WYLY STOPPED at an In-N-Out Burger, thinking he’d refuel, then head out to one of the bars near his house, have a beer, watch the end of the Lakers game. While he was waiting to order, he changed his mind. He was eating too much junk these days. He’d noticed this morning that he’d gained a couple of pounds. Out here, that mattered. Being an ex-soldier wasn’t enough. He needed to look the part.
He pulled out of line, headed home. He had a date tomorrow night, a nurse he’d picked up at a Starbucks the week before. Girls out here were easy. He was pretty sure that if he paid for dinner and half listened to whatever she told him, they’d wind up back at her place. Playing doctor. Though he better not make that joke. He’d tried it with another nurse a month back. She hadn’t laughed.
At the Safeway on De Soto, he picked up a premade salad and low-fat turkey. The guys he’d served with would be laughing. So be it. If everything went right, in a year or two he might start getting regular acting gigs. He could deal with a few tasteless dinners.
Chatsworth was a dull middle-class neighborhood, built in the 1960s and 1970s as Los Angeles expanded into the northern end of the Valley. Houses here were packed tightly on small lots, separated by walls or hedges for privacy. Wyly made a left onto Lassen, a right onto Owensmouth, another left and right, the streets getting shorter and shorter, and finally swung into his driveway. The place had two narrow bedrooms, a galley kitchen, and a living room that barely fit a couch and a coffee table. Wyly didn’t mind. After living for years in army housing, and then that barracks in Poland, he was just glad to have a place of his own.
He caught the very end of the Lakers game, then flipped on ESPN. At about 11:30, he was watching SportsCenter, nursing a Corona Light, and slapping mustard on the low-fat turkey to make it go down easier, when the doorbell rang.
“Yeah,” Wyly yelled. “Who’s there? ”
“Domino’s.”
Wyly hadn’t ordered any pizza. A month before, Pizza Hut made the same mistake. Maybe someone was pranking him. But as a prank, ordering pizza for someone was lame. The Pizza Hut guy left, no argument, when Wyly said he hadn’t ordered it.
“Not mine,” he said. He pulled open the door, saw the Domino’s box—
And then his stomach was torn in half. The pain was worse than the worst punch he’d ever taken, not just his skin or his abs but tearing deep into his gut.
“Oh, God,” he said. He dropped his beer and stumbled backward. His upper body jackknifed, closed on itself, as he instinctively tried to protect the wound. He put his right hand to his belly and felt blood, his own blood, trickling through his fingers. Barely a second had passed. Wyly didn’t understand exactly what was happening, much less why it was happening, but he knew he was in trouble.
Wyly tried to raise his arm to defend himself, though he felt the power leaving his legs. In a few seconds, he’d be on the floor—
“No—” he said. “Ple—”
He didn’t even get to beg. The second shot caught him higher up, breaking two ribs and tearing into his right lung. His muscles collapsed. He went down hard, no acting job, no slow-motion fall into the beer puddling on the clean wood floor. No noise from the shots. A silencer. The gun, the pistol, hidden under the Domino’s box. Wyly got that much but no more. He understood the how, but not the who or the why. Wyly tried to raise his head and look at the shooter, the killer, since he knew now that he was dying, would be dead very soon.
Then the pistol spoke its lethal whisper twice more. Wyly twitched and died. Behind him, the ESPN anchors introduced SportsCenter’s top ten plays of the day.
THE SHOOTER SLIPPED the pistol, silencer still attached, into the empty pizza box, and pulled the door shut and walked to the Toyota in the driveway and slipped inside. And the car rolled out and disappeared into the blurry Los Angeles night.
4
Don’t take your guns to town. ”
Wells was pulling himself up a steep rock face, when Johnny Cash’s voice erupted from his cell phone. The dream left him, and he found himself in his cabin. He couldn’t remember why he’d been climbing, or what waited for him at the peak. He squeezed his eyes, hoping to recover the mountain. But the phone kept ringing — or, more accurately, singing — until Wells swept an arm across the bedside table and grabbed it.
“Hello.” The word stuck in his throat. His tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth. His pulse hammered in his skull, a metronome gone mad. He wondered how much he’d drunk the night before. Three beers, a couple shots. Hadn’t seemed like all that much. He supposed he wasn’t used to drinking.
“I wake you? ” Shafer sounded amused. “Long night, John? ”
Wells lifted his head, an inch at a time, peeked at the clock by the bed: 12:15. He hadn’t slept past noon in at least twenty years. Then he remembered the martini. The martini had done him in. Anne had ordered it for him at last call, over his protests. Shaken not stirred, she’d told the bartender. Then she’d winked at him. He’d wanted to be irritated, but the truth was he’d been flattered. He’d told her who he was two beers before. She was twenty-nine, a cop in Conway, divorced two years before and remaking her life. She seemed amused that he’d wound up in a cabin in New Hampshire.
“Shouldn’t you be in the other Berlin? Chasing Russians? ”
“The cold war’s over, sweetheart.” Sweetheart said like a 1950s movie star.
“Germans, then. Back in high school, I wanted to go to Berlin, see the Love Parade.”
“That big rave? ”
“That big rave. I read about it, and it sounded like the coolest thing ever. Remember, I was sixteen. Instead, I got stupid, fell in love, married Frank Poynter, and now look at me. Stuck in a bar with a guy pretending to be John Wells.”
“I am John Wells. At least I think I am.”
“Sure you are. I bet you run this scam all the time.” She laughed and kissed him. Even before the martini, they both knew she was going back to the cabin.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT, ELLIS?” But he knew, without knowing, what Shafer wanted. This call was overdue. He ignored the jackhammer in his skull and sat up. Anne reached out, ran a hand down his back.
“I want you,” Shafer said. “Your presence is requested down here.”
“Mmmph.”
“Soon as possible. If you can tear yourself away from your social obligations.”
Wells didn’t bother asking how Shafer had guessed he wasn’t alone. “Unless you want to send a plane, it’s going to be tomorrow,” he said. “That too late? ”
“Tomorrow’s fine.”
Wells hung up. His first thought, he couldn’t help himself: Something wrong with Exley? But Shafer would have told him. This was business.
Anne slid her hand over his chest.
“I have to go,” he said.
She ignored his objection and pushed him down.
When they were done, they lay still for a minute. She got up before he did and reached for the rainbow-striped panties bunched under the bed beside his jeans. Fifteen minutes later, she stood at the door to the cabin and pressed a folded-up piece of notebook paper into his hand before she left. “My e-mail address,” she said. “You’re leaving town? ”