“Okay. Let’s go.”
The father-and-son team moved off, angling down the reverse slope of the hill, reducing the distance to the homes as they moved. There was sufficient cover, mostly in the form of oak trees and some sage, and they traversed the open spaces as quickly as the footing allowed. In eight minutes they were at the back wall.
“Three-three-four-one,” John reminded his son.
“Got it.” Toby continued on along the seven-foot block wall that encircled the back portion of the house at the end of Catarina Drive, while his father went in the opposite direction, toward the side of the property. The eldest Barrish boy trotted up the mound of earth at the northwest corner of the lot and peered over the wall. All was clear, with no apparent obstructions between the wall and the two-story house. A fifty-foot space to cover, Toby estimated, but then who would be watching?
He swung a leg onto the wall and rolled over, landing on his feet, and immediately trotted toward the side entrance his father had described to him. Located on the north wall of the four-car garage, the door had a single deadbolt lock. But that was to be no problem. Toby took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, closing it and feeling for the light switch that was supposed to be there, all the while beginning the thirty-second countdown. The fluorescent fixtures over the Jaguar and the Ford Explorer hummed, then flashed on. Beyond them Toby saw the flashing green light marking the location of the alarm box. He reached it as the count came to twelve, and punched in the four numbers on the keypad. The flashing stopped, they went solid green. He had ten more seconds to enter the next command, which was utterly simple. System off. He pressed the skinny black button, which made the panel go dark.
Done. Almost. He pulled the Beretta from his waistband and affixed the silencer, and waited by the door that led into the house.
* * *
The front doorbell surprised Monte Royce, causing him to jerk his cup of tea as he sat in the breakfast room. “Who could that be at this hour?” He set the dripping cup on its saucer and walked through the kitchen to the foyer, looking through the peephole before opening the— “What?”
The latch clicked and the door swung tentatively inward, the form of Monte Royce appearing in the widening gap. “Good morning, Monte.”
“John... What are you doing here?”
“Monte.” The voice, feeble but obviously female, came from upstairs. “Who is it?”
“Uh... No one, mother,” Royce lied. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
“She has good ears,” John observed. What a shame. She was the only part of this that caused him pause. But what had to be done had to be done.
“What—”
“Inside, Monte,” John suggested forcefully. “Somewhere she won’t hear us. We need to talk.”
Royce looked past his unexpected and unwelcome visitor. The liberally landscaped front yard and its high walls blocked any view of the street, and hopefully was preventing any of his few neighbors from seeing this. “All right. Come in. Into the study.”
John entered and made an immediate left, walking below an impressive open arch that led into the combination study/library. His host closed the front door and followed him in.
“What is it, John?” Royce asked again, watching as John continued walking toward the fireplace at the far end of the study. His hands were doing something to his front, but what... No!
“I wouldn’t, Monte,” John said as he turned, causing the elderly executive to end his retreat from the room. He closed on Royce, keeping the silenced Beretta pointing at the man’s chest. “To the garage. Now.”
Royce followed the instructions after a hesitation caused more by surprise than defiance. At the door that connected the garage to the kitchen he was shoved away, toward the sink. A second later another familiar face was in the room. And another gun.
“What is this?” Royce asked quietly, not wanting to disturb his mother.
“Down,” John said, motioning to the exquisitely tiled floor. “On your stomach.”
“John...”
“Now.”
Royce still had no idea what was happening. Was this some sort of warning to him? Some attempt to frighten him? Did they think he was going to talk? Lowering himself from a pushup position to the floor he tried to figure it all out. But all his deductions were wrong.
“Son,” John said.
Toby drew a bead on the back of Monte Royce’s head from a distance of seven feet and fired one round, which drilled into his skull with the sound of a dropped egg cracking upon the floor. The old man’s body jerked once, the arms actually coming in to attempt a rise, but that motion ceased in a few seconds. As blood poured from the entry wound the body went completely limp, then still.
“He’s done,” John said, looking to his son. “You stay here. I’ll be down in a minute.”
He went to the carpeted stairs and walked quickly to the second floor. The room he was interested in was at the near end of the hall, its location affording a gorgeous view of the hills to the west. John eased the cracked door fully open and stepped into the bedroom. A pair of old, yet very bright eyes immediately met his.
“John! Is it you?”
“It’s me, Canadia,” John answered, taking a few more steps that put him right at the old woman’s bedside.
Canadia Conyers Royce looked up at the man she revered. The man she saw as the hope for her people. “You look so good, John.”
“Thank you.” He sat on the edge of the mattress, facing the sweet lady, the gun resting on his lap. Its presence did not go unnoticed by her.
“It’s time, John, isn’t it?”
He nodded, looking at her tenderly. “Things have to be done, Canadia.”
Now she nodded, though very weakly. “And Monte?”
“He’s gone.”
She actually smiled. “He tried, John. But he was not you. He wasn’t like you at all.”
“I owe you a great deal, Canadia. Our people owe you a great deal.”
“I’ve done this for the same reasons my grandfather carried the Stars and Bars,” she said proudly, her eyes tearing,
“Shhh.” He put his right hand on the gun and slid it toward her, resting the silencer on the pillow next to her left ear. “It’s time for me to go.”
