Double Tap

PROLOGUE

Mist off the ocean was already beginning to drift over the pavement as he cruised along the beach in the rented Chevy. The house stood out like a gem, the last piece of private real estate before the public steps leading down to the beach. With chocolate-brown siding and white trim, the house sported rustic gables going in every direction beneath a river rock chimney.

He kept driving as he looked back in the mirror and caught a glimpse of the sandstone shelf behind the houses and the narrow beach now partially covered by the tide. White-frothed waves rolled up on the sand. In a few hours the incoming tide would devour what was left of the beach and waves would crash on the sandstone, sending spray onto the seawall that protected the estate’s rear patio.

The neighborhood was dominated by modern, upscale apartment buildings and small, stylish condos overlooking the Pacific. Oceanfront property was becoming far too valuable for private homes. The only single-family dwellings with ocean access appeared to be the two large homes at the end of the street just adjacent to the small public beach.

He was already familiar with the neighborhood, the daily routine, people walking their dogs, and surfers on the beach.

The house itself was larger than it looked. Set back from the street behind a set of double iron gates, the scale was made to appear diminutive by the use of small shingle siding and undersized dormered gables on the street façade. What looked like a story and a half in front became a full two stories on the ocean side. There, large windows on the second story maximized the ocean views. Beneath these, about thirty to forty feet back, was the stone-and-concrete seawall with two arched wooden doors leading up to an elevated patio overlooking the blue Pacific.

The house had a security system, but it was never used unless the occupant was leaving town for an extended period.

He rounded the block for the second time and checked for signs that might restrict parking. He saw none. The last thing he needed was a parking ticket that would document his presence in the neighborhood. Cops would check for this: an indication of any strange cars parked in the neighborhood. Once they had the license number, they would trace the vehicle to the rental agency and from there they would find his name. It was why he didn’t use his own car. The plates made it too recognizable.

He parked two blocks to the north, grabbed a light canvas jacket off the backseat, locked the car, and walked back toward the house on the beach. He stopped on the sidewalk near the steps as if to admire the ocean view while he slipped the jacket on and rolled the high collar up to cover his neck and the side of his face.

Below he could see the cove and the small public beach. From this angle he had a clear view to the south along the sandstone shelf behind the houses. It was deserted for as far as he could see. He had checked for security cameras. It was a risk. Some of the new models were the size of a thimble, hard to see unless you knew where to look, and wireless, so that there was little or no installation. A security company could show up and stuff one in a crevice between two boards in the side of the house and you’d never know it. There was one over the front porch, but nothing at the back of the house that he knew about. His eyes scanned for telephone poles one last time. The utilities along the waterfront appeared to be buried underground. There were occasional light standards every few hundred feet, but these contained only the ubiquitous vapor lamps for street lighting. If La Jolla had installed police security cameras, he was confident they had confined it to the downtown area and had skipped this neighborhood.

He walked partway down the stairs toward the beach, then stepped over the low concrete curb that separated them from the sandstone shelf. He strolled out onto the rocks. The breeze off the ocean buffeted his light jacket. But the collar wasn’t turned up for the wind. He used it to shield his profile from the wandering gaze of neighbors who might pass by a window at the wrong moment, or the prying eyes of some self-appointed general of the neighborhood watch, some old fart with nothing better to do than bend his venetian blinds every time a car door slammed in the street.

As he stood there surveying the back of the house, he heard the click of hard heels on concrete coming toward him. Out of the corner of one eye he glimpsed an old gent in white boating slacks and a blue blazer. He thought he saw a straw hat and a walking cane, but he couldn’t be sure. Whoever it was was ambling at a good clip along the sidewalk slightly above him.

The man in the canvas jacket didn’t turn or look up. Years of experience told him to avoid eye contact. Human sensory perception is less likely to register anything in the brain’s memory cells if what a person sees is inanimate. People who stay still become just another motionless object, like a rock or a bush out of bloom, something the untrained mind fails to record. He’d done enough recon and surveillance and walked into enough dangerous places to know this. Only another professional would notice anything about him, and remember it.

