Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

“They’ll question her in the house. Hopefully she’ll be too shook up to tell them anything useful.”

“Maybe so, but you don’t think she’ll stay in the house, so you? After what happened-”

“She’ll stay.”

“Why the hell would she?”

“Because,” Reynolds said quietly, “she has no place else to go.”

In the adrenaline rush of battle Abby hadn’t had time for emotion. The feeling part of her had been sealed off and shut down, quarantined until the danger was passed. Even after the gunfight she’d felt nothing except a strangely distanced sense of surprise that she was still alive.

Seeing Tess McCallum had been no surprise at all. For some reason it had seemed logical, almost inevitable that Tess would be there. Abby hadn’t questioned it. She’d been uncharacteristically subdued, inclined to accept Tess’s suggestions as if they were orders. Tess’s primary suggestion had been that Abby get out of the house and out of the neighborhood, fast.

“There’ll be police coming,” Tess said, “and the Bureau will be here, too. You don’t want to be involved in that.”

“No,” Abby agreed. “I don’t.”

“So you’d better go. I’ll say Andrea fought them off alone until I showed up. I don’t know how I’ll explain the gun-”

“It’s her gun,” Abby heard herself say. “I just borrowed it.”

“You didn’t fire your own weapon?”

“Never had the chance.”

“That’ll work, then. I’ll wipe the prints off. And I’ll make sure Andrea keeps your name out of it.”

“Okay.”

“They’ll have me tied up in debriefings for a good three hours. I’ll try to get free by nine or nine thirty. We can meet at that place in Santa Monica where we met last time.”

“The Boiler Room.”

Sirens rose in the distance. “You’d better get going,” Tess said. “Not out the back. The crime scene people will be all over that area, and we don’t need any extra shoe prints. There’s a side door that opens into the carport.”

And that was it. Abby carried her gun and her purse through the carport, then walked to her Miata. She pulled away as the sirens were closing in.

No questions asked. No protests registered. She was content to let Tess take charge.

Somewhere during the drive home to Westwood, the shock began to abate. By the time she was showering in her condo, rinsing off the smell of sweat and fear, she was starting to feel some serious rage.

Motherfuckers tried to kill her.

Yeah, and Andrea, too. But Abby wasn’t thinking much about Andrea Lowry-or Bethany Willett, or whatever she ought to be called.

When she toweled off, her hands were shaking. The details of her environment seemed too sharp, the colors too bright. Her head was humming. She wanted to lie down. Couldn’t. Had to keep moving. She had too much energy. She felt supercharged.

She changed into new clothes, choosing the outfit without conscious thought. Her mind was on the guy she’d seen at Andrea’s house, the guy who’d slipped off his singed ski mask.

Blondish hair, pale skin, narrow lips-and on his neck, a purple tattoo.

She grabbed a sheet of paper and sketched the tattoo. It was some kind of insect, probably a scorpion. The long tail with the pointed stinger was the giveaway. She folded up the picture and put it in her purse. She would need it. Later.

Before leaving the condo, she checked herself out in the full-length mirror in her bedroom. Her ensemble was borderline trashy-short skirt, tight blouse, no bra. She wondered what subliminal impulse had made her dress like a hooker. Then she thought about the scorpion tattoo, and she knew.

A man with skin art like that shouldn’t be too hard to find. One thing was for sure-she would know him if she saw him again.

And she intended to see him. She intended to have closure. Exactly what closure meant in this context, she couldn’t say. But she would have it.

Tonight.

Before they’d left, the FBI people had repaired the damage to Andrea’s phone line. She almost wished they hadn’t. For hours the phone had never stopped ringing. Finally she had jerked the cord out of the wall.

There was nothing she could do about the doorbell. Its incessant chiming had become the background music of her life.

She put tissue in her ears to block the sound. She retreated to the rear of her house, but some of her persecutors had made their way into the backyard and were banging on the rear door. Fortunately the broken glass panel had been boarded up, or they might have forced their way inside.

She withdrew into her bedroom. No escape. They were outside the windows, calling her name.

God, she hated them. TV people, radio people, newspaper people. Vultures, parasites, piranha. And they were after her again. After her-even though they didn’t know who she was. She imagined how it would be if they ever learned her real identity. She would be on constant display, a freak in a side show, twenty-hour hours a day.

She paced the house, afraid even to peep through the curtains for fear that her face would be glimpsed. If they got a picture of her and put it on TV, someone might recognize her as the Medea killer. Unlikely, after all these years, but she couldn’t take the chance.

They would leave eventually. She would wait them out. She was patient. She had endured twelve years in a mental institution. She could endure this.

Her mind kept running back over the events in the house, trying to find some logic in what had happened. Not the attack itself-there was a certain rough but inescapable logic to that-but its aftermath.

She remembered huddling behind the bed. Something exploded in the hall with a terrifying burst of light and noise. Moments later, when she heard an exchange of gunshots outside, she assumed Abby had retrieved her gun from her purse and was shooting it out with the intruders. Then there was silence, a long stretch of silence that scared her worse than the explosion and the gunfire. From the living room she heard low voices but could make out no words. Then the closing of a door-the door to the carport, she thought-and footsteps in the hall. A woman’s voice, but not Abby’s.

“Federal agent. Don’t be alarmed. The assailants have gone.”

It could be a trick. Andrea remained hidden.

“Ms. Lowry?” the voice asked. “I’m Special Agent McCallum, FBI.”

Andrea dared to raise her head. In the dimness she saw a woman in a business suit, gun in one hand, credentials in the other.

“FBI?” Andrea asked. It didn’t make sense.

Agent McCallum nodded. “I’m here to help. Other federal agents are on the way. So are the police and paramedics. Are you injured?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m all right.” Andrea got up slowly, her legs unsteady. “How did you get here so fast?”

“I’ll explain that later. Right now there’s something we need to discuss before anyone else arrives. It involves Abby.”

Andrea was baffled. “You know her?”

“We’ve worked together in the past. As you probably know, she needs to keep a low profile. Which is why it’s important that you not say anything about her when you’re interviewed by my colleagues. No mention of her name. Okay?”

“Not say anything?”

“I can’t allow her to be dragged into this. It would be bad for me and bad for her. We need you to keep the secret. Can you do that?”

“How do I explain what happened here?”

“The gun is yours, right? Say you fired it. Here, take it.” Andrea accepted the revolver, vaguely aware that she had now put her fingerprints on the handle. “You grabbed the gun and took cover in here. You held off the intruders by yourself.”