Panther's Prey

by Lachlan Smith

  I didn’t immediately get up. I didn’t want to frighten her or put her on the defensive, at least no more than was necessary. Rather, I wanted her to talk to me about what she really believed had happened to her husband. As I’d mentioned to Benton, the news stories I’d read had reported that in the week after Cho’s disappearance, she’d told the police and anyone else who’d listen that Gary couldn’t have committed suicide, that he wouldn’t have voluntarily written the note found in his abandoned car. Within a few short weeks, however, she’d changed her tune and begun pressing for a court ruling declaring her husband legally dead.

  Something or someone had changed her mind, and I didn’t believe it was the Kübler-Ross model I’d learned in Psych 101, i.e., denial transformed into acceptance. If there was bargaining involved, it wasn’t of the metaphysical kind. It seemed to me, rather, that a very real person had either made her a threat or a promise she’d had no choice but to accept.

  These were the thoughts running through my mind as I pondered how to make my approach. Then another car turned in to the cul-de-sac after Lydia’s BMW—a black SUV with tinted windows. Just like the one that had run me down. A wave of fear ran through my guts as I remembered my all-too-recent terrifying encounter on the bridge.

  I couldn’t be sure it was the same car. There’s probably no more common or nondescript vehicle in America than the armored tanks half the populace outside urban centers like San Francisco prefers to ride around in. There was an oddness about this one, though. Maybe the way its dark paint shone without a trace of dust or wear, or the utter blackness of its windows, which gave no glimpse even in silhouette of the occupants inside.

  My mind replayed the sound of fear in Lydia’s voice when I’d spoken my name.

  I took off running down the grassy slope, this movement delivering jarring pain. I landed on my heels in the ditch beside the road, sending a concussion through bones that deserved no further battering. Still, I managed to keep going, across the road and down the middle of the street into the peaceful neighborhood Lydia Cho had just returned to.

  I could see the black SUV at the curb in front of her house, pointed back in the direction it’d come. It was a Yukon, I saw. I faltered as I came into view of it, wondering if from inside it or the house I was being watched. I slowed to a walk, keeping to the other side of the street, ready to run if any of the windows started inching down.

  With no sign of life from the Yukon, I cautiously cut across the street toward the house. Because it was uphill from the road and surrounded by scrub oak and cypress, I couldn’t see inside. The BMW was parked next to the Volvo in the carport. Keeping one eye on the windows, I went up the drive. I reached the safety of the carport and paused there, out of view of anyone in the house. I still saw no movement or other sign of observation. I listened and heard nothing, scanned the street, and was reassured to see that my prowling hadn’t been noticed by any of the neighbors. Or not that I could tell. Finally I gathered myself, ducked behind the bushes at the front of the house, and eased along beneath the windows.

  The visitor, or visitors, had come in an SUV like a million others, I told myself again. They might not even be in this house, where nothing seemed amiss. I kept going, even at the risk of being picked up as a vagrant who had no business there.

  The rooms I could peer into—a study and a formal living area—were empty. I kept going around the corner, following the slope up half a level. Now what I was seeing undoubtedly was the master bedroom. It was ringed by a deck that extended along the back of the house, with a massive buckeye growing through a hole. Wide picture windows provided a multimillion-dollar view. In a corner, a Jacuzzi was barely shielded by a partial screen. I stared in shock at what I now saw: a kneeling man trying to drown a woman in it.

  He had her wrists pinned behind her. Catching a glint of metal, I realized she was handcuffed. Using the cuffs to control her, he was, with his other hand, pressing her head under the surface as she kicked and struggled. The attacker was tall and lean, with a military-style haircut, short on top and even shorter on the sides. His wide brow narrowed to a tapering chin, giving his face a wedgelike appearance. Dressed in a clean white T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, he had a handgun secured beneath one arm in a shoulder holster.

