by Thomas Perry
Jardine climbed into his car and started the engine, glanced at her, and felt his jaw drop. He had given her too long alone in his car. The gun she was holding now was his. He said, “Look, I don’t know you, but I’m sure you don’t want to get in any worse trouble than—”
“Nice try, Alvin,” she said. “I know you, and you know me. I knew you would be at the American Airlines terminal. I knew you would recognize me and follow. So here we are.”
“Mind telling me how you got a gun in past airport security?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “Before I flew out this morning, I left it on the other side of the checkpoint.” She looked at him in mock sympathy, then at his gun in her hand. “I guess you forgot to do the same.”
He reached the parking lot exit, his mind churning, trying to catch up, while she read his mind aloud. “You’re trying to convince yourself that you never heard of me killing anyone, so I probably won’t shoot if you try to get help at the gate.”
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “The thought had crossed my mind.”
“You don’t know me that well.”
He handed his ticket and his money to the attendant at the gate and took his receipt, then drove out of the lot toward Century Boulevard. She let him get a few blocks, then said, “Take La Tijera.” He turned onto the long, straight road. When they approached a small, dirty-looking motel she said, “Pull in over there.”
He stopped the car in the motel lot where part of the low pink stucco building shielded it from the street. Jardine turned off the engine and tried to settle himself. He had felt intense shock when he had seen the gun, but in his experience, if the trigger didn’t get pulled within the first few seconds, the danger went away. The story of how she had managed to walk out of an airport carrying a gun made him uneasy. She was a bit too wily for Jardine’s taste. He reminded himself that these were just little potholes on the approach to his triumph. She had picked exactly the sort of place he would have, where the odd sound now and then wouldn’t make anyone nervous because every ten seconds a jet plane came over so low you could see passengers’ faces in the windows.
She said, “Room eleven.” He got out and walked toward the door, listening for the sound of her feet behind him. He couldn’t hear them, so he was not sure how far away she was—not sure enough. He stopped at the door and she reached around him and held out the key. She was close enough, but he could feel the barrel of the gun against his back. “You’ll open the door, turn on the light, and step in where I can see you. Don’t turn around.”
He wanted nothing so much as to be indoors and out of sight with the door locked before he made his move, so he obeyed. In a few seconds, things would begin to go his way.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “Lie on the bed on your back.”
He sat and swung his long legs up onto the bed. “This could be a night to remember.”
She raised the pistol a little so it pointed at his chest and stood at the foot of the bed, where he couldn’t get at her.
“Just a little joke,” he muttered. “What do you want?”
“Take one of the wrist restraints out of your back pocket.”
His eyes widened. How had she known? He had let them hang out because he had wanted them to be ready, and then forgotten. Fool. “You don’t need those.”
She said, “It’s for your safety. If I know you can’t reach me, I might not get startled and shoot you. Put it around the bed frame and your left wrist.”
As he connected his wrist to the steel frame, he was already trying to work out the way to free himself. He could lift the frame off the slot in the headboard and slide the restraint to the end, but to do it, he had to get his weight off the bed. Maybe she would have to use the bathroom. “There. Satisfied?” He tried to sound patronizing.
She said, “I’m going to try to make this quick and simple. You know who I am, and I know who you are, so we won’t waste any more time on that.”
“What are we going to waste time on?”
“Tell me about Brian Reeves Vaughn.”
He smiled. “If you tell me about Rhonda Eckerly.” He studied her face for a reaction. “Or about Mary Perkins, or Coleman Fawcett, or Ronald Sitton.”
She frowned and shook her head. “Silly me. I forgot to tell you how this works.”
She took out of her purse a small silver picture frame and tossed it to him.
It was the photograph of his mother taken on her eightieth birthday. He was outraged. “You’ve been in my house.”
“I found that on the mantel in your living room, and it looked as though it might have sentimental value. I figured you might want to keep it, so I brought it … just in case.”
“Just in case of what?”
She looked at her watch. “It’s now one-thirty. You can usually drive the speed limit at this time of night. If you do, you can make it from here to your house in twenty-eight minutes.”
“So?”
“At two-thirty, the electric timer on the coffee maker in your kitchen will turn it on. The pot is filled with gasoline, and the heating element under it is covered with black powder. I’m betting it won’t burn the whole house down before the fire department gets there.”
“What if it does?”
“Then I will have wasted a lot of money on the heroin that’s in your bedroom. But that’s okay. There’s some in the garage too.”
She was bluffing. She had to be bluffing. But the picture of his mother staring him in the face reminded him: she had been there. He smirked. “You telling me you flew in with heroin, too?”
The way she shook her head gave him a sinking feeling. “No,” she said. “I didn’t know where to buy it in L.A., but Artie Macias did.”
“Artie Macias?” It was a grave injustice. Maybe when he had taken Artie Macias in, he had been rougher with him than he’d needed to be. But Jardine wasn’t the one who had jumped bail. And Gary the bondsman had offered to pay extra if an example got set for the rest of his customers.
