Dead Aim (44 page)

“A party?”

“Yes. It had gone on and on, and I started to hate being alone. I started working more, going out a lot more, just being with people so I wasn’t alone. A woman I met at a party told me that a mutual friend had told her about my problem and she had a suggestion.”

“What was it?”

“Her boyfriend had talked her into going to this self-defense camp, kind of for laughs, really. They had gone together, and she was hooked. It had changed her life. She had been afraid all the time, and now she wasn’t. I had noticed her earlier in the evening and wondered about her, and I think it was because of that. She always had a serene look on her face, but she carried herself with a kind of swagger. She walked straight up to people she had never met and was comfortable talking with them—very easy, very friendly, just as she was with me. I knew she was telling the truth. I let her write down the name and phone number on a slip of paper for me. Overnight I thought about it, and called the next day.”

“Was the camp what she said it was?”

“It was. I learned to use a gun. I don’t mean just how to aim it and hit something consistently. I mean how to care for it, how to carry it concealed, how and when to take it out and fire it, how to move during
a firefight. None of that stuff is obvious, and some of it is even counterintuitive intentionally, so your opponent can’t anticipate it. I went to classes in hand-to-hand combat. I know it doesn’t look as though I learned much—”

“Yes, it does,” he interjected.

“Well, I did. I’m pretty rusty now, and I couldn’t do what I was supposed to, which was to surprise the opponent. It also works best if you really want to hurt the other person, or at least don’t care if you do. I care about you.”

“Go on.” There was a warning in his voice.

“I went for a month-long course. It was a rule that you had to go for a whole month the first time, and take an all-around basic self-defense course. After that, you could go for two-week intensive courses, even one-week brush-up sessions. The month was terribly expensive for me, but it seemed worth it. I was out of sight for all that time, safe from Billy. I knew nothing to begin with, so every hour I was there made a terrific difference. When the month was over, I had made a lot of progress. I found I didn’t want to leave. I asked if I could take a two-week advanced course. That was even more extreme. It was urban combat: shotguns, things you could do with a car, even some booby traps. When that was nearly done, I went to one of the instructors and tried to sign up for another two weeks. She talked to me for a while, said she could tell that I was scared to go home, where I would be alone again. It wasn’t that, exactly.”

“What was it?”

“It wasn’t that I had become fearful of being alone. I had convinced myself that what I was going home to was a fight to the death against Billy—it was that specific—and I wasn’t ready. Do you see? I was easily good enough to not be afraid of living a normal life. I wasn’t good enough yet to go head-to-head against a man who wanted me dead, a convict who had killed somebody before. I told the instructor. A day later, she brought me in to speak with Michael Parish.”

“The one I met? The owner of the camp?”

“He’s more than that. Owning something is just money. It’s his, in a different way. The place is him. It’s a reflection of his ideas. All the people who work there look up to him and some of them seem to imitate him—his expressions, his mannerisms. He asked me to talk about what had been bothering me, to tell him everything. So I told him. I started to talk in brief, general terms, but the other instructor, whose name was Mary, kept prompting me. And I spilled all of it. He listened patiently and asked me all the right questions—the ones that convinced me that he cared about me, and was really hearing what I said—and I told him more. Finally, he said, ‘You seem convinced that at some point, you’re going to have to kill him.’ I said no, of course not. Then I said, ‘I hadn’t actually been thinking about it that way. I had only been learning to defend myself just in case. Shouldn’t everyone?’ All the time, he was watching me, not judging me or smiling or looking skeptical or anything, just waiting. And after a while, I said, ‘Well, yes. I suppose I really do think that at some point he is going to either try to get me himself or have one of his prison friends do it. What I’ve been doing here for the past six weeks is get myself ready to survive it. Now that I know more about what that means, I guess I would have to say yes, I have been preparing myself to kill him.’ ”

“And what did he say?”

“We had been in the main lodge, sitting on those hard, straight-backed wooden chairs like they have in some bars. That’s how he talks to you: sitting almost knee to knee in that empty room with nothing to look at but his eyes. What he did was kind of lean forward with his hands on his thighs and stand up. It brought his face close to mine, and in that second, he said, ‘Then let’s get it done.’ It was so quick, so quiet that I said, ‘What? I didn’t quite catch that.’ Then he called in Debbie, my martial arts instructor, and he said, “Tell Debbie everything about this man Billy—everything you know. If you need to go to your office to consult some file about him or something, bring her with you. Then come back. After we’ve got the information, it will take another week to prepare. Then we’ll take you back so you can kill him.’ ”

“Did you do it? Did it happen?”

She ignored the question, but he could tell that she was only delaying the answer. “The week was partly so they could follow him, watch him, figure out how and where to kill him. But it also gave them time to give me a few special lessons. They call going out to kill somebody a hunt. There’s a tracker to find and stalk the target, a scout to choose and secure the place, and a professional hunter to be with you and kill the target if you lose your nerve or make a mistake. I had to learn to work with them. And they wanted me to get used to what it looks like when anything the size of a man dies. They took me deer hunting out in the fields above the camp. The idea was to get me to shoot something that was alive, and see all the blood and suffering, and then I wouldn’t get all nervous later. He tries to get you to like the killing, so you’ll be good at it—have a dead aim. That’s what he calls it. We didn’t find a deer. After a couple of days of searching, we still didn’t find one. It had been a wet spring, and I guess there was plenty of food for them farther into the backcountry, so that’s where they were. I was relieved.”

“Did you kill Billy?”

