Voinovich stomped on the gas pedal and accelerated away from the curb abruptly, so the two Gaffneys were pinned to their seats before they could get into a sitting position.
“Jesus,” Jimmy muttered.
“Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints in California,” said Jerry. “I’ve never been so shocked in my life. I thought the old man would just be sitting there alone in his kitchen having lunch or something. What the hell was that?”
“It was an ambush,” said Voinovich.
“An ambush set up for whom—us?” said Jimmy. “How could Kapak know we were coming? We weren’t even sure we were going to do it until an hour ago.”
“I don’t tell people things,” said Voinovich.
“What are you looking at me for?” Jerry said. “I only talked to you two.”
Voinovich shrugged. “All right. Then it was the old man.”
“He told himself?”
“He’s been around for a long time. When he was coming up, it was a different world. In the Balkans, where he lived, you couldn’t close your eyes. People hated you for things your great-grandfather did. Anybody who lived must have gotten good at figuring out what other people were going to do before they did it.”
“He figured out that we would come for him?”
Jimmy said, “How could he?”
“He knows us, he knows that his luck has been disappearing fast,” said Voinovich. “Maybe he knew that the next thing was going to be that his own people would turn on him. He didn’t have to know who it would be.”
“Wait a minute,” Jerry said. “We can’t just assume something like that. We’d have to do something—leave the state, kill him—and we wouldn’t even have any proof that he knew it was us.”
“If he’s smart enough to know what we were going to do before we knew, then how are we going to get him to admit he knows it was us?”
“I don’t think we want to just show up at the front door right now.”
“Call him.”
“On the phone?”
“What else is there?”
Jerry reflected. “Maybe we should. If we do it now, we sound like we couldn’t be the ones who just came to his backyard. And he doesn’t have time to think things through and make a plan to trap us.” He held out his iPhone. “Here. Call him.”
Voinovich didn’t look at it. “Did you notice I’m driving?”
Jerry held the phone out to his brother.
“Not me. You two were the ones who have this great plan to call him. Your second great plan of the day, by the way.”
Jerry scowled, pressed an icon on his phone, and smiled. “Hey, boss. It’s me, Jerry.”
The others watched him for a moment while he listened. His facial muscles relaxed. He looked relieved, then actually smiled. “I’m out trying to find out what I can about the other girl who told us about Joe Carver. I’m pretty sure Carver will show up at her house sometime.”
Jerry’s eyes widened. “Wow. Scratch that, then. Anything else you want me to do now?”
“Tell him we’re here too,” said Voinovich. “It’s not just you.”
“I’m with my brother and the Russian,” he said. “I felt sorry for the poor bastards, getting humiliated like that last night, so I’m taking them to lunch. You want to come?” The expression on Jerry Gaffney’s face was vulpine. He was staring intently, his green eyes open and a toothy smile occupying his lips and baring his teeth. “Oh. Okay, I’ll see you at the clubs tonight. Siren first? Okay.”
He put the telephone away. “He doesn’t know. He wasn’t home. Can you believe it? He wasn’t even at home when it happened. He knows nothing. Zip.”
Jimmy said, “I can’t believe you tried to get him to come with us even now.”
“Why not? He doesn’t know. We could have scooped him up and it would be like the regular plan we already had.”
“But he didn’t go for it, right?” said Voinovich.
“No. He’s busy, running some errands today,” Jerry said. “But we’re okay. We’re safe. He doesn’t suspect anything.”
“Thank God,” Jimmy said.
Voinovich’s head gave a sudden twitch. He looked in his left mirror, then the right. “Cops.”
“Oh my God,” Jimmy said. He whirled in his seat and stared out the back window. “I think he wants you to pull over.”
“How can I? We have loaded guns and ski masks and body armor.”
“You have to,” Jimmy said. “You can’t outrun a police car in this fat-assed mammoth-mobile.”
Voinovich hit the gas pedal and the SUV’s hood rose as though the vehicle were about to angle off into the sky. The back of Jimmy’s head slapped the headrest and stayed there.
Jerry took out his gun, released the magazine, and seemed to count the rounds he had left.
Jimmy said, “No. You are not going to get in a gunfight with the police. This is still something we can live through, maybe even with nothing but fines and probation.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Jerry. “If they search this car, we don’t want anything to be loaded or strapped to us. Unload yours and then Vassily’s.” He leaned forward with difficulty as Voinovich took a quick turn. “See if you can get us to a curve where we’ll be out of their sight for a few seconds. We can toss the guns.”
“Right.” He handed his gun over the seat to Jerry, then turned his body to face ahead again. He drove faster. The police car’s siren began to blip, and its lights flashed.
Jerry gathered the guns on his lap, stuffed two of them into his ski mask, the others into Jimmy’s. He opened the window beside him. “I just figured out where to go,” he said. “We can’t make it up to Mulholland. Go along Ventura Boulevard to Carpenter and head for Laurel Canyon.”
“By the elementary school?”
“Yes.”
Voinovich sped along Ventura Place to the Boulevard, zigzagging in and out of the cars. He moved into the left-turn lane, then cut into the right and onto Carpenter. It was a narrow, quiet road where cars had to pull to the side to let each other pass, but he was going over fifty past the elementary school and through the stop sign at the intersection. Just past the school, the road turned and narrowed, and there was a high wooden fence to the right.
Just as the road curved to the right, Jerry hurled the first bundled pair of guns, then the second over the fence. He could see them fall, and then bounce down the hill twenty feet into a tree-lined chasm at the edge of a big estate, where a small, rocky stream bed meandered. He remembered the gun on his ankle, tore the Velcro fasteners of the holster, and threw them both and looked back.
Two seconds later, the police car appeared again, and it was coming close to the back of the SUV.
“Better stop now,” said Jerry. “He’s getting ready to hit us to spin us around.”
They made it around the last arc of the curve and saw there were already two police cars ahead, the officers sheltering at their sides, ready to shoot.
Voinovich stopped.
There was a swarm of angry policemen, dragging them out of three doors and onto their faces on the pavement. Cops knee-dropped onto their backs, twisted their arms behind them, and clicked handcuffs on their wrists.
“Lie still. You’re under arrest.”
“What for?”
“Stealing that SUV, for starters.”
Voinovich, a few feet off, yelled, “I didn’t steal it. It’s mine.”
“It was reported stolen early this morning, and the thieves are armed robbers. That got anything to do with you?”
“I reported it, and the Pasadena police found it and gave it back. I’m Vassily Voinovich.”
Jimmy Gaffney lay on his belly in silent rage. The cop who had handcuffed him said, “You want to tell me why you’re all wearing bulletproof vests?”