He rolled, the next gunshot making his ears ring, plaster exploding from the wall, stinging his face. Jolting to a painful halt in the living room, he only then realized that he was still holding the revolver that he had picked up before climbing the stairs to the bedroom. Reflexively, he pointed it upward and pulled the trigger, his aim bad, missing Tash as she ducked back from the landing above him.
Her surprise at being shot at slowed her enough that Coltrane had time to race down to the front-door landing before Tash fired again. He collided with Jennifer, who was fumbling to unlock the front door. “No time!” he yelled, dragging her down the further continuation of the stairs an instant before two bullets whacked holes in the door.
They were on the bottom level now, but the overhead light exposed them, and Jennifer flicked switches, sending the bottom level of the pool area into darkness. The next moment, Tash appeared at the landing, fired three times into the shadows, and dove back out of sight. Before his eyes could tell his brain to stop the impulse, Coltrane fired at the empty landing, the gun awkward in his hand, the recoil unnerving.
“Jennifer?”
“Here.” Her voice was unsteady behind him.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
Coltrane’s heart pounded so hard that he feared his arteries would burst. Crouching behind a concrete pillar, he aimed up toward the landing.
“The garden.” Jennifer’s voice shook. “We can get away through the back.”
“No, we’d be trapped. There’s a wall around it. We’d only have bushes for cover. She could pick us off from the living room balcony. Tash!”
No answer.
“Tash!” Coltrane raised his voice louder.
Still no answer.
“Melinda!” Jennifer called.
“What?”
“The neighbors will have heard the shots! They’ll have phoned the police!” Jennifer said. “It’s finished!”
“Not yet !” Tash/Melinda said. “But it soon will be!”
What’s she talking about? Coltrane wondered. She isn’t stupid enough to hang around until the police come. Why is she waiting?
And why is she wearing plastic gloves?
So she won’t leave fingerprints, he thought.
Then why did she press Walt’s semiautomatic into his hand and use his finger to pull the trigger?
So his hand would have gunpowder residue. Isn’t that what Walt said up in Big Bear? He threatened to shoot me, then put a pistol in my hand and squeeze off a shot. “So you’d have powder residue,” Walt had said. So it would look like I’d shot at Walt and he was forced to defend himself.
That’s what she’s doing. She wants to make it look as if Walt did the shooting, not her.
But there’ll be other evidence she can’t hide, he thought. How does she plan to—
What was that remote control she pressed Walt’s thumb on?
“Do you smell smoke?” Jennifer murmured.
Coltrane whirled. Even in the darkness, he could see thick gray smoke billowing behind him.
From the darkroom.
It wafted up his nose and made him bend over, coughing, his eyes watering, the smoke so dense that it cloaked the exit to the pool.
Walt must have planted an incendiary device among the chemicals in there. The remote control Tash pressed Walt’s thumb on set off—
“Jennifer, get away from—”
The door to the darkroom exploded, flames bursting out, flashing across the corridor, whooshing toward the ceiling. But as loud as the eruption was, it didn’t muffle Jennifer’s scream as she sprinted toward the concrete pillar behind which Coltrane crouched.
Tash shot at her silhouette against the flames.
Coltrane shot back.
“Jesus, my hair.” Jennifer pawed at it, brushing out sparks.
“Now it’s almost over!” Tash said.
Coltrane cast a panicked glance toward the roaring wall of flames behind him.
“So I’ll give you a choice!” Tash said. “You can burn to death, or you can let me shoot you.”
“And then drag Walt’s body down here to make it look like he killed us but got caught in the fire he set?”
“Sounds good to me!” Tash said.
“But you’re running out of time! I hear sirens!” Jennifer said.
“I don’t! It’s only been a couple of minutes! Nice try, though!”
