Dead Aim (23 page)

He knew that Debbie was undoubtedly with the target now, and that Emily was near here, probably in the restaurant or the street outside, making sure the scene was secure. When she saw the target and the tracker arrive, she would make the three calls. He corrected himself. She would make the calls if, after they arrived, it was safe. Parish had assured him of that, and repeating it to himself made him feel better. The scout had been there long before anyone else. She would already have studied the entrances and exits and every person there to be sure there was no threat, and she would make sure everything stayed that way.

He jumped as the pager in his hand began to vibrate. He had tested it before he had come, but now it didn’t feel like a machine: it felt alive. He barely kept himself from throwing it. He sat up straight and looked at the display in the little window on top. He hoped it would be a line of dashes, the sign that he had accidentally triggered it, but he could see 6543210, the number she’d told him to expect. It was real. She was calling them in.

He put the pager, very deliberately, into his pocket before he stood up. He had to get each stage of this out of the way in its turn. He moved to the aisle and out into the lobby. The lights made him blink and the strong, greasy popcorn smell nauseated him, but he made his
way through quickly enough, and as soon as he was out of the splash of light the marquee threw onto the sidewalk, he felt stronger and more purposeful again. He didn’t like Los Angeles, but these warm summer nights made walking easy and quick.

He walked with brisk, powerful strides and took deep breaths to force extra oxygen into his lungs, and it made him feel even better. As he came around a corner to a darker street, he ventured to touch the pistol hidden under his jacket at the back of his belt. He began to prepare himself by visualizing what was going to happen. As he did, he tensed each muscle he would use. He would arrive, and all of the others would be in position in view of the target. The target had been patiently stalked for days, and tonight, lured into a small, almost windowless restaurant on a side street. Markham would walk in, take a safe position a distance away, and pull out the gun to fire. The target might see the movement in time to duck or crouch, but it would do no good.

The thought made Markham walk faster. As he approached the restaurant, he could see without being seen, as though he were a ghost materializing out of the darkness. There were Parish and Emily, the scout, outside the front door, and there was Marshall Coleman strolling toward them from the opposite direction.

He stepped up to Parish, who said quietly, “It’s a go.” Markham moved to the front door, and heard Parish behind him repeating to Coleman, “It’s a go.” Markham opened the door and held it so Coleman could go first, then slipped in behind him.

Markham could see the target instantly, because Debbie was at the table with her. The target’s face had the round, pushed-in look of the lower classes, with a short, characterless nose and small, darting eyes.

Coleman was already reaching into his coat, covering his motion with the newspaper he carried, and Markham hesitated in confusion: had he missed some signal, not known of some change in the plan?

Markham saw Debbie stand up and heard her say, “I’m going to the ladies’ room,” looking down to fiddle in her purse. That distracted the
target for only a fraction of a second. All of the unexpected motion seemed to alarm her. She was on her feet instantly, and she made the one move Markham had not imagined in advance. She backed up toward the narrow corridor, retreating toward the rest rooms ahead of Debbie, so that Debbie would be between her and the shooters. Suddenly she was staring past Debbie at Markham and Coleman and reaching into her purse.

Debbie’s left hand jerked up and efficiently swatted the target’s hand away from the purse, while Debbie’s right hand stopped in front of the target’s face. Then Debbie whirled to the right, away from the target, and went low.

Markham saw that the target’s face had suddenly become wet. The target winced and blinked and ducked down, her mouth open and gasping, and clapped her hands to her eyes: pepper spray. The target was in agony. She rocked from side to side, tried to turn and make her way blindly down the hall toward the parking lot.

Markham quickly pulled out his pistol and fired without aiming, trying to catch up with Coleman, and the restaurant sounds were obliterated by the noise. Which shot cut flesh first scarcely mattered, because Parish had taught them not to fire once and wait. Coleman and Markham each fired rapidly four times, watching the target’s body jump and buckle. When she was on the floor, Markham stepped forward. The target was dead, but Markham had been taught that the coup de grâce was the professional way, so he aimed at the target’s forehead and fired once more.

He stepped back, because there was a blood rivulet heading along a crack in the floor toward his left shoe. As he looked up, he could see that Debbie had made it down the corridor to the back door. She opened it and slipped out.

He jumped when he heard the next shot, and involuntarily glanced down at his gun. The scout, Emily, had stepped inside. She was shooting the bartender and the waitress, then the two customers at the bar, then the one at the table. He had forgotten that the scout’s responsibility
was the place, choosing the spot and keeping it safe. She looked down at each of the bodies, then moved out the way Debbie had gone.

Markham turned on his heel and stepped toward the front door. He felt numb, slow and clumsy. The sudden silence left a ringing in his ears that seemed to rise and fall with his heartbeat. He saw Parish standing just inside the doorway, and held a picture of him as he stepped past him out into the night. Once again it was Parish, the instructor, looming silently on the periphery, watching everything with concentration and coldly evaluating it. His face was unreadable. As Markham turned on the sidewalk to look back, he saw Parish step calmly out the door after him.

Markham saw Coleman a block ahead of him, and he felt his pace increase in a canine eagerness to catch up. He had to keep himself from bounding up the street or calling out to him. They had done it. The hunt had been successful. They were outside now, the target was dead, and there were no living witnesses. He shivered briefly with residual fear, almost a physical memory of how he had felt. Now that his fear was only a memory, it was pleasant, titillating. He and Coleman had done it, gone up against an armed adversary, who had actually tried to shoot first. They had bet their lives, taken their chances, and won.

