I said, “Great. Point the gun down. I fucking dare you.”
He blinked. “You don’t think I can put one in her and still get you?”
“I don’t think you could hit yourself in the balls if you had all day to aim.”
“You fucker,” he said. He pronounced it “focker.”
“Okay,” I said. “You win. You said the bad word first. How you doing, Doc?”
“I’m okay.” A nice-looking woman who matched the description Louie had given me stood wringing her hands behind him. “My wife is okay. I’ve had better conversations.”
“Fine,” Eduardo said, having used the interval to work things through. “Then I shoot you first.”
“Why didn’t you say that at the beginning?” I said. “What is it you want me to do?”
“Get in here.”
“Sure. Okay. Kind of a jam-up, though. Maybe one or two people should get up. You wouldn’t want me to trip or anything. I might sue.”
He backed away, leaving the left side of the door clear. “Through here. Just get your ass through here.”
“On the way,” I said. I paused partway in. “Do you want me to close the door?”
“Uhh, yeah,” he said.
“Good thinking,” I said. I came the rest of the way in, avoided stepping on either Thistle or Doc, both of whom were looking up at me, and pulled the door closed. “Now what?” I said.
“Now stand there and shut up.” He took another couple of steps back and wiggled the gun back and forth in the bandaged hand a little to make the point that he could aim it at any of us who earned it, and then he pulled out a cell phone. With both eyes on me, he pushed a button and waited.
“Speed dial,” I said. “What did guys with guns do before speed dial?”
“Fucking shut up.” He practically jumped to attention. “No, Tony, no, not you. Listen, I got her. I got her right here.”
Tony said something, and Eduardo said, “Encino. Like near Hayvenhurst. Umm, Doc and Doc’s wife and the guy she hired, the crook. Yeah, both of them.”
I said, “The crook?”
“He’s talking too much,” Eduardo said, apparently in response to a question from Tony. “Yeah, no problem, I can bring her. The house or the office? Yeah, yeah, okay.” He closed the phone, tried to slip it into his pocket, and missed the pocket. He looked down for a second try, and I got the automatic out and shot him in the right shoulder.
The impact spun him around, the gun in his hand spraying bullets into Doc’s paneled walls as he reflexively pulled the trigger, and I covered the distance between him and me in a single leap and slammed my own gun against the side of his skull, hard enough to leave an imprint in the bone. His legs went loose, the muscles slack and purposeless. He took two aimless steps away from me, reminding me of the dog that had climbed the stairs with the dart in him, and just as I was about to hit him again, he collapsed, taking a table and a small mirror down with him.
“Get something that will put him out and keep him out,” I said to Doc. “Don’t be stingy with it, either. He’s got the body mass of a whale.” I took his gun and patted the parts of his body that were accessible and then rolled him over with my foot and checked the rest of the likely places. Doc had gotten up and was helping Thistle to her feet while Mrs. Doc fussed around with shaking hands, brushing at her husband’s jacket. “She needs some stitches in her hand,” I said. “And my guess is that she’s dehydrated and maybe a little bit in shock. And she’s lost a bunch of blood.”
“I’ll see to it,” Doc said.
“Great. But with all due respect, can you please get the shit you’re going to shoot into this behemoth?”
“On it,” Doc said, hurrying into the next room.
“Doesn’t look so big now, does he?” I asked Thistle.
“Shoot him,” she said. Mrs. Doc gasped.
“Honey, I already shot him. If I kill him, there’ll be all sorts of boring stuff to go through with cops and other folks I prefer not to hang with. We’re going to give him to people who won’t be nearly as nice to him as I am.”
Eduardo groaned. His eyes opened, and crossed to focus on the barrel of the gun that was about two inches from the bridge of his nose. “Just one question,” I said. “House or office?”
“Office,” he said. “Don’t shoot me.”
“You’re really, absolutely, positively, without any question whatsoever certain that it’s the office? Because if it isn’t, I’m going to come back here and shoot you seven or eight times, starting at the ankles and working my way up. I’m told that bullets through the knees and the hips cause extremely interesting reactions.”
“House,” he said.
“Good for you,” I said. “How difficult was that?”
Doc came in with a hypodermic and an ampule. Eduardo watched as he inserted the needle into the ampule and pulled back the plunger.
“This isn’t going to hurt a bit,” I said. “Don’t you hate it when they say that? It always hurts.”
Doc said to Eduardo, “Bye-bye.” He stuck the needle right through the sleeve of Eduardo’s jacket and pushed the plunger.
Eduardo winced, the big baby, when the needle went in. He looked at Doc. Then he looked at me. He put his uninjured arm underneath him as though he wanted to get up. His mouth was hanging open. He raised himself five or six inches and then it was as though the arm had dissolved, and he hit the floor face first.
“He’s bleeding on my rug,” Doc said.
“Was your life better before I arrived, or after?” I asked. Thistle laughed.
“There’s a sweet sound,” Doc said. “Come on, Junior, grab this asshole and help me get him onto the hardwood. I don’t want him to die on anything expensive.”
We dragged him off the carpet. “What am I supposed to do with him?” Doc asked.
“What you can, without going overboard. Fix him to the point where he won’t bleed to death, get Thistle feeling better, and then call Trey. Tell her that Eduardo showed up here and pushed his way in with a gun to wait for Thistle because he figured she’d come here for drugs, and that he’s been working with Tony. Tell her when he had Thistle here, he called Tony and said he was going to bring her over, but while he was on the phone, you got your hands on a gun and shot him. Tell her to get someone over here and take him off your hands.”
“What about Thistle?” Doc asked.
“Hide her. Tell Trey she ran away when you shot Eduardo. Whatever you do, don’t tell Trey I was here.”
“Where are you going?” Thistle asked.
“I’m going to put an end to this.”
45
The house couldn’t have been more perfect.
It sat well back from the street in the middle of one of the valley’s tattered scraps of orange grove. High hedges hid much of the yard and all of the house from the street, and the gate had a lock I could have picked with my teeth. I barely had to pause to open it, which was okay with me because the rain was pelting down with serious intent. The nearest neighbor was fifty, sixty yards away and, thanks to the hedges that followed the property line, completely out of sight.
I thought he might have installed cameras or lights activated by motion detectors, or something, but as I stood behind one of the orange trees farthest from the house and surveyed the property one square yard at a time, I didn’t see anything. Either he thought everybody loved him or else he believed he was so bad nobody would dare to mess with him.
Wrong on both counts.
I was pushing myself away from the tree, having decided the next stop in my cautious progress would be a big hibiscus with a wire frame around it, when somebody screamed.
It was a high scream, definitely female, and it came from the house. I’d like to say that the scream kicked me into heroic rescue mode, and that’s why I started running across open ground toward the door, but in fact, all it did was make it seem a lot more likely that everybody inside was too distracted to be watching the yard. I was only ten or twenty feet from the door when I heard another scream, and this time it was clear that the screamer was not screaming from pain. She was furious.