Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  The cop looked up from his paper, his clear, benevolent eyes wide open in a look of innocent surprise. “I assure you, we are taking it seriously.” The fact that he was lying was completely undisguised, and there was absolutely nothing Mallon could do about it.

  He had nothing more to say that would convince anyone. He reluctantly turned and walked. Mallon left by the side door and stepped out into the sunlight. The exit he had chosen gave him a short, shaded passage to walk before he reached Figueroa Street. He walked slowly, his shoulders hunched and his eyes studying the ground ahead. At the sidewalk he turned to the left, away from his house. He needed to walk and to think.

  He was in trouble. Somebody—either the man walking on the beach or the man in the boat with a rifle—had tried to kill him. Now it was clear to him that the police believed that he had imagined the whole episode, or made it up. His lawyer, the only one who really knew what had been going on since the death of Catherine Broward and could verify the details, had suddenly vanished. What Mallon decided to do next would very likely determine whether he lived or died. As he walked, he began to feel more and more alone and uneasy.

  He used the intersections as opportunities to turn and look back at the streets behind to detect followers. People were driving past on their way to stores or restaurants on the streets surrounding State. As they passed, he studied the faces of the drivers, looking for something out of the ordinary, some peculiar look, some expression that would give him a warning.

  Yesterday, the man on the beach had been striding along, his eyes focusing on Mallon and then moving away, then returning to check on him, as though to see how close he was getting. During those minutes, those steps on the beach, the young woman had been leaning close to the man, talking. She had slid her eyes to the side to keep Mallon in sight while she talked. She had looked like a person whispering secrets, although normal speech would not have been audible to Mallon over the surf. Mallon had never imagined that the older man and the young woman in a bathing suit were dangerous. The change had come suddenly.

  It was a strange look that had appeared on the man’s face. It had in it a preoccupied concentration at the brow. The eyes had been sharp and alert and hot with eagerness for what was about to happen. On the lips had been the beginnings of a smile. Could it have possibly been pleasure? No. It was excitement, anticipation, the certainty of winning. He had thought a lot about the expression on the man’s face, but it still made no sense to him. Was this the man who had killed Lydia? Had he been trying to kill Mallon next, because Mallon knew something that would help catch him? Was there some price on Mallon’s head that he had been sure he was about to collect? Then who were the others—the girl, the man with the rifle? There was simply no answer.

  When he got back to his house, Mallon quickly went up to his room and packed what he considered to be essential—a few sets of clean clothes, the cash he had withdrawn from the bank—then went down the stairs and out the door carrying his small suitcase. As he walked, he felt a tightness in his spine. He was expecting at each step to hear a shot, or a set of quick footsteps on the pavement behind him.

  The feeling that someone was watching, preparing to stop him never diminished, but he did not dare turn around and look back. He placed his suitcase in the trunk of his car, unlocked his door, sat in the driver’s seat, drove off, and hungrily searched the mirrors.

  The world was curiously indifferent to what had happened. He could see women at the supermarket lot unloading grocery carts into their car trunks, couples walking together along Anapamu Street. Cars were coming up from the direction of the ocean and the freeway, as others came down from the residential areas. Nobody had been affected by the death of Catherine Broward, the murder of Lydia Marks, the shooting on the beach, the disappearance of Diane Fleming. They had not even heard of them.

  Mallon drove along Anapamu to State, then down toward De la Guerra to coast past Diane’s office. He could see that the windows were dark and there were no cars in the tiny lot. He accelerated again, and in a few minutes he was on the freeway, heading south.

  He was going to do what he should have done two days ago: find Detective Angela Berwell and talk to her in person about everything that had happened since he and she and Lydia Marks had spent the evening together in the Hotel Bel-Air.

