Fidelity

20

Jerry Hobart got into his car, took out his pistol, checked the load and the safety, then slipped it into his jacket pocket. It was after midnight again, and he could go back to searching for the missing information. He was impatient to find it, but he knew he had to use this opportunity to spring the traps first and see who was watching them.

He drove to Van Nuys and turned toward the building where Kramer Investigations had its office. He knew it would be foolish to go inside right now, but he wanted to see who was waiting for him to try. At night he could make it difficult for anyone to see him well enough to remember him, but he might be able to identify some of the people who wanted to cause him trouble.

He drove to the neighborhood, parked on a street three blocks away, and walked toward the office building. He approached from the side where he had seen the movie theater from the roof of the building. As soon as he was on the street outside the theater, he pretended to be waiting for someone while he studied the office building. He saw no lighted windows in the Kramer Investigations office, or in any of the windows near it. He surveyed the parking lots and the curbs nearby. There were no cars of the models that the police used as unmarked vehicles, and no windowless vans. He saw no men loitering in the area, and no signs that anyone was watching the office from a building in the vicinity. He abandoned the safety of the theater entrance and walked closer to the office building.

He was trying to make himself a bit more obvious, to see if he could draw any watchers to move out of position to new spots where they could control him. He walked purposefully in the general direction of the building, but he could detect no movement. He walked past the front entrance, kept going to the end of the block, and turned left, away from the office building. As he walked along the side street, he looked behind him occasionally to see if anyone had followed.

Hobart saw nothing. As he walked the next two blocks, he kept up his vigilance, but still could not see any indication that the area was under surveillance. He tried to evaluate his visit to the building. It could be good news. If the police didn’t see any reason to watch the office, then maybe they were not taking his breakin seriously.

Of course, the police didn’t have to be sitting in the office all night with their feet on the desks to watch it. They could have a webcam set up on one of the computers in there and watch it from a computer in the nearest station. As he walked away from the building, he decided that the problem was complicated enough so he could never eliminate the possibility that the office was a trap. Even though he could see nothing out of place, he had an instinctive feeling that something was wrong.

Hobart got into his car and drove toward the Kramer house. When he reached the right street, he repeated the steps he always followed to avoid an ambush. First he drove past the house to see if it appeared inhabited, then drove on, looking for occupants in every vehicle parked within view. Then he widened his search for three blocks in every direction to find a small truck or a van that could contain surveillance equipment. All along his route he looked at the windows of buildings that had an unobstructed view of the Kramer house.

Hobart spent a half hour at his search. If there were people watching the Kramer house tonight, then they were very good at it, and very patient. He could detect nothing on his second time past the house that indicated it might be occupied or under surveillance. If there were cops nearby, then they had done a spectacular job of hiding. Cops always brought chase cars in a situation like this. It did them little good to see some guy in the dark trying to commit a crime if they let him drive off afterward. They always had a couple of big plain cars nearby. They couldn’t bear to go without them.

Then it occurred to Hobart that the chase car could be very close without being visible. The garage door at the Kramer house was shut. If the cops were in the house, the car could be in the garage, all ready to go after him if he ran, or to transport him in handcuffs if he couldn’t.

This time Hobart parked his car on a dark street three blocks from the Kramer house. He didn’t want to have anyone look out a window and notice that the car parked there the night when he had been in the Kramer house was here again. But in Los Angeles, people didn’t know what went on three blocks away. As he got out of his car, he caught a glimpse of a low shadow moving up a driveway to the back of a house: A foraging coyote had waited to be sure of his intentions.

Hobart respected coyotes. When he was young, he used to see them in the desert if he stayed out alone after full darkness set in. They were always aware of him before they showed themselves, always sure of the limits of his capabilities. They stayed just far enough away so he couldn’t harm them if he wanted to. He would see one walking beside the road, a skinny canine with pointy ears and muzzle, then trotting across the pavement to get from wherever it had spent the day to a different area that didn’t carry the scent of coyote.

Now Hobart’s business involved prowling the city late at night trying to find a way into a building to get at somebody inside. While he was out, he often came across coyotes. They were in the city doing what Hobart was doing: foraging for a way to stay alive. They had thrived in the city. They traveled from one place to another by trotting along the empty concrete riverbeds that ran from the Santa Monica Mountains along the north rim of the valley all the way to the ocean. They slipped between the iron bars of fences to drink from swimming pools. He often met them as they scavenged in alleys among open Dumpsters and garbage cans. Now and then he would see one trotting along a suburban sidewalk with a dead cat in its mouth.

