“What?” She was shocked. “Shoot them?”
“If you hit anybody, it’s over. If you just scare them, I can probably build up some distance and lose them.”
He allowed the dark vehicle to gain on them, glanced at the freeway signs and took the next exit. He coasted to the end of the exit ramp, turned right, and pulled into the first parking lot he saw on the new street. It was the big lot for a Home Depot store, and the aisles were full. He pulled to the end of the first aisle, stopped, and looked back to watch the street in the direction of the exit ramp. He waited for a few minutes, but he saw no sign that the SUV had come down the ramp.
“What now?” she asked.
“You can give my gun back, I guess.” He accepted it, put it back in the holster and covered it with his jacket again. He looked out at the street. “This is the way to the airport, isn’t it?”
“It’s one of the ways. The airport is just a few miles down the road that way. You stay parallel with the 101.”
“Then it might be another opportunity to throw some more confusion in our trail. I rented this car at the airport. I’d like to turn it in and get a different one.”
“Are you still against flying?”
“When you get on an airplane, people know exactly where you’re going and exactly what time you’ll arrive. If we go by car, we make them work to stay with us, and we get a chance to see who they are.”
22
PAUL GOT OUT of the black SUV and opened Sylvie’s door so she could climb out. As he watched her long legs swing out and straighten, and then saw her slide lightly off the seat and hop to the ground, he realized that the sight made him like her better. He had been seething, his jaw clenched much of the time since Sylvie had shot Ann Delatorre, and the nasty irrational remarks Sylvie had made in the parking lot at the pier had made things much worse. She was stupid and childish and completely unable to keep her mind focused on anything except herself. But the sight of those long legs and the graceful hop to the pavement dissipated his anger.
Paul was an aesthete. Other people could have said his response was not aesthetic but sexual, but that kind of statement would have shown that these people knew nothing. They didn’t understand that the two were the same: the response of the human mind to beauty.
He glanced toward the car rental building and took Sylvie’s arm, confident that he was pursuing the right strategy. Jack Till had left the freeway several miles before the airport. Till was fond of pulling tricks around airports, sometimes turning in his car and flying out, and sometimes turning in one car and renting another. Either way, the airport car rental was the place where Jack Till would be this afternoon.
“Why are we stopping here?” Sylvie asked.
“We’ve got to trade this SUV for a different vehicle.” He removed the two small suitcases from the SUV and shut the back door.
“Why?”
“It’s a tactic. Just like chess. I think he may have spotted us behind him. If he didn’t pick this out as the vehicle to worry about yet, he certainly saw it, so now is a good time to change. We’ll also block his move.”
“What move?”
“He rented his car here. He got off the freeway a few miles back, so we’re ahead of him. But he’s on his way here to turn in his car. Either he’ll just dump it and try to get on a plane to Los Angeles—which I doubt—or he’ll rent a new car, too.”
“And?”
“He’ll still be looking for the black SUV, and we’ll know what his new car is.”
Paul walked into the car rental building. At the counter, he took out his keys and the papers he’d been given when he’d rented the SUV. “I’d like to trade in my SUV for something smaller, please,” he said to the young woman behind the desk. She reminded him of a girl named Beth he had dated about twenty years ago. She had the same red-brown hair and the same light skin and blue eyes. This girl could be a close relative of Beth’s. He wished he could say something. Sylvie was too prickly and difficult to listen to even neutral observations about women. Pointing them out made her want to kill them. The girl handed his keys to a man in blue overalls and watched him disappear out a back door.
As he watched the girl turn to her computer to tap in some information, he was tempted to say something to her; but he had dated Beth under his real name, so he couldn’t. Anyway, Sylvie was a few feet away at the magazine rack near the door watching for Jack Till’s beige Lincoln to come up the access road to the rental buildings.
Sylvie’s jealousy was ridiculous, and that seemed to be part of her reason for it. The jealousy was her way of denying that she had done what he had seen her do in about fifty movies with at least a hundred men. When he first met her, he pretended that he didn’t recognize her, and never let the topic of pornographic movies enter a conversation. He waited patiently, and when she made a big event out of gently, gradually telling him about her two-year career, he brought in a box from the garage to show her that he had already bought copies of all of her films. He said little more than the fact that he knew, and that it made no difference to him. That fantastic claim had struck Sylvie as entirely true.
The truth was that her film career had intrigued him and added to his attraction to her. What he had found to be a more difficult topic was his profession. For a time he tried telling her he was an entrepreneur who had made some money selling an Internet start-up business, then that he acted as a business consultant, and sometimes traveled to other cities to solve clients’ problems.
In those days, he received most of his referrals from Bobby Mosca, the bartender at the Palazzo di Conti restaurant on La Brea. The Palazzo was a landmark where well-known people sometimes went, partly because it served good southern Italian food, and partly because it had a reputation. Sometimes the story was that it was a remote outpost for members of the Balacontano family who came west on business. A competing story was that Bugsy Siegel had once been the silent owner, and that when he was shot in the bungalow on the other side of town, one of the unintended consequences was that the apparent owners became the real owners.
One night Paul’s telephone rang, and Sylvie answered and handed it to Paul. When the call was finished, he looked up and saw her in the doorway. She said, “I know.”
Paul sat back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach. “You know what?”
“I know who Bobby is. I know what you do for a living.”
Paul nodded, keeping his eyes on her.
“You killed Darren so you could have me. Surely you must have expected me to know that much. When the police came here, they told me it was a professional execution. And after living with you for months, how could I not know?”
“So now what?”
“Are you asking me what I’m going to do about it?”
“No, I’m asking you what you feel about it.”
She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest, then kissed him, hard. “I love you.”
He had left late that night to complete the job Bobby had called about. He came home to find her waiting up for him.
She said, “How did it go? Tell me everything that happened.”
“Why?” he said. “Why would you want to hear about that?”
“How else am I going to learn?”
As he looked away from the counter at Sylvie, he forgave her for the arguments and the idiotic defensiveness and lack of confidence. She was everything he had ever wanted. If he could just keep her convinced of that, then things would be tolerable. He heard the rental agent behind him, and turned.
He accepted the keys to the new car and looked at the tags. The car was a blue four-door Ford. That was acceptable: It wasn’t anything like the SUV. “Thank you,” he said. He turned and walked to Sylvie, picked up the two suitcases, and let Sylvie hold the door open for him. He walked to the car and put the suitcases into the trunk. Paul was pleased to see that the mechanic had already driven the black SUV around to the back of the building to clean and service it.