by Thomas Perry
She smiled. “I’d forgotten. You have a talent for that.”
“For what?”
“For making people think that everything will be all right. You would have been a good general, sending soldiers on suicide missions and things. It’s a con game.”
“I won’t ask you to do anything I don’t.”
She shook her head. “You’re the one who jumps across the chasm and then turns to the rest of us and calls, ‘Come on. You can do it!’ Only we can’t. Or most of us can’t.”
The light changed and only one taxicab was caught in the intersection to block the traffic. Jack Till accelerated and then swerved into the left lane to avoid it at the last moment. He kept going on Pine Street and turned south onto Van Ness to head for the 101.
“Are we going to the airport?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Why not?”
“I haven’t seen anyone following us. If nobody is, then what they’re probably doing is betting that we’ll try to fly out.”
“And?”
“And then they’ll be waiting for us at the airport, so we don’t want to go there.”
“But you once told me airports are the safest place. How could they hurt us with all that security?”
“The system is designed to detect objects that blow up or people who might shoot into a crowd. There are a lot of other ways to kill a hundred-and-ten-pound woman and walk away.”
“Jesus!” she said. “I can’t believe that after six years I’m back to this again—running, just like the first day.”
“If you’ve got anything new to tell me, I’d love to hear it.”
“I had six years to think about this, but you know what? I didn’t. I mean, not in any useful way. I went about my life, and I thought about what I had to do each day. I met Louanda after a few weeks, and—”
“Louanda? Is that Ann Delatorre?”
“Yes. Her name was Louanda Rowan. Without her, I don’t think I would have made it this far.”
“I’m sorry about her. If only I had been able to convince her to let me help, she would be alive. Somebody found her after I did.”
“It’s not your fault. You didn’t know she existed. If I had been there to open the door as you expected, it never would have happened. I was the one who got her killed. I put her there.” Tears began to well in her eyes and drip down her cheeks. She took a tissue out of her purse and tried to dry them.
“I can tell you that kicking your own ass doesn’t leave much time for anything else.”
“Have you done a lot of that?”
“Enough for the moment.” Till drove aggressively like a cop on duty, moving along in a lane for a time, gaining steadily on the cars ahead and then switching lanes. He kept staring into the mirrors, trying to catch another car changing lanes to keep him in sight. After a few minutes, he said, “How are you doing?”
“Not so great. I’m so terrified, I can hardly breathe.”
“We’ve got to be scared, but only enough to stay alert and do the little things we can do. Use your fear. Look out the rear window every couple of minutes and see if the same car is in the same spot three times in a row. And talk to me to keep me alert. Tell me what you think now about what happened six years ago.”
“I suppose I have figured out some of it in the last six years. Not the important parts—about the man who is killing people or anything. Only the personal parts, the things about me, me, me. So it’s not worth saying aloud.”
“Yes it is. I’d like to hear it.”
“Why?”
“Because your life—and mine—might depend on it. We can drive fast and try to be inconspicuous, but that won’t stop the people who killed Louanda from trying to kill you.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
He said nothing. After a few seconds, she said, “Why aren’t you answering me?”
“Does that SUV back there look familiar? The dark one. It kept coming up a while ago, then kind of fell back, and now here it is again.”
She stared at it through the back window. “I don’t know. They all look alike.”
“I’m trying not to be an alarmist, but I’ve got a feeling about it. Have you ever fired a gun?”
Her eyes widened. “Not really. Not the way you mean. When I was at camp, they taught us riflery. And I fired a friend’s pistol once.”
“Here’s the problem. If the people in that SUV are the killers, they’ll pull up on your side of the car and slightly behind us. The first few shots will get you. Then they’ll pull forward to try for me.”
“What can we do?”
He reached to his belt and took out his gun. “Here is the safety. If I tell you to, flip it off with your thumb, keeping your finger outside the trigger guard. You hold the grips tight, aim out the window with both hands. You fire four shots into their windshield—two rounds at the shooter, then two rounds at the driver.”
“What?” She was shocked. “Shoot them?”
“If you hit anybody, it’s over. If you just scare them, I can probably build up some distance and lose them.”
He allowed the dark vehicle to gain on them, glanced at the freeway signs and took the next exit. He coasted to the end of the exit ramp, turned right, and pulled into the first parking lot he saw on the new street. It was the big lot for a Home Depot store, and the aisles were full. He pulled to the end of the first aisle, stopped, and looked back to watch the street in the direction of the exit ramp. He waited for a few minutes, but he saw no sign that the SUV had come down the ramp.
“What now?” she asked.
“You can give my gun back, I guess.” He accepted it, put it back in the holster and covered it with his jacket again. He looked out at the street. “This is the way to the airport, isn’t it?”
“It’s one of the ways. The airport is just a few miles down the road that way. You stay parallel with the 101.”
“Then it might be another opportunity to throw some more confusion in our trail. I rented this car at the airport. I’d like to turn it in and get a different one.”
“Are you still against flying?”
