Dead Aim

CHAPTER 30

Mallon had used parts of three rolls of packing tape to bind Diane’s wrists and ankles, then to connect the ankles and wrists.

He knelt beside her on the empty living room floor, and she recoiled from him. He said, “Diane, I’m not going to harm you. But you’ve got to tell me why they’re trying to kill me.” He stared into her eyes, and he could tell she had been listening to him and studying him. Her eyes were a bit calmer.

She took two or three deep breaths. “You didn’t have to do this to me. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I just panicked because you took away my phone. I thought it was so I couldn’t call for help, that you were planning to hurt me.”

“And your gun,” he said. “I found that too.”

Her brows tilted in hurt. “Don’t you think that’s the best evidence you have that I only wanted to help? I never did anything with it.”

“Why did you come to meet me with a gun?”

“Because we’re in danger. I own it because I’m a female attorney who lives alone. I bought it when I was just starting out in general practice in Los Angeles, and lived in a neighborhood that seemed scary to a girl from a small town. That was a long time ago, so I hardly ever thought about the gun until now. After those men followed me home from work this week, I threw a few things into a suitcase, put the gun into my bag, and took off. At the time, I was very glad I owned it.” She sighed, and looked as though she might cry. “Now I’m sorry.”

Mallon said, “Diane, if you’ll tell me the truth, I’ll let you go. Why are you involved with these people?”

“Involved?” Her eyes looked scared again. “I’m not involved. I was only trying to help you, and now they’re after both of us.”

“They’re not after both of us. They’re after me, and you’re helping them. Why are they so interested in killing me? What is it you think Lydia and I found out? Who are these people?”

She looked at him as though he were speaking a language she did not understand. “I don’t know any more than you do. Robert, you know me. I’m an honest person. I don’t consort with any criminals. I’ve never even represented any. I went into a general civil firm right out of law school and, when I had some experience, moved to Santa Barbara to open an office with a specialty I liked. You’re one of my best clients. I have no reason to harm you.”

Mallon said quietly, “Stop it. I’m giving you a chance to tell me the truth. Don’t you understand what that’s worth?”

“I am telling you the truth.” She stared at him for a few moments, motionless, and then the tears came. “I am. I am,” she said softly, and turned her face to the floor.

There was no doubt that she was lying. He stood up. The beach house was like the others in the row: it faced the sea. It had no lower-level windows on the street side, but presented to the world a plain front and a plain, closed garage door. Mallon had little reason to be afraid to leave a light on, but he decided to be careful. He switched the light off and took a step.

“Good-bye, Diane.” He walked toward the front door.

“Wait!”

He stopped.

“Please!” she begged. “You’re going to leave me like this? The house is closed up, and so are all the others along here. There’s nobody to find me. I’ll die.”

“Most likely,” he said. “I guess if I die, you will too.” He opened the door to step out.

“Wait!” she yelled. “I’ll tell you.”

He closed the door, turned on the light, walked back, and sat beside her again. “I’ll listen to it. All I ask is that it be true.”

“It will be,” she said. “If you go without knowing more than you do, they’ll kill you.”

“Why?” he said. “Why? I’ve asked you that over and over.”

Her face assumed a hard, empty look. “No reason.” She gazed into his eyes, and her expression became a grim amusement. “Does that surprise you?” She didn’t give him time to answer. “It’s true. The people involved in this-all the ones you’ve seen, anyway-were doing it because it gives them a thrill.” She watched him for a reaction. “It’s the sport of kings, the real one, you know. If you happen to be the sort of wealthy person who has gone to all the famous cities and to all the remote resorts that aren’t famous because just knowing the name of them is enough to make you cool, and you’ve worked your way through all of the other big-ticket extreme sports, then this is the option.”

“The big-ticket extreme sports?”

“You know. Having a helicopter drop you on some unreachable mountain nobody has skied before, buying a big sailboat to take across an ocean, setting speed records with racing cars. I guess people like that used to go shoot animals in Africa, but that’s lost its aura. Those two that came for you tonight-Markham and Coleman-that’s what they were in it for: fun.”

“How in the world did you ever get involved with people like that?”

