by Thomas Perry
“You thought I might be down here trying to frame her,” said Stillman.
“It had crossed my mind,” said Walker. “It’s the only way that a person like Ellen could get in trouble. I decided tonight that what you’ve been trying to do was figure out what really happened. So I’m telling you everything. I didn’t just meet Ellen in class and take her out to dinner once. I got to be very close to her, spent a couple of months watching her and listening to everything she said and turning it over and over in my mind. Then I spent a year afterward double-checking to figure out what went wrong. You’re investigating her? Well, I already did: she’s not somebody who commits insurance fraud.”
Stillman sighed. “Maybe. Do you at least agree with me that the next thing we ought to do is find her?”
“Yes,” said Walker. “But I don’t know how to do that.”
“I’ve got somebody working on it. After it gets dark, we’ll go to see him.”
9
Stillman stopped the car on a dark street in the flat outer reaches of the Santa Clarita Valley, just under the wall of jagged mountains that rose up implausibly to the north. To the left, across the street, was a high school athletic field with wooden bleachers behind an eight-foot chain-link fence, and beyond it a blacktop parking lot the size of a staging area for an armored division. Walker squinted into the darkness and made out that it had a metal post with a basketball backboard every hundred feet. Along the right side of the street was a row of nearly identical one-story houses that were darkened as though they had been hastily evacuated in advance of some natural disaster. “Nobody seems to be home,” said Walker.
“They’re in there all right,” said Stillman. “They just go to bed early.”
“The whole neighborhood?”
“Most of them have to drive all the way back into town in the morning to work. The rest have to get out of here by seven, before the kids arrive. The road gets clogged with buses and car pools and jaywalking teenagers.” Stillman got out of the car and waited for Walker, who lingered at the door and stared around him.
“What are you looking at?”
“Just trying to be sure you’re not cleverly trying to attract the attention of somebody who wants to break my skull, the way you did last night.”
“I explained about that,” said Stillman. “I just wanted to verify a theory I had. What point would there be in doing it again? Come on.”
Walker started up the sidewalk to the nearest house, but Stillman tapped his shoulder. “Not in there.”
“Then which one is it?”
“You can’t see it from here. It’s down the end of the street and across the basketball courts.”
“Why park so far away?”
“It’s a nice night. Southern California is a lot better at night than San Francisco, don’t you think? The air drifts in and stays put. It’s around all day getting heated up and lived in, so you’re kind of attached to it by nightfall. It’s a friendly arrangement.”
“Why do you always park in some screwy place and then walk?”
“I told you, it’s a nice night,” Stillman answered. Then he muttered, “Besides, it’s a habit.”
“Why does that not seem to be an adequate answer?” asked Walker.
“I didn’t say there wasn’t a reason for the habit,” Stillman admitted. “I told you we’re going to see a guy who works for me.”
“That was what you said.”
“Well,” said Stillman, “he doesn’t always work for me. That means that at other times he has to work for other people, right?”
“What other people?”
“Well, now, that is the sticky part, isn’t it?” Stillman said. “If he went around telling me things like that, he would probably tell other people who I was and what he did for me.”
Walker looked at Stillman uneasily, then turned his head to survey the deserted neighborhood. “You park far away from his house because his other customers are criminals. Is that it?”
“Not necessarily,” Stillman said. “I’m just respecting the great void in information I have. It’s always a good idea. Constantine Gochay is the guy we’re going to see. I use him for skip-tracing and similar dull, sedentary occupations that clash with my temperament. I save myself aggravation by hiring the best.”
“He’s the best?”
“Right. If I hire Gochay, I save money on the plane tickets I would have bought to places where somebody was six weeks ago. The problem with hiring the best is that everybody wants the best. A word like ‘everybody’ takes in a lot of people with a wide range of behavior patterns. It could, as you no doubt astutely surmise, include corporate headhunters trying to get background information on some job candidate, or the regular kind of headhunters. It could also include some of the strange, tropical flowerings of certain federal agencies that have been known to retain employees with names like ‘Black Luigi’ or ‘The Poison Dwarf.’ Do we want to meet them? No. Do we want them to see our car? No.”
They were across the dark blacktop forest of basketball hoops, walking up a road that seemed to have no sidewalks or street lamps. The houses on this road were new, most of them set back on sloping lawns and obscured by high fences and thick hedges. Stillman grasped Walker’s arm and pulled him through a gate set into a vine-covered wall. Walker’s feet detected a stone walkway up the front lawn. The house looked as dark as the others, but Stillman walked to the front door and rang the bell.
A moment later, a young woman with close-cropped red hair and very white skin appeared. She wore blue jeans and a gray sweater that hung to the middle of her thighs. Her glasses reflected the yellow bug light above the porch, so she seemed to Walker to be staring at him with the wide, disinterested eyes of a cat. “Go on in,” she ordered. “He’s expecting you.” Her accent sounded foreign to Walker, but it was so faint that he could not identify it beyond the conjecture that the continent must be Europe, and her appearance argued for the north.
