Her own blinds were open, the room's light thoughtlessly left on, and if he squinted through the still-bright noon sunlight, Stuart could just make out what appeared to be a poster on Bethany's bedroom wall. Scanning down, he got to Bethany's front door. Abruptly stepping back from the window, he realized how close the two buildings were-a hundred feet? Less? He could clearly read the greenish brass numbers of their street address set in the stucco next to the
door. Bethany's identification of his car, even in the dark, would be credible if not compelling if she got it in front of a jury.
The thought of himself in front of a jury turned him around and brought him beyond the master bedroom to the back end of the house. There, beside his tiny office, in a closet filled with file cabinets, piles of manuscript pages, rarely worn clothing, and free samples of fishing and other outdoor gear he'd endorsed, he moved an old blanket and some sweaters and junk out of the way and got down on one knee. With the door open behind him for the light, he worked the combination on his safe, reached in and felt the old Crown Royal bag in which he kept his gun wrapped, and pulled it out.
As always, the Smith & Wesson 9GVE pistol felt heavier than he knew it to be. Its empty, unloaded weight was less than two pounds, but the thing always had what he considered to be a psychic heft that made up for its diminutive size. At four inches of barrel length, the gun was a short, snubby, recreational weapon that he'd bought on a lark long before his marriage and rarely used since. He'd bought it, basically, for fun.
But today, in his nonreflective mood, he stood with the velvet bag and its gun in one hand, its two clips and one box of bullets in the other, and crossed the room to sit at his desk. Moving his keyboard out of the way, he reached in and pulled out the gun. Doubly wrapped as it was in an old, oil-stained T-shirt, he unwrapped the package and set it down in front of him.
He always kept it clean and well oiled, and now he felt a modicum of satisfaction that it was ready to shoot. Checking the date on his nearly full box of 9mm bullets, he realized that he must have bought the ammunition on his last trip to the range at the beginning of the summer. More good news. He didn't want to have to stop and buy more bullets and face even the cursory questions of a clerk or, worse, possible recognition.
Pulling each bullet out individually, he checked them for external imperfections, but found none in any of the nine (eight for the clip and then, after racking a round, one in the chamber) that he slapped into the pistol's handle. Neither were there any bullet problems for the second clip that he slipped into the pocket of his Levi's.
The gun loaded now, the safety on and double-checked, Stuart stood up, and leaving his empty Crown Royal bag and half box of bullets on the computer table, he went back to the safe. Reaching in, he grabbed from a pile of fifty-dollar bills that he kept there for just such an emergency. Flipping through the money, it seemed to him that it was significantly less than he thought he'd put away, but there were still several hundred dollars all told, plenty to get by on for a while. Closing the door and twisting the combo lock, he went back to his computer, moved the ammunition box out of the way, and put the loaded gun onto the desk proper. In his ergonomic chair, he brought the keyboard back down in front of him.
On his e-mail screen, he stared at the latest threat for the briefest instant before hitting the Reply icon and typing his own message back. Out of habit, he reread what he'd typed for spelling mistakes and typos and, finding none, moved his mouse up to Send and clicked. The text: "Come and get me, you cowardly son of a bitch"
Satisfied, he turned off the computer, picked up his S &W, and carried it into his bedroom, where he placed it carefully on the made-up bed. He did not own anything but a generic belt holster, and had no intention of using that. Nor did he have a permit to carry a concealed weapon, and that is what he fully intended to do.
But first, he needed to throw some things together. He kept his travel duffel bag on a peg in his bedroom closet, and he put that next to the gun on the bed, then went to his dresser and pulled out a week's worth of socks and underwear. He didn't know how long this was going to take; at the moment, he couldn't have said with any specificity what "this" even was. His brain took him to the probable day of his wife's funeral-the following Monday or Tuesday?-but refused to go any further.
All he knew was that he wasn't going to jail-not for a week, not for a day, not for an hour.
In the bathroom, he gathered up a small selection of essential toiletries. He thought he might find himself having trouble with sleep over the next few days, so he threw in a truly ancient, perhaps no longer effective, half-consumed bottle of Dalmane sleeping pills that Caryn had needed for a while. And her remaining Vicodin, a few tablets.
Back in the bedroom, he rolled up another pair of jeans, four T-shirts, a lightweight fleece undershirt and two identical brown pullover sweaters. It was warm today, but you never knew. This was San Francisco, and it could be midwinter by dinnertime.
The telephone by his bed rang and he started to lift the receiver, but finally let it go until the machine picked up on the fifth ring. He heard a female voice downstairs on the answering machine, but couldn't tell who it was exactly. Debra? Gina? Kymberly? Some reporter? He couldn't say and didn't care.
Finally, in the new jangling quiet, he stood in his closet, staring at his hanging clothes. He needed a moderately heavy jacket that allowed freedom of movement, that would call no attention to himself, that would cover where he intended, should the need arise, to tuck his gun into his belt at the center of his back. He chose a gray-green front-zipping parka from Mountain Hardwear and wrapped the gun in it, then stuffed it into the duffel and zipped it shut.
Downstairs, leaving his duffel bag on the dining room table, Stuart went out to the hot tub area one last time. He leaned over the tub for most of a minute, but nothing in these surroundings stuck to him. He picked up no sense of Caryn's presence, of her ghost. There was only humidity and the faint whiff of chlorine, and a vast emptiness.
The house had a side door that led to a walkway along the fence at the edge of his property. Aware of the growing probability of reporters lurking-Juhle had reported a sighting on the street when he'd come by, as had Gina and Hunt earlier-and wanting to avoid them at all costs, Stuart went down through the garage and out that door, then along the fence into his backyard, a small wasteland of yellowing grass and untended planter beds.
Stopping on the grass and looking up at the back windows of his surrounding neighbors, he made sure that no one happened to be staring out just at that moment. Satisfied, he continued down to the end of the fence, where a gate opened into another steep uphill walkway between two other houses.
Coming out on Larkin, he walked downhill for three driveways and stopped at the fourth, taking one last quick look around for reporters or bystanders. No one. He already had his key out, and now he put it where it belonged in the garage door, turned it and opened the door up. Scarce parking everywhere in San Francisco, but particularly here on Russian Hill, had forced him to rent this place for his old black Ford F-150 pickup truck for about the last seven years, beginning at eighty dollars a month-a hundred and fifty now, and considered a bargain at that.
Throwing his duffel bag onto the floor on the passenger side, he slid in behind the wheel. He fished around in the glove box for his Leatherman tool, then got out with that and walked to the street, which was lined with parked cars. Picking out a vehicle at random, and making sure it didn't have the window sticker that identified it as one of the neighborhood cars, he squatted quickly down and removed the back license plate, replacing it with his own truck's plate. He went to the front and repeated the process. In less than three minutes, the new plates were on his pickup. One minute later, he'd backed out, closed and locked the garage behind him, and driven off in the direction of Jedd Conley's office in North Beach.