Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  Mary said, “I’m sorry Phoenix didn’t work out for you, but there are lots and lots of places.” She tried a bold experiment. “If you could get a ride to California, would you go?”

  Emily stared at her for a moment, her mouth half open. “With you?”

  Mary nodded. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning, and it takes about seven hours of driving to reach L.A.”

  “What about your boyfriend? Will it be okay with him?”

  Mary nodded. “You’ll like him a lot.” She looked at Emily judiciously. “I can’t promise anything, but he’s about to start a business, and he’s looking for people to work there.”

  “I ought to go,” said Emily. “I really feel like it.”

  Mary wrote down the name of the hotel, the street, and the room number on the margin of an advertisement in the People magazine, then tore it off and handed it to her. “Come tomorrow morning.”

  “What time?” Emily asked anxiously.

  “I wouldn’t come much after seven. Michael likes to get on the road early. And he’s not my boyfriend. Please don’t say that he is in front of him. He wouldn’t like that.”

  “I really feel like it,” said Emily. “I’d love to walk out of here and never see Danny again. He thinks I don’t have any choice but to stay with him, because my parents have dumped me and I’m not in school or anything, so he treats me worse and worse. I’m beginning to hate him.”

  “If you don’t want to go back there, you can come right now,” said Mary. “You can spend the night with us.”

  Emily studied her, a bit uneasy. “Is this something weird?”

  Mary shook her head. “It’s pretty straightforward. He’s been buying up land, and he’s going to build something like a dude ranch, a self-defense school for rich people. He knows about that.”

  “I don’t mean the business,” Emily said. “I mean you and him. And now me.”

  Mary said, “Not to me. I’m not interested in you that way. He might be, but since he hasn’t seen you, I can’t really predict. I just thought you looked like you could use a friend, but that you didn’t look as though it was all your fault. Sometimes you meet people who are all alone, but they also look like they’re mean, so it shouldn’t be a big surprise to anybody. You don’t. But if you’re worried about it, there’s no pressure. Ours isn’t the last car out of here.”

  Emily opened a dryer and began to fold her clothes. She did it with the hasty efficiency of a person who was not devoting any thought to it. Mary returned to her magazine, holding her hand over the captions and trying to guess what they would be. Then Mary’s dryer stopped. She pushed one of the rolling baskets over to the machine and emptied it. When she returned, she saw that Emily was finished. She had packed up her laundry, and left Danny’s neatly folded on a counter. She helped Mary fold hers, and then followed her to the car.

  On the way to the hotel, Mary tried to prepare Emily for Michael Parish. She did not tell her that he had still been Eric Watkins when she’d met him, but she did tell her that he had been born in South Africa and had started out as a soldier there. She told her that he had been in lots of armies of African countries after that. She went no further, because the details were all vague and probably jumbled in her mind. He had mentioned Uganda and Zimbabwe. He talked most often about the Congo, but it seemed to be both a place and a river, both of sizes that kept changing, and part of the river was not even in the country. There was no way of sorting out in which places he had been part of the government and in which an invader, or part of a group chasing invaders into another country.

  She knew that the rank got higher each time, and it had not surprised her, because he was ambitious. Sometimes he had been a captain, sometimes a colonel. Unless colonel wasn’t a real rank, but was an honor the way it was in the South, where Colonel was just a name the chamber of commerce or even a club could give a man. He had once said he’d left South Africa because of the blacks. She had at first assumed it was because the change in the government had left the blacks in charge. But they were also in charge in Uganda, Zimbabwe, the Congo, and everywhere else he’d chosen to go, weren’t they? She had not pursued the issue very far.

  She had helped him invent the name Michael Parish. He had not said why he didn’t want to be Eric Watkins anymore, but she knew it was for reasons that had to do with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and with the banks and licensing authorities in California. She was not sure whether the fault that had been found with Eric Watkins was something that had happened since he had come to the United States, or something he feared might have stuck to him from his early days in Africa.

  Tonight, as Mary suffered through the farewell party, she still had not settled those details, although a good ten years had passed. They did not seem any more important now than they had then. She looked across the main lodge at Emily, who was surrounded by Helen Corrigan and her two classmates. Mary had been a good judge of character. She had also known from the beginning that Michael would find her attractive: Emily was so perfectly the opposite of Mary that he could hardly fail to think of her that way as soon as he saw them together. She had never doubted for a moment that Emily would acquiesce as soon as Michael signified a desire. Emily had as much as asked in the laundromat whether that would be part of it, and Mary had as much as confirmed it. She certainly had not denied it. She and Emily had at least shared some intelligence that included an understanding of what men were like.

  That was before Emily had even met Parish, had him look at her in that way he had, in which he devoted every bit of his attention to her, studying her and giving her the impression that he was seeing things about her that she had always wished men would notice but was convinced that none of them ever had. And even more to the point, she had not yet heard him. His talk was what was impossible to withstand. He used his foreignness, the fact that he had seen the world and knew things, to make people want to know them too. But he also used it to ask questions. It was as though he were a man not from across an ocean, but from across the galaxy, that he was a sublimely benevolent being who was deeply fascinated by every detail about a person but did not know anything about petty provincial rules against asking very personal questions. Talking to him for an extended period was like being slowly, gently, but relentlessly stripped.