  I circled the deck, fumbling in my pocket for my cell phone, then realized I’d left it in the car. Suddenly the man let go of her head and yanked her from the water by her hair. She seemed to get her feet underneath her but lost her balance, gasping and choking. Then he grabbed her under the arm before she could slip beneath the surface again, a great wave washing over the edge of the tub and splashing beneath the deck.

  The woman was shivering, coughing and retching, her workout clothes stuck to her body, water streaming down her head. She sagged over weak knees, held up by her tormentor. She was slight of build, and at around thirty or thirty-five years old, a good deal younger than her husband must have been.

  Finally he decided to speak. “What was that lawyer doing calling your number?” His voice was calm, completely detached.

  My stomach fell as I again remembered the fear I’d heard in her voice over the phone. Suddenly a radio crackled with a disembodied voice. He immediately silenced it, but, upon hearing the sound, my view of the situation hideously shifted, a single word reverberating in my mind.

  Cop.

  “What lawyer?” she gasped, and, as fast as a stone dropping, she went down again, her feet kicking wildly until he got one hand around both her wrists and used the other like a boat hook to sweep her legs completely out of the water, plunging her head beneath it.

  I began to move away from the more private bedroom section of the deck. Moments later, I came to four wide steps not visible from the hot tub nook, concealed from this vantage point by the living room’s protruding angle. I crossed the five feet of open space and reached the cover of the Jacuzzi’s privacy screen. Once there, I eased along the wall, my heart racing as the splashes continued for longer than it seemed anyone could hold her breath. Then all was still, followed by a momentous thrash as, presumably, she was again yanked from the water.

  With my back to a picture window, I inched toward the screen and peered through the lattice just as Lydia Cho, once more being held above the surface only by the hands that had been forcing her down, gave a retching cough. She appeared unconscious, her eyes rolled back.

  “Where’s your husband?” he asked.

  “He’s dead,” she gasped, in a voice so hoarse the words were hardly intelligible.

  “Too bad.” Her attacker hooked the neck of her shirt with one finger and pulled it away from her chest. As he ogled her, I rushed around the screen and grabbed for the gun holstered beneath his arm. If it’d been loose in the holster I would’ve had it, but it was fastened down.

  In an instant his hand was locked around my wrist, his eyes inches from mine, filled with outrage and surprise. I tightened my hand around the gun and with a tremendous heave used the shoulder holster to lift him and shove him backward over the rim of the hot tub. He held on to me as he fell, sending us both over into the water. I had to keep my hand around the gun—and the gun in its holster—or I was a dead man.

  The water was cold. He was beneath me, but the tub was deep and for a moment my hand slipped and I thought I was going to lose him. Then I lunged and closed my hand over the gun again, finding my feet. He came up and tried to roll me over but suddenly Lydia was behind him.

  Deftly, she’d flipped her legs through the loop of arms and handcuffs, wrapped the chain around his neck and pulled it taut under his chin, simultaneously strangling him and forcing his head underwater. He kicked and flailed, his neck muscles straining as he tried to free himself, raise his head, and breathe. He had a choice. Either he could let go my wrists and grab her arms, or he could win the struggle for the gun. He chose to continue fighting. The trouble was, I had both hands on the weapon now. His fingernails clawed more and more desperately at my wrists, his legs kicking, knees buc
king. I was practically kneeling on top of him, my own face just inches from the water.

  His hands flew up to Lydia’s wrists. I found the snap and was about to yank the weapon from its holster when he let go of her wrists and went for the gun again, but she was quicker than he was, reaching down and taking the weapon from me as I tugged it from the holster.

  “Move,” she said, pointing it.

  As I fell back, I heard a muffled thump and saw bubbles surface. A pink stain billowed in the water. Waves lapped the sides of the tub.

