveying the lay of shadows all around him, he decided to venture a peek. Half a block away, the stranger rocked back and forth, his head pivoting as if he had been scanning the sidewalk behind him and some internal gearshift had gotten stuck. A nearby porch light illuminated his matted shoulderlength hair but not his face.
The stranger backed up until he was at the mouth of an alleyway that ran behind the businesses on Santa Monica Boulevard, a once-important West Hollywood thoroughfare that had born the nickname Vaseline Alley before the sheriff’s department had planted traffic barriers at either end to keep the predators from cruising it after dark. When the stranger saw this new path of escape, he turned on his heel and entered it.
As soon as he reached the mouth of the alleyway, Ben called out to the stranger, who backed away from a dumpster he was trying to open with one hand.
“Jawbone,” Ben whispered.
The resident lunatic stared back at Ben with cue-ball eyes, chapped lips parted over yellowing teeth. Not a porn star. Not an Ivy League graduate. A deranged drug addict. He held a bulging black backpack in his right fist. The front flaps of his waffle-print coat were smeared with blood and it looked as if the bag was as well, even though the color partially masked the stains. Jawbone’s lips were moving rapidly, forming words Ben could barely hear.
“’Cause he wasn’t listening none, that’s why. ’Cause that thing was a-blowin’ and he wasn’t listenin’ none to what I say, so I had to … had to … had to …”
Displaying both of his palms at waist level, Ben started moving toward the man, trying to put nothing but supplication on his face even as he strained to hear the content of Jawbone’s frenzied speech, made even less intelligible by his heavy Southern accent.
“See I was tryin’ to get him to come out and see that there wasn’t somethin’ in his trash. Somethin’ movin’, alright? But he couldn’t hear me none over that blower …”
The leaf blower. Ron had been using that damn leaf blower and for some reason Jawbone, blitzed out of his head, had come into the yard, wanting his attention.
A few steps away from Jawbone, Ben lifted a hand and opened his mouth to speak. But before Ben made a sound, Jawbone spun, pulled the dumpster’s lid open with one hand, and tossed the black backpack inside. Then he took off running.
Everything inside of Ben seemed to rear up, trying to force him to chase Jawbone down the alley. But by the time this physical intention resolved itself into a coherent thought, Jawbone was gone. Go back to the house, Ben told himself, even as he pried open the dumpster’s lid with both hands. They weren’t fucking. Go back to the house now. But a more reasonable-sounding voice in his head told him that Jawbone had simply robbed them, that the blood stains all over him had been old, probably the result of some accident, and who knew what stereo equipment or old watches were stuffed inside the bag he had been so eager to get rid of.
Ben pulled a trash can over to the side of the dumpster, lifted the lid with one arm, and reached down for the bag with the other. When his fingers finally grazed a strap, his center of gravity shifted and suddenly he was eating plastic, having landed face-first