“Yes.” He half-turned again. “You won’t even talk to me?” There were tears forming in his eyes.
“No. I want you to go away.”
The tension went out of Herrenberg’s muscles. Gaffney unlocked the handcuffs and removed them, then put his hand on his gun, but Herrenberg didn’t even look back to see the gesture. He stepped out the door, down the steps to the outer door, and kept going.
Gaffney closed and locked the door, and turned.
Sandy was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, looking at him with her arms folded. “Are you sleepy?”
“Not now.”
“Me either.” As she stepped backward into the bedroom, she pulled the nightgown up and off, then threw it aside.
20
SPENCE SAT on the roof of the Bank of America building on Ventura Boulevard and watched the sun lighten the sky beyond the gradual curve where Du-Par’s and Trader Joe’s were just visible. He could hear one of the local flocks of escaped parrots screeching in first flight, and the cars that went by on the street weren’t late-night partygoers and insomniacs now. These were regular people on their way to work.
He knelt and reached down for the .308 Remington rifle he had lying on the blanket. He ejected the box magazine, opened the bolt to be sure there was no round in the chamber, and took the weapon apart, removing the barrel and trigger assembly from the stock. He wrapped the parts in the blanket and put it into his backpack. It was clear by now that Joe Carver wasn’t planning to show up to ambush whoever came with the night’s take from the clubs. He wasn’t too surprised. It had seemed unlikely that Carver would strike two nights in a row, and that unlikeliness had been Spence’s main reason for coming.
He slipped the straps over his shoulders and crossed the roof to the back of the building, then climbed down the steel rungs set into the wall. He stayed behind the bank building, then walked along the side of the parking structure to get to the sloping lawn above the Los Angeles River, followed the high metal fence that marked the concrete bank above the concrete channel, and turned where the bridge crossed over the river at Whitsett.
While he was still on Ventura, he passed two other men walking toward bus stops and wearing backpacks. Since the cost of gasoline had gotten ridiculous, more and more people in the eastern part of the Valley had stopped taking cars to work and begun riding the bus wearing backpacks. He passed the bus stop at Whitsett and crossed the bridge.
The night had not been completely wasted. It had given Spence time to think.
Kapak was not wrong about Joe Carver. He really did seem to want to blow Kapak’s life apart. It seemed to Spence that Carver had taken up the work with enthusiasm, and he was actually making progress in ruining Kapak. But it didn’t make Spence relish the idea of killing Carver.
Spence approached his car watchfully, then put the backpack in the trunk, got on the freeway at Laurel Canyon, and drove to Kapak’s house. He left his car a hundred feet from the front gate and went through the pedestrian gate with his key. As he passed the garage, he looked in the window and noticed that Kapak’s car was gone. He looked at the house. The windows were all still dark. He went inside, then walked through the building quickly, looking for signs that Kapak had been here.
When he reached the hallway to Kapak’s master suite, he removed his shoes and walked slowly along the hardwood floor in his socks, opened the door, and saw that the bed had not been slept in. On the way back he stepped into his shoes and thumbed through the directory of his telephone. Voinovich’s phone said, “The customer you dialed is out of the calling area,” which probably meant the phone was off. He got the same recording for Jimmy Gaffney and for Jerry Gaffney. He almost called Guzman, but remembered he was in the hospital recovering. He called Corona.
“Yeah?” The voice was sleepy.
“It’s me. Spence. I just got to Kapak’s house, and nobody’s here. He hasn’t been in his bed. Is something up?”
“Not that I heard.”
“How’s Guzman?”
“Not bad for a guy that was shot. They’re giving him a lot of pills for pain.”
“Tell him I’m sorry I haven’t been to see him yet. There are probably a few people watching to see who shows up.”
“I know the cops are, for sure. They’re making a list. I’m on it, but you don’t need to be. Guzman’s sleeping half the time anyway.”
“Just so he knows the rest of us haven’t dumped him there.”
“No problem. And I’ll call you if I find out what’s up with Kapak.”
Spence went to the other end of the house to the room off the pantry where he liked to sleep when he was in Kapak’s house. He sat at the table in the small room and looked closely at each of the sections on the security monitor screen until he was satisfied that no human activity was taking place.
He lay down on the narrow bed in the small room and placed his cell phone near his head so if it rang he would wake and get it quickly. He took his pistol out of his belt and put it under the pillow, then slept.
Joe Carver stepped out of his room at the motel and studied the morning for portents and omens. Yesterday it had been clear and hot, and today would be an exact repetition of the day. The weatherwoman on television—a person who had been so surgically altered that her body was like a child’s drawing of a woman and her face had the wide unchanging stare and protruding mouth of a bass—had stood in front of a chart that displayed a row of seven calendar days that each held a perfect yellow ball of a sun and the number 102. Carver knew that the best time for moving around the city was now, before it was fully light out.
He found his car undisturbed in the motel’s parking lot, held his breath while he started it, and then chuckled at himself for being nervous. There was no reason to imagine any of Kapak’s men knew he had a car, and even if they had found it here, that any of them was capable of rigging it to explode. He drove toward the plaza in Encino where there was a restaurant that served customers breakfast in a shady, enclosed alcove down a flight of stairs below street level.
Now that his anger was fading, he was ready to decide exactly what he wanted to do next. He knew he wanted Kapak’s men to leave him alone so he could restart his new life in Los Angeles. He wasn’t sure how to accomplish that without destroying them, and he wasn’t a murderer. At least, he had managed to keep from being one so far. The fact that he was here in Los Angeles at all had been because of a problem in Chicago that made the Kapak situation seem irritatingly familiar. He remembered the night it started.
It was late. His name was still Pete Rollins and he still smoked. He stepped outside the bar he owned and stood in the shadows under the awning, smoking a cigarette and watching a gentle snowfall building a feathery white layer over the sidewalk.
He saw a man drive up in a black Cadillac Escalade and stop in front of the building. Two men wearing long overcoats got out and headed into his bar. He snuffed out his cigarette in the sand-filled urn beside the door and went inside to make drinks for the newcomers.
He stepped into the warm, quiet room with the dark antique wood paneling and thick woodwork, and the glowing lights behind the bar that made the liquor bottles look like amber and emerald and diamond. He was proud of his establishment. As he walked in, he actually relished the sensation of surprise and pleasure his new customers must be feeling.
He came through the inner doorway just as the guns came out from under the long coats. They looked to Rollins like AK-47s with the wooden stocks cut off. The shorter man started firing into one of the customers at the bar while the other turned his body in a semicircle, sweeping the barrel of his rifle like the gun in a tank turret, ready to open up, but searching for a target. Rollins was astonished. The man who had been standing at the bar remained upright for a moment, and then collapsed into what looked like a pile of blood-soaked clothes on the floor.