slipped open a button on his shirt, reached inside, and withdrew the Taser that was tucked under his belt, against his abdomen. As he'd delayed getting out of the Honda, he had retrieved the weapon from the storage pocket in the driver's door.
'The laundry room is this way,' Mitch said, leading Taggart a few steps forward before turning suddenly with the Taser.
The detective wasn't following as close as Mitch had thought. He was a prudent two steps back.
Some Tasers fire darts trailing wires, which deliver a disabling shock from a moderate distance. Others require that the business end be thrust against the target, resulting in an intimacy equal to that of an assault with a knife.
This was the second Taser model, and Mitch had to get in close, get in fast.
As Mitch thrust with his right arm, Taggart blocked with his left. The Taser was almost knocked out of Mitch's hand.
Retreating, the detective reached cross-body, under his sports jacket, with his right hand, surely going for a weapon in a shoulder holster.
Taggart backed into a counter, Mitch feinted left, thrust right, and here came the gun hand from under the jacket. Mitch wanted bare skin, didn't want to risk fabric providing partial insulation against the shock, and he got the detective in the throat.
Eyes rolling back in his head, jaw sagging, Taggart fired one round, his knees folded, and he dropped.
The shot seemed unusually loud. The shot shook the room.
Chapter 56
Mitch was not wounded, but he thought about John Knox self-shot in the fall from the garage loft, and he knelt worriedly beside the detective.
On the floor at Taggart's side lay his pistol. Mitch shoved it out of reach.
Taggart shuddered as if chilled to the marrow, his hands clawed at the floor tiles, and bubbles of spit sputtered on his lips.
Faint, thin, pungent, a ribbon of smoke unraveled from Taggart's sports jacket. The bullet had burned a hole through it.
Mitch pulled back the jacket, looking for a wound. He didn't find one.
The relief he felt did not much buoy him. He was still guilty of assaulting a police officer.
This was the first time he had hurt an innocent person. Remorse, he found, actually had a taste: a bitterness rising at the back of the throat.
Pawing at Mitch's arm, the detective could not close his hand into a grip. He tried to say something, but his throat must be tight, his tongue thick, his lips numb.
Mitch wanted to avoid having to Taser him a second time. He said, 'I'm sorry,' and set to work.
The car key had vanished into Taggart's jacket. Mitch found it in the second pocket he searched.
In the laundry room, having digested the gunshot and having come to a conclusion about what it might mean, Anson began shouting. Mitch ignored him.
Taking Taggart by the feet, Mitch dragged him out of the house, onto the brick patio. He left the detective's pistol in the kitchen.
As he pulled the back door shut, he heard the doorbell ring inside. The police were at the front of the house.
As Mitch took time to lock the door to delay their exposure to Anson and his lies, he said to Taggart, 'I love her too much to trust anyone else with this. I'm sorry.'
He sprinted across the courtyard, along the side of the garage, and through the open back gate into the windswept alleyway.
When no one answered the doorbell, the cops would come around the side of the house, into the courtyard, and find Taggart on the bricks. They would be in the alley seconds later.
He threw the Taser on the passenger's seat as he got behind the wheel. Key, switch, the roar of the engine.
In the storage pocket of the door was the pistol that belonged to one of Campbell's hired killers. Seven rounds remained in the magazine.
He wasn't going to pull a gun on the police. His only option was to get the hell out of there.
He drove east, fully expecting that a squad car would suddenly hove across the end of the alleyway, thwarting him.
Panic is fear expressed by numbers of people simultaneously, by an audience or a mob. But Mitch had enough fear for a crowd, and panic seized him.
At the end of the alleyway, he turned right into the street. At the next intersection, he turned left, heading east again.
This area of Corona del Mar, itself a part of Newport Beach, was called the Village. A grid of streets, it could be sealed off with perhaps as few as three roadblocks.
He needed to get beyond those choke points. Fast.
In Julian Campbell's library, in the trunk of the Chrysler, and in that trunk a second time, he'd known fear, but nothing as intense as this. Then he had been afraid for himself; now he was afraid for Holly.
The worst that could happen to him was that he would be captured or shot by the police. He had weighed the costs of his options and had chosen the best game. Now he didn't care what happened to him except to the extent that if anything happened to him, Holly would stand alone.
In the Village, some of the streets were narrow. Mitch was on one of them. Vehicles were parked on both sides. With too much speed, he risked sheering a door off if somebody opened one.
Taggart could describe the Honda. In minutes, they would have the license-plate number from the Department of Motor Vehicles. He could not afford to rack up body damage that would make the car even more identifiable.
He arrived at a traffic signal at Pacific Coast Highway. Red.
Heavy traffic surged north and south on the divided highway.
He couldn't jump the light and weave into the flow without precipitating a chain reaction of collisions, with himself at the center of the ultimate snarl.
He glanced at the rearview mirror. Some kind of paneled truck or muscle van approached, still a block away. The roof appeared to be outfitted with an array of emergency beacons, like those on a police vehicle.
This was a street lined with mature trees. The dappling shadows and piercework of light rippled in veils across the moving vehicle, making it difficult to identify.
Out on northbound lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway, a police car passed, parting the traffic before it with emergency beacons but not with a siren.
Behind the Honda, the worrisome vehicle cruised within half a block, at which point Mitch could read the word ambulance on the brow above the windshield. They were in no hurry. They must be off duty or carrying the dead.
He exhaled a pent-up breath. The ambulance braked to a stop behind him, and his relief was short-lived when he wondered whether paramedics usually listened to a police scanner.
The traffic light changed to green. He crossed the southbound lanes and turned left, north on Coast Highway.
One bead of sweat chased another down the nape of his neck, under his collar, along the spillway of his spine.
He had traveled only a block on Coast Highway when a siren shrilled behind him: this time, in the rearview mirror, a police car.
Only fools led cops on a chase. They had air resources as well as a lot of iron on the ground.
Defeated, Mitch steered toward the curb. As he vacated the lane, the squad car shot past him and away.
