Gone Tomorrow

sorry,” I said again.
    For the next few minutes I was getting it from all sides. Jacob Mark was glaring at me because I had killed his sister. The waitress was angry because she could have sold about eight breakfasts in the time we had lingered over two cups of coffee. I took out a twenty-dollar bill and trapped it under my saucer. She saw me do it. Eight breakfasts’ worth of tips, right there. That solved the waitress problem. The Jacob Mark problem was tougher. He was still and silent and bristling. I saw him glance away, twice. Getting ready to disengage. Eventually he said, “I got to go. I got things to do. I have to find a way to tell her family.”
    I said, “Family?”
    “Molina, the ex–husband. And they have a son, Peter. My nephew.”
    “Susan had a son?”
    “What’s it to you?”
    The IQ of labradors .
    I said, “Jake, we’ve been sitting here talking about leverage, and you didn’t think to mention that Susan had a kid?”
    He went blank for a second. Said, “He’s not a kid. He’s twenty-two years old. He’s a senior at USC. He plays football. He’s bigger than you are. And he’s not close with his mother. He lived with his father after the divorce.”
    I said, “Call him.”
    “It’s four o’clock in the morning in California.”
    “Call him now.”
    “I’ll wake him up.”
    “I sure hope you will.”
    “He needs to be prepared for this.”
    “First he needs to be answering his phone.”
    So Jake took out his cell again and beeped through his address book and hit the green button against a name pretty low down on the list. Alphabetical order, I guessed. P for Peter . Jake held the phone against his ear and looked one kind of worried through the first five rings, and then another kind after the sixth. He kept the phone up a little while longer and then lowered it slowly and said, “Voice mail.”

Chapter 15
    I said, “Go to work . Call the LAPD or the USC campus cops and ask for some favors, blue to blue. Get someone to head over and check whether he’s home.”
    “They’ll laugh at me. It’s a college jock not answering his phone at four in the morning.”
    I said, “Just do it.”
    Jake said, “Come with me.”
    I shook my head. “I’m staying here. I want to talk to those private guys again.”
    “You’ll never find them.”
    “They’ll find me. I never answered their question, about whether Susan gave me anything. I think they’ll want to ask it again.”
    We arranged to meet in five hours’ time, in the same coffee shop. I watched him get back in his car and then I walked south on Eighth, slowly, like I had nowhere special to go, which I didn’t. I was tired from not sleeping much but wired from all the coffee, so overall I figured it was a wash in terms of alertness and energy. And I figured the private guys would be in the same boat. We had all been up all night. Which fact got me thinking about time. Just as two in the morning was the wrong time for a suicide bombing, it was also a weird time for Susan Mark to be heading for a rendezvous and delivering information. So I stood for a spell at the newspaper rack outside a deli and leafed through the tabloids. I found what I was half-expecting buried deep inside the Daily News . The New Jersey Turnpike had been closed northbound for four hours the previous evening. A tanker wreck, in fog. An acid spill. Multiple fatalities.
    I pictured Susan Mark trapped on the road between exits. A four-hour jam. A four-hour delay. Disbelief. Mounting tension. No way forward, no way back. A rock and a hard place. Time, ticking away. A deadline, approaching. A deadline, missed. Threats and sanctions and penalties, now presumed live and operational. The 6 train had seemed fast to me. It must have felt awful slow to her. You tipped her over the edge . Maybe so, but she hadn’t needed a whole lot of tipping.
    I butted the newspapers back into saleable condition and set off strolling again. I figured the guy with the torn jacket would have gone home to change, but the other three would be close by. They would have watched me enter the coffee shop, and they would have picked me up when I came out. I couldn’t see them on the street, but I wasn’t really looking for them. No point in looking for something when you know for sure it’s there.
    Back in the day Eighth Avenue had been a dangerous thoroughfare. Broken streetlights, vacant lots, shuttered stores, crack, hookers, muggers. I had seen all kinds of things there. I