“When you get on an airplane, people know exactly where you’re going and exactly what time you’ll arrive. If we go by car, we make them work to stay with us, and we get a chance to see who they are.”
22
PAUL GOT OUT of the black SUV and opened Sylvie’s door so she could climb out. As he watched her long legs swing out and straighten, and then saw her slide lightly off the seat and hop to the ground, he realized that the sight made him like her better. He had been seething, his jaw clenched much of the time since Sylvie had shot Ann Delatorre, and the nasty irrational remarks Sylvie had made in the parking lot at the pier had made things much worse. She was stupid and childish and completely unable to keep her mind focused on anything except herself. But the sight of those long legs and the graceful hop to the pavement dissipated his anger.
Paul was an aesthete. Other people could have said his response was not aesthetic but sexual, but that kind of statement would have shown that these people knew nothing. They didn’t understand that the two were the same: the response of the human mind to beauty.
He glanced toward the car rental building and took Sylvie’s arm, confident that he was pursuing the right strategy. Jack Till had left the freeway several miles before the airport. Till was fond of pulling tricks around airports, sometimes turning in his car and flying out, and sometimes turning in one car and renting another. Either way, the airport car rental was the place where Jack Till would be this afternoon.
“Why are we stopping here?” Sylvie asked.
“We’ve got to trade this SUV for a different vehicle.” He removed the two small suitcases from the SUV and shut the back door.
“Why?”
“It’s a tactic. Just like chess. I think he may have spotted us behind him. If he didn’t pick this out as the vehicle to worry about yet, he certainly saw it, so now is a good ti
me to change. We’ll also block his move.”
“What move?”
“He rented his car here. He got off the freeway a few miles back, so we’re ahead of him. But he’s on his way here to turn in his car. Either he’ll just dump it and try to get on a plane to Los Angeles—which I doubt—or he’ll rent a new car, too.”
“And?”
“He’ll still be looking for the black SUV, and we’ll know what his new car is.”
Paul walked into the car rental building. At the counter, he took out his keys and the papers he’d been given when he’d rented the SUV. “I’d like to trade in my SUV for something smaller, please,” he said to the young woman behind the desk. She reminded him of a girl named Beth he had dated about twenty years ago. She had the same red-brown hair and the same light skin and blue eyes. This girl could be a close relative of Beth’s. He wished he could say something. Sylvie was too prickly and difficult to listen to even neutral observations about women. Pointing them out made her want to kill them. The girl handed his keys to a man in blue overalls and watched him disappear out a back door.
As he watched the girl turn to her computer to tap in some information, he was tempted to say something to her; but he had dated Beth under his real name, so he couldn’t. Anyway, Sylvie was a few feet away at the magazine rack near the door watching for Jack Till’s beige Lincoln to come up the access road to the rental buildings.
Sylvie’s jealousy was ridiculous, and that seemed to be part of her reason for it. The jealousy was her way of denying that she had done what he had seen her do in about fifty movies with at least a hundred men. When he first met her, he pretended that he didn’t recognize her, and never let the topic of pornographic movies enter a conversation. He waited patiently, and when she made a big event out of gently, gradually telling him about her two-year career, he brought in a box from the garage to show her that he had already bought copies of all of her films. He said little more than the fact that he knew, and that it made no difference to him. That fantastic claim had struck Sylvie as entirely true.
The truth was that her film career had intrigued him and added to his attraction to her. What he had found to be a more difficult topic was his profession. For a time he tried telling her he was an entrepreneur who had made some money selling an Internet start-up business, then that he acted as a business consultant, and sometimes traveled to other cities to solve clients’ problems.
In those days, he received most of his referrals from Bobby Mosca, the bartender at the Palazzo di Conti restaurant on La Brea. The Palazzo was a landmark where well-known people sometimes went, partly because it served good southern Italian food, and partly because it had a reputation. Sometimes the story was that it was a remote outpost for members of the Balacontano family who came west on business. A competing story was that Bugsy Siegel had once been the silent owner, and that when he was shot in the bungalow on the other side of town, one of the unintended consequences was that the apparent owners became the real owners.
One night Paul’s telephone rang, and Sylvie answered and handed it to Paul. When the call was finished, he looked up and saw her in the doorway. She said, “I know.”
Paul sat back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach. “You know what?”
“I know who Bobby is. I know what you do for a living.”
Paul nodded, keeping his eyes on her.
“You killed Darren so you could have me. Surely you must have expected me to know that much. When the police came here, they told me it was a professional execution. And after living with you for months, how could I not know?”
“So now what?”
“Are you asking me what I’m going to do about it?”
“No, I’m asking you what you feel about it.”
She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest, then kissed him, hard. “I love you.”
He had left late that night to complete the job Bobby had called about. He came home to find her waiting up for him.
She said, “How did it go? Tell me everything that happened.”
“Why?” he said. “Why would you want to hear about that?”
“How else am I going to learn?”
