Silence

35

WHILE SYLVIE PACKED their suitcases in the bedroom, she could hear Paul in the kitchen and the living room and the office collecting things. Paul was good at picking out his own clothes, as men who were narcissists all seemed to be. Paul chose clothes that emphasized how tall and slim he was: pants with pronounced waistbands and narrow legs, tight pullover casual shirts, dress shirts with vertical stripes, sport coats that he wore buttoned to show off his thin waist.

She could tell from the sounds that Paul was collecting money from the various places where he had hidden cash. It was foolish to use credit cards when it wasn’t necessary, so as soon as they landed, they would use false names and start changing small numbers of dollars into euros as they needed them. There was no way to be completely anonymous, but there was no sense making yourself accessible to amateurs and incompetents. Paul had also called the bank this morning to let them know that sometime over the next few months, they might order an electronic transfer to a foreign bank. It was always best to smooth the way and know the latest procedures before you were on the other side of the earth and talking to a banker long-distance.

Sylvie had fretted while she was trying to decide what to pack for such a long and unpredictable trip, but Paul had said, “There are two suitcases, thirty by twenty-four inches. If something doesn’t fit in there, it’s not going. We’ll shop there and dress like locals.” She loved Paul’s ability to settle her. He spoke with a quiet, untroubled voice and rested his strong, gentle hands on her shoulders and held her still, grounding her, the way an expert rider calmed a skittish horse. Afterward, she didn’t know what had made her feel so anxious. Of course they didn’t need to bring everything in their closets. They could shop for anything they needed after they were out of the country.

It was ridiculous to be frantic and agitated: Densmore was dead. That had ended that stupid job they should never have taken in the first place. They would take a nice vacation, make it last a few months, and then come home long after everyone had forgotten about Wendy Harper and Eric Fuller.

She had known for a long time that Densmore was dangerous because he took so much trouble to be the sort of person nobody thought was dangerous. He’d had that smooth, soft way of speaking that could only be false. She had suspected that if he gained too much power over them, he would show a different side.

She went over in her mind the items she had put in the suitcases to be sure she had done her best with the time and space she had been allowed. Then she closed the suitcases and lifted hers tentatively off the bed, then Paul’s. They were both heavy, but she could carry either one if she had to, and Paul could carry them both. She looked inside again, and verified that she had put in the right variety of garments for late summer in Europe. Then she sat on the bed to think of anything else she needed.

She heard Paul moving along the hallway from the living room, and a slight feeling of worry crept into her mind. Last night, Michael Densmore had said, “I paid you four times—” and right then Paul had pulled the trigger and killed him. It had sounded as though Densmore might have been about to say, “I paid you four times the original price.” Paul had told her two days earlier that Densmore had offered to double the price, not quadruple it. She replayed the conversation in her memory, trying to intuit from the tone of Densmore’s voice what the rest of the sentence would have been. As she ran it through her mind again, she realized that she had the phrase wrong. What Densmore had said was “I offered to pay you four times—” That was important: offered, not paid.

It was entirely possible that Densmore, addled by cowardice, had simply misspoken, saying “four times” instead of “twice.” Or he may have been, in a clumsy, frightened way, trying to double his offer a second time to make up for his disloyalty in revealing their identities to a client and hiring a rival team without warning them. Densmore had denied hiring those men, but she had no doubt he had done it, and the more he had railed against the client for doing it, the more certain she had become. Redoubling the offer would not have been a bad strategy at that point. But that point was precisely the moment when Paul had shot him. She had to face the possibility that Paul had killed him to keep him from blurting out the real size of the deal in front of Sylvie. Could Paul have been planning to skim half the price of the job and hide it from her?

