Stalking the Angel by Robert Crais Read Free Book Online Page A

the pool and the dark silhouette of palm trees behind it. I watched the quarter moon bounce on the pool’s still surface, then tried the first door. It was open and the room was dark. I turned on the light.
    Mimi was lying on her back across a single bed, legs straight up against the wall, head hanging down over the bedside, eyes wide and unfocused. I said, “You okay?”
    She said nothing.
    “You want to talk to your mom, we can do it together. That might be easier.”
    She did not move. The room was white on white, as stark and cold as the Wyeth landscapes she had been staring at earlier. There were no posters on the walls or record albums on the floor or clothes spilling out of a hamper or diet soda cans or anything at all that would mark the room as a sixteen-year-old girl’s. On a glasstoppedwhite desk at the foot of the bed there were three oversized art books by someone named Kiro Asano and a paperback edition of Yukio Mishima’s
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
. The Mishima looked as if it had been read a hundred times. There was a small Hitachi color TV on the desk, and a scent in the room that might have been marijuana, but if it was it was not recent.
    I said, “You gotta be angry.” Mr. Sensitive.
    “To be angry is to waste life,” she said, not moving. “One must have a cruel heart.”
    Great.
    I finished my circuit of the house and found my way back to the den. Sheila was there, sitting on a bar stool, sipping from the short glass. She was wearing a man’s denim work shirt buttoned over the gown and she’d done something about her makeup. She looked good. I wondered how anyone who drank so much could stay that lean. Maybe when she was on the court she played harder than I had thought.
    I said, “The house is tight. All the windows are secure and the doors are locked. The alarm is armed and in order. With Hatcher out front, you’re not going to have a problem.”
    “If you say so.”
    I said, “Your daughter saw you kiss me. You might want to talk to her.”
    “Are you scared Bradley’s going to fire you?”
    A pulse began behind my right eye. “No. You might want to talk to her because she saw her mother kiss a strange man and that had to be frightening.”
    “She won’t tell. She never says anything. All she does is sit in her room and watch TV.”
    “Maybe she should tell. Maybe that’s the point.”
    Sheila drained the glass. “Bradley’s not going to fire you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
    The pulse began to throb. “I’m not worried about it. I don’t give a damn if Bradley fires me or not.”
    Sheila set the glass down hard. Red spots flared on her cheeks. “You must think I have it pretty good, don’t you? Big house, big money. Here’s this woman, plays tennis all day, what does she have to gripe about? Well, I’ve got shit is what I’ve got. What the hell’s a big house if there’s nothing in it?” She turned and stalked out the way she’d seen women do a hundred times on
Dallas
and
Falcon Crest
. Drama.
    I stood by the bar and breathed hard and waited for something else to happen, but nothing did. Somewhere a door slammed. Somewhere else a TV played. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe I would wake up and find myself in a 7-Eleven parking lot and think,
Oh, Elvis, ha-ha, you really dreamed up some zingo clients this time!
    I let myself out and got in the Corvette and had to stop at the gate to let a yellow Pantera with two teenagers in it pass. Hatcher was in his T-bird, a smug grin on his face.
    I leaned toward him. “If you say anything, Hatcher,” I said, “I’ll shoot you.”

7

    At nine-forty the next morning my phone rang and Jillian Becker said, “Did I wake you?”
    “Impossible. I never sleep.”
    “We’re back from Kyoto. Bradley wants to see you.”
    I had fallen asleep on the couch, watching a two A.M . rerun of
It Came from Beneath the Sea
with Ken Tobey and Faith Domergue. The cat had watched it with me and had fallen asleep