J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (22 page)

You’re mine.
I turned the flashlight on, pointed it at the wall roughly in the direction of my target.

One. Two. Three.

I set the flashlight on the wall, rolled to the left, and popped up. I fired at her position just as the wall next to me spit out a hail of shards and dust. The flashlight went dead.

Round six spat out the end of the revolver, and I heard a yelp.

I’d hit her.

And for about the next minute, she’d be mostly blind from the light.

I leapt over the wall, running flat out at her position. I shoved the .38 into my hip pocket and pulled out the .45 as I ran. Five shots left in the .45.

I covered the ground in maybe eight seconds. Maybe less. The house had to be backlighting me. Not good. I was banking that she’d dropped to the ground when I hit her.

And she had. At least, dropped her gun. A Knight’s PDW. Serious fucking hardware dead in the middle of the walking trail.

But she was nowhere around.

I looked on through the trees and saw a shadow running across the field toward the parking lot at the end of Poplar.

Flat out. Running till my lungs bled. I threw two slugs at her, missed. Three left. The .45 is shit at that kind of range, with shaky hands from running and adrenaline.

She changed directions to put houses in front of her. Backlit. Better target. Still out of range. I’d risk hitting a civilian asleep in their bed.

My feet pounded the ground, but she was too far ahead. She hit the pavement and sprinted up Poplar. I got up to the street just in time to catch her jumping into the passenger seat of a black BMW with dealer plates.

I kicked myself for being such a goddamned moron. It was the same car I passed at BAGG. And the Ackerman house. The one I’d parked behind when I got here. Perfect Bay Area camouflage.

It sped north on Railroad.

There was no way to find them.

I staggered to a standstill and leaned against the fence. My lungs ached like I’d been breathing acid. Every nerve jangled.

Every muscle went to rubber.

Sank to my haunches, then to the ground, holding onto that fence for dear life while I tried like hell to push the adrenaline out.

Still no time. Had to get back to get the ambulance and the cops.

A few minutes. Might have been ten. Might have been one. I don’t know—you can’t tell time when you’re that amped up. I somehow found my feet and staggered back along the path across the two-hundred-yards-plus-gully.

When I got to the shooter’s iron I took my jacket off and wrapped it, then picked it up in the vain hope that she hadn’t worn gloves or had somehow left fingerprints.

This was a professional’s weapon. I wasn’t going to find anything. But I did it right anyway. Sometimes you get lucky.

But fingerprints might not matter. She’d left blood on it. Tagged her close to the wrist on her left arm to get that much red and make her drop the thing. One more lead for the boys in blue—local hospitals always report gunshot wounds.

Back at the house, Sternwood was still breathing. Nya was still holding him, pressing that compress to him and trying hard not to look at Bridget or Phil on the floor in front of them.

The house had a land line. Maybe the last place around here that did.

It took the cops ten minutes to get there. Probably interrupted their evening donut meeting at 7-11.

They kept me there for three hours. They wanted to keep me more, but it’s a small department and I think they were just glad to be rid of me. They had my license number. They knew where to find me.

Nya went out wrapped in a blanket under her own power—a few bumps and bruises, but she was going to be okay. No cowardice in that woman at all, willing to stab her own father to defend a couple of barely-knowns who she’d decided were okay.

She was going to do just fine. Might even wind up a cop someday, if she could learn better impulse control.

I gave the flatfoots her home number. Dora was gonna be all kinds of shiny when she got that call.

Phil and Gravity went out in bags. So did Rawles.

Rawles, who should have been home, happy to have escaped the worst of it. Revenge is an expensive hobby.

Sternwood went out on a gurney. He was gonna live, but over the last two days they’d made him watch as they killed his girls in front of him. Gravity’s revenge, and a message from someone else.

Now Sternwood had also lost his son.

Gravity…or Charlie. Mowed down by…who? The people who mugged me. The people who tailed me earlier tonight. Probably the people who used him to get to Sternwood and the girls.

I had more pressing problems than the wound on my arm. One of them in particular had me scared to go anywhere near home.

