Nightlife

by Thomas Perry

  “And how in the world did that theory lead you to sit in the parking lot of the Sky Inn tonight?”

  “The place you want to be isn’t where the last victim was. It’s where the next one is going to be.”

  “You thought that Tanya Starling was going to the hotel to harm Detective Hobbes?”

  “It seemed likely.”

  “How long would you have stayed?”

  Calvin Dunn turned to Catherine Hobbes. “How long would we have stayed?”

  The others sat in silence, and Catherine realized she had to answer. “I can’t say.”

  Calvin Dunn turned to Hartnell. “We can’t say.”

  “Why would she think killing Detective Hobbes would solve her problems?”

  “Miss Hobbes was the one who investigated Tanya’s first killing and has been after her ever since. If it wasn’t for her, nobody would care about Tanya Starling. Cops don’t get much appreciation from the general public. But you can bet there’s one person who knows exactly who you are and exactly what you did in each case. I figured Tanya has to know who’s after her.”

  Hartnell sat still with his lips pursed. “It must have been kind of a disappointment to you that the shooter turned out not to be Tanya after all.”

  “It was her,” said Dunn. “That kid up on the fire escape was doing it for her.”

  “I’m sorry to cast doubt on your theories, but we have people killed around here that have nothing to do with Tanya Starling.”

  “Did he fire at anybody besides Miss Hobbes? Are there any bullet holes in any of the hundred other cars in the hotel parking lot or the two hundred that went up the street past him while he was waiting for her?”

  Hartnell’s eyes shot to Catherine, and she could tell he wanted to throw her out of the room. But Hartnell’s voice remained calm and deliberate. “Mr. Dunn, I think you need to remember that it’s my job to ask the questions.”

  “I’m just pointing out that the kid was doing it for Tanya.”

  “I caught that,” said Hartnell. “Let’s concentrate on you. Had you ever seen the sniper before you saw him on the fire escape?”

  “I think I probably did. It’s probable he was one of the people who drove by the hotel parking lot a bit earlier tonight. I was mostly looking for women, but I did take a look at everybody I saw.”

  “What do you suppose he was doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Mr. Dunn. You have a theory on everything. Was he looking for Detective Hobbes?”

  “More likely, her car.”

  “How did he know what her car looked like? How could he possibly know?”

  “I would guess he might have seen that press conference in front of the police station on television, then driven by the station parking lot and looked for a rental car. I don’t imagine there were a lot of them out there.”

  Hartnell knew Dunn was right, and that made him more frustrated. “All right. You were in the parking lot of the Sky Inn at around eleven-thirty, when the first shots were fired. Is that right?”

  “Almost. I think it was around eleven-forty.”

  “Take us through the rest of this. What did you do then?”

  “Well, I saw the car with Miss Hobbes in it come up the road and signal for the lot entrance, so I started looking at the cars behind it to see if Tanya was following her. The first shot looked like it drilled the rear strut, just in front of the rear window. Miss Hobbes jammed the gas pedal, hit the brakes, and spun around. Then a second shot hit the side window and went through the car, so she drove off across the lot as fast as she could. But because the bullet had hit both windows I could tell which direction the shot came from.”

  “Did you try to help her?”

  “Help her do what?”

  “Get to safety.”

  “She was already doing what I would have done, which was to drive like hell to get behind something to block the shooter’s view. She was weaving around a bit to give him a harder shot.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No. I knew she would do that.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I drove around the hotel building to get out on a side street, then drove toward the place where I thought the shooter was.”

  “And you thought the shooter was Tanya Starling.”

  “I didn’t have any other candidates in mind at the time, but I didn’t know who it was.”

  “But your theory that told you to be there suggested that that was who it was. So you didn’t call the police or try to help the potential victim to safety or warn the innocent bystanders who might drive into the lot. What did you do?”

  “I went after the shooter.”

  “And where did you find him?”

  “Perched on the fire escape of one of the taller buildings, about two blocks west of the hotel.”

  “What was he doing when you found him?”

  “Shooting.”

  “He wasn’t trying to get away?”

  “No. From up there he had a pretty good view. He probably figured he would see any police cars in plenty of time to get away.”

  “What do you think? Was he right?”

  “If he was wrong, he would still have been up on that balcony with a thirty-ought-six and a couple of boxes of ammo when the first cop cars came up that alley. Then you would have had a couple of those bagpipe funerals.”

  Hartnell was clenching and unclenching his teeth. Catherine could see his jaw muscles tightening and relaxing. “So when you got there, he was still shooting.”

  “Yes. Otherwise, he probably would have noticed me, but he had his eye in the scope.”

  “Why didn’t you shoot him? We found your gun in your coat.”

  “I’ve been deputized by the sheriff of Delacruz County, California, as an auxiliary officer, and if you found the gun you found the concealed-carry permit with it. Arizona and California have a reciprocal agreement.”

  “Answer my question. Why didn’t you shoot him?”

  “Because I wanted to try to get him alive.”

  “Why?”

  “So he would tell me where she was.”

  “So we’re back to Tanya Starling again?”

  “We’ve never been anywhere else.”

