Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  The man kept walking along the shoulder of the road, striding purposefully toward the house where Mallon was supposed to meet Diane. Mallon was a longtime daily walker who lived in a city full of walkers, and he was expert in the ways people looked when they walked on trails or the shoulders of roads. This one was strangely different. His body showed tension. He seemed to be straining to get to the house quickly.

  The man did not change his pace, but he suddenly turned his head to look at the nearby houses, and then to glance over his shoulder. His head faced forward again, and his right hand reached inside his sport coat. The hand did not emerge. It simply stayed there as he walked. The man passed another driveway while Mallon waited for his hand to reappear. The next house had two pillars at the edge of the driveway topped by small electric lanterns. As the man passed the house where Mallon was hiding, Mallon was only thirty feet away, and he could see the man’s face. Everything became clear and sharp, so he could study the man’s expression. The head was up and slightly forward, the brow was set in concentration, but the eyes were wide, eager, excited.

  As soon as the man’s right arm shifted, Mallon was sure. When the man’s right arm came up, Mallon could see the pistol he had known was there. The man walked on toward the deserted house where Mallon was supposed to meet Diane. Mallon watched from his hiding place across the street and three lots away, while the man walked around the house. As soon as the man had stepped out of sight, Mallon used the opportunity to retreat to the deep shadows at the side of the house where he had been hiding. He pried up a heavy piece of flagstone from the walkway where he stood, and watched as the man reappeared on the other side of the house down the street, then widened his search, the gun still in his hand as he prowled around the shrubbery in the garden. At last the man had satisfied himself that Mallon was not hiding there. He walked along the street a few feet, then crossed back to Mallon’s side and started to return the way he had come.

  Mallon held his breath, waiting. His hands clutched the heavy flagstone he had found. As the man drew nearer, Mallon suspected that something had gone wrong. The man was still walking, but slightly slower. His head was still held straight, but eyes had shifted to the left, searching. Mallon raised the heavy stone over his head with both hands. Suddenly the man spun, the gun in his hand. He jumped over the hedge where Mallon had been hiding and aimed the gun at the spot on the ground where Mallon had been.

  Mallon hurled the big stone. As soon as it left his hands, he dashed after it. The man’s head spun, but his eyes seemed to see only Mallon’s body, not the flying stone. He raised the pistol just as the broad flagstone hit his torso just below his chest. The pistol went off, spitting a flash of sparks. There was a heavy huff of air leaving his lungs, he buckled and staggered backward into the hedge, and then Mallon was on him. Mallon’s momentum propelled them both through the hedge into the street, with Mallon on top. He wrenched the pistol from the man’s grip and turned it toward the man, just as the man’s other arm jabbed hard at Mallon’s throat.

  Mallon fired twice quickly, the two rounds pounding into the man’s chest like punches. His jab lost its power, and both of his arms went limp and fell lifeless to the pavement, spread wide from his body.

  Part of Mallon’s mind was suddenly, oddly, detached from his body’s terror and agitation. He knew exactly what was about to happen, and knew what he must do to avoid it. He stood up. Then, without hesitation, he spun and ran across the road to the other side and hurdled a privet hedge, looking for the best place to take cover. He heard the sound of the car coming to life again. The headlights brightened the house to his left. In a moment they would be sweeping around the corner and onto him. He threw himself down behind the hedge and pressed his face into the grass.

  The car came up and stopped with a short skid beside the body of the man Mallon had shot. The man in the driver’s seat opened his door, and the dome light went on. He appeared to be in his late thirties, tall and lean like the first man. He popped out and shut the door to put out the light, produced a pistol, and bent his legs to lean on the hood of the car and take two-handed aim at the house above the fallen man. He made no attempt to kneel down and determine whether the man could be saved. He just gave a harsh, loud whisper: “Markham! You alive?” There was no response, no movement.

  The man stared over his car at the houses on that side of the street, at the shrubbery and trees along that side, even up at the roofs, but never behind him. Mallon had a persistent ringing in his ears, and the sight of the man seemed distant and absurd. The man was devoting all of his attention to the dark hiding places on the side of the street where he had found his fallen companion. He had simply assumed that Mallon would have shot him and run up that lawn for the cover that was closest. The man would not even consider the chance that Mallon had run across the street, and was behind him. Mallon began to feel hope.

  Mallon lay on the ground behind the hedge, carefully aiming the dead man’s pistol through the space between two woody stems just above the grass. After thirty or forty very long seconds, the man stuck his gun into his coat, bent low, and began to drag his companion’s body toward the door behind the driver’s seat. He stayed low, apparently confident that Mallon was hiding on the far side of the car. When he had pulled the body to a spot just behind the door, he went lower, and swung the door open. The dome lamp threw a sudden bath of light onto the deserted street, and the man’s face suddenly changed. Still bent low, he slammed the door and snatched the gun out of his jacket, and Mallon knew he’d been seen.

  The man raised the pistol, and he and Mallon both fired. Mallon was aware of two shots tearing through the foliage above and around him, but after a moment, the man fell forward onto his face.

