Walkers. Part 15

The "office" was a plywood cubicle sectioned off from one corner of the garage. It had a high counter with an old hand-crank adding machine and a litter of bills and invoices. A single high stool stood behind the counter. Taped to the walls were poster-size calendars from parts manufacturers that featured glossy 1940s-style pin-ups.

"Things are hectic around here today," McCoy said. "My best mechanic got himself knocked off last night, and I have to make do with these stupid-" he broke off and glanced at Olivares. "I have to get along with temporary help."

"Your mechanic was Edward Frankovich?" the detective said.

"Yeah."

"That's what we want to talk to you about."

McCoy looked relieved. "There was already a couple of cops here this morning. They told me what happened to him. You could of knocked me over with a feather. Who'd of thought a thing like that would happen to Big Ed? That's what we called him, Big Ed, on account of his size."

"Would you say he was a violent man?" Olivares asked. "Did he have a temper?"

"Big Ed? h.e.l.l no. He didn't have a violent bone in his body. Smiled a lot, didn't have much to say. He was a d.a.m.ned good worker. Never sick, never came in late. You could of knocked me over with a feather."

"Did you ever hear him mention the name Joana Raitt?" Olivares asked.

"Nah. But then, he never talked much about his personal life. He didn't have much of a personal life, if you ask me. He did his work. That's all I care about in a man." McCoy mopped the perspiration from his head again. "And now he's dead. That's a funny coincidence."

"What do you mean?"

"For a while I thought he was a goner last Friday, right in front of my eyes."

Dr. Hovde felt a chill between his shoulder blades. "What happened?" he said.

McCoy looked at Hovde as though seeing him for the first time, then switched his eyes back to Olivares.

"He's with me," the detective said. "Go ahead and answer the question."

"Well, what happened, we was eating lunch out in the back, me and Big Ed. We had sandwiches that we bought off the caterer's truck. There's no place around here where you can buy a decent sandwich. All they got is tacos and that s.h.i.+t." He glanced suddenly at Olivares, cleared his throat, and went on. "Anyhow, all of a sudden I hear Ed go *Hut!' like that, and I look over to see him floppin' his head around with his eyes bugged out to here. At first I thought he was havin' some kind of a fit, then his face starts turning blue and I know what's happened. He swallowed something and got it caught in his throat. I ran over and pounded him on the back, but it didn't do no good. He kind of staggered around the yard out back, grabbin' at his throat, and all the time gettin' blacker in the face. Then all of a sudden he goes down, whop, like a sack of potatoes.

"I got down next to him and I seen he ain't breathin' at all. I felt for his heartbeat and didn't get nothing. I said to myself, *Oh, s.h.i.+t, this guy is dead or d.a.m.n close to it.' I ran around to the front and got a couple of the guys to come back with me. When we got out there I'm d.a.m.ned if Big Ed ain't on his feet and walkin' around."

"He was all right?" Hovde asked.

"I didn't say that. He was up on his feet, but he sure as h.e.l.l didn't look good. His face still had that purplish color, and his eyes didn't seem to quite look at you, if you know what I mean. I asked him if he was okay, and he said yeah in a funny voice."

"Funny in what way?" said Hovde.

McCoy shrugged his meaty shoulders. "Thin, kind of. Flat. Like it was just coming from his mouth, not his chest. Anyway, I didn't like the way he looked at all, so I said why don't he take the rest of the day off. He said yeah again, and just walked out. Didn't even take his toolbox. I yelled *See you Monday,' after him, but he didn't answer. I never saw him again."

Dr. Hovde looked over and saw that Olivares was watching his face. "That's all I have," he said.

The sergeant turned to the garage owner. "That's it for now, Mr. McCoy." He handed over a card with his name and telephone extension. "If you think of anything else, give me a call."

"Absolutely, Sergeant. I've always been ready to cooperate with the police."

"Sure you have," said Olivares. He turned and walked out of the building. Dr. Hovde followed.

