his face.
‘Sorenson,’ Andy said, ‘calling your case interesting, it made my skin crawl. I’m a lot more than a case.’
‘You’re right,’ Miles said. ‘I don’t like him either.’ He spoke low, into his cupped hand, as if he were warming his skin with his breath.
‘Good, then, you don’t need his dumb-ass program.’ Andy slung an arm around his shoulder. ‘My favorite part of the confession was when you said you were trying to save me. That’s rich. You don’t save me, you don’t get to save yourself, that’s only fair, Miles.’
Miles stopped. Closed his eyes, hunched his shoulders against the cold, counted to one hundred, listening to the distant hum of cars driving on Paseo de Peralta. He opened his eyes and Andy was gone.
Would you forget the worst moment of your life?
I can’t go on this way, he thought. I can’t. He’d join the stupid program, let Sorenson take apart his brain if it would banish Andy. If Allison believed going under Sorenson’s wing would cure him, fine.
He touched the confession in his pocket, realizing he’d been rubbing at it like a praying man fingering a rosary. Tonight at eight. Tonight he’d give it to Allison as a show of faith, listen with an open, if broken, mind to Sorenson’s proposal to fix his head.
‘But I might kill you before tonight,’ Andy said, back again, leaning in close. ‘Make you step out in front of a speeding car. Put a gun in your mouth. Walk you up to the top of a tall building and right off the edge-’
Miles ran.
TWO
Dennis Groote was late to visit his daughter because he had to kill the last of the Duartes.
He’d tracked the man – an accountant who’d managed to duck under the police radar after the Duarte gang collapsed – to a meeting Monday night in San Diego at a luxury hotel near the beach. Groote had spent Monday night camped in an unoccupied room next to the target. He had slipped inside it at nine that evening using an illegal scramble card. If any late-arriving guests showed up to claim the room, he would simply send them back down to the front desk, claiming a mistake had been made, and leave. The kill would wait for another day. Patience meant success; patience meant life.
The accountant arrived shortly after nine-thirty Monday night, but wasn’t alone. Groote heard the accountant and a woman, talking in awkward tones, then the accountant’s laughter, hearty, trying to be macho. Then the unmistakable sounds of kissing, of clothes sliding along skin, of movement on mattress.
Groote played solitaire on his PDA during the lovemaking, yawning once, waiting for the accountant to be done. He could simply pick the lock on the adjoining room door, walk in, shoot them both, and not miss a second of visitation time with Amanda. But he did not see why he should kill a woman who simply had selected the wrong sexual partner for the evening. He hated the idea of an innocent person suffering needlessly. He waited and hoped that the target’s girlfriend wouldn’t stay the night.
But she did. Groote listened to them continue their intimacies until midnight, then they fell asleep. He gave them another hour, hoping the woman would rouse from the post-coital slumber. Still the sound of silence, of light snoring from both the accountant and the woman. Then Groote dozed himself, waking in the thin light of Tuesday morning.
He listened at the door. Hushed, steady snoring. But he heard a soft step, heard the shower next door rush to life.
Now. He could be done and gone while the woman showered, out of harm’s way. Groote jimmied the lock between the door linking the two rooms, eased it open. The accountant was fortyish, tall, barrel-chested. He didn’t look the part of a bean counter; more like a laborer, with his rough face and heavy jaw.
‘Hi,’ Groote said.
The accountant’s eyes opened in sleepy confusion and he said, ‘Uh, hi.’
‘You helped destroy my family. Just so you know.’ Groote shot him with his silenced gun, twice between the eyes.
He heard a scream from behind him, over the hiss of the shower. Damn, she’d started the hot water but hadn’t stepped under the spray. He grabbed the woman, shoved her hard against the wall, covered her mouth with his hand. She was older than the accountant, in her late forties. Groote recognized her; a concierge at the hotel. Groote had noticed her last night; he’d noticed and taken account of every person in the lobby during his walk-through. She’d had a welcoming smile for him then, glancing up from her computer, and he had nodded in return.
Now Groote jabbed his gun against the woman’s throat. ‘Answer me and I’ll let you live.’
The concierge closed her eyes, shuddering underneath his touch.
‘You understand?’
She nodded.
‘Why are you here?’ Groote took his hand a centimeter off her mouth.
‘Here?’ The concierge sputtered in her terror. ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God…’
‘Yes. Here. With him.’ Wrong place, wrong time, rattled in Groote’s head, but he hated the phrase. He heard Cathy’s final words: I’m taking your car, more room for junk in the trunk.
‘He invited me. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t.’ The concierge tried to back away from the gun barrel pressed into her throat, but Groote kept a hard grip on the woman’s hair.
‘Does he stay at this hotel often?’
She nodded a yes.
‘Did you know him before tonight?’
‘Yes.’
A predetermined choice then, not the random lovemaking of just one night. ‘You know what kind of man he is?’
She shuddered with fear. ‘He – he’s just a CPA. For a boating company…’
‘He had a different job before. His actions helped kill my wife, maim my daughter. He paid out the cash that bought the guns that destroyed my family.’
She shivered under his touch. ‘Boating… company…’
‘You should be more discerning about your friends, miss,’ he said gently.
‘Yes, okay, I will, I promise…’
‘I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.’
And he shot the concierge once between astonished eyes.
He took I-5 North to Orange. Staying up most of the night, generously giving the concierge the chance to leave, taking the time to check the accountant’s laptop and files for anyone else connected to the remnants of the Duarte crime ring who needed killing, setting up the scene to appear like a robbery, battling the morning traffic sludge, made him late for his morning with Amanda. But at least he knew now he had not been unfair.
Not like Amanda or Cathy, who had never had a chance.
At ten – almost an hour late – he screeched into the heart of Orange, zooming past the restored Orange Circle with its charming shops, down past Chapman University and its sparkling new buildings. Orange was a nice town; he ought to move here, be closer to Amanda. Hit man of suburbia – the idea nearly made him laugh. He drove a few more blocks down to a cluster of brick buildings that suggested the quiet ambience of a modern prep school. Except with bars on the windows. At the gate at Pleasant Point Hospital, he gave his name to the guard at the post. He drove up to the main building, parked his Mercedes, hurried across the lot. He knew he needed a shower, a shave, but he had not wanted to waste another moment. A group of the children played outside in the morning sunshine, a few others standing, staring off at the sky or the ground or their hands. He didn’t see Amanda.
He hurried into the building, checked in at the front desk. Today’s nurse was Mariana, his favorite.
‘I’m late,’ Groote said. ‘Terrible traffic.’
‘Amanda’s in her room,’ Mariana said.
