Last Breath (36 page)

Treat swiveling to face her again.

The purse in her hand.

His gun tracing a slow arc toward her.

Her hand inside the purse, finding her off-duty gun, the Smith .38, her finger slipping inside the trigger guard.

Treat about to shoot, point-blank range, no way he could miss.

But she fired first

Not aiming, just thrusting the purse in his direction and snapping the Smith’s trigger, blowing the handbag to tatters as she fired again and again and again, each shot blossoming like a many-petaled rose on his chest, his neck, his belly, and his eyes still staring, not with hatred any longer, only with dazed surprise.

She emptied the gun, and Treat tottered, slumped, fell off the bed.

Over the ringing in her ears she heard the smack of his body on the floor, a sound as final as the thump of earth on a coffin lid.

Then SWAT was in the room, two teams, ten men or more, guns everywhere, and she was holding up her hands in a protective reflex, saying, “It’s all right, guys. It’s over. I got him. It’s over.”

It was, too. Really.

The boogeyman was dead.

They called it “C.J.”

To Adam, this was the bitterest irony. The Los Angeles County Central Jail, to which he had been transferred this morning after two months of reconstructive surgery on his right hand, was known to its inmates by those initials. In the echoing cell block where he had been installed during the pretrial period, he heard the other prisoners yelling and laughing and cursing, and every other breath out of their mouths was “C.J.”

“Pissed off to be back in C.J., baby ...”

“Hey, motherfucker, what you doing here in C.J.?”

“Food in C.J.’s pretty damn good compared with the shit I been eating.”

“You fucking with me, man? Ain’t nobody got nothing good to say about C.J....”

He shut his eyes. Even here, he couldn’t escape that name and the memories it stirred.

After a long time he found the courage to examine his cell. A commode in plain view. Two bunk beds. No window. Steel bars, cement walls painted green. The paint was layered so thick it felt spongy, like an encrustation of moss.

He sat on the floor, hands in his lap. His right hand had been repaired in a series of painful operations to knit bone and tendons and minimize the awful scarring. He had not regained full use of his hand—the fingers did not contract fully, and his fingertips were numb. He could barely hold a pencil. He would have to learn to write left-handed.

Write what? he wondered desolately. A resume for my job search? An ad in the personals? Yeah, that would work.

Single White Professional Man, 30, currently incarcerated, awaiting trial for attempted murder of ex-wife, seeks college-educated female for friendship, dating, maybe more. Background in criminal law a plus.

Perfect.

In all his fantasies of killing C.J., he had not imagined this outcome. His worst expectation had been a dramatic standoff with police, ending in his glorious death. He had not conceived of this slow descent into degradation and despair.

His condo had been sold in an attempt to raise money for his legal defense, but he had so little equity in the property that the gesture was largely futile. His BMW, of course, had been trashed on the night of January 31. Under the circumstances, his insurance company refused to cover the damages, not that he could blame them.

Brigham & Garner fired him as soon as his name hit the papers. The only member of the firm to visit him in the hospital was good old Roger Eastman, and he had come not in friendship but in anger. Adam’s “shenanigans”—that was the word Roger used—had bestowed unwanted publicity on Midvale Office Park, delaying plans to resume construction and jeopardizing Roger’s investment. “The wife will kill me when she finds out how much money I stand to lose,” Roger said darkly. “Not if you kill her first,” Adam replied, but Roger hadn’t seen the humor in this riposte.

Well, what the hell. Being an attorney was boring anyway. And he could always be a jailhouse lawyer. Trade legal advice for cigarettes or something. Trouble was, he didn’t smoke. Maybe he would start.

These thoughts ran through his brain, but most of his attention was occupied by his hulking, tattooed, buzz-cut cellmate, who had been introduced to him as Horse.

Why Horse? That was what Adam wanted to know. Throughout the morning, the question had assumed a strange urgency.

Was it because the man was as big as a horse? Or because he ate like a horse? Maybe he liked horse racing. Maybe his favorite movie was
A Man Called Horse
.

For hours Adam had worried over this riddle, while his cellmate sat on his bunk, stiff and silent. Finally he could endure the suspense no longer.

“Can I ask you something?” he said, meeting the man’s eyes for the first time.

Horse grunted.

“Why do they call you that? You know ... Horse?”

“Nickname.”

“Yes, I gathered that much. But ... why?”

Horse showed no expression. “ ’Cause I got a big goddamn pecker, and my homies say I’m hung like a fuckin’ racehorse.”

Well. Mystery solved.