  “Who hired you to find her?”

  “A victim’s family.”

  “What’s the client’s name?”

  “It’s the Poole family.”

  “Hugo Poole hired you to kill her, didn’t he?”

  “He hired me to find her.”

  “You thought the boy on the fire escape was Tanya Starling, so you climbed up there intending to kill her. It must have been an incredible disappointment when you saw it wasn’t even a woman. It was a boy.”

  Dunn said, “I can see the friendly part of our talk is over. Now you can get me a lawyer at your expense, and I’ll be ready to continue.”

  Hartnell turned to the uniformed officer beside Catherine and said, “Put him in a holding cell for now.”

  Calvin Dunn stood up and faced Catherine while the police officer handcuffed his wrists behind his back. “Be careful for the next couple of days, darling. It looks like I won’t be around to watch your back.”

  33

  Anne Forster heard the news on the radio at seven in the morning, when she had already driven halfway into New Mexico. She had the radio tuned to the strongest signal she could find, the Albuquerque morning drive-time program.

  The woman who served as sidekick to the funny morning man read the story. “There’s a bizarre twist to the hunt for Tanya Starling, the woman wanted for questioning in multiple murders in several states. Last night in Flagstaff, Arizona, a sniper opened fire on a police detective from Portland, Oregon, who has been pursuing the case. Police say the sniper shot at Detective Sergeant Catherine Hobbes in the parking lot of her hotel. The sniper, in turn, was killed in an attempt to apprehend him, and remains unidentified. There is no word on the whereabouts of Tanya Starling.” />
  “I’m sorry, Ty,” she said quietly. The words sounded really good to her, with just a small break in her voice. She said it again, and it was even better. That bad-little-girl voice would have made Tyler’s knees buckle. The thought made her miss him for a moment.

  She was irritated that the woman on the radio was trying to make everything sound like her fault. Was she supposed to feel guilty now that this Catherine Hobbes had killed a sixteen-year-old? Anne’s eyes passed across the items that Ty had left in the car when he had gone off with the rifle. He had left his baseball cap, some pocket change he’d been afraid would jingle, his jacket. She reached into the jacket with her right hand and found his cell phone.

  She set it down and reached into her purse. She found the little notebook where she had written the phone numbers of Catherine Hobbes in Portland, Oregon. She dialed the home number and listened to the recorded invitation to leave a message.

  “Hello, Catherine,” she said. “It’s me again. I’m thinking about you.” She was pleased with that. She had not practiced or even planned it, but it had sounded scary. “I just heard on the radio that you killed the boy. He saw the press conference where you and the fat cop said nothing would happen to him. I told him to trust you. But you killed him. That was a disgusting thing to do. Good-bye, Catherine. I’ll be thinking about you.”

  She turned off the telephone and smiled: pretty good. If she had made the call any spookier, it would have seemed intentional. She left the telephone open and dropped it out the window, onto the pavement. This route—Interstate 40—was one of the busiest east-west roads in the country. In a few seconds one of the big fourteen-wheelers she had been passing for hours would come along and crush Ty’s phone to powder.

  She put on Tyler’s baseball cap so the brim would help shade her eyes as she drove east, toward the rising sun. She glanced in the mirror on the back of the sun visor. She looked cute. Maybe she should wear hats more often.

  When she reached Albuquerque, she watched the signs and took the turn at one that said I-25 North. She wasn’t sure where she was heading, but soon she began to see signs that listed cities, as though they were items on a menu: Santa Fe, Colorado Springs, Denver, Cheyenne. She would have to start avoiding little places, where people remembered everyone they had seen in their whole boring lives.

  She called me again.” Catherine Hobbes stood in Lieutenant Hartnell’s office, still holding her cell phone in her hand.

  Hartnell lifted his eyes from the file on his desk. “Tanya?”

  “Yes. She called my house in Portland and left a message about a half hour ago.”

  “Can I hear it?”

  She lifted her cell phone, tapped the keys to replay her message, and handed it to him. He listened to it, then took a small tape recorder out of his desk drawer, turned it on, and hit the 1 key on Catherine’s phone to replay the message beside the microphone. Then he pressed the 2 to save it, and handed it back to her. “She seems to think that you ambushed him.”

  “She seems to,” said Catherine. “The phone company says the call came from a cell phone, and the origin was Albuquerque. Here’s the number.” She handed it to him on a sheet from a desk message pad. “They say it belongs to Tyler Gilman, of Darling, Arizona.”

  “That’s just down the road, outside of town,” he said. He stood up and went to the door, then beckoned to someone. When one of the detectives came in, he said, “I need you to find out what you can about a Tyler Gilman. The address is in Darling. I think he’s either another victim or he’s our sniper.” Hartnell turned and came back to his desk.

  “Well,” said Catherine, “Thanks for letting me in on the investigation. I’d better be going now.”

  “Going?”

  “The call came from Albuquerque. I’ve got to see if I can get on a plane.”

  “You know she definitely talked that boy into trying to kill you?”

  “Think of it. She can talk somebody into that, and I can barely get my dates to open a door for me.”

