House Justice (37 page)

“Is that all?” Marty asked.

“No, there’s one more thing. I want you to call Rulon Tully right now. I want you to set up a meeting with him for tomorrow, or the next day at the latest. And I want the meeting to be someplace other than his house and it has to be after nine p.m.”

“Tully? He won’t talk to me. He hates me.”

“Well, if he doesn’t talk to you then you’re of no use to me, Marty. And I’m not the sort of person who keeps useless things.”

“That was Marty Taylor,” Rulon Tully said as he put down the phone.

As expected, Quinn didn’t respond.

“He wants to meet with me,” Tully said. “He says he wants to sell me his company.”

Quinn looked out the window. There was a hawk circling in the distance, looking for something to kill.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Tully said. “I mean, I can understand him wanting to dump the company, it’s a sinking ship, but why call me? He knows how I feel about him. He said the reason he wants to sell to me is because he figures I can turn things around, and the only reason he cares about that is because he doesn’t want to see all his people lose their jobs.”

Tully pushed off with his foot against the drafting table and his stool spun around, a weak, single-turn spin.

“Looking out for his people, I can buy that part,” Tully said. “He always was a bleeding heart. And I
am
in a good position to save the company, or at least parts of it, but there’s at least three other guys I can think of that could do that, too.”

Quinn looked at his watch.

Tully screamed, “Well, goddamnit, what do you think he’s up to?”

“I have no idea, Mr. Tully. I’m your chief of security, not your financial advisor. I know nothing about running your business.”

Tully started to tell the wooden bastard that he just wanted a sounding board, a commonsense assessment of the situation, but what was the point? He rubbed his small chin and thought some more.

“I suppose it could be guilt making him do this. He feels bad for… well, you know, and this is his way of making it up to me. Or maybe he thinks if he does this, I’ll stop coming after him, which, of course, I won’t. Hmm. No, I think I was right the first time. He thinks
this is the best way to get out of the business and keep some of his people employed.”

Tully spun around on the drafting stool again.

“I think I’ll meet him. I want to watch him grovel. And I want to find out how much trouble he’s in with the feds.”

“When’s the meeting?” Quinn asked.

“Tonight at ten.”

“Where?”

“A restaurant in Ventura.”

Quinn shook his head. “Why not have him come here? That would be better from a security standpoint.”

“He said he wanted to meet on neutral ground, like that’s gonna make a difference.” Before Quinn could say anything else, Tully laughed and said, “Yeah, I’m going to meet with the bastard. I’m going to tell him that I’m never going to stop until I’ve destroyed him. Then I’m going to spit in his eye.”

The florist was parked on Highway 101. Directly across from his position was the entrance to the access road leading to Rulon Tully’s estate.

Since he hadn’t been able to figure out a way to take Tully from his house, he had decided that he would wait for Tully to leave the estate, follow him, then hope some opportunity presented itself the way it had with Jimmy Franco. The problem with this plan—if you could call it a plan—was he had no idea
when
Tully would leave. He could be waiting for days, if not weeks. But what else could he do?

He realized the answer to that question was obvious: he could simply go back to Virginia and resume his life—but he knew he wasn’t going to do that.

He poured another cup of coffee from his thermos, his third cup in the last two hours. He was fighting to stay awake and it was only nine p.m. He thought again about the two men he had seen the day before, the ones spying on Tully’s estate at the same time he had been. He had no idea who they were or what they had been doing. One of the men—the older, gray-haired one—looked like he could have been a cop, but his companion—a stocky brute with tattooed arms— looked more like a criminal than a cop. The most likely explanation for their presence was that the two men were robbers casing Tully’s house. If they were robbers, and if they had any intelligence at all,
they would have quickly concluded that breaking into Tully’s place would be nearly impossible. Whoever they were, he could only hope that whatever they were doing didn’t interfere with his plans.

There was that word again:
plan
. He had no plan.

He lit a cigarette. He couldn’t believe after ten years of not smoking he was smoking again. True, he was under some stress, but he was still disgusted with his lack of willpower. He yawned. He decided he would wait half an hour more, then return to his motel and get some sleep. There was little chance that Tully would be going out at this late hour.

