Mortal Pursuit

by Brian Harper

  “Bad idea.” Cain kept his voice low.

  “I don’t see why.”

  Ordinarily she didn’t need things spelled out, but blood made her slow-witted. It was like catnip to her.

  He nodded toward the dining area. “I’d rather not get our friends any more worked up than they already are. We pop the rookie right in front of everybody, and things could get out of control.”

  “So what do we do with her” Tyler wiped blood off the handle of his gun. “Lock her up”

  “No.”

  Cain hated cops, all cops, even pretty little lady cops who’d barely gotten their feet wet in the field. Cops were bugs, meant to be squashed.

  “She disappears,” he said softly, his gaze fixed on Tyler. “Her and the other one and the car they came in. No muss, no fuss. You know that old Bobby Darin number Splish splash, Trish was takin’ a bath….” His hand made a downward sliding motion. “You and Blair make it happen.”

  Tyler’s heavy-lidded eyes shut briefly in acknowledgment. Blair giggled.

  “Take off their belts first,” Cain added. “No point wasting the gear. And give Lilith the radio so she can monitor the traffic.”

  He stepped into the foyer and crouched by the dead man named Wald. The mingled smells of blood and urine reached his nostrils through the mask. He barely noticed. The stink of death was as familiar to him as the fragrance of honeysuckle to a gardener.

  Rolling Wald on his side, Cain removed the cop’s handcuffs from a case on his belt, then found his key holder and detached it. The cuffs and the ring of keys went into Cain’s side pocket.

  He had an idea how to use those items. Not part of the plan, probably a mistake, but maybe … just maybe …

  From the closet he retrieved his duffel, stashed there before the cops arrived. He slung the bag over his shoulder and returned to the living room.

  Lilith was clipping the police radio to her belt. “Look at me,” she said gaily. “I’m Officer Robinson.” She leaned close to Trish, still out cold, and added, “You’re under arrest.”

  Tyler was amused. “What’s the charge”

  “Impersonating a cop,” Lilith said archly, and Tyler and Blair laughed.

  Even Cain had to smile. His Lilith was such a child.

  “Hey, boss,” Tyler said. “The Porsche is blocking the driveway. Got to move it if we’re gonna take the squad car out the rear gate.”

  Cain chuckled. “You’ve been itching to drive that hot little number since you saw it.” He turned toward the dining area. “Keys to the Porsche. Now.”

  Philip Danforth produced a key chain. Gage tossed it across the room, and Cain snagged it in a gloved fist.

  “No joyriding,” he warned Tyler as he passed along the keys. “We got work to do.”

  “You sound like my father.”

  I’m old enough, Cain thought, but didn’t say it.

  Tyler left. Blair busied himself with Wald. Cain and Lilith escorted Charles Kent away from the fireplace, to the dining area, and sat him down. He was as pale and listless as a lobotomy patient.

  Cain clapped his hands, and Ally jerked as if shot. “Valuables on the table.”

  Silently the Kents and Danforths removed their jewelry and wristwatches. Two Rolexes, two smaller gold watches, a gold wrist bangle, diamond-studded cuff links, a gold herringbone choker, a sapphire-tipped tie clasp, sterling silver earrings, a gold brooch with a red silk flower, even Judy’s silver crucifix.

  Outside, the Porsche’s motor turned over. Headlights rippled over the lawn.

  “Wallets, too.”

  They complied.

  “Wedding rings.”

  Judy started to say something, then changed her mind.

  “Now, on your feet.”

  Chairs were pushed back. The five prisoners stood, mute terror in their eyes. Cain thought of dogs waiting to be kicked.

  He nodded curtly to Gage and Lilith. Their guns swung up, and Barbara moaned.

  “March,” Gage said.

  For a moment there was no reaction. The word might have been a relic of some long-dead language, meaningless to modern ears.

  “Side hall,” Gage snapped. “That way.”

  Judy started moving obediently. Philip stood his ground. “Where are you taking us”

  Gage struck him across the face with his gun. Philip’s head snapped sideways, a gash torn in his lower lip.

  “Move!” Gage screamed.

