by Thomas Perry
“Densmore knows us. He knows we won’t tell anybody anything. We killed that black girl, and the cop south of San Francisco, and the couple in the hotel. If we spilled everything, he might get ten years, but we’d get the death penalty. That’s his insurance.”
“His point of view would be, we’ve fucked up the job so far, and therefore we ought to clean up the mess.”
“Can we at least try to talk to Densmore?”
“Let’s think about it before we do that. What if he insists that we finish it? Is it possible we’ll alienate him and still have to finish the job? And don’t forget: He’s just a lawyer, a go-between. We don’t know anything about the actual client. Do we want to give the client the idea that we’re not reliable, and that maybe he has to worry about us?”
“Since we don’t know him, we can’t do him any harm,” she said. “And since he doesn’t know us, he can’t do us any harm. What’s to stop him from calling somebody else?”
“It would have to be somebody who could drop whatever he was doing, get here, and go right to work. He’d never have seen Wendy Harper or Jack Till. And it has to be done now—in the next day or two—while she’s in the open. All she’s got to do is see the DA, and she’s gone again forever.”
“Okay,” Sylvie said. “We’re not doing this because we care if she lives or dies, right? We’re in it for money. They hired us because we’re professionals.”
“Sure.”
“So let’s just say politely that we believe we’ve been spotted, and we’ve killed a few bystanders, so it’s our professional opinion that the client would be better off having somebody else finish up. If Densmore says we’re letting him down, we say we’re sorry, but we know best. If his client gets all pissed off, we say we’re sorry about that, too. But Densmore can’t do anything to us. And if the client could, he wouldn’t need to hire us in the first place. As soon as we hang up, we pack our bags and go to Spain. We can study flamenco. We’ve been talking about it for years. It’s the height of tourist season now, but in a few weeks the off-season begins, and September is hot as hell here. We can come back after somebody else gets Wendy Harper.”
“Spain sounds pretty appealing to me right now,” Paul said. “From the moment when we heard Jack Till was getting ready to leave L.A., the whole thing got to be a pain in the ass. I’m sick of it.”
“That’s exactly how I feel. I’ve been afraid to tell you how much I hated it. I’m so glad you do, too.”
“We agree on that, but it still doesn’t get us out of the job. We gave our word to a man we’ve been working with for eight years. Changing our minds and pulling out isn’t a small thing.”
“If the relationship is worth anything at all, then we should be able to tell him honestly what’s been going on and level with him about how we feel about it. He’s a smart man. He may see the sense of it and tell us it’s time to quit.”
“That’s true,” Paul said.
“Should I get Densmore on the phone?”
“Hold it. We’re still just thinking.”
“Oh.” She turned away and put the pan into the dishwasher. She had fooled herself, let herself believe he was taking her ideas seriously, but of course he wasn’t. He didn’t think of her as an equal. After all these years, she was still just somebody to fuck. If he had to keep her in a good mood by pretending to consider her stupid suggestions, he would do it.
He said, “I guess you’re right. I hate to give up on anything, but this just isn’t working out. Densmore likes to be consulted. Let’s call him and see what he thinks.”
She turned and studied his face. He was looking down into his coffee cup. Then he picked it up and stared at the rim from the side. He saw lipstick and realized he had picked her cup up by mistake, then stood to retrieve his from the counter. His posture indicated that he was completely unaware that she had been getting upset. He looked as guileless as a big animal. She said, “Do you want to do the talking?”
“I don’t care who does it. It’s up to you.”
“I’ll dial, you talk.”
“Done.”
She called Densmore’s law office. When the receptionist answered, she said, “Hello. I have Paul Turner on the line for Mr. Densmore.” She had such a professional assistant voice that she made the receptionist nervous. Paul smiled at her as she handed him the telephone.
Paul waited for a second, then said, “Michael, it’s Paul. Is this your secure line? Good. No, it’s not finished. Far from it, I’m afraid. What? No, the reason I called.” He paused. “You’re sure I can talk? All right. We’ve had some setbacks. In order to find out where she was living, we had to kill a friend of hers in Henderson, Nevada. After we found her and had her under surveillance, we got pulled over by a cop near the San Francisco airport. I was driving a car rented with a fake ID, so I had to shoot him, too.”
Paul paused to listen for a few seconds. “Then a couple of hours south of there, we were just getting ready to make our move. We had her and Jack Till in a restaurant, and Sylvie was going into the ladies’ room to pop her, when another cop spotted our car outside. I saw him radioing for help. We had to slip into the hotel next door, con our way into a guest room, and kill a couple for their car.” He stopped to listen for a few seconds, then winked at Sylvie. “No. That still didn’t stop us. We followed Till and Wendy and tried to pull their car over just north of King City. Know where that is? I pulled up behind and Sylvie emptied a whole clip into their car—blew the rear window out, and Till drove the car off the road into a field.”
Paul put his arm around Sylvie and held the telephone so she could hear Densmore saying, “Didn’t you follow him?”
