Hauser she needed backup. “And get on the phone to the main desk, tell them to hold off using their security guards in the parking garage. We don’t need extra bodies down there.”
Extra bodies-perhaps not the best way of putting it.
She reconnoitered the lobby and located another stairwell. It was better to use two different approaches to the garage. That way she and Crandall were covering more territory. If the women decided to double back, using the stairs, there was more chance of intercepting them.
She ran to the stairwell. The lobby was a scene of utter confusion. People were racing all around her, some yelling into cell phones, others calling for family members they’d lost track of. She had the impression that security was evacuating the building, or at least the ground level. That was okay. It would keep the guards out of the garage, anyway.
She opened the stairwell door and went in, beaming her pocket flash down the shaft.
Abby was down there somewhere. Abby and Andrea.
Two felons. Two killers.
And the two of them had to be stopped.
Reynolds had been scared there for a few minutes. He could admit that much. For a moment he’d been certain the crazy bitch would pull the trigger and cut him down.
Death as such didn’t scare him. Everybody died. But to die in a hotel lobby, shot by his ex-lover in a scandal that would ruin his reputation forever, to be remembered only as a D.A.-turned-congressman who’d diddled a legal secretary and gotten his brains blown out-that prospect terrified him. Life and death were unimportant, but pride mattered.
Now the fear had left him, and even the throbbing pain in his leg seemed distant and unimportant. He saw a way clear of this mess. A way to save himself and make everything right.
“I can’t believe you’re kidnapping me,” he said, pitching his voice loud.
Andrea was silent. He risked saying more.
“My Mustang is pretty distinctive. The police will be able to spot it.”
“I don’t care about the police.”
“We’ll be lucky if we even get out of the hotel garage,” he said, again too loudly.
“Stop shouting.”
“It’s the gunshot. My ears are still ringing. I can’t hear myself think.”
He steered the car forward between the ranks of concrete pylons under the glare of fluorescent lights. He’d done what he could. Now it depended on Shanker.
Reynolds had done more than retrieve his keys when he’d reached into his pocket. He’d touched his cell phone and activated the speed dial. If he’d done it correctly, he should have placed a call to Shanker, who was sitting in his van on level one of the garage, waiting for Reynolds’ signal.
If Shanker had heard the few words he’d just spoken, he ought to be able to figure out what was going on- and to do something about it.
All that was needed was a momentary distraction. Reynolds leaned forward in the driver’s seat and felt the comforting weight of the gun under his jacket, the gun he had taken from the wall safe in his home office before driving to L.A.
He only had to get the pistol out of Andrea’s hands, or pin her down so she couldn’t fire. Then with her gun or with his own, he could take her out. One bullet to the head, and that would be the end of Andrea, formerly Bethany, the mother of two of his children, and the bane of his life.
And the beauty of it was, no one would blame him. The angry altercation in the lobby would actually work to his advantage. He had multiple witnesses to testify that the woman had been behaving in an irrational and violent manner, that she had held a gun on him and marched him into an elevator. He had the wound in his thigh to prove she was serious.
He was a victim, for God’s sake. Andrea Lowry was a crazy woman with a history of mental illness, institutionalization, and violence. She had been stalking him. She had finally tracked him down in the Brayton-he could invent a convincing reason for being there. Fortunately he’d been able to defend himself.
She wouldn’t be around to tell her side of the story. Only Abby remained to be dealt with, and she was already in trouble with the law, or so she claimed. Even if her story had been bullshit, there was a fair chance he could get to her before she could do him any harm. With both women out of the way, there would be no one to refute his version of events.
He could make it work. Hell, he could come out of this a hero. The crusading D.A. would now be a fighting congressman who’d taken on a stalker and won. He might be able to parlay this into a run for the senate. And for a senator from California, a slot on a presidential ticket was not an impossibility.
Or he might just be getting lightheaded from blood loss. But one thing was certain. If he had a chance to finish Andrea, he would take it. He would do the job his hired thugs had botched twenty years ago. He would kill the bitch at last.
The Man was in trouble. That much was obvious.
Shanker put the van into gear and barreled out of his parking spot.
The voices on the phone had been faint and slightly garbled, but he’d made out enough to know that Reynolds was being forced to drive out of the hotel garage, and that he had been shot or at least shot at, and that the shooter was a woman.
Abby, of course. It had to be. The bitch had pulled off another double cross.
But this one would be her last.
Reynolds was pulling close to the exit ramp when he saw the gray blur of Shanker’s van in his rearview mirror. The van was gaining fast.
Things were about to get interesting.
He tightened his grip on the wheel. A trickle of perspiration oozed down his neck. It was cold, as cold as the muzzle of the pistol still pressed against his skin.
“What’s the matter, Jack?” Andrea was looking at him with a suspicious, quizzical eye. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t have to answer. Shanker answered for him.
The van swung out from behind the car, pulling alongside like a wall of gray metal looming out of nowhere.
Andrea saw it. Her mouth opened in the beginning of a shout.
With a scream of tires, the van veered sideways, slamming solidly into the Mustang’s front end.
Instinctively Reynolds hit the brakes.
Too late.
The Mustang folded up against the van’s backside, rocking Reynolds and his passenger in their seats.
Neither of them was strapped in. Reynolds hit the steering wheel as the airbag deployed, smacking him in the face and retracting instantly. He was dazed momentarily but shook it off and spun in his seat to face Andrea. The passenger side airbag had crumpled in her lap, and the gun once held to his head was dangling from limp fingers.
He grabbed for it. She snapped alert and threw a clawing hand at his face, but he wedged himself closer, ignoring the shout of pain from his leg, and wrapped his fingers around the hand holding the gun.
Their eyes met, and he saw hopelessness and resignation in hers, submission before a superior adversary, acquiescence to the essential injustice of the world.
That was when he knew he had won. Prizing the pistol out of her grip was only an afterthought to his triumph. He pulled it free and jammed his forefinger between the trigger guard and the trigger, the barrel arrowed at her face.
To Andrea it was all strangely familiar, the gun in her face and the certainty of death-but really there was nothing strange about it, because she had died like this once before, hadn’t she? The memory was suddenly keen and sharp-the explosion behind her ear, the rush of white light that surprised her because it wasn’t darkness.
