Double Image

by David Morrell

If he couldn’t help Greg, he was going to help somebody, by God.

  In a rush, he untied a kerchief from the woman’s neck and twisted it around the girl’s arm, above the embedded glass. The girl, who had been trying to stand, sank back onto the glass-covered floor.

  “Hold the kerchief tightly, Jennifer.”

  He knelt beside the girl, gripped the shard, and pulled it free. The girl turned instantly pale. Blood continued to gush.

  “Twist the kerchief tighter.”

  Approaching sirens wailed.

  “She needs a pressure bandage.”

  The girl had a sweater tied around her waist. Coltrane tugged it free, wrapped the sleeve around the wound, and used his belt to secure it tightly. The sweater, which was blue, turned pink. But it didn’t turn crimson. The belt’s pressure on it was partially sealing the wound.

  “That’ll buy some time. You have to get her to a hospital,” Coltrane told the woman.

  Outside, the sirens wailed to a stop.

  “Take her to one of those ambulances. Hurry.” Even as Coltrane said that, it became obvious that the woman was in no condition to carry the girl outside. But no matter how determined he was to make sure the girl was safe, he didn’t dare risk carrying her out there himself. Ilkovic might spot him.

  Alarmed by how pale the girl was, watching her tremble, he realized that the child was going into shock. “No, don’t move her. We have to lay her flat. Prop her feet on that overturned chair. Keep them above her head. Somebody cover her with something.”

  A man in a windbreaker stared.

  “You,” Coltrane said. “Take off your jacket. Cover her.”

  In a daze, the man complied.

  As other sirens wailed, Coltrane spun toward a young woman in a jogging suit. “Get to one of those ambulances. Bring help.”

  The direction broke the woman’s paralysis. She scrambled toward the littered sidewalk.

  The moment Coltrane saw the woman speak urgently to an ambulance attendant, he stepped away. “We have to get out of here,” he told Jennifer. “Through the back.”

  Jennifer stared at him as if she had never seen him before.

  14

  W HERE DID YOU GET PARAMEDIC TRAINING ?”

  Coltrane sped around a corner, saw a gas station, and steered toward a pay phone next to the rest rooms at the side.

  Jennifer persisted. “This isn’t the first time you’ve had to—”

  Before she could finish her sentence, Coltrane skidded the car to a stop and jumped out. After hurrying to the phone booth, he shoved in coins and pressed numbers.

  “Threat Management Unit,” an authoritative voice said.

  “Give me Sergeant Nolan. This is an emergency.”

  “I’m afraid he isn’t—Wait a minute. He just walked in.”

  Coltrane gripped the phone tighter.

  “Sergeant Nolan here.”

  “Greg’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “Who is this? Coltrane? Slow down. What are you—”

  “I made an appointment to talk to him on a pay phone at a Pizza Hut in Century City.”

  “He told me.”

  “Ilkovic must have followed him. While Greg was in the restaurant, the bastard slipped a bomb under his car. It took out half a block. He’s dead.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  “Go to Greg’s house.” Coltrane couldn’t stop feeling breathless.

  The sudden change of topic startled Nolan. “What for? What are you talking about?”

  “Greg sent a surveillance team over there to look for microphones. I need to talk to you. We can trust that phone.”

  The instant Coltrane broke the connection, he pulled out a credit card and placed a long-distance call to New Haven, Connecticut—to his grandparents.

  Although the sky threatened rain and the temperature was in the fifties, he sweated as he listened to the phone ring.

  It rang again.

  Pick it up, Coltrane thought.

  It rang a third time.

  A fourth.

  Come on, come on, he thought urgently.

  “Hello,” an elderly male voice said.

  “Grandpa, it’s Mitch. I—”

  “You have reached the number for Ida and Fred,” the frail voice said. “We’re away from the phone at the moment. Please leave a brief message, and we’ll call you back.”

  Beep.