  The two men now lay on the pavement. Mallon had seen the places where they had been hit, and the detached, calm part of his mind assured him that they were dead, but he stepped over the hedge and across the street to look down at them and confirm it. He put the pistol into his jacket pocket. He picked up the second man’s pistol and put it into his other jacket pocket. Their weight stretched the material and pulled his jacket down on his shoulders.

  He reached for the handle of the car door, but as he did, he realized he could hear another engine. He could see lights beginning to glow on the trees in front of the house at the bend again. This car was coming fast. He would not have time to run across the street to his hedge. He considered getting into the dead men’s car, then considered hiding behind it. He saw that the pattern of blood on the pavement near the men’s bodies was beginning to light up already. It was time to lie down.

  CHAPTER 29

  Mallon had to lie on his belly to hide the gun in his hand and to be able to get up quickly, but he felt keenly the hardness of the asphalt. The two men on either side of him lay in perfect, open-eyed repose, like two whitefish in a delicatessen’s display case. He tried to imitate their stillness as the approaching car’s headlights brightened, swept across the house at the bend, and then settled on them.

  The glare intensified rapidly, until he could see red through his eyelids, and then the car stopped. He heard a door open and slam, waited for another that never came, but heard the sharp, small clop of a woman’s shoes coming around the car. They stopped.

  “Oh, Jesus.” It was just above a whisper, but it was Diane’s voice. “Oh, Jesus.”

  Mallon pushed off the pavement and got to his feet, and she gave a little cry. She was only a silhouette in front of the headlights, but he could make out that she was wearing tight, dark pants of some kind and a blouse. As he stepped toward her, she at first recoiled, then seemed to reel a little, as though she felt faint. “It’s me,” he said. “I’m not dead. Get in and drive us out of here.”

  She seemed to see that this was undeniably what she needed to do.She trotted the three steps back to the car, got in, and immediately threw it into gear to drive off. Mallon was only halfway in when the car shot forward, but he pulled his leg inside and let the acceleration shut
the door. She glanced at him, wide-eyed, for a second, then stared ahead at the dark road.

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice going up the scale as she spoke. “Who are those men on the ground? What happened to them?”

  Mallon stared at her, watching her face while the outdoor lights of houses passed across it, then left it in darkness, only the glow from the instrument panel giving her a yellowish pallor. “I killed them,” he said.

  “Killed them?” she repeated. “How?”

  “I was going to say that it wasn’t my fault, but of course it was. It took some effort. I heard their engine, so I knew they were coming. They guessed where I would be hiding, but I knew what their guess would be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I could see that they were here to kill me, so I had to stop them.”

  Diane looked at him in disbelief, her eyes wide, then squinted ahead at the road for a moment. Her eyes shot back to his face again and again, as though each time she expected some change to have occurred, but each time was shocked to see that it had not. “You just decided they were all here to harm you? You just guessed that and shot them?”

  He leaned close to her, and stared at the clock on the dashboard. “Ten-oh-five. I guess you were nearly on time. It was a good plan, but it didn’t work out well at all,” he said wearily. “No, I guess it did.”

  Diane was sitting stiffly, both hands on the wheel, but Mallon could see that her right eye was trying to keep him in sight. Mallon noticed that he was still holding a gun in his hand. He considered for a moment, then slipped it back into his jacket pocket.

  He sat back in the seat, and he could see a change in her posture. She straightened so noticeably that it looked as though she were growing.“I’m not sure that this was a good idea,” she said. “We’ll have to make a convincing argument that we had a compelling reason to leave the scene.”

  “What for?”

  “The trial,” she said with a hint of impatience, as though it were self-evident. “When somebody dies of gunshot wounds, there will be a trial. I’m fairly sure we can get you off—either self-defense or, at worst, manslaughter—but you’ll have to be very helpful and very forthcoming. We’ll need to prove they were after you. Did you ever see either of them before?”

  He answered all her questions. He marveled at the effect. As she talked, he could see her getting stronger and more confident that she had the right strategy. She was trying to make him weak and indecisive and, ultimately, passive, so that she would be in control. He felt a growing warmth in his chest and a tightness in his throat, but he did not let the feeling ignite into rage.

  He said, “I’m really exhausted, Diane. In the past couple of days, people have tried to kill me on the beach, at a hotel, and now here. I think all we can do at the moment is get ourselves to a place where we’ll be safe for a while.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  “Good. Turn right up here at Malibu Canyon, and we can go through the hills to the freeway, and then east, out of state, as we had planned.”

  “That’s not a good idea anymore, Robert,” she said. “I can’t let you do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you kill some people—in self-defense or not—then fleeing the state has a bad effect on police, district attorneys, judges, juries. In a capital case, it could be a fatal mistake.”

  He studied her face for a moment. Her confidence was as high as he had ever seen it. “Then what is a good idea?”

  “I think we should find a place close by, then try to get in touch with people who can help us. We should get some real protection for you while I try to make a deal with the police.”

  “All right,” he said. “Drive up the coast as far as Ventura. I know a good place.”