Coltrane felt the heat of the fire through the back of his sport coat. His hair felt warm. Smoke seared his throat. Doubled over, coughing, he knew that he and Jennifer had only a few more seconds before they would have to run toward the stairs. Although the house was made of reinforced concrete, the walls, floors, and ceilings of the interior had conventional wooden frames. Held in by the concrete, the flames would shoot along the wood like a firestorm. We have to get out of—
The vault, he thought, unable to stop coughing. It’s fireproof. He almost struggled toward it before he remembered that it had a halon-gas fire-extinguishing system. Not sufficient to put out the flames in the rest of the house but certainly enough to suffocate the two of them if they tried to seek shelter in there.
We have to rush the stairs and hope she doesn’t shoot us before we—
As the heat on his back became unbearable and he braced himself to run, he heard a scream from the front-door landing. A shot. But the bullet wasn’t aimed toward the lower level. It was aimed toward the figure who toppled down the stairs toward where Tash crouched out of sight at the side of the landing. The figure collided against her and sent her sprawling in full view of Coltrane. The figure was Walt. The blow to his head hadn’t killed him. Regaining consciousness, he must have lurched downstairs toward the sound of shouting on the bottom level. His husky body pinned her. His hands groped for her throat as she screamed again and pulled the trigger, blasting a spray of crimson from the back of his already-battered skull. In a panic, she squirmed to get out from under Walt’s now-truly deadweight.
Jennifer took advantage of the distraction and raced toward her. Caught by surprise, Coltrane took a second longer to rush from the fire.
Tash pushed Walt’s body off her and down the stairs, then aimed at Jennifer, who lost her balance when she dodged Walt’s tumbling body. The bullet meant for her hit Coltrane’s shoulder, knocking him backward onto the floor. For an instant, he blacked out. The heat of the spreading fire stung him back to panicked consciousness, the pain in his right shoulder sending his nervous system into spastic overdrive. As the flames seethed closer, he struggled to stand and saw Jennifer grappling with Tash on the landing. Tash pulled the trigger on her pistol, but nothing happened, the slide staying back, the magazine out of ammunition.
She threw the handgun, grazing Jennifer’s head. As Jennifer moaned and stumbled back, Tash turned, slipped, and scurried on all fours up the stairs. Jennifer grabbed for her, snagging the ankle-long hem of her dress. When Tash kicked backward, Jennifer held firm, but Tash’s frantic movements tore the dress, exposed her right leg to the knee, and left Jennifer holding a scrap of cloth.
Again, Tash tried to scurry up the stairs. Again, Jennifer grabbed at the dress, ripping more of it away, unable to restrain her. The two of them raced higher.
Jennifer doesn’t know I’ve been hit, Coltrane thought in dismay. His right shoulder throbbed as he wavered up the stairs. She thinks I’m coming to help her.
Amid the roar of the flames behind him, he heard noises outside the house: shouts, approaching sirens. Thank God, he thought, as he managed somehow to unlock the front door. But the crash of something being thrown above him and a wail of pain warned him that Jennifer needed him.
He struggled to climb higher, his mind swirling when for a second time that night he came to the wreckage of the furniture in the living room. And again he heard a commotion from even higher. Dripping blood, he wavered up the stairs.
To the bedroom.
It all came back to the bedroom, he thought.
The place was in da
rkness. When he groped to flick the switch on the wall and achieved no result, he realized that the crash he had heard was the room’s floor lamp being smashed.
The room’s silence unnerved him.
“Where is she?” Jennifer asked from the corner on Coltrane’s right.
“I don’t know. My eyes haven’t adjusted to the darkness. I—”
A heavy object struck him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, aggravating the agony in his shoulder. Dizzied by pain, he fell against a bureau, grabbed it for support, and touched a camera he had set there.
“Are you okay?” Jennifer whispered from the darkness to his right.
“No, I’ve been—”
Another object walloped against the wall near where Jennifer had spoken. “Where the hell is she throwing from?”
“I don’t know,” Coltrane said. “She’s wearing white. Even in the darkness, we ought to be able to see her.”
“She was wearing white.”
Coltrane didn’t understand the remark. Crouching, he grasped the camera.
Outside, the sirens grew closer, louder.
