"You'll give it back to me. If I can get convictions of a fair number of the old men, then I'll have more friends than I can use. It will also accomplish what you want most. Putting these people in prison forever, just like you did Carlo Balacontano, is as good as killing them, isn't it?"
He pursed his lips, and there was a pained expression in his eyes. "I appreciate the offer, and I believe it's real. But I can't accept it."
"What's wrong? What is it that's missing? I'm offering to keep you alive for as long as you want federal protection. If you don't get off the streets to a place where they can't reach you, they'll kill you."
"They'll keep trying, certainly."
She watched him as he drove back along Ventura Boulevard to Lankershim and then up the steep hill to her hotel. As he pulled into the circle in front of the entrance, she said, "Maybe this isn't the best I can do. Give me a chance. You haven't said what's missing. Just tell me, and I'll try to get it."
"Freedom," he said.
"I don't know how to give you that," she said. "The things you've done don't leave me a way."
"Exactly."
He stopped in front of the entrance and looked at her expectantly. She got out of the car and then stood for a moment, watching him as he moved the car forward and turned to leave the circular drive.
30
He drove off the circle and onto the driveway, watching her in the rearview mirror as she turned, walked into the hotel, and disappeared. He felt a small twinge of regret as he turned from the driveway onto the sloping road down the hill. He had begun to feel a kind of interest in her. It wasn't affection, just a kind of sympathy for her position in this mess. He thought about the little he knew about her. She had, about twenty years ago, signed on at the Justice Department. Since then, she had apparently given her job an honest effort. She had lost her husband somehow-cancer, if he remembered right-before he had even become aware of who she was, and she had raised her two kids alone. He was glad she hadn't done anything foolish to try to get him captured. He would have hated killing her.
He coasted down the long hill from the Universal complex, keeping his speed from increasing too quickly. The steep road headed due west to Lankershim Boulevard, then flattened and crossed it onto the bridge over the freeway. As he reached the level pavement at the bottom of the hill at the intersection, he looked in his rearview mirror and saw something that disturbed him. The car coming down the hill behind him was a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria. There was a driver wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, a tan short-sleeved shirt over a black T-shirt. A man in the passenger seat wore a brimmed cap that was a drab beige. He had a moustache and wore a pair of yellow shooting glasses.
It was this man that disturbed him. He was fiddling with something that rested on his lap. The fact that the car was pointed downward on the hill allowed Schaeffer to see through the windshield over the dashboard into the front seats. What the man in the passenger seat had on his lap appeared to be a small automatic weapon with a long silencer fitted on the short barrel. It looked like an Ingram MAC-10. He lifted it slightly, barrel upward, and slid a long magazine into the handle. Then he turned the weapon slightly and fiddled with the selector lever.
The light turned green, but Schaeffer didn't cross Lankershim. Instead, he quickly turned right just as the first of a large group of pedestrians was stepping off the curb into the crosswalk that led to the Universal Studios entrance from the bus and subway station across the street. He glanced in the mirror and saw that the stream of people that had spilled into the wake of his car had blocked the blue Crown Victoria. He memorized the car's exact color and shape as he sped up Lankershim.
He veered to the right at the fork onto Cahuenga, then turned right again to try to lose himself in the residential streets on that side. He had no real knowledge of the neighborhood, but he had the sense that in the flats of the east valley, there was a grid of north-south streets crossed by the big east-west boulevards-Ventura, Moorpark, Riverside, Magnolia, Burbank. He made a zigzag pattern as he sped away from Universal. He turned right on Riverside and drove east. He remembered that in this direction were Griffith Park and Burbank and Pasadena.
He had to find a telephone. As he drove along Riverside, he saw a Marie Callender's restaurant. He swung into the parking lot, trotted into the building, and put coins into the pay phone by the men's room. He dialed Elizabeth Waring's cell number. He heard her say "Hello?"
"It's me," he said.
"Have you changed-"
"No. Just listen. When I drove away from your hotel, two men in a blue Crown Vic pulled out after me. If they don't belong to you, then they're more shooters."
"How can you be sure?"
"One of them has what looks like a MAC-10 with a silencer. Are they yours?"
"No."
"They didn't follow me to your hotel today. I was watching for somebody like them. That means they knew where you were staying, and after they lost me in Pasadena this morning, they went to your hotel. They must have assumed that at some point I would show up."
"I can call the-"
"Don't call anybody. You've got to get on a plane and go home now. Right now. As soon as they realize they've lost me, they'll be back at your hotel. You're all they've got. So go."
"But I-" Even as she began to argue, she knew she was talking to dead air. She pressed the button on her phone, stepped to the closet, laid each outfit in her suitcase, and folded it over once. She went into the bathroom, got her toiletry kit, set it in the suitcase, and shut it.
She lifted the suitcase off the stand and set it on the floor, extended the handle, then picked up the hotel phone and punched the number for the front desk. "This is Ms. Waring in room 802. I'm checking out now. Could you please hold a cab for me? I'll be going to LAX."
As she rode the elevator down to the lobby, she reviewed what had just happened and what she was about to do. She was satisfied. She had no doubt that the Butcher's Boy, of all people, would recognize a pair of professional assassins if he saw them and would make a reliable guess about how they had come to be where they were. If professional killers knew who she was, then he was right that it was best for her to leave Los Angeles. If he lost them-when he lost them-they could only go back to her hotel looking for her. They seemed to see her as their easiest link to him. They probably assumed she would be a valuable hostage, or at least bait for an ambush.
They obviously didn't get it. They had no way of knowing that he was incapable of forming personal ties to people like her and that, most of the time, he cared very little which people died and which didn't. For him, death had always been a commodity to sell and be paid for. At the moment he was only interested in killing as many of the men who had voted to kill him as he could.
She strode quickly to the front desk, accepted the printed bill, and said, "Leave it on my credit card." The clerk at the desk said, "Your cab is at the door, Ms. Waring. Have a pleasant flight."
"Thank you," she said, and kept going. She had not exactly stopped, just walked along the counter on the way out. As the driver put her suitcase into the trunk, she sat in the back seat and scanned the lot, the sidewalks, the long drive. The driver got in and asked, "Which airline are you going to?" and she answered, "United. Terminal Seven." As he drove, she looked out the back window for a long time, hoping that the absence of the team of shooters didn't mean that they had caught up with the Butcher's Boy.
Schaeffer walked out of the restaurant with his head down and crossed the parking lot. He got into his car and pulled out of the lot onto Riverside Drive and headed eastward. He drove with determination, but was careful not to go too far over the speed limit. No matter what was chasing him, he couldn't afford to be pulled over with about a dozen stolen guns, all of them loaded, and some of them the property of dead men.