Silence

27

SYLVIE DROVE THE CAR up the long, steep, curving grade, past a convoy of slow trucks climbing toward Los Angeles. Even in the predawn darkness she could feel the change in climate. At the bottom was Camarillo, where the air was cool and damp from the ocean, but up here at the top was Thousand Oaks, where the air was dry, still heated up by yesterday’s sunshine. She knew that if she could have stopped the car and put her hand on the pavement, it would feel warm. As she drove past the green sign at the Los Angeles County line, she hit an invisible wall of frustration.

They had failed. She said, “I assume you don’t want me to drive this car to our house. Would you like to dump it someplace before the sun comes up?”

“In time,” he said. “I figure checkout time at the hotel where we got the car is noon. The housekeeping people will go into the room and find the bodies around twelve-thirty or so. We’ll be fine for now.”

“If you say so.” She drove past the eternal tie-up at the junction with the San Diego Freeway, and took the Van Nuys Boulevard exit.

Paul said, “Pull into the mall and let me out.”

Sylvie pulled to the far end near the corner and sat there as though she were checking a road map while Paul walked the few blocks to their house and returned in the black BMW. He stepped close to Sylvie and handed her the keys. “I’ll drive that one, and you follow me.”

He drove the stolen car onto the 170 freeway to the Simi Freeway and up to Little Tujunga Road. He drove up into the dry hills for a couple of miles, then pulled over on a wide turnout, and Sylvie stopped behind him. Already Sylvie could detect a special quality to the air that was still not luminous, but was beginning to lose its darkness. She got out of the BMW and joined Paul at the stolen car with the rags and Windex that Paul had brought from home.

They sprayed and wiped off the handles, knobs and buttons, the trunk and the hood, the interior metal and plastic surfaces. They were efficient and quick because they had done this together before. The whole process took no more than five minutes. Then Paul went to the trunk of the BMW, took out the fire extinguisher, opened the passenger door of the stolen car, and sprayed the interior thoroughly with white foam to destroy any prints they had missed. Paul reached inside to shift the transmission into neutral, then pushed the stolen car to the edge of the turnout and let it roll down the steep hillside into the dense brush below. The car was difficult to see from the turnout, and it appeared no more important than any of the other abandoned cars in gullies around Los Angeles. It looked as though it could have been there for years.

A few minutes later, they were in their BMW on the Simi Freeway going seventy miles an hour toward home. It was half-light when they approached the driveway of the house that Sylvie had inherited from Darren McKee. The garage door rose, Paul pulled inside, and the garage door closed behind them.

Neither of them spoke as they got out, walked through the doorway into the house, and locked the door behind them. One of the things that Sylvie loved about being married was that little talk was necessary at times like this, when they were both exhausted and disappointed and dirty. Two single people would think they had to fill the air with bright, insincere chatter. Sylvie stopped at the front door, glanced into the box she had put under the mail slot to catch the mail, but didn’t see anything that tempted her to look more closely. She walked to the master bedroom, opened the walk-in closet, stepped out of her clothes, took her robe off the hook, and went into the bathroom. In her peripheral vision she saw Paul doing something similar, and then heard him go two doors down the hall to the guest bathroom and close the door.

She stepped into the shower and turned it on. Usually Sylvie stood in the shower and passively let the water rush over her, but today she adjusted the temperature to be slightly hotter than usual, covered herself with soap, and scrubbed her skin. She washed her hair, then got out and ran the bath, settled into it, and lay there soaking. When she felt cleansed of the whole experience of the past few days she stood up, dried herself with a big, fluffy bath towel, and went back into the bedroom.

Paul had kept the blinds and curtains closed, so the room was dim and felt cool. Maybe he had turned on the air conditioning. He was lying in the bed with his back to her. She took off the robe and slipped under the covers beside him. She slid close to him, but she didn’t touch him. She closed her eyes.

When Sylvie awoke the room was still dark. She rolled over so she could see her clock radio. The red digits said 1:22. She reached behind her to verify the emptiness where Paul should have been. She lay there waking up. She smelled coffee. She caught a small sound in another part of the house that located him in her mind. She got up and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth.

As she passed the big mirror, she looked at her reflection, then took a step back to look again. Usually she saw only flaws, but today it seemed to her that she looked good naked. She brushed her teeth, then picked up a brush and began brushing out her hair in front of the big mirror instead of the makeup mirror as she normally did. She wasn’t twenty-five anymore, but she looked better than most women did at thirty, she assured herself. She finished her hair, splashed water on her face and patted it dry, then stepped to the makeup mirror and put on light daytime makeup, giving special attention to her eyes today because she had been sleeping, and then studied the effect. She looked even better. She looked terrific.

Sylvie decided to heighten the effect. Why not? She put on the eyeliner and mascara, and added eye shadow. Then she went into the closet and opened the lingerie drawers until she found what she had been picturing. She put on a sheer black lace baby-doll nightgown that had a bit of a push-up to emphasize her breasts. She turned in front of the mirror and looked at herself critically. The lace came down just to the spot where her legs reached her bottom, but didn’t quite cover her.

