charge you zero for the effort and call it even.” He stopped talking and pacing, and listened.
Paul looked at Sylvie and she knew. The look was only a glance, a flick of the eye to her face and away from it, but it told her. It was the sort of look someone gave involuntarily when he wished the other person wasn’t close enough to hear the phone conversation.
She knew that Michael Densmore was saying something that Paul was not prepared to refute. Paul had charged all the way to the top of the hill, but he was being slowly pushed back down to where he had started. She could see that the heavy weight of Densmore’s argument was growing. Paul was straining to resist. “More money isn’t the issue, Michael. It’s that the risk for us has become worse than the risk for someone—anyone—who hasn’t been seen.” He had to listen for a moment. “The price doesn’t matter. We want out. Today. There’s not much point in hanging around if we can’t get close enough to do the job.”
He listened again, and it seemed to Sylvie that he was being flattered. “Thanks, Michael. It’s good to hear that. But—” Densmore interrupted him, and he waited, then tried to cut off the pitch. “We’ve liked working with you, too.” He was talking more loudly, trying to talk over Densmore, but Sylvie knew it would not be possible. “I’ve just told you that the risk—to us, to everyone in this—is huge now, and growing the longer we’re involved.”
Paul paced back and forth for a long time, and Sylvie saw the glance again. She decided not to watch his humiliation. She turned and walked from the kitchen through the living room to the other wing of the house. There was no reason to stay. She knew.
From the bed she could barely hear Paul’s voice coming from the kitchen, just a faint male droning without any of the words. After the call was over, she heard his heavy feet as he wandered through the house searching for her. She knew when he had found her because the footsteps stopped for a few seconds in the hallway outside the bedroom, then receded again. She got off the bed and walked to the guest bedroom.
He was taking two suitcases down from the closet shelf. She could see that the gun safe was open again, and he had returned the two Remington Model 7s to the rack.
She said, “Are we going somewhere?”
“Yes.”
She considered acting as though she thought he was going to take her to Spain, so he would have to admit his defeat. But she kept herself from being cruel. “He wouldn’t let us out of it, huh?”
“No. He used the stick and carrot on us.”
“What’s the carrot?”
“Our price for getting Wendy Harper just doubled.”
“What’s the stick?”
“Well, the client knows our names.”
“So Densmore lied. He said he never told
“He said this was a special case. There was no way to avoid it, and the client is somebody who would never be foolish enough to tell the police or anyone else about us.”
“That’s not the stick. What’s the stick?”
“The client has power. He’s had people looking all over the place for six years, nonstop. Now that we’ve used the bloody shirt and the bat to draw her out, he has no way of finding her again. We’ve used up his only chance. Densmore thinks that if we fail—let alone quit—the client will kill him and us, too.”
28
IT WAS ALREADY afternoon when Jack Till awoke. He kept his eyes closed and oriented himself. He knew he was in a hotel bed in Morro Bay. He had driven from King City into Morro Bay in the night and found a hotel on a low ridge above the harbor. The hotel was big enough to have a night clerk on duty who was capable of finding a vacancy for a pair of tired travelers, particularly a pair who were willing to pay summer rates for an expensive set of adjoining rooms for a minimum of three days. He had gone back outside to park their new rental car among the others in the back of the hotel where it would not be seen from the street. This time he had chosen a blue Buick Park Avenue that didn’t resemble the cars he had driven before. Moving the car gave him a chance to circle the lot and sweep the surrounding area with his headlights to search for parked vehicles that still had people in them.
When he had returned to his room, he had found Ann Donnelly placing a chair to hold the door between the two rooms open. She said, “Whatever else happens, I don’t want to die and have you not know about it.”
“We’ll be okay. We’re pretty far from where they lost us.” Till had locked and chained his door and hers, then moved a chair in front of each to give him an extra second or two if the door opened. She sat on her bed and watched his preparations without revealing anything, but she did not seem especially comforted. He put his pistol in its holster on the bedside table. Then he turned off the light in his room before he undressed and got under the covers. For a time, he could hear Ann Donnelly moving around and see the flickering bluish glow of her television set on the white cottage cheese ceiling of her room.
Till closed his eyes and let the events of the day repeat themselves in his mind, from the time when he had reached Ann Donnelly’s house in San Rafael before noon, through the sight of the car’s headlights growing steadily in his rearview mirror and then the shots. He saw again the car veering to the left to try to pull up beside him, and remembered trying to block its movement and stay ahead. His body relived the feeling of speed, the sensation of rising in his seat whenever the car went over the top of a hill and started down, and his ears felt the shock of the bullet pounding through the rear window and spraying broken glass everywhere.
He had moved the car from side to side each time the car behind him moved, trying to anticipate the other driver’s intentions and block them without losing control. Then the shots had come again, some of them making an amplified bang because what he was hearing was the bullet punching through the steel of his car’s trunk.
Everything had happened so quickly that he had acted without deciding, not even contemplating the events until now, hours later, as he lay in bed. He remembered looking ahead at the windshield and seeing the bullet hole in it, the aura of powdered glass around it just above eye level and to the left, and knowing that the bullet must have missed his head by two inches. That sight had goaded him to act, and he had let the car fly off into the empty field because the road wasn’t working and the shots were too close.
“I can’t sleep in there.”
He opened his eyes and dimly saw the shape of her standing beside his bed. She was wearing a pair of pajama pants and an oversized T-shirt. “Why not?”
“Because today I lost my best friend, abandoned my children, my husband, my home, my name, and then got shot at and driven into a ravine.”
Till slid to the far side of the king bed and pulled back the covers to admit her. “Reason enough.”
She climbed in beside him and rested her head on the pillow. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to sleeping alone anymore.”
“You were married for three years?”
“Almost four.” She was quiet for a few seconds, and Till thought she was falling asleep, but she said, “That’s not a long time. It’s just long enough so you get used to the illusion that things will always be the same.”
“Never sleeping alone?”
“You don’t think you’ll ever have to lie in bed in a dark room at night alone. You will, of course. People go on business trips and things. Then you find yourself—by accident or on purpose—with your face in the other person’s pillow, smelling his smell.”
“So you loved him. When you were talking before it sounded as though you didn’t.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to say what relationships are really about, other than not wanting to be alone. Mad, romantic love isn’t necessary. All you have to feel is that you’d rather be with that person and all his faults than be alone. And you don’t have to feel even that much all day, every day. You only have to feel it once each time you’re ready to file for divorce and put it off. If that’s what love is, then I loved Dennis.”
“That sounds pretty grim.”
“It’s not meant to be. I was in disguise, living as a person I wasn’t, remember? I knew the person I invented would be safer married than single. If your whole life is a lie, why draw the line at one more that will give you an extra layer of security? When a woman marries, not only does she get a bigger, stronger companion who will try to protect her, but she takes on his name, his whole history, whatever credit and credibility he’s built up, friends of his
