Guilty (12 page)

"Demetria Davila." Macklin said.

Craven shook with terror, his eyes locked on Sam's gaping mouth.

"She's going to kill your daughter," Craven huffed. Macklin's face tightened with rage.

The dog growled. Or maybe it was Macklin.

"No," Craven sputtered, reading Macklin's eyes.

Macklin let go of the dog's collar and sprinted back to the chopper. Behind him, Craven's guts flew like pillow stuffing.

"She's at your house. She's going to kill them all." Brett Macklin's words crackled over the radio in Sergeant Ronald Shaw's car.

Shaw called for backup. And, without looking, made a sudden U-turn across Lincoln Boulevard. Cars moving in both directions came to wild, screeching stops. His Plymouth tore down the street, the siren screaming.

He steered madly through the Venice streets, screeching around corners, jumping curbs, charging against oncoming traffic. Cars spun out all around him, clogging up the traffic in his destructive wake.

How could he have left them alone? How could he have been so stupid?

He skidded to a stop outside his house and burst out of his car, gun drawn. He aimed at his front door across the hood of his car. The engine rattled and the car felt hot. The house was still.

Somebody should have peered out the window. Someone should have come running out the front door. Officer Barron should have come out.

It felt bad. Real bad.

Shaw ran in a crouch from the cover of his car and cut a zigzagging path to his front door. He flattened his back against the wall and held his gun up high.

Across the street, Jess and Gladys Furnow pulled back their blinds and waved at Shaw. There was always something interesting happening at the Shaw house.

He took a deep breath and let his free hand drop to the doorknob. His hand twisted the knob open. The door creaked as it swung a few inches into the dark entry hall.

Shaw saw the Furnows looking curiously at him. Up the street, Dave McDonnell, a heavyset magazine editor, proudly waxed his black Porsche and, seeing Shaw, crinkled his face in confusion. If they only knew what evil thrived in their midst. Death, dark and sinister, was now their neighbor.

The detective held out his gun and spun into the door frame, ready to face Davila, in whatever guise. Instead, he faced a living room full of defenseless Levitz furniture.

And Officer Barron.

Her corpse lay sprawled like a lion-skin rug, head propped up on its chin, mouth taped open in a mock growl.

A fireplace poker sticking out of her back nailed her to the floor. Blood seeped into the cracks between the floor tiles.

The sadistic bitch was McKimmon
.

Shaw swallowed back the bile and edged around the body. Barron was a fresh kill. Maybe Sunshine and Cory were alive. Maybe. His eyes searched the shadows for the slightest movement; his ears strained for the slightest sound.

Where the fuck is my backup?

He heard a glass break in the kitchen. In the silence of the house, the sound was like a sonic boom. Shaw inched his way across the living room toward the kitchen door. His shirt clung to his damp back and his jacket suddenly felt constricting.

The kitchen door parted a crack.

Inviting.

Shaw narrowed his eyes. His finger tightened on the trigger.

The broken glass, the open door. Bait to a trap.

But Shaw had no choice. He had to take action. The lives of Sunshine and Cory were at stake. The door loomed up, huge and menacing.

Behind it, he knew, hell waited.

He braced himself against the wall near the door hinge. Using his gun barrel, he eased open the door. The slowly widening crack revealed Cory, curled in a corner beside the kitchen table, her shocked eyes locked onto something across the room.

She's alive!

Shaw slowly slipped into the kitchen, his back hugging the door. Cory didn't seem to notice him. He followed her eyes to the opposite wall and straightened up.

Sunshine.

He stopped breathing. The room rolled under his feet and the door silently swung closed.

Sunshine was stabbed to the kitchen wall. Table knives. Forks. Steak knives. Skewers. Butcher knives. They all held her corpse in place.

Demetria Davila leaped out from behind the kitchen door, a gleaming butcher knife held over her head. Shaw spun and fired, blasting a hole in the wall where she had stood. She screamed with devilish glee, her eyes wild, her mouth wide in a delirious grin. He fired again as she buried her butcher knife deep in his chest. The errant slug blasted harmlessly into the ceiling.

Shaw fell backward, the shiny metal blurring in his eyes as she thrust again and again into his chest.