She held the door, so they had to sidestep in to get around her, and Walker was too hesitant to do anything but mistime it. There was a second when she leaned forward to check the street while he was still moving in and they came together, Walker’s chest fleetingly brushed by her breasts. The woman’s sharp green eyes flashed dangerously up at him in deep annoyance and then clouded not in exoneration but mere dismissal. He mumbled, “Excuse me,” and followed Stillman’s back as it disappeared into an open doorway at the other end of the big room.
He passed a huge projection television screen that held an image of a woman’s face a foot and a half wide with enormous lips and teeth, smiling about something the stereo speakers said was “scandalizing Hollywood.” He heard the young woman behind him, flopping down on a couch.
He stepped to the doorway to find Stillman and another man already staring expectantly at him. The other man was taller and thinner than Stillman, with black curly hair in ringlets that made him look like the bust of a Roman emperor. He nodded at Walker, then turned away, his eyes focusing on Stillman for a half-second before they moved to his work table.
The room was like a disordered and confused repair shop, the floor tangled with bundles of power cords and surge suppressors, the tables around the walls crowded with computers and screens, most of them with no keyboards. Printed papers were on the floor and laid in overlapping stacks, with some tossed in the empty boxes the paper had come in.
“Ellen Snyder . . . Ellen Snyder,” Gochay muttered as he looked at various pieces of paper, then put them back. He turned and squinted, then stepped to a table, tossed several sheets off the top of a pile, and snatched up a few more that had been on the bottom. Then he led Stillman and Walker through another open doorway into a narrow, dim hall that seemed to encircle the work room. He opened a door on the other side of the hall and led them inside.
The room appeared to have been transported here from somewhere in the Middle East. There were two big couches on either side of a large, low, copper-clad table that sat on an Orien
tal rug. Strewn around the room on the floor were oversized pillows upholstered with materials that seemed too complex—snippets of tapestries, Oriental weavings in patterns that weren’t the same as the rug, and one that was iridescent like bird feathers. There were no windows in the room, and nothing hung on the walls. Walker looked more closely at the walls and saw that what had looked like panels of plasterboard covered with high-gloss paint was sheet metal: the room was insulated—against sound? Electronic signals leaking out? He noticed a bank of computer components that seemed to be connected in some tandem arrangement humming quietly, with red and green lights no bigger than beads glowing steadily, and decided that must be what was being protected.
Stillman said, “What have we got?”
Constantine Gochay scanned the sheets. “I should have had Serena add this up for you before. I don’t know what the hell this is going to cost.” He reached the bottom of the last page. “Ah. I see. It’s thirty-five hundred.”
Stillman’s brows knitted. It was the first time Walker had seen him react to any expense.
Gochay nodded in sympathy. “I know. It’s not high enough, is it? She isn’t that hard to trace.”
“No,” said Stillman. “Is she even using fake names?”
“That much she’s doing,” said Gochay. “But it’s not complicated. She switches to a new one in each town, but then she’ll buy something with a card in the old name while she’s there. Or she’ll use it to buy a plane ticket to the next place.” He put the sheets in Stillman’s hands, then stood over his shoulder and pointed at the entries in order. “See?” He paused, and looked at Stillman again. “Maybe you should be careful, eh?”
“I haven’t thought of a reason yet why this one would want us to find her,” said Stillman. “I have to hope she’s just not too good at this.”
Gochay shrugged. “Then you’ll get what you get.”
“Hard to argue with that.” Stillman reached into his coat pocket, but Gochay stopped him.
“No, no. Please pay the lady on your way out.”
Walker followed Stillman into the hallway, through the work room, into the long space that Walker now realized was a false living room, placed between the outer walls and the rooms where everything illegal went on, to fool eavesdropping devices. The girl was lying on the couch staring disgustedly at a commercial with a red pickup truck bouncing unpleasantly up a steep dirt road in some mountains.
She looked up at Walker. “Did you and Constantine bring each other to a mutually satisfying completion?” Her accent was gone.
Walker answered, “Actually, you’re more my type.” He silently cursed himself. Why had he said that? This wasn’t somebody joking with him at the office. These people were criminals. She could even be Gochay’s wife. He could feel the hairs on his arms standing up.
But she smiled back, her eyes half-lidded in a way that made her look even more like a cat. “I don’t think so. I like girls.”
Walker said uncomfortably, “We have something in common.”
She brought her knees up and bobbed to her feet. “Good. We’ll go out some night and cruise the bars for pussy. Money, please.”
Stillman held out a handful of hundred-dollar bills. She snatched the money, folded the bills without counting them, then lifted her long sweater so she could stuff them into the pocket of her jeans. “Oh, Max. You shouldn’t have.”
“Good night, Serena,” said Stillman. “Always nice to see you.”
She opened the door. “Likewise, Max. Never darken my door again.” Stillman stepped out into the night. Walker tried to follow, but the girl moved in front of him, stood on tiptoes, and kissed his cheek. Then she pushed him toward the door. “Now go out and play with Max. Shoo!”
Walker found himself on the darkened porch. He couldn’t see Stillman, but he heard the voice. “She likes you.”
“Serena?” He stepped uneasily off the porch, relieved when his foot touched a surface that felt like a stepping-stone.