“Through my practice. I’m a servant of rich people: all kinds of rich people. If you manage money, you can’t have too many requirements other than that the money belong to them. This business is too competitive for that.”

“You got into this mess for thrills?”

She shook her head and closed her eyes. Tears seeped from the corners. Then she opened them again. “Not everybody gets a thrill. I got into it because I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Just before I came to Santa Barbara, when I was still in civil litigation in L.A., I defended a client named Carl Hayward. He wasn’t a very nice man, and I didn’t much like him, but that isn’t supposed to enter into legal representation. He was being sued. He had bought a restaurant about three years before. As I understood it, what happened was this: he hired an old male chef and one male kitchen helper, but everybody else who worked for him was a young girl. It was a crummy neighborhood, but it was a well-known old restaurant that was a favorite spot for people to go after plays or concerts: lobsters, big steaks, lots of liquor. It stayed open twenty-four hours a day, so he needed three shifts, but most of the business was between ten at night and six in the morning. Because it was that kind of place, he made the customers pay premium prices. Every night at about three A.M. he would come in and count the money. That was the time when things would begin to slow down. He put the cash in a bag, made out a deposit slip, and sent out one of the young girls who was getting off her shift to take it to the bank to drop in the night-deposit slot on the way home. One night, there was somebody waiting. The girl was a sixteen-year-old, who wasn’t supposed to be working at that hour or in a place that served liquor. She got killed.”

“This was a civil suit?”

She nodded. “The girl was a runaway from New Mexico. Her parents were drug cases who hadn’t even bothered to look for her when she left. But she had a brother. His name was Billy. He was five years older. He had been in jail when she left home, but she’d kept writing to him. He was still in jail when she got killed. When he got out, he got a good lawyer on a pro bono basis. Carl Hayward got me. Everybody expected us to settle. Hayward had clearly not checked anybody, least of all Tara, for age, or asked to see identification. She looked, if anything, younger than sixteen, and Hayward made no secret of the fact that he always had one of the girls carry the money because he didn’t want to get robbed. Three or four of them would get off at once, and it might be a different one that had the money each time. But he knew that he was putting them in danger, because at least once before, men had stopped the wrong girl and ended up with nothing but a purse full of tips. I let them go to court, and I won.”

“How?”

“A combination of things. I had a feeling about the jury. They weren’t all old ladies with pearls, but I could tell they were conservative. The brother’s record might be enough for some of them. I used it. I portrayed him as a creep who was happy to use his own young sister’s death to ruin an honest businessman and get rich. I said he was a vulture. I used the letters she sent him in prison, and said that if it was a dangerous situation, he knew it. I said he was like a pimp, who had encouraged her to work a dangerous, illegal job so she would send him money, and then tried to cash in, to sell her even after she had died.”

“Go on,” he said.

She frowned. “I was young, and I wanted so badly to win. I thought it was my job to use everything I could find or invent to get my client off. The opposing lawyer was Reynolds Phelan. You probably don’t know who that is, but every lawyer in the state does. He was president of the bar association when I was in law school. When the case was over, he waited for me outside the building. I actually thought he was going to congratulate me. He said that what I had done was disgusting. I’ll remember that forever.” She lapsed into silence.

“I’m waiting,” he prompted.

She sighed. “That was my first indication that things were going wrong. I started to get other indications right after the trial. Billy was not going to forget either. He had been in for manslaughter. Billy was very tough. In jail he got meaner and smarter. He started threatening me right after the trial. He had been in jail with men who were experts at intimidating people. They had taught him to do it without getting caught. There were calls late at night, always from pay phones. I would leave home for the office in the morning, and there would be a scary man across the street, staring at me with a smirk. The same when I left work for home. But it was never Billy. Not once. And each one was replaced by another after a couple of times. I told the cops. But the cops can’t charge somebody under the stalking law if he’s standing across the street once or twice. I told friends, I told colleagues, but nobody could help. Finally I was at a party.”

“A party?”

“Yes. It had gone on and on, and I started to hate being alone. I started working more, going out a lot more, just being with people so I wasn’t alone. A woman I met at a party told me that a mutual friend had told her about my problem and she had a suggestion.”

“What was it?”