“About a half a mile through weeds in the dark. Then he made it over a hill and into some woody country where he could see us coming. He was setting up for an ambush. The guy’s a retired cop. You can’t assume a man like that can’t defend himself.”
Paul stood and listened, his face beginning to have a flat, tired look. Then he began to pace. “We’re pretty sure we’ve used up our value, Michael. Somebody got our license number when we shot the cop. People saw us rent that car. There may even be security tape. Till had plenty of chances to see us when we made our move. He knows who to look for. We tried our damnedest, but from here on, anything we could do would be no surprise. We’ll charge you zero for the effort and call it even.” He stopped talking and pacing, and listened.
Paul looked at Sylvie and she knew. The look was only a glance, a flick of the eye to her face and away from it, but it told her. It was the sort of look someone gave involuntarily when he wished the other person wasn’t close enough to hear the phone conversation.
She knew that Michael Densmore was saying something that Paul was not prepared to refute. Paul had charged all the way to the top of the hill, but he was being slowly pushed back down to where he had started. She could see that the heavy weight of Densmore’s argument was growing. Paul was straining to resist. “More money isn’t the issue, Michael. It’s that the risk for us has become worse than the risk for someone—anyone—who hasn’t been seen.” He had to listen for a moment. “The price doesn’t matter. We want out. Today. There’s not much point in hanging around if we can’t get close enough to do the job.”
He listened again, and it seemed to Sylvie that he was being flattered. “Thanks, Michael. It’s good to hear that. But—” Densmore interrupted him, and he waited, then tried to cut off the pitch. “We’ve liked working with you, too.” He was talking more loudly, trying to talk over Densmore, but Sylvie knew it would not be possible. “I’ve just told you that the risk—to us, to everyone in this—is huge now, and growing the longer we’re involved.”
Paul paced back and forth for a long time, and Sylvie saw the glance again. She decided not to watch his humiliation. She turned and walked from the kitchen through the living room to the other wing of the house. There was no reason to stay. She knew.
From the bed she could barely hear Paul’s voice coming from t
he kitchen, just a faint male droning without any of the words. After the call was over, she heard his heavy feet as he wandered through the house searching for her. She knew when he had found her because the footsteps stopped for a few seconds in the hallway outside the bedroom, then receded again. She got off the bed and walked to the guest bedroom.
He was taking two suitcases down from the closet shelf. She could see that the gun safe was open again, and he had returned the two Remington Model 7s to the rack.
She said, “Are we going somewhere?”
“Yes.”
She considered acting as though she thought he was going to take her to Spain, so he would have to admit his defeat. But she kept herself from being cruel. “He wouldn’t let us out of it, huh?”
“No. He used the stick and carrot on us.”
“What’s the carrot?”
“Our price for getting Wendy Harper just doubled.”
“What’s the stick?”
“Well, the client knows our names.”
“So Densmore lied. He said he never told any client who we are.”
“He said this was a special case. There was no way to avoid it, and the client is somebody who would never be foolish enough to tell the police or anyone else about us.”
“That’s not the stick. What’s the stick?”
“The client has power. He’s had people looking all over the place for six years, nonstop. Now that we’ve used the bloody shirt and the bat to draw her out, he has no way of finding her again. We’ve used up his only chance. Densmore thinks that if we fail—let alone quit—the client will kill him and us, too.”
28
IT WAS ALREADY afternoon when Jack Till awoke. He kept his eyes closed and oriented himself. He knew he was in a hotel bed in Morro Bay. He had driven from King City into Morro Bay in the night and found a hotel on a low ridge above the harbor. The hotel was big enough to have a night clerk on duty who was capable of finding a vacancy for a pair of tired travelers, particularly a pair who were willing to pay summer rates for an expensive set of adjoining rooms for a minimum of three days. He had gone back outside to park their new rental car among the others in the back of the hotel where it would not be seen from the street. This time he had chosen a blue Buick Park Avenue that didn’t resemble the cars he had driven before. Moving the car gave him a chance to circle the lot and sweep the surrounding area with his headlights to search for parked vehicles that still had people in them.
When he had returned to his room, he had found Ann Donnelly placing a chair to hold the door between the two rooms open. She said, “Whatever else happens, I don’t want to die and have you not know about it.”
“We’ll be okay. We’re pretty far from where they lost us.” Till had locked and chained his door and hers, then moved a chair in front of each to give him an extra second or two if the door opened. She sat on her bed and watched his preparations without revealing anything, but she did not seem especially comforted. He put his pistol in its holster on the bedside table. Then he turned off the light in his room before he undressed and got under the covers. For a time, he could hear Ann Donnelly moving around and see the flickering bluish glow of her television set on the white cottage cheese ceiling of her room.
Till closed his eyes and let the events of the day repeat themselves in his mind, from the time when he had reached Ann Donnelly’s house in San Rafael before noon, through the sight of the car’s headlights growing steadily in his rearview mirror and then the shots. He saw again the car veering to the left to try to pull up beside him, and remembered trying to block its movement and stay ahead. His body relived the feeling of speed, the sensation of rising in his seat whenever the car went over the top of a hill and started down, and his ears felt the shock of the bullet pounding through the rear window and spraying broken glass everywhere.