“Yes,” she said. “When I told him who it was for, he couldn’t do enough. He said to make sure you knew who got it for you.”
He stared at the ceiling. He had thought this was his lucky night. “So if I don’t tell you what you want to know, you don’t let me go in time to get there by two-thirty. My house burns down, and the firemen find a lot of heroin.”
Her eyes were steady and unblinking. “Then you get to see what it’s like to be a runner instead of a chaser.”
He stared at the ceiling again, the muscles in his jaw working. He hated her. He wasn’t sure whether he was going to kill her tonight, but he sincerely felt he should. He knew that was absolutely the wrong way to think. She knew things that could make him rich in a day. He would give maybe ten thousand dollars for the pleasure of breaking her skinny neck. Ten million was too much to waste on one night of pleasure. He had to keep her alive, so he would have another chance. In fact, he admitted to himself, he had to do what she said or he was in trouble.
“The time is going by,” she reminded him.
He looked at her, beginning to feel the seconds now. He had to do this and get out of here. “I don’t know where he is.”
“I didn’t ask,” she said. “I want to know why he’s running.”
Jardine’s brain began to work again. “He came to you, didn’t he? He wants you to hide him.”
Jane said, “If we both answer questions, it’s going to take twice as long.”
Jardine took that as a confirmation. Brian Vaughn had run out of ideas on his own, and somebody was about to cash in on him, so he had inquired about hiring professional help. It was actually funny. She wasn’t sure he met her standards. “You don’t even know who he is?”
“This is a lot of trouble to go to if I know,” said Jane.
“Why did you pick me?”
“Because of the way you work. Most bounty hunters get hired to find somebody in particular. You’re one of the few who just sits i
n one place and watches faces. In order to do that, you need to have a current list of which faces are worth money. You tell me why Brian Vaughn’s is, and I’ll let you go home and unplug your coffeepot.”
Jardine stared at the ceiling again to focus his thoughts, but he found it took more strength than he had to overcome the awareness of each second ticking by. What if tonight was one of those nights when CalTrans decided to repave a section of the freeway between here and his house? “The reason you couldn’t find any Wanted posters on Brian Vaughn is that he hasn’t been charged yet.”
“Charged with what?”
“Murder.”
Jane nodded. It was what she had expected. “Where is he wanted?”
“Well,” said Jardine, “he isn’t, exactly, but he is. The police in Boston found a car with a deceased young lady in it. When they did the tests, they found that she had been freshly fucked.”
“Raped?”
“Not sure,” he said. “That’s always the theory when they’re dead, but she had all her clothes on right. No signs of a struggle, but her blood showed a fatal dose of a sedative. The car, it turned out, wasn’t hers. It belonged to Brian Vaughn.”
“Did they arrest him?”
“Here’s where we get into things I heard that I can’t swear to. He was rich—old money. He lived on an estate in some little town outside Boston. I heard the local police brought a detective or two from Boston out to the estate with their hats in their hands to inquire whether he might have something he’d like to get off his chest. It seems he wasn’t at home. But while they were on the way from the station to the house, some caretaker called to report that the car was missing.”
“Where was Vaughn?”
“Supposedly some servants said he was in Europe, some said they didn’t know. Anyway, the stories didn’t exactly match.”
“Did he have a family?”
“Sure did. His parents were really old—living in Florida. They said he had mentioned some time before that he was going to Europe. Anyway, you get the idea. Nobody knew which country he was in or when he left, but everybody was sure it was at least a week before this girl shows up dead in his car. Nobody can get in touch with him. Only suddenly, he’s got a lawyer.”
“How did the lawyer explain that?”
“The usual. He’s a family friend, he wonders if he can be of help to the police, and so on.” He looked at her nervously. “What time is it?”
“One forty-three. Do you know the lawyer’s name?”
“I never asked. It wouldn’t mean anything to me.”
“What happened next?”
“The police look closer. It seems Vaughn has a record.”
“What kind?”
“On paper, it’s spoiled-kid stuff. Driving fast and parking wherever, then not paying until the car gets impounded. But they also turn up a few people who hate Brian Vaughn, and one of them gives them the names of a couple of young ladies who were given large amounts of money years before. Sure enough, they’re real. Both decline to say what the money was for. The money came from Vaughn’s parents.”
“Go on.”
“The police are drooling. Now they want this guy bad. They don’t have enough to charge him with anything, and there’s no way they can go public and treat him like a fleeing suspect.”
“The car wasn’t enough?”
“They can’t shake the alibi until they find out what it is. They figure if they give him a DNA test, he is almost certainly going to be the missing player in the sex scene. He is also going to have to prove how and when he went to Europe, how his stolen car got to Boston without being hot-wired, and numerous other things too time-consuming to mention when my fucking house is about to burn down.” He sat up.
“You’ve got time,” she said as she raised the pistol. “Why do you know all this?”
“Who hasn’t been heard from?”
“The girl’s family. Who was she?”
“She was from New York. Vaughn definitely knew her. But everybody thought she was in New York that night, and there’s no proof Vaughn was around. Her family had a little money, and they hired a guy—a detective—to unravel all this stuff, and this is what he found out.”