  CHAPTER 23

  It’s going to be a special kind of hunt,” said Parish. “I’ve selected only the four of you to participate.” He surveyed the four young people sitting before him in the main lodge. They were all under twenty-five, all clean looking and physically fit. They were perfect, the sort of postadolescents that advertising agencies assembled for a television commercial, with teeth that had been straightened and polished, hair kept trimmed by expensive stylists. “You can hunt as a team or in pairs, or you can go out alone. It’s absolutely up to you. I trust each of you to that extent. You are among the very best hunters I’ve trained, in this country or elsewhere. I’ll be completely candid with you. The staff of the school will try to help by getting information to you in the field, but we will not be there to hold anybody’s hand during the hunt, or to get you out afterward.” He turned his head slowly to look at each of them.

  “I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s your hunt. You have to do your own thinking. That means thinking ahead. You do your own tracking to find the target. Before you do anything to reveal yourself, and especially before you take your shot, you’ll have to do your own scouting. Think: Is this the best spot for taking down the target? Do I have a path out that will get me away before any curious bystanders arrive? Do I have a second way out if that one is unexpectedly blocked or proves dangerous? You all know what the considerations are.”

  A hand went up, and Parish was pleased. He liked it when his students seemed eager. “Yes, Kira?” He could tell she was doing this to draw attention to herself, and he admired her for it.

  “What can you tell us about the target?”

  He smiled, then said quietly, “I was just coming to him. Mary will pass out photographs of him now.” He nodded at Mary, who had been leaning against the wall behind the four students. “She took them yesterday morning, and they came out very well. You should have little trouble recognizing him in most situations. He’s six feet tall, forty-eight years old, and looks trim and fit. He has brown hair with a bit of gray around the temples. He’s spent much of his life in the sun, so his skin has a slightly weathered look, and it’s tan. He’s divorced, and has lived alone for about ten years, so he’s comfortable without companions, and that’s the way he’s likely to be when you find him.”

  Parish watched Mary handing out copies of the pair of photographs she had taken in front of the Santa Barbara courthouse and in the parking lot nearby. Each person would hold a photograph up for a moment, scrutinize it, and then lower it. He waited until all four listeners had looked at both pictures and then raised their eyes to him again.

  “His name is Robert Mallon. He is, at least so far, unarmed. He’s a retired contractor and real estate developer. The bad news is that he got into the real estate development business at a time when it was about to boom, and he’s quite wealthy. As we all know, that gives a person flexibility, some experience in traveling, and possibly some allies or resources we don’t yet know about. He has also been hunted before.” He watched the faces suddenly become alert.” He has been here, and he has seen most members of the staff, which is why none of us will be going with you on this hunt.

  “You’re all wondering about him now—how he survived that kind of attention, whether there’s something terribly important about him that I’ve neglected to mention. Very good. I want you to think that way. You want to know what I’m holding back about him. The truth is, there’s not much. He has an honorable discharge from the military, but so do half the men his age, and as far as we know, he didn’t see any combat. He didn’t perform some physical feat to keep from being killed. In fact, he didn’t even run away. I think that the reason he’s alive is luck.” He
chuckled, shaking his head and lowering his eyes to the floor. There was a smattering of nervous laughter in the room.

  He looked up suddenly. “I’m very serious. Luck is not always just an excuse we make up to account for poor planning or stupidity. In the first attempt he was out for a walk alone on a beach. There was a scout with a rifle in a boat a couple of hundred yards offshore, there primarily to keep the surrounding area secure while the hunter and the unarmed tracker approached the target on the beach and killed him. The hunter was too eager. Mallon saw the gun and attacked the hunter, and they began to struggle. In order to end it, the scout was obliged to fire from a boat rocking in the surf. Just as he squeezed the trigger, the boat moved, and Mallon was not hit. Do not underestimate luck. It’s very real.”

