Dead Aim

CHAPTER 29

Mallon had to lie on his belly to hide the gun in his hand and to be able to get up quickly, but he felt keenly the hardness of the asphalt. The two men on either side of him lay in perfect, open-eyed repose, like two whitefish in a delicatessen’s display case. He tried to imitate their stillness as the approaching car’s headlights brightened, swept across the house at the bend, and then settled on them.

The glare intensified rapidly, until he could see red through his eyelids, and then the car stopped. He heard a door open and slam, waited for another that never came, but heard the sharp, small clop of a woman’s shoes coming around the car. They stopped.

“Oh, Jesus.” It was just above a whisper, but it was Diane’s voice. “Oh, Jesus.”

Mallon pushed off the pavement and got to his feet, and she gave a little cry. She was only a silhouette in front of the headlights, but he could make out that she was wearing tight, dark pants of some kind and a blouse. As he stepped toward her, she at first recoiled, then seemed to reel a little, as though she felt faint. “It’s me,” he said. “I’m not dead. Get in and drive us out of here.”

She seemed to see that this was undeniably what she needed to do. She trotted the three steps back to the car, got in, and immediately threw it into gear to drive off. Mallon was only halfway in when the car shot forward, but he pulled his leg inside and let the acceleration shut the door. She glanced at him, wide-eyed, for a second, then stared ahead at the dark road.

“What happened?” she asked, her voice going up the scale as she spoke. “Who are those men on the ground? What happened to them?”

Mallon stared at her, watching her face while the outdoor lights of houses passed across it, then left it in darkness, only the glow from the instrument panel giving her a yellowish pallor. “I killed them,” he said.

“Killed them?” she repeated. “How?”

“I was going to say that it wasn’t my fault, but of course it was. It took some effort. I heard their engine, so I knew they were coming. They guessed where I would be hiding, but I knew what their guess would be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I could see that they were here to kill me, so I had to stop them.”

Diane looked at him in disbelief, her eyes wide, then squinted ahead at the road for a moment. Her eyes shot back to his face again and again, as though each time she expected some change to have occurred, but each time was shocked to see that it had not. “You just decided they were all here to harm you? You just guessed that and shot them?”

He leaned close to her, and stared at the clock on the dashboard. “Ten-oh-five. I guess you were nearly on time. It was a good plan, but it didn’t work out well at all,” he said wearily. “No, I guess it did.”

Diane was sitting stiffly, both hands on the wheel, but Mallon could see that her right eye was trying to keep him in sight. Mallon noticed that he was still holding a gun in his hand. He considered for a moment, then slipped it back into his jacket pocket.

He sat back in the seat, and he could see a change in her posture. She straightened so noticeably that it looked as though she were growing.“I’m not sure that this was a good idea,” she said. “We’ll have to make a convincing argument that we had a compelling reason to leave the scene.”

“What for?”

“The trial,” she said with a hint of impatience, as though it were self-evident. “When somebody dies of gunshot wounds, there will be a trial. I’m fairly sure we can get you off-either self-defense or, at worst, manslaughter-but you’ll have to be very helpful and very forthcoming. We’ll need to prove they were after you. Did you ever see either of them before?”

He answered all her questions. He marveled at the effect. As she talked, he could see her getting stronger and more confident that she had the right strategy. She was trying to make him weak and indecisive and, ultimately, passive, so that she would be in control. He felt a growing warmth in his chest and a tightness in his throat, but he did not let the feeling ignite into rage.

He said, “I’m really exhausted, Diane. In the past couple of days, people have tried to kill me on the beach, at a hotel, and now here. I think all we can do at the moment is get ourselves to a place where we’ll be safe for a while.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Good. Turn right up here at Malibu Canyon, and we can go through the hills to the freeway, and then east, out of state, as we had planned.”

“That’s not a good idea anymore, Robert,” she said. “I can’t let you do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you kill some people-in self-defense or not-then fleeing the state has a bad effect on police, district attorneys, judges, juries. In a capital case, it could be a fatal mistake.”

He studied her face for a moment. Her confidence was as high as he had ever seen it. “Then what is a good idea?”

“I think we should find a place close by, then try to get in touch with people who can help us. We should get some real protection for you while I try to make a deal with the police.”

“All right,” he said. “Drive up the coast as far as Ventura. I know a good place.”