When they were back in the car, Olivares sat behind the steering wheel and watched Hovde expectantly. He said, "All right, Doc, I saw how you picked up on it when the fat boy told us how Frankovich choked on his sandwich Friday. You ready to let me in on it?"

Hovde squirmed in his seat. "I don't know quite how to say this."

"Just put it in simple, elementary English. Something a Mexican cop can understand."

Hovde laughed, but without mirth. "All right, here it is. What would you say if I told you Ed Frankovich actually died last Friday out in back of McCoy's garage when he choked on that sandwich?"

Olivares peered at him with lowered lids. "I'd say you are making a very bad joke."

"No joke," Hovde said. "You asked me, I told you. From what I've seen it's my opinion that Ed Frankovich was a dead man Friday afternoon."

"Uh-huh. And who, in your opinion, was it that broke into Joana Raitt's house Sunday night and got his brains beat out?"

Dr. Hovde s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably. "Ed Franko vich. Same guy."

"Kind of an unusual situation," said Olivarea drily. "Suppose you explain to this Mexican cop how such a thing could happen."

"I can't explain it," Hovde admitted. "I can only tell you that last night Joana Raitt was attacked by a dead man."

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," Olivares said in a groan.

"I know how it sounds, Dan, believe me. But the pathologist's findings at my hospital will bear out what I said. Frankovich died of asphyxiation, and he had been dead more than forty-eight hours when he was brought in late Sunday."

Olivares pinched his eyes together the way a man does when he feels a headache coming on.

"And there was another one," Hovde continued, unable to stop now. "A woman who almost drove her car into Joana last Thursday. The autopsy showed that the woman had died hours before the accident. I talked to her husband, and he confirmed that there was an accident with an electric hair dryer that could have killed her. She was already dead when she steered her car at the girl."

Olivares held up a hand. "Hold it."

"You wanted to hear."

"Okay, so now I've heard. And what I am going to do next is forget what I've heard. My advice to you is to do the same."

"I can't forget it, Dan, I'm involved."

"If you are, I'm sorry for you. I don't want any part of it."

"But you're a policeman."

"That's the point exactly, I'm a policeman. What I've got here is a simple case of homicide. Justifiable homicide, from the looks of it. My report will go in with the recommendation that no charges be filed."

"Aren't you even curious about what happened?"

"I know what happened, Doc. An ordinary guy went berserk. Happens every day. He attacked a citizen, got chilled by the citizen's boyfriend. Simple and straightforward."

"But-"

Olivares cut him off. "I don't know anything about any walking dead men, and I don't want to know anything about walking dead men."

Hovde subsided. "I kind of thought you'd feel that way."

Sergeant Olivares gave him a long, guarded look, then put the car in gear and took off.

Chapter 17.

Dr. Hovde was waiting at the door when Joana and Glen arrived. The doctor's apartment, like Glen's, was a one-bedroom with a compact kitchen, tile bathroom, and breakfast bar. Unlike Glen's, which reflected the occupant's personality in a kind of organized disarray, Warren Hovde's apartment was as sterile and unlived-in-looking as the day he had moved in. Most of his personal things were still in the house with Marge. There was no place to put them here. Nor did he have any interest in making the place more homelike. At best, he could only think of the Marina Village as extremely temporary.

Glen and Joana came in and sat down on the sofa. Dr. Hovde opened a cold bottle of Heineken's for each of them.

"How's the head feeling, Glen?" he asked.

Glen reached back and gingerly touched the lump where his head had struck the wall beam during the battle at Joana's house. "Tender, but it's no problem."

"That's good. How about you, Joana, are you sleeping all right?"

"Well enough. I wake up with a start two or three times a night, but I've been able to get back to sleep with no trouble."

"Good. If you think you need a sedative, I'll write you a prescription."

"I'm all right," Joana said. She caught and held the doctor's eyes. "But you didn't invite us here tonight to get a medical report."