Demetria Davila stood up, her arms covered in Shaw's blood up to her elbows. She tossed back her head in a wild laugh. Cory gripped her face with her hands and screamed until she fainted, her t body falling to one side.

Davila planted her foot on Shaw's quivering stomach and yanked the butcher knife from his chest. It made a moist, sucking sound as it slid out of his convulsing body. Grinning, she stepped through the puddles of blood towards the child.

The house shuddered. Davila froze and heard the unmistakable rumble of helicopter blades churning the air. She dropped the knife, picked up Shaw's gun, and walked into the living room. Through the drapes of the living room window, she could see the dark outline of the chopper landing on the lawn. She smiled and fired. The slugs tore through the drapes and shattered the glass.

Brett Macklin dove out of the chopper, the bullets whizzing dangerously close to him. He rolled across the lawn, popped up in firing stance, and riddled the draped window with gunfire from his Uzi.

Macklin ran forward and leaped through the window. He landed, rolled, and came up in a crouch. Officer Barron stared lifelessly at him.

Outside, the wail of police sirens grew close.

"Killing is an art, Macklin," he heard Davila yell, "an art I've perfected."

He kicked the kitchen door open and burst inside. To his left, Sunshine's corpse stuck to the wall. Shaw twitched in blood at her feet. Macklin turned and saw Cory—covered in blood and crumpled in a heap.

Macklin rushed to her and gently turned her over. There were no wounds. The blood belonged to the others.

She was alive.

Davila was gone.

He left Cory for the police and ran back to his chopper. Neighbors were coming out of their houses. Police cars screeched around the corner. Macklin lifted the chopper into the air as the squad cars converged on Shaw's house.

From the sky, the neighborhood looked like a giant model. Everything was clear—nothing was hidden. Macklin peered down, searching for any sign of the murderous Bitch.

A few doors down from Shaw's house, Macklin saw Dave McDonnell lying facedown on his driveway, tread marks on his back. A mile ahead, Macklin could see McDonnell's black Porsche weaving between cars.

The Bitch.

Macklin ped for her speeding car. She turned sharply, careening into the maze of narrow streets that led to the famed Venice canals. The network of seedy backwaters was all that was left of the tidal flats a turn-of-the-century developer tried to transform into Renaissance Italy.

Macklin could see squad cars closing off the streets in Davila's wake. She was trapped between the cops and the canals.

Or so he thought.

She burst through a picket fence and, to Macklin's sheer horror, charged for the family picnicking on the lawn. The family ran in all directions. He watched helplessly as she plowed over the family and then veered to strike a fleeing child. The kid bounced off her hood, sailed into the canal, and sunk into the morass of sewage.

The Porsche crashed through the fence again and skidded onto the street. Macklin stuck the barrel of his Uzi out the window. Bullets skitted on the asphalt around her car. She whipped around a corner and up onto a sidewalk. Macklin, in impotent rage, saw the carnage that was to come.

She cut a swath of blood through a crowd of beachgoers. Severed limbs spun into the air. The Porsche roared off the sidewalk and into the street. A huge Bekins moving truck suddenly pulled out of a side street. The truck grumbled into her path.

She veered sharply. The car spun. She regained control of the car and barreled across a vacant lot toward the narrow canal. Macklin charged over her, banked, and came around facing her as she picked up speed.

She was racing for the water.

She was going to jump it.

Macklin's eyes burned with fury. A victorious yell escaped from his lips as he bore down on the murderous Bitch.

The Porsche launched into the air above the canal. Macklin flew straight at her.

They smashed together head-on. The sky erupted with a monstrous thunderclap of flame. The helicopter and the Porsche meshed into a pulsating fire cloud that filled the sky and rained jagged, white-hot metal onto the grimy waters.

A helicopter blade spun through air and sliced into the side of the Bekins truck trailer. Trees and bushes along the bank erupted in flames. Windows shattered up and down the canal.

And amidst the steaming debris on the water, a blackened body floated facedown towards the shore.

December. Dawn.

The fog rolled in over the water and across the Pacific Coast Highway, slapping against the dry cliff like a wave and washing thickly over the Santa Monica high-rises.

Sergeant Ronald Shaw felt strange being outside. The world didn't seem the same. It probably never would.

