She couldn’t believe that with all that sun out there, these people chose the shady gloom, their small, plain, clapboard house hidden in trees along the gully like a poisonous mushroom. Below, behind the back of a house, stood a dilapidated garage with two beat-up garbage cans leaning against the side and a half-inflated, above-ground pool filled with stagnant water and leaves and crap. A mess of a place. Nothing looked cared for.
Marco appeared to be studying the house looking for signs of someone moving around.
“Nothing happening I can see,” he said.
“Maybe our boy’s sleeping. Been a tough night.”
The garage protected their approach as they slipped through a copse of lodgepole pines, moving now at a quick-step, keeping the garage between them and the house.
A cat shot from under a rusty piece of tin roofing behind the garage and vanished around the side. Marco nearly shot it.
Christ, he’s jumpier than I am!
Behind Corbin’s, there was a banged-up camper shell next to the dilapidated garage.
“Look at that, it’s a crime,” Marco whispered, pointing at a gutted-out car.
“Sixty-eight GT 390 Fastback,” Marco said. “Steve McQueen’s green machine. Same as the one in
Bullitt
. McQueen has to be turning over in his grave.” Marco shook his head at the lack of respect this guy had, letting that car rust and rot. He moved forward.
She noticed how he avoided everything on the ground that might trigger noise. Moved light for such a big man. She followed in his footsteps.
Farther on, Marco paused, stared at the kitchen window. No action. They waited there for a minute before moving forward, but Marco found the back door locked. He took out his pocketknife and removed the nearly rotted wooden frames of the closest windowpane, removed the glass, reached in, and opened the door slowly to minimize any hinge squeak. He was good at this.
The hall and steps to the kitchen had crap everywhere. Weight bench with dumbbells. On the floor, empty dumbbell bars and all kinds of stacked boxes. A Coleman outdoor barbecue. Coats on a rack. Boots below. Shovels and a rake. Barely a path to walk.
He stepped in, paused, and listened.
***
Leon was impressed with the perfection of the bullet hole, how it had taken out the entire mole.
That’s real art,
he thought.
It should hang in a major gallery.
He picked up Kora North’s nude. The murder/suicide would work, of course, but he’d never killed a beautiful woman before. Not that it would really matter. Still, if she looked anything like the photos of her, well, it would be a challenge of sorts. He’d do it, of course. It was the profession. Still…
But first he’d interrogate the woman. Make her feel she had a chance if she gave him some information he could use to find Jesup. Plus some understanding of the whole show here in paradise.
In the midst of these thoughts, something caught his attention. He’d gotten acclimated to the sounds of the PI’s world. Now there was something out of place.
Maybe just a bird on the roof.
Maybe wind.
Squirrel on the roof?
Or his imagination. He figured jet lag was still bothering him and maybe affecting his awareness. He listened. Then he got up and took his weapon and stood quiet, waiting for some indication he’d actually heard something not quite right.
He decided to make a house check. Back door first. He moved back into the kitchen, standing with one hip against the refrigerator, stared out the kitchen window toward the garage, and listened. A man in his line of work trusted nothing. Not even his senses.
Instincts are what keeps a man alive when he can’t trust anything he hears or sees.
33
Sydney followed Marco into a tight, junk-filled hall.
Moving in carefully through the boxes, weight rack, and garbage bags, Marco reached the second step and was almost at the floor into the kitchen when a man appeared. He came so fast and quiet around the corner, the two men bumped into each other with startled mutual grunts. One shot went off and Sydney ducked as the men locked up and twisted violently into the corner.
Sydney tried to stay free of them, but in the small hallway, that was impossible. They forced her back. She tripped, hit something round and hard, and, trying to stop her fall, her hand struck iron and her gun went down.
No, damnit!
Marco spun, his gun hand passing by her face as he tried to get it around, but the guy hit him hard and they locked up, knocking her into a weight bench. The two men crashed against some boxes, and then the three of them got locked in a violent wrestling match, stumbling over boxes, the weight bench, junk. They slammed from wall to wall, falling into junk, headbutting, elbows flying like sledgehammers. They were like a couple of pit bulls in a small cage, jaws locked on each other’s throats.
