Silence

by Thomas Perry

  “Because we did this—you and I—and we have to do the little we can to fix the consequences. Eric is an innocent victim.”

  “That’s another thing.” She looked desperate now, a person caught in a rip current and fighting it. “You say, ‘Of course he was framed.’ Well, who do you think did that? The man who couldn’t kill me six years ago. He couldn’t find me, so now he’s devised a way to make me show myself. How can you ask me to do that?”

  “Most of the damage is already done. The hunters have been in your house. They stole pictures—I think one was of you, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t steal a few to help them identify your husband and kids. No matter what, you’re going to have to stay away from that house. Whether you save Eric or not, you’re going to have to take your family into hiding. There’s a chance you’ll get some witness protection from the authorities this time. If not, I’ll certainly help you.” He could see that she was barely listening. She had been resisting the knowledge that the life she had invented in San Rafael was finished.

  “You’re sure they’ve found my house already?”

  “Yes.”

  “How could they?”

  He waited. She seemed to look around her at the buildings, the pier, the stretch of water near the dock where the boats to Alcatraz were taking on passengers, as though she had not seen them before.

  She said, “You haven’t said a word about Ann Delatorre.”

  “You haven’t, either.”

  “Is it what I think?”

  “It looked as though she fought. She probably didn’t see the gun, and it would have been quick.”

  Ann Donnelly’s eyes were shut tightly and she moved her head from side to side as though she were saying no, but she did not cry. When she opened them, Jack Till said, “You know what you have to do.”

  She began to walk. Jack Till walked with her toward the parking lot, and when he turned toward his car instead of hers, she was with him.

  20

  SYLVIE SAID, “You think she’s prettier than I am, don’t you?”

  Paul glanced at her, then back at the car’s side mirror. He used the button inside the car to adjust the mirror’s tilt to keep the man and woman in sight. “Hardly.”

  “You’re certainly staring at her.”

  “I’ve never seen her before. I want to get a good look.”

  “You always like those petite women with the little-girl shapes, and all men like blondes.”

  “I’m not in the market. And men don’t all like blondes. Men don’t even all like women.”

  Sylvie laughed. “That’s a thought, isn’t it? You do still like women, don’t you?”

  He took his eyes away from the mirror. “That’s an odd thing to say.”

  “I didn’t say it. You did.”

  He looked at Sylvie. She sat in the passenger seat of the rented sport utility vehicle, her body pulled away with her back to the door and facing him, as though she were planning to fend off a blow. He said with exaggerated patience, “I’m trying to keep my eyes on the woman because Densmore is paying us good money to kill her, not because I have some personal interest in her. I’m trying to be sure we can kill her without getting caught.” He looked into the mirror again and saw nothing, so he tried the other mirrors, then turned around in his seat.

  He saw them again walking along an aisle of cars. Wendy Harper moved away from her Nissan Maxima with a suitcase, and let Till guide her to a different aisle. The next few seconds were crucial. Paul needed to see the car they were going to take, and be sure it was the car he had already seen, and not some new one Till had planted here. He craned his neck, but they moved out of his view behind an SUV that was even bigger than his. Till was a pro. Paul couldn’t take the chance of driving close enough to let Till see his face, but he couldn’t let Till drive off and move out of his sight.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Huh?” he said.

  “I said I was sorry. So you don’t have to sit there freezing me out in absolute silence for the next few hours like I was a criminal.”

  “Fine. I don’t think you need to apologize, but I’ll accept your apology. Damn. I need to get a good look at the car they’re getting into, but I don’t dare let him see us.”

  “Why not just pull up behind him so he can’t back out of the space, and open fire on them?”

  “Because there are a thousand people who would turn around and see us.”

  “That’s the idea. When there are a thousand people, there may as well be no people. There will be hundreds of conflicting stories, and half of those people will see somebody else drive off and say it was them.”

  “That may be true, but we could easily shoot them and then get stuck in this lot behind somebody and not be able to get out.” He was getting irritated. He turned the ignition key and started the engine, began to back out of his space, and then was startled by the blare of a horn behind him.

  Paul stomped on the brake and the SUV jerked to a stop and rocked. He turned in his seat. It was a pair of teenagers, the boy driving and the girl glaring at Paul as they went past along the aisle.

  As Paul resumed his attempt to back out of the parking space, he thought about the pair. They could easily have waited for just a moment to let him back out, but they had the aggressive mentality that was getting to be an epidemic. These kids couldn’t imagine how close to the grave they were treading. It was difficult for even Paul to guess how much more provocation it would take right now for him to forget the caution he had urged on Sylvie and put a bullet through each of their heads. He got the big SUV out into the aisle and followed the two teenagers’ car toward the exit.

  He could see past their small car to the end of the aisle now, where Jack Till was opening the door of his beige Lincoln for Wendy Harper.

  Sylvie said, “There they are.”