  Screaming was bad, Cain knew. It showed a lack of discipline, an absence of control. The kid was raw, unseasoned. All wrong for this job.

  Philip offered no more resistance. He shambled after Judy, followed by Charles. Barbara and Ally, holding hands, were last to go.

  “Wait.” Cain grasped Ally’s shoulder. “The girl stays here.”

  A single violent tremor shook Ally hard.

  Barbara stared at Cain, her face drawn and blanched. “What for”

  “I don’t answer to you, Mrs. Kent.”

  “Don’t hurt her. Please, my God, she’s a child, don’t hurt her-“

  “She won’t be hurt. We need her help, that’s all.”

  “Help How can she help you What are you going to do”

  “Get moving.”

  “No, please”-she reached out blindly for her daughter-“she’s only fifteen, I’m begging you, take anything in the house, anything you want-“

  Gage seized Barbara by the hair and twisted her head sideways, wrenching a gasp out of her. “Shut up and march.”

  She was weeping as Gage shoved her toward the hall, where Lilith waited with the others.

  Charles watched, looking distantly astonished, as if he hadn’t known there was evil in the world.

  17

  Barbara took a last look at her daughter. Then the thug who’d struck Philip shoved her sharply from behind, and she stumbled into the side hallway.

  The intersection with the rear hall was only a few steps away. That hall led outside to the patio. She wondered if she and the others would be taken outside.

  A movie sequence unreeled in her mind. She and Charles and the Danforths lined up against the exterior wall. Spurt of silenced gunfire. Blood on the patio. Wind chimes tinkling over shattered bodies.

  Past fear she was conscious of anger, cold and unforgiving. Anger at the killers, to be sure, but a different and perhaps deeper anger also, directed at her husband.

  She had disliked Charles before, hated him now.

  Philip, at least, had made an effort. He’d signaled with the tapping of his spoon, defied the order to march. He had guts. He had, as her father would have said, balls.

  Where are your balls, Charles she thought acidly.

  Then the rear hall passed, and the two thugs, male and female, herded the prisoners deeper into the east wing.

  On her left Ally’s bedroom appeared, the room where her daughter had been held hostage when the police arrived. Through the doorway Barbara glimpsed a four-poster bed, a tidy bookcase, an Apple computer on a writing desk.

  She asked herself if Ally ever would sleep in that bed again, or read those books or do homework at that desk.

  Well, of course she would. The man had said he wouldn’t hurt her.

  And he hadn’t shot that patrolwoman.

  But the other officer, though-he was dead. Shot and killed in the foyer of her house, gunned down like an animal.

  The hall ended at the doorway to the master suite.

  How odd to enter her bedroom in the company of others, to see it through strangers’ eyes. She was absurdly glad she’d made the beds.

  Lace curtains billowed over the windows, the breeze carrying a perfume of roses from the front yard. The suite’s opposite wall was taken up by double bifold doors that opened on a walk-in closet.

  The female killer opened the doors, and her companion gestured with the gun. “In there.”

  “The closet” Judy sounded more bewildered than afraid.

  “Yes, damn it.”

  That one had a shor
t temper and sounded young. They all seemed young, Barbara thought, except for their leader. He was about her age, she guessed. Forty or forty-five.

  Men of that age sometimes developed a taste for young girls. Ally looked so lovely in that white dress.

  It showed a little cleavage. Was that man looking down her dress now, studying the lacy border of her bra, the hint of her white breasts

  If he forced her …

  “In,” the male thug snapped, shoving her again, and she realized she had hesitated at the threshold of the closet, wrapped in ugly thoughts.

  She joined Charles and the Danforths. The closet was as large as a freight elevator, not claustrophobically crowded even with the four of them inside. Several of Charles’s suits hung behind her, cellophane envelopes crinkling as they brushed her hair.

  The doors banged shut. Darkness.

  Bad to be here in the dark. Images came to her, images of Ally in her white dress-white, a virginal color; her daughter was still a virgin, she was quite sure of that-God, please let her be a virgin after tonight …

  Outside, the rattle of a chain, then the click of a padlock.