He wondered idly if there was some way he could force Tully to leave his home. The only thing that had occurred to him was to start a brush fire near the estate and hope it would become large enough to force Tully to evacuate. The problem with that idea was the coastal winds were notoriously unpredictable, and a fire was just as likely to destroy other homes in the area, and people and firemen could be killed. He wouldn’t do that.

A police car drove by at that moment, and another thought occurred to him: he could impersonate a cop. He could kidnap a cop, take the cop’s uniform and his car, drive up to Tully’s estate, and force Tully’s security people to let him in under some pretext. Once inside, he would take Tully from the estate at gunpoint. The downside with that plan—other than kidnapping a cop—was Tully’s people would see his face and with all the surveillance cameras on the estate they would end up with a picture of him. Still, he liked the idea. He would need to figure out a way to get a cop to come to him in some isolated spot, overcome the man, and, because he didn’t want to kill a cop, he’d have to find a place to put him for a day or two. But all that could be done. And it was certainly better than sitting indefinitely on the highway waiting for Tully to appear. He wished the idea had occurred to him earlier.

Tomorrow, he would…

A tow truck had just stopped in the left-turn lane, the lane that turned onto the access road. He wondered if one of Tully’s cars had broken
down, but if one had it seemed odd to be calling for a tow truck so late at night. Then a second vehicle, a Range Rover, pulled into the turn lane behind the tow truck, and the florist was almost positive the man in the passenger seat of the Rover was the gray-haired man who had been watching Tully’s house. What was going on?

The tow truck, with the Range Rover following, turned onto the access road. The florist hesitated for a moment and then started his car. He gave the other vehicles a two-minute lead and followed them down the access road with his headlights off. He knew where they were going. They were going to the blind curve, the ambush curve. He didn’t know why he was so sure of this, but he was. When he was about a hundred yards from the curve he stopped his car on the side of the access road, got out, and began crawling through the low shrubs near the road.

There they were. The tow truck was parked sideways, effectively blocking the road, but he couldn’t see the Range Rover. Ah, it had backed down into a shallow gully. Their plan was obvious; it was just what he would have done if he’d had men working with him. If Tully left his estate, the tow truck would block his way in front and the Range Rover would come out of the gully and box him in from behind.

He couldn’t imagine, however, that these men planned to stay parked on the access road indefinitely, so he figured they must have information that Tully was planning to leave his house tonight. But
why
were they ambushing him? The most logical answer was they were planning to kidnap him. Tully was enormously wealthy and his company would pay a fortune to ransom him. Or maybe they wanted to murder him; from what the florist had read, Tully had certainly made more than his share of enemies.

Whatever the case, this was the opportunity he had been looking for.

Yuri smiled at the young waitress and ordered a second cup of coffee. He was always surprised at the number of beautiful waitresses in
California; he supposed half of them were would-be film stars—or maybe good genes just abounded in this golden state.

He was at a cafe on the 101, and the plan was for him to wait there until Mikhail called and told him he had captured Tully and breached his estate. Once he received the call, it would take him only fifteen minutes to get to Tully’s place. He could have gone with Mikhail and the others and directed the operation himself, but he had no desire to be involved in the gunfight that was likely to occur when Mikhail took Tully. That was the reason he employed people like Mikhail: to take the risks—and the bullets.

He was impressed, as always, by Mikhail’s attention to detail. All of Mikhail’s men would wear masks and gloves. Once they were inside Tully’s estate, they would try not to kill his security force immediately; they might need them later to help move Tully’s possessions. Two large moving vans were parked at a rest stop ten miles farther down the highway, and the drivers would be called when Mikhail was ready to begin moving things from the house. In the morning, Tully’s staff would arrive—the gardeners, the secretaries, his cook, his masseuse —and these people would be allowed inside the gates, then placed in a locked room, except for one of the secretaries who would answer the phones and tell callers that Tully was unavailable.