Hovde gave them an embarra.s.sed smile. "No, I didn't. I was sort of easing into what I really want to talk about. This isn't easy for me. I've been a doctor too long. I am comfortable with broken bones and bedsores and fever charts, but I am now going to have to admit that we're faced with something here that they didn't teach us about in med school."

"Did you say *we'?" Joana asked.

Dr. Hovde nodded slowly. "Believe me, it is not my habit to involve myself in other people's personal lives. For a doctor that would be disastrous. But thisa this is different. It's too close to me to ignore. Besides, Joana, I feel I owe you."

"Owe me? I don't understand."'

"You came to me last week after your accident in the swimming pool. You had a bizarre story to tell, and you badly needed someone to listen to you. I listened, all right, but I didn't really hear you. The symptoms you described did not fit any known physical ailment, so I rejected them. Wrote them off as hallucinations. I sent you away with plat.i.tudes and a prescription for tranquilizers. That wasn't the kind of help you needed."

"What are you getting at, Doctor?" Glen said.

"In a moment," said Hovde. "Meantime, it would help if you both would call me Warren. Then I wouldn't feel so professorial."

They gave him brief smiles of a.s.sent.

"The first thing we should recognize," he continued, "is that Joana is in danger. Mortal danger."

"Even now?" Glen said.

"As far as we know. There have been two incidents already, and to be on the safe side we'd better a.s.sume there will be more."

"Excuse me," Glen said, "but I seem to be a couple of beats out of synch. What incidents?"

"The two attempts on Joana's life-Thursday afternoon, and again Sunday night."

"The woman in the car was no accident, was it?" Joana said.

"No. With what I've learned since then, I can a.s.sure you it was no accident."

"Explain that, Warren," Glen said.

"I will in a minute, but first consider the man who attacked Sunday night. There's no question that he was after Joana."

"No argument on that," Glen said. "He wasn't interested in me at all. All he wanted was to put me out of the way so he could get at Joana."

"Exactly. That makes two attempts on Joana's life in four days. Until we know exactly what we're up against, we've got to a.s.sume there will be more."

"Well, d.a.m.n it, what are we supposed to do?" Glen demanded. "I already killed one man."

"No you didn't," Hovde said.

There was a long moment during which no one spoke. Laughter from outside on the tennis court filtered in with the cool June air.

"Warren, I killed that man Frankovich," Glen said. "I hit him with a poker as hard as I could maybe a dozen times. I saw his skull break. I could have killed him with any one of those blows."

"That's the point," Hovde said. "Any single blow like that might have killed a normal person. The autopsy report confirmed that."

Glen's forehead creased in a puzzled frown. "But thena"

"You were hitting a dead man," Hovde told him.

Glen stared. Joana sat quietly, waiting for the doctor to go on.

"The autopsy on Frankovich was done at my hospital. So was the one on Mrs. Carlson, the woman in the car last Thursday. In both cases the time of death was established as being many hours before witnesses saw them fall."

"Do the police know about this?" Glen asked.

"They don't want to know. I tried telling Sergeant Olivares. He's an intelligent, capable man, but first and foremost, he is a policeman. When I started talking about walking dead people, he tuned me out. And I can't honestly say I blame him. There is no procedure to follow in a case like that, and policemen have to be very careful about improvising these days."

"Butawhat does it mean?" Glen asked. "What the h.e.l.l is going on?"

"I wish I knew," said Hovde. "All I can say for sure is that thesea walkers were dead when they attacked Joana."

"It has something to do with what happened to me last week in the swimming pool, doesn't it?" Joana said. "The tunnel, the watchers along the walls, the voice that didn't want to let me come back."

"That I can't answer," Hovde said. "Nothing in my experience equips me for speculating on things outside the normal."

"It's crazy," Glen said. "It doesn't compute. But for the moment, let's say that is what's happening. Dead people, walkers, as you call them, are somehow, and for some reason, attacking Joana." He stopped and grinned without humor. "Jesus, it's even hard for me to say that aloud."

"That will give you an idea of the trouble we'd have convincing the police."