  “Grandpa, it’s Mitch,” he said quickly. “As soon as you hear this, take Grandma and leave the house. Go to the police. Ask them to contact Sergeant Nolan at the Threat Management Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department. He’ll explain what’s happening. I don’t want to scare you, Grandpa, but there’s a very dangerous man after me, and you’re going to need protection. Don’t trust anybody you don’t know except the police. Make sure they help you.”

  Beep.

  The machine had reached the end of the time limit for the message. Coltrane hung up and stood tensely motionless in the phone booth, debating whether to call back and leave a further message. But he didn’t know what he would accomplish other than to frighten his grandparents even more than he already had.

  Maybe that’s a good thing, he thought. Being afraid of Ilkovic is a survival skill.

  “Mitch?”

  Jennifer’s voice surprised him. He turned.

  “You’ve been staring at the phone for two minutes now. Are you waiting for someone to call back? Are you okay?”

  “First Daniel. Now Greg. How many others are going to die because they’re close to me?”

  15

  A S THE GARAGE DOOR RUMBLED SHUT , Coltrane got out of the Saturn, unlocked the trunk, and took out the pump-action shotgun, along with the box of buckshot.

  Jennifer stepped back from the weapon.

  “You’re going to have to feel comfortable with this,” Coltrane said. “You’re going to have to learn how to use it.”

  Jennifer continued to look uneasy.

  It was midafternoon. Coltrane had driven around the valley, taking an erratic route that would have required Ilkovic to stay close and make his presence obvious. Amid the chaos of the explosion’s aftermath, with rescue workers arriving, victims being taken away, and onlookers milling, he didn’t think it likely that Ilkovic would have managed to see Jennifer and him leave the back of the Burger King and follow them to the car, but Coltrane couldn’t take anything for granted.

  The first two times he had phoned Greg’s house, someone from the electronic-surveillance team had answered. On the third try, he had gotten Nolan, and as alternating surges of grief and anger swept through him, he had bitterly told Nolan the plan that he and Greg had worked out.

  “Nothing’s changed. I’m still going through with it.”

  “I can’t sanction this. It’s too dangerous. We’ve already lost Greg. Don’t add yourself to the body count.”

  “Well, sanctioned or not, I’m going to show up at that cemetery Wednesday afternoon, so are you going to make sure I have backup or aren’t you?”

  “. . . Yes.”

  “That’s all I ask. Give me the cooperation Greg would have given.”

  “I want to give you something else. Police protection until Wednesday.”

  “Hey, if I had accepted police protection, if I’d been with Greg, both of us would have gotten blown up. Staying on my own is working out fine.”

  “Phone me tomorrow at ten. Be careful.”

  “After what happened to Greg”—it had hurt Coltrane to say Greg’s name—“you be careful.”

  Taking care was exactly what Coltrane was doing now. After prying the lid off the box of buckshot, he pushed three shells into the slot on the side of the pump-action shotgun. Telling Jennifer to stay behind him, he checked every section of the house, including the vault, even though the intrusion detector gave no indication that anyone had entered. Finally, he returned with Jennifer to the living room and unloaded the shotgun so that he could show
her how the weapon worked without any danger that it might go off.

  He held up one of the thumb-sized red plastic shells. “This contains gunpowder and hundreds of lead pellets. Depending on what you want to shoot—”

  “But I don’t want to shoot anything.”

  “—the pellets come in different sizes. The ones in this shell are called buckshot. They’re large, about the size of BBs. When the shell goes off, the pellets spew out the barrel and spread into a thirty-inch pattern.”

  “Mitch, you might as well save your breath. I’m not—”

  “So as long as you’re aiming in Ilkovic’s general direction, you have a damned good chance of hitting him with one of these. At close range, the pellets would really chew him up. Now, to hold the shotgun—”

  Jennifer shook her head forcefully. “I really don’t—”

  “See that grip underneath the barrel. Put your left hand there. Then put your right hand here at the thin part of the stock, just behind the trigger guard. Raise the butt of the stock to your shoulder.”

