by Thomas Perry
“Ed,” she whispered.
“Huh?”
“There was a car in the driveway just now.”
She spoke very quietly, but Ed was the kind of person who came to instantly, ready to talk rationally or defend himself. She felt the mattress shift as his muscles contracted and his body became tense. He was here, ready. “Is he there now?”
“I think he pulled out, but he was there too long.”
Ed didn’t need further explanation. He skipped ahead to the realization that he was going to investigate. He rose in the dark, silently as a snake uncoiling. She could tell he had already grasped the .45 with the silencer attached that he kept by the bed. He drifted out of the bedroom in the dark, the only sound the faint creak of a floorboard.
Nicole sat up too. She swung her legs off the bed and walked to the wall, where she reached up and took the second silenced .45 pistol off the shelf. She held it diagonally across her body and followed Ed into the living room. Ed had bought the pistols and had their barrels threaded for silencers because they were the perfect weapons for home defense. He had said that if they were bothered by intruders, it would be at night. He wanted to be able to handle the problem without waking any neighbors, and a silencer was a good flash suppressor, so they’d have another advantage. They also had a loaded Benelli semiauto shotgun under the bed, but she decided to leave that where it was.
She could see Ed standing at the window that overlooked the driveway, just closing the curtain. He moved to the other side of the living room to look out the corner of that window too. He saw Nicole waiting at the hallway entrance and moved close to her. “I don’t see anybody, but I’ve got a feeling about this, so I’m going out.”
“Give me a minute to get something on,” she said. “You might want to get dressed too.”
They went back to the bedroom and put on jeans, shirts, and sneakers. Ed went through the kitchen to the back door and out to the yard. Nicole kept twenty-five feet behind him. If their footsteps were far apart, the adversary would be less likely to hear them coming. She also knew that most shooters couldn’t shoot two people that far apart before she could return fire.
They made their way across the dark yard, staying behind the row of bushes at the back fence because it was the best cover their yard afforded. Carrying the pistol with the extra eight inches of silencer attached was awkward for her, but she was glad Ed had insisted on keeping a pair of guns that way. In the dark there was no better advantage than silence.
The possibility that worried her most was that the car might have belonged to the Abels. There was nobody else that she and Ed had attacked or threatened lately, so even if it wasn’t the Abels, it was likely to be someone after the Hoyts because of the Abels—the police, probably. How they could have found out where she and Ed lived was difficult to guess. In any case, somebody had come here tonight at 3:00 a.m. to do some reconnaissance.
Nicole thought about the implications. She and Ed might have to run away. The simple inconvenience of abandoning their house and leaving was intimidating. She and Ed had always kept large sums of cash hidden in various places—safe deposit boxes in other American cities, mostly. They also maintained bank accounts in a few different names—mostly female names. Nicole wasn’t the type who inspired fear or suspicion among bank tellers, but Ed was kind of scary in person. But it could be hard to put her hands on the money and get out if the Abels knew who they were. The Abels were former cops, and they undoubtedly had some agency on speed dial that could close the borders to a pair of fugitives.
Nicole walked slowly, letting Ed get a bit farther ahead of her. She hung back because the distance made them harder to shoot. But she knew that if the enemy were the police, distance wouldn’t do her much good. Trained and experienced combat shooters would know how to stay out of a cross fire, and there would be too many of them to fight.
As Nicole advanced she planned her moves. Keeping Ed about forty feet ahead of her made concealment easier for both of them. If there was a shot or a target appeared, Nicole would assume a two-handed grip and fire. She only had the seven-round magazine and one round in the chamber, so she would have to exert some discipline and not just blast away. She would have to make every shot a good one, hoping the suppressed sound and the diminished muzzle flash would give her extra time before they got her in their sights.
She moved forward from bush to bush, and then to the edge of the yard. Ed was already forty feet into the next lot, a big strip of land that had held an old bungalow from the 1930s when she and Ed moved here. A few months ago the owner died. The owner’s son had planned to sell the land to a developer, but Ed had persuaded him to let him buy it. Ed had hired a crew to drive a bulldozer through the house and cart away the wood, brick, and concrete, so now the lot had been cleared to give the Hoyts another open, flat expanse of land that would give an intruder no place to hide. Ed had not yet gotten around to making the uneven, weedy lot into an extension of their lawn. Maybe he never would now.
Nicole thought again about leaving her house behind, and an inventory of important belongings entered her mind. She had thousands of dollars’ worth of Lladro statues. She had the Wedding figures, Ballerina Waiting Backstage, Timid Japanese Girl, the Attorney. That one alone had cost over seven hundred dollars new. And the classic ones—Don Quixote, Cinderella, and the others—were famous. Porcelain statues were simply not things she could take with her on the run. And there were the guns. She and Ed must have fifty thousand dollars’ worth of guns around the house. Guns were heavy, but leaving them would be dangerous. Police ballistics experts wouldn’t have a lot of difficulty matching the guns to various bullets that had been fired into people over the past few years. If she and Ed had to bug out, they would have to do something with all of these belongings.