  Footsteps. Leaving.

  The killers had gone, but the ugly images remained, and the awful thoughts, and the cold terror …

  “He’s going to hurt her,” someone whispered, and with a small shock she realized it was herself. “The look in his eyes …”

  Charles, her husband, Ally’s father-he was the one who ought to have comforted her now. He didn’t move.

  It was Judy who took her hand in a warm, reassuring squeeze.

  Alone with Ally in the dining area, Cain felt the girl’s violent trembling, her helpless terror, and liked it.

  Movement in the foyer. Tyler reentered the house. He knelt by Trish Robinson, rolled her over, and unbuckled her gun belt.

  Ally watched the procedure with peculiar intensity. Cain tightened his grip on her shoulder.

  “In the den,” he said, not harshly.

  They crossed the living room together. As they reached the den, Tyler slung the cop, beltless but still cuffed, over his shoulder. Blood trickled out of her hairline, striping her cheek.

  He carried her through the front door. Ally watched him go.

  “He won’t hurt her,” she whispered. “Will he”

  “You don’t even know the lady. What’s it to you”

  “She seemed… nice.”

  Cain smiled under his mask. “Nice people get hurt sometimes.” He touched the girl’s delicate chin. “How about you You’re a nice person, aren’t you”

  Teardrops dewed her lashes. Her mouth worked without sound. Such a pretty mouth.

  “Aren’t you. Ally Aren’t you nice”

  Still smiling, he led her into the den.

  18

  Sergeant Ed Edinger hated coffee, all coffee, but he drank gallons of it to stay alert throughout the mid-P.M. watch. In a town with so little criminal activity that the very existence of a police department was optional, there wasn’t much to engage his attention even on a Saturday night.

  He supposed he ought to like it that way, but just once a high-speed chase or a hostage situation might be nice.

  Just once.

  The coffee nook outside his office could have used a decorator’s touch. Its sole ornament was a cork bulletin board plastered with outdated memoranda, many generated by himself. The square of short-nap carpet under the folding table was a mosaic of deeply ingrained coffee stains. Ed was responsible for a few of those, as well.

  He tilted the carafe and poured a steaming black arc into a souvenir mug from Palm Springs. His wife collected mugs.

  Sugar and cream followed in excessive amounts. Ed would add anything to coffee, in any quantity, to make the damn stuff tolerable.

  “Hey, Sarge.”

  Glancing up, he saw a tall, big-shouldered woman saunter up to the coffee machine, holding a Styrofoam cup. Louise Stagget, one of the two night-watch dispatchers, known universally as Lou.

  Ed nodded by way of greeting. “Radio keeping you busy” he asked, already knowing the answer. He monitored the chatter on and off throughout the night.

  “Hardly. Even slower than usual.” Lou drained the carafe into her cup. “Pete Wald sure seems to think so.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean”

  “Only that he went code seven at twenty twenty-eight.”

  Ed found Lou’s habit of using military time mildly irritating. He had to make the conversion to Pacific Daylight Time in his head, and he wasn’t that good with numbers.

  “Just a few minutes ago,” he said, doing the math. “So what”

  “Seemed a little peculiar. You know, he’d been on duty less than a half hour. Kind of early in his watch to be taking a break.”

  Ed sipped his coffee and winced, his unfailing reaction. “Like you say, it’s a slow night.”

  “He could at least cruise the shopping district or the motels by the freeway. Not everything comes in via nine-one-one.”

  “Well, maybe he’s just not feeling so good.” Ed was reluctant to criticize Pete Wald, a good friend for many years. “Bad chili or something.”

  “I don’t think it was him.”

  Lou let the words hang in space as she busied herself with a filter bag, preparing to brew a new pot.

  The phone in the lobby shrilled briefly, then was answered. Somewhere a police siren wailed, the sound making Ed frown in bemusement until he realized that it came from the detective squad room, where two of the guys were watching a TV cop show while filling out a burglary report.

  “I think,” Lou concluded after a sufficiently dramatic pause, “it was that girl.”

  Trish Robinson. No surprise.

