by Thomas Perry
Paul said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that I couldn’t stop here. I guess I missed the sign.” He was intensely aware of everything going on around him. He felt the car move microscopically as Sylvie’s back muscles contracted to make a slight shift in position. He knew she was looking ahead at Till and Wendy Harper, and he moved his eyes to see what had affected her.
There was an airport-shuttle bus at the Cheapcars lot with its doors open. A couple of customers who must have turned in cars climbed aboard. Paul strained to see whether Jack Till and Wendy Harper were among them. This was agony. Were they going to the terminal?
“May I see your license, please?”
Paul turned toward Officer Rodeno. “Look, I haven’t blocked any traffic or done any harm. I was just getting ready to pull out when you arrived.”
“May I see your license, Mr. Porter?” Rodeno repeated.
Paul sighed and took out his wallet. He had needed to use the Porter license to rent the car, so it was still in the pocket under the clear plastic. He slipped it out and handed it to the cop.
The license was good. He had bought a doctored Arkansas license two years ago in the name of William Porter and used it as identification to apply for a California license. As he thought about the trouble he’d gone through, his irritation grew. Officer Rodeno studied the license and then Paul’s face. After a moment he turned away from Paul and stepped toward his car. The cop was going to run a check on William Porter.
Paul felt Sylvie move again, and then felt her put her gun in his hand. He could feel that the silencer had been screwed onto the barrel. He stuck it under his arm beneath his sport coat, got out of the car, and followed Officer Rodeno to his police car. Officer Rodeno sat behind the wheel with the door open, looking down at the license. He reached for the radio microphone. Paul moved to the open door of the police car, used his body to block any observer’s view, and in a single, efficient movement, pulled out the gun and fired. There was a spitting sound, Rodeno’s head jerked to the side an inch or two, then bowed, and his body followed it to rest on the wheel. Paul leaned in the open door and toppled Rodeno’s body onto the passenger seat, got in and closed the door, then used his legs to push the body the rest of the way to the passenger side. The engine was already idling, and he threw it into gear and drove.
Paul adjusted the rearview mirror, and he saw Sylvie pull out onto the road to follow him in the rental car. He looked around for witnesses, but to his relief, he could detect nobody looking in his direction. Nobody seemed to have seen how the traffic stop had ended, or at least interpreted it as a killing. Shooting the cop and driving off had been quiet and taken no more than three or four seconds.
Instead of taking the loop to go through the airport again, Paul took the entrance to the freeway, then pulled off at the first exit and parked the police car on the lot of a big Sears store. He took a moment to retrieve his William Porter license and rental papers from the floor, and wipe off the door handles and steering wheel. By then Sylvie was pulling to a stop beside him. He got into the passenger seat and sat in silence for a few seconds while Sylvie drove off.
“What’s the matter?” Sylvie asked.
“I still can’t believe that happened. Did you see if they went to the airport?”
“They didn’t get into the shuttle bus.”
“Where are they, then?”
“They rented another car, just like we did. It’s a Lincoln Town Car, like the other one, only charcoal gray. I have the license number, and they were just getting into it when we left. We can catch them in a few minutes.”
23
JACK TILL THREADED the gray Town Car in and out of the heavy traffic in the airport loop, then took the entrance to the 101 South, glancing in his mirrors with nervous alertness.
“What’s wrong?” Ann Donnelly asked. “Did you see something?”
“Nothing that stands out. This is just the time when we can get out clean. If there are no problems now, then there won’t be later.” He looked into the mirror again as he merged with the traffic on the freeway. “Back there near the car rental there was a cop who had pulled someone over to write a ticket. Maybe we were lucky and he scared off anybody who might have followed us.”
“I hope there was nobody to scare.”
“I’ve got to think that if these people were in San Rafael this afternoon, then they’ll be somewhere near here now.”
She frowned. “If we lose them, they’ll catch up in Los Angeles, won’t they—or fly there and wait? That’s the part that keeps scaring me. I’m coming back to them, and they know it.”
“I wish I could say you’re wrong. I don’t think you are. The trick is to get them to reveal themselves.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“We make finding us as hard as we can, and see if we can spot someone searching. We pull off the road now and then and see who follows.”
“That’s all we can do?”
“Unless you can give me something to go on.”
She straightened. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“We talked years ago about who was trying to kill you. At the time, you said you didn’t know.”
“Are you saying you didn’t believe me?”
“I believed the bruises and the limp.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“That was a long time ago. There might have been details that you didn’t notice at the time that have surfaced in your memory—coincidences or unusual events. Maybe people said things that you heard, but didn’t recall right away.”
“I made a conscious decision after I left not to spend my life thinking about that. I thought about the way I wanted things to be in the future and what steps I should take to make it happen.”
“Then make a conscious decision to remember now. Think.”
“About what?”
“Try to bring back what you saw and heard at the time, or impressions you had. Have you remembered anything about the attack in the years since then?”
