Dead Aim (37 page)

“Good hunting.”

Kira turned off her telephone, and sighed. “He’s at the Beverly Towers on Sunset. Room 1503.”

“Wow,” said Lee. “That was easy.”

“Yeah, but popping him in a hotel isn’t. Whoever does it will be stuck way up on the fifteenth floor. If there are shots in a hotel room, somebody hears them. Then you only have three or four ways down, and the only place you can end up is the lobby,” said Jimmy.

“We’ll think of something,” Tim assured them.

“Yeah?” Jimmy’s voice was contemptuous. “Like what?”

“I don’t know yet. It’s early. He’s checked in, but probably he won’t stay in his room all the time. He drove to L.A. for some reason. Maybe there’s somebody he wants to see, or something he wants to buy. Anyway, he’s got to eat. Maybe he’ll go out for that. Anything can happen.”

Kira decided to stay in the conversation to establish sides. “Tim’s right: anything can happen. We could get him just by being near his car.”

“It would have to be better than that,” Lee scoffed.

“The car was just an example,” Kira said. “Tim’s saying that it’s too soon to say it’s not doable. We’ll think of something. We will.”

The talk was an irritant, not quite an argument, just a general peevish dismissal of anything anyone said. But Kira didn’t allow herself to feel weary or discouraged. The talk was an annoyance, but she had used it to delineate the sides. By the time the car came to the top of the long hill that rose above Camarillo and over the invisible line into Los Angeles County, the distinctions had been made: Jimmy and Lee, the
two friends from somewhere or other, were in the front seat sharing contemptuous glances and patronizing smirks about Kira and Tim, thinking they couldn’t see from the back seat.

She had become Tim’s ally. He owed her more than he probably had yet understood. The other two could make the cleverest sarcastic remarks about Tim that had ever been heard, and it meant nothing. The contest was over, and they were the losers. They knew it. She could tell that they knew it, because she could hear it in the bitter, disappointed tone of their voices. They were trying to convince themselves that it wasn’t a real loss because Tim wasn’t as cool as they were and Kira was too dumb to be credible, but the defeat was primal. The desirable girl—the only girl—had picked Tim, and not them. It didn’t matter whether her criteria were fair or wise: her choice was absolute and irrefutable. She could also tell from the disproportionate level of their irritation that they had each understood that this had not been an empty contest. There was a prize, and they were imagining exactly what having that prize would have been like.

She returned her attention to Tim. She had moved closer to him, and sometimes touched his arm or his hand as she made a point. She was secure now, and she could concentrate on the hunt. Soon they were off the freeway, going south over a winding canyon road down into Beverly Hills. When they reached Sunset and she saw the wide avenues lined with tall coconut palms, she began to watch for the hotel. She saw it coming from a distance. After a few seconds’ thought, she said, “Anyone have a plan besides me?”

Ten minutes later, Kira and Tim entered the lobby. Tim was carrying his suitcase and had her overnight bag strapped over his shoulder, but he was strong enough so that it looked effortless. Kira scurried to the counter ahead of him and said, “We just called a few minutes ago and had a room set aside for us.”

The clerk was a girl about Kira’s age. “Mr. and Mrs. Wilson?”

“That’s right.”

“And how will you be paying for your stay with us?”

Kira placed on the counter one of the two credit cards she had bought before the hunt. It had been sold to her for two thousand dollars as a spree card. It was a perfect clone of a real card belonging to a real Mrs. Wilson, who was supposedly in Europe for the summer, where someone had gotten the card’s information when she had used it. Kira had bought the clone because she had known that on this hunt she would have to make her own arrangements for getting out afterward, and, with the fake Massachusetts driver’s license she’d had made to order, the card would allow her to rent a car or buy a plane ticket.

She held her breath as the clerk swiped the card on a magnetic reader, looked at a screen, and frowned. She swiped it again, and Kira began to feel the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She slipped her hand into her purse, grasped the pistol’s grips, and let her face go blank. The clerk turned the card around to face her, and began tapping keys on the card reader. There was a pause while the machine communicated over a telephone line with some other machine, and then a sudden clackety-clack as the reader printed out a receipt. The clerk smiled, and Kira slowly pulled her right hand out of the purse. She took the clerk’s silver pen and signed, then accepted the little folder with the magnetic key cards, turned, and walked to the row of elevators in an alcove.

