Page 15 of Hero

Could she go to the police and ask for some kind of protection? They would probably relish the irony after all the clients she had protected. She couldn’t do it anyway. She would have to tell them that the reason she needed help was that she’d been fired, so her former colleagues couldn’t help her. That would make the cops think she must have beenin the wrong when she’d fired her weapon at the two robbers. It would also let them know she was no longer working in the profession. That would void her reason for a gun permit, and if she had no protection, she would need to have a gun.

She would have to buy one, but that was going to be tricky. The state of California required a gun buyer to prove residence and had a ten-day waiting period before she could take possession of the weapon. After the ten days she would have to accomplish the very dicey business of substituting the new gun on her carry permit, which was borderline fraudulent to begin with. Virtually no carry permits were approved in Los Angeles County, but it was legal to carry in Los Angeles if a person had a permit issued in another county. Spengler-Nash’s employees who were armed had permits based on their supposed main residence at a ranch the company owned in Kern County. She would have to lie, change nothing on official paperwork, and keep the permit she had.

To Justine’s growing uneasiness was added the maddening knowledge that being unarmed was her own fault, another proof that she had been asleep instead of anticipating what could happen. Many of the bodyguards she’d worked with—especially the men—owned more than one pistol. They liked guns, some of them maybe too much.

Justine wanted to drive home to her condominium, but she knew it would be insane not to begin dealing with her vulnerability immediately. She drove to Burbank and parked near the gun store where she had bought ammunition and gun cleaning supplies a number of times. She walked in and picked out a man about sixty behind the counter. She said, “I would like to buy a Glock 17.”

“May I see some identification, please?”

She gave him her driver’s license to supply a government-issued ID, and her car registration because they were both in the name she was bornwith, Anna Sophia Kepka, and had the same address, and then filled out the forms he gave her on the glass counter. She used her Anna Kepka credit card to pay the $625 plus tax for the pistol and added in the cost of two fifty-round boxes of 9 x 19-millimeter ammunition. She left her phone number so the store could call her when the government clearance came through so she could pick up her purchases.

When she left the store and got into her car, she felt a bit less panicky because she had done something in her first hour out of the office. Her mind instantly reminded her she would be stupid to soothe herself with such a small step. She was still unarmed and about to drive toward her home, which was certainly no safer than Ben Spengler’s, and a hell of a lot smaller. She sat in the driver’s seat and studied each of the cars parked within her sight, paying particular attention to the ones in her mirrors. Then she started her engine and pulled out, her eyes flicking back to her mirrors long enough to be sure none of the cars pulled out to follow.

10

Leo Sealy drove to Westwood, partly because it was nowhere near his home or his destination, so having his picture on security footage and receipts in his pocket might actually be helpful. He parked in the municipal parking structure on Broxton. When he walked out of the parking structure, he looked at the spot where he wanted a restaurant to be and the Broxton Brewery was there, so he went in to eat dinner.

Looking so hard for Justine Poole was turning Sealy into a nocturnal creature once again. He’d always found it safest and most comfortable to do his killing at night, and he hoped that this night was going to be another profitable one. But where was Justine Poole? She hadn’t been to her condo, and she hadn’t been in Benjamin Spengler’s mansion, so where was she?

He thought about what he would be doing if he were Justine Poole. There were two leading possibilities. One was to get out of Los Angeles, and the other was to stay and be hard to find. He had not found anybody he could identify as her family yet. Looking for Anna Kepka had beenfruitless. There were also thousands of Pooles all over the country, and he had no reason to connect any of them with her either. She was probably too sensible to go and hide with family anyway, because staying with them would ultimately make finding her easier, and make killing them necessary. Killing Benjamin Spengler had bought Sealy some time, but it almost certainly had alerted Justine Poole to the fact that a professional was coming for her next. He was fairly sure she would stay in LA, but try to be invisible.

If she had been working at Spengler-Nash she must know Los Angeles well, and that meant she knew places she could go where she wouldn’t be easy to spot or to get close to. Her profession also made her potentially challenging in other ways. The personal security business was mostly about keeping drunken fans away from celebrities and about smoothing the way for businessmen whose time was worth a lot of money, but sometimes clients were people with real enemies, so she would be in the habit of keeping her eyes open and recognizing who was harmless and who wasn’t.

He guessed that she would be skittish tonight, and very watchful. If he were Justine Poole, he would stay where he had a feel for things and knew people. A benefit of her job was that many of the people she knew carried guns. She would probably be staying with a friend from work or a group of them. When it was late enough, he finished his dinner, paid for his food, and went to get his car. He put on his baseball cap and KN95 mask, drove down the ramp onto Broxton, and headed downtown.

He was going to watch the changing of the shifts at Spengler-Nash. The eightP.M.-to-fiveA.M.had to be her regular shift if she had been on duty the night of the attempted robbery. He still had not seen a picture of Justine Poole, but he thought he probably could pick her out. Heexpected she might be good at sneaking out of the place at the end of her shift, but he would find her because the others would show her to him by trying to protect her.

Sealy followed his rule of not driving past the place where he intended to commit a crime, even when he was driving a car with stolen plates. Security cameras were everywhere. He parked one street away, walked between two buildings, and waited in the dark space across the street from Spengler-Nash.

He watched the eight o’clock shift arriving. They drove into the entrance to an underground parking lot, then disappeared down a ramp. It was hard to see drivers well, but some of them were women.