“Yes.” She looked straight at the ceiling, a full smile stretched across her face. “I must go, too. Good luck, John.”
He said nothing more, then squeezed the trigger once. The impact of the bullet snapped her head right as a fountain of red arched onto the white bedding. John headed back downstairs without even looking at the sight, and joined his son in the kitchen.
“She’s dead?” Toby asked, though he knew the answer already.
“Our work is done,” John said. “For now. Let’s get out of here.”
Twenty minutes later they were back at the Aerostar, and a few minutes after that they were just one of the thousands of cars creeping along the Ventura Freeway, none of their fellow commuters wise to the fact that two murderers were in their midst.
* * *
He drove a Mercedes, which he would retire as his get-to-work car once the newest-model Corvette he’d ordered came in. His wife tagged it just a symptom of a mid-life crisis long in coming, but Seymour Mankowitz knew the real reason. He was tired of the staid, lawyerly image forced upon him by the profession he’d chosen, and wanted at least some zest in his life. Cruising from his Pacific Palisades home to his office on Reseda Boulevard each day in a jet black rocket would provide just that.
But, for now, it was the respectable Mercedes, which he guided into the alley behind his office in the north of the San Fernando Valley. Halfway to the narrow path’s end he turned right, into the private parking lot reserved for himself and his two partners. Neither of their cars was there, which he expected. Both were already gone, on their way to Telluride for a Thanksgiving on the slopes. Him? He was here to meet with...
Mankowitz shook the feeling away. John Barrish was his client right now,
and he had to treat him as such. Not as an aberration. Once the ties were severed, which he hoped would be soon, then he could allow himself to express what he truly felt. Until then...
His professionalism restored, Mankowitz took his briefcase in hand and stepped from the Mercedes, clicking on the alarm that sounded with a chirp. He walked toward the back of the car, the entrance to his building just beyond, but slowed as a long, old car glided to a stop in the alley, blocking the entrance to the lot.
Darian put the car in park and stepped out, looking at the man from across the hood of the Buick. Moises got out from the passenger side. He was just a few yards from the clearly frightened white man. At almost the same instant both men produced their Ingrams, leveling them at their target.
“Wait! No!” Mankowitz dropped his briefcase and took an unsteady step backward. But it would change nothing.
Moises fired first, grabbing the front end of his Ingram and raising it just a bit from the center-mass point of aim he’d been instructed to use. The thirty rounds began impacting just below the lawyer’s pronounced Adam’s apple and stitched up the length of his face. Only a third of the .45-caliber slugs actually found their target, but that was more than enough to turn Seymour Mankowitz’s head to a grotesque bloody rose of flesh and bone. Darian’s shots were placed well, all but five devastating the lawyer’s midsection. What remained of the body flopped backward a few feet, tumbling to the ground at the side of the Mercedes.
“Get in!” Darian yelled, checking their surroundings quickly for any witnesses. There were none.
“Did you see that?!”
“Here.” Darian handed his weapon across the seat to Moises and dropped the Buick into gear, resisting the urge to stomp on the gas. Instead he pulled away from the scene quickly, but without screeching the tires. “Put ‘em in the bag.”
“Oh man!” Moises reached over the front seat and buried the still smoking Ingrams in a large duffel, his heart pounding. “Did you see that fucker go down?!”
“Easy, Brother Moises,” Darian cautioned, though his own adrenaline level was still high. “Get yourself together.”
“Right,” Moises said, nodding sharply. He took several deep breaths as Darian put distance between them and their victim. I did it. I offed him. I can do it!
“Are you okay?”
“You bet, Brother Darian. A-OK.”
Darian reached over and gave the young fighter a gentle punch in the arm. “I knew you would be. I knew it.”
So did I. That thought struck Moises as somehow strange, but he was beyond harboring any concern as to why that was. It was just the way it was now. His new reality.
* * *
Priority One in the morning was always getting the Braun coffeemaker running. Wisely, Frankie used pre-packed filters, and was religious about keeping the small plastic pitcher beside the machine filled with water. No running to get this or mess with measurements. Just drop in the filter, pour, and switch it on. And there was just enough time to refill the pitcher before the line of black liquid would pass the one-cup mark on the glass pot. She stepped from the cubicle on her way to the water cooler, a trip that was cut short by the sight of Hal Lightman approaching. “What are you doing here? You were on late last night.”
“I was here last night,” Lightman corrected her. In one hand was a stack of green-and-white computer printout. “When’s Art getting in?”
“In a bit. I’m doing the early shift this morning. Why?”
“I think I found something.”
Frankie put the pitcher down and motioned for Hal to lay the stack on Art’s empty desk. “What is it?”
“I was running down Birch and Associates, looking for permits and business licenses, et cetera, and this came back from the county.” He pointed to a copy of the fire department safety inspection done just three months earlier.
“It passed. So?”
“Look at who owns the space Kostin was leasing.”
Frankie’s eyes shifted to the pertinent information. “Green Hills Trust? This is the same place that owned his house.”