He grasped the collar of his trench coat tight around his neck and looked out over the water into the hazy distance. An immense flock of squawking seagulls swirled over the frothy swells. He shivered in his jacket and scolded himself for not wearing heavier clothing.

The surf rode high on the beach, arms of water reaching out for the three or four joggers he saw traversing the shore.
Life goes on.
There were so many other people, so many who were living lives no different now from those they'd led six months ago. It was hard for him to believe.

God, how he wished he was one of them.

Shaw turned and strode down the pier, careful not to stray far from the security of the handrail. He wasn't used to walking yet, and lugging the heavy briefcase in his left hand was taking a lot out of him. Six months of confinement, hospital food, blank walls, and an endless stream of game shows were hard to shake off. So were the nightmares, the horrific, recurring images of Sunshine staring down at him with large, dead eyes.

But at least he had survived.

Shaw breathed deeply, relishing the cool bite in the air. The scent of rubbing alcohol was gloriously absent from the ocean mist. A lone merchant lifted the storm boards from the windows of his fish market and paid no attention to Shaw as he hobbled past. At the end of the pier, the single fisherman was just a misty, solitary shape.

"Hey, got a light?"

The voice startled Shaw. He turned, his heart thumping nervously. A stubble-faced wino grinned toothlessly at him, a cigarette stub hanging from the corner of his mouth.

"Don't smoke," Shaw mumbled, vaguely disappointed and, in an odd way, relieved.

The wino shrugged and shuffled off to bum a light off the fish merchant. Shaw sighed and walked on. His chest ached and his arms felt leaden.

The doctors said he'd be as good as new in a year.
Good as new.

Shaw fell into a bench at the end of the pier. The fisherman hunched on the rail beside him and cast his line out to the warning buoys several yards out to sea. Waves whipped the pier's aging pilings. The heavy stench of fish hung in the air around the fisherman. Shaw glanced into the man's plastic bucket and saw two scrawny salmon flopping in a few cups of filthy seawater.

Shaw looked up into the fisherman's pale, scarred face and dark, brooding eyes and motioned to the bucket. "Is this good or bad luck?"

The fisherman glanced down at him and then his catch.

"Bad."

Shaw nodded. "Well, it's a nice morning, anyway."

The fisherman shrugged and gently reeled in his line. Shaw glanced over his shoulder and looked down the length of the pier. The wino urinated against the abandoned Sinbad dance hall. A woman in a dirty tank top and faded jeans roller-skated towards them, rolls of fat jiggling on her body as her wheels thudded between the planks.

Shaw faced the sea again. A trawler, anchored offshore, bounced on the water. He stared at it, strangely fascinated. Maybe he'd just do the same thing. Shaw shivered and buried his hands deep in his warm pockets.

The fisherman set down his pole and unscrewed the cap on a metal Thermos. Shaw smelled the tantalizing aroma of fresh, ground coffee, steaming hot. The fisherman seemed to sense this. His lips twisted into a thin smile.

He offered Shaw the plastic cup.

Shaw waved it away. "No, thanks, I—"

The fisherman ignored Shaw's protests and set it on the bench. "I'll drink from the Thermos." As if to prove his point, he took a sip. Shaw smiled and took the cup.

"Thanks."

The fisherman leaned against the wood railing and looked down at Shaw. "You feeling okay?"

Shaw nodded, savoring his sip of coffee. It was a far cry from the sewage the hospital served.

The fisherman nodded and took another sip. "I've been worried about you."

Shaw felt another shiver course through his body. But it wasn't the cold. He met the fisherman's hard gaze. The fisherman gave him a grim smile.

"Mack," Shaw said.

Brett Macklin nodded.

"My God, your face. It's completely different."

Macklin took a seat beside his old friend. "Most of it is steel, plastic, and superglue." He took a drink from his Thermos. The hot steam felt nice on his face. "I looked in the mirror and I saw a stranger. It's the way it should be."

Shaw used his foot to slide the briefcase over to Macklin. "This is from Mayor Stocker."

Macklin didn't look at it. "How much?"

"It's a hundred thousand dollars of the taxpayers' money," Shaw said. "He's buying your silence and the end of your vigilance in this city."