Page 44 of Hero

“I don’t know. You’re an investigative journalist. Maybe you can help figure out who is behind this. The boys with the guns aren’t the problem anymore. The one I need to catch is the one who hired them and hired the man who killed my boss and is trying to kill me. I think that one place to start might be by finding who has a previous connection to the lawyers who organized the picketing at my building and downtown.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “I really will.”

In a few more minutes he was turning into the driveway by the big house. He followed the pavement around the corner of the house, pressed the remote control, and glided under the rising door into the garage. Then he set the remote control into the drink holder at the front of the console and parked. They walked to the guesthouse and she watched him spend a minute doing the things that people did when they came home late at night—glancing at windows and adjusting the thermostat and looking around to be sure everything was the way he remembered leaving it.

He said, “We’ll set you up in my room, and I’ll go camp out in the main house again, since you seem determined to resist my many attractions.”

“Don’t feel disappointed,” she said. “Tonight I would make a better doorstop than girlfriend.”

“At least you’ll have clean sheets, since you washed them. I dried them and put them back on the bed.”

“Good for me. Thanks.”

He went to the door. “Good night.”

“Good night.” She almost faked a yawn, but sensed it would look fake. She watched the same lights go on in the lower windows of the big house and then go out and new ones appear on the second floor. After a few minutes they disappeared too. It was time to get to work. Her killer could already be on his way. Justine turned out the lights in the guesthouse and sat back down in case Joe had decided to watch her for a few minutes to be sure she wasn’t up to something secret that he should know about. She was.

Justine used the time to evaluate her situation. She had been sleeping for hours before Marina the lawyer arrived, then more hours before the pounding on the doors of the hotel rooms had roused everyone andbegun the evacuation, so she was probably much more rested than her killer was. She’d had a good dinner. She had run, but he had run too.

What she had done after that was crazy, but she had realized that she had already exhausted the rational and normal ways of staying alive. The killer had found her everywhere except one place. The only thing she’d done that had helped her was to use poor Joe, who was a giant sucker because he was a writer, and that made him a slave to his nosiness.

She knew she had reached the end of Joe’s usefulness. Things were now beyond his capabilities, and all she could possibly accomplish if she accepted more of his help was to get him killed.

Justine had become convinced tonight that the hunt was not going to end in her favor. When her opponent had the only gun, there wasn’t really such a thing as a defense. There were only hiding and running. Being under police investigation made it illegal to do either, and she was out of effective ways in any case.

She waited for her eyes to get adjusted to the darkness in the guesthouse. She wished for her grandmother. She had often remembered things after she’d grown up and wondered whether she had merely imagined they had come from her grandmother. Some had seemed to be things no grown-up would ever say to a child.

“We were cozy and warm and safe until one day our parents and our aunts and uncles started to whisper. If one of us wandered into a room where they were whispering, they would stop. Then one day, my mother was a different person. The other adults were still whispering. I had begun to sneak around and listen, so I already knew plenty.

“She told me more. There had been a battle miles and miles away. The best regiments, the ones who would never give up an inch of ground, were in it. Later I heard some of them really never did give up an inch.There were so many heroes that the enemy had needed to bring up earth-moving machines to bury them all.

“Afterward there were still men who taught us to fight. We had no weapons, so they taught us to make the world a weapon—dig ditches and put spikes upright in them, ruin roads, bury food, weaken the wood floors of houses so they’d fall through. Later, when people stole bullets from the bodies of enemies, we made what they call in English ‘zip guns’ from pipe and wood handles and rubber from tire inner tubes. One shot only, and then half of them blew up or fell apart. Some people learned to make bombs. They used them for traps, but some of the makers blew themselves up or burned to death. But we made the world a terrible place for invaders. It was all we had the power to do.”

Justine judged that she had remained still as long as she dared. She could see much better now. It occurred to her that she was also less frightened. She was used to night. Since the age of twenty-one she had spent more of her waking hours after dark than in sunlight. She had worked those hours to make some famous client or other safe to step into the electric glare that came with attention. She had been good at taking them out of the light with her afterward.

Justine had already thoroughly searched Joe’s bedroom, but now she went looking for other places where he might have hidden something. She was hoping to find a gun, longing for one, imagining one as though to prepare herself to detect its shape. She was choosing to search in places where a person might hide one—in a drawer under dish towels, in a covered pot or pan, under a couch, in the back of a file drawer. She opened the coat closet and ran a hand over the surface of the high shelf, and felt inside the three shoe boxes he had on the floor. She swept her hand among the jackets hanging on hangers to detect anything hard and heavy.

Justine knew that people tended to hide things as close to them as possible, with the bedroom the favorite place. She could barely accept the fact that she had been luckless in her search for weapons, but she had no more time. She would have to use what there was. She went to the butcher block on the kitchen counter and pulled a few knives out part way to learn what was beneath the identical handles. She rejected the bread knife, the chopper, and both the large and small butcher knives. She selected the boning knife, which had a narrow, rigid blade about eight inches long. It was very sharp, had a pointed tip, and a bit of a widening at the bottom of the handle to give her fingers some hope of a stable grip.