As soon as they were inside, Tim leaned close and whispered, “I didn’t see any sign of him in the lobby or the gift shop.” She felt the soft puffs of his breath on her ear, and it made delicious chills go down her spine. She pulled away, and gave a little shimmy. “That tickles.” Then she raised her eyes to him. “No. But let’s talk in the room.”

She had asked for a room as high up as possible, where there would be a view, and she had scored the fifteenth floor. She had told the others casually, without making too much of it, and left it to them to remember their negative comments and to consider whether they could have gotten so close to Mallon’s room so effortlessly.

She had turned to Jimmy and said, “You two will have to find a way to watch his car without getting noticed.” She had been aware that she
was making the estrangement between them complete. Jimmy and Lee would be outside somewhere, or possibly in a dark, damp underground parking structure, while she took Tim upstairs to a comfortable hotel room with her. She and Tim would probably be the ones to get Mallon, and Jimmy and Lee would get nothing.

She gave Tim one of the card keys to their room and whispered, “1509,” then slipped the other card into a pocket of her purse, where she could find it easily. As the elevator stopped and she walked out, she thought about the fifteenth floor. No hotel ever had a thirteenth, so they called that the fourteenth, and the fifteenth was really the fourteenth. She had traveled with her father and mother enough to know that she would almost certainly be able to get a room up high. That was because business travelers all knew that no fire department in the world had a ladder that went up above the sixth floor. If Mallon had unexpectedly shown up an hour ago and been given the fifteenth floor, chances were that she would be too.

She let Tim go ahead of her past 1503, his heavy feet made heavier by the luggage he carried. She used the noise to cover her while she stopped by the door. She placed her ear to the wood and listened. She heard Tim open room 1509. She knew he was standing in the doorway holding the door open and watching her from behind, so she tried to look dangerous and alluring at the same time, making her leg muscles tense and sucking in her abdominals to prepare to spring.

She held her pose for fifteen or twenty seconds, but she could hear nothing. She turned her head slightly and brought her eye to the corner to see Tim. He was no longer holding the luggage. He had his jacket over his left arm, and the other hand hidden, obviously on his gun. He was staring at her hard.

Kira stayed still for another few seconds to give Mr. Mallon a chance to move or cough or snore. Then she straightened and walked silently, as Debbie had taught her, placing her weight on the outer edges of her feet. She slipped through the doorway of 1509 past Tim, and waited for him to close the door quietly.

“I’m pretty sure he’s out,” she said. “It’s too early for dinner.”

Tim nodded. “Best thing to do is wait for him.” He sat down on the bed.

She stood in front of him so she could look into his eyes. “Do you want to see if we can get into his room and wait there for him?”

Tim said, a little too quickly, “I don’t see how.”

“You’re right,” she said. “That was a silly idea.” She sat on the other side of the bed. “It’s just that these magnetic key cards sometimes don’t work right, and you can open more than one door with them. I don’t suppose it happens very often.”

He seemed a bit more interested. He stood and picked up his jacket, then quickly went out the door. She was amazed. He had not said anything to her about joining him or anything. She picked up her purse and went to the door. She opened it a crack to look down the hall, but he was already on the way back. He brushed past her into the room, then went to the windows. He said, “So much for that. Not even any balcony, so that’s out too.”

“I don’t think it would be much fun to climb from one to the other way up here, anyway,” she said, then gave a little shiver. He didn’t seem to have seen it, or to be listening to her.

Kira walked toward the cabinet that held the television set, but when she reached it she didn’t feel like opening it. She was aware that time was going by, and the time was precious. It was nearly dark outside, day turning to evening. She knew it was likely that if Mallon was out now, he would probably be out for the evening. If he came back, the others would be watching for his car. He was dead without knowing it. What was bothering her was that she had gone to a lot of trouble, taken a lot of chances, and used up some luck to get where she was at this moment, and her forward motion seemed to have stalled.