They
had used Gravity to get to Sternwood.

So who the hell were
they
?

3:00 AM, Tuesday

Half Moon Bay PD wasn’t happy to let me go. In the end I had to call my lawyer and have him pull the “You may be a big fish in that small pond, but I have a big water pump that can empty it and leave you high and dry” routine. I didn’t want to—they were doing their jobs and doing it pretty damn well under unusual circumstances, but I had bigger things on my mind.

There was only one person I knew where to find at this hour, and she was probably the last person on Earth who wanted to see me.

I had to pull her address from my payroll records, which meant more wardriving to find an open network once I reached San Mateo, then querying the office server over the net.

Google maps had me rolling up to her apartment complex in Castro Valley a little after three. Her lights were on—she was twenty and living on her own, I’d have been a little disappointed if she actually slept at night.

Two shallow concrete steps up from the tarmac brought me
t
o the door set into the brick-facade wall.

Knock knock.

Her shadow through the peep-hole, checking to see who I was. Another thirty seconds of waiting, and the door opened to reveal Rachael in a terry-cloth robe that, judging by the embroidered logo, she’d stolen from the Rio in Las Vegas.

She crossed her arms, looked at me for about two seconds, then walloped me hard across the left cheek. Not a slap—a proper right hook. She wound up with her left, but I reached up and caught it.

I said: “I probably deserve that.”

“Yeah, you do. What kind of fucktard leaves his intern with a,” she clamped her voice down to a hiss, “body to deal with and asks her to cover up that he was there.”

“You weren’t supposed to know I was there.”

“Oh, that makes it all better. You left a note on my desk, dimwit.”

“Shit.” Figures I’d forget something.

“So why the hell are you here?”

I raised an eyebrow at her and shook my head just a little bit, “Because I’m out of my depth, and you’re the only person I can trust.”

She folded her arms across her chest again and tapped her foot at me. She looked me up and down. Her eyes flitted to the wound on my arm three times, the scuffs on my knuckles twice, the tear in my jacket, then came back up and met me. “Donald!” Here’s hoping the neighbors slept well.

A dazed-looking, fairly lean, naked Asian man blundered sideways out of the door to the right—presumably to the bedroom—and froze when he saw me. Well, most of him did. There was a certain amount of after-the-fact jiggling that was pretty difficult to ignore.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes. It’s time for you to go home now.”

“What, already?”

“I’ll call you. Seems I’ve got a work emergency.” She pinched her brow together at me as she said it, making it clear just how much I now owed her.

“Okay.” He returned through the door. Rachael didn’t move during the three minutes he was evidently collecting his belongings and arranging them into something resembling an outfit.

She just blocked my path, with her arms folded and her bare toes tapping on the aluminum door plate. I resisted cradling my aching face.

Donald emerged again, dressed incongruously in a bowler hat, corset-vest, and cargo pants outfitted with D-rings and rope braids. He picked up a brass-headed walking stick, kissed Rachel, and shouldered his way past me. Not happy about being kicked out, but not petulant either. Not even a glare at me as he left.

She picked ‘em well.

Once he was in his car, Rachael swept her arms into the living room.

“Come on in.”

“Thanks.”

I plopped down on her sofa while she went back into her room.

“You want ice for your face?” she shouted.

“That would be great.”

“It’s in the freezer.”

“Thanks a lot.” I hauled my broken-down ass out of the deep pile of pillows and into the one-butt kitchen. A bag of frozen peas would do the trick splendidly.

My ass found it’s resting spot, my cheek throbbed under the press of peas, and my hostess emerged from her room dressed in high-mobility clothes—BDUs over a body suit.

“You’ve done this before.”

“What?”

I nodded at her getup. “Tactical work.”

“Is that what we’re up for?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

“Okay.” She sat down on a leather Ikea chair opposite me. “If you’re showing up at my house at three in the morning, it’s serious.”

“You’ve had training?”

“My dad was in Desert Storm, now he’s a cop. I’m the son he never had. Do the math.