Now she was armed about as well as she could have been three thousand years ago. Maybe she could do better. The guesthouse was a reflection of Joe Alston. He was the kind of man who was able to throw a laptop and a change of clothes into a bag and go find out about something happening ten thousand miles away. He wasn’t very interested in possessions. When he could, he put them in drawers and closets so he didn’t have to look at them. What he had that she might be able to use was a friend who wasn’t like that.

He was living in the guesthouse of James Peter Turpin, who was a producer and director. Joe had told her nothing of the story, but she’d met Turpin once at some event. She’d noticed the two men were about the same age, were both physically fit but no longer athletes. They had the same Norhteastern inflection. She guessed they had been friends somewhere before they’d both reached LA—probably in college or some early job.

James Turpin was rich, and he was famous in the only way that mattered to serious men. People who made a difference in the entertainment business knew him, but to other people his name was just one offifty or a hundred on a rolling list of credits. Looking at the house and grounds told her that Turpin was not Spartan like Joe. He bought cars and furniture, had people keep every plant trimmed and watered, the buildings in repair and painted.

He had made a few successful movies in which the characters were all bent on murdering each other, so it was possible that somebody might have given him something dangerous as a souvenir. Male movie people were always doing that kind of thing—giving a sword or dagger or something that had been used as a prop to the person who had made the luck that was enhancing the others’ lives. She didn’t dare waste her emotion hoping for a pistol, but she knew Turpin had made a movie set in the Amazon that had featured blowguns with poisoned darts. Even one of those would be an improvement over what she had. She had followed that train of thought as a way of calming herself, but it was so close to the truth that it made her admit to herself that with the passing of time she was beginning to feel afraid.

When Joe had driven her here the first time, she had seen that the far space in the garage had been occupied by an antique sports car that was half hidden by a dust cover, probably something Turpin had bought intending to have it rebuilt. It showed her that he had enough of that rich people whimsy that he might own something else she could use.

She moved across the dark living room to the side facing the main house, unlocked the door leading to the pool, and stood motionless for a minute to be sure that her killer hadn’t arrived yet. Then she opened the door and stepped out. She made her way in the silent, dark night to the side door of the garage. She had seen Joe open this door without a key, so she entered and closed the door. There was a light switch on the wall, so she turned it on. There was a long workbench along the back wall, and on it were battery-operated power tools, all charging from arow of outlets on the wall. They were not the sort of mismatched tools that workmen bought, one at a time over a period of years as they were needed. These were a set, all bought at once. There was also a lot of irrelevant stuff in this area—a couple of cigars and a pack of matches, baseball caps on hooks, some receipts, a putty knife, a bottle opener in the shape of a hula dancer.

She walked to the old car parked in the far space. She pulled back the tarp. The finish made her pause. It was dark blue. The car must be about ninety years old, but it gleamed. She knew it was the kind of paint that had been sprayed on and dried, then rubbed by hand with extremely mild abrasives, painted again and rubbed again, maybe a dozen layers so it had depth, like a gemstone. But pulling back the dust cover allowed her to see something else. Under the chassis was a large sheet metal pan, about an inch and a half deep. It was obviously placed there to catch oil drips. The pan was large, probably manufactured for professional shops, not for a sportscar that wasn’t much bigger than her own compact sedan. She noticed that there were some other things in the big garage. There was a low rectangular device about the size of a steamer trunk that she judged to be an emergency generator. It wasn’t hooked up to anything, so it must be here for the aftermath of the giant earthquake everybody had been waiting for since she was a child. A few feet away were two large metal gas cans, and she supposed they were for the generator.

Her killer was coming. She had made sure that he knew where to find her, and he was almost certain to be here before daylight. She had to use what she could find here. She looked at the wall above. There were two black heavy-duty extension cords about eighty to one hundred feet long hanging there on hooks. They probably had something to do with the generator too. She unhooked one and took it to the workbench. Sheused a pair of wire cutters to snip the socket off the end, and then split the two copper wires that were exposed, and stripped about four inches of the insulation off them.

She went back to the old car. The front was facing out, so she knelt in front of it and dragged the sheet metal pan out from under the car and stood the pan on its side against the garage door. She found a two-wheel dolly, brought it back, got it under the pan, and wheeled it out the side door to the yard.

She knew exactly where she wanted it. There was a space where the path from the garage to the main house narrowed and ran between the pool and the tropical garden. She placed the pan there. Then she stuck the bare wires in the pan and held them in position with small clamps from the workbench. She used a trowel to dig a shallow trench through the tropical garden and lay the long extension cord in it, then covered the cord with a little of the dirt. She took it all the way to the guesthouse, and left the plug directly under the outdoor socket. She used the hose to fill the pan with water, and then covered the pan with the dust cover from the sportscar so the water wouldn’t show. Then she went to the green trash can to see if there were any grass clippings. There were. She rolled the can to the pan, scooped out the grass clippings she could reach, and sprinkled them over the dust cover, then rolled the can back to its space behind the garage.

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