  For a shocked moment, we sat facing each other, Lydia’s hair streamed down either side of her face. One cowboy boot surfaced. She pushed it aside and fished underwater, ransacking the man’s pockets until she came out with a set of keys, which she used to unlock the cuffs. She dropped them in the water, keeping the gun and keys. Then, holding the weapon down at her hip, she went like a sleepwalker across the deck and through the sliding glass door without a word to me.

  As the adrenaline trickled out, pain set in, the muscles tightening over my wounded, now reinjured ribs. Each intake of breath brought tears to my eyes and sent spasms shooting through me. I was afraid for a moment that I wouldn’t be able to climb out of the tub unassisted, but finally I managed it by rolling over the edge. I lay on my back for a few moments, then maneuvered onto my side and got to my knees, then at last to my feet.

  I followed the trail of drips, including spots of blood, and found Lydia in the bedroom. She crouched there, filling a large suitcase from the bureau drawers, wincing in pain as she moved. A bruise was forming on her jaw. A clump of her hair had been torn out, I saw, and blood dripped from the raw patch on her scalp.

  “There’s an SUV out front. I didn’t see anyone in it but couldn’t be sure.”

  “Don’t you think they’d be in here by now if there was?” She glanced over her shoulder but didn’t pause, grabbing garments out of a drawer and pressing them down tightly into the suitcase to make them fit. By the size of the bag and the amount of clothing she was squeezing into it she didn’t plan to return to the house for a long time. If ever.

  The place was perfectly quiet. I’d been listening for sirens and heard nothing, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were already being encircled by silent forces.

  I could barely talk, and felt like my legs would give out. “Who was he?”

  She shrugged helplessly. “The man who’s been looking for Gary. He never bothered to introduce himself or show ID. So not a cop. Anyway, who are you and what do you want?”

  I told her my name. “We’ve got to report this.” I also thought it was possible that one or both of us needed to be in the hospital.

  “No, we don’t. Once you went for his gun, it was the only thing we could do.”

  We. What was I doing now? Helping her? In any case, I hadn’t yet called the police. “I went for his gun because I thought he was going to drown you. You shot him in self-defense. The thing is, it’s not going to seem that way if you run away now without calling it in.”

  She let the comment pass. “Bring the suitcase, please. You have your car?”

  I could phone the cops and explain what had happened—the man drowning the woman in the hot tub when I arrived, my reasonable fear for her life …

  “Do I need to say I’ll shoot you if you don’t do as I ask?”

  I didn’t believe she would. On the other hand, she seemed remarkably unfazed, considering she’d just killed a man.

  “It’s not here. I left it at the Café Deli off Alpine Road.” I figured she was probably in shock.

  “Forget it, then. Put the bags in the trunk of the Beemer.”

  It was simplest to do as she asked. She had his keys and we went out to the Yukon on the street.

  It was empty, as bare as a rental inside. There was a cell phone on the center console. After making sure it was deactivated, she pocketed it. She’d done a fast change in the bedroom, slipping on dry clothes, but I was still sopping wet. I heard no sirens, saw no faces at any of the neighbors’ windows as she backed out of the driveway.

  “Your hands are shaking,” she said, glancing over at me as she drove.

  “Yours aren’t?”

  “I’ve worn out my nerves, waiting for the earth to crack open and swallow me. Now that it has, all I feel is relief. And resolve.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “To Gary,” she said, and with a leaping sensation in my stomach, I glanced over at her, confirming that in fact he was alive.

  Neither of us spoke for a while after that. She kept the car pointed north. Night had fallen before she told me where we were going. We were on Interstate 5, tucked into the ceaseless anonymous flow of traffic, mostly long-haul truckers.

  “Before Gary disappeared, he mentioned once that if we were ever in danger, there’s a cabin in the mountains we could hide at. A friend from a long time ago owns it, he said, a person no one would ever connect him with. He had me memorize the directions. It seemed strange at the time, but he must have known this day was coming. That’s where we’re going now.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “A week or so after they found the car, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. A throwaway phone, obviously. It was Gary. He was furious at me for trying to persuade everyone he was still alive. I was going to ruin everything, he said. Yesterday he called again and told me where he was. He knew I understood which place he meant; otherwise, they’d have gone straight to him instead of trying to make me tell them how to find him.”

