Phantom prey

Back at the house, Alyssa looked at the gas cans. The three identical red plastic containers were used to gas up Hunter’s home toys: the John Deere lawn tractor and a smaller Lawn- Boy trim mower, a heavy Toro snowblower, a Stihl chain saw, a weed whip, a leaf blower, the limb- trimmer. They had a yard service to do all of that work, and a plow guy to clear the driveway in the winter, but Hunter liked to putter, and he had enough money to putter with what he wanted.

There were probably ten gallons of gas in the three containers. She wouldn’t be able to bring the container back with her, so she’d have to leave it in the car. Would Helen notice that one of the gas cans was gone? No matter-Alyssa could go someplace far away and buy another, when she had time.

She filled one of the containers all the way, pouring from the other, then humped it over to the Benz. Damn thing was heavy. As she lifted it in, she thought, This is crazy.

“No, it’s not,” Fairy said. Fairy was popping up whenever she wished; at the same time, Alyssa no longer worried that she might take over. She now seemed more like a twin sister than an alien being. “It has to be done. It has to be,” Fairy continued. “If there’s one thing we can chicken out on, it’s putting the knife at Frank’s place. But we must obliterate any evidence that can be used against us. We have to get rid of the car.”

So Alyssa put the can in the trunk of the car, on top of a layer of newspapers, closed the trunk, and looked at her watch. Seven o’clock, and dark. “Might as well do it,” Fairy said. “Let’s go… Can I drive?”

A few last things to do. She found an old T- shirt, cut it into strips, made a ten- foot- long soft- cotton fuse, soaked it in gasoline, and put it in a Ziploc bag. She’d string it out when she got there, and the Ziploc bag would keep the odor of gas out of the Benz. Got a bottle of Windex, a role of paper towels, and a pair of yellow plastic kitchen gloves, and put them in the Benz. She’d clean up the Honda’s steering wheel and other plastic surfaces, just in case. And finally, she changed into a navy blue tracksuit and running shoes.

“I’d really like to fuck you,” Loren said from the bedroom mirror. “Turns my crank when I watch you getting dressed. “Don’t talk to me like that,” Alyssa said. She was cold, and frightened. Her life hung on what would happen in the next hour.

“He’s talking to me,” Fairy said. “Oh, God,” Alyssa groaned. “Listen, you know- maybe it’s time for me to drive,” Fairy said

“Like, right now. Totally.”

The hangar area was deserted, dark and cold, and moving the car, for the first five hundred yards, was not a problem. But outside the gate, after she turned down the hill, a cop car came around a corner and fell in behind her.

Fairy was sitting on a plastic sheet; and became so obsessively careful, so slow and purposeful with her turn lights, that she flashed on the possibility that he’d check to see if she were drunk. When she turned the corner at the bottom of the hill, on Concord, he followed after her, and stayed behind. When she turned left, off Concord, though, he went on, apparently never giving her a thought.

She exhaled, and touched her forehead, found cold sweat. Nothing ever goes as planned. Never.

Instead of driving directly to the site where she planned to burn the car, she did a couple of laps around the neighborhood, checking for police. And she said, “I can feel you there, Alyssa, you’re slowing me down.”

They had decided to burn the car against a chain- link fence, in a patch of weeds, behind a warehouse wall, where the view to the street would be blocked. If the fire was low enough, it might not be discovered for quite a while, she thought. Nothing was moving along her dirt road behind the place when she pulled in and killed the lights. She sat for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom, then slipped out of the car.

Cold. Colder than it felt in her driveway, or up at the airport. She shivered, looked around, couldn’t see much; security lights down the way. She could hear cars from over on Concord… but nothing else.

The gas can was there, on the backseat. After a last look, she reached in and tipped it upside down between the front and back seats. The gas poured onto the floorboards; she got the gas- soaked rag out of the Ziploc bag, stretched it out, ten feet; waited for the gurgling to stop in the back of the car, looked around one last time, stressed, jittery, got a matchbook from her pocket, stood back from the end of the fuse, dropped a match on it, and turned to run.

Match went out: no fire. Went back, lit another match-the thick odor of gasoline flowed around the car-and dropped the match again and started to run. Stopped, almost started back, when she saw the fire start, and then begin working down the fuse.

She ran. She was a hundred feet away when the car went up with a huge WHOOOMMP and she thought ohmigod and the fire climbed higher than the roof of the warehouse, a pyramid of smoke and flame probably visible for a mile around, and she dug in and ran, and ran, and crossed the street and ran up the hill and in the distance, heard the sirens…

Later, in the night. At Frank Willett’s house, a snug little ranch, with the incriminating knife in her pocket, she jogged along the street, away from her car, watching, watching, was about to turn in at the front door when she saw a woman walking toward her, on the other side of the street, carrying a grocery sack, and she went on by the house, turning her face away from the woman, jogging and thinking, Nothing ever goes as planned.

She jogged back, five minutes later, and this time, made the move.

And it went as planned… Why was that? she wondered.

19

Lucas spent the morning arranging surveillance on Frank Willett, a loose one- man tag until they could decide whether or not to pick him up. He’d called Austin early and had gotten Willett’s work schedule. He was teaching tai chi at one spa and had Pilates classes at two others.

“I’ve been thinking about Frank,” Austin said. “He seems too gentle to kill anyone. But I can’t let this go. I’ve got to check and make sure he’s not selling dope in my places.”

“Just take it easy for a couple of days, huh?” Lucas asked. “A couple days won’t make any difference. We’ll make some kind of decision by then.”

She said she’d think about it.

And he had bureaucratic stuff to do, with the Republican convention security committee. After the committee meeting, he stopped at United Hospital to check on a friend who’d had an early- morning angiogram, and had gotten a couple of stents in his heart. After that, dropped down to the United cafeteria for a slice of pepperoni pizza and a bottle of diet Coke, and tried not to think about stents.

Coming up the ramp from the hospital’s subterranean first floor, his cell phone rang: Carol. “You’ve been out of service,” she said. “Can’t get anything in the hospital,” he said. “What’s up?'

'A cop is calling from San Francisco on Willett,” she said. “He said he’d be there for another hour-that’s a half hour now. I got a number.”

Luther Wane sounded like a cheerful man, though he had a gravelly smoker’s cough. Between hacks, he said, “I talked to the prosecutor and they don’t want him. I mean, they’d take him, if it was free, but they don’t want to pay to send somebody out there to get him.”

“That sorta sucks,” Lucas said. “Yeah, well, they’ll probably have to dismiss anyway. Even if they don’t, he won’t get any time. We got too many people in jail and the budget’s all shot in the ass, and a skinny case on a small- time dealer that’s six years old… they figure it’d cost us ten grand to come get him and they don’t want to pay.”

“But if he jumped bail…” Lucas said. It seemed ridiculous. “That’s another problem,” Wane said. “He was bailed out with a court date to come. But the prosecutor in the case got killed and the paper got lost, and we can’t