Jeffery Deaver - Triple Threat

Hannah said, “After Barnes was dead I saw you with that fancy video camera of yours. I was afraid you’d got me on tape.”

“And you undid my brake line.” He gave a brittle laugh. “Sure, you know cars—the way you talked Rudy down with the brake lights incident. You were going go through the wreckage and find the camera and tapes.”

“Except you got to the switchback faster than I thought you would and rammed into me.”

Pellam understood. “Change of plans, sure. You decided to go for cocktails in my camper. You get the tapes when I went to the convenience store?”

“I got ‘em.” She nodded, presumably at the truck, parked nearby.

“But you still needed the fall guy.” Pellam looked toward Ed Billings. “And you showed up to kidnap Taylor, dress up in his clothes and kill the trooper.”

“Right.”

“And now I kill Taylor and he kills me. End of story.”

Hannah had lost interest in the narrative. “Yeah,” she said. “Shoot him. I’m bored with all this crap. I want to get home.”

Hamlin has a mall…

Just like the end of a Quentin Tarantino film. The filmmaker tended to fall back on the good old Mexican Standoff, everybody pointing a gun at each other.

“Only one thing,” Pellam said, buying time.

“What’s that?” Ed asked.

“When does she shoot you ?”

“Me?”

“That’s the scenario, situations like this. The girl sets it all up and then shifts the blame to her husband. He takes the fall and she rides off into the sunset with the money.”

A brief pause. Ed said, “You know the flaw in that? You can only do it once. And so far we’re worth more to each other alive.”

He lifted the Glock.

Which was when a series of lights came on and voices started shouting, “Police, police! On the ground, drop the weapons!” and similar assorted cop phrases, all enthusiastically punctuated.

Pellam supposed that Sheriff Werther and the others were charging forward with their assault rifles and executing some nifty arrest procedures.

He couldn’t say. At the first flash of spotlight he’d dropped to his belly and ducked. Another aspect of noir stories is that everybody has a gun and is always real eager to use it.

# # #

Fifteen minutes later Pellam was leaning against the side of Sheriff Werther’s car. He handed back the tracking device—it looked like a garage door opener—that the man had slipped into his pocket at the sham arrest two hours ago, in front of the Winnebago.

“Worked pretty good,” Pellam observed.

Werther, though, winced, looking at it. “Truth be told, seems there was only five minutes or so of battery left.”

Meaning, Pellam assumed, that if they hadn’t tracked him to the quarry in that time he’d now be dead.

“Ah.”

But considering that the sheriff’s plan had been thrown together quickly, it was understandable that there’d been a glitch or two.

When Pellam had been patched through to Werther after finding the trooper dead and Rudy injured, the sheriff had explained that the medical examiner had given the opinion that the man had been stabbed by someone who was short—five five or less, given the angle of the knife wounds. “And remember, somebody’d tried to drag the body to a cave? The trooper thought it was that they’d been spotted. Fact is, I decided they just weren’t strong enough.”

Those facts suggested the killer might be a woman, he explained.

Well, there were two women having something to do with the case, Werther had said: Hannah and Lis. And each of them had a male partner who could be an accomplice. So the sheriff decided to set up a trap to find out if either of them was the killer. But he needed Pellam’s help. The location scout was supposed to let both Hannah and Lis know that he was searching for Taylor.

Turning himself into a fall guy.

Whoever showed up at the quarry to kill him would be the guilty party.

Taylor was at the hospital in Redding for observation. Ed Billings had whaled on him pretty bad. When he’d said good-bye to Pellam a half hour before, he’d smiled ruefully and said, “Hey, quite an experience, hm?”

“Good luck with the poems,” the location scout had told him as he walked to the ambulance.

“Say,” Werther now asked Pellam, “ did you get anybody on tape at Devil’s Playground?”

Pellam gave a sour laugh. “Not a soul.”

“Hm, too bad. Though I don’t suspect we need the evidence.”

“You’ve got property around there, too, don’t you, Sheriff?” Pellam asked wryly.

“Oh, what Rita was saying? Yeah, I do. Vacation house that I rent out. Helps for some of the expenses my son has.”

For his autistic grandchild, Pellam recalled.

“You suspect me?” Werther asked.

“No, sir, never occurred to me.”

It had.

“Okay… Now, about that little matter you and I horse traded on? It’s all taken care of,” the sheriff said.

“Thanks.”

“You earned it.”

Pellam then asked for his brother-in-law’s phone number.

“Rudy? He can’t get your camper in shape until tomorrow.”

“This is about something else.”

Motion in the corner of his eye. Hannah Billings was being led across the parking area in front of the quarry to a squad car. She glanced his way.

A phrase came to Pellam’s mind:

If looks could kill…

# # #

Here’s Rita at the diner, her name proudly stitched on her impressive bosom.

She’s doing what she does best with diligence and polite mien, and with no tolerance for nonsense from former movie directors turned location scouts, from flirtatious poets, from killers noir at heart, from saints. Anybody. She takes waitressing seriously.

Pellam wasn’t in the mood for frozen so he’d arranged a private vehicle rental from Rudy (yes, the bile-green Gremlin, which was, he knew, a very underrated vehicle—it could beat the Pinto and VW Beetle hands down, at least with the optional four-speed Borg-Warner).

He’s finished a meatloaf dinner and orders pie with cheese. He didn’t used to like this combo but, really, who shouldn’t? It doesn’t get any better than sweet apples and savory Kraft. He’d go for a whiskey, but that’s not an option at the Overlook, so it’s coffee, which is exemplary.

He gets a call on his Motorola cell phone. The director of Paradice is ecstatic that Pellam has secured a permit to shoot in Devil’s Playground after all.

“How’d you do it?”

Put my life on the line to catch a femme fatale, he thinks, earning Sheriff Werther’s friendship and assistance in all things governmental here.

“Just pulled some strings.”

“Ah, I love string-pullers,” the director says breathily.

Pellam thinks about suggesting a new name for the film: Devil’s Playground . But he knows in his heart that the director will never buy it—he just loves his misspelled title.

Fine. It’s his movie, not mine.

As he ends the call Pellam feels eyes aimed his way. He looks up and believes that Rita is casting him a flirt, which is not by any means a bad thing.

Then he glances at her with a smile and sees she is, in fact, looking a few degrees past him. It’s toward a young man standing beside a revolving dessert display, featuring cakes that seem three feet high. He’s looking back at her. The nervous boy is handsome if pimply. He sits down at the end of the counter, isolated so he can gab a bit with her in private. He also will, Pellam knows, leave a five-dollar tip, though he can’t really afford it, on a ten-dollar tab, which will both embarrass and enthrall her.

Ain’t love grand?

The pie comes in for a landing and Pellam indulges. It’s good, no question.