As he looked away from the counter at Sylvie, he forgave her for the arguments and the idiotic defensiveness and lack of confidence. She was everything he had ever wanted. If he could just keep her convinced of that, then things would be tolerable. He heard the rental agent behind him, and turned.
He accepted the keys to the new car and looked at the tags. The car was a blue four-door Ford. That was acceptable: It wasn’t anything like the SUV. “Thank you,” he said. He turned and walked to Sylvie, picked up the two suitcases, and let Sylvie hold the door open for him. He walked to the car and put the suitcases into the trunk. Paul was pleased to see that the mechanic had already driven the black SUV around to the back of the building to clean and service it.
He and Sylvie got in. “Have you kept watching for Till’s beige rental car?”
“Of course. There’s only this one road for rental return. So far there have been fourteen cars since we got here. Two were beige or brown, but neither went to the Cheapcars lot, and neither had Till or the girl in them.”
“Good watching.” He reminded himself that he had thought of her as stupid, but Sylvie was absolutely not unintelligent. She could make all sorts of calculations and computations without engaging the major parts of her brain, and then announce them as though they were self-evident. It had been imprecise of him to let the word stupid float into his mind.
He felt his affection for her surge. He would never be able to separate what he saw from what he felt or what he thought. She was beautiful, therefore she was enticing, therefore he wanted her. The beauty itself was even more complicated because it was not perfection—Sylvie would never leave a flawless corpse—but depended upon an expression of the lips and a look about the eyes and a way of moving.
Paul understood his long attraction to her, but had never fully accounted for the moments when he reached the other extreme and felt rage. This gave his perceptions of her a tentative quality that made him uncomfortable. He watched the road, looking to the left and then the right, then pulled out of the lot.
“There it is,” she said. The beige Lincoln Town Car popped into Paul’s rearview mirror. He lifted his foot from the gas pedal and let the car slow down so it would stay on the straight section long enough for him to see the Lincoln turn into the Cheapcars lot. “Hurry up! You’ve got to make it all the way around the loop past the terminals and come by again in time to see.”
“I will,” he said. “Calm down.” He sped up again and went around the corner out of sight of the rental lots, and toward the airport. He went past the terminals, maneuvering patiently among the shuttle buses, cars, and taxi vans. He kept to the left so he could take the rental-car loop again. When he came to it he took it and went slowly along the road until he could see the Cheapcars lot, and then pulled the car over to wait. He watched as a maintenance man came out and took charge of the beige Town Car, reaching toward the steering wheel shaft to turn on the engine and check the gauges.
Suddenly there was a movement in Paul’s peripheral vision. The unexpectedness of it made him jump. He looked up and saw the front of a police car growing to fill the rearview mirror.
Paul noted that the cop had not turned on his blue-and-red flashers. The cop got out of the driver’s seat instantly, which meant that he was not calling in the stop yet. He appeared at the side of the car beside Paul’s window. He was less than thirty years old, with a chubby boyish face that didn’t seem to go with his trim body, and black hair that seemed to start too low on his forehead, like a knit cap. Paul noticed the squared-off surface of his torso that revealed the body armor under his uniform.
Paul looked ahead through the windshield. This was just the kind of thing that Paul could not permit to happen. He had done everything right, followed patiently when a less-clever person would have mad
e some premature, impulsive attempt that would have alarmed Jack Till. Now, when Till had finally come together with Wendy Harper, this fat-faced cherub of a cop was here to ruin everything. Paul read the metal tag on his right pocket: Rodeno.
The cop leaned on the car so he could look in at them. “Afternoon, folks.”
“Afternoon,” Paul said.
In the periphery of his vision, he saw Sylvie give the cop too much of a smile, and heard her voice become false and musical. “Hello, officer.”
Paul stifled his irritation. She was trying to get control of the situation in the way that had always worked for her, and that was probably good. Even a cop would respond to a friendly smile from a pretty woman, even if she was fifteen years too old for him. Paul could see that the tension in the cop’s arms relaxed a bit as he leaned to speak to them.
“Are you having car trouble?”
“No,” Paul said. “Not exactly. I just rented this car and drove it out of the lot, but I needed to pull over, adjust the seats, and get to know the controls a little better before I get on the freeway with it.”
“That’s the kind of thing you should do in the lot before you drive out. What agency did you rent it from?”
“Miracle Rent-a-Car.” Paul looked ahead again. He could see Jack Till and Wendy Harper coming out of the rental office. Time was passing, the moment of opportunity getting wasted.
“May I see your rental papers, please?”
Paul had not yet put them away, so he was able to snatch them out of the well in the door. The name he had used to rent them was William Porter. He supposed the name was going to be worthless after this. “Sure.” He jabbed them out the window of the car, practically in Officer Rodeno’s face. “Here they are.”
Officer Rodeno had been startled by the abrupt movement. He accepted the papers and straightened. “The problem is, this isn’t a place where you can park and make adjustments. It’s a no-stopping zone. You should have gone around the loop and back into the Miracle lot, or off the loop onto a street where you could stop legally. Then you could make whatever adjustments were necessary to drive safely.”
