Dead Aim

CHAPTER 31

Mallon drove beside the ocean, heading back toward Santa Barbara. There was no question that the people Diane called the hunters and trackers and scouts would be trying to figure out where he and Diane had gotten to. Probably they had expected to hear from her by now. If they found the bodies he had left on that quiet road in Malibu, they would probably assume she was dead.

He was aware that he was going to have to do something quickly, or he was going to die. Diane had been right: there appeared to be a plentiful supply of people from that self-defense camp who had either been eager to join the hunt for him or been induced to join it to protect secrets. If their secrets were like Diane’s, they had little choice but to try to prevent him from drawing attention to the camp. He thought about the police.

Detective Berwell had been trying to trap him into saying something incriminating. The Santa Barbara police seemed to Mallon to have been more receptive to his theories, or anyway more sympathetic, than the Los Angeles police. At least Detective Fowler had seemed to be. Maybe with what Mallon knew now, Fowler would be able to do something. Mallon writhed in the seat to reach his wallet, found Fowler’s business card, picked up Diane’s telephone, and turned it on. Instantly the silence was shattered by the annoying musical ring. The little screen showed him which button to press to answer, but he did not press it. Instead, he turned off the phone for a few seconds, then turned it on again and quickly dialed Fowler’s number.

A male voice answered. “Police department.”

“Hello,” said Mallon. “My name is Robert Mallon. I need to reach Lieutenant Fowler right away. It’s an emergency.”

The cop’s voice was beginning to change from sleepy to irritated when he spoke. “I’m sorry, but Lieutenant Fowler works during the day. It’s now after one A.M. He’ll be here in about six hours, and I’m sure he’ll call you back. But if this really is an emergency, then somebody else can certainly help. Can you explain what the problem is?”

“You don’t know my name-Robert Mallon?” asked Mallon, incredulous. “I’m the man that somebody tried to kill on Cabrillo Beach.”

“Of course I know who you are,” said the cop. “It would be hard not to. If you’re in trouble again, tell me about it. Where are you?”

“I’m in a car, using a cell phone.”

“Are you in danger?”

“Yes, I am. They’ve tried twice more in Los Angeles.”

“Is someone after you now?”

“They’re searching for me,” he said. “They haven’t given up. But I can’t describe them yet, because I won’t know the next set until I see them come for me.”

“Mr. Mallon. Tell me exactly where you are.”

Mallon had a panicky feeling. He instinctively evaded the demand. “I’m on a cell phone. I can’t hear you very well.”

“Are you still armed? Do you have a gun?”

Mallon hesitated. He had never said he was armed. He said loudly, “I guess my battery’s gone. If you can still hear me, I’ll call you again from a regular phone later, when Lieutenant Fowler is in.” He pressed the power button to end the call. If the cop knew about the gun, he knew about Malibu. It had not sounded as though the cop had wanted to help. It sounded as though he wanted to get Mallon into custody.

Mallon was in trouble. He was driving the stolen car of a woman he had kidnapped. He was carrying three loaded guns-also stolen-and undoubtedly had powder residue on his hands from killing the men who had owned two of them. If he went to a police station anywhere, he was going into a cell. He would be in the newspapers, and the hunters would know exactly where he was. Even if the police released him on bail, the killers would be waiting for him. He had killed people. He had done it to stay alive, but at the moment he could hardly look less innocent. Tonight, he realized, the police were as dangerous to him as the hunters.

The term made him think about the people who were trying to kill him. The ones he had seen were spoiled rich people who were paying for the privilege of killing him for a thrill. But the others-Parish and his friends-were professionals who had made killing into a business. As he thought about them, he told himself it was because he was trying to decide what he would do about them, but he was not really considering anymore. He knew. He had to stop them from killing anyone else, and tonight was probably his last chance. He had to do it tonight.

He was calm, able to look at his own predicament from a distance. The facts that had been making him feel hopeless had not changed, but once he had gotten beyond hope, he could see other aspects of them. He was driving a stolen car, but it was Diane’s. It was a car the enemy probably knew. If they saw it coming, they would sense no threat.