Her voice went soft, almost a whisper. “Yes. I did.” She took a breath, and said, “Parish and Mary drove me to L.A. I was surprised to see where they had found him. It was a bowling alley. He worked there late at night, waxing the lanes after closing time. The place had a lighted sign that said
MOONLIGHT BOWLING, MIDNIGHT TO 2 A.M
. After that, it closed, and Billy went to work. It was really pretty easy. Debbie had been at Moonlight Bowling with some other people who worked for Parish. She went into the ladies’ room at one-thirty or so, and hid in a stall. Everybody else left, but she stayed until the place was all locked up, then came out, went to the door, and propped it open a crack. It was a set of glass doors, so we saw Billy when we arrived. He was waxing an alley with a polishing machine. He was looking up toward the pins and walking backward, so he wouldn’t leave footprints. He didn’t even see or hear us come in. The scout was the
first in the door, and that was Mary. She held it open for me. The last was the pro hunter, and this time that was Parish. The two of them waited in that sunken area around the scoring table, and I stood up on the foul line. I waited until he was only about eight feet away. I could have shot him in the back of the head, but Parish and Mary and Debbie were there, so I did it the way they had taught me. First and second shots go into the torso where the heart and lungs are, and the third, after he’s down and incapacitated, can go to the head. You never leave until he’s positively dead. When he was, we walked back out of the bowling alley and got into the car to drive home. I didn’t feel bad about it until a couple of months later, after I had gotten over the fear and thought about it objectively. I had done something horrible to him, and because I had, I felt I had to kill him.”

“But that’s why you’re here,” said Mallon. “To do the same thing to me.”

“I know,” she moaned. “It’s the same thing again. Only I couldn’t help it, don’t you see? Parish would kill me if I didn’t. This is my fault. You’re my fault. I didn’t imagine that the woman who committed suicide had anything to do with the self-defense school. How could I? They didn’t have her real name then. So I encouraged you to get through your obsession, even wrote up a contract so you could hire Lydia Marks to help you. I put everyone else in danger—Parish, Mary, Debbie, the other instructors, the special customers Parish teaches to kill people—so how could I refuse to help them solve the problem? They would kill me. How could they let me refuse and live?”

“Good question,” said Mallon. “I guess they couldn’t.” He stood. “I’m sorry for you, and sorry for me. I’ve got to go now.”

“You’re not going to leave me?” she asked. “I told you the truth. You’ve got to let me go. You promised.”

“I promised,” Mallon said. “But I can’t let you go until this is over.”

She was appalled, desperate. “But without me, you won’t get through this. You don’t know enough. You’re not good enough. They’ll kill you. Now that they’ve tried, there’s no way they can ever stop
hunting you. They’ll keep trying until it’s done. I could tell you things, recognize people you would never suspect were after you. I can get you away from it. That’s the only way. If you leave me and go out there alone, I’ll just die here, waiting for you to get back.”

“Maybe.” He stepped out the door and locked it behind him. He could hear her shouting, but just barely. Out here, the sound of the ocean was much louder, and even tonight’s gentle breeze made it hard to hear anything.

M
allon drove beside the ocean, heading back toward Santa Barbara. There was no question that the people Diane called the hunters and trackers and scouts would be trying to figure out where he and Diane had gotten to. Probably they had expected to hear from her by now. If they found the bodies he had left on that quiet road in Malibu, they would probably assume she was dead.

He was aware that he was going to have to do something quickly, or he was going to die. Diane had been right: there appeared to be a plentiful supply of people from that self-defense camp who had either been eager to join the hunt for him or been induced to join it to protect secrets. If their secrets were like Diane’s, they had little choice but to try to prevent him from drawing attention to the camp. He thought about the police.

Detective Berwell had been trying to trap him into saying something incriminating. The Santa Barbara police seemed to Mallon to have been more receptive to his theories, or anyway more sympathetic, than the Los Angeles police. At least Detective Fowler had seemed to be. Maybe with what Mallon knew now, Fowler would be able to do something. Mallon writhed in the seat to reach his wallet,
found Fowler’s business card, picked up Diane’s telephone, and turned it on. Instantly the silence was shattered by the annoying musical ring. The little screen showed him which button to press to answer, but he did not press it. Instead, he turned off the phone for a few seconds, then turned it on again and quickly dialed Fowler’s number.

A male voice answered. “Police department.”

“Hello,” said Mallon. “My name is Robert Mallon. I need to reach Lieutenant Fowler right away. It’s an emergency.”

The cop’s voice was beginning to change from sleepy to irritated when he spoke. “I’m sorry, but Lieutenant Fowler works during the day. It’s now after one
A.M.
He’ll be here in about six hours, and I’m sure he’ll call you back. But if this really is an emergency, then somebody else can certainly help. Can you explain what the problem is?”

“You don’t know my name—Robert Mallon?” asked Mallon, incredulous. “I’m the man that somebody tried to kill on Cabrillo Beach.”

“Of course I know who you are,” said the cop. “It would be hard not to. If you’re in trouble again, tell me about it. Where are you?”

“I’m in a car, using a cell phone.”

“Are you in danger?”

“Yes, I am. They’ve tried twice more in Los Angeles.”

“Is someone after you now?”

“They’re searching for me,” he said. “They haven’t given up. But I can’t describe them yet, because I won’t know the next set until I see them come for me.”

“Mr. Mallon. Tell me exactly where you are.”

Mallon had a panicky feeling. He instinctively evaded the demand. “I’m on a cell phone. I can’t hear you very well.”

“Are you still armed? Do you have a gun?”

Mallon hesitated. He had never said he was armed. He said loudly, “I guess my battery’s gone. If you can still hear me, I’ll call you again from a regular phone later, when Lieutenant Fowler is in.” He pressed the power button to end the call. If the cop knew about the gun, he
knew about Malibu. It had not sounded as though the cop had wanted to help. It sounded as though he wanted to get Mallon into custody.