“Well that explains a lot, except…”

“Except what?”

“Why you covered my ass today.”

“You fucked up, mister fancy pants.”

“Right, we covered that. So why didn’t you rat me out?”

She leaned forward. “You mean why did I let a broken down disgraced cop with blinkered brains and questionable shower habits make me accessory-after-the-fact to first degree murder, with a little obstruction on the side?”

I blanched. “Um…yeah.”

“I want that job.”

“Are you blackmailing me?”

“Wha…ha!” She broke down somewhere between a guffaw and a giggle. “No, no, no. You have had a bad night. No, I mean if I covered for you, you’d notice I was worth the trouble.”

“That’s pretty calculating—risky too. If I’d killed her…”

“If you’d killed her you wouldn’t have left a note in the first place. And you wouldn’t have run out of there unless someone else was in trouble.”

“You think you know me pretty well.”

“Duh, I’ve been investigating you.” She rolled her eyes like my brain cells had started a die-off when I left college. “I’ve got access to all your files. Get a fuckin’ clue, Lantham. It’s hard to miss the kind of guy you are, reading your notes. Why do you think I want the damn job in the first place?”

“You might want to reconsider that application.”

“Why?”

“You read my case notes?”

“The ones you left at the office this morning—well, yesterday morning.”

“Then you don’t know the half of it.”

So I unwound the whole web for her. Every blind alley and curve ball and stupid-assed move I’d made in the past seventy-two hours—well, almost every one. I told her about the beach, and the beach house, and what Phil did to Rawles, and how nothing I did made a damn bit of difference for anyone but Nya. I wasn’t looking forward to that part of presenting my bill to Dora. Not one bit.

But I held something back.

Rachael didn’t see the problem. I didn’t expect her to.

“Sounds like the case is closed and you did what you could.”

“Yeah.” I kind of looked past her, still not sure I wanted to bring her the rest of the way in.

“Got some minor PTSD going on?”

“I suppose.” I took the peas down from my face to give my cheek a rest.

“One thing I don’t understand.”

“Oh?”

“You never let your phone go dead. What happened?”

“Stolen.”

She blinked. “How?”

“I haven’t quite told you everything.”

So I did. I told her about the mugging, and why I didn’t notice the body till I’d been in the office overnight. About chasing Gravity out to Half Moon Bay on Saturday. About how Nya suddenly reappeared when I was on to something. About the black BMW from Bondage-a-Go-Go, and the Ackerman house, and the fight with whoever had been driving it after he tailed me. I told her about feeling like they always had the drop on me, like somehow they knew what I was going to do—like when Rawles picked that fight with me at the car, and when they slipped out of the club right when I was napping, and a dozen other little things that hadn’t fit.

And about the woman—I was sure now she was the one who Tased me—who swiss-cheesed Gravity, and the chase through the park.

“She shot him?”

I nodded.

“And she’d been keeping you off his ass till then?”

I nodded.

“Shit.” She flomped back into her chair.

“Yeah. Smells like a cover-up to me.” I threw the pea bag on the coffee table between us. “That piece of hardware she dropped is serious shit. Knight’s Armament PDW, costs close to seven thousand on the street and you have to go to an arms dealer to get it. Whoever these people are, they’re big. And they’ve got to know I’m involved.”

“And if they don’t yet, they will as soon as your shooter gets to home base.”

“Yeah.”

She looked at me as if she was wondering whether I was going to ask her to hide me or help me disappear.

“I’m sorry, this was a mistake. I’d better go.” I stood.

She stood too. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t have much of a choice. I’m gonna try to disappear.”

“If you could find them, don’t you think they can find you?”

“Well what would you do?”

As if to answer me, she walked over to a door in the wall and opened it—a coat closet—and snatched a light jacket out of it. She grabbed a flick baton about eight inches long and secreted it up her sleeve. When she turned to look at me, she must have seen the astonishment on my face.

“What, I grew up in a bad neighborhood.”

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Gravity’s phone dead-ended at Kinksters?”

“Yeah.”