  Ed had suspected that Lou disliked the rookie, maybe because Robinson was twenty years younger and forty pounds lighter, or maybe just for the pure pleasure of spite.

  “What about her” he asked, taking another sip and registering another grimace.

  “She’s a slacker.”

  “A what”

  “Slacker. One of these young people nowadays who thinks the world owes ‘em a living. You know.”

  “So she’s young. We were too.”

  “But we weren’t slackers. It was a different world back then. People still had a sense of responsibility. Way things are going, soon there’ll be nothing but slackers. These damn kids’ll ruin us. No values. No backbone.”

  “You’re being too hard on her,” Ed said, but he wondered. Robinson had been late for roll call. Not a good sign.

  “Maybe I am.” Lou shrugged. “Hey, when was the last time you got down to L.A. Three, four years”

  “More like five. City’s a hellhole. I keep my distance.” He finished his coffee in a noisy slurp. “Why”

  “You ever talk to Robinson about the houses there”

  “Houses”

  “Like in Bel-Air, Beverly Hills …”

  “Why the hell would I talk about houses”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Lou turned away without explanation.

  Baffled, Ed watched her walk down the hall to the communications room. She shook her head once, and he caught a muttered word.

  “Slacker.”

  Then she was gone, and Ed was left asking himself if the rookie was going to work out.

  19

  “Got her okay” Blair called from the driveway.

  Tyler lugged the lady cop down the flagstone path in the starlight. “Easy as taking out the garbage.”

  The trunk of the squad car was open, the interior light illuminating two helmet bags and some folded blankets. Blair tossed them out, and Tyler dumped the patrolwoman inside.

  She groaned but didn’t stir. The clasp securing her hair came loose, and a spill of blonde strands, shoulder length, fanned out in a lustrous spray.

  “She’s pretty, huh” Blair said.

  “Yeah.” Tyler shut the trunk and heard it lock. “Soon she’ll be pretty dead.”

  As he w
alked to the driver’s door, he glanced through the side window. Officer Wald lay across the floor of the backseat, his right eye gone, the left staring sightlessly.

  In Wald’s wallet Tyler had found a photo of a redheaded wife and two high school kids posing on Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara. Family man.

  But not anymore.

  He got behind the wheel and raised his ski mask, grateful to have it off. Sweat dampened his face. His ponytail was a wet mop. The camouflage paint around his eyes had run like black tears.

  In the passenger seat Blair tugged off his own mask, revealing a lumpy nose and pockmarked cheeks. “Hot night, huh”

  “I grew up in Arizona,” Tyler said. “Lake Havasu City. Gets to be a hundred fifteen in the summer.”

  “Where you gonna go once we split the haul”

  “Just south of here. Malibu. You”

  “Maybe back to San Diego. Me and Gage grew up there. Nice town.”

  “Lots of Mexicans.”

  “The Mexicans are all right. I used to do some part-time stuff with some Mexicans.”

  “What stuff”

  “Swiping boats. Real easy work. Just hotwire the sucker and go.”

  Tyler nodded. “I helped run a chop shop out in El Centro for a while. Autos, I mean. Not a bad way to earn a living.”

  “The gangs are taking over the auto racket. Boats too. Not much future in it for the independent businessman.”

  “Well, after we get paid, the future’s gonna look a lot brighter for all of us.”

  “You got that right,” Blair said with a smile.

  Though they had spent the past thirty-six hours together, this was Tyler Sinclair’s longest conversation with Blair Sharkey. The kid didn’t say much, and his brother Gage said even less.

  Still, Tyler had seen enough of them to judge that neither measured up to Hector Avalon, the man they had replaced. Tyler had gotten to know old Hector pretty well during a week of drills conducted by Cain in the wilds of the San Jacinto Mountains. The crew had donned their black camouflage outfits, practiced with modified Glocks that fired blank rounds, and run through every possible contingency plan.

  Basic training, Cain had called it. Boot camp.

  Too bad the Sharkeys hadn’t been part of all that. Maybe then tonight’s mishap wouldn’t have occurred, and the lady in the trunk wouldn’t have to die.