They always detected danger, and always appraised it accurately. They didn’t run from a man on foot until he was less than forty feet away. If one of them was going up a street at his characteristic tireless trot and a car appeared suddenly with its size and noise and blinding headlights and speed, the coyote would merely divert his course up over the curb and onto a lawn, where he would wait for the car to pass. The coyote knew that no matter how nightmarish the car was, it wasn’t able to jump off the pavement and chase him up the lawn and around the house.

People had been poisoning and trapping coyotes for two hundred years, but there were more coyotes than ever. A coyote would approach the bait and sniff around it, and it would know. A coyote seemed to smell not just the food, but the small quantity of extra chemical that didn’t belong, and something else, too. Maybe it was only that the smell of human beings was stronger than it ought to be near a day-old chunk of meat. But maybe what the coyote smelled was the malice, some ingredient in the mixture of smells that revealed the excitement of the trapper. It could be the minuscule shot of adrenaline that made it into the sweat on the trapper’s hands while he was thinking about how clever he was and imagining the death of the coyote. Even though the coyote was hungry, his ribs visible through the mangy fur along his sides, he would nose the bait and move on. He didn’t let his optimism tell him that everything must be safe just because he couldn’t see anyone watching him.

Hobart approached the Kramer house through the neighbor’s back yard. He moved to the back wall and sat down quietly on a plastic lawn chair near the pool. He remained there for a time, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood. Entering a neighborhood meant crossing invisible lines of force, stepping on the territories of various dogs, cats, and other animals, making tiny noises that disturbed people’s sleep and violated the tranquillity of the place. It was necessary to remain still and let any ripples he had stirred up settle and leave the surface smooth again.

People and animals had a sense of duration, a feeling for how long things took. When he had waited much longer than any intruder would, he stood and quietly climbed the cinder-block wall into the Kramer yard. He crouched at the corner of the yard, with the thick foliage at his back so he didn’t stand out, and stared in the windows of the house, looking for signs that it was occupied. There were no windows that were open, no lights that he could see in any room.

It was past one o’clock, but anyone who was waiting in the house would still be fairly alert. There might be a radio on to keep them awake, or they might be walking from place to place to look out various doors and windows to spot him. Hobart saw no signs, but he waited ten more minutes in his corner before he put on his ski mask and gloves and approached the back of the house.

He moved along the windows, peering in at different angles to try to pick out a light, and then searching for objects that had not been in the living room on his last visit-a coat or a magazine or a coffee cup-but he saw none of those things. He moved from the big windows to the garage, and looked in the window. Emily Kramer’s car was still inside, but that meant nothing except that she had not driven herself when she had left. No cop would use it as a chase car. He moved back along the wall to the living room again, trying to decide.

Emily Kramer was not here, and that was as he had expected. He had intended to terrify her on his first visit, and he had never doubted that he would succeed. But he wasn’t sure how to interpret the apparent absence of other people. Could the police have listened to Emily Kramer’s story and not known that Hobart would come back? He had told her what he had come for, and she had seen him leave without it. The cops should be in this house waiting for him. He thought of electronic surveillance again. They could be keeping watch on both the office and the house from somewhere else.

Hobart moved to the side of the house and looked up, traced the power line from the pole at the street to the corner of the house, and moved toward it until he found the meter and the circuit box beside it. He moved his face close to the meter and saw the wheel inside turning. Power was being used, but the wheel was turning very slowly. It was the sort of power that ran the refrigerator and a few electric clocks.

Hobart looked around and chose a spot in the back corner of the yard where there were two trees with thick trunks that appeared to rise from a single spot. He flipped the main switch to turn off the electricity. The click was loud in the silence, and the sound made him move more quickly to the hiding place he had chosen. He stood behind the forked trunks, rested his pistol arm on the nub of a pruned branch, and waited. From here he could see through the rear windows into the living room, and he could see the circuit box. If someone was here, Hobart would probably see him either coming to find out which of the circuit breakers was flipped, or sweeping the back yard with a flashlight.

He waited fifteen minutes. Then he moved to the sliding door where he had entered the house the previous night. He could see the residue of the police technicians’ fingerprint dust all over the area near the lock. Nobody had made any attempt to clean it, or their wipes and smudges would have shown up, too. Hobart used his knife to push up the door latch, then closed the blade and put it away while he watched to see if any of the shadows in the house changed shape. He slid the door open a few inches and listened. There were no footsteps, no creaking floorboards. He entered.

Hobart sidestepped away from the sliding door so his back was to a solid wall and his silhouette would not stand out. There were still no sounds, no lights. He slid the door shut.