The question was delicate and unpleasant. They had gone to the parking structure without an agreement to kill Michael Densmore. Sylvie had secretly hoped that was what would happen, but she had professed to agree with Paul when he had said, “We ought to get him in a quiet place, ask him a few searching questions, and see what we think of his answers.” Sylvie had been afraid of Densmore. Paul did not seem to have noticed, but Densmore had been too attentive to her in the wrong way: opened doors for her, but didn’t leave enough space for her to get past without brushing against him; leaned over her too close when he had pulled out her chair. He had appeared overly polite and respectful when they had all been together talking about business, and had deferred to her as though he accepted her as Paul’s equal. But as soon as Paul stepped out of the room, or even looked away for a few seconds, Densmore’s eyes had changed. He had stared frankly and openly at her body, or looked into her eyes with a smirk. But he had never done anything that would give her a chance to say to Paul, “Look. See what he’s doing?”

She had not been completely sure what Paul’s reaction would have been if she had said something to Paul. She knew Paul would say, “Did he touch you? What exactly did he say? What did he do?” If she tried to explain, she was afraid he might say, “Sylvie, you’re suddenly shy about the way men look at you? The star of Honeymoon Ranch Two and Three?”

She had been cautious, but she had known that the last thing she wanted was to find herself in Michael Densmore’s power. Last night she had actually wanted to kill Densmore, but the way Paul had done it, in such a hurry as though he had intended to shut him up, made her wonder.

Suppose Densmore had actually offered more money on the phone a few days ago than Paul had said. That might not matter, either. Paul might have been saving the real figure to surprise her later. In either case, the money was only hypothetical: They had not killed Wendy Harper, and so they had not received payment.

Still, Sylvie was not satisfied. Maybe Paul had received an advance and kept it from her. Maybe Paul had demanded more after their failure up north. Maybe Paul had been hiding money from her for a long time, and Densmore had known and played along. That would provide an entirely different—but not necessarily better—meaning to the way he had looked at her all those times in his office. She shifted, and the sound of the floor creaking under her foot startled her. She caught her reflection in the mirror over her dresser.

To her horror, she saw a woman who had become middle-aged. She had wrinkles, breasts that were beginning to sag even though she had worked tirelessly to maintain her muscle tone. Of course Paul was hiding money from her, using it to pay for affairs with younger women. Good hotels were expensive, even if he used them for only three hours in the middle of the day.

Sylvie felt angry at herself, humiliated. She had to get through the next few minutes, to avoid Paul. She looked around, saw the bathroom door, hurried through it into the bathroom and turned on the water in the big tub. She wasn’t sure why she was doing it, except that this was a familiar, simple act, she was alone, and the sound of the water was a kind of privacy, too.

The doorbell. How could there be anybody at the door? She turned off the water, rushed back into the bedroom, and looked through the window to see if there were cops moving through the yard. No. She could see the pool, the trees, the wall at the back of the property. She opened the cabinet and snatched a stack of clean towels, took her pistol out of the nightstand, stuck it between the top two, and carried them toward the living room.

When she came into the living room, she saw Paul on the opposite side of it, hurrying in from the kitchen, putting a pistol into the back of his pants, and covering it with his shirttail. He waved his hand toward the door and pantomimed turning a knob. She nodded and went to the front door just as the bell rang again. She looked through the peephole and saw a man standing on the front steps.

“Who is it?” she called.

“My name is Carl Zacca, Mrs. Turner. I represent the man who’s been dealing with you through Mr. Densmore.”

Sylvie turned to Paul. “Shit!” she whispered.

“We’ve got to let him in,” Paul said. “He knows we’re home.”

She glared at him and shook her head, but Paul brushed past her, opened the door, and stepped back.

The man who stood in the doorway was handsome, with thick black hair and a genuine-looking smile. He held out his hand. “Carl Zacca, Mr. Turner. I’m really sorry to bother you, but would you mind if I came in?”

Paul stepped back. “Come in.” When Carl Zacca was past the threshold, Paul swung the door shut. He had his hand behind him, on the gun in the back of his belt. “Sit down over here on the couch.”

Carl Zacca sat on the white couch in the conversation area facing the front of the room. Sylvie kept her hand on the gun under the towels and planned the shots she would take through the back of the couch so she could kill him quickly.