  “Mitch, you’re not listening to me.”

  “Cradle the stock against the meaty part of your shoulder. Raise the gun and aim along—”

  “Will you stop?”

  Coltrane looked at her in surprise.

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not going near that thing.”

  “You’re telling me that if Ilkovic broke in here, you wouldn’t defend yourself?”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “But what if—”

  “Guns scare me to death.”

  “I’m not exactly crazy about them, either,” Coltrane said.

  “Then how come you know so god-awful much about them?”

  Coltrane tried to calm himself. “When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, I met an arms dealer in West Pakistan who smuggled weapons to the Afghans. I crossed the border with him. But not before he insisted I learn about some of his weapons so I could help protect the convoy if there was trouble.”

  Jennifer stared.

  “Three days later, he was killed in a Soviet gunship attack. The rest of us buried him under rocks and moved on. The photograph of that rock pile and his sons staring at it was reprinted in the New York Times. It was the start of my career.”

  “And did you ever have to use any of those weapons?”

  Coltrane looked away.

  “Did you?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It does.”

  “Yes,” Coltrane said, “I had to use some of those weapons.”

  Jennifer shuddered. “I feel like I’m in a blizzard. I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have asked.”

  Now it was Jennifer’s turn to look away.

  “Remember, you had a choice to be on your own, but you insisted on hiding with me.”

  “Great,” Jennifer said. “This is something else we can curse Ilkovic for. He’s got us arguing. About guns.”

  16

  A LTHOUGH THEIR SLEEPING BAGS LAY NEXT TO EACH OTHER , Coltrane felt a disquieting sense that he and Jennifer slept apart. Not that he was able to get much sleep. Preoccupied, he lay awake in the darkness, staring toward the ceiling. He kept thinking of the last thing Jennifer had said to him before emotional exhaustion forced them to lie down. “Hiding with you in this house, I could almost pretend that we’re in a secret, magical place where Ilkovic can’t get to us. But seeing that gun on the floor next to you reminds me that there isn’t any magical place.”

  Thinking of all the pain and despair he had photographed, Coltrane quietly agreed. It was yet another reason to curse Ilkovic. After having worked so hard to turn his back on the direction in which his career had been taking him, Coltrane again found himself enmired in bleakness. Street smarts and survival skills that he had hoped never again to use were depressingly familiar. Ilkovic had dragged him back. And for that, and for Daniel and Greg and the tension between Jennifer and himself and his fears about his grandparents, Ilkovic was going to pay.

  The silence smothered him. His cheeks felt warm. He had never associated grief with a fever, but now that he thought about it, grief was one of the worst illnesses anybody could suffer. Before he realized what he was doing, he stood, approached the murky stairway, and descended toward the bottom level.

  Not bothering to look toward the entrance to the vault, he passed the corridor that separated the vault from the darkroom and reached the French doors that led outside to the pool. The illumination of stars and the moon made glints on the still water. He saw the vague outlines of the nearest shrubs and flowers.

  His cheeks feeling warmer, he reached to open one of the doors, to let the night air cool him, and at once stopped himself, remembering that he had to disarm the security system before he went outside. Besides, what if Ilkovic had somehow tracked him here? It would be foolish to expose himself by leaving the house.

  And what about Jennifer? What if she woke up and couldn’t find him? All too vividly, he remembered what that dismaying emotion had been like—this morning, when Jennifer had gotten up earlier than he did and he had frantically searched the house, at last discovering that she was outside in the back garden.

  “I solved our little mystery. The different numbers. Twenty-five versus thirty,” she had said distractedly.

  It had taken him a moment before he understood what she was talking about. “When we paced the inside and the outside of the vault?”

  “There’s a door around the side. To a utility area.”

  Yes, mystery solved. The missing five feet were easily accounted for, taken up by an area devoted to a water heater and a furnace/air conditioner. It’s amazing how we ignore the obvious, Coltrane thought, glancing behind him toward the corridor that paralleled the vault. It was also amazing how an emotion-ravaged mind sought distractions.

