'How can you be sure?'
'One of them has what looks like a MAC-10 with a silencer. Are they yours?'
'No.'
'They didn't follow me to your hotel today. I was watching for somebody like them. That means they knew where you were staying, and after they lost me in Pasadena this morning, they went to your hotel. They must have assumed that at some point I would show up.'
'I can call the-'
'Don't call anybody. You've got to get on a plane and go home now. Right now. As soon as they realize they've lost me, they'll be back at your hotel. You're all they've got. So go.'
'But I-' Even as she began to argue, she knew she was talking to dead air. She pressed the button on her phone, stepped to the closet, laid each outfit in her suitcase, and folded it over once. She went into the bathroom, got her toiletry kit, set it in the suitcase, and shut it.
She lifted the suitcase off the stand and set it on the floor, extended the handle, then picked up the hotel phone and punched the number for the front desk. 'This is Ms. Waring in room 802. I'm checking out now. Could you please hold a cab for me? I'll be going to LAX.'
As she rode the elevator down to the lobby, she reviewed what had just happened and what she was about to do. She was satisfied. She had no doubt that the Butcher's Boy, of all people, would recognize a pair of professional assassins if he saw them and would make a reliable guess about how they had come to be where they were. If professional killers knew who she was, then he was right that it was best for her to leave Los Angeles. If he lost them-when he lost them-they could only go back to her hotel looking for her. They seemed to see her as their easiest link to him. They probably assumed she would be a valuable hostage, or at least bait for an ambush.
They obviously didn't get it. They had no way of knowing that he was incapable of forming personal ties to people like her and that, most of the time, he cared very little which people died and which didn't. For him, death had always been a commodity to sell and be paid for. At the moment he was only interested in killing as many of the men who had voted to kill him as he could.
She strode quickly to the front desk, accepted the printed bill, and said, 'Leave it on my credit card.' The clerk at the desk said, 'Your cab is at the door, Ms. Waring. Have a pleasant flight.'
'Thank you,' she said, and kept going. She had not exactly stopped, just walked along the counter on the way out. As the driver put her suitcase into the trunk, she sat in the back seat and scanned the lot, the sidewalks, the long drive. The driver got in and asked, 'Which airline are you going to?' and she answered, 'United. Terminal Seven.' As he drove, she looked out the back window for a long time, hoping that the absence of the team of shooters didn't mean that they had caught up with the Butcher's Boy.
Schaeffer walked out of the restaurant with his head down and crossed the parking lot. He got into his car and pulled out of the lot onto Riverside Drive and headed eastward. He drove with determination, but was careful not to go too far over the speed limit. No matter what was chasing him, he couldn't afford to be pulled over with about a dozen stolen guns, all of them loaded, and some of them the property of dead men.
He drove to Victory Boulevard, turned right and then left onto the long parkway into Griffith Park. The speed limit was twenty-five, but the road was nearly empty at midday on a weekday, so he went forty. He took the long curve around the parking lot of the Los Angeles Zoo, but when he was nearly around the curve he looked across the lot and saw the blue Crown Victoria just starting toward him at the beginning of the curve.
He sped up, goading the Camry along the straight stretch that bisected the golf course. There was a stop sign ahead, and it looked like the perfect spot to hide a police car, so he stopped for it. As he did, he saw a sign that said CAROUSEL. He cranked the wheel to the right and drove up the side road in the direction the arrow pointed. There was a rise, and then the road dipped and turned into a little vale. There was a parking lot to the left, over a low grassy hill away from the carousel. He parked, got out of the car, took his messenger bag full of guns and ammunition, and ran for the wooded hillside above the carousel. He took cover and looked down at the lower ground. The carousel looked like the real thing, a relic of the early 1900s that had been restored at some point by people who at least cared how it looked. The horses had a layer of bright, shiny paint, and the brass poles were worn by hands but polished. A few feet away from it was a small ticket booth, and beyond that was a snack bar, but he couldn't see anyone inside either structure. Finally, he saw a sign on the booth that said OPEN WEEKENDS with smaller print beneath that was unreadable from this distance. He supposed that when school was in session, there was no reason to keep the carousel running.
