Hobart had learned to be an expert marksman when he was a boy. He had become accustomed early to the mil-dot reticle that had been invented for military snipers. Reading the dots on the crosshairs had become automatic for him before he was thirteen. At 600 yards, the space between two dots on the crosshairs of a lOX scope was 21.6 inches. He could estimate the range of a shot by comparing the sizes of objects to that, so he memorized the sizes of things. A license plate was 12 inches long. A standard table was about 3 0 inches high. Most exterior doors were 36 inches wide and 80 high. At that range, a woman who was 5‘3” was three dots tall.
He would spend days alone in the desert, pacing the distances and shooting until he could do it all reflexively. In those days he had very little money and a box of ammunition was expensive, so he needed to do much more measuring, aiming, and thinking than shooting.
Hobart loaded his new rifle into the trunk of his rental car, but kept the new pistol in its box on the floor beside him, then drove to the hotel and parked in the parking structure. He left the rifle in the trunk, but he took the pistol, cleaning kit, and ammunition with him because in the shopping bag they didn’t look like anything in particular. In his room he put on a pair of thin surgical gloves, opened the box, took out the gun, broke it down, cleaned it thoroughly, and left a thin layer of gun oil on the working parts.
There were people who liked hollow point ammunition with a .45 because the bullet mushroomed a bit when it hit, and supposedly did a lot of damage to the target without going through and piercing walls and doors. But Hobart had found that regular ball ammo had never failed to stop anybody, and he didn’t consider a bullet going through a wall or a door to be a disadvantage. He had bought a couple of twenty-round boxes of ball ammunition, so he opened one and, keeping his gloves on, he began to pick the bullets out of their little plastic tray and insert them into one of the two magazines that had come with the gun.
Whenever he touched the internal parts of a gun or loaded a magazine, he wore gloves. Jerry Hobart had survived a long time in a dangerous world by maintaining the view that if he wasn’t stupid, a great many other people probably weren’t, either. Some cop might be enterprising enough to check a surface other than the obvious ones.
He hid the gun in his inner jacket pocket, collected his boxes and bags, and went out to the car. As he opened the trunk and tossed the bag inside, he glanced at the rifle again. He would leave it in its box, and the scope too, until he needed them. He liked the Model 700. It was about as accurate and reliable as it needed to be, and many thousands had been sold. The kind of shooting he was doing these days didn’t require anything it couldn’t give him. In a city, there were very few shots that were longer than two hundred yards. Buildings got in the way.
Hobart drove down the steep hill from the Universal City complex, past the Red Line subway lots, and onto Ventura Boulevard. He was going to take a look at a house. He had been given this address once before, but he had not seen any advantage in going there and risking being noticed. Whenever anyone died from any kind of incident, the people who had been in proximity all searched their memories to convince themselves they’d seen some sign that it was going to happen. While they were searching their memories for signs and portents, he hadn’t wanted any of them to stumble across the image of Jerry Hobart. But this time things were different. He would probably need to visit this address.
He drove west about three miles to Van Nuys Boulevard, then north another mile to a neighborhood called Valley Glen. He drove up and down a few major east-west streets Vanowen, Victory, Sherman Way, and Burbank Boulevard, Oxnard-to see which ones had road crews working on them, which were clogged by traffic. In this part of town over the past year, there had been a lot of streets torn up so concrete storm drainpipes five feet in diameter could be laid in deep trenches. A man who planned to do something but didn’t pay attention to how he was going to get out afterward didn’t deserve to get out.
Hobart drove past the house and studied it from the street. There were signs stuck on the lawn that said HAMMER SECURITY and a smaller ARMED RESPONSE. That meant he would have to examine the
doors and windows for the lapses. The electronics in these systems were all the same. The devices were reliable and difficult to defeat, but what Hobart needed to defeat wasn’t devices, it was people: the installer who left some point of access to the house unwired because it was too difficult, and the homeowner who didn’t bother to turn on the system. From here Hobart could see two rectangular cement boxes at the sides of the house that gave workmen access to the crawl space under it, and a vent on the roof that he could unscrew to gain access to the attic. He was sure those wouldn’t be wired. On some houses even the second-floor windows weren’t.
There was no sign of a dog, which was good news to Hobart. Befriending or killing a dog before it barked was a chore he would prefer to avoid. The structure of the house made it easy for him, too. The bedrooms would be on the second floor in the back, and on the floor below would be the living room. The living room was usually the easiest place to enter these houses in the San Fernando Valley, because there were often double French doors or big sliding windows to open onto the patio and the swimming pool. The living room was always worth a visit anyway, because those windows transformed the room into a museum diorama-the inhabitants like game animals stuffed and posed behind glass for his inspection.
Hobart liked the way the garage was placed at the rear of the property behind the house. He would be able to stand at the back corner and look into the house unseen. He sped up, pleased. There was nothing about the house that posed an obstacle to Jared Hobart. He could practically walk in through the walls.
The one thing he wondered about was why a man like Forrest would hire him to do this. Hobart had simply accepted the notion that a private detective knew or was about to learn something unpleasant about Forrest, so Forrest had wanted him dead.
But Hobart had to wonder what Forrest had to fear from the detective’s widow. Maybe-before he killed her-it would be worthwhile to find out.
12
It was late at night, and the traffic near the detective’s office was thin. Jerry Hobart wore a black baseball cap with the brim pulled low above his eyes as he walked along the side of the office building. Security cameras were always mounted high, partly to give them an unobstructed view, and partly to keep them out of reach. He didn’t have any confidence in his ability to find them all, so he kept his face averted and shielded from view by the brim. He saw the underground parking entrance and exit had been closed with iron grates, so he kept going.
It took him a few seconds to see a way in. He could see that the windows on the first and second floors were all bordered by thin silver alarm tape, but there was no tape on the ones farther up the side. Landlords always tried to save money, and paying to wire every window on the third floor and above must have seemed like a needless expense. Hobart knew there would be other ways in, so he continued to look for the easiest.
He walked to the back of the building where he was shielded from view by the backs of other, taller structures, and looked up at the fire escape. There was a ladder about ten feet from the ground, weighted so a person coming down would cause the ladder to descend. Hobart took off his belt, jumped and swung the buckle over the bottom step of the ladder, and lodged the buckle in the corner where the step met the frame. As soon as the buckle caught, Hobart’s weight brought the ladder down.
Hobart climbed the ladder to the top floor of the building. As he ascended, he looked in the windows, and saw the hallway on each floor, so he began to have a sense of the building’s structure. It was built on an old- fashioned pattern, each floor a single hallway with a stairwell on each end, offices on both sides and the elevator shafts running up the center. When he reached the top, he pulled himself up so he could get his elbows over the edge of the roof and look. The top was a flat tar covering with a cluster of pipes, a big box for the air conditioning, and louvered vents. There was also a right triangular structure jutting upward with a door in it. That was what he had hoped he would find.
Hobart climbed up and walked to the door. He tried the knob, but it was locked. He took out his lockblade knife, flipped it open and slid it between the door and the jamb to get the feel of the locking mechanism. After a second or two, he realized the lock wasn’t a serious one. It was just enough to keep tenants off the roof. He withdrew the knife, then pushed the blade into the space at the right spot, eased the spring-loaded plunger aside, and opened the door. He waited and listened for an alarm, but there was no sound. He wasn’t in a hurry, so he disengaged the lock, pushed the door shut so nobody who passed in the hall below would notice an open door, and sat down beside it.
Jerry Hobart had found in the past that his enterprises were most successful when he took the time to think,