Mallon drove on, watching the sights along the freeway to detect signs that the exit for Route 33 was coming. What he had wasn’t a plan. It was a reflex, a fighter’s simple physical movement to block an attacker by striking first, a lunge to rock him backward before he could straighten an arm into Mallon’s face. He was going to drive away from the ocean, northward past Ojai, and up into the hills to that camp. If there was any evidence to prove what these people had done, that was where it would be.

Mallon watched the rearview mirror for headlights, but he saw none after he had coasted off the freeway onto the exit ramp. He kept looking, because on a weeknight after one A.M., any other car on this stretch of road might be one of the hunters. There were no headlights coming toward him either, but the emptiness of the road ahead was little comfort.

The road meandered a bit as it came away from the coast above Ventura, and every time a new stretch presented itself to his sight he strained his eyes to see anything that might indicate someone was watching for him. He envisioned a car just off the highway, maybe parked on a narrow dirt road as though it belonged there, or shielded from view by bushes. If he had been running something like this camp, he would have defended it. After a time, he decided that he had not been thinking clearly. Ojai was still ahead. It was a good-sized town with plenty of traffic most hours of the day. If there was a sentinel somewhere, he would be on a smaller road somewhere north of the town.

Mallon came through Ojai at one-twenty A.M. He drove past the long, low row of stores along the main street, and reached the block with the overhanging roof and the tan fake adobe arches and pillars, still watching for a sign that anybody was awake and paying attention to him. The sight of the place brought back an old memory. During the brief period after the divorce, when he had discovered he was wealthier than he had imagined, he had considered Ojai as a place to live. He had driven along this street and liked the architecture. He had spent a day thinking about acquiring a block of businesses farther up the street and rebuilding them in the same Spanish-revival style, but his enthusiasm had faded with the sun. He’d had a quiet dinner in his hotel and admitted to himself that he could not go through with the project. It had seemed to him that going into another business was so unnecessary that it amounted to an absurdity, an indefensible vanity, like French aristocrats pretending to be shepherds and shepherdesses while real peasants starved.

Tonight those times seemed to Mallon to be distant, almost unimaginable, his concerns outgrown like the concerns of a child. Suddenly, he decided that he knew something more about Catherine Broward. He had never thought clearly about what happened when a person took the life of another human being. Now he knew, and he was beginning to understand why Catherine had been so determined to drown herself. Seeing what could be done to another person, the harm that needed to be done to a human body to kill it, was a minor revelation. The bigger revelation was that once a person had done that to someone, he was changed too.

Catherine must have felt different afterward. The knowledge, the memory of killing her boyfriend, had made her feel tarnished and diminished. She had wanted the feeling to end, but it didn’t end. That was why she had been so determined: she believed that if she lived another day or a decade, there would be no improvement. Mallon knew that he too had changed, but his change had been different, and it felt like a clarification of his vision. He did not feel regret, or mourn the loss of the men he had killed, or search for a way that he could have avoided it so he could accuse himself of not having tried hard enough. He hated them. He was relieved that they were dead, and that he was not. The reward of victory was being alive.

Mallon was already through Ojai, and the road to the north was narrower and darker. There were no cars now but his. He endured a long period when nothing looked familiar to him. The trees seemed thicker and taller than he remembered, the dark hills lay in new patterns. He wondered how he could have gotten onto the wrong road. But then he saw a configuration of rocks that he had seen when he’d come here with Lydia-just a flash in the headlights, but undeniably the same-and then the turnoff to the right that led eastward into the hills. He drove from there unerringly to the spot where the high chain-link fence around the self-defense camp began. He resisted the temptation to turn his headlights off. If anyone inside the camp was looking, a pair of headlights moving past on the road would probably cause no alarm, but a driver trying to keep his car from being seen would be worrisome. He kept going at a slow, constant speed, and continued far past the gate before he turned off the lights and let the car quietly roll to a stop on the layer of pine needles at the shoulder of the road.

He got out, walked to the fence, stared through it, and listened. He could just see the back of the long, low building where he and Lydia had gone to talk with Michael Parish. Diane had called it “the main lodge.” There were lights on, and now and then he saw something beyond the window shades that looked like movement. He was disappointed. He had felt confident that he would be able to find some piece of evidence in that building that connected Parish and his self-defense camp with at least one of the attacks on him. It had seemed likely that the staff would have retired to their quarters at this hour, leaving the building unoccupied.

