Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (5 page)

I lit a cigarette, took a harsh pull at it,
had to resist a very strong impulse to look over my shoulder.

Meanwhile, Souza was saying, "I know this
all started with the damned TV crew."

"What damned TV crew is that, Greg?" I
inquired with resignation, I know, clearly apparent in my
voice.

"Out there this morning,
you know, at the murder scene. That bastard got me on his Minicam,
I know he did, and he probably got all of us. I saw him inside
talking to the employees after you guys left, and I overheard some
talk about our missing VIP. Listen, that stuff is supposed to be
under the lid. It's no wonder it's blown all to hell now. The early
evening news starts at four-thirty in this area. Those bastards
were at my office by five-thirty."

I said, wearily, "Greg, please—what the hell
are we into?"

"Not sure, old buddy, but it's plenty ripe,
I can tell you that. I finally got a line on my mysterious retainer
after peeling off three layers of cover. Know who we're working
for?"

I said, "I can hardly wait to be told that,
Greg, believe me.

"We're working for the fuckin' Russians, I
think."

I said, "Oh God," and meant it as a
prayer.

"That's not for sure, yet, so don't get
totally unhinged. But watch your ass while I get it all
straightened out. And maybe you better warn the girl."

That time I did look over my shoulder. I
said, "You think...?"

"Sure, it's possible. Maybe you should put
her in a hotel, too. But for God's sake, don't go to the cops with
this, don't go to anyone, don't trust anyone, I think we're into
some deep shit here. Uh, listen, Ash...just in case...I mean,
anything could happen. Right? I already gave this to Foster, just
in case. Eye on the sky. Okay? Remember, eye on the sky. Now get
lost."

The receiver was buzzing
in my ear. I hung it up, went straight to the Maserati, turned her
around, and blasted off for Verdugo Mountain. I was less than five
minutes from her front door, so she'd been alone for no more than
ten to twelve minutes and, besides, I had not fully bought Greg
Souza's whole bag—but this guy was no dummy—a pain in the ass,
maybe, but no dummy—so I had a very mixed bag of churning guts just
barely under the control of a skeptical mind— not so much under
control as to prevent me from liberating a Walther PPK from a trick
compartment under the carpet at my feet. The long and the short of
it is that I got back to the House of Isaac in three minutes flat.
The hot and the cold of it is that the electronic gate was standing
wide open, whereas it had closed and locked behind me just minutes
earlier. A dark sedan was parked behind Jen's Jaguar in the alcove;
I caught that in my peripheral vision as I stood the Maserati on
her nose and bailed out running.

A skinny guy in a business
suit lunged out of the sedan and rushed me. I took the angular
momentum of that rush off the left hip and spun him on across the
driveway and into the iron fencing. I paused briefly at the open
doorway for a quick sniff of the inside atmosphere and threw a
quick look over my shoulder to make sure the guy was not up and
rushing again; he was not; I palmed the Walther and pushed on
inside, all the guts at full wriggle now and prepared for most
anything.

Greg Souza did not come by his paranoia
cheaply. Let me get this explanation into the record, right here.
The guy earned his spurs in the craziest of all the crazy worlds
possible. The international "intelligence" community has had its
good press and bad; it has been idealized, crucified, and lampooned
in every media form for many years now, and the paranoid agent who
sees a conspiracy in every bush is probably the most hackneyed
buffoon to ever grace a television screen. I poke fun at Souza
myself, even though I know with the certainty of one who has been
there himself that these guys do not get that way innocently. They
do live in an insane world where there is no principle or ethic and
no morality larger than the mission itself. It is a world in which
success is always right and failure always wrong, and there is no
price that will not be paid for success.

Which is mainly why I got the hell out.

And which was why, at that moment in the
House of Isaac, my guts were fairly screaming with concern for Dr.
Jen.

Nor were they screaming for nothing.

This very bland-faced, pleasant looking man
was on both knees beside the Jacuzzi, Jennifer was in the Jacuzzi,
totally submerged, and the guy was holding her under.

He noticed my presence
there just maybe a single heartbeat before I took his head in both
of my hands and threw it across the wet bar. The body followed, but
not exactly in a proper arc.

