The Voice Inside

45

Rudy sat in the old Cadillac, two blocks from the marina. He’d been here for hours, hypnotized by the rain, staring through the darkness and haze at the apartment building across the street. It was almost dawn on Sunday, but there wouldn’t be any sunrise today, just the gloom of black clouds. The only thing that helped him see was the streetlight overhead. The yachts in the harbor were invisible.

His clothes hadn’t dried. They were still a mess of rain, mud, and blood. He’d had a narrow escape from Sweeney Ridge. The cops had descended on the hills like locusts, and even in the fog, he’d barely eluded them on his way back to the parking lot at Skyline College. A helicopter searchlight had passed over the Cadillac only seconds after he’d ducked inside.

He wasn’t a fool. He knew he didn’t have much time left. Everyone was looking for him.

The street around him was empty in the rain. Above the boulevard trees, a light came on in the third-floor apartment, and a silhouette moved behind the curtains. He lifted his binoculars, but there was nothing to see. He’d already spotted Easton’s brother leaving two hours earlier in the dead of night, and after that, the windows had been dark. But not now. She was up. Weekends didn’t matter in the restaurant world. She’d be leaving soon.

Rudy reached behind him and grabbed a trench coat from the back seat. He took what he needed from his backpack. The Taser. The knife. The duct tape. And Maria’s watch, already smashed, its time stopped at 3:42 a.m. He secured them all in the right-side pocket of the coat. He was ready. He kept his eyes trained on the steps that led down from the apartment building plaza, and he waited.

It was strange. He no longer felt alive. The numbness that had dominated his life for so many years was back. When he’d slid the knife across the neck of Nina Flores, he’d felt a rush that must have been like shooting up with pure heroin. Hope was Nina; Nina was Hope. He’d finally been able to get revenge on his wife for what she’d done to their daughter. With each murder after that, the anticipation had built toward a perfect moment of violence. It became an addiction.

But now he felt empty. The rush was gone.

He’d thought, with Jess Salceda, that it was simply because she wasn’t part of the game. She was an outsider who’d trespassed where she didn’t belong. He’d assumed that it would be different with Maria, but it wasn’t. There was no high, no adrenaline, no vaulting sense of purpose. Killing her gave him nothing.

And yet he couldn’t stop himself. He needed the rush even more badly now that he couldn’t find it. He would do anything to feel that way again, even if it was only one last time for one last moment.

Up on the third floor, the lights went off again. The apartment was dark.

Rudy tensed, his eyes on the plaza steps. The rain kept coming in waves. The wind roared. He checked the mirrors and saw that he was alone on the street. It would take less than a minute for her to lock the apartment, go down three flights of stairs, cross the courtyard, and emerge onto the sidewalk.

As he waited for her, his backup phone rang.

Rudy thought about ignoring it, but he knew it was Phil. And Phil calling now meant trouble.

“This is a bad time,” he said, answering the phone.

“Where are you?” Phil asked.

“You know where I am.”

“You should split, man,” his brother said. “Now.”

Rudy briefly closed his eyes. Phil had always been the weak link, the one who would crack sooner or later. “What did you tell them?”

“Enough that they’ll be coming for you,” Phil replied. “You better get away from there while you can. Sorry.”

Phil hung up.

At that same moment, across the street, Rudy saw Tabby Blaine dash down the steps in the rain. Her red hair was a flame on the dark morning. She wore a belted purple raincoat down to her ankles. She turned away from the bay toward her car, walking easily in heels. It was now or never.

Rudy grabbed his coat. He got out of the Cadillac and shrugged the coat onto his body. He crossed the street and made his way to the sidewalk and settled in behind her. Leaves blew off the trees in the wind and scattered between them. The rain covered the noise of his footsteps. If she looked back, she would see him, but she didn’t look back.

Slowly, he increased his pace and closed the gap.

At the end of the block, she crossed the street, and he was off the curb before she reached the other side. He knew which car was hers. A red Saab. He could see it halfway up the block, squeezed onto a short patch of curb between two driveways. Inside the pocket of his coat, his hand closed around the grip of the Taser.

The rain blew into their faces. Rudy had to squint and rub his eyes to see. He was close behind her now, almost close enough to grab. She was at the bumper of the Saab, and she put a hand into her pocket. He heard the beep of the car doors unlocking as she yanked out her key fob.

Then everything happened at once.

Tabby’s phone rang. He could hear the ringtone playing a song. “Shut Up and Dance.” He was right behind her now, but she stopped as she answered the phone. He stopped, too. They were both on the street, immediately next to the Saab, but she didn’t know he was there.

“Hey, Frost,” Tabby said into the phone. “You’re up early.”

Simultaneously, another noise filled the street. The noise of sirens. Instinctively, Rudy looked back over his shoulder, and where the street intersected Marina Boulevard at the harbor, he saw a police car veer around the corner. And then another. And another. They converged at the apartment building, and as the police officers flooded from the vehicles, they already had their guns drawn in their hands.