If there were surveillance cameras or similar devices in the house, they would be run off the house current, so he was confident he had killed them. He was in, and he was alone. Now he could begin his search. He had already formed a mental map of the house on his first visit. People usually hid things like papers and tapes in places where they would be out of sight, but where they could still reach them in a hurry. They didn’t want them in spots where a routine cleanup would uncover them, or a burglar would know something valuable was hidden-like a wall safe.

Phil Kramer had been devious. He had not been the sort of man who would put papers in a bank safe-deposit box and have to wait for business hours to retrieve them. He was the sort of man who would put papers in with other papers, or put tapes with other tapes, and Hobart already had a theory about where that might be. There was a hall that ran between the living room and the kitchen and then picked up past the kitchen, and led to a room. It must have been a maid’s room at one time, but now it was a den or office. He stepped to the hallway.

“Hold it!”

Hobart spun, dropped to a squat and fired in the general direction of the deep male voice. He didn’t pause, but sprang, launching himself in the direction of the sliding windows in the living room. He knew he couldn’t make it to the one he had unlocked, so he dashed for the other one. As he ran, he held his pistol in front of him and fired through the glass as quickly as he could, spreading his shots over the large pane and shattering it. He managed to get off six shots, crossed his forearms in front of his face and hurled himself through the curtain of still-falling shards.

In that instant, he was aware of shots behind him, but he knew that his best chance was to keep moving. He sprinted to the back of the yard, hauled himself to the top of the wall, and rolled over it just as somebody found the circuit box and a bright light came on, transforming the backyard of the Kramer house into a white glare.

Hobart dashed for the next street, ran across it and up the driveway of the house on the far side. He saw a wooden gate between the two houses, reached over the top to feel for a latch and release it, and ran between the two houses to the next yard. This time there was a chain-link fence with thick shrubbery growing on both sides of it, but he clambered over it to the sound of ringing clinks and breaking branches, and kept running.

He made it to the street where his rental car was parked. He was winded now, but he sprinted up the sidewalk to the car. As he got into the driver’s seat, he heard the growl of an engine. A car was accelerating somewhere nearby, as though it were driving up and down the streets he had just crossed.

Jerry Hobart had been hunted before. He knew he couldn’t stay here in his parked car and hope he wouldn’t be found, and he couldn’t hide in the shrubbery somewhere in the neighborhood. His only chance was to go. He started the engine and accelerated, trying to get out of this small grid of streets and onto one of the big boulevards that would take him to a freeway entrance. He built up speed as he reached the first intersection, then let his foot hover over the brake pedal while he glanced to his left to be sure nothing was coming toward him on the side street, then hit the accelerator again. He ejected the magazine from his gun and clicked the spare into place.

As he reached the second intersection, he looked to his left and saw another car flash across the side street one block to his left. There was somebody driving a parallel course to his. He turned to the left. If the driver was a cop, he would assert his innocence by following him out of the neighborhood. If the cop didn’t buy it, he would have the inevitable confrontation facing the cop instead of looking over his shoulder. When he reached the next street, he turned to the right to follow the speeding car.

What he saw wasn’t what he had expected. The other driver had seen him, too, and the car was swinging into a driveway on the left. He could see it was a dark green Toyota, not a model that cops used. Now it was backing into the street to come back toward him. Hobart pushed the button to lower his side window, gripped his gun in his left hand, and drove toward it. The other car backed quickly across the road to block him.

Hobart opened fire at the driver. He saw the driver’s side window shatter and saw one shot hit the edge of the car’s roof and throw sparks as it glanced off into the night. After that he couldn’t see the driver anymore, but he fired three rounds at the driver’s door, and then he was past the car. As he coasted into a turn at the next block to get away from the small residential streets, he looked into his mirrors, but he couldn’t tell whether he had hit the man or not. The car hadn’t moved yet. Then he turned left onto Vanowen, moving fast toward the east. He tore off his ski mask and put it in his pocket, and felt the cool air on his sweating face.

He turned right on Van Nuys Boulevard to avoid waiting at a red light, then left onto Riverside. At this time of night, he could go fortyfive along unobstructed streets and not look as though he was running from something. In ten minutes he reached Lankershim, and that took him to the entrance of the complex at Universal City. In three more minutes, he was driving up to his hotel on the hill overlooking Universal Studios and the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley.

He gave his car to the parking attendant and watched him drive it away to store it with the hundreds of others in the parking structure. As Hobart walked toward the hotel lobby, he stopped and looked to the northwest, toward Emily Kramer’s house. Far off, he could see a couple of helicopters in the air, weaving back and forth over the flat grid of unidentifiable streets. Now and then one of them would circle, and the strong beam of a floodlight would emanate from its belly and illuminate something below for a few seconds, and then move on.