At eight he knew she was probably inside. The people in her specialty, the ones who went out to guard clients, would be leaving on assignments soon. He couldn’t be sure that she would be going out on assignments so soon after Spengler had gotten himself killed. She might be stuck at a desk while she waited for things to cool down or get worse. He needed to get a different angle to watch the bodyguards leaving. He walked down the sidewalk from the building and stopped just around the first corner near the traffic signal so he could study each car that passed. Four of the cars that went by were nearly identical black SUVs with the Bentley logo on them. The drivers, male and female, wore the same black outfit. He couldn’t see who else was in the cars, but he guessed that they were all on their way to an event or events where the security was supposed to be visible and substantial, but still upscale. There were other cars that seemed chosen to go unnoticed. The bodyguards were alone or in pairs, driving cars that seemed to be personal and ordinary, practically invisible in a city with three million cars. His attempt to spot someone who had to be Justine Poole failed. He headed back toward the building.

As he walked, he studied the buildings near the Spengler-Nash office. The headquarters space was on the fifth floor, so he needed a higher vantage to look down into the fifth-floor windows. There were three buildings that were tall enough, but he saw problems that would preclude his using any of the three. One was a bank, so it would have all of the best technology installed to keep out people like him. The second was a fancy apartment building, so the only entrance to the elevators and stairs was through a single lobby with twenty-four-hour security guards and doormen, also there to keep out people like him. The third was too far away from the Spengler-Nash building, and the apartment building blocked the view from there. A single clean kill with a rifle shot through her office window was not practical this time.

Sealy returned to his car and drove back toward his apartment to wait for Justine Poole’s shift to end, so he could watch her and her colleagues emerge from the parking garage and head home. He hoped to pick her out immediately, but he knew now that spotting her wouldn’t be that easy. He would have to look for a twenty-nine-year-old woman who left with another person, and follow them to a house or apartment. If it was two women, he would see which one used a key to open the door, and kill the other one. If it was more than two people, he would ignore the one with the key and shoot as many of the others as he could before they could scatter.

At fourA.M.he returned downtown to the Spengler-Nash building. His parking space on the next street was still empty when he arrived. After a few minutes watching he began to see morning shift people arriving. Each time a car arrived, the iron gate on the entrance rose to admit it. Spengler-Nash was obviously on a twenty-four-hour schedule, and it made sense that shifts overlapped, so if a bodyguard on a jobneeded help there would be plenty of people to send. But this increased the number of people and cars in the garage during the overlap, and it gave him his chance. He watched for a few more seconds, then got out of his car and walked toward Broadway, the street where Spengler-Nash was. He crossed the street half a block away so he could approach the entrance near the left side while the morning shift cars entered on the right side. He walked to the entrance, pivoted to the left and walked along the inner wall to an aisle where every space was taken, and knelt down to tie his shoe beside a car. The people arriving who might have noticed a man on foot on the other end of the garage parked their cars and disappeared into the elevators.

He saw the first members of the night shift come out of an elevator. They were both middle-aged men, one of them a tall, athletic-looking Black man with short gray hair. He wore a gray sport coat that was slightly looser than the current style, and Sealy supposed it was to conceal the gun in his shoulder holster. The other man looked to Sealy like the type of prey he had at first assumed he’d be after. This one had dark, thinning hair and a mustache. He leaned from side to side as he maneuvered his paunchy body from the elevator to his car. Everything about him said he was a retired cop, probably one with a leg injury.

Sealy ducked into the emergency stairwell and climbed. He ran up the stairs two at a time, and arrived at a door marked “5” quickly. He was breathing hard, but he controlled this, taking deep breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth for only about thirty seconds before his breathing was silent. He opened the door a crack and looked toward the elevators.

Both elevators were stopped on the fifth floor filling up with another load of night-shift people going home. What he was doing was risky, but if he got even a brief look at Justine Poole’s face and followed her tothe address where she was staying, she was as good as dead. And taking risks was what Mr. Conger was paying him for.

People came through the hallway and into the elevators. Some wore clothes that Sealy could only think of as disguises—garments designed to help them fill a role. One man wore a tuxedo, another wore a sweatsuit that said “University of Pennsylvania” on it. Four men wore black synthetic jackets and pants with a lot of zippered pockets, and two women in cocktail dresses clutched small purses as they headed for the elevator on high heels. Both of them were older than twenty-nine, he judged—too old to be Justine Poole. The elevator doors closed, and while the next bunch gathered to wait for it to come back up, he had more time to study them in full, bright light and listen to their talk.

Sealy kept watching and evaluating. He rejected the males and, one by one, the women wearing costumes. After a few minutes he began to feel the urgency of picking one. He couldn’t wait until they were all gone to find her. Already the stream of people was starting to thin out. He began to think he might have missed her. Then he realized he might have misinterpreted their tactic.

If they really wanted to protect her, they might be waiting until everyone was gone instead of bringing her out early. Maybe all of the first people out were, in a sense, decoys. Somewhere behind the darkened windows on the ground floor one of the staff could be watching for somebody like him to make a move and reveal himself. Maybe his best countertactic now was to outwait them.

It took a great deal of self-discipline to stand in the stairwell watching through a half-inch open space in a nearly closed door. Several times he tried to guess which of the people who had already left had been the one. He had also guessed that Justine Poole and her friend would get into the same car. Maybe that had been his mistake.

Then he saw three women, all wearing the black uniforms, emerge from a doorway and head to the elevators. They talked to each other in quiet, friendly tones, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying, except for an occasional phrase or single word. It was like eavesdropping on a conversation in a foreign language. Then one of them, a woman about forty, said, “Justine.”

At first he wasn’t sure, but then all three of them looked behind them as though to see if anyone else had overheard. Just then the elevator arrived, and one of them tugged the one who had spoken into it while the third pushed a button in the elevator and the door closed.

Sealy spun and descended the stairs as quickly as he could, grasping both railings to hoist himself up and vault down four or five steps at a time. When he reached the garage level, he saw the three women walking away from the elevator. He took out his cell phone, steadied it by leaning on a pillar and began taking pictures, about three a second.

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