A lone motionless figure, he stood facing the ocean with his back to the sidewalk until the sound of the footsteps was well past. Then he took a quick glimpse to his left and watched as the old man continued on up the street and finally disappeared from view around a curve.

He took a deep breath, then let it out. If the man had stopped and asked for the time, or even if he had only come down the steps and stopped for a moment to glance at him on his way to the beach, it would have been over. He couldn’t take the chance. He would have had to leave, back to square one, two weeks of careful planning down the drain. He couldn’t be sure how much time he had before she would act. She was busy, a million projects at the office. She might get distracted. Then again, she might pull it from a pile on her desk tomorrow and go to work on it. He had set certain parameters of safety before he even started. It was why so many people got nailed. They were careless.

His heart pounded as he watched the ocean. A half dozen surfers sat astride their boards two hundred yards out, riding over the crests of approaching waves and into the trailing troughs. He was confident that they were too far away to make out human features or to identify a lone figure walking on the rocks behind the houses. The beach was not popular with swimmers. The water was too rough. The waves on an incoming tide would grind a swimmer against the solid sandstone that formed sharp ledges along the shore.

The late-afternoon light had reached that visual netherworld between shadows and vapor. Soon the streetlights would flicker on. He strolled over the rocks, at one point leaping across a craggy divide where foaming surf washed seaweed into a swale on the beach below. He strolled along the uneven surface, hands in his pants pockets, until he reached a point over the water where the rocks became slick with moisture from the fractured waves. Then slowly he turned until his back was to the ocean. He glanced up at the stone seawall topped by its white picket fence and the looming brown walls and large windows behind it.

The house looked deserted. There was no longer any live-in security-that he knew. It was made-to-order.

The only thing left was to figure some way to get rid of the maid, and so he did. Early one afternoon he called the house, knowing that the owner would be at the office. Only the maid would be there. He identified himself, using a false name, and said he was calling from the Isotenics security department. He explained that since security was no longer providing protection at the residence, they had been ordered to obtain information regarding any employees who worked there or who had keys to the house. He then proceeded to ask a number of questions regarding references, where the maid had worked previously, where she had been born, a list of residences where she had lived or worked for the five years immediately preceding her employment in the house. The poor woman tripped over a number of these, hemming and hawing, making it clear by her vague responses that she couldn’t answer many of them, at least not truthfully.

He finally administered the coup de grâce. He asked for her Social Security number and date of birth and told her it was just for their records so they could run a background check for security. He couldn’t be sure from the silence on the other end of the phone but he figured she must have shit a brick, knowing that if they ran this information through a government computer they would discover that she was in the country illegally. Knock on any dozen doors in posh areas of Southern California and chances are that if a maid answers she will be speaking English, if at all, with a southern accent, and it won’t be from Georgia.

Two days later, in the middle of the night, Madelyn Chapman’s Mexican maid grabbed her few belongings, stuffed them into a small suitcase, and disappeared. She didn’t even bother to ask for her final paycheck. The new replacement worked for a large domestic-services firm and worked a normal shift, eight hours. She always left the house by four-thirty. He had watched her today as she went out the front door, turning her key in the dead bolt to lock it from the outside.

He turned and looked out toward the ocean again. The surfers had taken no notice. Their attention was riveted on the burgeoning set of cresting combers rolling in behind them.

He reached into his jacket pocket, plucked out the brown leather driving gloves, and slipped them on his hands as he walked. He glanced quickly up at the windows of the two adjacent buildings. The house on the left was dark. The larger apartment building to the right was angled back from the beach and followed the natural curve of shore so that once he’d gone ten paces, no one looking from the apartment’s upper windows could see him.

Within seconds he reached the cover of the seawall and one of the arched doors leading up to the patio above. The door itself was made with heavy planks of wood with a garden latch on the inside for a lock. He slipped the thin blade of a Swiss army knife into the crack between the door and its frame and lifted the latch. In three seconds he was inside with the garden door closed behind him.

He had a set of picks for the lock on the back door but preferred not to use them because they would leave scratch marks, tool impressions, one more piece of evidence that he didn’t need to leave behind. It took less than a minute to find what he was looking for: a ground-floor window that wasn’t latched. It was not a high-crime neighborhood, as the lackadaisical habits of many of the residents showed.