  Michael had found Mary at sixteen, and she had found Emily at nineteen, and Michael had raised them. They were his apprentices, his partners, his first and best students, so perfectly schooled in his ways that they were inheritors of his experiences as well as his knowledge.

  She had never stopped being the same girl she had been when she’d left North Carolina, the girl she thought of as the basic human being. But when she wanted to, she could also be like him, someone who had hunted on veldts and fought in jungles. In becoming his second self, his reflection, she had acquired the power to kill. That was something she could never repay him for.

  Mary looked around her at the small group of students. As soon as this lot had drunk too much and gone back to their cabins, she would take off this uncomfortable dress and begin to look over her gear to prepare for the next hunting party.

  CHAPTER 19

  This morning Mallon walked the route he had usually taken during the years after he had first come to Santa Barbara, past the tourist hotels along Cabrillo Beach. The other direction—westward along the beach toward Hope Ranch and Isla Vista—would have taken him to the spot where Catherine had gone into the water, and he had not been able to bear it since her death. He was agitated, anxious, pacing along looking down at the sidewalk, going over and over the details of Lydia’s murder and trying to decide what he should do next. Diane seemed to have anticipated the restlessness he would be feeling, the urge to do something. She called him every couple of days to tell him that the Los Angeles police had not yet been able to provide new answers to her questions about Lydia’s death.

  Mallon needed to do something about Lydia’s death, but he had to be smart: what else could he do
that wouldn’t just distract and delay the police? Mallon tried to distinguish what he knew from what he felt. He knew that Lydia had begun to favor the theory that Catherine Broward had not exactly committed suicide: she had committed murder, sentenced herself to death, and carried out her own execution. Lydia had told him that much. What else did Mallon know? Lydia had said she was going to try to find out more about Catherine Broward. She had not said that she was going to do it that night, or how she would go about it when she did. But everything Mallon knew made him believe that Lydia had gone with the wrong person to the wrong place in order to ask questions about Catherine.

  Mallon walked onto Cabrillo Boulevard, above the ocean, and kept going, past the zoo and the bird sanctuary, across the street and onto East Beach. The volleyball game that had been going on the afternoon when he had arrived ten years ago was still going on, all of the players still in their early twenties. They had been replaced many times since the first time he had seen them—always just at physical prime, a little too old to be spending business hours playing a game on a beach, already late at starting real work, already late at beginning to see each other as future husbands and wives, if not for actually marrying and having families. Within a few months, if not tomorrow, this set would be gone, replaced one at a time by others exactly like them.

  He walked on, assessing the progress of the tide. This was a walk that took him to several spots where the high tide would swallow the whole of a narrow beach and the waves would roll into the cliffs. He judged from the thin strip of dry sand above the breakers that he might get a bit wet today, but it did not matter.

  He went a quarter mile and came to the first of the small points that jutted out into the sea. He liked the stretches between these points, scallops of beach cut off by the rising waves. The power of places like this was not in vastness—a stretch of empty beach did not have to be long—but in seclusion. It made them seem prehistoric: human beings had not yet come. A gang of white seagulls hung in the air above the point ahead, showing him the way.

  He walked along the beach toward the white gulls, thinking of his walk on the beach with Lydia Marks three days after Catherine had died. Lydia had been very astute and perceptive, searching in the right spot for the purse. It had never occurred to either of them that day that Catherine might have killed herself because she could not live with something she had done. Guilt was such an odd—what was it, an emotion? A judgment? It seemed to be both—an affliction, debilitating as a disease. He had felt it; he felt it now, but he didn’t understand it. And even if Lydia had been right about Catherine, if guilt was a way to understand Catherine perfectly, he still did not know who had killed Lydia Marks. He did believe he might know why.

  He tried to separate the logical question from his grief and anger, but he could not. The part of the story of Mark Romano’s death that he and Lydia had both ignored was that Mark Romano had not been the only victim. When Detective Berwell had told them that a family nearby had been killed the same night, he and Lydia had let it go by; it was sad, but it had not seemed to have anything to do with Catherine Broward. But if Lydia’s final theory was right, and the person who had killed Mark Romano was Catherine, then it was a crucial fact. Somebody had shot four innocent people to keep them quiet, and Catherine would never have done that.

  He was looking down again, so he was a bit surprised when he raised his eyes and saw two people walking along the wet sand toward him. One was a man in late middle age, dressed in baggy shorts and a nylon jacket, his head covered by a cap of netting with a bill like a baseball cap. The woman with him was half his age and attracted Mallon’s attention because her features seemed to be slightly exaggerated: she was short and had wide hips and large breasts, and her face had a wide mouth with full lips, and big eyes.

  He stared at them while they were still far enough away so that he was sure they could not tell he was staring. They seemed to be opposites: the man was all bundled up to keep off the sun and the wind, but the girl was walking along comfortably in a black two-piece bathing suit, letting her curly dark hair blow in the wind as she approached.