The men blocking what little light there was in the battle against the door, Sydney scrambled on the dark floor looking for the gun. Instead, she came up with something that felt like an empty dumbbell bar. She grabbed it in both hands, got up against the wall, and looked for a chance to use it.
Their opponent leveraged Marco into Sydney and one of their guns fired again, the shot so close to her ear she could feel the heat of the bullet. The ferocious battle between the men once again knocked Sydney back and into boxes and a bench, but she didn’t lose her grip on the metal bar.
Marco and his opponent were locked up and smashing into one wall, then the junk against the other wall with such fury and speed, it was hard for Sydney to get into the fight. When Marco snapped his arm down, freeing his hand, he then tried to bring his own weapon up but took a vicious elbow in the throat and a knee as they twisted back and fell against skis and a snowboard. Marco tried to regain his footing, spin the guy back into the wall, but took another hard elbow.
Sydney finally had a target and swung the dumbbell bar, but it hit a glancing blow off the man’s shoulder. The two men fell against the steps. As the assailant twisted around toward her, Sydney found another chance. She swung the bar like a baseball bat.
The dumbbell bar hit with a sickening crack of bone. The guy let out some kind of wild-sounding moan and backed to the door, his hands flying to his face, his gun hitting the floor. She tried to get him again but he thrust out both arms and pushed her violently back into Marco, and the two of them went down against the steps.
The man fled out the back door, sunlight bursting into the narrow, junk-filled hallway.
“I lost my gun,” Marco said, frantically scrambling away from her and trying to find it.
She located the gun their attacker had dropped, then went out the door. Marco, having found his weapon, came right behind her. At first they didn’t see any sign of the guy.
“He could be close. Have a backup piece,” Marco said, inching toward the side of the house.
But then Sydney saw the man run behind the garage, his hands cradling his face. She fired three shots. It was a long way for a snub nose to be accurate, but she saw him stumble, and it looked like he fell in the shrubs just inside the tree line.
“Looks like you got him,” Marco said. “He’s not short and fat.”
“That’s definitely not Corbin,” Sydney said.
She figured he wasn’t going to survive the breaking of his skull and the bullets. It hit her that she’d never killed anyone before. Everyone involved in law, or the military, was ready to do the obvious if necessary, but the fact of it would be something she’d think about later. It wasn’t that he didn’t deserve what he got. That was never the issue. It was just that it was something that, when it happened, was significant.
Or should be,
she thought. But maybe for some, not so much. Or maybe it was all context. She didn’t know. That would all come later.
“Let’s clear the house,” Marco said. “See if fat boy is there. The guy in the woods with the broken head might be able to talk on a cell phone, get help, so we need to get out of here. Bastard could still fight.”
Marco, his mouth bloody as well, spit some to the side and then wiped his mouth and nose with his shirt tail. “You had to have ripped some of those stitches.”
“We’ll deal with that later.”
She had the Colt and handed him the Heckler and Koch compact with silencer. They headed into the house slow and cautious, just in case Corbin lay in wait.
34
A hundred yards up the hill from the house, Leon leaned against a tree, feeling sick, the pain shooting spikes through his skull.
Jesus, Jesus Christ, I’m dead. The bitch broke my fucking skull. It’s her! Jesus!
The pain was like nothing he’d ever known before in his life. Had to have a broken face.
The three shots hadn’t hit him, though one bullet had taken a piece out of his left ear. Fucking bitch was crazy. He stared down toward the house, tears welling in his eyes, blurring his vision, blood dripping from his nose and mouth.
I messed up. I took a job on short notice and messed up.
Enraged, he pulled out his cell phone and found he couldn’t talk. He put it away and reached for his ankle holster. But the effort spiked the pain and any thought he had of going back into the fight vanished.
He found himself trapped between his desire to get down there and kill these people, put an end to this, and the excruciating, immobilizing pain that became so intense he wanted to scream.
He’d gotten a glimpse of her and seen enough pictures to know that was Jesup and Cillo’s nephew.
Jesus, tough sonsabitches.
He couldn’t believe it. They weren’t running and hiding—they were on the hunt!
Everything now flipped over on its back. Tahoe had suddenly become a very dangerous place.