In an instant, they spotted the Cadillac parked across the street. In the next instant, they surrounded it.

Rudy turned back. The police couldn’t see him two blocks away. Tabby was still on the phone, but she heard the sirens, too, and as she turned around, she saw him directly behind her. Her green eyes were smart and alert. She knew exactly who he was and why he was here. She opened her mouth to say something into the phone — a scream, a cry for help — but before she could say a word, he fired the Taser into her neck.

Her body lurched as the electricity jolted her. She crumpled, knees bending, and he grabbed her. Her phone spilled to the sidewalk, and he kicked it away. He scooped up her keys. It took him only a few quick seconds to yank open the front door of the Saab and stuff her inside, facedown. He bent over her body as rain poured in and clumsily pulled her wrists together and wound gray tape around to bind her hands behind her. She twitched, already beginning to recover from the electrical jolt. He slammed the passenger door shut and ran around to the driver’s side.

He got in and locked the doors, and he started the car and put it in gear. He eyed the mirror. The police had already filled the street two blocks away, but they hadn’t spotted him. They were streaming into the plaza of the apartment building. He heard more sirens, more vehicles getting closer.

Tabby squirmed violently in an attempt to get up, but he shoved her face down hard. As she screamed, he covered her mouth and pushed the sticky blade of the knife below her ear.

“Don’t move, and don’t say a word,” he barked. “If you talk, if you scream, this all ends right now.”

The warning made her lie still.

He thought, One way or another, this all ends right now.

Rudy spun the wheel, and the Saab squealed away.

“Tabby!” Frost shouted into the phone.

Her voice cut off as she began to speak, and all he heard was the pound of the rain, a car door slamming, and the overlapping wail of distant sirens. He shouted her name again, but when she didn’t answer, he threw his phone against the passenger door and drove even faster. He had never driven faster in his life.

The Suburban rocketed north down the long hill toward the marina. The street was narrow, crowded with parked cars. His siren carried him through the intersections, which were mostly deserted in the early hours of Sunday morning. Rain poured across the truck. His windshield wipers jerked back and forth in a futile attempt to keep the glass clear, and he had to lean forward to see the road. Even as morning broke, the bay was invisible. Duane’s condo was half a mile away.

Ahead of him, he saw headlights coming the opposite way, racing up the hill. The two vehicles were only two blocks apart when the southbound car made a sharp left turn, ignoring the stoplight. In the flash of his headlights, Frost saw a shine of red, and he had a quick mental image of Tabby outside Duane’s apartment building, about to get into a red Saab. He hit the brakes hard and turned right. He followed a parallel course one block south, flooring the accelerator, trying to get a jump on the car on the other street. He made a wide, screeching left and reached the intersection at Lombard at almost the same moment as the car he was chasing. It was a red Saab. And he glimpsed the face of the driver through the rain.

Rudy Cutter.

Just for a moment, he also saw a woman rear up in the passenger seat before Cutter pushed her down. The woman had a swirl of red hair. It was Tabby, and she was alive.

The Saab spun away, its right-side wheels jerking off the ground before dropping heavily back down. The car jolted north toward the bay, kicking up spray like a fountain. Frost followed on his bumper. The street was wider here, and they had to swerve to avoid the early morning buses. Apartment buildings lined both sides of the street. Block by block, the bay got closer.

He radioed in a call for backup.

Seconds later, both vehicles screamed through the last intersection at Marina Boulevard, where the road ended at the water. They were on a flat, open stretch of road bordered by the marina’s green park, with the Golden Gate Bridge and the East Bay hills coming into view under the low clouds. Cutter sped right, and Frost brought up the Suburban immediately next to him. They raced side by side as the street curved eastward, and he could see bouncing white and red lights as cars ahead and behind them spilled to the curb to get out of their way.

The red-roofed piers of Fort Mason loomed on their left. As they neared the intersection at Buchanan, two more squad cars converged from the south and east, and together, they forced Cutter off the boulevard into an empty parking lot leading to the old fort. Frost lost a few seconds as the Suburban lurched into a clumsy turn. The water was on his left. Dozens of boats bobbed like toys in the fierce wind.

Cutter had a hundred-yard lead as he steered the Saab past the gatehouse at the fort’s entrance, but he was running out of pavement. Beyond the barracks and piers, the road dead-ended at the bay. As Frost wheeled past the gatehouse himself, with the two police cars close behind him, he spotted the Saab disappearing between the fort’s last dormitory building and a steep hillside lined with cypress trees. He pointed the Suburban across the empty parking lot and headed the same way.

As he passed the last of the fort’s white brick buildings, he reached the final stretch of road at the water. Old railroad tracks ran across the pavement. A high retaining wall rose immediately to his right. Ahead of him, a long pier jutted into the bay. Where concrete pylons marked the end of the road, he saw the red Saab, its engine still running, its two front doors wide open.

The car was empty. Cutter was gone. So was Tabby.