Within seconds he popped the screen, slid the lower half of the window up, and nimbly slipped inside the house. He closed the window but left the screen propped against a small bush outside. There was still enough light from outside so that he didn’t need to use the penlight in his pocket. He found himself in one of the lower level guest bedrooms. In the corner on one wall, near the ceiling, was a small white sphere of plastic. It looked like an oversized egg with a flat side against the wall. On the side facing out was a recessed area, curved and white, perhaps an inch in length, aimed out at the room. It was a motion detector. His eyes were riveted on the tiny light under the recessed area as he froze stone still and counted silently in his head. When he reached thirty, the light still hadn’t flashed. The system was off.

He took a deep breath and started looking around the room. It had three doors, one leading to the closet, another to a bathroom. This was open. He could see the claw-foot tub inside.

He moved to the third door, which was closed, pressed his ear against the wood, and listened for a moment. Then he turned the knob and let it open just a crack as he peered into the hallway. He listened for sounds of movement upstairs, the creaking of floorboards, footfalls, the sounds of a television. He heard nothing except the hiss of conditioned air flowing from the register high on the wall behind him.

He slipped his shoes off and held them in one hand, then stepped silently into the hallway. Walking on the tile floor in stocking feet, he made no sound as he moved past two closed doors and entered the kitchen.

The place looked like the inside of a spaceship: curving stainless-steel appliances, a refrigerator, a freezer, and a sleek square commercial cooker with a gleaming copper hood. He allowed the gloved finger of one hand to brush over the maker’s name on the front of the stove as he passed by: the label read Morice.

A short hallway led past the pantry to the three-car garage. There was only one car inside, a late-model Mercedes.

He went back into the house. In the other direction were the living room and a large formal dining area. An equally spacious elliptical entry was graced by an intricately carved oval table of dark hardwood, something from the primordial rain forests of Africa or South America. It was laid over with a thick piece of glass, smooth and clear, not a single fingerprint or smudge on it. A staircase curved around the walls of the entry leading up to the second story. Under the stairs was a curving arc of display cases, each framed by a glass door and a cylinder lock, the kind you would find in a public museum housing rare artifacts. He assumed that just such pricey items were inside: shelves filled with art glass reached from floor to ceiling, ending as the stairs dropped down below head height. The shelves, though built-in, had the look of something that was added-not part of the architect’s original vision but functional for the owner.

He set his shoes down on the carpeted floor by the foot of the stairs. He couldn’t be sure if there were sections of hardwood or tile upstairs, and until he was certain the house was empty, it was best not to make a sound.

As he passed through the entry, he took care not to allow himself to be captured by the lens of the security camera outside. It was mounted on the ceiling of the porch and aimed back at the double front doors, each of which had a fan-shaped window at the top.

He hugged the doors, stooping slightly to stay under the windows, and slipped through the entry. He found himself in another large entertaining area with a conversation pit and fireplace. There were more items of glass art here, on tables and adorning shelves. Beyond this was a still larger room, this one with mirrors on two walls. It was filled with exercise equipment: two stationary bikes, a treadmill, a weight machine, two different types of ellipticals, a StairMaster and one of those multistations for working every muscle group in the body. These were devices that until now he’d seen only in commercial fitness clubs. Taped to the mirror on the wall was a business card with the phone number and name of a professional trainer. He began to worry. This was something new, unexpected. What other changes might have been made? What if the owner or some later hired help had gone through the drawers upstairs and cleaned them out?

He checked his watch, then moved quickly back toward the entry. Something caught his attention: a noise from the garage. He stood still and listened. It was the hum of an electric motor. His heart skipped a beat. Could it be the garage door going up? He listened, his eyes quickly scanning the room for the nearest register. It was hissing air again. The noise continued. He counted silently in his head. It didn’t stop. The noise was the motor from the forced-air system, the air conditioner.

He took a deep breath, then quickly headed up the curving staircase two steps at a time to the second floor. At the top was a sizable landing maybe thirty feet square. It was enclosed on two sides by large lighted display cases showcasing art glass that, by their shapes and colors, made it clear they were not functional objects.