“Was any of this in the papers?”
“Sure. ‘Amanda Barnes found dead in stolen car. Owner could not be reached for comment by press time.’ ”
“How did Vaughn manage that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the lawyer was working overtime. And maybe the police helped. They don’t usually want it all over the news that a guy like this is their only suspect until they’ve got their hands on him. He had the money and the sort of history that would make them think he could stay in Europe forever. They asked Interpol to watch for him and let him know they wanted to talk. Big silence on the other end.”
“You still haven’t exactly said how you heard. Did you know the detective?”
“Not personally.”
“Then how?”
“Word got around.”
“How much is the girl’s family offering?”
“A hundred grand. I added him to my list when I heard about it. I figured if he was in Europe, his smartest move wouldn’t be to fly into Logan Airport or Kennedy. It would be to stay in Europe until somebody gets around to losing some physical evidence or they arrest somebody else for something similar. But if he got homesick, he’d fly in at L.A., where nobody’s expecting him.”
Jane nodded. “We only have about five minutes left. The police haven’t charged him. If you saw him, you couldn’t grab him and drag him to a station. You couldn’t handcuff him and take him on a plane to Boston. Just what were you supposed to do for a hundred thousand?”
“Detain him.”
“Detain him for whom?”
“For whoever is willing to pay me the hundred thousand.” He fidgeted. “Now, can I go?”
“Which was it? Were you supposed to do it yourself, or tie him up and call somebody?”
His eyes shifted wildly. He looked at the door, he looked at her, then at the door again. “The hundred was for killing him. If I could keep him alive long enough for the girl’s father to fly out here and blow his brains out, that was two hundred.”
Jane sighed. She glanced at her watch and stood up. “All right,” she said. “You’ve got thirty-three minutes to go save your house and your spotless reputation.”
She held the gun on him as she walked close to the bed and used her pocketknife to slice the wrist restraint.
Jardine stood up. In the back of his mind was a reckless urge. He had insurance on the house, and his equity in it was less than forty thousand anyway. Having her in his hands would be like having millions. What was in the house, anyway? Cheap clothes, furniture that was ten years old and had stains on it from things that had gotten spilled, and … oh, yes. Heroin.
He took a step toward the door, then went back to the bed and picked up the picture of his mother, and his eyes met hers. “I won’t forget this.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean next time I see you I might just kill you.”
Jane shook her head. “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t take the chance that I might be worth money.”
Jardine stared at her and heard his breath hiss in and out through his teeth. He half-formed a plan to stop at a phone booth and call someone to break into his house while he waited for her outside. His friends and colleagues paraded through his mind, but each face had something hidden behind it—maybe greed, maybe the suspicion of unspoken malice. He turned, rushed out, and ran across the little parking lot toward his car. As he flung the door open he heard distant sirens. He muttered, “Don’t let that be a ten-car pileup on the freeway.” To whose ear he had spoken, or why he had taken three precious seconds to say it, he had no idea.
Jane waited until she had seen Jardine drive as far as the freeway entrance, then walked out of the building and down the street to her car. When she had started the engine and was almost to the same freew
ay entrance, she allowed herself to feel relief. For some reason, the part she felt most relieved about was a tiny detail. She was glad that he had chosen to move in when she had wanted him to—when she was walking up to a car she had never seen before in the middle of a deserted parking lot and pretending it was hers. Once he was standing in front of her, she had been too busy to feel afraid.
As she drove north toward Santa Barbara, her thoughts turned to Brian Vaughn. Jardine had insinuated that the family had been supplying him with money since he had disappeared. Certainly he had spent more than he could have carried with him. The face-changers had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep protecting him afterward. They would only do that if they thought the money was going to keep on coming and they couldn’t get their hands on it all at once.
Other little details made Jardine’s story seem right. If the police were playing Vaughn carefully, trying to lure him home, they might behave as Jardine had said. Vaughn had been in a very difficult position. The police had not charged him, but they would certainly keep quietly looking for him until they found him, so he couldn’t go anyplace where people would recognize him. He also had to worry about how many people like Jardine might be looking for him. The only solution had been to stop calling himself Brian Vaughn, and stop looking like Brian Vaughn.
What had not struck Jane as right was the story Jardine had told her about the crime, but she had to take into account that it had probably been of little interest to Jardine. The dead girl had been found in Brian Vaughn’s car. She tried to imagine how that could have happened.
One possibility was that Vaughn had picked her up in New York and taken her to his house in Weston. He had drugged and raped her, then realized that he had given her so much sedative that she had died. He had loaded her body into his car, intending to take her back to her apartment in New York. He had somehow been trapped—had mechanical trouble, run out of gas, gotten stuck in snow or mud—and had seen no alternative to abandoning the car. Maybe he had thought he was leaving temporarily, to walk to a gas station or something, but the police found the car before he could get back. But the story had to account not just for what had happened but for what Brian Vaughn had wanted to happen.