Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“What will happen then?”

But he had his hand over his free ear, and he was listening to the earpiece, nodding and smiling. He turned to her. “They’re ready. Are you?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

They moved around the building to the rear, and stopped at the edge of a paved alley that held a dumpster. She could see a back door that opened onto a short corridor with a telephone and rest rooms. Parish opened his raincoat, reached to the inner pocket, and handed her the gun. It was a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol like the ones she had practiced with on the ranch. She could feel Parish watching her closely, so she performed all of the necessary motions deliberately and efficiently. She checked the safety to be sure it was engaged, released the magazine and withdrew it to verify that it held a full load, then pushed it back up into the butt until it clicked in. She pulled the slide back to cycle the first round into the chamber, then flipped off the safety again. Her eye passed across his, and caught there. “I have good reasons,” she said.

He smiled broadly, amused. “The only reason you need is that you want to.”

He held his hand to his ear again. “All right. The woman has gotten up and is walking toward the ladies’ room. She’s inside. Mary is moving in to keep her there. Now Emily is going to his table. She says the woman asked her to tell him she needs him outside. It sounds as though he’s coming. Yes. Get ready. The first one out that door will be Emily. Did you hear me?”

“Yes. I heard you.” She held the gun behind her back as he’d taught her, not in a pocket where it could catch on the lining or come out too slowly. The door opened and out came Emily, stepping into the circle of light from the overhead flood over the door. Emily did not look in their direction but took a wide, leisurely turn out of the door and held it open.

The man who came out after her was David. He glanced around under the light for his new girlfriend. He looked good. He seemed to have lost five or ten pounds, and his hair was a little gray at the temples now. It went well with the dark gray suit.

“David,” she said. “Here.”

He turned his head, saw her female shape in the shadows, took a step toward her, then stopped. He seemed to know the voice. He half-turned, but Emily was leaning against the closed door.

Marcia brought the gun around her body at shoulder height. David pushed Emily aside so he could tug on the door, but she had engaged the lock when she had closed it. He whirled toward Marcia, and she fired. The gun kicked upward a few inches, but she brought it down and fired once, twice more at his chest. Her aim had not been perfect, and he was sitting on the ground now. She could see a hole in the suit up near his left shoulder-not his heart-and another in the middle of his belly. He had both his hands clasped over that one, and his mouth was clenched in a bare-toothed grimace. She knew now why they had made her kill the deer. The size and the look of dazed agony were about the same.

Parish said, “Marcia, we’re just about out of time.”

Marcia stood over David, staring at his eyes. She wanted to say something to him that would make him hurt more than the bullets and teach him that he deserved this.

She heard footsteps behind her. Parish appeared on the left side of her peripheral vision, pulled his gun out, held it near David’s temple, and fired it through his head. The body toppled sideways onto the pavement as though pushed by a wind.

Then Parish had her by the arm, and Emily Lyons was striding off along I Street to the west. Parish’s legs were much longer than Marcia’s and they were stepping along at a pace that forced her to trot to keep up, but she knew that his coat shielded her so that together they would look like any other couple going home in the rain.

Then they were down under the street in the Metro station again, boarding a train. “Doors closing,” said the soothing recorded female voice, and they were away. They sat together. She looked up at Parish’s face for the first time, but he seemed unaware that she was looking. She turned to stare out the window into the darkness of the tunnel.

He had even done the last thing better. She had seen it on David’s face. She had already shot him two or three times, and he had been in pain. But she had watched his expression change as soon as he had seen Parish step out of the shadows with a gun. It was then that she had understood.

She had been staring stupidly down at David, trying to think of words. Words! But then she had seen David’s eyes. He knew what Parish was about to do, and it meant everything to him. She could tell that somewhere, deep in his mind, hidden from her, had been the thought that this would be over: an ambulance would come and take him to a hospital, and the surgeons would save him. He would somehow live on. All the time while he had been watching Marcia standing there over him, trying to choose between ways of saying “I hate you” and ways of saying “You deserve this,” he had been thinking, She’ll go away soon, because she has to, and I’ll get through this. I’ll live. But when he had seen Parish with the pistol, stepping up to him, he had felt much more than the pain she had caused. David’s eyes had said that he now knew that this moment was absolutely his last. There would be no ambulance, no surgeons. He was going to have a bullet through his brain.

She even understood the deer better. The reason they were dangerous when they were wounded was not that they were trying to fight. They were trying to get up and run. They still had hope. Parish had taken David’s hope.

Suddenly, Marcia was terribly tired. She felt as though she were weightless, but she could barely lift her arm.

“Well?” said Parish.

She cocked her head and looked up at him.

He asked, “Was it what you expected?”

“No.”

“Not disappointed, are you?”

She looked down at her hands. To her surprise, they were not clenched in fists, or shaking. They were merely her hands, at rest on her lap, the fingers a bit too plump for her taste, the nails too short to be very pretty. “No,” she said. “It was exactly what I might have wished for. I just couldn’t decide how it should end. But you knew. You ended it perfectly.”

When Lydia had driven Robert Mallon down from the self-defense school to his house in Santa Barbara in the late afternoon, she had stopped the car in the driveway without turning off the engine. Mallon had said, “Aren’t you going to stay?”

Lydia had answered, “No. I’m going back to L. A to spend a few days asking around, and see if I can find some more people we can talk to. I’ll get in touch as soon as I do. In the meantime, check in with Diane and let her know you’re home. Fowler may have asked about you.”

Mallon had returned to his routines. In the mornings he walked on the beach. Since Catherine’s death he had not wanted to walk near the spot where he had pulled her out of the water, so now he usually walked down to the foot of State Street and followed the coast to the east toward Montecito. Each time he returned to his house, he immediately stepped to the kitchen counter to see if the red light on his answering machine was blinking, but always it glowed steadily.

On the eighth day, the telephone rang, and he picked it up to hear Lydia’s voice. “Bobby?”

“Yes, Lydia.”

“I’m in the car right now, but I wanted to tell you I’m interviewing somebody tomorrow, and I thought you might be interested in joining me.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s a woman who knew both of them. It took me a while to hunt her down, because she’s moved a few times since those days, but I just talked to her and she’s agreed to meet me in a bar on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice at one o’clock. You don’t have to decide right now. I’ll be there either way.”