Each of them seemed to be letting sentences die off at the end, and then turning their attention inward, wishing that they liked each other better, wondering what had gone wrong. She stole a glance at Tim. He was lying on the bed with his hands behind his head, staring at the
ceiling with a pouting expression. People in situations like this wore out their enthusiasm; they just got tired of smiling, tired of thinking of the right things to say, tired of listening.

Kira couldn’t let it go that way, let this chance turn into a failure that would gnaw at her later, just because of shyness, or passivity, or laziness or something. She heard herself whispering, “I want this.” She hesitated, glancing at the television cabinet. Finally she took two deep breaths and walked around to the other side of the bed.

She sat down, then swung her legs up, lay beside him, put her hands behind her head, knitting the fingers as he had, and stared up at the smoke detector on the ceiling. “I guess all we can do now is wait.”

“Guess so,” he said.

“Any ideas about how we could pass the time?”

She caught a swift movement as he turned his head toward her abruptly, so she turned hers more slowly and looked into his blue eyes. She saw that they had suddenly become inquisitive. She turned her body toward him, crooked her elbow, and leaned her head on her right hand. She gave him a mischievous smile.

He rolled, almost a lunge toward her that startled her a little, and put her on her back. He hovered above her as he kissed her, pressing his mouth against hers too heavily. His tongue pried open her lips and came inside, searching, and then his right hand was groping, moving to her left breast. He was eager, she told herself: passionate, not rough. She began to need to stop for a second, because it was hard to breathe, but he didn’t stop for that. She turned her head to break off the kiss, and took three deep breaths, and then she was feeling better. It was easier now, nice, really. He was kissing her neck, and he didn’t have the weight of his upper body on hers anymore.

Then he was undressing her, but so quickly that she was afraid he was going to rip her top, or maybe tear the zipper of the leather pants. “Wait,” she whispered. “Let me.”

At first there was an instant when she was not sure that he would, but his hands stopped. She sat up, took off the top, and she could see
the blue eyes staring in appreciation. She was beautiful, and she was glad that he knew it. She swung her legs off the bed and laid the top on the chair, then took off the leather pants. She left her underpants on and walked to the counter by the television, dug into a pocket of the purse, and found the condom. She stepped to the bed, holding it up and smiling.

He was beside the bed, quickly stripping off his clothes. As soon as he was naked, he stepped closer and pulled her to him. He kissed her and then pushed her onto the bed, and continued what he had been doing before.

“Here,” she said after a few minutes. She pushed the condom into his hand.

He tugged her panties off. He obviously had interpreted her gesture as a signal that she was ready to accept him, but she noticed he had tossed the condom aside.

“Aren’t you going to use it?”

He shook his head. “Don’t like them.”

“But we should. Would you please do it anyway?”

He stopped and held her at arm’s length, staring into her eyes. “What? Do you have AIDS or something?”

“No,” she snapped. “Do you?”

“What do you have, then?”

“Nothing!” she said angrily. “It’s just a normal precaution.”

He let go of her, then turned to pick up the condom, and sighed heavily as he tore the wrapper off and put it on. “There. You happy?”

She quickly made a decision. She lay back on the bed. She wriggled a bit to get closer. “Yes,” she said. “Very happy.”

She wanted it to be true, but something had turned sour. He had seemed a bit too rough and hurried before, but now he was distant, uncaring. He was very strong, and he made sudden, almost violent movements, grasping her too tightly and then thrusting too hard. She said, “Wait, be a little more gentle.”

“If you’d relax, you’d enjoy it.”

“Please.”

He seemed to get more quick, more violent, ignoring her voice. She decided that what he had said might actually help if she could do it, and it was all she could do, so she tried to relax all her muscles, to offer no resistance. She only had to endure it for a few more minutes, and it was over. He disengaged himself from her, and she kept still, staring at the ceiling. He lay beside her for a few seconds, then got up, walked into the bathroom, and closed the door.