Page 24 of Hero

“I get by.”

“How?”

“You know the ant and the grasshopper?”

“Not personally.”

“Aesop’s fables. The grasshopper fools around all summer and dies when the winter comes. The ant works hard, saves part of whatever ants get paid by their editors, and thrives.”

“He’s still an ant, though.”

“True.”

“Well, I’ll stop bothering you and let you get to work. I need to check my phones.”

“I wondered about that. Why do you have two phones?”

It seemed fair to her that he was retaliating for her prying questions, but she tried to end it. “One work and one life.” It was not quite a lie. The police had held the work phone she’d had the night of the shooting, but when she’d gone home to collect her things, she’d reactivated anolder work phone because the numbers and information it held were still valid.

Joe Alston recognized that she had accidentally given him an invitation to ask about her work, but he made a decision not to use it. He sat at his desk and took a laptop computer out of the deep drawer on the right and opened it. She was relieved that he really did have work to do. She had bought herself some time in a place where her killer would never look for her. She could stop and think of a way to help get Ben’s killer caught.

She walked to the conversation area where the furniture was, took her charger out of her purse, plugged it into the wall to charge her main phone, and sat on a couch nearby. It had occurred to her that she had little reason anymore to have two phones, but the old work phone had possibly crucial information on it and she had to keep its battery charged. She went to the wall and exchanged the phones.

She took another look at the pictures of the man who had been standing in the garage at Spengler-Nash. Then she looked at the pictures she had taken of the man driving the BMW. She was sure she had been right that they were the same man. She decided to see if he had turned up in any other pictures without her recognizing him.

This morning she had taken a few shots while she rode the shuttle bus, while she waited in line for the taxi, and then a few through the rear window of the cab. She had taken a few more in the coffee shop while she had been pretending to read her email. And there, among the people at tables, was Joe Alston, surreptitiously looking in her direction.

Justine wasn’t sure why she was doing what she was about to do. She wasn’t afraid of him or anything, but she had decided to look him up. She found he wrote under his own name, Joseph Alston, which made him seem more adult and legitimate to her, so she tapped a link.

The first article she found was from a month ago. It seemed at first to be just another of the innumerable articles about depressing failures of the city government. A group of local business owners and CEOs had begun trying to make a practical plan to build water storage systems and make possible reuse of water. Since they, together, employed a large number of engineers and architects and owned heavy equipment, they had made a good start. It was a good article.

She scanned another one. It was about unions and the recent attempts to organize fields that had never had unions before. She had begun to read with skepticism. Spengler-Nash had never had a union and for all of her time there she had received constant training, steadily rising pay, and friendly working conditions among people prepared to risk their lives for her. But as she read some of Joseph Alston’s interviews with employees in other specialized industries, she began to recognize some of the complaints. While Ben was alive everyone loved and trusted him and he treated them well. But before his body was cold, his brother and sister had come in and obliterated Justine’s working life and made her more vulnerable to Ben’s killer and to criminal charges. A union might have been able to help her in a number of ways. It was another good article.

She began to feel guilty about Joe Alston. She had correctly assessed him in several ways—a heterosexual on his own and therefore susceptible to manipulation by a young woman; a decent guy, and therefore not likely to refuse a favor, steal her jacket, or make a scene. She’d guessed he was some kind of freelancer and therefore someone with time for her to waste. She had used him to make sure that when her killer looked in the coffee shop windows, he wouldn’t find her.

She regretted that she had put him in danger—or really, drawn him into her danger. It was an unfair thing to do even in a moment of extreme need. Still, thanks to her selfish moves, they were both here inthis secret place. He seemed to be doing his work, which was all he’d wanted. And every minute she wasn’t out on the street showing her face was a minute when her killer was wasting his time and energy, getting tired and frustrated and learning nothing.

About fifteen feet away Joe Alston was looking at his computer screen. On it was a photograph of Justine Poole, the professional bodyguard who had won a shoot-out against five armed robbers, killed one—no, now it was two because the surgery hadn’t saved the wounded one—and blocked the escape of the others and gotten them arrested.

He had just written the last lines of a draft of his article about a group of unscrupulous real estate lawyers. They had been using some recent well-meaning but foolish legislation that had outlawed local zoning. His article followed several projects sure to transform residential neighborhoods into overcrowded, overheated slums with great profits to developers. His first draft had most of what he needed, but the evidence he had collected wasn’t going to disappear. If anything, it would grow fuller and stronger in the time it would take him to explore another topic.

This Justine Poole story was impossible to ignore. Reporters were already calling her a hero. Every journalist in the city was looking for her, hoping for an interview, even some small part of her story that would rate a byline or a one-minute report in front of a camera. And Justine Poole was sitting on his couch, no more than fifteen feet away.

17

Leo Sealy had turned in the BMW and was driving a white Toyota, his third rental car since he’d begun this job. He was changing everything he could, in case Justine Poole had seen him at the airport or afterward. He would keep changing things until he got her. This afternoon he was wearing a tan baseball cap with no insignia on the crown and a pair of wraparound sunglasses. These small transformations mattered. He had to fool not only Justine Poole, but random people too. Anyone who saw him twice was a potential witness.

A different car made it possible to make any sight of him a onetime thing. He was just one driver in the endless stream of cars going past. A second sight of him could raise curiosity. He tried to rent his cars in the most common colors—black, white, or silver—and never the same make or model as the last one.

Since he had succeeded in finding her hotel, guessing she would be at the airport, and following her cab from the airport way the hell out to Encino, he had temporarily lost sight of her when she’d doubled back. He had sped up and realized the cab must have turned off around the Studio City exit, so he’d gone back, found a parking space and searchedVentura Boulevard. He had walked in and out of about ten stores, four restaurants, and a coffee shop, stared into many windows, and not seen her. He had gotten back into the car and driven up and down Ventura Boulevard and its cross streets for another hour. She was on foot, so she should have been visible on the sidewalk at some point. “Should have been” meant nothing. She had probably gotten a Lyft or Uber out of there right away.

Leo Sealy usually had more success at stalking female targets and finding them quickly. They were smaller and slower and they didn’t have his physical stamina. The vast majority wore shoes that hurt them and about half were used to wearing clothes that made them stand out—bright colors, very tight or very loose, and, in this weather, short.

This one was different. She had worked in a job that involved getting clients in and out of public places without attracting attention, glancing at spaces ahead and instantly judging their risk potential and the directions trouble might come from. He was beginning to wonder whether she had seen his face at some point and could see him coming. It would also not be out of the question for her to turn serious about getting on an airplane. Los Angeles wasn’t the world. She had not done it this morning but it might have been because he had been too close behind her. She would know he’d buy a ticket, follow her in past the metal detectors, and see which plane she took.

For the moment he had to keep trying the standard methods in the hope that he would see her in one of her usual places—her home, her employer’s building, and the streets between them. If that didn’t work sometime this afternoon, his skip-tracing company might find more activity on one of her credit cards. If she was determined not to go home, she would probably need another hotel. If she kept moving with a small bag, she would need to buy clothes. If she had no place to cook, she’dneed to pay to eat somewhere. Almost anything she did would bring him straight to her. He was also always thinking, trying to invent another way. That was what made Leo Sealy one of the best.

It took Joe Alston five minutes to decide to set aside everything else and write the story of Justine Poole. He liked to think of himself as a man dedicated to finding and revealing the truth. He used this view to make himself get out of bed each morning and get to work. Not all truths were lofty or useful or made him like human beings better, but he had to write stories that were likely to strike editors as worth pursuing because people would read them.

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