  We stopped for gas. Lydia went in to use the toilet and buy us something to eat while I filled the tank. She gave me a doubtful glance as she was getting out, like she knew better than to trust me by leaving me alone, but felt she had no alternative. She couldn’t very well march me at gunpoint into the women’s restroom with her. Or maybe she guessed that my ribs had tightened so badly there was no way I could stand on my own.

  I was a lawyer. Though most of my clients were criminals, I believed in the rule of law. What had happened at the house had been self-defense, but the longer we went without reporting it, the more it looked like murder. If so, I’d be judged an accessory as of the moment Lydia came out and we drove on, any pretense of my being an unwilling hostage fading further with every mile in which I turned down the opportunity for escape.

  On the other hand, if Gary Cho was at the end of this long drive, I didn’t want our trip to end here before we reached him. I was convinced he knew who’d killed Jordan and why.

  I was still in the car when Lydia climbed back in behind the wheel. She’d bought several packets of Motrin and some sodas for us to share. I watched the rearview mirror the rest of the way, but no police car had appeared by the time we reached the end of a gravel road in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest late that night.

  Chapter 19

  The headlights shone on a fairly primitive log cabin. Behind it, mountains blocked out the stars. There didn’t appear to be anyone home, though the air was tinged with wood smoke. Beneath a rough overhang on one side of the house, wood was stacked. An axe stuck out from the chopping block out front, which was surrounded by split logs. A mountain bike hung upside down over the board porch beneath the overreaching eaves.

  I needed help from Lydia to get out of the car. She was surprisingly strong for her size. On my feet, I found I was able to walk—haltingly at first, but better after a few steps. With the added exercise, however, breathing once again became a painful problem.

  Inside, the place was a surprisingly large single room holding a queen bed, a table, a woodstove, and a basin. From the looks of it, the inhabitant had vacated, seemingly in haste. Flames still crackled in the woodstove. I found a battery-operated lantern and turned it on. “What now?”

  “We wait.” Lydia went through the cabin discovering what she recognized as signs of her husband: a pair of running shoes, an Italian-style stovetop coffee percolator, a bottle of Knob Creek.

  We’d been there half an hou
r when, without warning, the door was flung open and Cho came in. I jumped, earning another excruciating spasm from my ribs, but Lydia seemed unsurprised. I recognized him from online photos. He was a very tall, thin man with graying hair and a disparaging gaze. He wore ski pants, hiking boots, a hooded sweatshirt, and a waterproof jacket. He seemed to make no differentiation between his wife and me.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “We weren’t followed,” she assured him, answering an entirely different question from the one he’d asked.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “The one who’s been following me is dead. That’s how.”

  Concern deepened in his eyes. Surprise yielded to tenderness, and he stepped forward, gathered her to his chest, and hugged her.

  Self-conscious, I turned away, but they’d already parted, Cho turning his back.

  At the stove, he opened the door and added a few hunks of split wood, then stabbed at the embers with a poker until the flames leapt up. He seemed to be studying them as if the solution to their problems might be found in that fiery belly. He closed the stove door again.

  “Who are you?” he wanted to know.

  I told him my name. Cho shared a look with his wife I couldn’t read, an intense wordless communication. Then he said, “Leo and I are going to step outside.”

  Lydia nodded. He held out his hand and she passed him the gun. I felt a shock like an electric charge as I realized the danger I might be in.

  The night air was crisp, the temperature just above freezing. The scent of pines was overpowering, intoxicating. The moon had risen above the mountains, making them seem almost near enough to touch, though they must have been miles away. The fissures and furrows of their stark topography remained in shadow, presenting a study in contrasts, like Japanese woodcut prints I’d seen.