He was still dressed in the gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans he'd worn to case the houses in Pasadena before dawn. He judged that the outfit would keep him from standing out much in these wooded hillsides, but he kept moving, climbing to improve his cover while he watched for the blue car. He didn't want to go too high, where the short live oaks were sparsely spread and there were stretches of empty brown grass. He crouched in thick brush about three hundred feet away. As he looked down on the scene, he sensed a presence, or maybe realized he'd seen something without identifying it, and moved only his eyes in that direction. It was a scrawny, intense- eyed coyote standing thirty feet off, the sunlight dappling its fur. After a few seconds, the coyote seemed to sense some change it didn't like and skulked off into the tawny brush higher up the hillside.
The dark blue Crown Victoria pulled up the drive into the lot and stopped. The two men got out and slammed the doors, then walked toward the carousel. They stood and looked at it for a minute or two, and then the one with the MAC-10 stepped to the left to the ticket booth. He craned his neck to look at the window, seemed to despair of seeing inside, and gave up. He raised his MAC-10 with its silencer on the barrel and fired a line of rounds across the front of the booth about six inches from the ground, then a second line back across the booth about two feet up. The noise was barely audible, just the gun's hot, expanded gas spitting out bullets, and the bullets punching through the wooden-board wall. The gun was so fast that after it was still, the ejected brass casings clinked as they all fell on the asphalt, bounced once, and rolled. The man removed the long, straight magazine, put it in his coat pocket, and inserted a fresh one.
Thirty rounds. If Schaeffer had been closer, he could have counted holes in the ticket booth, but he was pretty sure the man was using thirty-round magazines. The second man kicked open the door of the ticket booth, looked inside, and closed it again, but it was hanging on one hinge so he just propped it shut.
They moved to the second, larger building, the snack stand. It was hardly more substantial than the ticket booth, but they didn't spray the wall. They went to the door, and the man with the MAC-10 fired a short burst at the door lock and then shouldered his way inside. The two spent a minute or two looking behind things, but found nothing.
Schaeffer could see the MAC-10 had altered their behavior. It was such an overpowering weapon that they seemed to have forgotten that it couldn't do everything. And they seemed to think it made them bulletproof. He began to move down the hill closer to them while he waited for his moment to come. The two men came out of the snack stand and moved to the carousel. They stepped into the center where the motor was and satisfied themselves that he wasn't hiding there. While they were occupied, Schaeffer crept closer.
They walked up over the grass-covered hill to the parking lot and toward his parked Camry. They seemed not to feel any urgency about what they were doing. Schaeffer watched the one with the MAC-10 raise it and fire short bursts at the tires on the far side, then shoot out all the glass. His magazine was empty again so he put in a third. This time he aimed at the engine and fired. He walked around to the other side to get the last pair of tires. He had not noticed that the car no longer shielded him from the brush-covered hillside; he was standing in the open.
As the man began his burst, Schaeffer rested his right arm on the low horizontal branch of an oak tree, took careful aim, and fired. His first shot caught the man with the MAC-10 in the back and spun him around. As the man began to buckle, Schaeffer fired another shot and caught him in the chest. The man sprawled on the pavement.
His companion, the driver, snatched up the MAC-10, ducked, and stayed low as he scuttled to the far side of Schaeffer's car. When he got there, he learned what Schaeffer already suspected. The third magazine was empty.
Schaeffer shifted his aim to the second man. He rested his arm on the tree limb and fired whenever he saw a slice of the man appear over the hood of the Camry as he tried to spot the man who had shot his companion.
When Schaeffer had exhausted the bullets in the Beretta's magazine, he reached into his messenger bag for another pistol. He aimed it carefully at the far edge of the hood of his gray car, directly above the flat front tire. The man would be crouching there to keep from having a shot ricochet under the car and hit him. He counted to five,