  He brightened. “I also happen to know that it doesn’t last forever. His changed the moment you four arrived. You’re as unlike the people he’s expecting as you could possibly be. You’re superbly trained. You have each killed before and shown an aptitude for it. Your youth is an immense advantage. Your senses are at their sharpest, and you can easily move faster, and keep going longer, than anyone Mr. Mallon’s age. Mr. Mallon is now on the run. He left Santa Barbara in his car—the one he’s standing beside in the first picture—at three-fifteen. Right now he is on the Ventura Freeway heading toward Los Angeles. Emily Lyons and Paul Spangler are following him. You can call them on the road to learn where he is.” He was pleased to see that people in the room were fidgeting, anxious to leave.

  “Take a last careful look at the faces of the people around you. One of the reasons I brought all four of you together was so you could see the people you don’t know. If you see any of them again later, don’t mistake them for some inconvenient bystander and open fire.” Parish turned his wrist to bring his watch into view. “It is now four thirty-nine.” He lowered his arm, pivoted, and walked toward the door. He stopped, turned his head, and said, “Good hunting.”

  Kira squeezed her eyes closed and then opened them again. It was humbling. It almost made her cry. She could hardly believe that she was even here, that Michael had allowed her to be one of the people to play this game. She raised her left hand quickly to flick the curtain of blond hair from before her left eye so she could see Michael disappear.

  She had been sure that while he had been talking, he had been looking right at her. Of course, he had looked at the others too—the three boys—but he had been looking at her more often, and for longer looks, than one-fourth of the time.

  She stood and turned her head toward the window as though to look outside. There was nothing out there but an evergreen, but with the sun at this angle in the late afternoon, she could step into a beam of sunlight and see her reflection clearly.

  She was pleased. The halter top revealed the slenderness of her waist and the outline of her breasts, and it let the definition of her arm muscles show. That was good for this group, because they probably wanted to be near a woman who was kind of buff. Some limp flower of a girl might get them blown away with her. She half-turned but kept her eyes on her reflection. The leather pants were great, too, maybe even better than the top. The window gave everything a greenish tint, so the burgundy leather looked black, but the effect was the same. There were so few people who could wear leather pants like that without looking as though their asses were crammed in and ready to explode. As the others moved to the door, she pried her eyes away from the window with a little trepidation to see whether she had attracted the kind of attention she needed.

  She saw that it was the one with reddish-yellow hair who had responded first to her telepathic signal. He was looking at one of the photographs and listening to what one of his friends was saying, then suddenly he raised his eyes and turned to face her. One of his friends, the tall, thin one with the black hair, saw him do it, and moved his eyes to see what his friend was looking at. The third, a shorter, stockier one with a shaved head and a bull neck, turned to her last. He mumbled something that she hoped was “In your dreams,” instead of something nasty, but the one with strawberry-blond hair was already making his way toward Kira.

  He smiled shyly. “My name is Tim. I was wondering if you would like to hunt with us.” He swept a hand in the general direction of his two friends. They were waiting for him by the door, pretending to be deep in discussion of some unrelated matter.

  Kira tentatively imitated his smile, making sure hers was a bit smaller than his, and artfully made a slight shrug. She liked his eyes. They were clear blue. She looked warily at the two by the door. “Are you sure your friends wouldn’t mind?”

  “They’d be glad. Having you along would make us look less like a hunting party.” He glanced around the room impatiently. “That’s why Parish hires all those babes to be his pros. It makes everybody safer.”

  Kira did not like the sound of that. It was a bit too pragmatic and cynical, and not at all respectful. But at least it sounded to her like honesty, and it acknowledged that he had been looking at her in that way. He had ungrudgingly conceded to her that much—that she was too pretty to appear dangerous. She looked around the room very much the way he had, as though she were considering his invitation. “All right,” she said. “My name is Kira.”

  “I know,” said Tim. He led her to the others. “This is Kira,” he said. “This is Jimmy.” He indicated the tall one, then pointed to the shorter one. “And Lee.” The shorter one, Lee, smiled and muttered something about being pleased, and the taller one merely nodded and stared into her eyes, but he did take her hand and give it a little shake.

