All right-he was still my baby until I’d exhausted all the possibilities. There was at least one other place he might have gone before leaving the Bay Area entirely; check that first, and then start backtracking.
I drove over to 101, went north again. Heading for Containers, Inc.
* * * *
He was there.
By God, he was there.
He’d parked his wife’s car at the rear of the lot, in heavy shadow beyond the last of the sodium-vapor arcs. I couldn’t see it clearly from the deserted street, but it was the only car on the lot and therefore a dead giveaway. So were the lights burning in the office wing. Who else was likely to be here at this hour on a Saturday evening?
I drove on past, made a U-turn, parked alongside a weedy vacant lot that blended into the abandoned railroad yards, and fast-walked into the factory lot. There was no fog here tonight, just a high overcast, but the wind was sharp and gusty across the flatlands from the bay. It created odd, disturbed sounds-flutterings, purlings, murmurs, low moaning cries. I could have made all sorts of noise and Coleman wouldn’t have heard me coming.
The car back in the shadows was the white foreign job, all right. I got close enough to make sure, avoiding the puddles of greenish light from the arcs, then changed direction and went to the office entrance. The door was unlocked. Careless, Coleman, I thought; you’re in a big hurry, huh? I took Vega’s.38 out of my jacket pocket. The odd thing was, now that the hunt was almost over, the tension had gone right out of me and I was calm to the point of detachment. The hatred was still there, but it was like a core of heat inside a casing of dry ice.
I rotated the knob with my left hand, eased the door open and myself inside. The waiting area and outer office were dark. But he’d left the door that led to the private offices partially ajar, and light showed back that way. I stood still for a few seconds, listening. Silence at first; then, above the wind, I heard some sort of thunking noise. I moved again, heel and toe, through the open doorway and along the wall. Now I could hear other sounds: papers being hurriedly shifted around.
The door to his office was wide open. I stepped into the outspill of light with the.38 at arm’s length, saw where he was and what he was doing, and said, “Hello, Coleman.”
He nearly jumped out of his skin. He was down on one knee in front of his safe, transferring stacks of currency from there into a leather briefcase. The sound of my voice brought him up so fast, in a twisting about-face, that he cracked his elbow on the upper edge of the safe, staggered, had to brace himself against his desk to keep from falling down. As soon as he focused on me and the.38, his eyes bulged as wide and terrified as Vega’s had last night. He stood clutching his elbow and shaking-literally shaking, head to foot.
“End of the line, Coleman,” I said.
He said, “No,” squeakily, as if trying to deny it.
“Too bad for you you decided to keep some of your runout money here. But then, I’d have just caught up with you somewhere else.”
“What … what are you going to do?”
“Well, let’s see. I could turn you over to the cops. Or I could do to you what you tried to have Vega do to me last night-I could blow your damn head off.”
“You wouldn’t … Jesus you wouldn’t …”
I was tempted to keep on tormenting him, the way a cat will torment a cornered rat, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. One little twist of the knife was as much cruelty as I could muster, even for a piss-poor human being like Coleman Lujack.
I said, “Finish what you were doing. Hurry it up.”
Two simple commands, but I might have spoken them in Arabic; he didn’t comprehend because he was thinking about dying. He stayed where he was, wagging his head, trembling as if with a fever. His face was paper-white. Sweat stained it, ran like melting parentheses around the corners of his mouth. Thief, killer, sociopath-and underneath it all, coward.
“Come on, Coleman.” I waggled the gun. “Finish loading the briefcase.”
“Briefcase,” he said.
“Right. Put all the money into it. Now.”
He moved all at once, jerkily; went to one knee and clawed up handfuls of currency and shoved them haphazardly into the open case. At first his hands were so palsied he dropped or spilled as much as he stuffed inside. Then he seemed to gather himself, regain part of his control. When he finished emptying the safe and looked around at me again, I saw a small desperate cunning mixed in with his fear.
“There’s more than a hundred thousand dollars here,” he said. “But it’s not all I have. There’s another hundred thousand … some bearer bonds and jewelry. You can have it, all of it … I’ll take you to it … just let me go.”
“Still trying to buy time. You’re a pistol, you are.”
“No, I mean it, I swear …”
“I’m not selling, Coleman.”
“Take what’s here, then. I don’t care about the money. I don’t want to die, I don’t want to go to prison. …”
“You should have thought of that before you murdered your brother.”
“No! It wasn’t me, it was Vega … all Vega’s idea.”
“Sure it was.”
“It was. I swear to God-”
“Shut up, damn you.” I was sick of him-of what he was, of the sight and sound of him. I wanted Coleman Lujack out of my life as fast as possible. Take him out to my car and handcuff him-I keep a pair of handcuffs in the trunk, along with other emergency equipment-and then drive him to the Hall of Justice. Even if he refused to talk, the money in his briefcase and what I had to say would be enough for the police to hold him until the INS could be brought in and Vega cracked open. “Get on your feet.”
He did that, in the same jerky movements. “Now close the briefcase and pick it up.”
He did that too-and then held the case out toward me as if it were a pagan offering. His half-popped eyes begged me not to sacrifice him.
“Uh-uh,” I said. “You carry it.”
“You … you won’t kill me?”
“That depends on whether or not you do what I tell you.”
“I’ll do anything you say. Just don’t kill me, please….”
“Walk out of here, not too fast, not too slow. And keep your mouth shut from now on. I don’t want to hear another word out of you.”
I backed off to one side as I spoke. Immediately he came away from the safe and around the desk in jelly-legged strides; he was no longer looking at me. He went through the door, turned along the hall with his shoulders hunched, as if he expected a bullet in the back at any second. I followed by several paces, warily. I doubted he had the guts to try jumping me and the.38, but you never know. Even a coward will fight if he’s desperate enough.
Through the darkened waiting area, outside into the cold rackety wind. Coleman kept walking; I paused to reach back and pull the door shut. Then I saw him break stride, half-turn toward the rear of the office wing. A second or two later I saw what he saw: the shadow breaking away from other shadows along the wall.
Coleman screamed, “No!”
Then the shooting started.
* * * *
Chapter 19
I don’t know how many shots there were-at least three, maybe as many as five. I went down flat on the ground after the first one, in tight against the wall, whacking my chin on the asphalt. For a second or two my vision was cockeyed. When it cleared I was seeing Coleman buckled forward at the waist, falling … and out ahead of me, the flash of the shooter’s weapon as he fired once in my direction. Instinctively I pulled my head down and in, but it was a wild shot, the bullet smacking wood somewhere high above me an instant before I heard the report.