I gasped.
“What?” Pammy asked.
I handed her the page of notes I had just read.
“Her roommate Lucy told me Darla was making a lot of money,” I said, “but Lucy didn’t know how.”
“You think this is the same Darla?” Pammy asked as she handed the note back to me. I put it back in the folder.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” I said, “since she ended up dead, too.”
I shivered. We had more than enough here. We needed to get him in that motel room, drugged to a stupor, and call the police. We could bring the files inside, along with the matchbooks, and let the cops connect the dots. We wouldn’t have to drive to Walnut Creek after all.
But, to make sure that Lavassier got caught, I would call Detective Jessup in the Walnut Creek police department when I got home tonight and pretend to be Carol Anne Houk again. I’d give him a head’s up about the truck’s location (which, at that point, would be the Golden Bear), the matches, and the Mount Diablo connection.
That would guarantee that someone would charge Lavassier with something and get him off the streets of Berkeley.
“How much time do we have?” I asked.
“About twenty minutes,” Pammy said. “I think we’re okay.”
The faster we got out of the truck, the better. But I wanted to see if we could find a connection to any of the missing kids. I thumbed through the file folders, looking at names, while Pammy dug through the mess on the driver’s side.
“He lives in his truck,” she said.
“No wonder he parked it away from everything else,” I said.
Then my breath caught. He probably had weapons hidden in here. We needed to find them.
“Pammy,” I said, “make sure you look under the seat for weapons.”
“Already thought of that,” she said.
I pushed on the glove box. It didn’t open. It was locked.
Pammy and I looked at each other. Did we waste the next ten minutes trying to open that or did we worry about it later? If we locked up the truck before he got back here, he would have to go through two different locks to get to any weapon he might have stashed.
And by then, if Eagle had done her job, he would be too impaired to do much.
“I don’t suppose you know how to pick a lock,” Pammy said.
“Not that one,” I said.
“Then let’s figure out what we need here so we don’t have to spend a lot more time around the truck when we’re in the Golden Bear parking lot,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. Because we both knew the faster we finished, the better off we would be.
59
Eagle
Eagle pushed open the outer door of the restaurant. She clung to her purse and looked both ways. Lavassier was on this side of the street, heading north.
She pivoted and started to run after him, cursing the stupid new shoes pinching her feet. She made it to the driveway into the Golden Bear Motel when she heard a man yelling.
“Ma’am! Ma’am! Ma’am!”
She glanced over her shoulder, saw the manager of the restaurant standing just outside the door, shaking something at her.
Her damn gloves.
She looked away, saw Lavassier had stopped, and was watching her and the manager. Goddamn it. She didn’t want Lavassier to know she had followed him.
Although right now, he would think she was coming after him to get him to change his mind about finding her made-up daughter. But if she ran after him, what would he think then?
And her brain wasn’t working well enough to come up with a plausible lie for stopping him in the street. He wouldn’t want her to anyway. He had already made himself clear. He didn’t want to do business with her.
If she followed him, he would speed up to get away from her, and that was the last thing she wanted.
She pivoted and walked back to the manager who, asshole that he was, didn’t hurry toward her. He actually made her come to him.
He held out the gloves, and smiled as if he expected another tip. She had already overpaid for the coffee, by probably two dollars and fifty cents, but he wanted more money for doing something nice and friendly.
Bastard.
Or maybe he didn’t want anything except a thank-you.
So she said, “Thank you,” and snatched the gloves out of his hand.
When she turned around, Lavassier was gone. She couldn’t see him anywhere.
This time, she did run. The motel covered most of San Pablo on this side of the street. There was nowhere for him to duck in. Which meant he had probably turned right on Virginia or had gone into a nearby house.
She had no idea why he would go into a house.
She reached the intersection faster than she expected, but at a cost. Blisters had formed on the heels of both feet.
She looked right, expecting to see him or the truck alongside the bungalows lining both sides of Virginia. But he wasn’t there. And the truck wasn’t there, not that she could see anyway.
She whirled, and as she did, she caught movement on the other side of the road, near Franklin Elementary.
Jesus, he had parked behind the school.
She started to cross the street, but a car nearly hit her, honking and swerving. Two other cars passed behind it, as well as cars in the opposite lane.
She had no idea where the traffic had come from, only that there was some. She had been so focused on Lavassier that she hadn’t seen it.
She took the few seconds she was trapped on the east side of San Pablo to slip on the gloves. Then she removed the hypodermic from her purse. She’d still have to get the cap off the needle end, but that would only take a second.
Her heart was pounding.
The traffic light one block south changed to red, and the traffic coming toward her stopped. Three more cars went by on the far side of the street before there was a break in traffic.
She hurried across San Pablo. People were sitting at tables outside a small restaurant. She didn’t want to yell a warning to Pammy and Val. Eagle didn’t want to call attention to herself any more than she already had.
The restaurant patrons were watching her, some society matron, running in her Cinderella slippers while wearing gloves. They would remember her.