Nicole entered the empty lot, ducking lower and moving along the opposite side of the field from her husband. She could barely see him, and now and then he would stop and stay perfectly still. If her eyes didn’t happen to be on him at that instant, she sometimes lost him until he moved again. When they went to bed there had been a sliver of moon, but it must have gone low behind a cloud or something, because there was no moonlight to help her now. She crouched and waited, letting the darkness and the stillness hide her while she watched and listened.
After a few more seconds Ed began to move again, and she sensed that something was different. He glided forward, stepping along at a walk, lifting his foot above the weeds at each step. Then he began to run. He reached the sidewalk, went to one knee, and aimed his pistol to the right.
Nicole kept her eyes on him as she began to run. Her place was up there where she could see the street and add covering fire for Ed.
A flashlight beam suddenly bathed Ed in white light. Ed fired two rapid shots in that direction with his silenced pistol, and then fired once more. At the training camp where they had met, they had been taught to fire two to the chest and then one to the head. The flashlight beam disappeared, and she knew before she reached the street that somebody was dead.
She looked up the street and saw a lighted flashlight lying on the sidewalk. In the aura around the beam of light, she saw the body of a man lying beside it.
Ed stepped to the prone figure, knelt, and scowled at the man’s face. He felt the man’s neck for a pulse, but abandoned that idea after a second or two. He turned the man over and patted the pockets. He dug his hand into one of them, came up with the man’s key chain, and stood.
Nicole arrived beside him and saw it all in the light that still spilled from the flashlight on the pavement. And she noticed that in the light she could make out the color of the SUV that was parked ten feet away. Brown. She bent to look down at the dead man’s face, and then looked up at Ed.
“Yep,” he whispered. “It’s Vincent Boylan. I don’t know what the hell he thought he was doing.” Ed bent and picked up the flashlight, turned it off, and then removed the pistol from Boylan’s hand. “You’d better bring the car while I load hi
m into his. Then follow me.”
Nicole turned and ran along the sidewalk to their house, and then around to the back door. She hurried to the bedroom and retrieved her purse, and then dug out her keys on the way to the garage. She backed the gray Camry out of the garage, closed the garage door with the remote control, and drove up behind the brown SUV with her headlights off. She could see a big wet spot where Ed must have dragged out the hose and sprayed down the sidewalk.
Boylan’s body was already gone, and she could see Ed must be in the driver’s seat of the brown SUV, because he wasn’t visible anywhere else. The SUV’s engine started and the vehicle began to move.
Ed drove for a hundred yards to the first intersection, turned left, and drove a few yards past it before he switched on the headlights. Nicole turned on her lights, and Ed sped up. She wished he had his cell phone, so she could talk to him about what had happened and what they were going to do now. She supposed it was her fault that he didn’t have it. She could have brought his phone with her when she’d gone to get her purse, and given it to him.
She followed the brown SUV as Ed drove out of their neighborhood and down the road to the freeway entrance. He got on the eastbound side and sped up. She hoped he wasn’t going to lead her to some remote spot far out in the desert and make this night a worse nightmare. She was in no mood to drag Boylan’s body around and help dig a grave, and then try to race home before the sun came up.
Just as she was beginning to feel fretful, Ed took the exit off the freeway at Coldwater Canyon and went south to Valley Vista Boulevard. He turned a couple of times on narrow roads before she was sure she realized where he was going. He stopped and idled just at the curve where he had stopped earlier in the day. They were almost to Boylan’s house. He got out, walked back to their car, and gestured to Nicole to roll down her window.
Nicole said, “Aren’t we going to bury him?”
“Not unless you want to bury his SUV too.”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“We don’t have time to do anything with him that would make much difference, and this is our only chance to satisfy our curiosity about him. Come on. We’ll park his car in his garage and see what we can find out in his house.”
“But what about his body?”
“We’ll just cover it and leave it in the back of his car. Nobody will find it for a day or two.”
“What if he’s married? Or he has a girlfriend?”
“If he had a woman in his bed then he shouldn’t have gone out to bother us. Come on.” He walked to Boylan’s SUV.
That’s Ed all right, she thought. She shook her head and got out of the Camry, then trotted to the passenger door of the SUV and sat beside Ed. He drove them ahead to Boylan’s house, turned up the driveway, and pulled into the attached garage. Ed closed the garage door with the remote control, and they got out. He switched on Boylan’s flashlight and opened the back of the SUV, where Boylan’s body lay. He patted Boylan’s pockets until he found a cell phone, and handed it to Nicole. “Put this in your purse. It’s probably got our number in the memory.”
Nicole put the phone in her purse and looked at Boylan in the dim, moving light. “What do you think he was doing? Why would he come and case our house?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ed said. “What I’m guessing is that he saw us following him here this morning and thought he’d kill us before we killed him.”
“Jesus,” she said. “He’d have to be an idiot.”
Ed went to the back of the garage, found what looked like the canvas of an old awning, and brought it back and covered Boylan with it, then closed the hatch. He took a red shop rag from the workbench and wiped down the steering wheel, the door handles, the glove compartment, and the hatch.
“Come on. Let’s go in.” He stepped to the door that led into the house and aimed the flashlight in through the window, and then turned it off. “No sign of a Rottweiler, and the alarm system isn’t armed. I guess you’re right about him being an idiot.”
