face as she saw him. She got into the front seat now, keys in hand.
“Yes?” she said.
Pete Gordon knew that he looked healthy and clean and wide-eyed and trustworthy. His all-American good looks were an asset, but he wasn’t vain. No more than a Venus flytrap was vain.
“I’ve got a flat,” Pete said, throwing up his hands. “I really hate to ask, but could I use your cell phone to call Triple-A?”
He flashed a smile and got the dimples going, and at last she smiled, too, and said, “I do that-forget to charge the darned thing.”
She dug into her purse, then looked up with the cell phone in hand. Her smile wavered as she read Pete’s new expression, no longer eager to please but hard and determined.
She dropped her eyes to the gun he was holding-thinking that somehow she’d gotten it wrong-looked back into his face, and saw the chill in his dark eyes.
She jerked away from him, dropping her keys and her phone into the foot well. She climbed halfway into the backseat.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Don’t-do anything. I’ve got cash-”
Pete fired, the round whizzing through the suppressor, hitting the woman in the neck. She grabbed at the wound, blood spouting through her fingers.
“Don’t worry. He won’t feel anything. I promise,” Pete Gordon said.
He shot the woman again,
Chapter 2
A CAR SCREAMED down the ramp and squealed around the corner, speeding past Pete as he turned his face toward the concrete center island. He was sure he hadn’t been seen, and anyway he’d done everything right. Strictly by the book.
The woman’s open bag was lying inside the car. With his hand in his jacket pocket, using it as a kind of glove, he dug around in her junk, looking for her lipstick.
He found it, then swiveled up the bright-red tube.
He waited as a couple of gabby women in an Escalade drove up the ramp looking for a spot, then he took the lipstick tube between his thumb and forefinger and considered what he would write on the windshield.
He thought of writing FOR KENNY but changed his mind. He laughed to himself as he also considered and rejected PETEY WAS HERE.
Then he got real.
He printed WCF in bold red letters, four inches high, and underscored the writing with a smeary red line. Then he closed the lipstick and dropped it into his pocket, where it clicked against his gun.
Satisfied, he backed out of the car, shut the doors, wiped down the handles with the soft flannel lining of his baseball jacket, and walked to the elevator bank. He stood aside as the door opened and an old man wheeled his wife out onto the main floor of the garage. He kept his head down, avoiding eye contact with the old couple, and they ignored him.
That was good, but he wished he could tell them.
Pete Gordon got into the elevator and rode it up to the third floor, thinking he was having a really good day, the first good one in about a year. It had been a long time coming, but he’d finally launched his master plan.
He was exhilarated, because he was absolutely sure it would work.
WCF, people. WCF.
Chapter 3
PETE GORDON DROVE down the looping ramp of the garage. He passed the dead woman’s car on the ground floor but didn’t even brake, confident that there was no blood outside the car, nothing to show that he’d been there.
With the garage as packed as it was, it could be hours before the mom and her bawler were found in that tidy spot near the end of the row.
Pete took it nice and slow, easing the car out of the garage and accelerating onto Winston, heading toward 19th Avenue. He reviewed the shooting in his mind as he waited at the light, thinking about how easy it had been- no wasted rounds, nothing forgotten-and how crazed it was going to make the cops.
The cops were going to bust their stones on this one, all right, and by the time they figured it out, he’d be living in another country and this crime would be one of the cold cases some old Homicide dick would never solve.
Pete took the long way home, up Sloat Boulevard, up and over Portola Drive, where he waited for the Muni train to pass with commuters all in a row, and finally up Clipper Street toward his crappy apartment in the Mission.
It was almost dinnertime, and his own little bawlers would be puffing up their cheeks, getting ready to sound the alarm. He had his key out when he got to the apartment. He opened the lock and gave the door a kick.
He could smell the baby’s diapers from the doorway, the little stinker standing in the kiddie cage in the middle of the floor, hanging on to the handrail, crying out as soon as he saw his dad.
“Daddy!” Sherry called. “He needs to be changed.”
“Goody,” Peter Gordon said. “Shut up, stink bomb,” he told the boy. “I’ll get to you in a minute.” He took the remote control from his daughter’s hand, switched from the cartoons, and checked the news.
The stock market was down. Oil prices were up. He watched the latest Hollywood update. Nothing was said about two bodies found in the Stonestown Galleria parking lot.
“I’m hungry,” Sherry said.
“Well, which is it first? Dinner or poop?”
“Poop first,” she said.
“All right, then.”
Pete Gordon picked up the baby, as dear to him as a sack of cement, not even sure the little shit was his, although even if he was, he still didn’t care. He put the baby on its back on the changing table and went through the ritual, holding the kiddo by the ankles, wiping him down, dusting his butt with powder, wrapping him up in Pampers, then putting him back in the kiddie cage.
“Franks and beans?” he asked his daughter.
“My absolute favorite,” Sherry said, putting a pigtail in her mouth.
“Put a shirt on the stink bomb,” Pete Gordon said, “so your mother doesn’t have a gas attack when she gets home.”
Gordon microwaved some formula for the stink bomb and opened the canned franks and beans. He turned on the undercabinet TV and the stove, what wifey should be doing instead of him, the bitch, and dumped the contents of the can into a pot.
The beans were burning when the breaking news came on.
