The Face[脸]
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FREE OF BOTH INSIPID music AND VOICES FROM Beyond, four flights of stairs led down to the lowest of the three subterranean levels of the hospital.
Ethan and Hazard followed the familiar, brightly lighted white corridor past the garden room to a set of double doors. Beyond lay the ambulance garage.
Among other vehicles belonging to the hospital, four van-type ambulances stood side by side. Empty parking stalls suggested that additional units in the fleet were at work in the rainy day.
Ethan went to the nearest ambulance. He hesitated, then opened the rear door.
Inside, red tinsel was strung at the ceiling along both the left and right sides of the compartment. Six clusters of tiny bells hung here, as well, one set at the beginning, another at the middle, and a third at the end of each garland of tinsel.
At the second ambulance, Hazard said, “Here.”
Ethan joined him at the open back door.
Two lengths of red tinsel. Only five sets of bells. The missing set, in the middle of the right-hand garland of tinsel, was the one that had been given to him as he lay dying.
[380] A cold tremble, almost a pressure, moved slowly down the center of his back, as if the fleshless tip of a skeletal finger were tracing his spine from cervical vertebrae to coccyx.
Hazard said, “One set of bells is missing, but between us we have two.”
“Maybe not. Maybe we have the same set.”
“What do you mean?”
Behind them, a man said, “May I help you?”
Turning, Ethan saw the paramedic who had attended to him in the racing ambulance less than twenty-four hours ago.
The discovery of the bells in his hand outside Forever Roses had already been one piece of dark magic too many. Now, to come face to face with this man, seen before only in that dream, made the death in the ambulance seem real even though he still breathed, still lived.
The shock of recognition was not mutual. The paramedic regarded Ethan with no greater interest than he might have shown toward any stranger.
Hazard flashed his department ID. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Cameron Sheen.”
“Mr. Sheen, we need to know what calls this particular ambulance answered yesterday afternoon.”
“What time exactly?” the paramedic asked.
Hazard looked at Ethan, and Ethan found his voice. “Between five and six o’clock.”
“I was crewing it then with Rick Laslow,” Sheen said. “Couple minutes after five, there’s a police call, an eleven-eighty, accident with major injury, corner of Westwood Boulevard and Wilshire.”
That was miles from the location at which Ethan had bounced off the PT Cruiser.
“Honda tangled with a Hummer,” Sheen said. “We carried the guy in the car. He looked like he’d butted heads with a Peterbilt, not just [381] a Hummer. We took him street to surgery in personal-best time, and from what I hear, he’ll come out of it good enough to jump and hump again.”
Ethan named the two streets that formed the intersection half a block from Forever Roses. “You catch calls that far west?”
“Sure. If we figure we know a way to beat the gridlock, we go wherever the blood is.”
“Did you answer a call to that intersection yesterday?”
The paramedic shook his head. “Not me and Rick. Maybe one of the other units. You could check the dispatcher’s log.”
“You look familiar to me,” Ethan said. “Have we met somewhere before?”
Sheen frowned, seemed to search his memory. Then: “Not that I recall. So do you want to check the dispatcher’s log?”
“No,” Hazard said, “but there’s one more thing.” He pointed at one of the garlands of tinsel in the back of the ambulance. “The middle set of bells is missing.”
Peering into the van, Sheen said, “Missing bells? Are they? I guess so. What about it?”
“We’re wondering what happened to them.”
Puzzlement worked Sheen’s face into a squint. “You are? Those little bells? Don’t recall anything happening to them during my watch. Maybe one of the guys on another shift could help you.”
At a glance from Hazard, Ethan shrugged. Hazard slammed shut the ambulance door.
Sheen’s puzzlement resolved into amazement. “You don’t mean they send two detectives ’cause maybe someone stole a two-dollar Christmas ornament?”
Neither Ethan nor Hazard had an answer for that.
Sheen should have let it go then, but like a lot of people these days, his ignorance of the true nature of a cop’s work allowed him to feel [382] smugly superior to anyone with a badge. “What’s it take to get a kitten out of a tree—a SWAT team?”
Hazard said, “The missing ornament isn’t simply a matter of two dollars, is it, Detective Truman?”
“No,” Ethan agreed, falling into their old rhythm, “it’s the principle of the thing. And it’s a hate crime.”
“Definitely a felony hate crime under the California Criminal Code,” Hazard deadpanned.
“For the duration of the season,” Ethan said, “we’re assigned to the Ornament and Manger Scene Defacement Response Team.”
“That’s a division,” Hazard added, “of the Christmas Spirit Task Force established pursuant to the Anti-Hate Act of 2001.”
A tentative smile crept across Sheen’s face as he cocked his head first at Ethan, then at Hazard. “You’re goofing me, right, doing Dragnet.”
Employing the intense and disapproving stare with which he could wither everything from hard-case thugs to flower arrangements, Hazard said, “Are you a Christian hater, Mr. Sheen?”
Sheen’s creeping smile froze before it fully formed. “What?”
“Do you,” Ethan asked, “believe in freedom of religion or are you one of those who think the United States Constitution guarantees you freedom from religion?”
Blinking the smile out of his eyes, licking it off his lips, the paramedic said, “Sure, of course, freedom of religion, who doesn’t believe in it?”
“If we were to obtain a warrant to search your residence right now,” Hazard said, “would we find a collection of anti-Christian hate literature, Mr. Sheen?”
“What? Me? I don’t hate anybody. I’m a get-along guy. What’re you talking about?”
“Would we find bomb-making materials?” Ethan asked.
As Sheen’s smirk had frozen and cracked apart under Hazard’s cold [383] stare, so now the color drained from his face, leaving him as gray as the unpainted concrete walls of the ambulance garage.
Backing away from Hazard and Ethan, raising his hands as if to call a time-out, Sheen said, “What is this? Are you serious? This is crazy. What—there’s a two-dollar Christmas ornament missing, so I should get a lawyer?”
“If you have one,” Hazard said solemnly, “maybe you’d be smart to give him a call.”
Still not sure what to believe, Sheen backed away another step, two, then pivoted from them and hurried toward the dayroom in which ambulance crews waited to be dispatched.
“SWAT team, my ass,” Hazard grumbled.
Ethan smiled. “You da man.”
“You da man.”
Ethan had forgotten how much easier life could be with backup, especially backup with a sense of humor.
“You should rejoin the force,” Hazard said as they crossed the garage toward the doors to the garden-room corridor. “We could save the world, have some fun.”
On the stairs to the upper level of the public garage, Ethan said, “Supposing all this craziness stops sooner or later—being gut shot but not, the bells, the voice on the phone, a guy walking into your closet mirror. You think it’s possible just to go back to the usual cop stuff like nothing strange ever happened?”
“What am I supposed to do—become a monk?”
“Seems like this ought to ... change things.”
“I’m happy who I am,” Hazard said. “I’m already as cool as cool gets. Don’t you think I’m cool to the chromosomes?”
“You’re walking ice.”
“Not to say I don’t have heat.”
“Not to say,” Ethan agreed.
“I’ve got plenty of heat.”
[384] “You’re so cool, you’re hot.”
“Exactly. So there’s no reason for me to change unless maybe I meet Jesus, and He slaps me upside the head.”
They weren’t in a graveyard, weren’t whistling, but the tenor of their words, echoing off the crypt-cold walls of the stairwell, brought to Ethan’s mind old movie images of boys masking their fear with bravado as they journeyed through a cemetery at high midnight.
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