She knelt on the bed behind him.
“You’ll get a kick, Mr. Wonderful said some redheaded guy woke him up in the middle of the day with a lot of questions.”
“Yeah?” Bland spoke with scant interest. He had long since decided that you only had to seem to listen to women.
“Questions about you.”
Bland was suddenly all attention. “About me?”
“What kind of car you drive, where you were, like that. Jake ran him off.” She reached around him with eager fingers. “Hurry up, honey, you got my motor running...”
Bland was indeed hurrying. He was already off the bed, pulling up his pants. He had no doubt at all that the redheaded man asleep in his car up on Toyon was after the Panoz.
“Listen, Vix, I gotta go. Be out of town for a few days.”
“Whadda ya mean, outta town?” Anger was clouding her face. “You got your rocks off, what about my rocks?”
Bland knotted his shoelaces. “Save ’em till I get back.”
“Save ’em?” she shrieked. “Why you rotten...”
Her curses followed him out of the house. There were a thousand Vixens in this world, only a few Panoz cars. Twenty minutes later he was swinging the sleek shiny auto up out of Toyon Court past poor slumbering O’B, who obviously had overpoured during his late lunch with Zack Zanopheros.
Bart Heslip, out of his car to shadow-box beside the front fender, had just knocked out Oscar de la Hoya with a really nifty combination when approaching lights and swelling engine noise swung the Bear Gulch Road gate silently inward. Immediately after a Lexus exited, Bart drove through as the gate swung shut.
The blacktop hairpinned back upon itself half a dozen times in the first mile of steep, heavily wooded hillside. A big mule deer buck, eight nascent points of velvet-covered scimitar antler adorning his head, poised on the edge of challenge in Bart’s headlights for two breathless heartbeats. Then he threw his black nose into the air and bounded off down the slope.
Around another hairpin, so tight and steep there was a mirror set at its apex to let drivers see approaching vehicles, a pair of fat-butt raccoons scuttled across in front of him. Their masked bandit faces wore sneers and their beer bellies rolled from side to side as they scrambled up the slope with their thieves’ honor intact.
Bart parked a dozen yards beyond the luminous numbers 7 and 2 tacked to a tree on the right-hand side of Bear Gulch. He killed engine and lights, sat listening to the night sounds and the creak of the cooling engine. Then, leaving Giselle’s hot-sheet on the front seat, he locked up his DKA Taurus and started back toward the driveway, disappearing down the hillside carrying only his repo tools and a flash.
A petite orange tiger-stripe cat was sitting in rapt attention beside a decorative koi pond in front of the rambling redwood-and-stone house. Obviously the Pussy Galore purloined by Romeo Ferretti from his former partner Chuckie up in San Francisco. Big slow drifting submarine shapes below the dark surface held the cat enthralled. The good life, cat-style.
Yeah! Bart’s careful flashlight showed the Ferrari parked in plain view, its nose against a stone-and-concrete retaining wall at the end of a widened-out parking apron. The top was up; moisture had collected on the sleek coachwork.
No visible lights in the house, but their bedroom might be over the two-car garage facing the driveway. Bart boldly tried the driver’s side door. Unlocked. Didn’t even have to use his picks on the old-fashioned wind-wing such cars sported. When he opened the door, the light under the dash showed him a stubby between-seats gear shift. He reached in, popped it into neutral. Hand brake already set. He swung the door almost shut without slamming, so the interior light would go out. Piece of cake.
That’s when the rude beast inside the garage started roaring and slamming itself against the closed overhead door. But Bart already had the Ferrari’s raised hood resting on his back, leaning into the engine compartment with his flashlight between his teeth. He clipped the hotwire to the distributor, found the hot post of the battery, laid the third prong of the wire against the double posts of the solanoid.
rrrRRRrrr rrrRRRrrr rrrRRRrrr VROOOOOOOOOM!
A window went up. He stepped back and slammed the hood.
“Stop! Thief!”
Stone chips flew behind his right shoulder, crack! and crack! again. Something touched his left ear with a hot finger. A third shot merely spattered more stone chips.
A voice shouted, “No! Herb! My God, don’t shoot my car!”
Bart had dropped and rolled in tight against the side of the Ferrari away from the house. Ablaze with excitement, he swung the door open above him and snaked himself into the driver’s seat. He’d never been shot at before — not in earnest. It was terrifying and exhilarating.
He couldn’t back the low-slung Ferrari up to the street without bottoming out, and the bank wanted its car back in one piece. He did a classic bootlegger’s turn on the concrete apron to end up facing the steep driveway for his run up the slope.
A two-hundred-pound Rottweiler, obviously raised on raw liver — raw human liver — raced from the garage to launch itself at his still-open door. Bart kicked out savagely just as the massive beast left the ground. His heel slammed into the short crinkled nose, the dog spun away going yowp! yowp! yowp! in astonishment. People didn’t do that to him: he did that to people.
Bright-beam lights shone in Bart’s rearview and another powerful engine roared behind him. Coming up into slanting Bear Gulch Road, he swung right, uphill, running without lights, racing past his own parked car. Over the crest, out of sight, stop!, kill the engine, hope they turned downhill.
Downhill, his pursuers might catch up with him before the gate could open at his approach. Since the Ferrari was on no cop’s hotsheet, only DKA’s, they could shoot him and get away with it — but officer, we thought he was a car thief.
He went on, using his lights now. Away clean. After a mile, he became aware of a dull throb in his nicked ear. Lucky the upholstery was leather. Easy to clean the blood off it.
O’B came up behind the wheel of his car with a start. Four A.M., two hours after bar-close. Head full of ache, mouth full of the all-too-familiar dirty sweatsocks. He checked the carport. Empty. He groped in the glove-box for his emergency flask, tipped it up to his lips. Empty, too. Damn!
Tim Bland wasn’t coming back tonight. Time to go find a twenty-four-hour gym with a sauna, soak out the alcohol. His wife, Bella, was going to be really pissed. O’B drove away into the fog.
Thirteen
The fog had broken early; sunshine blessed the Marina District’s wide quiet morning streets. When Harriet Nettrick’s doorbell rang at North Point and Broderick, she saw on her terrazzo stoop two young nice-looking men she took to be Latino. Each carried a workman’s long metal toolbox. The panel truck in the driveway wore the familiar Water Department logo.
She opened the door. The one with FRANK sewn above his tan uniform’s pocket said, “Mrs. Nettrick? We’re from the Water Department. A chemical contaminant has gotten into the pipes for this area and we have to eliminate it. Can we come in?”
She opened the door. “My goodness, I hope it isn’t—”
“The kitchen, ma’am?” He was all business. “Syd, you go check the upstairs bathroom.”
Syd went up the stairs as Frank followed Harriet to the kitchen and across its old-fashioned inlaid white tile floor to the sink.