The Gentlemen's Hour

155

Petra sleeps the sleep of the dead.

Which, fortunately, Boone thinks, is just a metaphor, thanks to Johnny B.

That brings up another troublesome question. Who fingered me for the cartel? Johnny B was one of the few people who knew what I had on Paradise Homes.

No, Boone thinks. Couldn’t be.

So run it back, barney. Who else knew about Paradise Homes?

Bill Blasingame, of course.

Nicole. But it wasn’t her. Boone called her from the police station and she was all right. She’d almost gone to Blasingame’s house, and changed her mind.

Johnny and . . .

Dan and Donna.

The Perfect Couple.

He remembers his conversation with Johnny B the morning after the Schering murder.

“There’s nothing on that tape that’s going to help you, J.”

“They might have said something . . .”

“They didn’t.”

“Nichols hear the tape?”

No, Boone thinks, he didn’t. He didn’t even know about the tape. Boone goes out to the Deuce, digs around in the back, and reaches into the flipper where he hid the tape he’d made of Phil Schering and Donna Nichols. He pops the cassette into the tape player, fast forwards past their lovemaking, and watches the timer until it hits the morning before she left the house.

“You have to.”

Donna says.

“I’m not going to prison for you.”

Silence, then,

“If you don’t change your report, Dan and I are ruined. How could you do that to me? After—”

“Is that why you fucked me, Donna?”

“I’m begging you, Phil.”

“And I thought you loved me.”

A short, cynical laugh.

“If it’s money,”

Donna says,

“we can pay you whatever . . .”

The nifty LiveWire Fast Track Ultrathin Real-Time GPS tracking device keeps a record of every place where the target vehicle went. Boone types in the command for the program to do just that and watches it for the night when Schering was murdered.

You didn’t follow Donna Nichols that morning, Boone tells himself. You followed Phil. You assumed Donna went straight home, but . . .

The record says she didn’t. The record says that she went to a house down in Point Loma, was there for an hour, and then she went home.

Boone scrolls the tracking record. Donna Nichols made three more visits to the same house over the past two days. She—or at least her cool white Lexus—went to that house just after you left her at the party at the Prado. Just a little while before you were bagged and thrown into the water, then interrogated.

To find out what you did with the records.

He turns the GPS device onto “active” and watches the screen.

Donna Nichols is at the same house now.