Swimsuit - James Patterson [23]
“Careful of what?”
“Remember when you left your briefcase with all of your notes on the Donato story in a diner?”
“You’re going to bring up the bus again, aren’t you?”
“Since you mention it.”
“I was under your spell, goofball. I was looking at you when I stepped off the curb. If you were here now, it could happen again —”
“What I’m saying is, you sound the same way now as you did then.”
“I do, huh?”
“Yeah, you kinda do. So watch out, okay? Pay attention. Look both ways.”
Ten feet away, a couple clinked glasses, held hands across a small table. Honeymooners, I thought.
“I miss you,” I said.
“I miss you, too. I’m keeping the bed warm for you, so come home soon.”
I sent a wireless kiss to my girl in L.A. and said good night.
Chapter 28
AT SEVEN FIFTEEN Monday morning, Levon watched the driver pull the black sedan up to the entrance of the Wailea Princess. Levon got into the front passenger seat as Hawkins and Barb got into the back, and when all the doors had slammed shut, Levon told Marco to please take them to the police station in Kihei.
During the ride, Levon half listened as Hawkins talked, telling him how to handle the police, saying to be helpful, to make the cops your friends and not to be belligerent because that would work against them.
Levon had nodded, grunted “uh-huh” a few times, but he was inside his head, wouldn’t have been able to describe the route between the hotel and the police station, his mind fully focused on the upcoming meeting with Lieutenant James Jackson.
Levon came back to the present as Marco was parking at the mini–strip mall, and he jumped out before the car had fully stopped. He walked straight up to the shoebox-sized substation, a storefront wedged between a tattoo parlor and a pizzeria.
The glass door was locked, and so Levon jabbed the intercom button and spoke his name, saying to the female voice that he had an appointment at eight with Lieutenant Jackson. There was a buzz and the door opened and they were in.
The station looked to Levon like a small-town DMV. The walls were bureaucrat green; the floor, a buffed linoleum; the long hallway-width room lined with facing rows of plastic chairs.
At the end of the narrow room was a reception window, its metal shutter rolled down, and beside it was a closed door. Levon sat down next to Barbara, and Hawkins sat across from them with his notebook sticking out of his breast pocket, and they waited.
At a few minutes past eight, the shuttered window opened and people trickled in to pay parking tickets, register their cars, God knows what else. Guys with Rasta hair; girls with complicated tattoos; young moms with small, bawling kids.
Levon felt a stabbing pain behind his eyes, and he thought about Kim, wanting to know where she could be right now and if she was in any pain and why this had happened.
After a while, he stood up and paced along the gallery of Wanted posters, looked into the staring eyes of murderers and armed robbers, and then there were the missing-children posters, some of them digitally altered to age the kids to how they might look now, having disappeared so many years ago.
Behind him, Barbara said to Hawkins, “Can you believe it? We’ve been here two hours. Don’t you just want to scream?”
And Levon did want to scream. Where was his daughter? He leaned down and spoke to the female officer behind the window. “Does Lieutenant Jackson know we’re here?”
“Yes, sir, he sure does.”
Levon sat down next to Barb, pinched the place between his eyes, wondered why Jackson was taking so long. And he thought about Hawkins, how he’d gotten in very tight with Barb. Levon trusted Barb’s judgment, but, like a lot of women, she made friends fast. Sometimes too fast.
Levon watched Hawkins writing in his notebook and then some teenage girls joined the line at the front desk, talking in high-pitched chatter that just about took off the top of his head.
By ten fifteen, Levon’s agitation was like the rumbling of the volcanoes that had raised this island out of the prehistoric