He lay as still in the water as he could, hoping that if the shooter was still there, he was watching him through the scope of a rifle from a distance, where he wouldn’t be able to see if there was blood in the water or not. He held his breath, trying for one more minute, just one more minute, and then he’d make the break.
She set me up, he thought as pain started to shoot through his lungs. Literally set me up. Put me on my feet, up nice and straight where I’d be a perfect target and she’d be safe. But why? I guess I’ll have to find her and ask her.
He sank his head back under the water and then lunged up, diving for the edge of the pool. He rolled twice in the direction the shot had come from and pressed himself against the fence. Forcing himself to count slowly to five, he caught his breath and then scrambled on all fours to the sliding glass door, reached up to open it, and dove behind the sofa.
His skin pricked with the pins and needles of fear.
The house was quiet. Of course it would be, wouldn’t it, he thought, if someone were waiting with a gun. While I crouch here, naked and dripping and just wanting to lie down and cry. Okay, okay, get on with it. Get dry, get some clothes on, and get going. First things first. Let’s make sure we’re all alone in the house.
The first couple of steps were the hardest. He straightened up and walked past the big picture window. He checked behind the breakfast bar, then walked down the hallway and looked into the bedrooms and the baths. He was alone in the house. Where had all his new little friends gone? Off somewhere waiting for all the nasty blood to drain out of the filter system? Pretty damn smart, shooting him in a hot tub. So little to clean up.
They were so damn confident they had left his clothes right there in the guest bedroom where he had shucked them. His vinyl bag also. That struck him as odd. Why hadn’t they taken his belongings along with them and dumped them? Maybe they were waiting to get rid of them along with his corpse.
He checked his bag. They had clearly gone through it, but hadn’t taken anything. All his nice burglar stuff, his book, even the two grand in cash were all there. Strange, but true.
He took a towel from the bathroom rack and dried himself. Now what would Graham tell me to do in this situation, he asked himself. Easy. He’d tell me to get the fuck out of here, lay low, and call in for help. “No job is so important,” the gremlin had told him more than once, “it’s worth dying for. Believe me, son, the client wouldn’t do it for you.” None of the usual jokes or insults, just a straightforward command: Save your ass.
So, according to the Gospel According to Graham, Book One, Chapter One, Verse One, he should waste no time and haul his butt out of there. But he was beginning to get past the fear into something else: anger. He was starting to get goddamned good and pissed off that they had tried to kill him-would have killed him if he hadn’t leaned over to splash a little water on his face-and he wanted to get a little of his own back. They had made the worst kind of fool of him, set him up in the worst kind of way. Betrayed him.
The absurdity hit him. How could they betray me, he thought? It would be like Christ pulling a pistol on Judas after the kiss.
Nevertheless, he was angry. And scared. Someone had tried to kill him and he didn’t know why and that was a dangerous situation. He put on the black sweatshirt, jeans, and tennis shoes he had packed in the bag, then smeared some black greasepaint on his face. If they were out there somewhere wanting to put a bullet in him, he could at least make it a little harder on them. Then he opened the window and threw his bag out, put both hands on the top of the sill, and swung through, falling gently into some shrubs. It took him ten minutes to find just the right tree, a tall, thick cedar with a low-hanging limb. He hauled himself up on the limb and climbed as high as his fear of heights would let him: about another ten feet.
His perch gave him a nice view of the Kendall household, which was what he wanted. He especially wanted to see what would happen when someone came to dispose of a body that had disposed of itself.
Three hours is a long time on surveillance, but particularly long when you’re literally up a tree. Neal cursed everyone he could think of, starting with Joe Graham, the Man, Levine, Pendleton, the Kendalls, and concluding with one Li Lan, a true artist in every sense of the word. She painted some pretty pictures, all right.
He was still thinking about her when the car-a dumb Saab, naturally-pulled into the driveway, and the Kendalls got out. If they were shaken up with guilt, or hyped with blood lust, or even enervated from a rather special evening, they showed no signs of it. Olivia went straight into the house as Tom went around to the deck. Neal watched as he pulled the blue plastic cover over the tub and then turned the lights out. If there was supposed to be a dead Neal Carey in there, this guy sure didn’t know about it.
Maybe I imagined the whole damned thing, he thought. Then he remembered the sight of Li Lan standing naked on the deck wearing only that smile, and he could hear the sound of that bullet like it was through a headset, and he knew he hadn’t imagined anything. Someone had tried to take him out of the game permanently, and he didn’t have a clue who or why. He waited for another half hour to see if anything more interesting developed. It didn’t, so he let himself down from the tree.
Well, he thought, they suckered me with the oldest combination known to man, booze and a woman. I guess I put one over on them: They wasted their money on the booze.
He moved cautiously but at a steady pace, using the sides of the streets to walk from tree to tree. He knew it would get trickier as he got closer to town, and standing at a phone booth would be the riskiest part, but that was a chance he had to take. He remembered that there was a convenience store on the other side of town, and he headed there. His route would take him through Terminal Square and right past the bookstore and the gallery. It was too much open ground, so he cut north of the square and worked his way toward the sound of running water. He let himself down into the creekbed and followed it south. There was more creek than bed, so he spent most of the walk sloshing through ankle-deep running water-or falling into ankle-deep running water-and it took him an hour to make it to where he thought the convenience store was. He crawled to the edge of the creekbed and peeked out. He had overshot the store by about a quarter of a mile, but there, glistening in the modest parking lot, was a phone booth.
Neal walked back up along the bed, came up to the lip again, checked that the road was empty, and crossed over to the telephone.
He dialed the number he had found in his wallet.
A grumpy voice answered on the eighth ring. “What!”
“Crowe?”
“Who else?”
“It’s Neal Carey. I need your help.”
“Are you having an aesthetic crisis?”
“Sort of.”
Crowe’s Porsche 911-black, of course-rolled into the parking lot just before sunrise. Neal, huddled and shivering in the wet grass on the edge of the creekbank, scrambled across the road and jumped into the passenger seat.
“Drive,” said Neal, “and turn the heat on.”
Crowe put the car in gear, pumped up the heat, and glanced at Neal’s black clothes and black face.
“I can understand a philistine like you trying to emulate Crowe, but do you think you have perhaps taken it a bit too far?”
“Crowe, how do you feel about harboring a fugitive?”