Page 46 of Hero

He turned on the light. It was time to test his theory about the last owner’s guns. If James had been stuck with them, they would be here in the safe, and James had told him where he kept the combination. If there weren’t any, then he was sure that he had seen baseball stuff in a downstairs closet, including a bat. He would go outside and take a look with that.

Justine had to assume that her killer had heard her break the car window, and if he had, he would be on his way. He certainly knew what he had left in his car, so he would not come out into the open driveway. He would come around the back of the house to ambush her from roughly the place where she had chosen to wait for him to arrive. She forced herself not to wonder whether he would step into the electrified pan of water and kill himself, because she needed to think about what to do if he didn’t.

She dashed up the driveway, running on her toes to keep her steps quick and quiet. When she reached the five-car garage she veered tothe left to reach cover quickly and go around the back of it. As soon as she was beside it she stopped and then moved forward slowly. Both the left and right sides had human-sized doors. She gave the doorknob of the one beside her a gentle half-turn to be sure she had left them both unlocked, and then kept going, turned right at the end of the wall and continued around to the back of the garage, then moved along it toward the backyard.

Sealy had been sneaking along the side of the main house studying it for openings and vulnerabilities when he had heard the bang. Instantly he’d been certain what made a noise like that. Justine Poole, or someone, had broken a window of his rented car. He had to assume that in a fancy neighborhood like this one it hadn’t been some unrelated vandal or thief. Justine Poole hadn’t been asleep after all.

She had broken into his car, which told him several things. She had seen him coming, because otherwise the car could have been anyone’s. If so, she must have sat waiting for him to arrive. Worse, if she had not been armed before, she was armed now. The bang meant she’d tampered with his car, and he was probably not going to be able to use it to leave. Had she known or expected he would find the envelope with this return address on it? Could she have swept it out of the car to lure him here?

Sealy knew he had to take each of the obstacles, one at a time. She had probably made his car inoperable, but he could solve that. When he had arrived, he hadn’t seen the car she’d driven before, but there had to be one nearby. As soon as she and any housemates were dead, he could find any keys in the house and use them to locate and start the car they went with and get out of here. First, she had to be dead.

She was more of a problem than most. The reason she was in her predicament was that she had been called to the yard of a big house at night and shot two attackers to death before any one of the five of them could shoot her. What that probably meant was that she had been patient and controlled while they had been aggressive and stupid, thinking if they fired enough rounds in her general direction, some of them had to hit her.

He would need to be smarter and more patient than she was to win. She was probably away from his car by now, beginning to make her way toward him in the dark. He needed to make a few preparations before she arrived. His first move was to step along the side of the big house, looking hard for something he knew had to be there. He found it about where he’d expected, on the end of the big building away from the driveway. He saw the distinctive shape of the meter first, with the glass dome. Beside it was what he needed, the main circuit box. He opened the metal door and held up his phone to get a faint, weak light from the screen, found the main power circuit breaker, switched it off, and shut the door on the box. He had brought a padlock for this, and he closed the latch on the box and padlocked it. He moved his phone close to the meter so he could see the little wheel inside. It wasn’t turning now. He pocketed his phone and moved on beside the house.

When Justine heard theclacksound of the circuit breaker her breath caught in her throat and she crouched where she was, behind the garage in the dark. This had never occurred to her when she had been preparing, but it had been the first thing her killer had done. She was enraged at herself for not thinking he would cut off the power to the house. Hewasn’t going to step in the pan of water and electrocute himself. Her trap had instantly been turned into nothing. He must have wanted to be sure he didn’t set off some motion-sensor floodlight and suddenly be lit up in the open. Had he thought he’d neutralize the alarms? No, if he was a pro, he would know that the systems had a battery wired in, and the newer ones also sent wireless mobile phone signals to the company. It had to be the lights that he was afraid of.

Didn’t he know that she would hear the sound of the circuit breaker? Yes. If he hadn’t before, he knew now, after he’d tripped it. Maybe that had been his own kind of trap, and he’d wanted her to hear it. He could be crouching in the dark near the main circuit box with a round in the chamber waiting for her to come check it. She had to rely on what she knew about him, which included what he knew about her. He would know that she wasn’t completely inept in a gun fight at night. He knew she’d broken the window of his car and taken his revolver, so he knew she was armed. He had decided that his chances were better if there was no light. Justine had to make light.

Sealy was moving along the side of the house that he believed was farthest from the bedrooms, at least the ones most likely to be occupied. The big master suites were most likely to be on the upper floor at or near the wings, where it was easiest to set aside large spaces and preserve privacy. He chose a set of French doors. It was impossible to see anything inside, but their position in the back near the middle of the building was promising. It might be a dining room or a conservatory, since there was a kitchen door only a dozen feet farther along the wall.

The fact that Justine Poole had just tampered with his car proved she was outdoors. That meant that right now, for this moment, at least, the alarm system was disarmed so she could get back in. He had a choice of going inside to wait for her to return or going after her. He decided that waiting inside was too dangerous unless he knew more. He hurried along the side of the house to the corner near the driveway and stopped. She would be coming back up the driveway to get in one of the two back doors. He looked at the guesthouse or pool house or whatever it was. Maybe she would be heading there when she returned instead of the main house, but it changed nothing. He was at a choke point between the pool deck, the main house, and some kind of exotic garden. If she came up the driveway he would hear her and open fire.

Justine was behind the garage again in the darkness. She had knelt here a few minutes ago and tried to remember everything that she had seen in the garage earlier when she’d had light, and then she had gone in the side door and walked straight to them, a blind woman walking in a memory. For a moment she had considered trying to restore power by starting the generator, but only for a moment. The generator had a gasoline engine, and that made noise. Instead, she had picked up the two gasoline cans stored beside it, stepped out the far door and made her way behind the garage to the spot where she stood now.