  The superfluity of her observation was an affront to Paul’s consciousness. Of course he could see them. The fact that Sylvie was here to see them was entirely his doing. When he and Sylvie had broken into Wendy Harper’s house and found it deserted, Sylvie had simply assumed they would rush off to be long gone before the burglary was discovered. It was Paul who had insisted on parking down the street and watching the house. He had known he had been right to insist when the first person to arrive was Jack Till. And when Till left the house, Paul managed to follow him all the way to Pier 39 without being discovered. He fought the urge to remind her.

  “This is where things really start,” he said. “We’ve managed to stick with him while he found her for us, and neither of them has seen us yet. That’s huge.”

  “Okay,” Sylvie said.

  “Just concentrate on getting a clear view of their car, the license number, and where they go. We’re going to have to leave the lot first and wait for them to pass.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t take your eyes off Till. He’s a pro, so he probably has something in mind.”

  “I said all right.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know. Could it be because you treat me like shit?”

  “When was this?”

  “Well, let’s see. Ever since we went to Vegas, you’ve been snapping at me.”

  “No I haven’t. I’ve just been trying to keep us both focused on this job. I have more experience, so maybe I give more directions. That’s all.”

  “You were really nasty to me after I shot that black woman. I heard the commotion, then ran in and saw her biting and scratching you and going for your eyes, so I did it. That’s all. And since then you’ve been hurting my feelings. Is it because a woman was about to kick your ass, and I’m the witness? Or is it because I’m a woman and I saved you?”

  Paul’s consciousness alternated between the sting of her accusation and a hollow amusement at the irrationality of it. When he was able to stabilize his emotions for a moment, he said, “I wanted to scare her, not kill her.”

  “You scared her, all right.�
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  “If I had wanted her dead, I would have shot her myself. I had a gun. You knew that.”

  “I knew it, and so did she. I didn’t want her to get her hands on it and kill us both.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You fired because you didn’t have confidence that I could keep her alive long enough to get her to talk. So I had to spend an hour cleaning up, and then another hour taking the house apart to find out what she could have told us.”

  “We’re here, and it’s because I found the phone number.”

  “Yes, we’re here—about an hour too late to have caught her packing and killed her before Jack Till got to her. Those two extra hours in Henderson start to look bigger now, don’t they?”

  “So I finally think I understand.”

  It was a battle for clarification. Their fights were always like this, the anger of the struggle forcing each of them to reveal the resentments they had resolved to hide, but finding they needed to use them as ammunition. His sense of structure told him that the fight was nearly at its core now, and soon he could know what it had been about. “What is it that you understand?”

  “You haven’t been romantic since we left home. Are you just angry at me for shooting her, or are you losing interest?”

  “I’m not losing interest in you. I’m with you practically all the time, aren’t I? Maybe that’s the problem.”

  “I don’t mean being around. I mean—you know.”

  “Sex?” It always astounded Paul that she had such a hard time saying even the word, given her history.

  “Yes. You’ve been so cold and distant. You haven’t been very interested in me for a long time.”

  “We’ve been working every minute. I’m interested, but I don’t know when anything could have happened. When we haven’t been on an airplane, we’ve been in a car.” He took his eyes away from the cars ahead of him moving slowly toward the gate. “I love you. Don’t ever forget the trouble we went through to be together. That’s how much I wanted you.”

  “Wanted?”

  “Want.”

  She leaned over to throw her arms around his neck and put a soft kiss on his cheek. “Let’s kill them now and rent a room.”

  There was the sound of a horn behind them, and Paul glanced into the rearview mirror. This time it was a middle-aged woman who had noticed that he had let five or six extra feet of space open up between his bumper and the trunk of the two teenagers’ car. “Just keep your eyes on their car,” he said.

  It still rankled Paul that Sylvie had accused him of being defeated by that young black woman in Henderson. Sylvie had killed her and left him no way to defend himself from the accusation of weakness. He had been just about to incapacitate the young woman when Sylvie had rushed in, hysterical, and shot her. He knew a dozen ways to immobilize a smaller opponent like that woman. He had been training in martial arts since he was a teenager.

  He had been without any sense of direction as a boy. It had seemed to him that the gravity that held most other people to some path had no effect on him. People around him, even his own brothers and sisters, seemed to have some image they were growing into, some template that they were learning to fit.

  Paul had balance, control, and coordination, so he thought he might be good at sports, but he had a difficult time finding the right one. He was tall and thin, so the basketball team had seemed a possibility, but he found that the countless hours of shooting a basket, rebounding, and shooting again that made other boys good players made him bored. He tried football, but it was like the punishment for some forbidden act that he had not even had the pleasure of committing. Then he found a karate class in a storefront on his way home from school. In karate he could use everything about himself—his long reach, his high kick, his coordination, his energy, his anger.

