The Last Detective Read Free

the edge of light; voices whisper, but I cannot understand. One shade might be my mother, another the father I never knew. I want to ask them who lies in this grave, but when I turn for their help I find only darkness. No one remains to ask, no one to help. I am on my own.
The nameless headstone waits for me.
What lies here?
Who has left this child alone?
I am desperate to escape this place. I want to beat feet, boogie, truck, book, haul ass, motor, shred, jet, jam, split, cut out, blow, roll, abandon, get away, get gone, scram, RUN . . . but in the strange way of dreams a shovel appears in my hands. My feet will not move, my body will not obey. A voice in my head tells me to throw the blade aside, but a power I cannot resist forces my hand: If I dig, I will find; if I find, I will know. The voice pleads with me to stop, but I am possessed. The voice warns that I will not want to see the secrets that lie below, but I dig deep and true to expose the grave.
The black earth opens.
The casket is revealed.
The voice shrieks for me to stop, to look away, to save myself, and so I clench my eyes. I have recognized the voice. It is my own.
I fear what lies at my feet, but I have no choice. I must see the truth.
My eyes open.
I look.

1
            
    A silence filled the canyon below my house that fall; no hawks floated overhead, the coyotes did not sing, the owl that lived in the tall pine outside my door no longer asked my name. A smarter person would have taken these things as a warning, but the air was chill and clear in that magnified way it can be in the winter, letting me see beyond the houses sprinkled on the hillsides below and out into the great basin city of Los Angeles. On days like those when you can see so far, you often forget to look at what is right in front of you, what is next to you, what is so close that it is part of you. I should have seen the silence as a warning, but I did not.
    “How many people has she killed?”
    Grunts, curses, and the snap of punches came from the next room.
    Ben Chenier shouted, “What?”
    “How many people has she killed?”
    We were twenty feet apart, me in the kitchen and Ben in the living room, shouting at the tops of our lungs; Ben Chenier, also known as my girlfriend's ten-year-old son, and me, also known as Elvis Cole, the World's Greatest Detective and Ben's caretaker while his mother, Lucy Chenier, was away on business. This was our fifth and final day together.
    I went to the door.
    “Is there a volume control on that thing?”
    Ben was so involved with something called a Game Freak that he did not look up. You held the Game Freak like a pistol with one hand and worked the controls with the other while the action unfolded on a built-in computer screen. The salesman told me that it was a hot seller with boys ages ten to fourteen. He hadn't told me that it was louder than a shoot-out at rush hour.
    Ben had been playing the game since I had given it to him the day before, but I knew he wasn't enjoying himself, and that bothered me. He had hiked with me in the hills and let me teach him some of the things I knew about martial arts and had come with me to my office because he thought private investigators did more than phone deadbeat clients and clean pigeon crap off balcony rails. I had brought him to school in the mornings and home in the afternoons, and between those times we had cooked Thai food, watched Bruce Willis movies, and laughed a lot together. But now he used the game to hide from me with an absolute lack of joy. I knew why, and seeing him like that left me feeling badly, not only for him, but for my part in it. Fighting it out with Yakuza spree killers was easier than talking to boys.
    I went over and dropped onto the couch next to him.
    “We could go for a hike up on Mulholland.”
    He ignored me.
    “You want to work out? I could show you another tae kwon do kata before your mom gets home.”
    “Uh-uh.”
    I said, “You want to talk about me and