Finally the flashlight beam lowered. The boots retreated, the door drew closed, and Evan eased out a breath. He lifted his gaze, noting the clear view into the plaza across, the unobstructed angle onto the alley where he and Katrin had jumped into the strategically parked minivan, taking fire.
So once Evan had cleared Katrin from the restaurant, Slatcher had climbed to the roof and cycled his follow-up shots from here. Still flat on his stomach, Evan turned his head. Right beside him, a domed heating vent thrust up from the tar paper. He had a silhouette view of the vent’s flashing strip, secured by hand-twist screws. Of the four screws, two were barely twisted on at all.
Someone had removed and replaced the heating vent in a hurry.
Evan rolled over, spun off the screws, and lifted the vent. He pulled a small Maglite from one of his cargo pockets and directed the powerful beam down the exposed shaft.
Sure enough, a sniper rifle was caught in a duct junction ten meters down.
It looked to be a McMillan .308-caliber police model — easy to acquire, common enough to make it hard to track. Dumping the gun at the scene was a calling card of the elite contract killer, who knew better than to hold on to a weapon that could be tested for forensics later. A pair of latex gloves rested near the rifle barrel, a keen choice, as leather gloves left unique prints. Beside them a white, cup-shaped object had landed. Evan focused on it until it resolved as a medical mask.
He felt the adrenaline moving through his veins quicken.
Before fleeing the scene, Slatcher had trashed not just the rifle. Not just gloves that would have exhibited gunpowder residue. But the truly professional touch was the medical mask he’d left behind as well after he’d ceased shooting. Had he been arrested leaving the scene and given a nasal swab to detect inhaled gunpowder residue, the mask would have ensured a negative test result.
A noise startled Evan from his thoughts — the vertical access door across the roof banging open. He would have been spotted instantly were the door not facing the opposite direction. The cop had to walk around the concrete framing to bring Evan into sight.
Reacting quickly, he grabbed the dome of the roof vent and clicked it back into place over the shaft. Already rolling for the roof’s edge, he swept the loose screws off into space with the blade of his hand. He caught the lip as he tumbled over, also catching a fleeting glimpse of the flashlight lens emerging from around the side of the open access door.
His weight swung him neatly around the roof’s edge. He released, bending his knees to cushion his landing on the balcony. He wound up right in front of the hole cut into the sliding glass door.
Way down below he heard the screws tap the sidewalk as they finally hit ground. Reaching through the hole, he unlocked the door and slid it open slowly, stepping inside and easing it shut just as he heard the cop’s footsteps creak the roof overhead. Now the flashlight beam played down along the balcony’s edge, though Evan was safely out of view inside.
He was pushing his luck with this little game of cat and mouse. He had to move quickly. Tilting his head, he picked up the angle of moonlight across the neat vacuum stripes. Boot imprints from the cops trampled the space. But in one spot the carpet thread was scuffed up at three points, the corners of a triangle.
A sniper’s tripod.
The flashlight beam withdrew from the balcony, and he heard the cop’s footsteps moving back toward the access door.
Evan searched the ceiling just in front of the scuff marks, and sure enough he picked up a metal glint. A staple, embedded in the popcorn ceiling. The ceiling was low enough that he could reach it when he went up on tiptoes, and he pried the staple free. Beneath it was a tiny swatch of fabric — a torn bit left pinned beneath the staple, likely when CSI had removed the screen drape. The purpose of a drape, which typically went from ceiling to floor, was to shield the sniper from view. Evan held the bit of fabric up toward the window so it was backlit by the neon glow of the pagoda gate. It was gauzy, of course, for Slatcher to see and shoot through, but not opaque enough to block the glint of a scope in direct sunlight.
His meet with Katrin had been scheduled for high noon. The move to Chinatown had taken them to twelve-thirty, the L.A. sun near its apex.
If Evan had arrived at the restaurant at any other time of day, he wouldn’t have caught that reflected glint. He took a moment to consider this fragment of good luck, then exhaled and refocused on the room.
At last he positioned himself behind the spot where the tripod had been set down. The sole picture of Danny Slatcher had shown him carrying a Pelican case in his right hand, so Evan lined up behind the imaginary rifle in a right-handed shooter’s orientation, peering through a pretend scope.
What he saw confirmed his worst fear, and he felt his jaw clench until it throbbed.
The view through the circle cut into the sliding glass door gave him a perfect angle down at the restaurant. Based on where he’d been sitting at the table, his critical mass would have blocked any shot of Katrin.
Slatcher hadn’t been aiming at her.
He’d been aiming at Evan.
28
Unholy Union
Evan walked the L.A. River to clear his head. The unlikeliest-looking waterway in the county, it was a polluted trickle through a wide concrete channel. Shrubs dotted the water’s edge, and graffiti embellished the sloped sides of the basin. The slumbering homeless lay like sacks of grain, dead or drunk or just goddamned exhausted. Downtown was overhead and all around, and yet down here, sunk in a trough beneath the city, it felt like a desolate underworld, isolated from man and God.
The December air whipped at Evan’s neck as he sidestepped overturned shopping carts, loose tires from semis, the occasional mossy hull of a wrecked car left behind by some musclehead who’d tried to play drag-racing Danny Zuko when the water dried up.
Traffic hummed all around, invisible save the lightsaber headlights scanning the darkness above and the soothing white noise that thrummed the basin walls, a primordial murmur of blood rushing through veins. Evan had come to the stretch flowing beneath the East Los Angeles Interchange, the unholy union of Highway 101, Route 60, and Interstates 5 and 10. He’d read somewhere that this was the busiest highway exchange in the world, daily spinning half a million vehicles through its confusion of cloverleafs.
He realized now why he’d come to this place to make the phone call he was about to make: It was a comforting reminder of his anonymity in this great stacked sprawl of a city.
The bullets fired into Lotus Dim Sum had been meant for him. Someone had set Danny Slatcher on his tail, put him in the crosshairs. And Katrin wasn’t the bait. Couldn’t be the bait. Because Evan knew how to read people. Jack had taught him that, as had eight different psyops experts over years of training and countless under-the-gun interactions since then. Her tears had been real — as was her fear. Which meant that he’d dragged her into this. Devastated her life. Gotten her father killed.
Of the myriad questions scratching at the walls of his skull, one rose above the din: Who had hired Danny Slatcher to kill him?