He remembered the square blacktopped parking lot across the driveway from the building on the front side. He could see only part of it from here, but he could make out four or five cars, parked close to one another. Then he recognized one of them. It was the black Lexus that had blocked his way in the hotel parking garage, the one driven by the young man with the reddish hair. He could see no human shapes, hear no sound but the breeze in the upper boughs of the pine trees beyond the fence.

Mallon carefully arranged his weapons. He put the two identical Beretta Model 92 pistols he’d taken from the two men on the road into the side pockets of his jacket, where he could reach one easily with either hand but they did not restrain his movement. He considered taking Diane’s small pistol with him, but he admitted to himself that the two Berettas probably held more rounds than he would live to use. He hid hers under the passenger seat, then walked off to search for a place to climb the fence.

Mallon strode along the road for about three hundred yards, looking up along the top of the fence at the coiled razor wire, and down at the fence posts. He had worked construction sites where somebody had deemed it necessary that the usual chain-link fence be wired like that. Whenever it had been strung, he had insisted that the fence rental company handle it, instead of his crew. The wire was treacherous stuff that had a way of springing around whenever it was cut, and taking a gash out of anyone nearby.

The wire along this fence was strung in a way that compressed it tightly, more like the wire around a prison than a construction site. The chain-link mesh was pulled taut, so there were no spots along the bottom where a man could get a bit of slack and slip under, and the posts were set in concrete.

But Mallon knew something about this kind of fence that Parish probably didn’t know. Installing them was heavy, dull work that pinched fingers and dug gouges in flesh. It was work that the installation companies hired young, inexperienced laborers to do. A straw boss could go through, pound wooden stakes into the ground where he wanted posts, and then go away for a few hours while his crew dug postholes, mixed cement in small batches, and set posts. A day or two later, the crew could come through again, unrolling chain-link mesh along the line and connecting it to the posts. The work was hard and heavy. Mallon had no doubt that the posts near the front gate and the buildings were set in very deep, wide holes with plenty of cement. He could see that in the stretch he was walking now along the road, they were still pretty good. But the farther the fence got from the front gate, where the bosses and the customers were, the worse the work would be.

He reached the spot where the fence turned away from the road into the woods, and kept walking. When he was three hundred feet from the road, he knelt beside one of the posts and tested his theory. This one had been set in a hole that was only nine inches wide, which left room for only about three inches of cement around the three-inch post. He had been right. They’d had to dig through tree roots. They’d had to carry the bags of cement and buckets of water way out here through the brush to mix by hand. There didn’t even seem to be a decent path that could accommodate a wheelbarrow. As the day had worn on, and they’d gone deeper into the forest, where the bosses didn’t come very often, the laborers had used less cement, and less care.

Mallon walked along another hundred feet until he came to a post that looked a bit off plumb. He examined the base, and decided this was the one. He began to rock it back and forth, harder and harder, until he had it at a forty-five-degree angle. The shallow clump of concrete at the base extended only an inch or so from the pole. He went to his back on the bed of pine needles, lifted the chain-link mesh with both hands, and wriggled under, pushing with his feet. When he was on the other side, he pushed the post upright, stomped some of the loose earth around the concrete, and tried to memorize the way it looked so that he could find it again. He could tell that it was unlikely he would be able to pick it out in a hurry at night. The fence was a line of identical posts surrounded by nearly identical pine trees. He stepped to one of the trees, picked a broken bough off the ground that had already turned brown, then wove it in and out of the links.

He stepped back to be sure he could recognize it, then turned and moved off into the fenced-in land. He was still surrounded by trees, but he could tell that, somewhere off to his left, the land rose gradually to a ridge. He headed in that direction because he guessed that might offer him the safest way of observing the complex of buildings. The lights from the area near the gate and the driveway would not reach up there.