Yuri planned to complete the operation in less than twenty-four hours. As soon as Mikhail told him everything was under control, he would go to Tully’s estate, and while Mikhail’s men were moving things from the house into the moving vans, he would force Tully to transfer money to his account in Mexico, where it would be transferred again to another account in Switzerland. By this time tomorrow night, Tully would be dead and his possessions would be on their way to a fence in Los Angeles who had the contacts to sell the sort of exotic things that Tully owned. Yuri hadn’t decided if he would kill all of Tully’s people when the operation was complete, but once he had killed Tully it wouldn’t matter how many other people died because the authorities would react in an overwhelming manner to Tully’s death. He would decide when the time came.

The waitress returned with his coffee.

“Thank you,” Yuri said. “You’re a very pretty girl. Are you an actress?”

Xavier Quinn sat in the backseat of the Mercedes with Tully, doing his best to ignore his employer. Tully was as excited as a little kid on his way to the circus—an ugly, spoiled little kid—and the opportunity to meet with Marty Taylor and humiliate him had made him giddy with anticipation. Every once in a while Tully would bark out a laugh and hit the seat next to him with one of his tiny fists. Quinn imagined Tully was thinking about what he would say to Taylor and was laughing about what he expected Taylor’s reaction would be.

Rulon Tully was insane.

Quinn decided, at that moment, that he would leave Tully’s employment at the end of the month. His initial goal had been to wait until he had banked two million, and he was a man who hated not to meet a goal, but the time had come. Then another thought occurred to him as the maniac on the seat next to him giggled again. He decided he would force Tully to give him the villa he owned near Florence. The villa was small and Tully hadn’t used it in years but he would still resent giving it to him. But he would. Quinn had information that could send Tully to prison without ever implicating himself, and Tully knew this. Yes, he liked the idea: Tully’s Italian villa would be part of his severance package.

The only thing that concerned him was he had no idea what he would do after he retired. He couldn’t just sit in the villa day after day drinking wine and enjoying the view. He supposed he could consult on security problems for wealthy Europeans; they were constantly being kidnapped. He wouldn’t have to do it full time, just when he got bored or needed an infusion of cash. And having worked for Tully would impress folks, and he’d ensure that Tully gave him a glowing recommendation. Yes, that might be …

“Mr. Quinn,” the driver said. “Look.”

Quinn stopped daydreaming and looked out the front windshield. There was a large tow truck blocking the road in front of them.

“Stop!” he told the driver.

“What’s happening?” Tully asked.

Quinn ignored Tully. “Jack, back up, now! Fast!”

Jack slammed the Mercedes into reverse, spun his head to look behind him, then said, “Oh, shit.”

Quinn turned. A Range Rover had come out of a gully on the left side of the road and was now blocking their path.

“Ram it, Jack,” Quinn said.

“What’s going on?” Tully screamed.

Jack stepped on the gas but the Range Rover was only five feet from the Mercedes’s back bumper. Jack hit it hard, but he hadn’t been able to get the momentum needed to knock the Rover out of the way.

“Go off the road!” Quinn said. The terrain on the right side of the road was rough and most likely impassable, but they had to try. Then Quinn noticed that two men wearing ski masks had gotten out of the tow truck and were pointing Uzis at them, and before Jack had time to drive off the road both men fired simultaneously and shredded the Mercedes’s front tires—and Tully became hysterical.

“Shut up!” Quinn screamed at Tully. He could now see five men, all wearing ski masks. Four of the men held Uzis; the fifth man had his hands down at his side, and Quinn sensed that he was the one in charge. He didn’t know how long they had—the bulletproof glass would protect them from the Uzis, but not indefinitely. He pulled out his cell phone to call back to the security force at the estate and speed-dialed the number, but the phone showed he wasn’t getting a signal. This was bad.

The leader walked up to the driver’s-side door of the Mercedes and Quinn saw that he wasn’t unarmed as he’d originally thought. The man tapped on the driver’s window with a heavy, long-barreled revolver and, realizing they couldn’t hear him inside the Mercedes, made a motion for Jack to roll down the window. The barrel of the revolver was almost nine inches long, and Quinn recognized the weapon. It
was a .500 S&W Magnum. The Mercedes had bulletproof glass— which in reality was bullet-
resistant
glass—and it was designed not to shatter when struck by bullets fired from most conventional weapons. The .500 S&W, however, was not a conventional weapon; it was supposedly designed for macho hunters who wanted to use a handgun to go after big game, big game like Kodiak bears.