She wasn’t quite certain where her killer was. She had been listening since the moment when she’d returned to the yard, but he seemed to be as careful as she was about making noise. She lifted the nearest five-gallon can to the back corner of the garage and set it down. She looked upat the sky again, but couldn’t see the moon or stars because of the thick layer of clouds. In LA summers, the nighttime clouds and haze almost always burned off by noon and the sun took over. It occurred to her that she might not be alive when that happened this time. She would try to be. She adjusted the revolver in her waistband and unscrewed the cap of the can. The fumes of the gasoline seemed to engulf her, and she worried that in this motionless night air her killer would smell it. She tilted the can to let a thin stream go out into the trench she’d dug in the ground, pouring it slowly so that it didn’t make aglug-glugsound. It wasn’t collecting in a puddle, so it must be flowing away from her, and when she’d poured more, she guessed it must be moving past the grass in the direction of the tropical garden. She knew she couldn’t keep pouring much longer than a minute, or he would smell it and figure out what was going on.

She closed the cap, set the can aside, and took out the book of matches she’d taken from the workbench. She held it in her left hand and tore off a match with her right. She struck the match and released it, and as she pulled her right hand back, she was already reaching for the revolver.

Sealy heard theskritchsound, and then a huff like a breath of wind, and then the whole yard behind the big house turned bright—first an explosion of blue, and then a wall of glaring orange fire streaking across the yard toward him. He tugged out his pistol, but the fire arrived and he jumped back to evade it. He had a sense of where the fire had started, so as his feet landed on solid ground, he fired five shots along the corner of the garage.

Joe Alston heard thepow-pow-pow-pow-pow. He snatched up the pistol he had just loaded, ran to the sliding door, and stepped out into the sitting room. The big windows were a single wall of bright orange light from flames as high as the second floor. He sprinted out to the upstairs landing and then ran down the staircase, turned at the bottom and ran for the French doors that led to the backyard. He stopped for a second to look, saw nothing that made any sense, but pulled the door open and stepped outside.

Sealy felt pain, looked down and saw that the left calf of his pants and his left jacket sleeve had been lit by the fire. He slapped at the flames, but his vigorous movements only made them grow and flare brighter. He dashed to the pool deck and dived. There was a wild, bright moment of flight, and then his body arced downward and plunged through the water’s surface into the cool, quiet world beneath, now illuminated by the flames billowing into the air above it.

Justine ran, closed her eyes, and covered her face as she jumped through the wall of fire to the pool deck. The heat behind her told her when to open her eyes. She caught herself, stood at the end of the pool deck, and raised the revolver.

She could see her killer under the surface of the water. He was moving his legs and arms to stay upright, but going nowhere. His right handstill held the pistol he had just fired. He let out some air that bubbled to the surface, and she saw what he was trying to do. Without the air his body sank. He brought his legs together and pointed his toes. When he touched bottom he bent his knees, pushed off, and began to rise. She watched him straighten his right arm and move his finger into the trigger guard as he rose.

Would his pistol even work? She gripped the revolver and watched him. Should she try to get back and take cover, and did she even have time? He was only about two feet below the surface now, and his right hand with the gun was coming up above his body. His legs gave a strong scissors kick.

Justine aimed the revolver at a spot about six inches below the surface and forced herself to wait until the very top of his head broke the surface, then fired. The bullet churned the water and threw up a splash so she couldn’t see him for a second, but then she could and what she saw first was blood. It was coming from his head, a swirling red cloud.

Joe Alston was running toward the gunshot noise, and he saw something through the veil of bright flames. He stopped at the deck with the gun in both hands and aimed at the only figure standing. The figure turned to look at him, and he saw that it was Justine.

That was when Justine heard the first sirens. It occurred to her that what they were responding to probably hadn’t been the shots. It hadto be the fire. The flames didn’t seem to have caught anything else yet, but they were high and bright. She set the revolver down on the pool deck and said, “Put it down, Joe. They’ll be hoping to see a man with a gun.” Then she walked toward the guesthouse, unplugged the extension cord, and headed toward the driveway to meet the firemen and police officers.

32

Mr. Conger said, “All I was doing was trying to take care of my own guys. I still have two dead men, and three others sitting in county jail for almost a week, waiting to see if they’ll even get bailed out. What I did was to make sure they knew I wouldn’t abandon them. I wanted them to be respected while they were locked up, and they would be if I let people know I stood by them. The guy I hired to do that was a first-rate guy, and he was taking care of it. You all knew Sealy. What happened to him was a fluke.”

Noore was much younger than Mr. Conger, but he was very large, at least six feet six and three hundred pounds, and that gave him a sort of aristocracy conferred by nature. “You went after Jerry Pinsky. People love Jerry Pinsky. He isn’t some little jerk who’s getting above himself wearing a two hundred thousand dollar watch and driving a Rolls to the supermarket. The minute you sent a crew to rob him you made sure the police weren’t going to be able to ignore it. What happened to your guys doesn’t matter. You brought trouble down on all of us.”

Mr. Conger believed he could still gain control of this. He assumed a smile and turned it on each of the others, one at a time. He felt thesolution was to rely on his reputation and reassert his authority. “I’ve been here for a long time. I know what works and what doesn’t.”

Ducky Sanders spoke up. “What’s been working is making them believe the robberies were being done by small groups of young guys who were friends and happened to see all the rich bastards sitting at outdoor tables in the afternoon drinking wine under umbrellas. Now they think we’re the Mafia.”

Mr. Conger said, “I get your pitch. You think I’m going to pay all of you damages for bringing you bad publicity. I’m not going to do that.”

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