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“I’m curious,” she said, “about the way you’ve handled this.”
Taking her comment as disapproval or suspicion, he said, “I’m not aware of any other options.”
“You could have kept the ten thousand for yourself.”
“Somebody would have come looking for me.”
“Maybe not. Now … for sure someone will. You could have just passed my photo to the killer, with the money, and done a fade, got out of the way and let things unfold as they would have done if you’d never been there.”
“And then … where would I go?”
“To dinner. To a movie. Home to bed.”
“Is that what you’d have done?” he asked.
“I don’t interest me. You interest me.”
“I’m not an interesting guy.”
“Not the way you present yourself, no. What you’re hiding is what makes you interesting.”
“I’ve told you everything.”
“About what happened in the bar. But … about you?”
The rearview mirror was angled toward him. He had avoided his eyes by meeting hers. Now he looked at his narrow reflection, and at once away, down at the ceramic parrot choked in his right hand.
“My coffee’s cold,” he said.
“Mine, too. When the killer left the tavern, you could have called the police.”
“Not after I saw he was a cop.”
“The tavern’s in Huntington Beach. I’m in Laguna Beach. He’s a cop in a different jurisdiction.”
“I don’t know his jurisdiction. The car was an unmarked sedan. He could be a Laguna Beach cop for all I know.”
“So. Now what, Tim?”
He needed to look at her and he dreaded looking at her, and he didn’t know why or how, within minutes of their meeting, she should have become the focus of either need or dread. He had never felt like this before, and although a thousand songs and movies had programmed him to call it love, he knew it wasn’t love. He wasn’t a man who fell in love at first sight. Besides, love didn’t have such an element of mortal terror as was a part of this feeling.
He said, “The only evidence I have to give the cops is the photo of you, but that’s no evidence at all.”
“The license number of the unmarked sedan,” she reminded him.
“That’s not evidence. It’s just a lead. I know someone who might be able to trace it for me and get me the driver’s name. Someone I can trust.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll figure something.”
Her gaze, which had not turned from him, had the gravitational force of twin moons, and inevitably the tide of his attention was pulled toward her.
Eye to eye again with her, he told himself to remember this moment, this tightening knot of terror that was also a loosening knot of wild exaltation, for when he realized the name for it, he would understand why he was suddenly walking out of the life he had known—and had sought—into a new life that he could not know and that he might come desperately to regret.
“You should leave this house tonight,” he said. “Stay somewhere you’ve never been before. Not with a friend or relative.”
“You think the killer’s coming?”
“Tomorrow, the next day, sooner or later, when he and the guy who hired him realize what happened.”
She didn’t appear to be afraid. “All right,” she said.
Her equanimity perplexed him.
His cell phone rang.
After Linda took his coffee mug, he answered the call.
Liam Rooney said, “He was just here, asking who was the big guy on the last stool.”
“Already. Damn. I figured a day or two. Was it the first or second guy?”
“The second. I took a closer look at him this time. Tim, he’s a freak. He’s a shark in shoes.”
Tim remembered the killer’s persistent dreamy smile, the dilated eyes hungry for light.
“What’s going on?” Liam asked.
“It’s about a woman,” Tim said, as he had said before. “I’ll take care of it.”
In retrospect, the killer had realized that something about the encounter in the tavern had not been right. He had probably called a contact number for the skydiver.
Through the windshield, the kitchen looked warm and cozy. On a wall hung a rack of cutlery.
“You can’t freeze me out like this,” said Rooney.
“I’m not thinking about you,” Tim said, opening the door and getting out of the coupe. “I’m thinking about Michelle. Keep your neck out of this—for her.”
Carrying both coffee mugs, Linda exited the Ford from the driver’s door.
“Exactly how long ago did the guy leave?” Tim asked Rooney.
“I waited maybe five minutes before calling you—in case he might come back and see me on the phone, and wonder. He looks like a guy who always puts two and two together.”
“Gotta go,” Tim said, pressed END, and pocketed the phone.
As Linda took the mugs to the sink, Tim selected a knife from the wall rack. He passed over the butcher knife for a shorter and pointier blade.
