Sue Grafton - F is For Fugitive

Sliding glass doors along the front opened onto a second-floor balcony overlooking Ocean Street. The drapes were open and I could make out a desk, a swivel chair, bookcases, a reading lamp. I swept the room with the narrow beam of the penlight, getting my bearings. The book titles were half fiction, half college textbooks in psychology. Ann's.

On the desk was a photo of Ori in her youth. She really had been beautiful, with large luminous eyes. I searched the desk drawers. Nothing of interest. Checked the closet alcove, which was filled with summer clothing. The bathroom held nothing. The door that connected this room to room 20 was locked. Locked doors are always more interesting than the other kind. This time I got out my set of key picks and set to work. In TV shows, people pick locks with remarkable ease. Not so in real life, where you have to have the patience of a saint. I was working in the dark, clamping the penlight in my mouth like a cigar while I used the rocker pick in my left hand and the wire in my right. Sometimes I do this efficiently, but that's usually when the light is good. This time it took forever, and I was sweating from the tension when the lock finally gave.

Room 20 was a duplicate of the one I'd occupied. This was Ann's bedroom, the one Maxine was not to clean. I could see why. On the closet floor, dead ahead, was a Ponsness-Warren shot shell reloader with a built-in wad guide, an adjustable crimp die, and two powder reservoirs filled with rock salt. I crossed to the closet and hunkered down, inspecting the device, which looks like a cross between a bird feeder and a cappuccino machine, and is designed to pack a shell with anything you like. A blast of rock salt, at close range, usually ends up buried under your skin where it stings like a son of a bitch, but doesn't do much else. Tap had found out just how ineffectual salt can be in staving off the sheriff's deputies.

I had really hit the jackpot. On the floor beside the reloader was a microcassette recorder with a tape in it. I pressed the rewind button and then pressed play, listening to a familiar voice slowed down to a series of quite nasty gravel-throated threats. I rewound, switched the tape speed, and tried it again. The voice was clearly Ann's, spelling out her intentions with an ax and a chain saw. The whole thing sounded stupid, but she must have had a ball. "I am going to get you…" We used to do shit like this as kids. "I am going to cut your head off…"I smiled grimly, remembering the night those calls had come through. I'd taken comfort from the fact that someone two doors away was wide awake like me. The square of light had looked so cozy at that hour. All the time she'd been in here, dialing room-to-room, part of her campaign of psychological abuse. At this point I couldn't even remember when I'd had an uninterrupted night's sleep. I was being carried on adrenaline and nerve, the momentum of events sweeping me willy-nilly down the path. The night my room was broken into, all she'd had to do was use her passkey and jimmy up the sliding glass door afterward so it would look like the point of entry. I got to my feet and checked the shelf above. In a shoebox, I found a windowed envelope addressed to "Erica Dahl" containing quarterly dividends and year-end tax summaries for IBM stock. There must have been more than a hundred such envelopes neatly packed into the box, along with a social security card, driver's license, and passport-with Ann Fowler's photograph affixed. The statements from Merrill Lynch showed a $42,000 investment in shares of IBM back in 1967. With stock splits in the intervening years, the shares had more than doubled in value. I noticed that "Erica" had dutifully paid taxes on the interest that accrued from year to year. Ann Fowler was too shrewd to get tripped up by the IRS.

I flashed the penlight through her living room and kitchenette, doing a one-eighty turn. When the narrow beam crossed the bedstead, I caught an oval of white and flashed the light back over it again. Ann.was propped up in bed watching me. Her face was dead pale, her eyes enormous, so filled with lunacy and hate that my skin crawled. I felt as if I'd been pierced with an icy arrow, the chill spreading from the core of my body to my fingertips. In her lap she held a double-barreled shotgun, which she raised and pointed right at my chest. Probably not rock salt. I didn't think the spider story was going to work with her.

"Finding everything you need?" she asked.

I raised my hands just to show I knew how to behave. "Hey, you're pretty good. You almost got away with it."

Her smile was thin. "Now that you're 'wanted,' I can do it, don't you think?" she said conversationally. "All I have to do is pull the trigger and claim trespass."

"And then what?"

"You tell me."

I hadn't quite worked the whole story out, but I knew enough to make a flying guess. Why you have chats with killers in circumstances like these is because you hope against hope you can (1) talk them out of it, (2) stall until help arrives, or (3) enjoy a few more moments of this precious commodity we call life, which consists (in large part) of breathing in and out. Hard to do with your lungs blown out your back.

"Well," said I, hoping to make a short story long, "I figure once your daddy dies and you unload this place, you'll take the proceeds, add them to the profits from the forty-two thou you stole, and sail off into the sunset. Possibly with Dwight Shales, or so you hope."

"And why not?"

"Why not, indeed? Sounds like a great plan. Does he know about it yet?"

"He will," she said.

"What makes you think he'll agree?"

"Why wouldn't he? He's free now. And I will be, too, as soon as Pop dies."

"And you think that constitutes a relationship?" I said, astonished.

"What do you know about relationships?"

"Hey, I've been married twice. That's more than you can say."

"You're divorced. You don't know dick."

I had to shrug at that.

"I bet Jean was sorry she confided in you."

"Very. At the end, she put up quite a fight."

"But you won."

"I had to. I couldn't have her ruining Dwight's life."

"Assuming it was his," I said.

"The babe? Of course it was."

"Oh great. No problem, then. You're completely justified," I said. "Does he know how much you've done for him?"

"That's our little secret. Yours and mine."

"How did you know where Shana would be Wednesday night?"

"Simple. I followed her."

"But why kill the woman?"

"Same reason I'm going to kill you. For screwing Dwight."

"She was going up there to meet Joe Dunne," I said. "Neither one of us screwed Dwight."

"Bullshit!"

"It's not bullshit. He's a nice enough guy, but he's not my type. He told me himself he and Shana were just friends. It was strictly platonic. They hadn't even screwed once!"

"You liar. You think I don't know what's been going on? You sashay into town and start coming, on to him, riding around in his car, having cozy dinners…"

"Ann, we were talking. That's all it was."

"Nobody's going to get in my way, Kinsey. Not after all I've been through. I've worked too hard and waited too long. I've sacrificed my entire adult life, and you're not going to spoil things now that I'm almost free."

"Well, listen, Ann… if I may say so, you're as crazy as a bug. No ofFense, but you are looney-tunes, completely cuckoo-nuts." I was just making mouth noises while I thought about my gun. My little Davis was still in the holster tucked up against my left breast. What I wanted to do was take it out and plug her right between the eyes-or someplace fatal. But here's the way I figured it. By the time I reached up under my turtleneck, snatched the gun out, pointed it, and fired, that shotgun of hers would have taken off my face. And how was I going to get the gun, feign a heart attack? I didn't think she'd fall for it. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and since I could see her perfectly, I had to guess she could see me just as well.