“I don’t care if he did pay a big chunk of his rent on that house up front—this is too much to consider just a coincidence.”
Way too much, Frankie thought. “Do you have the info on the trust?”
“On my desk.”
“Bring it over,” Frankie said with some excitement, knowing that coincidences were often found to be conspiracies when illegality was involved. It was time to move on this, and fast. “Let’s get digging.”
And there was another person who’d want to join in the dig, Frankie knew. She picked up the phone and dialed with one hand. Art answered on the second ring.
* * *
Ray Harback led the two men through the airlock-like pair of doors and into the noise of the physical plant one level above 73. “This is the stuff your boss was interested in.”
Roger shifted the weight of the “camera” bag on his shoulder and leaned close to their guide. “He said he wanted good shots of the flow monitor setup.”
Harback nodded, one hand holding his hearing protectors. “Over here.” He walked a short distance and pointed to the large outflow conduit. “This is it.”
Mustafa brought up the rear as his comrade engaged the white man in a distracting conversation. He had his own bag, but there was nothing approximating a camera in it. Not even close.
Harback felt a jab in his back and turned, freezing at the sight of the boxy-looking gun pointing at his gut. The man he had been talking to removed a similar weapon from his bag and shoved it in his ribs. “What... What is this?”
Mustafa gestured with the gun for Harback to back up, directing him around a corner where the ductwork disappeared into the floor. Roger laid his weapon on the ground and removed the cylinder from his bag, seeing in his peripheral vision the suppressed Ingram in his comrade’s hand buck twice. He had it on single shot. A smart move, Roger thought, considering all the concrete in this space. It could have been ricochet city had any rounds missed.
“Dead,” Mustafa yelled, his mouth close to Roger’s covered ears. “I’ll watch the door.”
Roger nodded and stepped over the duct to the opposite side, seeing the access panel immediately. He twisted the twin latches and swung it up on its hinges. Next he took the cylinder. The switch he was supposed to throw was on the top, covered by a piece of tape that had held it in the unmarked safe position. Without realizing it he took a shallow breath and held it, then removed the tape and pressed the switch in one motion. A red LED came on, which he took to mean that the thing was now live. Live. That was an odd way to put it, Roger thought, considering...
But that it was, leaving just sixty minutes. He looked at his watch and made a mental note of the time, then closed the access panel and hopped back over the ductwork. “It’s set.”
Mustafa nodded and slid the still warm Ingram into the long camera bag, as did his comrade. “All right, Brother Roger. This is it.”
“Let’s scoot,” Roger said, knowing he did not want to be anywhere close when the shit went off. Mustafa’s willing acceptance of his suggestion convinced him that he had company in that desire.
* * *
The Green Hills Trust had been established in early 1992 by a smattering of well-to-do senior citizens concerned that their idle savings were not being served well by the declining bank interest rates. Real estate, they had decided, was an attractive option, particularly when the low property prices brought on by a weakening economy spurred a buyer’s market. And prices would certainly go up again. Until then, when a tidy profit could be realized by selling high, a decent cash flow could be had through renting. That was the plan.
But something else had come of that venture, something Frankie and Hal were endeavoring to discover.
“These old folks own over a hundred units,” Hal said, reading from his half of the printout. “It’s about a fifty-fifty split between residential and commercial.”
Frankie look
ed up from the stack before her. “You checked out the people that manage the properties, right?”
“They’re as clean as clean can be,” Hal answered. “They just show the properties when someone asks and collect the rent. Besides, they’re just working people. No connections to anything other than the obvious.”
Lightman was a healthy cynic, with a suspicious nature thrown in for good measure. If he was branding someone as clean, Frankie knew, they were. “All right, what about the members of the trust?”
“A gathering of geezers,” Hal said, little hope in his voice. He passed the list of those who had bought into the trust to Frankie. It ran eight pages. “I looked at the first page and moved on. The average age has to be something like eighty.”
Not the sorts to be behind this thing, Frankie thought as she verified Lightman’s analysis of the members’ ages. She flipped through the list and saw no reason to lower the threshold he had set. “A mortician’s dream. Some of these people are past ninety. A couple even—” Wait. Back up. “Hal. Look.”
Lightman looked to the spot that Frankie’s finger indicated. “C. C. Royce.” His eyes came up, peering over the bifocals he used for reading. “Royce.”
Frankie opened the appropriate drawer and removed a file that held the breadth of the information they had gathered on Monte Royce. The bastard, she thought, one of his statements made during their interview of him coming to mind. ‘You can imagine she is quite old....’ It didn’t take her long to find confirmation of her supposition. “Here. Canadia Conyers Royce.” She handed the pertinent page from the CEO’s biography in his company’s annual report. “Mother of Monte.”
“Son of a bitch,” Lightman commented, removing his glasses. “It looks like Mommy Dearest was doing a little recruiting of tenants for her little boy.”
“It looks that way,” Frankie agreed without enthusiasm. There was still the nagging question as to why Monte Royce would be involved in this. This new information only solidified a link between Royce and Kostin. It provided no connection to the man they believed was actually running the show: John Barrish. He was safe— “Hold on.”
Capitol Punishment (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 3) Page 18