  Mallon felt frustrated when they came too close to permit him to stare anymore. Even with his eyes hidden by his sunglasses, it would be too obvious. He directed his gaze out past the next curve in the shoreline, toward the sea. It was then that he thought about the boat. It had been out there since the man and the woman had rounded the point, moving so slowly that Mallon could sometimes hear an unevenness in the distant engine sound that indicated it was running just above a stall. It was a small cruiser with a low, streamlined profile, a white hull, and a cabin that probably held only one bunk on each side. He could tell by the deep register of the engine that it was overpowered, and part of him was waiting for it to do something to justify the power: drop a pair of skiers into the water, or suddenly roar out toward the islands. As it bobbed on a wave, he saw a glint of glass near the stern that must have come from binoculars.

  He constructed a story to make sense of it: the old boy was very rich, some billionaire who was well known to people who kept track of billionaires, but whose existence was absolutely new to Mallon. People like that visited Santa Barbara all the time, and quite a few of them had houses there. That explained the young girlfriend or wife, and it explained the boat out there, moving along at a slow walk with the couple. It carried servants with the old man’s heart medicine and Viagra or, more likely, security people who were using binoculars to study the shore for danger. From out there it was easy to see everything before, behind, and above them, while still preserving the illusion that the two were alone. He glanced to his left at the man and the woman as they passed.

  His eyes, by preference, moved to the girl, but the man was in motion, and that attracted Mallon’s attention. His right hand, the one in his jacket pocket, was coming out. The girl reacted in a surprising way: she grasped his biceps, as though to keep the man from falling. The hand came out anyway. The man twisted away from her toward Mallon, and she lost her grip.

  The man started to bring his hand up across his belly, toward the side Mallon was on. The girl was behind him now, and she was backing away like a wary cat. Then Mallon saw that the hand held a gun. It was a heavy, solid-looking chunk of metal, a semiautomatic pistol with square corners and a muzzle that looked huge to Mallon, like the end of a pipe.

  Mallon was instantly aware of the vast emptiness around him. The distance to the next point was a hundred and fifty feet, the backtrack to the last one was twice that far, and he would be running in loose sand. Behind Mallon was the Pacific, a stretch of empty horizon that stretched around half the planet. The only place for Mallon to go was toward the man.

  The man was still off balance, and he brought the gun around his body clumsily. Mallon leapt, both hands in front of him. He struck down the man’s forearm with his left fist, and brought his right into the man’s face. It landed on the man’s cheek with a smack, and he punched again quickly and reached for the gun.

  The man’s body abruptly jumped and contorted, and Mallon got the impression he had heard the bang only afterward. The man dropped to the sand on his arm, covering the gun hand, but Mallon had the thought that he must have accidentally shot himself instead of Mallon. Then the body jumped, and Mallon heard the second shot.

  Mallon looked up toward the young woman for an explanation, but she was doing something unexpected. She lowered her arms, and only then did he realize that what she had been doing behind the man during the struggle was waving them. She was looking at the ocean, and he followed her eyes to see what she was staring at.

  The boat was moving closer now, roaring toward the beach. He saw a figure kneeling low near the bow, resting a rifle with a scope on the gunwale. He felt a moment of gratitude: the sharpshooter had undoubtedly saved his life. But then the rifle fired. The shot plowed into the cliff behind him, and he dived to the sand beside the body. He saw a hand move from the trigger to grasp a bolt and cycle it to put a new round in the chamber.
The boat was pounding over the waves, the bow rising on each crest, then slapping down with such a jolt that the man in the bow could not hold the rifle steady.

  Mallon looked to see if the girl was taking cover, but she was sprinting into the ocean. She had already made it down the beach and was still running, her knees high and the water nearly to her waist. She used the last of her momentum to dive over an incoming wave, and then swam. The boat swung in close to shore just beyond the line of breakers. The man crouching in the bow put down his rifle and moved along the rail to the stern as the boat glided close to the swimming woman. He rested his chest on the gunwale, took both the woman’s forearms, held her as though they were two trapeze artists, and pulled her up into the boat. Both of them lay low, nearly hidden by the side of the boat as it quickly swung out toward the sea, accelerated to full speed, and angled around the point out of Mallon’s sight.

  Mallon looked down at the man in the sand. He knew he had to find out if the man was alive, but he did not want to touch him. He turned his head to stare around him—up and down the beach and out onto the water—at first to verify that it was really over, and then in the hope that people had heard the rifle and were coming to help him. He was alone. He knelt down.

  He touched the man’s back, felt no breathing, then moved the hand up to his neck, with the vague intention of feeling the carotid artery for a pulse. But the man was lying face down, and Mallon wasn’t sure what he was touching. The neck seemed loose, like the neck of a dead chicken. He pulled his hand away and it was covered with a bright streak of blood. He looked at it, wiped it on the back of the man’s jacket, then realized that new blood appeared there. Pushing it down saturated the cloth.

  Mallon slid one hand under the shoulder and the other under the hip, and rolled the body over. The man’s eyes were open and the jaw slack. The front of him had sand stuck to it from the forehead to the feet. Mallon could see down the half-open front of the jacket that the rifle bullet had torn through him and emerged, spraying blood and bits of flesh into the lining.