He thought he heard something and glanced over the balcony to the formal entry and the big black table downstairs. He listened for a second. He was getting jumpy. His ears were playing tricks. The landing was carpeted in a sea of deep wool pile that continued down the wide hallway in both directions off the landing.

He headed toward the guest suite at the end of the hall on his left. When he got there he listened at the closed door for a moment, then quietly opened it. A large fireplace with a decorative convex mirror over the mantel gave him a fish-eye view of the entire room, the king-size bed with its neatly made-up comforter, bed skirt, and sham of heavy tapestry. The room had its own bath. Through its open door, light streamed in through an outside window.

He stepped into the room and closed the door. It was spacious, decorated with a masculine touch, all clean lines and dark colors.

He proceeded to the tall dresser at the far side of the room, opened the second drawer, and swept his gloved right hand under a heavy quilt blanket until he felt something hard and heavy. Grasping the handle, he pulled it from under the bulkier cloth: it was a sand-camouflage canvas bag about twenty inches square, zippered on three sides.

Closing the drawer, he put the bag on top of the dresser, unzipped it, and flipped back the top before feeling its weight. A flash of blue metal clattered across the polished wooden surface, hit the wall behind the dresser, and caromed onto the carpeted floor with a muffled thud.

He stood motionless, sucking air, looking idly at the long scratch in the dark mahogany surface of the dresser and the nicked wall behind it.

He listened for any sound of movement in the house, waiting for what seemed an eternity. Sweat ran down his forehead and along the bridge of his nose. It burned in his right eye as he tuned every auditory nerve in his head to troll the distant reaches of the house, sending out waves of anxiety like sonar, listening for any sound that might bounce back.

Nothing! Even the air conditioner with its telltale hiss from the room’s louvered registers seemed to have cycled off.

Finally he moved, stooped, and picked up the pistol’s loaded metal clip from the floor, one of two fitted into pockets in the flipped-open top of the gun case. The loaded clip weighed nearly a pound.

He slapped the metal against the open palm of his other hand, seating the loaded rounds properly against the magazine’s rear wall. Then he turned his attention back to the bag on top of the dresser. Held in place in the bottom by a thick Velcro strap was a heavy-framed blue metal semiautomatic pistol.

The letters on the side of the slide read: USSOCOM. The gun was made in Germany by Heckler amp; Koch and came in only one caliber, 45 auto.

He had brought his own rounds, just six loose ones in the pocket of his jacket, in case he needed them. Store-bought, a common manufacture, so that they would be virtually impossible to trace. As it turned out, he wouldn’t need them, not with the two fully loaded clips included in the bag.

Inside he also found the dark metal tube.

He pulled the Velcro tab open and carefully picked up the pistol. It was accurized, a threaded muzzle on the barrel-special bushings, adjustable trigger, precision springs, a rail slide for the special sight also in the bag, and a chromed barrel-the whole enchilada in a package you could slip into a small backpack.

He slid the gun’s sight along the rail until it was seated in the proper position, then locked it in place using the small Allen wrench included in the bag to tighten the set screw. He threaded the silencer over the exposed tip of the barrel, then checked the loaded clip that had fallen on the floor one more time.

It was then that he noticed the strange shape and tint of the bullet tip of the top round. It wasn’t lead or copper but something else. He tried to scratch it first with his fingernail, then with the sharp edge of the Allen wrench, but neither made an impression. A highly sophisticated handgun with a railed sight and a silencer. He thought for a moment. Then instinctively he knew what the space-age bullet was and what it was designed to do. Smiling to himself at the brainteaser he would be delivering to the cops, he ejected the top round from the clip and replaced it with one of his own soft lead-tipped bullets from the loose rounds he’d brought with him in his pocket.

He was about to slide the loaded clip into the handle when he looked down and suddenly realized he’d forgotten something. The disquieting thought didn’t have time to even settle in his brain when he heard the noise, a kind of metal clang followed by the hum of an electric motor, this time not in the house but outside. The mechanized iron gates at the driveway out in front were opening.