“No. I told the police everything, twice, and then I told you. A man I didn’t know was waiting for me when I came home from the restaurant and hit me with a bat. When other cars came, he ran.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”
“I don’t know. I think I would have right after it happened. When the cars came their headlights lit him up for a second. But I was half-conscious with a concussion, and six years is a long time. He could have changed a lot.” She made a fist, and pounded it on her knee. “Why ask me about all this now? Can’t you see how scared I am?”
“Of course you’re scared.” He searched the mirrors behind him again. “What I find helps most is to try to do something about it.”
“What? Try to remember things that happened in the dark years ago?”
“Not this minute.” He had planted the idea, so it was time to back off and let her think about it. “For now, try to see if you can detect anybody following us. In an hour or two it will begin to get dark. If anyone is following us, I’d like to spot them before the headlights start coming on. It’s a good idea to take roll so you can keep track: white pickup, green Bug, gray Volvo, blue Ford, red Cherokee.”
She looked out the rear window. “I see them.”
“Sometimes when people follow you, they’ll do it in teams. For a while there will be a black SUV behind you. Then it disappears, so you don’t think about it again. But then up comes a green car. You’ve never seen him before. He’s been back too far, not even keeping in sight of you. He hasn’t had to because the guy in the black car has been keeping in touch with him on the phone. Now it’s his turn to follow you. Maybe they’ll switch again in a half hour. Tag team. That’s the way we did it when I was a cop.”
“You’re just trying to distract me, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not. You’re still trying not to get caught, aren’t you? If we stay alert, we’ll have an advantage.”
“All right. At least I�
�ll be doing something.” She half-turned in her seat and leaned on the door while she watched.
Till glanced at her and then away, his mind rapidly filling with unrelated observations. In six years, she had become more attractive. Her eyes had acquired a stronger, wiser look, and her features looked finer and more defined. He supposed maybe when he had left her at the Santa Barbara airport, her face had still retained some of the swelling from the beating.
Something else had changed since he had seen her last, but maybe the change was in him. Years ago she had been a pretty young woman who had been hurt and terrified and needed his help. He had been able to tell himself that she was dazed and disoriented, and that she probably hadn’t seen anything anyway.
This time, Till could see that she was lying to him. She knew something that she had not been willing to tell anyone six years ago, and was not willing to tell him now.
24
IT WAS GETTING DARK, and the cars all had their headlights on.
Sylvie leaned close to Paul and touched his cheek as he drove, then rested her hand on his thigh. “Are you okay?”
“Huh? Sure. Why?”
“When you kill somebody like that, there always seems to be a big rush of adrenaline—heart pounding, sweating, really happy you’re alive—but then afterward there’s always a kind of bad feeling, a letdown. I always get tired.”
“I’m not tired,” he said. “I’m just trying to do five things at once. We need to hear the radio, so we know if the police start looking for this car. I need to keep Till’s car in sight, but stay back far enough so he doesn’t notice us. I need to pay attention to the road ahead so we don’t hit somebody, and the road behind in case the police do come after us.”
She moved her hand up his thigh only an inch or two. “That’s only four. Want something else to think about, so you’re not short?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She withdrew to her side of the car.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not annoyed. I’m trying to—” He stopped. “Look. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I do have a delayed reaction to the cop. I had no intention of doing that, no plan about doing it. He just came out of nowhere with his helpful Boy Scout face and gave me the choice of letting him run my license or killing him. Maybe he put me in a bad mood, but I don’t want to take it out on you. I’m just preoccupied, that’s all.”
She shrugged. “I was just trying to cheer you up. Let me find a better radio station.”
“Thanks. It’s almost the half-hour, and I want to be sure we pick it up if they’ve identified this car.”
Sylvie held the button down and let the radio find the next strong signal, then listened to a commercial about somebody’s “giant shopping mall of cars,” and then found a news report. There was no mention of their rental car, not even any mention that a cop had been killed. Here it was, hours later, and nobody seemed to have looked inside the parked cop car yet.
Sylvie was impressed with Paul’s timing. Killing the cop a minute earlier would have been foolish: There was still a chance he would go away. Killing him ten seconds later would have been too late.
She started to smile, but something stopped her lips, choked off the affection. Paul wasn’t behaving right with her. Earlier in the day she had provoked him a bit to explore the question, but she had not yet satisfied herself. She had accepted his explanation of his coldness and distance, but her acceptance had been only tentative. It was only talk, but here was that feeling again. Were his conciliatory words more real than her feeling? She loved him, had given herself to him all these years, and he was rejecting her, shutting her out.
She felt pained. She was over forty now. The first time she had noticed a change in the way she looked—a decline—had been when she was only twenty-five. Until then every change had been an improvement. But at twenty-five, there had been a slight change in the texture of her skin. There had not been any wrinkles yet, just a loss in the elasticity of the skin beside her eyes and on her forehead.