But what they would remember was the gold, ivory, and pink striped dress, the shoes, the headband, and the gloves, not her face.
Please, God, she didn’t want them to remember her face.
She kept it turned slightly away from them as she passed them. She didn’t see Lavassier. She hadn’t seen him cross the street, she hadn’t seen him go behind the school.
She didn’t know for certain if that was where he parked. Maybe he had parked on a side street.
And it was getting just dark enough that everything had that twilight haze. The edges of buildings and trees looked fuzzy, as if she needed glasses.
At least there was no one else on this part of the street.
She hurried and finally saw the back end of the truck, barely visible behind the Franklin School.
“Oh, thank God,” she said, surprising herself by speaking out loud. “Oh, thank fucking God.”
60
Pammy
“What the hell are you doing in my truck?”
Pammy looked up. Val was sitting in the passenger seat, file folders spread across her lap. She looked out the window as if she had seen a ghost.
Pammy eased the driver’s door open and slid out. “Come on, Val,” she whispered, but as she did, the sound of the passenger door opening covered her voice.
The passenger door yanked back, and the entire truck shook.
“I asked you a question, bitch! What are you doing in my truck?”
Pammy couldn’t quite see him, but she knew who it was. Lavassier. He grabbed Val and pulled her toward him, the file folders slipping to the ground. She braced her hands on the inside of the door frame, but she wasn’t large enough to hold that position.
He yank
ed again, and she fell to the pavement with a sickening thud.
Pammy wished now that she had found a weapon underneath the seat. But she hadn’t brought a gun. Pammy had always said that she thought guns caused more problems than they solved.
Maybe she was wrong.
“Who the hell are you?” he said, and at that moment, Pammy realized he wasn’t yelling. He was in control. Complete control.
He knew how to hurt people, and he was a big man.
Val had had no training at all, and he had probably just knocked the wind out of her.
But, as far as Pammy could tell, he hadn’t seen her. She cast about the parking area for a weapon, but she didn’t see anything she could use. And the bastard hadn’t even had a tire iron in the truck. Nothing. He probably kept it clean of make-shift weapons so his teenage prisoners had nothing to use to free themselves.
Bastard.
“Ouch!” Now, he sounded angry. “You bit me, you fucking bitch!”
Val was defending herself. But she had to get away.
Pammy tried to send Val a telepathic message. Run! Run! First rule of defense. Get the hell out of here.
Not that Pammy could follow that rule. She was trapped by the truck itself. If she tried to leave, he would see her, depending on how he was standing.
Second rule of defense against a larger opponent: Use everything, and do not fight fair.
Everything.
There weren’t even rocks on this side of the truck. Just the cinderblock, which she grabbed. It weighed nothing—and that was when she realized that her adrenaline was pumping.
She had always told her students to use the power adrenaline gave them.
There was a loud bang, and the entire truck shook. Shit! Pammy suddenly realized that he was using the same technique to subdue Val that he had used to subdue the woman Eagle had seen.
He was slamming Val’s head into the truck. That could kill her.
Pammy had to stop him.
The shortest distance between him and her was around the front of the truck. If he saw her, so be it.
She snuck around and winced as the bang sounded again, followed by a moan. The truck shook.
Pammy crouched so that she was half hidden as she made it to the passenger side of the truck. She ducked behind the door, then stepped around it.
He was half turned away from Pammy, but his head was bent slightly because he was focused on Val. His left hand was gripping the top of her skull, his right arm was wrapped around her torso, lifting her off the ground.
She was still alive, and not entirely knocked senseless, because she was kicking. She wasn’t connecting, but she was kicking.
He whipped his entire body toward the truck, and as he did, Pammy stepped out from behind the door. She mimicked his movement, swinging the cinderblock, the pointed end aimed for the back of his head.
Hit hard, Pammy Girl, her father’s voice instructed her, because you’ll probably only get one shot at this.
She used her entire body, all the power she had ever had, to slam that cinderblock into Lavassier’s skull.
The block hit as he moved toward the truck. She didn’t connect with the back of his head, but the side of it, the pointed end of the cinderblock slamming into his temple.
He staggered sideways, letting go of Val, who crumpled to the ground.
Pammy ignored her for the moment, instead stepping forward and bringing down the block again, this time hitting the side of his face so hard that she heard the cracking of bones.
She lifted the block again, swinging it like a hammer, and slamming it into him a third time.
“Pammy. That’s enough.”
It took a half second for the voice to register.
She looked up. Eagle stood next to the crumbling concrete wall, looking like she had just come from a summer party.
“Set it down,” Eagle said. “You’ve done enough.”
61
Eagle
He was obviously dead. Pammy had crushed his skull—and she had done so mostly silently.
That was the part that had impressed Eagle. There had been no screaming, not from Pammy, not from Val. All Eagle had heard as she ran toward the truck was the bang of Val’s head against the metal and then the sound of crunching bone.