It was a house beside the ocean just north of Ventura, and he knew it because he had once owned it. He had bought it shortly after he had come to Santa Barbara, with the notion that he would remodel it and resell it. But before he had gotten around to drawing any plans, he had received an unsolicited offer and sold it for a profit to a couple from Los Angeles. He had driven by not long ago and seen that the house had been sold again. Then, a couple of weeks ago, he had read in the Santa Barbara News-Press that a Ventura investment partnership was planning to tear it and several others down to build enormous beach palaces for people who had the ante and wanted to be part of the final California land rush.

He did not need to direct her there, only to wait awhile and say, “It’s up ahead on the left,” then say, “Here’s the one. Pull into the driveway.”

The house was dark and the garage had a padlock on it, but the windows had not been boarded and there was no contractor’s chain-link fence to interfere. He had known from experience that announcing a plan was one thing, but getting the building permits and the approvals from the Coastal Commission for a big project on the oceanfront was another. It often took years.

Diane said irritably, “What is this place?”

Mallon did not answer. He was out of the car and walking around to the side of the house to look in the kitchen window. The sound of the waves coming in on the beach was steady and regular, just loud enough to make her unsure whether he had answered her or not. He could see the small green numbers on the oven control panel, which meant the power was on. He looked through the doorway at the front entry, then at the back of the house, but there were no lights on the alarm keypads.

He remembered that the back door had been small and solid with heavy dead bolts, and the windows had been big, with double panes for strength. As he stepped around the back, he could see that some remodeling had been done since he had last seen the house. The back entrance was now through a pair of French doors with a simple bolt that turned by hand. He approved of the concrete patio that had been added and, even more, the low reinforced-concrete wall with an irregular row of boulders in front of it to break up any big waves that might come all the way up here in an extremely high tide.

He looked around the patio for a few seconds, but found that the owners had not left anything he could use, so he kept walking to the place where he remembered the gas meter was. There he found a wrench that was designed for turning off the gas in an emergency. He took it to the French door and swung it once into the small pane of glass nearest to the bolt. He reached in and opened the door, stepped inside, then crossed the living room to the front door, undid the bolt, opened it, and beckoned to Diane.

She was still sitting in the driver’s seat looking uncomfortable. She shook her head and stayed there. Mallon left the front door open and walked to her side of the car. “Come on in,” he said. “We’ll be safe and comfortable here until we can get things straightened out.”

She glared at him. “What are you talking about? You just broke a window to get in. I heard you.”

He shrugged. “The house belongs to a friend of mine. He won’t mind. I sold it to him.” She stared straight ahead, the same resentful expression on her face. “Diane, get out of the damned car.” He pulled her door open and waited.

She was looking up at him now, and he could see she was still reluctant, but she slowly and deliberately swung her legs out, leaned forward, and stood up. She had her arms wrapped around herself with her purse dangling from one hand and her keys in the other as she walked to the front door and into the house.

She turned on the switch by the door so the overhead light went on, stepped to the center of the living room, and looked around her. There were a few movers’ cardboard boxes collapsed on one side of the expanse of wall-to-wall carpet, and a few partial rolls of packing tape beside them. “There’s no furniture. Is your friend Japanese?”

“He’s not living here, he’s putting the house up for sale again. That’s why I know he wouldn’t care about the glass.”

She set her purse on the floor, tossed her keys into it, and looked around. “If you owned the place once, you must remember where the bathrooms are. Which way?” She watched Mallon point, then walked to the door, pushed it open, switched on the light, and closed the door.

Mallon immediately knelt to reach into her purse. He found her cell phone, but his hand had brushed a second object that interested him. He reached inside again, grasped it, and brought it out.

The gun was surprisingly small. It barely filled his hand. He slipped the gun and the telephone into the two inner pockets of his jacket, stood, and looked around him, trying to think clearly. He heard the toilet flush. He switched off the overhead light, stepped silently into the dining area, opened the back door, went outside, and watched through the windows.

She came out and looked around her. “Robert?” She stepped toward the kitchen and then to the hallway and looked around some more, then quickly snatched up her purse and slipped into the bathroom again. After a few seconds, she emerged and set her purse exactly where it had been. She stepped back and looked at it, adjusted its tilt a bit, and sat down a few feet from it, her back against the wall.

Mallon returned and shut the door, then went to the pile of movers’ boxes and tape. He used his pocketknife to cut a square of cardboard off one of the boxes and then taped it over the broken glass.

“Robert,” said Diane. “Why are we here?”