That had been a mild, tiny warning that things were happening. She had been married to Darren then, and she had not mentioned it to him. She had needed to think about it and see whether creams and lotions would restore her skin. She’d thought maybe it was because she was working out in the gym so much and taking hot showers afterward. The air in Los Angeles was so dry, and maybe her soap was too harsh.
Then she had blamed Cherie Will. Just before Sylvie had quit, there had been a series of movies that Cherie had decided to shoot outdoors. One, Sylvie remembered, had been about a picnic, and the other had been a thing about cowboys and cowgirls. Sylvie had gotten terribly sunburned, and sunburn was the worst thing for skin. Cherie had told everybody she was shooting so many movies way out on a ranch because the actors looked so much better in natural sunlight. The truth was that she had bought the ranch and was charging her own production company location-rental fees to help pay for it. All she had needed to dress the set was a checkered tablecloth for the picnic and two bales of hay for the cowboy stuff. Cherie had told her that her makeup would protect her face from sunburn.
That had been when Sylvie was twenty or twenty-one, and now she was over forty. How could she have gotten so old? She had always looked younger and prettier than her age, but now time was catching up to her. The dancing and the exercise had fought off the years for a long time, but now she was beginning to see a bit of extra fat on her bottom in spite of the work. Maybe even her tummy was beginning to soften.
She watched Paul without moving her head. He was resenting her. The resentment always was officially for being annoying or making a mistake or something, but it was really for letting herself go. Being a less-desirable woman was to be less respected, less wanted. For at least the past couple of weeks, he had been making the situation increasingly clear to her.
Sylvie could feel a suspicion slowly revealing itself to her. As she had been getting older and less desirable, Paul was becoming older and more desirable. He was still trim and hard. The extra years had given his skin a tan, sculpted look. The bulging muscles of his arms and legs had been giving way to a sinewy leanness. His thick dark hair had grayed a bit at the temples. He looked distinguished and seasoned. On her a gray hair was a blemish, a revelation that her youthful look was an imposture.
Paul had to be cheating on her. She tried to think of who and when. It could easily be that little dance instructor Mindy, the puppy dog. She had been flirting with Paul for at least a year, and lately she’d been overtly trying to get between them by using Paul as her partner, almost a second instructor. The woman could be any woman, or lots of women. There was no way to catch Paul after the fact, or know whether he had even started cheating yet. He was emotionally separating himself from her, and that was the big step.
How could Paul be so disloyal? She knew the answer to that, too. He would consider himself justified—all the work was done for him in advance. It wouldn’t matter that Sylvie had been completely faithful to him for fifteen years, and shared his difficulties and dangers—literally killed for him. He would believe that because of those two years in her life when she was very young and naïve, she had no rights. The fact that she had stopped doing films four years before she met him and already been a respectable married woman would be irrelevant. She simply had no right to be jealous.
Arguing with Paul’s justification was a meaningless activity. Justification was meaningless. What he wanted to do, he would do. Was doing. She was aging, and that was enough. When Paul had spent enough time searching and holding auditions for the next woman to assume her role, he would replace her.
Sylvie looked at Paul again, driving along the dark highway. He had such a strong, appealing profile. The slight upturn of his lips and the arched eyebrows gave him a special expression, the look of a perfect partner. The expression had always struck her as the look of a flamenco dancer, dangerous in a sexual way—jealous, aggressive, maybe just on the edge of violence.
Her breath c
aught in her chest and stayed there for a moment. She forced it out slowly through pursed lips and waited a moment before she took another, just as slowly, to calm herself. She looked at him again. Paul wasn’t some fat, soft-minded little business executive. Was he likely to file for divorce and then wait quietly for six months while Sylvie’s lawyers stripped the meat off his bones?
If Paul had made the decision that he was finished with Sylvie, then she would have a problem. “I love you, Paul.”
“What?
“I was just thinking about what a difference meeting you has made in my life. If it were all over now, I wouldn’t regret it.”
She studied him. He seemed genuinely puzzled, but not quite daring to be pleased, as though he were waiting anxiously for something unpleasant to follow. “What brought this on?”
“I don’t know. Just being here with you, I guess. I was just thinking that things in life—even ones that seem permanent—are temporary.”
He glanced at her with a look of amusement. “Are you trying to kiss me off?”
She laughed once, with no conviction. “Of course not. I just said I loved you. But since you brought up kissing people off, I guess it applies to that, too. If you did decide to leave me someday, I love you too much to make it hard for you.” She had been listening to her own voice to hear whether the lie sounded convincing, but she wasn’t sure how well she had done. He seemed merely confused.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. All of those women who get dumped think they have to get revenge in court and leave their husbands in poverty. I’ve heard them at lunch in restaurants laughing about how much they took, like harpies or something. They gossip about the ex-husband and the new woman, and try to sabotage them any way they can.” Her eyes stayed on him as she talked. “You know. They turn him in to the IRS for hiding income or something like that.” With some effort, she softened. “I just want you to know I’m not like them. If you want somebody younger and don’t find me attractive anymore, I won’t punish you for that.”
