drivers were keeping their windows up. According to what Cale McLaughlin had told me, the laser rifle the sniper was using was capable of firing through nonreflective glass, yet if the killer wanted to get an unimpaired shot, he might want to lower the window first.
We shied away from the street, but I walked next to the curb. Old-fashioned chivalry, just the way my dad taught me, but this time it was for more practical reasons than to keep the lady I was escorting from being splattered with mud from passing cars. If she was the killer’s primary target, then I would be shielding her a little more this way. Of course, if she was right, it didn’t really matter what I did, because the bastard might try to nail me first. It wasn’t a comforting thought.
“You have any idea which judge you’re going to find?” I asked as we walked. Only one city block left to go; I could already see the small plaza across the street from the intersection of Central and Carondelet. Directly beyond the plaza was the five-story white concrete box that was the county courthouse.
Hinckley hesitated, then shook her head. “I don’t keep up with the judges around here,” she replied, her eyes locked on the street. “I was just planning on going in there and finding someone’s name on a door.”
I sighed and shook my head. Glancing down at the sidewalk, I noticed for the first time that she wore knee- length calfskin boots; the laces on her right boot were loose and were beginning to drag the ground, but I wasn’t about to remind her to stop and retie them. “It’s a little harder than that,” I said. “They keep office hours like everyone else … and on a Friday afternoon, if they’re not in court, then they’re probably out on the golf links.”
I thought about it for another moment, trying to remember the names of judges whose cases I had covered in the past for the paper. “We might try Swenson … Edith Swenson,” I added. “She’s supposed to be pretty honest, at least. I don’t know if she’s in, but we could always …”
Her breath suddenly sucked in as I felt her arm go rigid in mine. I followed her gaze and saw a van turning the corner of Carondelet and heading our way. A white Ford Econovan, late eighties vintage-a rusted-out old gashog, pale gray fumes farting out of its exhaust pipe, probably on the last weeks of its expiration sticker-but what caught her attention was that it was moving very slowly toward us. I looked closer; I couldn’t see the driver, but the passenger window was lowered.
The doorway of another restaurant was just a few feet away, beneath an ornamental canvas awning. “In there!” I snapped.
Hinckley didn’t need any urging. We scurried under the awning and into the doorway. I grabbed the door handle and was about to pull it open when the Econovan rumbled past.
Both of us froze and stared at the van; an old black gentleman was behind the wheel, and he didn’t seem to be paying a bit of attention to us as he tooled down Central away from the courthouse. I caught a couple of bars from a vintage soul number blaring from the stereo as the clunker rumbled past:
False alarm.
Beryl sagged against the doorframe, her hand against her chest. “God,” she whispered as she let out a hoarse laugh. “I never thought I’d be so glad to hear Ike and Tina Turner.”
“I’ll find a copy for you when we get out of this.” I pulled her out of the doorway.
“Oh, hell …” She stopped suddenly and looked down at her feet. “My boot’s untied.”
I thought again about letting her take care of her laces, but I let it pass. The next vehicle to pass us might have more than classic Motown tunes blasting through its side windows. “Don’t worry about it now,” I said as I tugged at her arm. “Just keep going.”
We walked past an alley entrance and the last building on the block, a condemned midcentury office building with windows boarded up with plywood: another victim of the earthquake, whose owner had apparently decided that demolition was less expensive than renovation. By now we were almost directly across the corner from the courthouse, a block-size building nearly as homely and featureless as the adjacent county jail and the Government Center highrise. All three buildings suffered from that peculiar form of governmental architecture a friend of mine had once described as “Twentieth Century Post-Gothic Paranoid”: no windows in featureless walls on the ground floor, the narrow casement windows on the upper floors resembling the archer slots in medieval castles. Trust us, we’re the government …
“Fine with me,” I muttered, “so long as you can repel laser beams.”
“What?” Hinckley asked.
“Nothing. Just thinking aloud.” As I said this, another thought occurred to me. “What about the two other guys … um, Dick and Jeff? When do I get to meet them?”
She shot me a glance that spoke volumes. She was placing enough confidence in me to hear out her story and witness her surrender to a judge, but she wasn’t quite ready to entrust her friends’ lives to my hands. After all, I had already confessed to her that Barris was counting on me to track down Payson-Smith for him. Even though I had obviously been surprised by the cellular smartcard Barris had given me and I had willingly left it behind in the restaurant, there was still no guarantee that I wasn’t playing stool pigeon for ERA.
“I’ll let you know when the time’s right,” she said softly. “They already know about you, don’t worry … but we need to take this one step at a time. All right?”
“Yeah. Okay. Whatever.”
We arrived at the corner of Central and Carondelet. No other pedestrians were in sight; no cars violated the No Parking signs in front of the courthouse and the jail. So far, so good; all we had to do was cross the street, make it through the postage-stamp plaza with its rows of empty cement planters, and the side door of the courthouse was wide open to us. Walk-through metal detectors had been established in all the courthouse entrances some twenty years ago after some lunatic had opened fire in a courtroom and killed a few people, and there were always a couple of cops stationed at the checkpoints. Once we were through the side door, we were home free.
I gave the area a quick scan, then I grabbed her hand and pulled her off the sidewalk, leading her out into the street. “Okay,” I said, “let’s go.”
We jaywalked through the wide intersection, not running but not sightseeing either. Halfway through the intersection, she dropped my hand. We stepped onto the curb, walking beside each other, and began to stride into the plaza. I could see people walking or seated at desks behind the courthouse windows. The side door was only seventy feet away.
She made a slight grunt, as if she had tripped on her bootlaces, but I paid no attention. I was beginning to relax.
“I think I can find that Turner CD at a place down on Delmar,” I said. “You ever been to Vintage Vinyl? It’s got the best …”
No answer. She wasn’t walking beside me anymore. I turned around, half-expecting to see that she had finally stopped to lace up her boots.
Dr. Beryl Hinckley lay sprawled on her face across the concrete sidewalk just a few feet from the curb, her arms and legs still twitching slightly as what remained of her brain told her that it was time to run like hell.
Not that she had been given much chance to run; the silent beam that killed her had burned a thumbhole through the back of her skull.
The moment stretched, became surreal. Cars moved by on the street. Pigeons wandered around the edge of the plaza in search of infinitesimal scraps of food. A commuter ’copter moaned overhead, heading for the municipal heliport several blocks away. A dead woman lay at my feet, and all around me the world was going about its normal day-to-day business. One second you’re talking to someone about buying secondhand CDs; the next second, that person is cold meat on the street corner, shot down by a …
Laser beam.
I yanked myself out of my stupor, began looking around. No cars were in sight, but all around me were high- rise buildings. Countless windows in a half-dozen towers, and the sniper could be lurking behind any one of them, even now drawing a dead bead on me.
The nearest of the plaza’s tree-planters was directly behind me, a large round urn about three feet high and eight feet in diameter. I dove behind it, crouching in its shadow as my heart triphammered in my ears. There were seventeen more planters just like it behind me, artfully arranged in three rows of six each, leading down the plaza until they ended near the courthouse door. The planters were empty, but they might provide enough cover for me. If I could keep dodging behind them as I made a run for the side door …
Yeah, right. The next planter in the row was at least ten feet away; the sniper could pick me off easily as