He had moved the car from side to side each time the car behind him moved, trying to anticipate the other driver’s intentions and block them without losing control. Then the shots had come again, some of them making an amplified bang because what he was hearing was the bullet punching through the steel of his car’s trunk.
Everything had happened so quickly that he had acted without deciding, not even contemplating the events until now, hours later, as he lay in bed. He remembered looking ahead at the windshield and seeing the bullet hole in it, the aura of powdered glass around it just above eye level and to the left, and knowing that the bullet must have missed his head by two inches. That sight had goaded him to act, and he had let the car fly off into the empty field because the road wasn’t working and the shots were too close.
“I can’t sleep in there.”
He opened his eyes and dimly saw the shape of her standing beside his bed. She was wearing a pair of pajama pants and an oversized T-shirt. “Why not?”
“Because today I lost my best friend, abandoned my children, my husband, my home, my name, and then got shot at and driven into a ravine.”
Till slid to the far side of the king bed and pulled back the covers to admit her. “Reason enough.”
She climbed in beside him and rested her head on the pillow. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to sleeping alone anymore.”
“You were married for three years?”
“Almost four.” She was quiet for a few seconds, and Till thought she was falling asleep, but she said, “That’s not a long time. It’s just long enough so you get used to the illusion that things will always be the same.”
“Never sleeping alone?”
“You don’t think you’ll ever have to lie in bed in a dark room at night alone. You will, of course. People go on business trips and things. Then you find yourself—by accident or on purpose—with your face in the other person’s pillow, smelling his smell.”
“So you loved him. When you were talking before it sounded as though you didn’t.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to say what relationships are really about, other than not wanting to be alone. Mad, romantic love isn’t necessary. All you have to feel is that you’d rather be with that person and all his faults than be alone. And you don’t have to feel even that much all day, every day. You only have to feel it once each time you’re ready to file for divorce and put it off. If that’s what love is, then I loved Dennis.”
“That sounds pretty grim.”
“It’s not meant to be. I was in disguise, living as a person I wasn’t, remember? I knew the person I invented would be safer married than single. If your whole life is a lie, why draw the line at one more that will give you an extra layer of security? When a woman marries, not only does she get a bigger, stronger companion who will try to protect her, but she takes on his name, his whole history, whatever credit and credibility he’s built up, friends of his who will swear she’s legitimate. And I didn’t lie to Dennis. Everyone else in San Rafael, but not him.”
“Why did you think that he could protect you from the guys who were after you? Did you tell him what to look for, or describe them to him?”
“My disguise was being Mrs. Dennis Donnelly. It’s a lot easier to stay in character if you can find things to like. I knew Dennis loved me, and for a woman, that’s a bigger part of the equation than men know. I like him. I may regret that I married him, but I’m grateful to him. Now that’s over.”
Till had been asking for information about the killers, not her husband. Her answer surprised him. “You’re sure?”
“God, if I wasn’t before today, I would be now.”
“Because they found you?””
She turned toward him in bed. He could see her big eyes reflecting the faint light of the clock. “If I had been with Dennis when they found me, I would be dead tonight. I’m not, because I was with you. And he’s not dead, and the kids have their father.”
He glanced at the red numbers glowing on the nightstand. “It’s four-fifteen A.M. on your first night since you found out you were in trouble. For a while tonight, we were hanging by spit. Maybe you ought to put off t
hinking about the big things until you recover from that.”
“Maybe.”
“Good night.” He turned to face away from her, and closed his eyes. After a few seconds he felt her move closer to him, so she was touching his back.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for letting me sleep with you.”
“You’re welcome.” He lay in the bed staring into the darkness. Her voice had come from very close, almost the back of his neck, and he could feel that she was curled against him. Her touch, which she probably didn’t think he could even feel, was the biggest phenomenon in the room. He squeezed his eyes closed, forcing out thoughts of her, and let his tired, overactive mind rest, as it often did at night, on the thought of Holly sleeping peacefully in her room at Garden House.
It was no longer morning when his eyes opened. He sat up in the bed, and he realized he must have been hearing daytime sounds for hours, because when he heard someone walking along the hallway outside the door of his room, the sound was a continuation, not a beginning. He looked at the clock on the nightstand. The numbers said 2:20.
Ann was still asleep. He got out of the bed quietly, took his cell phone off the nightstand, and walked into her room, closed the door, and pushed the curtain open a few inches. The afternoon was bright, and people were walking below the hotel along the street to the harbor. Beyond the docks, restaurants, and shops, a few hundred yards out into the ocean, was the bulbous shape of Morro Rock, with tiny white birds circling above it and launching themselves from its peak to plummet a couple hundred feet toward the water. He wondered what it would be like to live here, where there was a single feature, a shape that dwarfed everything and seemed to be everywhere he looked. He supposed that people must become experts on the way it looked at different times of day and in different weather.
Till opened his cell phone and dialed. After a moment he heard, “Hello?”