“Her boyfriend had talked her into going to this self-defense camp, kind of for laughs, really. They had gone together, and she was hooked. It had changed her life. She had been afraid all the time, and now she wasn’t. I had noticed her earlier in the evening and wondered about her, and I think it was because of that. She always had a serene look on her face, but she carried herself with a kind of swagger. She walked straight up to people she had never met and was comfortable talking with them-very easy, very friendly, just as she was with me. I knew she was telling the truth. I let her write down the name and phone number on a slip of paper for me. Overnight I thought about it, and called the next day.”

“Was the camp what she said it was?”

“It was. I learned to use a gun. I don’t mean just how to aim it and hit something consistently. I mean how to care for it, how to carry it concealed, how and when to take it out and fire it, how to move during a firefight. None of that stuff is obvious, and some of it is even counterintuitive intentionally, so your opponent can’t anticipate it. I went to classes in hand-to-hand combat. I know it doesn’t look as though I learned much-”

“Yes, it does,” he interjected.

“Well, I did. I’m pretty rusty now, and I couldn’t do what I was supposed to, which was to surprise the opponent. It also works best if you really want to hurt the other person, or at least don’t care if you do. I care about you.”

“Go on.” There was a warning in his voice.

“I went for a month-long course. It was a rule that you had to go for a whole month the first time, and take an all-around basic self-defense course. After that, you could go for two-week intensive courses, even one-week brush-up sessions. The month was terribly expensive for me, but it seemed worth it. I was out of sight for all that time, safe from Billy. I knew nothing to begin with, so every hour I was there made a terrific difference. When the month was over, I had made a lot of progress. I found I didn’t want to leave. I asked if I could take a two-week advanced course. That was even more extreme. It was urban combat: shotguns, things you could do with a car, even some booby traps. When that was nearly done, I went to one of the instructors and tried to sign up for another two weeks. She talked to me for a while, said she could tell that I was scared to go home, where I would be alone again. It wasn’t that, exactly.”

“What was it?”

“It wasn’t that I had become fearful of being alone. I had convinced myself that what I was going home to was a fight to the death against Billy-it was that specific-and I wasn’t ready. Do you see? I was easily good enough to not be afraid of living a normal life. I wasn’t good enough yet to go head-to-head against a man who wanted me dead, a convict who had killed somebody before. I told the instructor. A day later, she brought me in to speak with Michael Parish.”

“The one I met? The owner of the camp?”

“He’s more than that. Owning something is just money. It’s his, in a different way. The place is him. It’s a reflection of his ideas. All the people who work there look up to him and some of them seem to imitate him-his expressions, his mannerisms. He asked me to talk about what had been bothering me, to tell him everything. So I told him. I started to talk in brief, general terms, but the other instructor, whose name was Mary, kept prompting me. And I spilled all of it. He listened patiently and asked me all the right questions-the ones that convinced me that he cared about me, and was really hearing what I said-and I told him more. Finally, he said, ‘You seem convinced that at some point, you’re going to have to kill him.’ I said no, of course not. Then I said, ‘I hadn’t actually been thinking about it that way. I had only been learning to defend myself just in case. Shouldn’t everyone?’ All the time, he was watching me, not judging me or smiling or looking skeptical or anything, just waiting. And after a while, I said, ‘Well, yes. I suppose I really do think that at some point he is going to either try to get me himself or have one of his prison friends do it. What I’ve been doing here for the past six weeks is get myself ready to survive it. Now that I know more about what that means, I guess I would have to say yes, I have been preparing myself to kill him.’ ”

“And what did he say?”

“We had been in the main lodge, sitting on those hard, straight-backed wooden chairs like they have in some bars. That’s how he talks to you: sitting almost knee to knee in that empty room with nothing to look at but his eyes. What he did was kind of lean forward with his hands on his thighs and stand up. It brought his face close to mine, and in that second, he said, ‘Then let’s get it done.’ It was so quick, so quiet that I said, ‘What? I didn’t quite catch that.’ Then he called in Debbie, my martial arts instructor, and he said, “Tell Debbie everything about this man Billy-everything you know. If you need to go to your office to consult some file about him or something, bring her with you. Then come back. After we’ve got the information, it will take another week to prepare. Then we’ll take you back so you can kill him.’ ”

“Did you do it? Did it happen?”

