"You pull a gun on someone and you can go to jail!" He half yelled it; the other half was whine, high and nasal.
I answered by shooting once, blowing the Buick's right front tire. Their hands were already up. Now they reached higher, stretching. "On your bellies!" I said, twitching my gun at the two in front of me. They went down as if their knees had melted, very cooperative, hands wide. Meanwhile I'd heard Tuuli's door close. I glanced back and saw the guy on her side backing away. She'd have her Lady Colt in her hand. I pointed the Walther at the guy still in the Buick, behind the steering wheel; his hands were up by his ears. I stepped to where I could see his other front tire, and shot it out. That left me with seven rounds. "Out!" I told him, and out he got.
"You got a trashing tool in there?" I asked. He nodded. "In back?" Another nod. "Get it out! Carefully, or I'll put one of these right through your spine." He gave a little half sob, opened the back door, and brought out a short-handled sledgehammer.
"Whose car?" I asked.
"My old man's."
"Your what?!"
"My father's."
"He know what you use it for?"
"He thinks I'm at Sepulveda Mall, ice skating."
"Hon!" I said. "Cover those three!"
"I am!"
I had the driver get back in his Buick and drive it ahead a few meters, out of the way, then get out with his hammer and lie down by the other three. "Hon," I said, "back out and then back east down the road a hundred feet or so." I was assuming none of the punks had read my plates, and I didn't want them to. When she'd done it, I had the four of them get up, watching them closely. I decided that none had a gun actually on him, though there may have been one in their car. They were dressed in the Valley Smooth style, tights with a codpiece, and not even pocket space for a handkerchief. "Pick up your tools!" I told them.
They did.
"Now trash the Buick!"
No one moved. Then I fired a round close, very close, to the head of one of them, the one nearest the car, the driver. He may have felt it zip past his ear. Whatever. He flinched and yelped. "The next one," I told him, "is right through your face."
It was really real to him now that he could die, bleed out his life right there, right then. He stepped quickly to his father's car, smashed a front window, then stopped and looked back at me. The others were moving reluctantly. "That's a start," I told him. "Keep it up."
Meanwhile Tuuli had come back and handed me the Glock. I stood there like John Wayne, a gun in each hand. The driver sobbed again, not weeping but in frustration, and again he swung, this time with more force, putting a large dent in the door. The others joined in, and in a moment they were all hammering away.
That's what they were doing while we backed off to my car and got in. I presumed the shots had been heard, and three should have been enough for someone to get a directional fix on them, more or less. I accelerated hard past the trashers, wanting to get off Mulholland onto Beverly Glen Boulevard, the quickest way into the anonymity of Valley traffic.
As we wound down the hill, I was shaking, telling myself it was all right, that no one could identify me. That they'd had it coming; that they were lucky I hadn't leg-shot them. They weren't really hard cases, but up there with the two of us alone, if we hadn't been armed, they'd hardly have settled for trashing our car.
But I didn't really calm down all the way home.
Our building loomed square and shadowed behind its sentinel date palms and the row of tall, vine-covered Mexican pines along the curb. The place had never looked so good. I stopped, put my key card into the slot, and when the cover raised, keyed in my code number. Through the open window, I heard insects or tree frogs or something chirring in the darkness, and a mockingbird tried a tentative half bar. Voices murmured on balconies, and someone laughed softly. The door swung up, and I rolled down the ramp and inside. Al, the guard covering the garage that night, waved from his booth.
I never even thought about Lon Thomas or Vic Merlin. When we got to the apartment, Tuuli and I were in one another's arms almost before the door closed.
10
TWO APPOINTMENTS
The next day I slept in till after Tuuli was up. She fixed our breakfasts, then left for an appointment in Thousand Oaks. If I hadn't had the Christman case in mind when we got in the night before, I did now. And I knew what I wanted to do next. I'd pretend to be a freelance writer, and get an interview appointment with N. Lonnberg Thomas, President of the Church of the New Gnosis.
I wasn't sure what I might accomplish, the case was still so amorphous. But church factions were suspect, and I needed to poke around and see what I could learn.
I spent a couple of hours at Gold's, doing Choi Li Fut forms followed by a Nautilus workout, had a good lunch at Morey's, then went to my office, where I created a fictional résumé of imaginary publication credits, and printed it out. Next I tried to foresee what questions Thomas or his secretary might ask before giving me an interview, and how I'd handle them.
Then I called the church, got a receptionist, and told her I wanted to speak with N. Lonnberg Thomas. When she asked what the call concerned, I told her my name was Martin Eberly—Eberly's my mother's maiden name—an identity I have official-looking documentation for, from driver's license to credit cards. That I was a freelance writer preparing an article on the church, and wanted an interview with Reverend Thomas at his earliest convenience. I'd gotten a lot of adverse statements about the church, I said, and felt I should hear its story from its own president. Particularly since I had an uncle in Detroit whom the church had relieved of his eczema and asthma.
"Give me your phone number," she said, "and Reverend Thomas can call you back."
"No," I told her, "I'm not willing to do that. My experience has been that all too often such return calls are never made. They get postponed and then forgotten. Tell Mr. Thomas that the article will be written, whether or not he talks with me."
She put me on hold for forty minutes, which didn't bother me. The executive director of a controversial outfit like Thomas' would receive more than a few calls from writers and would-be writers. One way to thin them was to leave them on hold for extended periods. While I waited, I read my new ASI Journal.
Suddenly I had only a dial tone, which did irritate me. I dialed again. This time I was only on hold four or five minutes before Thomas' personal secretary came on the line, a sound-only connection. She asked a few well-designed questions, then somewhat to my surprise gave me an appointment to talk with Thomas the next afternoon at 1:30, in the Administration Building on Campus.
It had been easier than I'd expected. After that I went to Carlos' office and we talked about the guy who'd tailed me. We couldn't see anything to do about it. And the guy knew, now, I was onto him, which could well be the end of it. There was no strong reason to think the church was responsible, or anyone interested in the Christman case. In our business you offend people from time to time, and some of them get resentful. I knew that better than almost anyone, from when I was a kid. You can also draw the attention of the police or other investigation firms, who may suspect you of operating in an area they're interested in.
* * *
It was that evening at home that I got a call from Vic Merlin. From the way he talked, I guessed he'd been a Texas country boy who'd read a lot and gone to college, then lived somewhere else. He called me Martti right away. Visually he made a very different impression on me than Sigurdsson had: he made me think of a slightly built, elderly pixie who'd grown up on grits and beef instead of herring and mutton. I told him what Sigurdsson no doubt already had—that I'd gotten his name from Sproule, and that I was investigating the disappearance of Ray Christman. I ended up with a date to meet him at the airport in Wickenberg, Arizona, in two days, at 2:30 p.m. From there he'd take me to his place.