“Yep, God help you.” Stillman walked toward the street. “And whatever her name is, it’s not Serena. That’s just a six-letter computer password.”
10
As they moved to the end of the dark street and came around the corner toward the high school, the silhouettes of three men materialized out of the shadows. Walker’s muscles tensed, his mind first identifying them as the nameless, dangerous people he had been half-expecting to meet at Gochay’s, then transforming them into the two men who had appeared the same way in the alley last night. But they weren’t even looking in his direction. He reminded himself that he was near a high school. They were probably just boys hanging around after practice, the way he had at that age. They stepped apart to the edges of the sidewalk, so that Walker and Stillman could only pass between them. Stillman’s pace never slowed. “Evening,” he said. Walker had no choice but to fall a step behind, since there wasn’t room to pass except single file.
There was no answer. As Stillman came abreast of the men, Walker could see their shapes were bigger, wider than high school boys. He detected a sudden movement in the dim light. The man nearest to Stillman brought his hand up, but Stillman was in motion too. His left hand batted the arm down, and held it while he spun the man around and brought his right elbow into the man’s throat. The man instinctively backed up as fast as he could, trying to avoid the crushing force on his throat, until his head bounced against the face of the man in the middle with a hollow bone-sound.
Walker ducked low and hurled himself into the thickest shadows, where the two men’s bodies seemed to overlap. He knew his shoulder hit someone’s midsection when he felt the belly give inward and he heard a huff that came from somewhere above. He stayed low and punched wildly, his fists hammering at the two men as quickly as his arms would move. He leaned into them and kept advancing with his knees high, digging hard like a football lineman to keep the two men off balance.
His head rang and stung with glancing blows, and he endured two heavy hammer-thumps on his back. He kept moving, but suddenly ducked his left shoulder and swung his right arm higher toward the faces. In the darkness, the sudden hook upward caught someone by surprise and landed between an eye and nose.
There was a cry, and the resistance gave way abruptly. As he lunged forward into empty air, one of them landed a kick on the right side of his stomach. The sudden impact made his lungs refuse to breathe, and that induced a panic in him. He felt like a man in deep water struggling toward the surface. His legs pumped harder to get clear, and as they did, he realized his foot was pushing off the torso of a man who was down.
He felt his foot tangle in the arm of the fallen man, and then he knew the pavement was coming. His arms instantly pushed out in front of him in a reflex to break the fall, but they skidded on concrete and the burning sensation shot up to his elbows. He rolled and kicked out, and heard a wet thwock sound that told him his heel had made contact with an open mouth. He scrambled to his feet and felt a strong pressure around his shoulders that pulled him forward. The voice of Stillman was close to his ear: “Run.”
He dug in and ran a few steps with Stillman before he heard the noise. It was not as loud as it should have been, just a pop like a firecracker. His lungs expanded with alarm and sucked in a breath over the hurt, overruling whatever cramp it was that had squeezed his chest for the past fifteen seconds. He was running harder now, dashing along the street with each leg straining to put another footstep between him and a gun. He was aware of the quick, rhythmic tapping of Stillman’s shoes on the pavement to his right. He heard pop-pop-pop and spun his head to look, but Stillman was still up, and Walker’s awkward movement had given Stillman a chance to get a step ahead.
According to some rule that was too basic to put into words, that meant Walker was free to run as fast as he pleased. He stretched his legs, pumped his arms, and dashed onto the broad asphalt surface. He veered away from Stillman to keep from bumping him, and the next shot hit the pavement between them, splashing bright sparks and bits
of powdered asphalt ahead like skipped stones.
Walker weaved in and out of the tall poles that held basketball backboards, then realized that would make his next move predictable. He let his next sidestep take him off at an angle away from the poles. He heard a bullet ring a pole and ricochet into the darkness, then determined to stop trying to be clever.
He heard Stillman’s voice. “Something’s wrong,” he rasped.
“No shit,” said Walker, annoyed.
“They’re not running after us.”
“Good!”
They reached the end of the pavement and Walker felt faster running across the grass, but the light from the street lamps seemed inordinately bright. He ran still harder, but in a minute he began to slow down to keep from jarring his feet on the sidewalk. He heard Stillman behind him, and then the heavy footsteps slowed too. “The car,” Stillman gasped, winded.
Walker stopped. It was true. He had been running away from the gun, not running toward anything. But they had reached the street where Stillman had parked the car, and he should have been able to see it, but he didn’t. He looked around to check his bearings. It should have been right across the street. He looked at Stillman and said uselessly, “It’s gone.”
Walker tried to sort out the possible implications. Stillman had parked in a place where cars got stolen, Stillman had left the keys in it, Stillman had made some other reckless mistake. His eyes settled on the end of the road. There was a major thoroughfare up there. Headlights were passing by—one, then two in opposite directions, then a big truck—as though nothing were happening down this quiet side street, and Walker wasn’t about to die. He started toward the lights.
“Wait!” said Stillman. “Don’t go that way.”
Walker looked back. “Why not?”
“I think that’s why the car’s gone. They want us on the street.” He crossed the road and started up the front lawn of the nearest house. When he reached the front steps he turned to beckon to Walker.
