Weir floored it. From the corner of his eye, he could see Phil Kearns reaching under his coat to snap off the safety strap on his holster. He pulled up to a liquor store and slammed on the brakes. Ray was out before the truck stopped, throwing someone off a pay phone to call in backup. Thirty seconds later, he was back in and Jim’s truck was screeching away from the curb in a cloud of tire smoke.
“Whoa,” said Lucinda.
“Was that his light I saw upstairs?” asked Weir.
“I guess so,” she said apprehensively.
“How many rooms upstairs?”
“Mine, and his, and the bathroom.”
“His is on the right, facing the street?”
“Yeah.Are you guys after Joe now, or what?”
“When we get to the house, you stay here,” said Weir. “Don’t move from this truck, not one inch. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah, but like, whoa... this truck’s fast. What did he do? What did Joseph do?”
“Shut up,” said Kearns. “I’ll take the back door, Jim. You two head up front. Is there another way out, Lucinda?”
“No. You guys are like all over it.”
“Who’s home besides your grandmother?”
“Nobody I know of,” she said, bracing herself on the dash as Weir ran the red light at Dillman’s.
“Does he have a gun?” asked Kearns.
“I don’t know.”
“No car?” asked Weir.
“It’s in the shop.”
“What are you going to do when I stop this truck, Lucinda?”
“Stay in it. Gawd... wait ’til my friends hear about this!”
“Got a piece, Ray?”
“Ankle biter. Let’s go.”
Jim slowed down before the house, turned into the driveway, cut the lights and engine, and pocketed the keys. He looked once at the girl.
“I’m staying,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
On the porch, they waited ten seconds for Kearns to find the back way in. Then Ray tried the door, found it open, and stepped inside. Looking down the entryway to the living room, Jim could see a white-haired old woman sitting up asleep on the couch. The stairs were to his right. He heard Kearns in the kitchen, saw his shadow on the floor. Two at a time, he took the stairs, wood creaking under the runner, one hand on the railing and the other holding his father’s old .45. Ray was two steps behind. Jim stopped on the landing. Lucinda’s room, away from the street, was dark. Down the hall and across from it was Goins’s, the door shut and a faint light coming from beneath it. Jim lined himself up opposite the door, flicked off the safety, reached to the knob, and turned. Half an inch was all it rotated before stopping against the lock.
Weir stepped back and lowered his shoulder for the charge, but Raymond flew past him and slammed into the door.
With a shriek of breaking wood, it flew open, shot all the way back, and slammed against the wall with a thud. Jim, in a crouch, swung the gun, far left to right, his eyes drinking in the room as fast as he could make them. Ray moved left. Jim spun right, backed into a corner and scanned again over the automatic’s sight. The curtains of the open window swayed inward. He swung, held. The curtains swayed back. Weir dove to the floor, landing hard on his belly, the gun pointing under the bed. He rolled up, ran out of the room, down the hallway to the empty bathroom, then into Lucinda’s perfume-heavy lair, a place of rock-star posters, stuffed animals, clothes thrown everywhere.
Raymond was already there, slipping his gun into its ankle holster.
Back in Goins’s room, Jim really looked at everything for the first time: the computer on the desk, the cardboard box beside the bed, the pair of old-fashioned ladies’ eyeglasses sitting on the pillow with a piece of paper under them. The paper said, “I found your glasses, Mrs. Fostes. Love, Joseph.” Standing at the window, Jim guessed the distance to the thick branch of the avocado tree. Six feet max, he thought, easy enough.
Kearns blew in, a storm of pastel linens with a shiny 9mm auto.
“He cleared,” said Jim.
“I’ll call Watch. Window?”
“That’s my guess.”
“Shit.”
“He can’t get far. Hurry up, Phil.”
Weir waited in Horton Goins’s room while Kearns went into Lucinda’s and made the call. He slipped the gun into his holster and knelt down beside the box next to the bed. Shirts, shorts, two cameras, a sheet of proofs, a razor and shaving cream, a hairbrush, toothbrush, and two pairs of white and black checkered tennis shoes.
A sudden shadow in the doorway sent a fresh surge of alarm up his back. Mrs. Fostes, squinting terribly, steadied her rocking head of white hair at Jim. “Who are you?”
“Police, Mrs. Fostes — kind of. I’m sorry.”
She stepped in slowly, Kearns standing now in the hall with a “Let’s go” expression on his face. Raymond slipped behind Mrs. Fostes — taking advantage of her considerable blind spot — and started down the stairs.
“Where’s my granddaughter?”
“She’s okay. She’ll be right up.”
“Is Joseph here?”
“He left. I don’t think he’s coming back.”
Mrs. Fostes’s tired old eyes did their best to behold Weir.
Jim fetched the glasses from the pillow and slipped them on her. They settled perfectly into the dark indentations on either side of her nose. Mrs. Fostes’s eyes burned into Jim’s.
“Where did you find these?”
“Joseph did,” said Weir. “If you see him again, call the Newport Beach Police immediately.” He could hear Kearns’s footsteps pounding down the stairs, and Lucinda’s voice in the entryway.
“Why should I call you?”
“He’s a murder suspect, Mrs. Fostes.”
“Oh my.” She looked around the room once, as if her new eyesight were a gift from God. “There was something strange about him. But he was decent enough to return my glasses, wasn’t he?”
Chapter 25
Knees pumping, the thin tire vibrating on the road just below him, the curved handlebars of the borrowed ten-speed tight in his clenched bleeding hands, Joseph slid through the fog and blurring lights of Bayside Drive, drawn by a growing, beckoning purpose.
The urgent breathing around him — did it belong to him, or was it the scoffing recognition of every light that bore into his eyes, every car that swept by so close that he could feel its accusing breath on his arm, every set of eyes behind the darkened windows calling down to the hunters of the world, the killer you seek is southbound on Bayside — surround him, capture him, shoot him down in the dust of his own madness?
Joseph thanked God for the city map he’d studied so long and hard as he charted Ann’s movements all those lonely, thrilling weeks. Darkness here, a narrow winding road, banks of ivy green-black in the night, the comfort of fog and close houses all the way into Corona del Mar, all the way to The Meeting.
His legs were burning and his lungs seemed too small, but Joseph did his best to find a rhythm to sustain him. The biking helmet fit perfectly. His hands upon the bars were sticky with blood; the splitting flesh sent blades of pain up into his wrists and forearms. Up, down, in out, keep to the side, forget your hands, I was a fool to think could live in the same house as a girl who thinks cops are cute.
He could feel the pack balanced on his back, the weight of Ann inside it, beside his best 35 mm, ten rolls of film, a few portraits stuck inside a National Geographic, a clean pair of socks and two T-shirts, two ripe avocados from the tree he had used to escape. The black road charged under him, split by the trembling narrow tire. He pushed up on the handlebars, raised his aching head, then settled back into the rhythm.