Page 3 of Hero

“No, but since people learned I broke up with Allen last week a couple of online tabloids have been making a story out of it, saying he’s devastated and I’m a cold-hearted bitch and all that. What they don’t seem to know is that he was so heartbroken that he had to console himself in advance while he was in New York.”

“Really?”

“Yep, with three different women—two models and an actress. Any publicity is usually good, but I hope this pie thing doesn’t catch on.”

“No hard feelings? Real ones, I mean?”

“None on my side, and he gets to keep the models and actress until they read about each other.” She looked at her watch. “That was fun,but I’m tired. We’re doing a retake tomorrow and I’ve got to go in for hair and makeup at sixA.M.”

“It takes the same time to get you home as it did to get you here,” Justine said. “We’ll be at your place in fifteen minutes.”

Ben Spengler watched the dark blue Mercedes crawl past Mystique Restaurant for the third time. There were two young men in the front seat and at least two in the back, and maybe another between them. Spengler glanced at his watch. It had only been five minutes this time. The intervals were getting shorter. He suspected it was because they didn’t want to miss the moment when the high-value diners paid their checks and went home. Tonight, Jerry and Estelle Pinsky were in there meeting with some other charity donors about another idea for saving some part of the world, and the bodyguard keeping an eye on the Pinskys was Ben Spengler. He seldom gave himself client protection assignments anymore, but the Pinskys were old Hollywood, and they had been paying Spengler-Nash for security since practically his grandfather’s time. Giving them the boss’s personal attention was a courtesy.

The Mercedes was just all wrong. Those young guys couldn’t afford that Mercedes unless they were cryptocurrency speculators or a singing group he hadn’t heard of, and if they were, why the hell would they be circling Mystique? There were twenty clubs within a half mile that catered to people without gray hair, and at ten-thirty they were full of women who had made themselves beautiful to come out in twos or threes to meet somebody. He took out his cell phone and his finger moved down the contacts list toward the “P” for “Police.”

He could call them now, but he had always resisted calling them until he was watching the suspect make an unambiguous move. Calling the cops too soon only irritated them. They needed to know whether they were being asked to arrest a few young men because some older guy disapproved of their wardrobe and posture, or if they were being invited to blunder into an ambush by a squad of terrorists carrying machine guns. He looked at the word “Police” again, and then touched the name below it with his index finger.

“Poole,” said the familiar voice.

“Hey, Justine,” Spengler said. “I’m on the Pinskys. They’re in Mystique and I’ve got about four or five young guys in a Mercedes gliding past every few minutes. Have you still got Marcia Min?”

“I just took her home. She has a six o’clock call tomorrow. Where do you want me—the restaurant or the Pinskys’ house?”

“The house would be best.”

“I’ll see you there,” she said. “Let me know when they’re moving.”

“I will. Stay out of sight until we know what the plan is.”

Justine was in her car looking at her phone for the fastest route to the Pinskys’ house. She had been there a couple of times, but she was a night shift person, and she knew that sometimes the best route could be blocked by accidents or road repairs. Tonight, the GPS estimated the trip would take eight minutes.

The Pinskys lived in a big house in a part of Beverly Hills where nearly every house belonged to somebody who had screen credits, but theirs had been built forty or fifty years ago, before people had stopped feeling any discomfort about building a place that was as big as Justine’s high school. She had studied the Pinsky house the first time she’d been assigned to work a party there. The lot had originally been part of the director Miles Moncton’s ranch in the early 1920s,and she had seen an old picture of it online. There had been a few gentle hills covered with dry grass and a few California oaks scattered about fifty feet apart.

The hills were bulldozed flat at some point and the land cut into two- and three-acre parcels, but some of the old trees were still visible, probably spared to shade the houses. The road was now lined with fifteen-foot hedges like green walls, and at intervals there were iron gates blocking private roads.

She approached the Pinskys’ address and saw that neither Ben Spengler or the Pinskys had arrived. She pulled up to the gate, looked at her work phone, and found the four-digit gate code. She pressed the numbers and the gate rolled out of her way. She drove in, pulling her car up the driveway and around the garage to the parking lot that had been built there for party guests. She put on her utility belt, picked up her flashlight, got out, and walked around the house to the front.

