Will rolled into Beverly Hills just before seven in the morning and did a drive-by of the coffee shop. North Beverly Drive was devoid of traffic-at this hour the whole city had the feel of a sleepy small town. He parked on a parallel street, Canon, set the alarm on his phone to nine-thirty, and promptly fell asleep.
When the alarm went off the street was bustling and the car had grown uncomfortably warm. His first order of business was finding a public restroom to do some morning ablutions. There was a gas station a block away. He grabbed his overnight bag, got out of the car and heard a sound, his prepaid phone clattering onto the sidewalk. He swore at himself, picked it up and stuffed it back in his pants.
At that moment Will’s screen blip at the Area 51 Ops Center went dark. Frazier was alerted and did a caustic rant before calming down and concluding, “It’ll be okay. He’s in our box. In a half hour this’ll be history.”
Sal and Tony’s Coffee Shop was popular. A mix of locals and tourists crammed the tables and booths. It smelled of pancake batter, coffee, and hash, and when Will arrived a few minutes early, his ears were assaulted by loud conversations.
The hostess greeted him with a gravelly cigarette voice: “How’re you doing, honey? You a single?”
“I’m meeting someone.” He looked around. “I don’t think he’s here yet.” Shackleton was supposed to be at the back door near the pay phone at ten.
“Shouldn’t be too long. We’ll have you seated in a couple of minutes.”
“I need to use your phone,” he said.
“I’ll find you.”
From the back of the restaurant, Will studied the room, jumping from table to table, profiling the customers. There was an elderly man with a cane, and his wife-locals. Four smartly dressed young men-salesmen. Three pale flabby women with Rodeo Drive visors-tourists. Six Korean women-tourists. A father with a six-year-old son-divorce visitation. A strung-out young couple in their twenties in tattered jeans-locals. Two middle-aged men and a woman with Verizon shirts-workers.
And then there was a table of four in the middle of the room that made his palms clammy. Four men in their thirties, cut from the same piece of cloth. Clean-cut, recent haircuts, fit-he could tell from their necks they were lifters. All of them were trying too hard to appear casual in loose shirts and khakis, forcing the pass-the-hash-browns banter. One of them had his fanny pack laid on the table.
None of them looked his way, and he pretended not to look at them. He shuffled his feet and waited by the phone, keeping them in his peripheral field. Agency boys; which agency, he didn’t know. Everything told him to abort, to walk out the back door and keep going, but then what? He had to find Shackleton and this was the only way. He’d have to deal with the lifters. He felt the weight of his gun against his ribs every time he breathed.
Frazier felt a spark of electricity coursing through his body when Will Piper appeared on his monitor. The fanny pack was being manipulated by one of the men to track him, and the monitor showed him standing up against a wall beside a pay phone.
“Okay, DeCorso, that’s good,” Frazier said into his headset mic. “I’ve got him.” He clenched his jaw. He wanted to see the screen fill with the second target, he wanted to fire out the go order and to watch his men take both of them down and bundle them up for special delivery.
Will explored his options. He did his best imitation of a casual saunter and entered the men’s room for a look-see. There were no windows. He splashed some cold water on his face and wiped himself dry. It was still a few minutes before ten. He left the men’s room and headed straight out the back door. He wanted to see if any of the men made a move, but more important, he wanted to scope out his environs. There was an alleyway running between Beverly and Canon that serviced the buildings on both streets. He saw the back entrances of a bookstore, a drugstore, a beauty salon, a shoe store, and a bank all within a stone’s throw. To his left the alley opened up into a parking lot servicing one of the commercial buildings on Canon. There were foot routes that would take him north, south, east, or west. He felt a little less trapped and went back inside.
“There you are!” the hostess called out from the front, startling him. “I got your table.”
The table for two was near the window, but the view to the phone was unimpeded. It was 10:00 A.M. The men at the middle table were getting more coffee.
DeCorso, the team leader, had a buzz cut, heavy black eyebrows, and thick hairy forearms. Frazier was complaining into DeCorso’s earpiece, “It’s time. Where the fuck is Shackleton?”
On his monitor Frazier watched Will pouring coffee from a carafe and stirring in cream.
Five minutes passed.
Will was hungry, so he ordered.
Ten minutes.
He wolfed down eggs and bacon. The men in the middle were lingering.
At ten-fifteen he was beginning to think that Shackleton was playing him. Three cups of coffee had taken their toll-he got up to use the men’s room. The only other person inside was the old man with his cane, moving like a snail. When Will was done, he left and noticed the bulletin board beside the pay phone. It was a paper quilt of business cards, apartment-for-rent flyers, lost cats. He’d seen the board earlier but it hadn’t registered.
It was staring him in the face!
A three-by-five-inch card, the size of a postcard.
A hand-drawn coffin, the Doomsday coffin, and the words: Bev Hills Hotel, Bung 7.
Will swallowed hard and acted on pure impulse.
He snatched the card and dashed out the back door into the alleyway.
Frazier reacted before the men on the scene. “He’s taking off! Goddamn it, he’s taking off!”
The men jumped up and pursued but got hung up when the old man leaving the restroom blocked their way. It was impossible to watch the video images since the camera bag was jostling up and down, but Frazier saw the old man in some frames and screamed, “Don’t slow down! He’ll get away!”
DeCorso lifted the man in a bear grip and deposited him back in the men’s room while his colleagues rushed to the door. When they hit the alleyway it was empty. On DeCorso’s orders, two went right, two went left.
They frantically searched, scouring the alley, running through stores and buildings on Beverly and Canon, checking under parked cars. Frazier was screaming so much into DeCorso’s earpiece that the man begged him, “Malcolm, please calm down. I can’t operate with all the yelling.”
Will was in a bathroom stall in the Via Veneto Hair Salon, one door away from the coffee shop. He stayed put for over ten minutes, half standing on the toilet, his gun drawn. Someone entered shortly after he arrived but left without using the facilities. He exhaled and maintained his uncomfortable pose.
He couldn’t stay there all day and someone was bound to use the toilet, so he left the bathroom and quietly slipped into the salon, where a half-dozen pretty hairdressers were working away on customers and chatting. It looked like a female-only type of shop and he was way out of place.
“Hi!” one of the hairdressers said, surprised. She had severely short blond hair and a micro-mini stretched over strawberry tights. “Didn’t see you.”
“You do walk-ins?” Will asked.
“Not usually,” the girl said, but she liked his looks and wondered if he might be famous. “Do I know you?” she asked.
“Not yet, but if you give me a haircut you will,” he teased. “You do men?”
She was smitten. “I’ll do you myself,” she gushed. “I had a cancellation anyway.”
“I don’t want to sit near the window and I want you to take your time. I’m not in a rush.”
“You’ve got a lot of demands, don’t you?” She laughed. “Well, I will take good care of you, Mr. Bossy Man! You sit right there and I’ll get you a cup of coffee or tea.”
An hour later Will had four things: a good haircut, a manicure, the girl’s phone number, and his freedom. He asked for a cab and when he saw it standing on Canon, he gave her a big tip, sprang into the backseat and sank low. As it pulled away, he felt he’d made a clean escape. He ripped up the slip with the phone number and let the fragments flutter out the window. He’d have to tell Nancy about this act, certifiable proof of his commitment.