The Pacific Coast Highway offered the most direct route from the Lamplighter Tavern to this street in Laguna Beach. Even on a Monday evening, traffic could be unpredictable. Door to door, the trip might take forty minutes.
In addition to a detachable emergency beacon, maybe the unmarked sedan had a siren. In the last few miles of approach, the siren would not be used; they would never hear the killer coming.
Turning away from the sink, Linda saw the knife in Tim’s fist. She did not misinterpret the moment or need an explanation.
She said, “How long do we have?”
“Can you pack a suitcase in five minutes?”
“Quicker.”
“Do it.”
She glanced at the ’39 Ford.
“It’s too attention-getting,” Tim said. “You should leave it.”
“It’s my only car.”
“I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
Her green gaze was as sharp as a shard of bottle glass. “What’s in this for you? Now you’ve told me, you could split.”
“This guy—he’ll want to waste me, too. If he gets my name.”
“And you think I’ll spill it, when he finds me.”
“Whether you spill it or not, he’ll get it. I need to know who he is, but more important, I need to know who hired him. Maybe when you’ve had more time to think about it, you’ll figure it out.”
She shook her head. “There’s nobody. If the only thing in this for you is the chance I’ll figure who wants me dead, then there’s nothing in this for you.”
“There’s something,” he disagreed. “Come on, pack what you need.”
She glanced at the ’39 Ford again. “I’ll be back for it.”
“When this is done.”
“I’m going to drive it all over, to wherever there’s something left from those days, something you can still see that they haven’t torn down yet or desecrated.”
Tim said, “The good old days.”
“They were good and they were bad. But they were different.” She hurried away to pack.
Tim turned off the kitchen lights. He went down the hall to the living room, and he switched off those lights, too.
At a window, he pulled back a sheer curtain and stood watching a scene that had gone as still as a miniature village in a glass paperweight.
He, too, had been glassed-in for a long time, by choice. Now and then he had lifted a hammer to shatter through to something, but he had never struck the blow because he didn’t know what he wanted on the other side of the glass.
Having strayed from a nearby canyon, perhaps emboldened by the round risen moon, a coyote climbed the gently sloping street. When it passed through lamplight, its eyes shone silver as if cataracted, but in shadows its gaze was luminous and red, and blind to nothing.
Six (#u65e7b131-c2e7-55e0-bb92-b6c31e1b1967)
As if following the spoor of the now vanished coyote, Tim drove north. He turned left at the stop sign and headed downhill toward the Pacific Coast Highway.
He repeatedly checked the rearview mirror. No one followed them.
“Where do you want to stay?” he asked.
“I’ll figure that out later.”
Still in blue jeans and a midnight-blue sweater, she had added a camel-colored corduroy jacket. She held her purse on her lap, and her carryall was in the backseat.
“Later when?”
“After we’ve seen the guy you can trust, the one who can trace that license-plate number.”
“I figured to go to him alone.”
“Aren’t I presentable?”
She was not as pretty as she had been in the photo, yet she struck him as somehow better looking. Her hair, such a dark brown that it seemed black, had been shorter than this, and calculatedly shaggy, when she had stood before the DMV camera.
“Totally presentable,” he assured her. “But with you there, he’ll be uneasy. He’ll want to know more of what it’s about.”
“So we tell him whatever sounds good.”
“This isn’t a guy that I lie to.”
“Is there one?”
“One what?”
“Never mind. Leave it to me. I’ll shine him up something he’ll like.”
“Not you, either,” Tim said. “We walk the line with this guy.”
“Who is he—your dad or something?”
“I owe him a lot. He’s solid. Pedro Santo. Pete. He’s a robbery-homicide detective.”
“So we’re going to the cops, after all?”
“Unofficially.”
They headed north along the coast. Southbound traffic was light. A few cars rocketed past them in excess of the speed limit, but none featured an emergency beacon.
To the west, the house-crowded bluffs descended to unpopulated lowlands. Beyond coastal scrub and wide beaches, the Pacific folded the sky down to itself at a black horizon.
