Silence

instead of hers, she was with him.

20

SYLVIE SAID, “You think she’s prettier than I am, don’t you?”

Paul glanced at her, then back at the car’s side mirror. He used the button inside the car to adjust the mirror’s tilt to keep the man and woman in sight. “Hardly.”

“You’re certainly staring at her.”

“I’ve never seen her before. I want to get a good look.”

“You always like those petite women with the little-girl shapes, and all men like blondes.”

“I’m not in the market. And men don’t all like blondes. Men don’t even all like women.”

Sylvie laughed. “That’s a thought, isn’t it? You do still like women, don’t you?”

He took his eyes away from the mirror. “That’s an odd thing to say.”

“I didn’t say it. You did.”

He looked at Sylvie. She sat in the passenger seat of the rented sport utility vehicle, her body pulled away with her back to the door and facing him, as though she were planning to fend off a blow. He said with exaggerated patience, “I’m trying to keep my eyes on the woman because Densmore is paying us good money to kill her, not because I have some personal interest in her. I’m trying to be sure we can kill her without getting caught.” He looked into the mirror again and saw nothing, so he tried the other mirrors, then turned around in his seat.

He saw them again walking along an aisle of cars. Wendy Harper moved away from her Nissan Maxima with a suitcase, and let Till guide her to a different aisle. The next few seconds were crucial. Paul needed to see the car they were going to take, and be sure it was the car he had already seen, and not some new one Till had planted here. He craned his neck, but they moved out of his view behind an SUV that was even bigger than his. Till was a pro. Paul couldn’t take the chance of driving close enough to let Till see his face, but he couldn’t let Till drive off and move out of his sight.

“I’m sorry.”

“Huh?” he said.

“I said I was sorry. So you don’t have to sit there freezing me out in absolute silence for the next few hours like I was a criminal.”

“Fine. I don’t think you need to apologize, but I’ll accept your apology. Damn. I need to get a good look at the car they’re getting into, but I don’t dare let him see us.”

“Why not just pull up behind him so he can’t back out of the space, and open fire on them?”

“Because there are a thousand people who would turn around and see us.”

“That’s the idea. When there are a thousand people, there may as well be no people. There will be hundreds of conflicting stories, and half of those people will see somebody else drive off and say it was them.”

“That may be true, but we could easily shoot them and then get stuck in this lot behind somebody and not be able to get out.” He was getting irritated. He turned the ignition key and started the engine, began to back out of his space, and then was startled by the blare of a horn behind him.

Paul stomped on the brake and the SUV jerked to a stop and rocked. He turned in his seat. It was a pair of teenagers, the boy driving and the girl glaring at Paul as they went past along the aisle.

As Paul resumed his attempt to back out of the parking space, he thought about the pair. They could easily have waited for just a moment to let him back out, but they had the aggressive mentality that was getting to be an epidemic. These kids couldn’t imagine how close to the grave they were treading. It was difficult for even Paul to guess how much more provocation it would take right now for him to forget the caution he had urged on Sylvie and put a bullet through each of their heads. He got the big SUV out into the aisle and followed the two teenagers’ car toward the exit.

He could see past their small car to the end of the aisle now, where Jack Till was opening the door of his beige Lincoln for Wendy Harper.

Sylvie said, “There they are.”

The superfluity of her observation was an affront to Paul’s consciousness. Of course he could see them. The fact that Sylvie was here to see them was entirely his doing. When he and Sylvie had broken into Wendy Harper’s house and found it deserted, Sylvie had simply assumed they would rush off to be long gone before the burglary was discovered. It was Paul who had insisted on parking down the street and watching the house. He had known he had been right to insist when the first person to arrive was Jack Till. And when Till left the house, Paul managed to follow him all the way to Pier 39 without being discovered. He fought the urge to remind her.

“This is where things really start,” he said. “We’ve managed to stick with him while he found her for us, and neither of them has seen us yet. That’s huge.”

“Okay,” Sylvie said.

“Just concentrate on getting a clear view of their car, the license number, and where they go. We’re going to have to leave the lot first and wait for them to pass.”

“All right.”

“Don’t take your eyes off Till. He’s a pro, so he probably has something in mind.”

“I said all right.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know. Could it be because you treat me like shit?”

“When was this?”

“Well, let’s see. Ever since we went to Vegas, you’ve been snapping at me.”

“No I haven’t. I’ve just been trying to keep us both focused on this job. I have more experience, so maybe I give more directions. That’s all.”

“You were really nasty to me after I shot that black woman. I heard the commotion, then ran in and saw her biting and scratching you and going for your eyes, so I did it. That’s all. And since then you’ve been hurting my feelings. Is it because a woman was about to kick your ass, and I’m the witness? Or is it because I’m a woman and I saved you?”

Paul’s consciousness alternated between the sting of her accusation and a hollow amusement at the irrationality of it. When he was able to stabilize his emotions for a moment, he said, “I wanted to scare her, not kill her.”

“You scared her, all right.”

“If I had wanted her dead, I would have shot her myself. I had a gun. You knew that.”

“I knew it, and so did she. I didn’t want her to get her hands on it and kill us both.”

“Okay,” he said. “You fired because you didn’t have confidence that I could keep her alive long enough to get her to talk. So I had to spend an hour cleaning up, and then another hour taking the house apart to find out what she could have told us.”

“We’re here, and it’s because I found the phone number.”

“Yes, we’re here—about an hour too late to have caught her packing and killed her before Jack Till got to her. Those two extra hours in Henderson start to look bigger now, don’t they?”

“So I finally think I understand.”

It was a battle for clarification. Their fights were always like this, the anger of the struggle forcing each of them to reveal the resentments they had resolved to hide, but finding they needed to use them as ammunition. His sense of structure told him that the fight was nearly at its core now, and soon he could know what it had been about. “What is it that you understand?”

“You haven’t been romantic since we left home. Are you just angry at me for shooting her, or are you losing interest?”

“I’m not losing interest in you. I’m with you practically all the time, aren’t I? Maybe that’s the problem.”

“I don’t mean being around. I mean—you know.”

“Sex?” It always astounded Paul that she had such a hard time saying even the word, given her history.

“Yes. You’ve been so cold and distant. You haven’t been very interested in me for a long time.”

“We’ve been working every minute. I’m interested, but I don’t know when anything could have happened. When we haven’t been on an airplane, we’ve been in a car.” He took his eyes away from the cars ahead of him