  He didn’t laugh. “If you know, then you ought to take some precautions.”

  “I spend all my time with other cops.”

  “Think about tomorrow or the next day,” said Hartnell. “She could do it again. Some man you never saw before could walk up and put a bullet in your head, just to win points with her.”

  “Absolutely true,” said Catherine Hobbes. “It’s always been a crummy job.” She stepped to his desk, leaned across it to hold out her right hand. “Thanks for everything.”

  34

  Anne Forster was exhausted from driving, but she was excited. Denver was big and busy and had lots of traffic. There were crowds of pedestrians on the downtown streets who walked past one another without really looking, just as they did in Chicago or Los Angeles. Their memories must be so overloaded with faces that ones they saw on the street left only an impression that blurred and faded within seconds.

  As she came into the central part of the city on I-25, she saw a sign for something called City Park, so she took the exit. When she got to the park entrance, she pulled into a lot and turned off the engine. There were hundreds of people in the range of her vision, and they were all sorts—most looking relaxed and happy, walking or sitting, throwing Frisbees, chasing children. She got out of the car to hide her purse in the trunk, but on the way she glanced in at the back seat. She had brought along a blanket from Tyler’s bedroom in case she wanted to nap while Tyler drove. She hid the small pistol she’d taken from Mary Tilson in the pocket of her jacket, locked the trunk, took the blanket with her to the shade of a big tree on the vast lawn, and arranged herself on it.

  She rolled the jacket up and used it as a pillow. She knew that since she didn’t look either poor or crazy, nobody would object to her dozing off under a tree in the park in the daytime. All she really had to worry about was the very slim chance that somebody who had seen her picture on television would come by and recognize her despite her dyed hair and new clothes, or that a patrol car would pick out Tyler’s car among the hundred parked in the lot. She listened to the sounds of the people and gradually slipped into sleep.

  She slept peacefully until seven, when a car drove along the edge of the parking lot with a booming bass beat on its stereo, and she sat up quickly with her hand on the jacket and looked around. The young mothers and their toddlers, the old men and women had all gone home now. They were being replaced by teenagers, mostly slow-strolling couples or gangs of boys patrolling the park for girls. She decided it was time to go.

  She stood up, put on Tyler’s jacket carefully so the gun would remain unseen in the pocket, and folded up the blanket. She stared up at the big trees and decided that she liked Denver. It was going to be the place where she would make herself safe again. She walked to the car, put her blanket in the trunk and got her purse, then went into the public restroom to wash her face and brush her hair.

  She drove until she found the right kind of restaurant, a diner with vinyl booths. She ordered a big dinner, and while she ate she thought about the steps she needed to take, each in its place in the logical order of things.

  The way to survive was to find someone to be. She had read somewhere that the best place to find the sort of information she was going to need was in people’s trash, and she decided that the best kind of name would belong to a middle-class home owner. She drove through nice neighborhoods until she found streets where there were garbage containers rolled out to the curb to await the morning collection, but she did not stop. Instead, she kept driving until she knew the boundaries of the next day’s pickup area.

  She chose neighborhoods as though she were buying a house. She wanted houses that were recently painted, solid buildings with good landscaping and no signs of neglect or disrepair. She stayed away from the homes of the very rich, because she had a suspicion that the richest people must have security patrols watching their neighborhoods late at night.

  At one A.M., after she had selected the right block, she parked and walk
ed to a set of cans. She began to open the lids, lifting and touching the trash bags. The ones that felt heavy and solid or gooey she put back. The ones that felt as though they contained paper, she took with her. She went on for an hour, collecting bags of garbage and putting them in her car trunk. When she had collected all the car would hold, she drove to a shopping mall and parked away from the lights near a dumpster.

  She used the flashlight from Ty’s trunk and began to go through the garbage bags, working quickly. She set aside all of the pieces of paper that looked like bills or receipts. She dropped the bags in the dumpster and went out to get more. She kept working in the same way for four more trips. By dawn she had a big pile of other people’s discarded papers in the back seat.

  When daylight came she parked in the shade of a tall, windowless self-storage building and went through the bills and papers. After an hour she had gone through all of the papers but had not found any of the information she needed.

  At seven she drove to a part of the city park where she had not been before, found a parking place, and lay on her blanket under a tree to sleep. At three o’clock, the sun had moved far enough so she was lying in the sun. She awoke with a terrible glare in her eyes, and reached up to feel her face. It was hot but not tender, so she had hope that she had avoided a sunburn. She had to be careful, because people who lived on the street all seemed to have faces damaged by the sun. She had to look middle-class as long as she could.

  She went to the nearest public restroom and examined her appearance as she washed and brushed her teeth. She was still okay, still clean looking and undamaged. But the fear had been planted, so she went to a drugstore and bought sunblock, shampoo, conditioner, and moisturizer, then drove back into the park to a restroom near the zoo. She washed her hair, gave herself a sponge bath, and rubbed her skin with lotion, then put on fresh clothes.

  She went to the telephone beside the restroom and used the phone directory to find the addresses of three hospitals. Tonight was going to be a hard one for her, but she judged that it had a better chance of bringing her success than last night had.