I did not even look for the touchdown but
had the spluttering, bug-eyed beauty in my arms and hauling even
before the crash beyond the bar. She was okay; a little the worse
for wear but alive and well enough, which maybe was more than could
be said a few minutes hence if we had hung around to discuss the
matter. I wrapped her in a towel and carried her out of there,
carefully placed her inside the Maserati, and away we went without
a backward glance.

I thought I caught a glint of light
reflecting from a metallic surface near some trees just below the
drive as we flashed past that point but I was not positive I had
seen anything at all, and it was no time for idle curiosity—nor was
it necessary, with the Maserati beneath us. She lifted us up, up,
and away—and I knew damned well that nothing on wheels behind us
would so much as taste our dust until I was ready for that.

We hit the Foothill
Freeway at full scream and I did not throttle-back until I'd worked
us through a briskly running traffic pack and had them all numbered
in my rearview.

Dr. Jen had spoken not a
word and I'd had little opportunity to do more than toss her an
occasional reassuring smile until that moment. But then I lit a
cigarette and offered it to her. To my surprise, she accepted it
and took a businesslike pull at it. So I lit another for myself and
tried to wind the guts back into place.

"You okay?" I quietly inquired.

"Does mad as hell
qualify?" she replied, just as quietly.

I chuckled and said, "I'd be mad, too. You
looked like hell, kiddo. Snot coming out your nose, eyes all bugged
and terrified. Can't you find a better way to get your kicks?"

She asked, "Did you kill him?"

I shrugged as I replied, "Unless I've lost
my touch."

"How does that make you feel?"

I shrugged again. "It was his nickel. How
does it make you feel?"

She did not reply to that but told me, "Ash,
I'm really scared."

"We're okay for now," I assured her.

"I don't mean—I mean...
Isaac. That man was looking for Isaac."

"He seemed pretty busy with you," I
commented.

"He was trying to get me to tell him where
Isaac is. I kept telling him I didn't know. And he kept pushing me
back under. Why in the world would a man like that be looking
for... ?" She made a lunge for me and held on for dear life. "My
God but you were a beautiful sight to terrified eyes! Thank you,
Ash. I don't know how to... just thanks, thanks."

I asked, very quietly, "Where is Isaac,
Jen?"

"I don't know," she whispered.

I said, "I believe that you do."

"No. Please. I just don't know."

But she did. She knew.

Chapter Six: The Lock

I moved from the Foothill to the Simi Valley
Freeway and ran on west to Topanga Canyon then took that surface
route south for roughly twenty miles to the coast, which put me
down about halfway between Santa Monica and Malibu. If you are
unfamiliar with the area, Topanga Canyon all the way through the
Santa Monica Mountains is a tortuous course and heavily traveled,
so the going was relatively slow and it was nearing eight o'clock
when we hit the coast highway. Throughout that tense journey,
however, we had traveled in silence, with not so much as a word
between us. Which gave a lot of thinking time, and I certainly
needed that. Jen needed it too, apparently—curled up beside me
wearing only a damp towel, hair wetly tousled, brooding.

As we turned again
westbound along the coast, she very quietly bent the silence with
an almost musing observation. "What am I going to do, Ash? I'm
naked. Don't even have a hairbrush, a toothbrush—nothing. I can't
run around in this condition."

"The operative idea
there," I suggested, "is 'run around.' You can do that. Be
thankful. The other stuff is mere process. I'll run in up here
someplace and get you something to wear, cosmetics, whatever you
need. Pad and pencil right in front of you. Make a list. Sizes,
too, please."

She gave me a long,
searching look, then sighed and went to work on her list of needs.
That lasted for about twenty seconds. Then, with pencil poised
above the pad and her attention apparently pointed that way, she
softly inquired, "Does it bother you? That you have killed that
man?"

"Maybe two of them," I corrected her, in
about the same tone. "But I thought we already covered that."

She said, "No. You just shrugged it
off."

I told her, "I hit a deer
once. With a car. Bounded out of the darkness and froze in my
headlights, not ten feet in front of me. Didn't even have time to
move my foot off the accelerator before the impact. It bothered me.
Yeah, it bothered me."

"Is that an allegory?"

I tossed her a smile and said, "I guess.
Some things are simply unavoidable. You regret it. But you can't
take it back. And there's no sense in wearing a hair shirt all your
life because of it."

"But it does bother you,"
she decided quietly.