When Mallon had climbed for ten or fifteen minutes up the wooded slope, he came out into a field that led onto the ridge. He made out in the moonlight that it was only the first of at least three rows of foothills that stretched into the backcountry toward a high mountain range, without any glow of electric lights, or any lighter-colored gashes for roads. Just below the ridge where he stood were a couple of buildings. One was the size of a two-car garage, and the other was cabin-sized, both in the same plain style of rustic architecture as the buildings he had seen on his visit with Lydia.

He turned around to look down toward the buildings near the gate. There the slope was clear of trees and brush, like a field of clover and alfalfa. He could make out the main lodge, and now he could see all of the parking lot across the driveway. He counted six cars. He tried to decide what that meant. One would belong to Michael Parish, the man he and Lydia had spoken to. Diane had mentioned two women instructors and a man, which meant three more cars. That left only the Lexus the red-haired man had driven, and one other.

There was a second big building, this one with a high roof, like a barn. It had only high windows and skylights, but it was dark, so Mallon could not tell what was inside. He guessed it must be the gym that he’d heard Parish mention on his first visit, the place where they offered instruction in hand-to-hand fighting. Scattered around on the outskirts were six low buildings that he identified as barracks. Each had three doors on each side, so probably they were each divided into six private rooms with separate entrances. There was no sure way for him to tell how many of them were occupied, but from the six cars, he had to assume that at least two barracks were being used.

It was a difficult place for an intruder, he decided. The front gate, the parking lot, and the area around the main offices were bathed in light, even at this hour. The driveway, which he could now see deserved to be called a road, was lighted at intervals all the way to the big building he had identified as a gym. The living quarters were around the complex on the outer fringes, where it was darker and quieter. Any or all of them might be occupied by people who would hear a person walking by outside. The site did not offer any obvious places for someone like Mallon to enter and be sure of going unnoticed.

Mallon turned and looked away from the camp. Before he went down there, he would need to get a closer look at the buildings separated from the main complex. He had to be sure they weren’t occupied before he turned his back on them.

Mallon kept to the shadowy places where groves of trees had been spared. He made his way to the more distant of the two buildings first. It was a cabin. He moved cautiously along the wall, examining it as carefully as he could. The siding consisted of rough slats nailed vertically to the frame of two-by-fours at top and bottom to cover plywood sheets, then painted a light olive to blend into the landscape.

Mallon moved cautiously to the window on a narrow end of the building and looked inside. In the moonlight that shone through the windows he could see one room with three sets of empty bunk beds, a table, and six chairs. There was a bathroom, which was open. He could see three kerosene lanterns: one in the center of the table, and two hanging from wrought-iron supports high on the walls. The cabin looked primitive. Maybe it was an extra place to accommodate guests who wanted the illusion of roughing it, or maybe its purpose was isolation. It didn’t matter. There was nobody here now.

Mallon took off his jacket and pressed it against a windowpane near the latch to muffle the sound while he broke the glass with the butt of one of his pistols. Then he raised the window and climbed inside. He collected a lantern and a box of matches from the table, and went outside.

The walk to the second building was at least two hundred yards. Beside it was a wooden tower that he had mistaken for a big tree from a distance in the dark. It was on a ridge overlooking a dry riverbed that had been outfitted as a firing range. There were barrows of earth bulldozed up some distance away, where he could just make out a row of posts with white squares that were probably targets on them, and at one side, a wind sock. He knew what that was for. When he had been a boy shooting on the family farm, he had put one up himself, because the targets were far enough away so that on some days it had been necessary to adjust for the wind.

He stepped up to the garage-like building and examined it. The walls were painted the same color as the others, but now he could see that they were made of cinder blocks. He had a suspicion, a hope that he was right about what this building might be. He quickly walked around the building, looking for windows. The fact that there were none raised his hopes higher. When he reached the door and touched it, he was almost sure: the door was steel. This was the logical place to store the things they needed for the range: paper targets, the machinery for the pop-up combat targets, bench rests, spotting scopes. But maybe, just maybe, there would be other things inside that he could use.

Mallon examined the door closely. It opened inward so the hinges were not accessible, and there were three dead bolts set about a foot apart, so the door would be impossible for one man to batter in. The only way he could imagine opening it was with a cutting torch or a concrete saw. The cinder-block-and-mortar walls were impervious to anything he could do without tools.