  It was a house beside the ocean just north of Ventura, and he knew it because he had once owned it. He had bought it shortly after he had come to Santa Barbara, with the notion that he would remodel it and resell it. But before he had gotten around to drawing any plans, he had received an unsolicited offer and sold it for a profit to a couple from Los Angeles. He had driven by not long ago and seen that the house had been sold again. Then, a couple of weeks ago, he had read in the Santa Barbara News-Press that a Ventura investment partnership was planning to tear it and several others down to build enormous beach palaces for people who had the ante and wanted to be part of the final California land rush.

  He did not need to direct her there, only to wait awhile and say, “It’s up ahead on the left,” then say, “Here’s the one. Pull into the driveway.”

  The house was dark and the garage had a padlock on it, but the windows had not been boarded and there was no contractor’s chain-link fence to interfere. He had known from experience that announcing a plan was one thing, but getting the building permits and the approvals from the Coastal Commission for a big project on the oceanfront was another. It often took years.

  Diane said irritably, “What is this place?”

  Mallon did not answer. He was out of the car and walking around to the side of the house to look in the kitchen window. The sound of the waves coming in on the beach was steady and regular, just loud enough to make her unsure whether he had answered her or not. He could see the small green numbers on the oven control panel, which meant the power was on. He looked through the doorway at the front entry, then at the back of the house, but there were no lights on the alarm keypads.

  He remembered that the back door had been small and solid with heavy dead bolts, and the windows had been big, with double panes for strength. As he stepped around the back, he could see that some remodeling had been done since he had last seen the house. The back entrance was now through a pair of French doors with a simple bolt that turned by hand. He approved of the concrete patio that had been added and, even more, the low reinforced-concrete wall with an irregular row of boulders in front of it to break up any big waves that might come all the way up here in an extremely high tide.

  He looked around the patio for a few seconds, but found that the owners had not left anything he could use, so he kept walking to the place where he remembered the gas meter was. There he found a wrench that was designed for turning off the gas in an emergency. He took it to the French door and swung it once into the small pane of glass nearest to the bolt. He reached in and opened the door, stepped inside, then crossed the living room to the front door, undid the bolt, opened it, and beckoned to Diane.

  She was still sitting in the driver’s seat looking uncomfortable. She shook her head and stayed there. Mallon left the front door open and walked to her side of the car. “Come on in,” he said. “We’ll be safe and comfortable here until we can get things straightened out.”

  She glared at him. “What are you talking about? You just broke a window to get in. I heard you.”

  He shrugged. “The house belongs to a friend of mine. He won’t mind. I sold it to him.” She stared straight ahead, the same resentful expression on her face. “Diane, get out of the damned car.” He pulled her door open and waited.

  She was looking up at him now, and he could see she was still reluctant, but she slowly and deliberately swung her legs out, leaned forward, and stood up. She had her arms wrapped around herself with her purse dangling from one hand and her keys in the other as she walked to the front door and into the house.

  She turned on the switch by the door so the overhead light went on, stepped to the center of the living room, and looked around her. There were a few movers’ cardboard boxes collapsed on one side of the expanse of wall-to-wall carpet, and a few partial rolls of packing tape beside them. “There’s no furniture. Is your friend Japanese?”

  “He’s not living here, he’s putting the house up for sale again. That’s why I know he wouldn’t care about the glass.”

  She set her purse on the floor, tossed her keys into it, and looked around. “If you owned the place once, you must remember where the bathrooms are. Which way?” She watched Mallon
point, then walked to the door, pushed it open, switched on the light, and closed the door.

  Mallon immediately knelt to reach into her purse. He found her cell phone, but his hand had brushed a second object that interested him. He reached inside again, grasped it, and brought it out.

  The gun was surprisingly small. It barely filled his hand. He slipped the gun and the telephone into the two inner pockets of his jacket, stood, and looked around him, trying to think clearly. He heard the toilet flush. He switched off the overhead light, stepped silently into the dining area, opened the back door, went outside, and watched through the windows.

  She came out and looked around her. “Robert?” She stepped toward the kitchen and then to the hallway and looked around some more, then quickly snatched up her purse and slipped into the bathroom again. After a few seconds, she emerged and set her purse exactly where it had been. She stepped back and looked at it, adjusted its tilt a bit, and sat down a few feet from it, her back against the wall.

  Mallon returned and shut the door, then went to the pile of movers’ boxes and tape. He used his pocketknife to cut a square of cardboard off one of the boxes and then taped it over the broken glass.

  “Robert,” said Diane. “Why are we here?”

  He turned and looked at her in the dim light from the bathroom. “I’m not entirely certain,” he answered. “We need to talk a bit before either of us does anything.”

  “All right.” She folded her arms and waited. “So?”

  He took a deep breath and released it slowly. He had been dreading this, but he reflected that it had already begun: he had taken her gun and her phone, and she knew it. “How did those two men know that you and I were going to meet at that house in Malibu?”

  She looked shocked. “Are you sure?” she asked. “What makes you think they knew it?”