  She went outside onto the porch and they followed. At least they knew enough to let her go first, she thought. They knew she was a girl. She walked to her car, opened the trunk, lifted out her overnight bag, and slung the strap over her shoulder. Tim was at her side in a moment. “Take that for you?”

  She slipped the strap and let him take it. Things seemed to be going exactly as she had planned: better than she had really expected. Since before the first time she had come to the camp, things had been going very badly for Kira, and this seemed to be a good indication of impending improvement.

  Kira had first started thinking about taking some kind of self-defense class because a boy she had met at a party had tried to force her to have sex. It had been scary, and she had reacted by kicking and screaming for help instead of trying to reason with him. It had worked, but afterward she had been depressed, and there was nothing to do about it. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what was bothering her. It was that there were simply too many problems to solve at once, with one solution. One was that she had picked the boy out. She had liked him. She spent some time afterward looking back on the whole evening and wondering whether she had made his moves seem scary when they weren’t, and whether maybe if she had been a bit more tolerant at certain stages, it might not have worked out all right—been a nice experience, even. But another problem was a dissatisfaction with the small number and low quality of options she’d had at the time.

  He had seemed to think she was saying, “No, no, no,” and meaning the opposite, as people sometimes did. She had decided to make it clear what she meant, but as she prepared to do that, she was aware that he might not care. With that thought had come her objective assessment that if he decided not to stop, she was not going to be able to do anything about it: he was much bigger and stronger than she was. He had stopped. He had apologized profusely. He had kept apologizing for so long and with such sincerity that he had become boring, and then annoying. She had not let him know that this was the meaning of her scowl, but had let him assume it was simple, unambiguous, outraged innocence.

  Of all the uncomfortable feelings that night had caused, the only one she could find a solution for was the inability to defend herself. Over the next few weeks she had talked to a few boys she knew, the ones who owned guns and took karate lessons. One of them had told her about the self-defense camp in the forest north of Ojai.

  Kira had called the camp and asked if they w
ould mail her an application. When it arrived, she had carried it to her father. Kira’s father was the president of a boring company that made computerized devices that controlled car fuel intake, but he had once been a marine. Actually, he had been a captain in the Marines, but to him rank was not the distinction that mattered. To him, men were marines, or they were not.

  He had stared at the brochure and at the application with the stony face he used for business. When he had looked up at her, the pale gray eyes were soft and concerned. “Baby, has something happened that you haven’t told me?”

  She had been prepared for this. She had giggled and shaken her head hard. “Of course not. It’s just that when I come home late, the street near my apartment sometimes seems so dark and empty. I thought it might make sense to, you know, learn to take care of myself.”

  He had nodded and handed her the brochure. “Go do it. I’ll pay.”

  She had gone to the camp. She had always been good at classes like dance and gymnastics, and the hand-to-hand combat classes that Debbie taught had been like seeing the final picture in a set of assembly instructions: this was what all the work had been about. Spinning, kicking, and assuming exact postures correctly were precisely what she had been taught to do in dance classes. Doing handsprings and flips, balancing and rolling to recover from falls were just gymnastics exercises she had been trained to do since she was a toddler. After a month with Debbie she had become quick and wily. But a month had not satisfied her. It had only been enough time to stimulate her imagination. She had called her father and asked if she could stay on for another month.

  She referred to him as “Jonathan” when she talked about him, but never when she spoke to him. She called him “Daddy” and told him that she was getting so good that he would be amazed. She talked to him about her work on the pistol range. She knew that Jonathan Tolliver had a deep skepticism about how much a hundred-and-ten-pound girl could ever learn to do in a hand-to-hand fight with a two-hundred-pound man, but he had great faith in firearms. He had always kept a few of them around his house: an M1911A1 .45 sidearm like the one he had been issued in the Corps, a .44 Magnum revolver that looked a lot like the guns cowboys used in movies, and two semiautomatic nine-millimeter pistols that he kept as a greeting for burglars. He fired them now and then to keep his aim sharp.