As though he’d had the same thought, Zacca turned his head and looked over his shoulder at her. She said, “Hello, Mr. Zacca.”

“Carl. Please call me Carl. And the guns aren’t really necessary. I’m a friend.”

“Fine,” Paul said. “Tell me again. Who do you work for? What’s his name?”

He answered without hesitation, “Scott Schelling.” He smiled and watched Paul and Sylvie exchange a glance. “The reason I came was—I don’t know, you may have heard already—that Michael Densmore has died. Did you know?”

“No,” said Paul. “How did that happen?”

The expression on Paul Turner’s face answered that question, thought Carl. They had killed him. “I don’t know. Somebody shot him, I heard. As soon as we knew, Mr. Schelling sent me here to establish contact with you. Densmore said that you prefer not to work directly with customers, but we didn’t know what else to do. We don’t have a go-between anymore, and we’re in the middle of a crisis. I hope you don’t mind.”

He looked at Sylvie, but she said nothing. She didn’t remove her hand from the stack of towels. He looked at Paul.

“No,” Paul said.

“Good, because every minute counts now. We’re only going to have a brief period when Wendy Harper is in sight. She’s like a rabbit. We’ve seen her pop out of her hiding place, but she’s running, and what she’s running for is the next rabbit hole. If she makes it, we’re through.”

Paul said, “We appreciate your coming all the way over here, and we respect you for being straight about who you work for and not trying to lie about it. But you guys already exercised your right to choice when you hired a pair of amateurs to take over for us. We watched those two die while we were staring through rifle sights, waiting for our shot.”

“We didn’t hire them; that was Densmore.”

Paul glanced at Sylvie again. She was watchful, her face conveying nothing of what she might be thinking or feeling. Paul said, “When we got replaced, we came home. We’re out. We haven’t been paid anything, so we don’t owe you anything.”

“I can understand why you thought that, but I’m here to tell you everything’s okay. You can go finish the contact.”

“We’re out.”

“Then we’d like you to come back in.”

“What are you offering?”

“Paul.” It was Sylvie’s voice, and he could see in his peripheral vision that she was shaking her head, but he ignored her.

“We’ll pay in full what Densmore promised you.”

“Densmore’s dead.”

Carl studied Paul for a moment. He saw that Paul was not returning his gaze as a man might who was bluffing. Carl said, “I get the feeling that we started out wrong. I’m just trying to build an easy, open relationship so we can handle this situation efficiently. Mr. Schelling didn’t want you to worry when you heard Densmore was dead. We’re still around, and we’re still interested. You’ll get paid. We’ll live up to our end of the agreement.”

“The only agreement we had was with Densmore,” said Paul. “He’s dead, so there is no agreement.”

Carl wondered what strange thing he had done in some earlier lifetime to put him in a house in Van Nuys between two professional killers, each of them with one hand hidden so it could hold a gun. “I’ll tell you what. You give me a figure that will bring you back in, and I’ll call Mr. Schelling and see if it’s acceptable to him.”

“A million dollars.” It was Sylvie’s voice—a number called out in urgency, like an auction bid.

The two men turned to look at Sylvie. She stared back at them defiantly, letting the words hang in the room.

Carl spoke. “I don’t understand. You’re joking?”

“No,” she said. “This wasn’t a regular job from the beginning. From the minute we planted the bat and the bloody rag in Eric Fuller’s yard, everybody who mattered knew we were luring Wendy Harper into the open to kill her. Now the cops know it, too. They’re waiting for somebody to try again. If you think you can do it, go ahead.”

Carl Zacca looked at Paul Turner. “I’m going to reach into my pocket for my phone. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Carl moved his right hand slowly inside his coat pocket. His hand almost involuntarily moved to touch the handgrips of his gun. Verifying its presence was like touching a good-luck charm. He removed his hand, transferred the cell phone to his left, but kept his posture the same: sitting on the edge of the couch, bent forward slightly so his coat was pushed away from his body and the inner pocket was easy to reach. He pushed the button to dial Scott’s number and put the phone to his left ear.