Across the room, he saw what looked like a single pulse from a firefly. The spark came and went so suddenly, he wondered if his eyes were playing tricks on him, baffled until he remembered Tash’s problem with static electricity. Readying the camera, he aimed it toward where he had seen the spark, activated the flash, and pushed the shutter button.
The stab of light caught her in midmotion, crawling toward the open door to the balcony. Because the flash was directed away from him, it didn’t hurt his eyes and presumably Jennifer’s as much as it did Tash’s. She winced, her hand raised to protect her vision. At once it was dark again, and Tash scurried toward the balcony as Jennifer leapt from her hiding place. Jennifer’s cryptic remark that Tash wasn’t wearing white any longer now made sense—because her white dress had been torn from her. She was naked, her sleek tan body hard to see in the darkness. Jennifer’s own clothes had been torn, a sleeve of her navy blazer ripped off, the buttons of her silk blouse yanked open.
She caught up to Tash on the balcony, and Tash’s supple body fought back in a way reminiscent of a feral cat. She was clawing, twisting, lunging, spitting, streaks of blood suddenly appearing on Jennifer’s cheeks.
“Bitch!” Jennifer screamed, the ferocity of her attack increasing.
The flames from the bottom level lit up the night. Smoke rose toward the struggling figures, and from behind. The stairway filled with a haze that drifted into the bedroom.
As Jennifer lunged in a fury, Tash sidestepped, shouldered Jennifer against the railing, grabbed her feet, and upended her, throwing her over the side.
32
C OLTRANE ’ S HEART STOPPED .
With a shock, it restarted, urging him toward the railing. Jennifer had gripped the railing as Tash flipped her over, and now Jennifer dangled, straining to hang on as Tash pounded at her fingers and tried to peel them off. Below, flames roared from both levels, and the swimming pool didn’t extend to this side—beneath the flames, there was only a tiled patio.
“No!” Thrusting Tash aside, Coltrane reached his good arm toward Jennifer to pull her up.
The punch to his wounded shoulder drove him nearly insane with anguish. Seeing Tash try to hit him a second time, he managed to block the blow, but not without further pain to his wound.
“I can’t hold on!” Jennifer shouted.
But Coltrane couldn’t pull her up. He had to let go and defend himself against Tash, who lifted a heavy flowerpot to throw at him as she had at Walt. The effort to raise the pot above her head tilted her off balance, and when Coltrane pushed her as hard as he could, she hit the railing, so top-weighted that when he slammed her shoulders, she, too, went over the side.
Jennifer jerked. “She grabbed me! I can’t hang on!”
In a rush, Coltrane leaned over the side and slung his good arm under Jennifer’s chest, straining to support her weight. Below her, he saw Tash dangling from Jennifer’s ankles, the flames from both levels roaring up at her. Losing his hold, desperate, he tested his wounded arm, using it to try to pull Jennifer up. Blood pulsed. His injured muscle failed.
“No!” He strained harder with his good arm, feeling Jennifer slip. All the while, he stared down at Tash, who clawed her way up Jennifer’s legs, almost to her knees.
Coltrane wept with the effort to keep Jennifer from falling.
Tash groped higher.
Jennifer jerked her right leg free and kicked.
Tash reached up.
Jennifer kicked again.
“Why . . . don’t . . . you”—Jennifer kicked harder, and Coltrane couldn’t help thinking about Walt’s last words to Tash and where Tash’s mother had said she wanted her—“go . . . to . . . hell.”
As Coltrane felt Jennifer slipping away from him, Jennifer gave one last kick, and Tash lost her grip, screaming, plummeting into the flames below. The roar of the fire was so intense that Coltrane couldn’t hear the impact of her body hitting the patio two levels down.
Jennifer felt weightless. “Hang on to me! Don’t let go!”
“I’m trying as hard as I can!”
Jennifer pulled herself toward him. “My shoes are on fire!”
