moving slowly toward the gate. “I love you. Don’t ever forget the trouble we went through to be together. That’s how much I wanted you.”
“Wanted?”
“Want.”
She leaned over to throw her arms around his neck and put a soft kiss on his cheek. “Let’s kill them now and rent a room.”
There was the sound of a horn behind them, and Paul glanced into the rearview mirror. This time it was a middle-aged woman who had noticed that he had let five or six extra feet of space open up between his bumper and the trunk of the two teenagers’ car. “Just keep your eyes on their car,” he said.
It still rankled Paul that Sylvie had accused him of being defeated by that young black woman in Henderson. Sylvie had killed her and left him no way to defend himself from the accusation of weakness. He had been just about to incapacitate the young woman when Sylvie had rushed in, hysterical, and shot her. He knew a dozen ways to immobilize a smaller opponent like that woman. He had been training in martial arts since he was a teenager.
He had been without any sense of direction as a boy. It had seemed to him that the gravity that held most other people to some path had no effect on him. People around him, even his own brothers and sisters, seemed to have some image they were growing into, some template that they were learning to fit.
Paul had balance, control, and coordination, so he thought he might be good at sports, but he had a difficult time finding the right one. He was tall and thin, so the basketball team had seemed a possibility, but he found that the countless hours of shooting a basket, rebounding, and shooting again that made other boys good players made him bored. He tried football, but it was like the punishment for some forbidden act that he had not even had the pleasure of committing. Then he found a karate class in a storefront on his way home from school. In karate he could use everything about himself—his long reach, his high kick, his coordination, his energy, his anger.
By the age of fifteen, he had already become a dangerous boy. He had little to do with the other students at school, but when he walked down the hall, he cut a path through the crowd like an icebreaker, straight and undeviating, bumping aside anyone who didn’t see him coming and forcing those who did to go around him. One afternoon a boy pushed back, hard. Paul spun with the push, held the boy’s arm and broke it, then delivered a series of quick blows that left the boy unconscious and bleeding in the hallway.
That evening after his mother came home from work, the police arrived and took Paul to the station. They asked him a lot of questions, and then locked him up for the night. Paul’s mother went to the station and tried to get him out, but the police weren’t yet sure how serious the charges would be, so they stalled. Finally he had been sent to a juvenile facility in the mountains for thirty days. That was where he had gotten his first paying job.
When he had been there for about two weeks and won four fights, three boys from the North Valley came to him and explained that they had a problem. They had been working as street pushers for a marijuana dealer. They had been in a feud with boys who worked for a rival dealer, and it had given one of them an idea. They would rob their own dealer’s house, and then blame it on their competitors. The flaw in the scheme was that when they had broken into the house, a neighbor had seen them. The dealer they worked for was terrifying. He had several plantations in remote parts of national forests, tended by small groups of armed men. Each time a crop was ripe they picked it, bagged it, and packed it out on foot. The dealer had plenty of men from these crews to find and kill the boys if he learned what they had done. They needed to kill the neighbor before he saw them again and recognized them, but they were all going to be in the juvenile camp for at least two months.
They knew Paul was getting out in a couple of weeks. They were willing to tell him where they had hidden a gun and pay him a thousand dollars each to kill the neighbor. Paul said, “All right.” As soon as he was out of juvenile camp, he went to the address they had given him, found the gun, went to the neighbor’s house, and shot him while he slept. Paul had finally discovered his sport.
Paul had been doing paying jobs for a lot of years before he’d ever met Sylvie. It was incredible to him that she would attack his competence just to win points in some stupid argument. He forced himself to be calm. Nobody ever said women fought fair, and nobody ever sought out women because they were logical.
Behind him a horn sounded again, this time a long, loud blare.
21
JACK TILL SWIVELED in his seat to see what the honking was about, but all he could determine was that it had come from one of the cars in the line behind him. A car had stopped in the aisle to let him out so it could take his parking space. The boy with a black baseball cap who was driving made Till uneasy because he was talking to his girlfriend instead of watching, but Till backed out and moved off.
Till turned out of the parking lot and drove west, away from the harbor. He wanted to be on a freeway heading south before the afternoon rush hour. He knew the importance of momentum to a witness like Wendy Harper. If things seemed to be stalled and faltering, she would begin to rethink her choices. He watched her closely whenever he was forced to stop at a traffic signal or wait for an obstruction to clear, and he could detect the nervous mannerisms he feared: looking out the side window at familiar buildings, her thumb running back and forth along the door handle. San Francisco was still home. He hadn’t gotten her out of town yet. She could open the door at any stop, slip out, and know her way around.
“Don’t be nervous,” he reassured her. “You made the right decision.”
“It was made for me.”
“So much the better. You don’t have to second-guess yourself.”
“What I wonder is why you couldn’t have brought a video camera and taken a shot of me talking and holding a newspaper or something. Maybe draw some blood for DNA tests.”
“I thought of that,” he said. “We know the crime lab has samples of your blood. The Assistant DA would have objected, but I think Jay Chernoff—he’s Eric’s lawyer—could have made it work in court.”
“Why didn’t you, then?”
“Because by the time I got to talk to you, Ann Delatorre was already dead and her killers had found their way to your house. There was no secret left to protect. The only option left was to get you out of town.”
Her impatient expression let Till know that she had thought of that herself, and hearing him repeat what her own mind had told her was not soothing. “See that building down Geary toward Market?”
“The big gray one?”
“No. The brown antique-looking one. My husband works there. His office is right up there on the fourth floor, this side. I can see his window.”
“What company?”
“Pan-World Technical Commerce. It started as a trading company to bring hard drives and things from Asia, but now the finance arm is what makes most of the money.”
“It sounds like a good job.”
“He’s one of the owners. The partners. It took him about ten years to build it into anything. They started out working from a house in Oakland. I feel terrible that he’ll lose it all because of me.”
Till could see the building’s magnetic pull on her as they waited for the light to change. She was feeling a strong urge to jump out of the idling car and run inside the building. He knew that distracting her was impossible, so he tried to keep her talking. “Maybe we can get his partners to buy him out.”
“Probably not. I suspect that when they know he has to liquidate, he’ll get his next lesson in business. They’ll keep him hanging until he has to walk away and leave his share to them.”
“They’d do that?”
“That’s the way I read them, but I might be more cynical and pessimistic than most people.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll try to get some serious legal talent involved, and I’ll serve as the go-between. We can sell his share of the business, your house, and your cars. I can collect your money and make a transfer to your next identity through intermediaries. If necessary, I can deliver it to you in cash.”
She smiled. “I’d forgotten. You have a talent for that.”
“For what?”
“For making people think that everything will be all right. You would have been a good general, sending soldiers on suicide missions and things. It’s a con game.”
“I won’t ask you to do anything I don’t.”