At first, Eagle had thought that was the sound of Val’s head breaking against the truck—although she hadn’t known it was Val, not right away. It could have been Pammy.
Then Eagle rounded the concrete wall, and saw Pammy hit Lavassier with the block while he was already on the ground. She had picked up that block like it didn’t weigh a thing, and was prepared to hit him again, when Eagle spoke up.
Now, Pammy had stopped, her face speckled with blood, her eyes wild.
“Set the block down,” Eagle said gently. She put the hypo back into her purse, then pulled off the gloves. She didn’t want Lavassier’s blood on anything she owned if she could avoid it.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to touch him. No one had half a skull, lost that much blood, and lived.
The blood was flowing toward the street, away from Val, away from Pammy’s shoes—at least at the moment.
Eagle stepped over Lavassier’s body. Val was crumpled beside him. The back of her neck and part of her shirt was damp with blood, but whose Eagle couldn’t tell.
Val blinked at her. “I’m all right.”
“You’re not,” Eagle said.
Val’s face was swelling and already bruising. Still, she gave Eagle a real smile. “I’ll have a headache. But I’ll be all right.”
Eagle would test that as soon as they got out of here.
“We have him,” Val said. “He kept notes. They’re in the truck.”
Eagle let out a breath. “Contracts,” she said, more to herself than Val.
“Exactly.” Val sat up, put a hand to the side of her face, and moaned. “Okay, Jesus, that hurts. That’s good, right?”
Eagle had no idea. But she had to do something.
Pammy was still standing over Lavassier, staring down at him. She had left the block beside his head.
“Can you stand?” Eagle asked Val.
She put a hand on the side of the truck. Eagle looked at her, hoping for—and seeing—gloves. Val used the truck’s side as a brace and got to her feet, swaying slightly.
“I bit him,” she said.
Great, Eagle thought. They had to get out of here, then. Police could compare bite marks to someone’s dental records, if they had the records.
“I don’t think that killed him,” Eagle said.
“He’s dead?” Val turned, nearly fell over, and caught herself against the truck. “Jesus, he’s dead. Pammy, he’s dead.”
“I know.” Pammy’s voice was flat.
“We have to get out of here,” Eagle said. “Right now.”
“We have the motel room,” Pammy said. “I think I can pick him up.”
“We don’t need to,” Eagle said. “Let’s go.”
“No,” Val said. “We have to lock the truck.”
“What?” Eagle asked. “Forget the truck. We have to go.”
“No,” Val said. “There’s enough evidence in this truck to convict this asshole of at least one murder and maybe more.”
“No one’s convicting him of anything,” Eagle said. “He’s dead, Val.”
“I know.” She still had a hand on the side of the truck. “But no one will care who killed him if they figure out that he’s been murdering college students for money.”
She was right. Holy Jesus, she was right. If they got out of here now, and somehow left the truck intact, all the police would think was that one of his victims had killed him and then run away.
“Okay.” Eagle glanced at Pammy’s hands. She was still wearing gloves as well. “Pamela! I need you to pay attention.”
Pammy looked up, eyes glassy with shock.
“You are going to walk to the driver’s side of this truck, lock the door, and close it. Do you got that?”<
br />
“Why not you?” Pammy asked. She probably wasn’t thinking clearly, but it seemed like Val was.
So Eagle answered for Val’s edification, not Pammy’s. Eagle pointed to her stupid Cinderella slippers.
“Let’s just be practical, shall we?” she asked.
“Yes,” Pammy said. “Which is why—”
“Don’t argue,” Eagle said. “I need you to act fast. We have medical issues.”
They did—she really did need to deal with Val’s face—but those medical issue were less of a problem than Pammy’s shock, and the three of them, standing over a dead body.
“Move,” Eagle said.
“Yes, right,” Pammy said, and walked around the truck. She reached the other side, locked the door like instructed, and slammed it shut.
The sound reverberated in the small space like a gunshot. Eagle was shocked that no one had come over here from that restaurant on San Pablo.
“I got this one,” Val said, holding the passenger door. She depressed the lock and eased the door closed.
Eagle stepped back and peered down the side of the building. They couldn’t go back by San Pablo, not with all of that blood on Pammy’s face. But there was a nightclub one block over, and no one would think twice about a woman with bruises near there. People would simply assume there had been an altercation inside.
There had to be a way around the back of the school. Eagle just had to trust it.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“We leave him?” Pammy asked, as she came around the back of the truck.
“Right next to the trash,” Eagle said. “Exactly where he belongs.”
62
Val
We made it to 10th Street before I actually felt the injury. I knew it was there, of course, but something kept me going—adrenaline, excitement, shock. I wasn’t feeling anything, and then, suddenly, my knees buckled.
Eagle caught me. She wrapped an arm around me, and logically, I should have balked. I’d been balking against touch ever since Vitel, but this time, having someone hold me up felt good.
Protectors Page 53