The feeling was better than the first time he had gone hang gliding, better than rock climbing. He had killed an armed enemy in a gun battle. After all, he was pretty sure that his first round had been the one that had done the trick. It was a shame that he couldn’t tell anyone about it, at least not for a lot of years. And there was no trophy for this kind of hunting. The rewards were all internal. Now that the target was dead, he wished that the target had been a man, not a woman. But that made little difference, really: Markham would have been just as dead if the target had fired first. He knew that no matter how long he lived, he would never forget the name: Lydia Marks.

M
allon squinted against the morning sunshine as he walked up to the office on De la Guerra Street holding a folded newspaper under his arm. He stepped inside, looked at the seats along the wall where clients were supposed to sit and wait, and approached Sylvia, the secretary. She said, “Good morning, Mr. Mallon. Can I get you something to drink while you’re waiting, maybe a cup of coffee, or …?” Her voice trailed off as she saw the expression on his face.

“No, thanks,” he said, then turned to see Diane coming out of her inner office.

She looked at Mallon, then quickly at Sylvia, a question in her eyes. Sylvia gave a tiny shrug, and Diane’s eyes snapped back to Mallon. “Robert!” she said, with a large, fixed smile. “Come on in.” She stepped aside to let Mallon in, then lingered, her eyes on Sylvia again. But Sylvia only slowly moved her shoulders up and shook her head, her eyes wide.

Mallon stood waiting in the center of the carpet until Diane had closed the heavy office door. “Lydia is dead.”

She froze. “What do you mean, ‘dead’? How?”

“She’s been murdered. Somebody killed her last night. It’s on the
news on the L.A. television stations. It’s even in the early edition of the L.A.
Times
.”

“Oh, Robert, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

Mallon handed her the folded newspaper, with the article facing up. She stared at it, her eyes picking up disconnected phrases, which she said aloud—“evening shootout,” “unknown assailants”—then she lowered it. She tried to hand it back to Mallon, but he would not reach for it.

“Keep it. I bought that on the way for you. I have one at home.”

“This is terrible.” She dropped it on her desk and turned away from it, toward Mallon. “Tell me what happened.”

“Somebody killed her in a little restaurant down south of the L.A. airport. They shot her, it says, ‘numerous times.’ They also killed a bartender, a waitress, and three customers. It says the police aren’t sure who was the intended victim, or if it had something to do with the restaurant—maybe a robbery. They had to be after Lydia.”

“They did?”

“Look at the place. She wouldn’t go into a place like that all by herself unless she was on business.” He picked up the newspaper from her desk, turned it over, and held it in front of her face. There was a picture of some officials pushing a wheeled stretcher into an ambulance. The building was low, made of stucco, with a big sign and a satellite dish, and only small front windows high on the wall.

“It looks like a dive,” she agreed. “So what was she doing there?”

“She must have been meeting somebody, probably another one of the women who knew Mark Romano. When we met with people, if she couldn’t go to their homes or businesses, she would suggest a place that was expensive. She said it helped her to get people to open up to her. She even stayed in big, fancy hotels, because she figured local people knew the hotels and judged strangers by where they stayed.” Mallon stared at the picture again. “Not this time, though. The person she was interviewing must have picked that place.”

Diane looked at the picture again, then leaned on her desk and read
the article. She seemed to be concentrating, so Mallon sat in a chair by the wall and waited. After a minute, she looked up. “It doesn’t say she was meeting anyone.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t. They don’t seem to know that she was working, or that what she did when she was working was talk to people. I need to tell them.”

Diane stared at Mallon, an expression of curiosity on her face. “They know who she was: it says she was a private detective. I think they must know how detectives work. They’re investigators too, after all. They know the mechanics of the job better than we do.” She paused, then said uncomfortably, “How well did you know her, really?”

“About as well as I know anybody,” he said. “What are you getting at?”

“I’m just wondering. You said you hadn’t seen her in a long time. She also had other cases, a bail bond business to run, undoubtedly a lot of personal relationships that you can’t know about.” She looked at him defensively. “I’m just saying, it may be too early to imagine that we know why she was killed.”

“I called the bail bond office and talked to her partner. He said she’d called in every day to check with him, and all she seemed to be working on was Catherine Broward.”

“Do we know she would tell him if there was something else?”

“I’m not sure what I know anymore,” Mallon said. “Before I talk to the police in L.A. today, is there anything else I need to keep in mind?”

“Yes. Don’t,” she said.

“But they’ll need to know about the case she was working on for me, and what she was investigating, and so on.”

“You’re right,” she said. “We’ve got to do that. But I think you’d better let me make that call.”

“You do?” Mallon was surprised.

Diane nodded. “I do. After all, I wrote up her contract, and kept in touch with both of you all the way through. At the moment, I know what was going on as well as you do. I have a responsibility as an officer
of the court to come forward whether you do or not. I also am unlikely to whet their appetites for a suspect. If, after I’ve told them what we know, they still want to talk to you, we’ll go there with Brian Logan.”

He squinted at her skeptically. “I’m just trying to help them solve the death of an old friend who was doing me a favor. Why so cautious? What have I got to be worried about?”

“Let’s see. You hired Lydia originally after you spoke with the Santa Barbara police about a woman who had died of a gunshot wound right after she was with you. Once her death was declared a suicide, you and Lydia both went across the country to conduct a private investigation of her life. You then started in on her boyfriend’s murder. Now Lydia has been murdered. I don’t know everything there is to know about homicide cases. It’s not my field. I do know that every now and then, a person who has been talking to the police, giving them leads, will be arrested for a murder. And the next thing you know, the police are building a case based on the fact that he’s been around when several other people were murdered, sometimes a few people going back ten or twenty years. It’s hard sometimes for the police to believe these things are coincidental.”