He used Boylan’s key to open the kitchen door. When they were both inside he locked it again. They walked through the room to the hallway that led beside the staircase to the front entry. When they reached the staircase Ed faced Nicole, put his index finger over his mouth, and then pointed upstairs.
Nicole nodded and screwed the silencer on her gun again, and then began to climb the stairs. She was much better than Ed was at moving quietly, since she weighed about forty percent less than he did. She placed her foot on each step right beside the wall, where the wood would be nailed tightly to the vertical board beneath, and not bend or creak. She reached the top in a few seconds and found herself in a carpeted hallway. She walked along the padded surface, moving nimbly and rapidly with her gun low in front of her. She glanced into each room to be sure it wasn’t occupied, and then moved on.
After a few doorways she was beginning to feel relieved, because the place seemed to be empty. But as she approached the far end of the hall, she heard a female voice. “Vince?” it said. Nicole froze, her shallow breaths sounding loud to her and the back of her neck suddenly sweaty. “Vince? What are you doing?” The voice was sleepy and querulous, a young woman’s voice. “Vince?”
Nicole called out in her softest, most motherly voice, “Don’t be afraid, honey. They’re putting the fire out now, but you’d better get dressed.” She kept moving down the hall toward the woman’s voice.
The woman stood in the doorway, just closing the button at the waist of a pair of tight jeans. She was tall and thin in a tank top with an open man’s shirt thrown over it and her feet bare. When she saw Nicole she reached to the top of a dresser just inside the room and turned toward her with a pistol in her right hand.
Nicole’s gun flashed, and in that half second she saw the long blond hair, the peach tank top, and the hole being punched into it at the sternum. Nicole fired twice more, each flash revealing the woman’s look of utter surprise. The woman fell forward onto the floor and lay still. Nicole fired another round into the woman’s head and then walked around her body toward the bedroom.
The stairway resonated with Ed’s heavy footsteps pounding upward, and Nicole turned to see him arrive with his pistol in a two-handed grip.
“I’m fine,” Nicole said. “Thanks for asking.”
Ed switched on the flashlight and held its beam on the woman. “She’s not. Who is she?”
Nicole looked down at her. “She’s got a wedding ring on, so I assume she’s his wife. I’ll see if I can find her purse and check.”
She took his flashlight, went inside the bedroom, surveyed the room, and saw a purse hanging on the doorknob of the closet. She looked inside, found a small wallet, and opened it. “License says she’s Leslie Ann Kuyper, DOB June sixteenth, nineteen eighty-six. Her voice sounded a lot younger. I guess she used her maiden name.”
“I don’t like that,” Ed said.
“I know,” Nicole said. “This credit card says she’s Leslie Boylan. Like her better now?”
“No. Let’s start looking.”
“Any idea what we’re looking for?”
He said, “Anything that will tell us who his client was. An address book, other cell phones, a computer. And anything that has our name on it, or our address.”
She handed Ed the flashlight, returned the wallet to the purse, and let it swing back on its strap. “I’ll look around up here. Why don’t you start searching the first floor?”
“All right.” Ed left the room and she heard him going down the stairs. She reached into the large walk-in closet and found the light switch, then closed the door behind her before she turned it on so the light wouldn’t show through the bedroom window.
She had read somewhere that people who hid things in their houses usually hid them close to where they slept. She wasn’t sure if that applied to the whole population, but the kind of people she and Ed had been hired to kill seemed to do things that way. They tended to be people who wanted to protect their valuables themsel
ves, and they wanted to be able to snatch them up quickly and get out of the house before whatever they’d done caught up with them.
Nicole opened the drawers of the built-in dressers. She found a very thin pair of leather gloves that belonged to the dead woman, and put them on to search. She started with the bottom drawers and worked her way up. She looked for papers, notebooks, flash drives, disks. About halfway up in the dresser across the room she found a drawer with a false bottom. She pried it up and found the money. It was all in neat, banded stacks of hundreds, laid in evenly to form a foundation for the false drawer bottom. The cash wasn’t actually hidden, just stored as though Boylan wanted to keep the money separate and out of the way. She loaded the stacks of bills into a pillowcase and set it by the door so she would remember to take it. After that she found a gun in an upper drawer, but nothing else that was of any interest.
She saw that the woman had some pretty good jewelry, but taking it to a jewelry store to have it melted and reset would make the jeweler call the insurance companies to see if it was stolen.
She moved out to the rest of the bedroom, working with only the light from inside the closet. There was another gun in the nightstand on Boylan’s side. There was nothing that told her anything she didn’t already know. She moved to the next bedroom, the next, and the next. They were all spare rooms that had not been in use, and there wasn’t anything hidden in, behind, or under any of the furniture.
Ed looked up when he heard her coming down the stairs, and saw the pillowcase. “What did you find?”
“A drawer full of cash and a couple of guns. I left the guns.”
“Were you careful about prints and things?”
She held up her gloved hand. “Yeah. Were you?”
He held up his hand and showed her a bright yellow rubber glove. “I found these in the kitchen.”