The Pinsky house was a long, low structure that had been a typical wooden ranch house of the sort that celebrities of the 1970s still had until Jerry and Estelle Pinsky had become concerned about the fires that had burned through some Southern California neighborhoods. They had hired an architect to transform the ranch into a simulated Spanish colonial adobe rancho with a red tile roof, white concrete-and-stucco walls, and a yard that was carefully re-landscaped to ensure that nothing that could burn was within twenty feet of the house. The wooden doors and window shutters had been reinforced with steel, and the outer walls were raised to ten feet. Low desert gardens ran along the inner side of the perimeter walls. Much closer to the house were the pool, spa, patio, and tennis courts—all things that didn’t burn.

What Justine liked about it was that all the fireproofing had accidentally turned the place into a fortress. It was too bad that the rest of theworld couldn’t afford to do that, but the rest of the world hadn’t produced three or four long-running television sitcoms and two dozen movies.

She knew exactly what the next step of her job had to be. She went past the front gate and moved along the perimeter to be sure that the crew stalking the Pinskys hadn’t sent friends ahead to secure control of the place. Her search told her she was alone. She left the gate open to make sure the Pinskys could drive straight in without waiting, continue up the long driveway to the door beside the garage, slip inside the house, and engage the locks.

Justine knew where she wanted to be—close to the front gate on the inner side of the perimeter wall. That was where the gate’s electric motor was, bolted to its own small concrete foundation and shielded from view by the gray steel housing that protected it from weather and dust. Justine stepped to the other side of the motor, sat down with her back against the outer wall, and looked at her phone. There was no message from Ben Spengler, which she assured herself meant that the Pinskys still hadn’t left Mystique and Spengler was watching over them.

She put the phone away and checked her gear. She had three pairs of handcuffs on her utility belt, along with her Glock 17 and two ten-round magazines loaded with 9-millimeter rounds. When she’d left the car, she had also brought the tactical flashlight with its brutal eye-searing glare. She’d had no use for any of this equipment or place to carry it earlier tonight while she had been watching over Marcia Min at the Comedy Pit. The thought made her remember Marcia joking about the black Spengler-Nash outfit she and the others sometimes wore. She wished she were wearing hers now, instead of street clothes. She would have been more comfortable and harder to see in the dark.

Justine hated this part of the job—the waiting when she knew the threat was real and she was putting the body she lived in, the creaturethat she was, at risk. She also loved this part, when she was crouching in a well-chosen spot, knowing things the adversaries didn’t suspect yet, and sure that the most crucial thing they didn’t suspect was Justine Poole. She could feel her heart gradually increasing its beat, like an engine warming up.

She knew she must not stand up or try to look out through the gate. She needed to see her opponents well before a confrontation happened, but she also had to be alert to the possibility of an advance scout sent ahead to detect the presence of professional security. Just today Ben had sent her security footage to help her learn how the latest group of follow-home robberies were being choreographed. They hadn’t had time yet to talk seriously about how to go about stopping one.

She knew that Spengler’s method tonight would begin by following the robbers’ Mercedes and taking good, clear pictures of it that showed the license plates. When the Mercedes reached the gate—closed or open—he would pull in behind it so he could block the robbers’ escape and do whatever would get their attention away from the victims while the police caught up. Why hadn’t he called her by now?

And here came the Pinskys. She watched the glow from their headlights moving along the canopies of the trees, but she heard only the whisper of the tires on the pavement as their electric vehicle approached. The car began its turn toward the gate and a slight brightening appeared in the driveway that allowed Justine to see the paving stones. The car completed the arc and straightened, and its headlights shone up the driveway and lit the garage door as the car kept going. Jerry must have pressed the remote control in the car because the electric motor beside Justine turned and the teeth of its main gear meshed with the chain and the gate began to close behind it.

Justine rose to a crouch, keeping her head low and on the safe side of the motor housing, and waited. The garage door at the end of the driveway started to rise.

The Pinskys’ car pulled ahead and its headlights illuminated the back wall of the garage. Justine could see their silhouettes through the rear window, Jerry’s head on the left side, and Estelle’s on the right. The lights went out.Get out, she thought.Get into the house.Didn’t they know?

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