Page 45 of Hero

She looked at what she had done. All of the things she had found—the drip pan, the dust cover, the extension cords, and everything else, were pieces of luck. They weren’t major ones, but they gave her more of a chance than she’d had. The last preparation, the one that made her most nervous, was the electricity. She walked to the side of the guesthouse, picked up the plug of the extension cord between her thumb and forefinger, placed her feet on the single flagstone that kept her from makingcontact with the ground, and pushed the plug into the socket. Nothing happened that she could see, but she knew everything had happened.

Her killer was smart. He was well-practiced and calm. When he hadn’t succeeded right away, he’d immediately thought of other ways to get to her. In persistence, at least, he was a bit like Justine. She stepped back into the garage and looked at her watch. It was after threeA.M.She had worked quickly and efficiently, but she and her killer had used up the night. In the next hour or so, her killer would be coming for her. This time he would find her.

She took one more look around the garage for things that might help her. She had seen the killer a few times and tried to develop strategies for evading him or outthinking him. She had thought about him for days—the way he looked, the way he killed and kept from being caught. There was no more time for Justine—or for Anna. She saw a carpenter’s hammer among the tools hanging on the wall. She took it down and tested its balance and weight. It was good. Almost any average-sized man could kill a woman with his hands. A woman swinging a hammer like this one would be a very different story.

Justine turned off the light, stepped outside, went along the pool deck to the end of the guesthouse, turned to walk under the umbrella shapes of the big trees where the shadows were deepest, and then between the tall green shrubs that had been planted for privacy. When she reached the front of the big house she turned again and found a sheltered spot beside a hedge, set down her hammer and boning knife, lay behind them on the grass, and stayed there, watching the street for the arrival of her killer.

31

Sealy drove up the quiet street toward the corner with only his fog lights on. He switched off even those and let the car’s momentum carry it into the turn onto the street where Joseph Alston lived. He accelerated out of the turn and took his foot off the pedal to coast the last block in silence. As soon as he spotted the right house he pulled over to the curb and parked.

He looked at the clock set into the dashboard. It was already after threeA.M.The delay he had run into had been maddening. By the time he had walked back to the lot a couple of blocks from the hotel to get his rental car, things had changed. While he’d been chasing Justine Poole, the police had received so many reinforcements that they had greatly widened their security perimeter and made it impervious to vehicle traffic. Hours earlier, when he had called in the bomb threat, he had been certain that his car had been parked far enough away to be outside any perimeter they might set up.

The phone conversation had been a tricky one. He had needed to tell them enough to persuade the bomb squad that he could do real damage. He had needed to distinguish himself from the lunatics and from theamateurs who used black powder or dynamite. He had mentioned a few ingredients of military-grade high explosives. That had brought out many more backup units and convinced the commanders that they needed a much wider margin of safety. He had needed to wait over two hours for the police to finish their full search of the hotel and roll up the yellow “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape before they opened the block where his car was parked.

The bomb threat call was an instance of Sealy getting in his own way, but it had happened long before the shift in the current of the universe. Things had begun to improve while he was at the hotel.

Since then, it seemed to him that the universe had begun to correct the imbalance that had allowed the girl bodyguard to survive this long. Sealy had failed at everything tonight and risked making Mr. Conger cut his contract short, but here he was.

Justine Poole was undoubtedly in that house over there, and after all the running she’d done tonight she was almost certainly asleep. The man who had picked her up on the street had been tall and slim and appeared to be in his thirties. He had to be Joseph Alston. He was probably her boyfriend or somebody who wanted to be, so Sealy had to be prepared to find him in the same bedroom and needed to be prepared to kill him too. Mr. Conger would certainly not consider him a bystander but an unavoidable obstacle. It would take two shots instead of one; not a big deal.

Sealy made one change. He had been planning to take the .357 Magnum revolver for this visit and use it on the girl so he wouldn’t have to deal with brass being ejected all over the place by the Glock. Now he decided it would be best to take only the Glock. It was lighter and slimmer than the .357 Magnum, and even the two spare loadedmagazines wouldn’t hamper his movement because he could separate them in two pockets. He reached into the console between the front seats, took out the Glock, and put it in his right jacket pocket.

It seemed a bitter irony that after an eight-year career of extreme care and professionalism, he found himself suspected by a repeat client of having become overconfident and careless. He gave his head a small involuntary shake and reached back into the console to adjust the position of the revolver. He wanted the muzzle pointed downward and the grips upward just under the lid of the console. He wanted the pistol there for insurance. There was a possibility, however remote, that he might be driving away in a few minutes with an empty weapon or feeling the need to make someone think he was, when he actually had a loaded revolver ready to go and in easy reach.

He also had a knife in his pants pocket and a strangling cord with two wooden handles in case he had the chance to work silently. Working in a big city meant there was always somebody close enough to hear. He looked at his car’s clock. He had been parked here for almost five minutes. The average emergency call to the police brought a car in about that many minutes. They always said it was three, but it was more like six. He gave it another two minutes before he was sure nobody had seen him and called. This was just another item on the checklist in his head.