After a few seconds, he said, “It’s Carl. I’ve met our two friends and we’ve been having a nice talk, but they want more money, and I need to run their offer past you. Is that something you can do now?”

He heard Scott Schelling say, “Is this figure a holdup?”

“Yes.”

“Just say yes or no. Is it a million?”

“Yes.”

“Take a very good look around you. See every security mechanism, where the furniture is, the alarm system, and so on. I’ll want you to draw a picture of it from memory the minute you get out of there. Can you do that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay. Then I’ll give you some time to look. Give the phone to Paul Turner.”

“Yes, sir.” He held the telephone out toward Paul. “He would like to talk to you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. He’s waiting.”

Paul took three steps forward and accepted the telephone. Carl noticed that he, too, held it to his left ear. His right hand moved to the back of his shirt. “This is Turner.”

“Paul, this is Scott Schelling. I’ve heard a lot of good things about you and your wife. I really sent my friend Carl over there just to make sure you didn’t feel you were abandoned and on your own now. We want you with us. You’re the only ones who have seen her in six years, and I can’t find somebody else now. She’ll be in Los Angeles in three or four hours. Carl tells me that it will take more money. How much?”

“A million bucks.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“The only reason to do this is for a lot of money.”

“I suppose. But getting that much in cash on short notice is not easy.”

“If you want to let it go or have somebody else do it cheaper, we’ll never reveal anything we know about it. But if you want us, that’s what it will cost—in cash, as soon as it’s done.”

“All right. It’s a high price, but no hard feelings. I’ll have the money ready. You can get to work.”

“Then we’re in.”

“Paul!” It was Sylvie’s voice. Paul jerked his head to look at the man on the couch, then at her, but she had not been warning him of danger.

“What?” The phone had gone dead.

She was angry. “We need to talk.”

“We can talk while we’re getting ready. She has to be done today.” He tossed the phone back to Carl Zacca. “Carl, it’s been pleasant, but time is passing.”

Carl put the phone away and stood up. “Well, then, we’ll see you later with your money. You made a hell of a deal on this.”

“We’ll see.” Paul followed Carl to the door, closed and locked it behind him.

“Paul, have you lost your mind?”

“Sssh.” He had the gun in his hand, prepared to fire through the door as he squinted through the peephole. After a few more seconds, they heard a car moving off. Then he turned to her. “He’s gone. I haven’t lost my mind, and neither have you. That million-dollar thing was quick thinking. It made everything kind of crystallize.” He stepped close and hugged her, then kissed her cheek and released her. He hurried toward the bedroom, and she pursued him.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“You named the price, and he met it.”

“But that was just—”

“Brilliant.”

“You can’t possibly think this music guy is planning to hand us a million bucks.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then what are you doing? We’re all packed. We have reservations. We could be gone already.”

“We will be. It will just be a few days later before we get to Europe, that’s all. Pack the passports and shove the money I’ve been collecting into the suitcases. When the doorbell rang, I stashed it in the refrigerator.”

“What are you saying? We can’t leave now.” Her voice was a wail of frustration. “You just agreed to a job.”

“I’m not talking about running. We’ll do the job. We’ll get a million bucks.”

“I only said that to make him go away. And he only agreed because he expects to have somebody kill us afterward.”

Paul held Sylvie’s shoulders and looked at her as though he were trying to hypnotize her. “Sylvie, think about this guy. Six years ago, he made a mistake. So what did he do? He spent the next six years trying to find the woman who knows about it, even though she hasn’t told anybody. He’s a maniac about being careful.”

“That’s not reassuring. That scares the shit out of me. He’ll kill us, too.”

Paul grinned. “I know he doesn’t intend to pay us. I could have asked for New Jersey, and he would have agreed. But he’s also smart enough to know that no matter what precautions he takes, there is at least a slight possibility that he might find himself alone with us after we kill Wendy. He knows that if we show up to get paid and he isn’t ready to hand us a suitcase full of money, he’s dead. What do you think he’s going to do?”