He sat on a fallen branch on the hillside in the pines trying to get his mind settled, get himself calm, his skull on fire. Pain spiked and shot in waves through his head. What had she hit him with? That bitch had tried to take his fucking head off!
Everything they said about her was true. She was crazy. The woman had gunshot wounds and was still on the hunt and in the fight. What kind of crazy-ass woman was he dealing with? No wonder everybody wanted her dead.
You got to get them now, he told himself.
But he couldn’t move, couldn’t think of anything beyond his misery.
Off in the distance where the road appeared over a rise before dipping back down into the ravine half a mile or so away, he saw a car coming. He wondered if it was the hooker, Kora North. Everything in Leon’s world was going to hell.
When the car slid down around the curve, reappeared, and slowed, he knew it was her.
***
Sydney and Marco found Corbin slumped, listless, in a chair, eyes open, blood on his forehead, a startled look on his face.
“Rigor from a bullet isn’t exactly cosmetic surgery,” Sydney said. “Doesn’t improve the look. But he’s not been dead long. Maybe an hour or two.”
Marco, his senses on high alert, trigger finger flexing like a coiled snake, readied himself for any hostile target.
They quickly cleared the other rooms. The occupant had bad habits. Filthy toilet, mold, dirty clothes. Cracked paint. Smudges soiling the carpets. Smells. The small house clear, they came back into the living room.
The hole in the man’s head had a filigree of red around it. “
Flor roja la Muerte
,” Marco said.
“Meaning?”
“Death’s red flower. Something that happens very frequently in Mexico. Whole bouquets. We need to get moving. You want to use the bathroom, go ahead.”
Sydney let out a dark chuckle. “Funny. I’d piss in the woods before I’d sit my ass on anything in this shithole.” Then she said, “Son of a bitch,” as she pulled out files and a notebook computer from the open tennis bag. “My bag, my stuff. Our boy has been busy.”
Marco came over and looked. “Well, he didn’t get far with your stuff. Or Corbin’s. Which means he’ll be back if he’s capable. Or he’ll send somebody. You have blood on your nose. Looks funny.”
She went into the kitchen to find paper towels to wipe blood from her nose and mouth while he picked up some photos.
“Tapes and a folder with pictures of various sexcapades,” he said.
Sydney looked at the photos when she’d come back into the living room. “I know this girl.”
Marco heard a car and went to the window. “You want a little surprise? It’s her. Just pulled up in her BMW.”
Sydney came over and looked out the window. “No way. It is. One and the same. Kora North, one of the highest priced girls in Tahoe, who now works exclusive with the Thorp Incline crowd. What the hell’s going on? And she looks pissed off and in a big hurry.”
The tall, striking female left her shiny black Beamer and came up the walk past the pickup truck. Long legs, gold hair, and substantial breasts in a halter top, the calendar-girl body swung toward the steps with aggressiveness. She clutched her shoulder bag like she was afraid it would swing off her shoulder and run away.
Marco went to the door to invite the high-priced bombshell in.
Sydney said quietly, “This should be interesting.”
Everything had changed now. He knew that, and so did Sydney. There was no way out of this. Whatever Sydney had in mind, it now included him. He felt a lot like he was back in Mexico.
35
Through a slit opening in the side window curtain, Sydney watched Kora North walk up to the door, where Marco was ready to welcome her.
Kora looked stressed and angry. She started to knock, but Marco opened the door, grabbed her arm, and yanked her inside so fast she didn’t have time to resist. When she struggled to get something from her bag, Sydney ripped the bag out of her hands.
He kicked the door shut.
“Easy girl,” Marco said as Kora fought him with cat-claw ferocity, wild eyes, and screaming curses.
After taking a couple of hard blows to the face and shoulder, he subdued her by grabbing under her armpits, pinching off the nerves, and angling his hips so she couldn’t get a knee to his groin.
“Easy! Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“You
are
hurting me, asshole!” she yelled.
Kora North had a Hollywood body and a viper’s disposition. Marco grabbed her wrists and pinned them in front of her. Sydney caught a whiff of perfume that smelled like fresh-baked apples and cinnamon. A little surprising.