He turned and looked at her in the dim light from the bathroom. “I’m not entirely certain,” he answered. “We need to talk a bit before either of us does anything.”

“All right.” She folded her arms and waited. “So?”

He took a deep breath and released it slowly. He had been dreading this, but he reflected that it had already begun: he had taken her gun and her phone, and she knew it. “How did those two men know that you and I were going to meet at that house in Malibu?”

She looked shocked. “Are you sure?” she asked. “What makes you think they knew it?”

“They arrived after I did. They might not have known I was already there, but they certainly knew I would be. I think that’s why one guy came ahead alone. They wanted to see whether I had arrived.”

She eyed him skeptically. “How could they possibly have known?”

“How could they possibly have gone to a particular block on a narrow, dark street in Malibu to find me if they didn’t?”

In the light from the bathroom doorway, he could see her eyes. She had been rigid and tense, but now she was beginning to be frightened. “You’re scaring me. Do you think they tapped our phone call? That they heard what we were planning, and then came to wait for us?”

He shook his head slowly, never taking his eyes off hers. “We never said aloud where we were going to meet, remember? You said it was the place we once looked at together.”

“Did they follow you?”

“No chance,” he said. “I took a taxi to the edge of Malibu. I went down to the beach for a time. Then I went back up on the road and walked there that way after it was dark.”

“Then maybe they followed me,” she said. “Oh, Robert, I’m sorry. I never saw them.”

“You got there after they did.”

She said, “This time, yes. But I drove down there earlier. I didn’t want to sit around in a hotel waiting and then run into traffic and be late, so I left early. I drove through once as soon as I got to Malibu, just to be sure I remembered which house it was. Then I went to a movie.”

“Why didn’t they follow you to the movie, and stick with you? It’s a great place to meet someone.”

Diane shook her head, her body rocking impatiently. “How do I know? I don’t even know if they did follow me. They didn’t find me, did they? They found you.”

All the time while Diane was talking he watched her. He could actually see her in the act of thinking: grasping at alternative explanations, but rejecting this one as too transparently foolish, that one as incriminating. “No matter what they saw,” Mallon pointed out, “they couldn’t have known that the time for them to show up was ten.”

She shrugged. “Then they did tap the phone call.”

“No,” said Mallon. “They didn’t. You told them.”

“No.” Diane began to move on the carpet, pushing herself slowly to get farther away from him. “No, I didn’t. I would never do that. I don’t even know who they are, and I’m your friend. I work for you. We’ve known each other for eight or nine years. Why would I want to help somebody kill you?”

Some instinct or memory or warning came into Diane’s mind, and she stopped moving away. She seemed to have difficulty preparing herself. “There’s no reason at all. We can’t let ourselves get paranoid and turn on each other,” she said, and she began to move a bit closer.

Mallon could see what she was thinking, as though it were printed on her forehead. She knew he was armed. She did not want to be ten or twelve feet away from him, close enough for him to be sure of hitting her if he fired, too far away for her to do anything to stop him. She was smiling with a sincere, concerned look in her eyes as she moved closer. Without any shade of change in her expression, and without a change in the direction of her movement, she sprang.

Mallon’s reaction was a simple reflex, a lunge to the left to avoid her. She managed to land a single, hard blow that missed his throat but stung his chest near the shoulder. Her other hand was already at his jacket pocket, groping for the gun. Mallon swatted her arm down and held her wrist. He used it to spin her around, then pushed to get her to the floor face downward. He straddled her as she struggled, then clamped his left hand around the back of her neck to hold her there.

He leaned to the right to grasp the roll of packing tape he had left on the floor after he’d covered the broken window, and she used that moment to twist and push down with her legs to try to roll him off. He managed to snatch the tape, then flop his weight onto her back to keep her down.

In spite of his size and weight, she never stopped struggling to overcome him, and from the first few seconds he had been aware that she was better at this than she should be. She used every chance to keep him from gaining control. Every time he tried to shift his position, she would feel the direction of his motion and push off to try to accelerate it and free herself. They fought in silence in the near darkness, their breaths now coming in heavy, hard gasps.

At last, she had worn herself out trying to lift him. He was able to clamp both her wrists behind her, and wrapped five turns of the tape around them to hold them.

“What?” she gasped. “Why… what do you… want?”

He leaned close, so his lips were right behind her ear. “I promise I won’t hurt you. I want you to tell me the truth.”