L.A. Woman (A Gideon and Sirius Novel Book 5) by Alan Russell

Author:Alan Russell [Russell, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Three Tails Press
Published: 2019-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

I had a window seat on the flight back, but took little notice of the view. For once, seeing Haines might have been a good thing for me. There’d been no time to stew about my personal life and what was going on between Lisbet and me. Instead, I felt this urgency to try and work out Haines’s hidden meanings. It was a matter of life and death.

Listening closely to someone speaking is a greatly underrated skill, and it’s especially hard when you’re trying to out-clever that individual during the course of the conversation. The word games were behind me now. I concentrated on the recording and heard myself ask Haines, “Then why castor beans?”

I pressed Pause and thought about how Haines had responded. He’d chosen to answer by lifting his hands up. Most people don’t shrug like that. They raise their shoulders, or spread their hands to show their emptiness. It had almost looked like Haines was raising something high in the air.

There were plenty of dots in my notepad. Connecting them was the problem. I listened to Haines reciting “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” reference Humpty Dumpty, and tell the tale of a peanut on a railroad track. My gut feeling was that he’d been attempting to be cute.

Haines had been his most dismissive when I’d queried Flattop Jones and his message. He’d sounded almost contemptuous of my contract-killer question, relegating Flattop’s declaration of love for the police department to “sarcasm.” It was almost as if Haines had been annoyed, but not at me. Was it possible he hadn’t wanted me to focus on what the All-In Killer had written?

More rewinding, and more note-taking. Haines had seemed to particularly enjoy reciting, “‘Who do you think you are?’” He’d repeated the lyrics, but there was something a little off in his intonation. Hearing it twice made it stand out. Who do didn’t sound like two words, but one. I was hearing hoodoo. It was probably nothing, but I still made a note.

And then I heard a voice other than Haines’s. The flight attendant was announcing our descent.

The passage of time surprised me. I stowed the tape recorder and looked out the window. More than ten million people live in LA County. From above, the cars moving along the crowded freeways looked like a busy ant colony on the move.

When an ant finds food, it secretes a chemical pheromone for other ants to follow. Once the ant returns to the colony, the other ants have a chemical roadmap to the food source. For them, that’s the smell test.

If only I had pheromones to follow, I thought. And then wondered if I did.

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