She and Paul had just spent too much time jammed into cars together, tracking that stupid woman and her private detective. It was time to remind Paul that she wasn’t just some partner, some other man who was a buddy of his. She was his wife. She took one last look and then walked out of the closet and let her senses guide her to him. He was in the kitchen cleaning guns.

She stopped in the living room so he could just catch sight of her in the corner of his eye, then moved toward the big leather couch along the far wall in front of the bookcases. She heard a sound—the scrape of his chair, then heard him get up, his feet coming across the kitchen floor, through the dining room, then onto the carpet. She kept her back to him, as though she had heard nothing.

“Wow,” he said.

She looked over her shoulder at him, smiled, and gave her bottom a comical little wiggle. “Oh, Mr. Turner,” she said in a fake southern-belle voice. “What can you be thinking?”

He seemed to swoop, coming across the room without sound, or enough time elapsing, and he had his arms around her. She enjoyed the powerful effect she had on him. He never spoke again, he simply made love to her. There was never anything routine or perfunctory about the way Paul Turner was with her, but this time he was irresistible. At times he was tender, gentle, and then he would be ardent and passionate, almost too physical, so she felt small and weak. It wasn’t that he seemed to be taking her against her will, but that her will was irrelevant because when she felt this way, he could make her want to do anything.

When it was over, she lay still, her muscles all relaxing, letting her heartbeat slow. She opened her eyes and was mildly surprised to remember that they had never left the living room. He was on his side, leaning on his elbow and looking down at her.

“What were you doing before I came in here to distract you?” she said.

“I was cleaning rifles. That pair of .308s we bought last year in South Carolina.”

“I had forgotten we even had those. I remember we sighted them in on the range, and never fired them again. Why did they need cleaning?”

“They didn’t, actually. It was just something to do while you were asleep. I’m glad you decided to get up.” A small self-satisfied proprietary smile formed on his lips.

She forgave him for the smile, even though she deserved every bit of the credit and considerable gratitude for what had just happened. That, she supposed, was another aspect of long marriages. When they had first found each other years ago, she had not been able to read that smile, could not have detected that mixed with the admiration was pride of ownership and self-satisfaction.

Sylvie got up and walked into the bedroom suite. She tossed the skimpy nightgown into the bin for delicate wash and stepped into the shower. She hummed, then sang in a quiet voice, because she was happy.

When she was out of the shower, she pulled on a pair of comfortable jeans and a T-shirt. She walked into the kitchen, and poured herself a cup of coffee. Paul was just reassembling the second rifle, and she could see why she had forgotten he had bought this pair. She and Paul had at least two other pairs built on the Remington Model 7 pattern, all with dull gray synthetic stocks that wouldn’t reflect light or hold a fingerprint. There were a pair in .30-06 and identical ones in .22, so they could practice without spending tons of money for high-powered, deafening ammunition that made the gun kick her shoulder until it was bruised and sore.

She and Paul tried to get in lots of practice sessions. The thought reminded her that when she and Paul had gotten together she used to call it “rehearsal,” and he used to laugh at her. She watched him as he picked up the two guns and carried them toward the spare bedroom he used as an office, to lock them in the gun safe. She supposed there were things about her that annoyed him, but he almost never mentioned any of them. Maybe that was why she had bouts of free-ranging anxiety: She would notice signs in his face and body that signaled irritation, but since he hadn’t said anything, she had no way to limit what she imagined might be bothering him. It could be anything about her—or even everything—so she became defensive.

When Paul came back into the kitchen, she put her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss. “Well, what can I make you for breakfast?”

“Nothing. I’ll take you out to breakfast.”

“No, thanks. I want to be in my own house for a while and bask in blissful domesticity. How about some eggs and bacon?”

He shrugged. “Sounds good.”

She went to the refrigerator and took out the eggs, butter, and bacon while he cleared the table of his cleaning rods, patches, gun oil, and rags, and began to set it for breakfast.

She broke one egg, then another into the pan, dropped the shells into the sink and looked back at him. “Before you answer the next question, I would like you to take a minute to think, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do we really have to collect on Wendy Harper?”

He sat quietly for about five seconds, then said, “Yes. We pretty much do.”

“Pretty much?”

“That means yes. It’s a lot of money. We spend a lot, so we need to make a lot. And it’s a job for Michael Densmore. He’s been our best source of jobs for the past seven or eight years.”

“That’s true, but think about it a minute.” Her spatula lifted the eggs expertly and slid them onto a plate without breaking the yolks. “Do we actually need this money? We own this house free and clear. We paid cash for both cars. We each had savings from before we met. We have the money we’ve saved together, and we still have all of the money Darren left me about fifteen years ago, don’t we?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s got to add up.”

“Of course. We could quit now, and probably live a very comfortable life until we die.” He grinned. “Or until I die, anyway, which is all I need to worry about.”

“You’re so sweet.” His toast popped up, and she plucked it out of the toaster, dropped it on the plate, and set it in front of him.

“Seriously, we’re probably fine, as long as nobody gets sick, there’s no unforeseeable disaster, and all that. We have some investment income that we’ve been reinvesting for years. If you don’t like working, I’d be willing to stop after this job’s done.”

“Why not before? Why not today?”

“Because we took this job. Once we’ve met with the middleman and heard the whole story, we’re in. We’re obligated. We know too much to walk away.”

“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 the 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.”