After forty-five minutes dealing with voice-mail and holding (for some reason the LAPD played some sort of Turkish-sounding music in the background while people waited on hold; it sounded to Leonard like the wailing of crime victims), he finally got through to a police sergeant, waited another ten minutes while his call was transferred to Missing Persons, and then he was prompted for the facts. As soon as Leonard gave his grandson’s age as “sixteen” he heard the interest go out of the policeman on the other end. The final advice was—Wait a week. Call the parents of your grandson’s friends—ask them if the boy is there. If your grandson doesn’t come home by then, call us again.
Leonard had wanted to call the parents of Val’s friends, but the only boy in that group whose name he’d known was William Coyne. There were no Coynes in the ever-dwindling online phone book.
Hadn’t the boy, William, in that one time they’d met where the young Coyne was obviously shining Leonard on, said something almost condescending about his mother working for the Japanese Advisor? Or for the city in some liaison capacity with Omura’s staff?
Leonard had his phone search through all the online city official and Getty Castle directories but there was no Coyne listed anywhere. Wait… hadn’t Val said something last year about his friend Billy the C’s parents getting divorced? It had been part of a contemptuous spiel that Val had launched at Leonard about
Leonard had no clue. He gave up that avenue of search.
Finally, in early afternoon, Leonard left a note for Val to phone him if he came home before his grandfather returned and spent the afternoon on his bike, searching the downtown as far south as the 10, as far west as the roadblocks at Highland Avenue that kept him out of Beverly Hills, as far east as the
Everywhere there were convoys of armored military vehicles—National Guard, Homeland Security, and even some regular Army. The smoke in the south was very thick. Los Angeles radio and local Internet news reported nothing out of the ordinary.
In the end, returning to their still-empty and dark basement apartment around 7 p.m., Leonard was beside himself with anger and concern.
Perhaps it was just the sight and diesel-stink of all the military vehicles he’d seen and madly pedaled out of the way of that day, but Leonard wondered if this increased belligerence and erratic behavior from Val were a result of him turning sixteen and having to face the draft now in less than a year. It was the last real
On that last query, Leonard had been less than helpful—he really had trouble understanding the NSEACPS hegemony, much less its war goals in China and elsewhere, and could only explain that sending the troops to fight for the financially more stable India and Nippon was one of America’s few sources of hard currency.
“Mr. Hartley at school says there was an