  There was something about that utility area. . . . A thought struggled to surface, then sank back into the roiling depths of his subconscious.

  He shook his head, unable to clear it. Glancing at the luminous dial on his watch, he saw that the time was ten after two. You need to try to sleep. You’ve got only a day to figure out the details of what to do if Ilkovic follows you from the cemetery on Wednesday.

  His hand cramping on the shotgun, Coltrane stepped back from the wall of windows and the glass-paneled door. About to turn to go upstairs to Jennifer, he paused as the thought that had struggled to surface made another attempt.

  Something about the utility area.

  Yes, it was deep enough to account for the five-foot difference between the inside and the outside of the vault. But what about . . .

  How wide was . . .

  The thought broke free. The utility area doesn’t stretch all the way along that section of the house, he realized. When I looked inside, it was only about eight feet from left to right.

  But the vault’s fifteen feet wide. If the utility area takes up eight feet of that, what’s in the remaining seven feet of the strip along that side?

  Coltrane’s cheeks became cold, blood draining from them. There wasn’t another door on the outside wall. That meant if there was a seven-by-five-foot area farther along, the only way to get into it would have to be . . .

  Jesus.

  It was the first time Coltrane had ever wanted to enter the vault.

  17

  P ULLING THE KEY FROM HIS JEANS , Coltrane approached the vault’s entrance. As he opened the outside door, exposing the blackness of the metal door, he set the shotgun against the wall and inserted the key into the metal door’s lock. For something so heavy, the door swung open smoothly, requiring almost no effort for him to push it.

  He reached in to the left, brushed his hand against the wall, found the light switch, and flicked it, squinting from the harshness of the overhead lights. Again, the chill of the place overwhelmed him. The rows of gray metal library shelves had never seemed bleaker. The concrete walls and floor seemed to shrink
. Overcoming the sensation of being squeezed, he picked up the shotgun and entered the vault.

  His gaze never wavered from the left section of the opposite wall. But he couldn’t get there directly. He had to walk straight ahead until he reached the last row of shelves, then turn left and proceed to the area that held his attention. The wall was lined with shelves. Facing them, positioning himself in the middle, he glanced to the right. Behind those shelves and that section of the wall was the utility area. But what was behind the shelves and the section of the wall on the left?

  Again he set down the shotgun. He leaned close to the shelves on the left section of the wall. The metal frame that supported them was bolted to the concrete behind them. He tugged at the shelves but had no effect; they remained firmly in place.

  He ran his hands along the back edges of the shelves. Crouching, then stretching, he checked above and below them, also along the sides, wherever they met the concrete. It won’t be something difficult, he told himself. Packard was in a wheelchair. The old man didn’t have the strength for anything complicated or awkward. It would have to be . . .

  At wheelchair height, Coltrane touched a slight projection of metal at the back of the right side of the shelves.

  Something easy, he thought.

  He pulled down on the wedge of metal, but it didn’t budge.

  Something simple and . . .

  He pulled up on the wedge of metal. It immediately responded.

  Clever.

  He heard the click of metal, of a latch being released.

  Yes.

  This time when he pulled at the shelves, they did budge. Not a lot. Not enough to move forward. But enough to indicate that they were no longer secured to the wall. What else do I have to . . .

  He shifted to the left side of the shelves, crouched at wheelchair height, reached to the back where the side met the concrete, and touched a corresponding wedge of metal. When he pulled it upward, another latch snicked free, and now the shelves moved smoothly forward, seeming to float.

  No matter how rapidly Coltrane breathed, he couldn’t seem to get enough air. He stepped to the right, out of the way, and continued to pull on the shelves, their outward movement so smooth that even an aged man in a wheelchair could have controlled them. Viewing that section of the wall from the side, he saw that what had appeared to be solid concrete was actually a concretelike stucco attached to a partition of oak. On the left, large foldout hinges at the top, bottom, and middle made the false wall capable of being moved in and out.