She struggled upward, Coltrane lifting, and abruptly they were sprawled on the balcony, Coltrane ignoring the sharp misery of his wound, burning his hands as he yanked off Jennifer’s smoking shoes and threw them away.
But flames filled the stairway to the bedroom. So weak that they could hardly walk, they wavered toward the section of the balcony farthest from the flames. From there, they had a view of the flashing lights of emergency vehicles in front of the house, of the crowd that had gathered and firefighters spraying water at the blaze.
A woman in the crowd shouted, “My God, someone’s up there!”
Two firemen stared toward the upper balcony, turned off the hose they had trained on the house, and ran toward the ladder truck, raising it to save the two figures they had seen.
EPILOGUE
F IRE PURIFIES , but how, Coltrane wondered, can you incinerate your mind? The increasing traumas of the previous two months had so numbed him that only after surviving the final horror did he begin to understand the full extent of his psychic damage. The rational part of him had grieved over the murders of his two closest friends and of his grandparents, but the irrational part, he came to realize, had never acknowledged that those murders had occurred, that those loved ones were lost to him forever. Those conflicting parts seemed to be reacting to separate universes, and in one of those universes, the murders couldn’t possibly have occurred, just as Coltrane couldn’t possibly have been hunted by Dragan Ilkovic. So, if those events couldn’t have occurred, they hadn’t occurred. Otherwise, he would surely have gone insane.
Dragan Ilkovic had seemed the epitome of evil, but then Coltrane had encountered Tash Adler, her malignance existing on such an unimaginably primal level that it had shocked away the numbness created by what Ilkovic had done to him. He wept without warning. He couldn’t sleep for fear of nightmares. He needed all his concentration to explain repeatedly to the police and the fire investigators what had happened in his house that night and the events that had led up to it.
When you reach absolute bottom, Coltrane told himself, when you can’t possibly fall any further and deeper, you have to start climbing. In that way, Tash had done him a favor. By setting fire to the house that had once belonged to Rebecca Chance and Randolph Packard, she had destroyed part of a festering past that had taken possession of him.
Similarly, the money with which Coltrane had purchased the house was his only legacy from his hated father, and although Coltrane’s insurance company would reimburse him for the devastation of the property, he had the sense that the money had been cleansed, that the legacy, too, had been destroyed in the fire. He planned to give some of it to Greg’s widow and the rest to various charities. He refused to rebuild the house. He put the lot up for s
ale.
But there was one other element of the past that he had to deal with, and on a balmy day a month later, he drove to the trailer court in Glendale, where he steered down the lane past the dilapidated playground where his mother had once pushed him in a swing. He knocked on the door of the battered trailer where he and his mother had once lived and where his father had shot his mother and then committed suicide. He knocked several times, but the elderly black woman didn’t answer.
“Mister, she don’t live here no more,” a kid on a beat-up bicycle said.
“Do you know where she moved?”
“She don’t live anywhere. She dead.”
“Ah.” His spirit sank. “And who lives here now?”
“Nobody.”
He bought the trailer, had it towed away, and, without ever stepping into it again, watched as a huge metal press crumpled it, destroying it. He bought the best new trailer he could find, had it towed onto the trailer court, found the poorest family in the area, and arranged for them to live rent-free in the trailer. Then he paid for the old playground to be leveled and a shiny new one to take its place. It gave him tremendous satisfaction. He was cleaning house, he told himself, throwing out the past.
One aspect of the past that he was happy to retain, although he felt oddly distant from it, was the special edition of Southern California Magazine in which Randolph Packard’s classic series of photographs of L.A. houses in the twenties and thirties was mirrored by Coltrane’s updates of them, along with the photographs of people and places he had come in contact with during the odyssey of his assignment.
“They’re brilliant,” Jennifer said. “They’re going to give you a whole new direction for your career.”
“I feel as if someone else took them,” Coltrane said. “I’m a different person now.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want you to become too complacent.” Her tone was teasing.
“I know one thing. I’ll never take another photograph that doesn’t make me appreciate being alive and part of the world.”
“Like this photograph?”
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