He opened the car door. The dome light didn’t go on because he had turned it off before he’d headed to the hotel. This time was going to be it—the final visit. He got out and closed the door without slamming it, locked it with his key fob, and walked toward the house.

Justine lay on the grass and watched her killer walking toward the house. What the hell could he have been doing sitting in his car all that time? He had looked as though he was busy moving things here and there.

And then she knew. He was a pro. He had not been doing something stupid like using his cell phone to talk to somebody. He had been preparing his equipment. He’d been doing what she would have done—putting each item he needed in the right place on his body so his hand would go right to it when he needed it.

It was at that moment that she understood something else about him. Yes, he had been loading his pockets with the things he would need. But he had been fiddling around in the car so long because he had equipment that he wasn’t bringing. What would that be? She didn’t dare to let her mind jump at what she wished it would be. Instead, she left it open for her observations and instincts to work their way to it. She kept her eyes on him as he walked the last stretch of sidewalk, crossed the street to James Peter Turpin’s driveway, and turned into it.

He was wearing a lightweight black windbreaker, dark pants, a dark-colored baseball cap, and a black surgical mask. She knew he’d worn it to keep his white skin from reflecting light and making him visible. She regretted that she didn’t have a mask too.

Justine slowly and quietly emerged from her position among the shrubbery and stood up, listening. She heard no sound of her killer backtracking to see if he was being followed or hurrying forward to come around the house to appear behind her. She went away from the house to the front gate, out to the sidewalk and across the street. She made the rest of her trip by maintaining the maximum distance from the house, ready to hide or run or freeze. If he saw her now, thehammer and boning knife she’d brought were nothing. If he shot her from the driveway, they would just be two things to drop when she fell.

When she reached his car, she took out her phone. The license plate was undoubtedly stolen, and she knew she was taking a risk, but she had a faint hope that she could leave one more lead for the cops if she died. She set her phone’s camera, moved her body so the faint light from the street lamp would not be blocked, and took a picture, then ducked below the car’s side, crept forward, waited, and listened, holding the hammer and knife. She sent the photograph to Detective Kunkel’s phone. She was protected, for the moment, by the car’s engine block and right wheel.

She crouched, ready to spring, and stayed that way for thirty seconds before she peeked out past the car’s grille at the house. He wasn’t coming, so she raised her head to window level and looked down into the car. She couldn’t see anything on the seats or the floor, even when she used the glow of her phone’s screen. She knelt beside the right front tire again and poked the side wall of the tire with the boning knife, applied both hands to the butt of the handle, and pushed hard. The blade went in, she tugged it out, moved to the rear one and stabbed that too, then dared to come around for the other two. She heard the hiss of the air escaping and saw the car beginning to settle slightly as the tires softened.

She looked at the big house. The guesthouse wasn’t visible behind it. She knew that her killer might look for her in the main house, and if he did, Joe was in trouble. She couldn’t put off the next part any longer. It had never really been a choice.

Justine stepped to the car’s passenger window and swung the hammer. It hit the window with a bang and pounded a spray of small cubes of glass inward onto the seat and floor. She reached inside to the armrest and found the door handle. She opened the door and knelt on the seat,opened the glove compartment, found it empty, reached for the console, and flipped the top open.

The gun’s handgrips were more than a shape she had been hoping for. They had a texture that made her hand feel good as it gave her hope of living another few minutes. She lifted the revolver close to catch a little light, saw that there were rounds in the cylinder, drew herself back out of the car, and began to run.

Joe Alston woke up, swung his feet off the bed, and moved to the window. What was that noise? It had sounded like a car accident—a bang of an impact and then glass. There was nothing visible from this window, only the roofs of the garage and the guesthouse, and the dark foliage of trees and the lawn. He sensed that he shouldn’t be in a rush to turn on any lights. Justine had been in terrible danger tonight, and there was no reason to believe that had changed. He couldn’t imagine that a gang of young thieves had found her here, but he couldn’t assume that they or the professional killer hadn’t.

He stepped out of the room, across the hall to the bedroom that faced the street. He moved the window’s curtain aside and looked out. A couple of houses away there was a car parked by the curb. That was unusual for this neighborhood. All of the houses were big, with enough driveway and garage space for the inhabitants and their guests to park.

He was looking from above, so he couldn’t be sure, but there seemed to be something odd about the car. The chassis looked very low to the ground, as though the suspension had been custom-modified. Maybe it just seemed that way because there weren’t other cars to compare it to.

He moved his face closer to the glass and looked up and down the street. There was nobody on foot near it or visible anywhere, but he was still uneasy. He left that bedroom and kept going to the big sitting room at the top of the stairs.

There were big windows here that looked out over the yard, but he had already looked and seen nothing out of place in that direction. He still had the feeling that something was up. He turned and stepped to the bookcase, pulled open the section that was built into it to hide the door, slid the pocket door aside, stepped into James’s safe room, and closed both doors behind him.

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