“Are you threatening me?”
“Of course it’s a threat. My God, are you listening at all?”
“This meeting is over,” she said. “You can all leave my house now.”
“I’m happy to do that,” Chernoff said. “I’ll be petitioning the judge to dismiss the charges against Eric Fuller before the end of the afternoon. If I were you, I’d try to get in first to drop the charges before then. But you suit yourself.”
Chernoff crossed the room in ten quick paces, opened the door and stopped only long enough to say, “Eric, I’ll call you later when the charges are dismissed.” Then he was out the door.
Eric nodded, then looked at Wendy. “Do you think we could talk?”
Wendy looked at Eric, then at Till. Jack Till hid his instinctive feeling of jealousy and his more reasoned dread of loss. He said, “I don’t think Miss Gordon wants us here, and I don’t want you standing around on a street in plain sight. Wendy, you can ride with Eric, and I can follow you to the police station. Eric, do you know how to get there?”
“Unfortunately, I do,” Eric said.
Linda Gordon came out of the kitchen, and she seemed to be propelled toward the door. She hurried past them, flung the front door open, and stepped out onto the porch. Jay Chernoff’s red Saab was just pulling away from the curb as she shouted, “Mr. Chernoff!” She waved her arm frantically. “Mr. Chernoff!”
Jack Till saw her do a quick half-turn and then fall sideways on the porch before he heard the distant report of the gun. He and Poliakoff dropped to their knees on opposite sides of Linda Gordon’s fallen body. Each of them grasped an arm to drag her inside. Till kicked the door shut, and then he and Poliakoff were up and at the windows, trying to locate the shooter.
“Rifle,” Till said.
“A sound delay,” said Poliakoff. “At least half a second.”
“Six or seven hundred feet.”
“The hill at the end of the street.”
“There’s an empty lot, and I think there’s a road up above, so it could have been one of the back yards. Call it in.”
Poliakoff took a hand radio out of his pocket. “This is Sergeant Poliakoff. I am under sniper fire at 5605 Greenbelt Street, Sherman Oaks. There’s a gunshot victim here, and I need an ambulance. I think the sniper is at the south end of Greenbelt on the hillside. It’s three blocks south of Ventura, four blocks west of Coldwater. I’ll stand by.”
Till was back on the floor with Linda Gordon. “Wendy,” he said. “Get a couple of blankets and a pillow off her bed.” To Linda Gordon, he said, “You’re going to be just fine. You got clipped in the shoulder, but it went right through. We’re going to make you comfortable, and the ambulance will be here in a minute.”
Wendy knelt beside Jack with the blankets and pillow. Till gently lifted Linda Gordon’s head and slipped the pillow under, then covered her with the blankets. As Wendy bent over her, he noticed how closely Wendy’s long blond hair matched the color of Linda Gordon’s.
37
PAUL TURNER RAN down the hill with long strides that his momentum lengthened into jumps and landings, and then he was off the hill and into the car. “Got her,” he said. “High on the left side, maybe the heart.”
Sylvie looked into the rearview mirror and pulled the car away from the curb, then continued up Valley Vista. “You’re sure it was fatal?”
“I can’t give you a firm medical prognosis through a rifle scope,” he said. “All I can do is hit her with a .308 and clear my calendar in case there’s a funeral.”
“I suppose,” she said. The road skirted the low hills in winding curves toward the west. She couldn’t drive as fast as she wanted to because this was a suburban residential area, with stop signs and streets coming in on the right every two hundred feet or so. A few of the curves were blind, and this was not a time when they could afford to risk an accident. Paul opened his window. She said, “Can you close your window?”
“Why?”
“It’s creating a vacuum or something and it’s hurting my ears.”
“I’m listening for sirens.”
“We won’t have any trouble hearing them. If you drive with your window open, people think you’re drunk or smoking pot.”
He sighed, pressed the button, and watched the window slide up. “I can’t believe how great this feels.”
“I guess I’m still a little bit behind you,” she said. “Everything about this job has been hard until two minutes ago. I need to get used to the idea that Wendy Harper is finally dead, and we can take a vacation.”
Paul was grinning. “It’s great. I knew the thing to do was follow Eric Fuller. I knew damned well that wherever she was, he would turn up.”
“You get full credit.” At the time when they had been planning, Sylvie had been about to suggest the same thing, but she had wisely decided to let his idea be the one they chose. She had seen nothing objectionable in it, and she had known that if it turned out to be a mistake, she would rather blame him than be blamed. She had also decided that it was a good strategy to accept his idea without a murmur because her acquiescence would give him confidence. Killing was mostly psychology. Paul had followed Eric Fuller to the safe house easily and bagged Wendy Harper with a single shot from two hundred yards out, so obviously Sylvie had been right. She congratulated herself silently. “You’re the best,” she said.
He said, “I knew that no matter what else she did, as soon as she hit town, they would see each other. He could hardly have her come all the way down here after six years to save his ass and not even thank her. It just wouldn’t be natural. And from our point of view, I knew he was going to be perfect. The one you want to shadow isn’t some cop who follows people for a living, and is perfectly capable of noticing you and getting you arrested. It’s the sorry bastard who spends his time in a restaurant chopping onions.”
Sylvie kept herself from speaking. At times she felt amazement at how egocentric men were. It had not yet occurred to him that he owed her a share in the congratulations. Killing Wendy Harper had not been a matter of following a lovesick chef from La Cienega to Greenbelt Street and sitting behind a bush waiting for a chance to pop an unsuspecting woman. There had been plenty of effort and frustration for Sylvie, too.
Paul seemed to notice that she wasn’t seconding everything he said anymore. “But I can’t take all the credit. You did a great job on this, too, Sylvie. Really.”
She detected in herself a perverse urge to bait him, to say, “Oh? What did I do?” She knew by now that he would say something patronizing: “What? Oh, a lot. You were with me all the way.” She forced herself to forgo the opportunity to make herself irritated and miserable. That was another skill she had picked up during a long marriage. She could see quarrels coming from a great distance, could play them out in her mind to confirm that there was nothing for her to gain, and then decline them. “You’re sweet, Paul.”
She swerved into the turn at Beverly Glen, crossed the intersection at the Cadillac dealership onto Tyrone, and kept going north toward home. She moved up the back streets until she came to Vanowen, and then followed it west nearly to their house. She was thinking ahead. In less than a day, they could be on their way to Madrid.
She drove up to the house and pulled into the driveway. It was late afternoon now, and other people in the neighborhood would be getting home soon. That felt good. She loved living a secret life while appearing to be doing exactly what other people did. She pushed the button on the opener and watched the garage door roll up. She drove in, turned off the engine, and closed the door behind them. “We finally killed the bitch, and now we’re home free. I love it, and I love you.” She leaned over and kissed Paul’s cheek.