  By the age of fifteen, he had already become a dangerous boy. He had little to do with the other students at school, but when he walked down the hall, he cut a path through the crowd like an icebreaker, straight and undeviating, bumping aside anyone who didn’t see him coming and forcing those who did to go around him. One afternoon a boy pushed back, hard. Paul spun with the push, held the boy’s arm and broke it, then delivered a series of quick blows that left the boy unconscious and bleeding in the hallway.

  That evening after his mother came home from work, the police arrived and took Paul to the station. They asked him a lot of questions, and then locked him up for the night. Paul’s mother went to the station and tried to get him out, but the police weren’t yet sure how serious the charges would be, so they stalled. Finally he had been sent to a juvenile facility in the mountains for thirty days. That was where he had gotten his first paying job.

  When he had been there for about two weeks and won four fights, three boys from the North Valley came to him and explained that they had a problem. They had been working as street pushers for a marijuana dealer. They had been in a feud with boys who worked for a rival dealer, and it had given one of them an idea. They would rob their own dealer’s house, and then blame it on their competitors. The flaw in the scheme was that when they had broken into the house, a neighbor had seen them. The dealer they worked for was terrifying. He had several plantations in remote parts of national forests, tended by small groups of armed men. Each time a crop was ripe they picked it, bagged it, and packed it out on foot. The dealer had plenty of men from these crews to find and kill the boys if he learned what they had done. They needed to kill the neighbor before he saw them again and recognized them, but they were all going to be in the juvenile camp for at least two months.

  They knew Paul was getting out in a couple of weeks. They were willing to tell him where they had hidden a gun and pay him a thousand dollars each to kill the neighbor. Paul said, “All right.” As soon as he was out of juvenile camp, he went to the address they had given him, found the gun, went to the neighbor’s house, and shot him while he slept. Paul had finally discovered his sport.

  Paul had been doing paying jobs for a lot of years before he’d ever met Sylvie. It was incredible to him that she would attack his competence just to win points in some stupid argument. He forced himself to be calm. Nobody ever said women fought fair, and nobody ever sought out women because they were logical.

  Behind him a horn sounded again, this time a long, loud blare.

  21

  JACK TILL SWIVELED in his seat to see what the honking was about, but all he could determine was that it had come from one of the cars in the line behind him. A car had stopped in the aisle to let him out so it could take his parking space. The boy with a black baseball cap who was driving made Till uneasy because he was talking to his girlfriend instead of watching, but Till backed out and moved off.

  Till turned out of the parking lot and drove west, away from the harbor. He wanted to be on a freeway heading south before the afternoon rush hour. He knew the importance of momentum to a witness like Wendy Harper. If things seemed to be stalled and faltering, she would begin to rethink her choices. He watched her closely whenever he was forced to stop at a traffic signal or wait for an obstruction to clear, and he could detect the nervous mannerisms he feared: looking out the side window at familiar buildings, her thumb running back and forth along the door handle. San Francisco was still home. He hadn’t gotten her out of town yet. She could open the door at any stop, slip out, and know her way around.

  “Don’t be nervous,” he reassured her. “You made the right decision.”

  “It was made for me.”

  “So much the better. You don’t have to second-guess yourself.”

  “What I wonder is why you couldn’t have brought a video camera and taken a shot of me talking and holding a newspaper or something. Maybe draw some blood for DNA tests.”

  “I thought of that,” he said. “We know the crime lab has samples of your blood. The Assistant DA would have objected, but I think Jay Chernoff—he’s Eric’s lawyer—could have made it work in court.”

  “Why didn’t you, then?”


  “Because by the time I got to talk to you, Ann Delatorre was already dead and her killers had found their way to your house. There was no secret left to protect. The only option left was to get you out of town.”

  Her impatient expression let Till know that she had thought of that herself, and hearing him repeat what her own mind had told her was not soothing. “See that building down Geary toward Market?”

  “The big gray one?”

  “No. The brown antique-looking one. My husband works there. His office is right up there on the fourth floor, this side. I can see his window.”

  “What company?”

  “Pan-World Technical Commerce. It started as a trading company to bring hard drives and things from Asia, but now the finance arm is what makes most of the money.”

  “It sounds like a good job.”

  “He’s one of the owners. The partners. It took him about ten years to build it into anything. They started out working from a house in Oakland. I feel terrible that he’ll lose it all because of me.”

  Till could see the building’s magnetic pull on her as they waited for the light to change. She was feeling a strong urge to jump out of the idling car and run inside the building. He knew that distracting her was impossible, so he tried to keep her talking. “Maybe we can get his partners to buy him out.”

  “Probably not. I suspect that when they know he has to liquidate, he’ll get his next lesson in business. They’ll keep him hanging until he has to walk away and leave his share to them.”

  “They’d do that?”

  “That’s the way I read them, but I might be more cynical and pessimistic than most people.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll try to get some serious legal talent involved, and I’ll serve as the go-between. We can sell his share of the business, your house, and your cars. I can collect your money and make a transfer to your next identity through intermediaries. If necessary, I can deliver it to you in cash.”