She ignored the question, but he could tell that she was only delaying the answer. “The week was partly so they could follow him, watch him, figure out how and where to kill him. But it also gave them time to give me a few special lessons. They call going out to kill somebody a hunt. There’s a tracker to find and stalk the target, a scout to choose and secure the place, and a professional hunter to be with you and kill the target if you lose your nerve or make a mistake. I had to learn to work with them. And they wanted me to get used to what it looks like when anything the size of a man dies. They took me deer hunting out in the fields above the camp. The idea was to get me to shoot something that was alive, and see all the blood and suffering, and then I wouldn’t get all nervous later. He tries to get you to like the killing, so you’ll be good at it-have a dead aim. That’s what he calls it. We didn’t find a deer. After a couple of days of searching, we still didn’t find one. It had been a wet spring, and I guess there was plenty of food for them farther into the backcountry, so that’s where they were. I was relieved.”

“Did you kill Billy?”

Her voice went soft, almost a whisper. “Yes. I did.” She took a breath, and said, “Parish and Mary drove me to L.A. I was surprised to see where they had found him. It was a bowling alley. He worked there late at night, waxing the lanes after closing time. The place had a lighted sign that said MOONLIGHT BOWLING, MIDNIGHT TO 2 A.M. After that, it closed, and Billy went to work. It was really pretty easy. Debbie had been at Moonlight Bowling with some other people who worked for Parish. She went into the ladies’ room at one-thirty or so, and hid in a stall. Everybody else left, but she stayed until the place was all locked up, then came out, went to the door, and propped it open a crack. It was a set of glass doors, so we saw Billy when we arrived. He was waxing an alley with a polishing machine. He was looking up toward the pins and walking backward, so he wouldn’t leave footprints. He didn’t even see or hear us come in. The scout was the first in the door, and that was Mary. She held it open for me. The last was the pro hunter, and this time that was Parish. The two of them waited in that sunken area around the scoring table, and I stood up on the foul line. I waited until he was only about eight feet away. I could have shot him in the back of the head, but Parish and Mary and Debbie were there, so I did it the way they had taught me. First and second shots go into the torso where the heart and lungs are, and the third, after he’s down and incapacitated, can go to the head. You never leave until he’s positively dead. When he was, we walked back out of the bowling alley and got into the car to drive home. I didn’t feel bad about it until a couple of months later, after I had gotten over the fear and thought about it objectively. I had done something horrible to him, and because I had, I felt I had to kill him.”

“But that’s why you’re here,” said Mallon. “To do the same thing to me.”

“I know,” she moaned. “It’s the same thing again. Only I couldn’t help it, don’t you see? Parish would kill me if I didn’t. This is my fault. You’re my fault. I didn’t imagine that the woman who committed suicide had anything to do with the self-defense school. How could I? They didn’t have her real name then. So I encouraged you to get through your obsession, even wrote up a contract so you could hire Lydia Marks to help you. I put everyone else in danger-Parish, Mary, Debbie, the other instructors, the special customers Parish teaches to kill people-so how could I refuse to help them solve the problem? They would kill me. How could they let me refuse and live?”

“Good question,” said Mallon. “I guess they couldn’t.” He stood. “I’m sorry for you, and sorry for me. I’ve got to go now.”

“You’re not going to leave me?” she asked. “I told you the truth. You’ve got to let me go. You promised.”

“I promised,” Mallon said. “But I can’t let you go until this is over.”

She was appalled, desperate. “But without me, you won’t get through this. You don’t know enough. You’re not good enough. They’ll kill you. Now that they’ve tried, there’s no way they can ever stop hunting you. They’ll keep trying until it’s done. I could tell you things, recognize people you would never suspect were after you. I can get you away from it. That’s the only way. If you leave me and go out there alone, I’ll just die here, waiting for you to get back.”

“Maybe.” He stepped out the door and locked it behind him. He could hear her shouting, but just barely. Out here, the sound of the ocean was much louder, and even tonight’s gentle breeze made it hard to hear anything.