"If I think about it. Sure. It bothers me.
Every death bothers me. It always seems wrong. Yet I know..."

"You and Isaac would, I believe, speak the
same language."

"Glad to hear that."

"Yes. He says that death is implicit in
birth, yet it always comes as a surprise; it is always resisted,
always resented, and always improper..."

I finished the quotation, for her. "There is
no such thing as a proper death."

She gave me a delighted smile. "You have
read him."

I replied, "It has been a
long time. But he keeps coming back, little by little."

Dr. Jen seemed pleased as punch about
that.

I told her, "Better finish your list.
Shopping center just ahead."

But her needs were simple. A few basic
cosmetic items, comb and brush, sandals, jeans, pair of panties and
a bra, blouse. I knew a small boutique just a few minutes from my
place where all of it could be had. Took me just a couple of
minutes to round it all up, then I added a small overnight bag and
a simple purse to the list and used the telephone while the clerk
wrote it up. Just wanted to see if anyone was home at my place. I
let it ring about six times, hung up, paid for the purchase, and
told the clerk a bald-faced lie. "Someone stole my friend's clothes
out of the car while we were on the beach," I explained. "She's out
there in the car, right now, shivering in a damp towel. Could she
use your dressing room to...?"

Why of course, certainly, no problem.

I left the purchase on the
counter while I returned to the Maserati and told Jen, "Someone
stole your clothes at the beach. There's a dressing room inside.
You're welcome to use it. The stuff is paid for. Take your time. I
need to check something out. Be back in ten minutes;
promise."

She seemed a bit doubtful about the whole
thing but gathered the towel around her, slid out of the car, and
walked with surprising dignity in bare feet and towel to the shop.
I escorted her to the door, kissed her forehead, and repeated, "Ten
minutes."

The returning smile was a bit uncertain but
she went on inside. I was in the Maserati and out of there while
the clerk was showing her to the dressing room. I had no memory
whatever of any "Hank Gavinsky" but I wanted to see the guy for
myself if indeed he did exist and if indeed he was waiting to "see"
me.

He did, and he was—well,
sort of. And, yes, I recognized that face when I saw it—though
probably I would not have if we bad merely bumped into each other
on the street. I had left the Maserati a block back and came up on
his blind side by foot. The car displayed a rental company decal
and was parked some fifty feet off my driveway; the window on the
driver's side was down and the radio was playing soft music with
the sound of KBIG, a popular "easy listening" L.A. station; the guy
looked half asleep.

I slid the Walther around the doorpost and
nuzzled it into his ear as I said, softly, "Bang—you're dead."

He sure was. Already. Throat cut, ear to
ear. And not too long ago. Whoever did it was either as quiet as a
cat or was able to approach as a friend: a blood-soaked sniper's
pistol equipped with silencer and scope lay in his lap; death had
indeed come, here, as a total surprise.

So much for my hastily
conceived plan of action, concocted during the journey through
Topanga Canyon. I had hoped to have a bit of gentle conversation
with this guy—a very candid conversation, at gunpoint—which could
get directly into the heart of whichever "misunderstanding" had
sent him to my door. The only thing left of that idea now was to
elicit as much information as possible from the corpse. But it was
such a messy one, and I did not want this guy's blood on my hands
or any bloody fingerprints anywhere. I did manage to get the coat
open and to extract a slim wallet from an inside pocket without
violating the scene in any visible way. But I learned little from
the wallet, except that Gavinsky was traveling under the identity
of Walter Simonds. He carried a Maryland driver's license and a
couple of credit cards under that name. Except for several large
bills, there was nothing else. I replaced the wallet in the inside
coat-pocket, then went to the other side of the car for a look at
the glove compartment. Car rental papers in there were under the
same name. The car had been rented at Los Angeles International
Airport. An area map, supplied by the rental agency, had been
marked with a highlighting pen to show the route from LAX to
Malibu. The car had been checked out at seven-twenty that morning.
That did not compute. Why had Gavinsky marked a route from LAX to
Malibu even before I was into the case? And, if his visit had
nothing to do with the case of the missing scientist, then what was
it concerned with? Why had he been sitting there just outside my
door all day with a sniper's piece in his lap? Obviously the guy
had been dispatched to dispatch me. But, for God's sake,
why?