He looked up and judged the distance between the spotting tower and the building. It was about eight feet, but the tower was a bit higher than the building’s roof. He climbed the ladder to the tower platform and looked again. It seemed a bit farther than it had from the ground, but he reminded himself that he had made his judgment before fear had added a few feet. He climbed up to the rail, bending to stay under the roof of the tower, and held on to one of its supports. He took a breath, and jumped.

He hit the roof of the building about halfway up, then dug hard with his toes and scrambled with his hands to keep from sliding off. After a moment he was able to stop himself, then lie on his belly with his toes holding him there. He took out his pocketknife.

Amateurs who wanted to make a building secure often overlooked a single design problem, and he was lying on it now. A composition shingle roof was designed to keep out the rain, not intruders. He used his knife to help him pry up short roofing nails so he could pull shingles from the roof. He went at it patiently, tugging off shingles and leaving the tarpaper beneath until he could feel the long line where two sheets of plywood met. He stripped the tarpaper off to expose the nails.

He dug into the wood around each of the nail heads with a cutting blade, just deep enough to get a purchase with the bottle-opener blade, then pry the nail up a bit. He went to his knees, put both hands under the sheet, and lifted. There was a creak, and the sheet of plywood came up. It acted as a lever to bend and partially extract the nails on the other edge, so he didn’t need to remove them. He held the sheet up like an open door and looked down into the building. It was too dark to see anything in the windowless space below.

Mallon took out the box of matches he had taken from the other building, struck one, and lowered it into the space as far as his arm would reach. The bare concrete floor was about twelve feet below him. He was fairly confident that he could drop straight down and not hurt himself, but even more certain that he would not be able to get back out. The match burned close to his fingers. He turned its head upward so that it would not burn him, then in a few seconds had to let it drop. Just before it went out, he saw the distinctive color of fresh pine board.

He lit a second match and stared at the spot to be sure he had not imagined it. He dropped that match too, lowered himself into the hole in the roof until he was hanging by both hands from the lowest edge, then let go. He fell longer than he had expected to, but managed to land on his toes, bend his knees, and fall sideways to break the impact.

Mallon collected himself, stood, and lit a third match. There was another lantern on the shelf in front of him, so he lifted the chimney, lit it, and blew out his match. He raised the lantern and looked around him. First he studied the inner side of the door: the dead bolts required a key.

Shelves along the near wall held the things he had expected to see: paper targets of various sizes with black bull’s-eyes, a pile of cutouts in human shape that had been shot through many times and patched and painted, more glue and patches, a few spotting scopes and binoculars in leather cases, a bore-sighting kit, a whole shelf of cleaning kits with rods, rags, solvent, and gun oil. He moved closer to the shelf that held the binoculars. There was one set that seemed to have a single eyepiece, but not like a spotting scope. He took it off the hook where it hung, and removed the leather case. It was a night-vision scope. He turned it on and looked through the eyepiece, but it didn’t work, so he opened the battery compartment and saw that the batteries had been removed. After a short search of the shelves, he found some batteries, inserted them, and tried the scope again. The eyepiece shone with a bright green glow. He hung the scope around his neck and held the lantern up toward the opposite wall.

In the light he saw a wooden rack that held five bolt-action hunting rifles. He came closer. They looked like the Remington Model 70 rifles he and his father had used at home when he’d been a boy, but these had polymer stocks and three-to-nine-power scopes attached. When he examined the receiver of the nearest one, it said MODEL 710. They must be what the shooting instructors used to teach the clients marksmanship. He looked to his right along a long, narrow workbench. There were two boxes of. 30-06 ammunition. He nodded to himself as he looked around him at his discoveries. The room was an arsenal, a workshop, a storehouse. But it contained nothing that would convict anybody of anything.

He thought about the people behind the lighted windows in the building on the other side of the hill. They had corrupted and destroyed Catherine and Diane. They had murdered Lydia. They had trained killers, then sent them after Mallon too. They were staying up late tonight, undoubtedly discussing other ways of isolating Robert Mallon far from here and killing him cleverly and entertainingly. After they finished with Mallon, they would train other killers to go after other victims. He could not let them do that. He had to keep looking.