“It’s locked. I’ll have to get the key.”
Settles thought for a moment and shook his head. “Let’s see if it’s really locked.” He waved her toward the rear of the van with the flashlight.
The handle of the van’s single rear door was on the left. Settles positioned himself six feet away from it. “Open the door and tell whoever’s inside to come out,” he said.
“There’s nobody inside and it’s locked.”
“Try the door anyway, Terri.”
Her hand went to the rear door’s handle and pulled it down. “It wasn’t locked after all,” she said.
“Open it nice and slow, Terri,” Settles said.
She opened it quickly instead, moving with the door as it swung to the right. The flashlight revealed the double-barreled shotgun first and then, above it, the remarkably ugly face of Francis the Plumber who stood, crouched over, holding the shotgun at hip level. Ivy Settles hesitated for a tenth of a second before he began to pull the trigger of his revolver. But by then the right barrel of the shotgun had fired and its load was knocking Settles backward. As he fell, his Chief’s Special fired up into the air toward the stars and a full moon. The shotgun blast tore away much of the left side of Settles’s chest and he died seconds after he fell to the ground.
The woman who said her name was Terri Candles moved from behind the van’s open rear door and looked up at the short fat ugly man who was sometimes a false priest and sometimes a false plumber.
“Did I do okay, honey?” she asked him.
“You did fine,” the man said and pulled the trigger that fired the shell in the shotgun’s other barrel.
Chapter 30
A thirty-two-year-old Ventura stockbroker, on his way to Durango in his BMW 325i convertible for a dirty weekend, was talking on his cellular phone to one of the women who would compose the menage a trois when the pink Ford van whizzed past him, heading east, at not less than eighty miles per hour.
The stockbroker thought nothing of it and continued talking to the woman until a minute later, which made it 9:11 P.M., when he saw the two bodies, one a man, the other a woman, lying on the left shoulder of Noble’s Trace at the edge of the failed industrial park. A Honda Prelude was parked nearby with its lights on.
The stockbroker slowed to stare at the two bodies, told the woman on the phone to forget about the weekend, hung up and drove very fast until he came to the first gas station in Durango. There, he dropped a quarter into a pay phone, dialed 911 and, refusing to identify himself, told whoever answered about the two bodies, the Honda and the pink Ford van that had sped past him at eighty.
The stockbroker could have used his cellular phone to make the call, but he dimly remembered someone warning him that all 911 calls are immediately traced-or something like that. And since he was already performing his duty by telling the police about the bodies, the stockbroker could see no reason for further civic involvement with Durango where he didn’t even live anyhow.
He drove east on Noble’s Trace, heading back toward U.S. 101, and looked quickly away to the left as he again passed by the bodies. When the stockbroker was a mile past them, he once more picked up his cellular phone, called a woman in Santa Barbara, mentioned he soon would just happen to be in her neighborhood and wondered if she’d like to go out for a drink and maybe a bite to eat. The woman, without apology or explanation, said no thanks.
The stockbroker drove on toward Ventura and home, listening to a tape of Linda Ronstadt singing Nelson Riddle arrangements and feeling not only very sorry for himself, but also uncomfortably virtuous.
Chief Sid Fork was on the end stool at the bar in the Blue Eagle, eating a cheeseburger and drinking a draft beer, when Virginia Trice pushed the phone over to him. Fork automatically looked up at the clock above the bar. The time was 9:23 P.M.
After Fork said hello, Detective Wade Bryant, the too-tall elf, identified himself and said, “Ivy just got blown away by a shotgun on the Trace two blocks past the city limits. A woman in her late twenties is also down and dead. Same way. Ivy’s Honda is parked with its lights on.”
“Which side of the road?” Fork asked.
“South. The sheriff got an anonymous nine-one-one and called us. The guy that called it in told ’em about the bodies and said a pink Ford van had passed him going like a bat out of hell the other way, east.”
“Who’s the woman?”
“No ID. But she’s around twenty-seven, twenty-eight, short brown hair, brown eyes, five-nine or -ten, and she’s wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘I Shoot Anything.’ Just about everything between her belt and snatch is blown away.”
“You there now?”
“Me and Joe Huff.” Bryant paused. “You know something, Sid? It’s the first time I ever saw Joe throw up.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Fork hung up the phone and pushed it back to Virginia Trice, who said, “What’s wrong now?”
“Ivy Settles.”
“Dead?”
Fork nodded.
New grief seemed to press new lines into Virginia Trice’s face. Her eyes filled with tears. Her lower lip quivered. She sniffed noisily and said, “That’s just not…right.”
“I know,” Fork said. “Let me borrow a key to your house.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to find Vines and if he’s not there, I want to wait for him inside, not out in my car.”
“He’s got something to do with Ivy?”
“Something. But not what you think.”
Sid Fork knew what to expect when he saw the Aston Martin parked in front of the floodlit Victorian house. He sighed, parked his own car in front of the Aston Martin, got out, almost nodded hello to Kelly Vines’s blue Mercedes and started up the serpentine brick walk to the front door.
He used the key Virginia Trice had given him to enter the old house. Some lights were on downstairs, but after a quick look into the parlor and kitchen-both empty-Fork went up the oak staircase to the second floor and down the hall until he came to a door with light coming from beneath it.
He raised his fist to knock, hesitated, then knocked four times, very firmly, the way he thought a policeman should knock. A moment later the light from beneath the door went off.
“Goddamnit, it’s me-Sid.”
The light from beneath the door came back on and the door was opened by Dixie Mansur, who, from what Fork could see, wore nothing but a man’s shirt and it carelessly buttoned.
“We thought you might be Parvis with a lecture,” she said with a grin.
“Sure.”
“What’s up?”
“I have to talk to Vines.”
“Why?”
Before Fork could invent an answer, Vines appeared at the half-open door, wearing only his pants. “Talk about what?”
“We have to go someplace.”
“Where?”
“When we get there, you’ll know what we have to talk about.”
Vines’s face stiffened, immobilizing his mouth and almost everything else except his eyes, which turned suspicious as, not quite realizing it, he turned a question into an accusation. “It’s Adair, isn’t it?” Vines said. “Something’s happened to him.”
“It’s not Adair.”