“What are you in for?” Horse asked without stirring from his bunk.

“Awaiting trial. Can’t raise the bail. They set it high.”

“Don’t care about that shit. Wanna know what you did.”

“It’s all allegations. Unproven.”

“What they
say
you did.”

Adam sighed. “Kidnapping, assault, battery, attempted murder, aiding and abetting ...” That was for withholding knowledge of Bluebeard’s Web site. “Couple counts of breaking and entering, possession of an unregistered firearm, other things.”

“Lotta shit.”

“It’s all unproven.” Adam clung to that word.

“You’re innocent, right? Sure. Everybody’s innocent. How long you goin’ away for, if they nail you on all counts?”

“Life,” Adam answered desolately.

Horse took this in without emotion. “You got money, I bet.” He was looking at Adam’s unlined face and the remnants of a stylish haircut.

“Not a lot.”

“You was makin’ money, on the outside.”

“Yeah.”

“Pullin’ down big bucks.”

“Getting there.”

“And you throwed it all away. Was it worth it?”

Adam rallied. “Yes. It was worth it. I had to stand up for myself. I wouldn’t let her walk all over me, you know?” He felt a man like Horse would understand. “She thought she could just sweep me out of her life, but I showed her. I taught her a damn lesson, at least. I let her know that nobody—
nobody
—fucks with me. Nobody makes me their bitch.”

Horse sat very still, absorbing this tirade. Then he said, “You might be wrong about that last part, bro.”

Adam saw that Horse was smiling.

And that smile made it real to him, all of it—this cell and the tattooed inmate and the shape of his life for the rest of his days.

***

C.J. met Walsh and Cellini for lunch at a coffee shop in Santa Monica, across the street from the palm-lined palisades. The topic of Gavin Treat was avoided for most of the meal. They talked of safe subjects—new departmental regulations that uniforms like C.J. didn’t like, Walsh’s fondness for
Columbo
and other cop shows, Cellini’s time on patrol, C.J.’s hobby of collecting antiques. Rick Tanner’s name came up. “I’m still seeing him,” C.J. said with a smile. “He can be a little bit of a jerk sometimes, but ... I guess I don’t mind.”

“All men are jerks sometimes,” Cellini opined, drawing a protest from Walsh—a futile protest, since he was outvoted two to one.

When they were sipping coffee at the end of the meal, Walsh mentioned Treat for the first time. “You told us he gained access to your parents’ house through a doggie door. The Sheriff’s people in Riverside County have had a look at that door. It’s only fifteen inches wide.”

C.J. shrugged. “Even so, he must have used it.”

“He did. He had Marfan syndrome—it causes loose limbs, you know, double-jointedness. People with that condition can sometimes pop their shoulders in and out of their sockets at will. That’s how he got in.”

“Dislocated his shoulders?”

“Evidently—one shoulder at a time. It would have hurt like hell for a minute or two, but I guess he had a high threshold of pain.”

“Or a high degree of motivation. He lived to kill, didn’t he? It was the only thing that mattered to him. No home, no friends, no long-term career. Just the body count.”

“And his spiders,” Walsh said.

Silence for a few moments, broken by Cellini.

“The car he got away in—at first we thought it was stolen. Turns out it’s his. He registered it under a phony name. His getaway wheels. Know what we found in the trunk?”

“Let me guess. Fake ID, cash, a disguise?”

“Right on the money. He would have become Mr. Allan Holt. New social security number, birth certificate, driver’s license—a New Mexico license, by the way. Two grand in bills of various denominations. Hair coloring kit, glasses, change of clothes in a carry-on bag.”

“So he could have made a clean break, started over.”

Walsh nodded, picking up the story. “If you hadn’t gone home that night, he might have decided to book. We wouldn’t have caught him. He’d be killing again. You saved a lot of lives, C.J. You were right to take the risk, and I was wrong to try to talk you out of it.”

“Thanks. But I wasn’t as altruistic as you think. I did it for myself. I had to finish things. I’d lived with the fear too long. I had to get rid of it—exorcise it—once and for all.”

They didn’t say much after that. The check came, and Walsh paid, insisting that it was his prerogative as the highest-ranking officer present, the oldest person among them, and most important, the only man at the table. Cellini and C.J. reaffirmed their earlier vote, but they let Walsh pay anyway.

Then Walsh and Cellini drove off in a department-issue Caprice, and C.J. crossed the street to walk in Palisades Park.

The day was clear, and leaning on the railing at the edge of the high bluff, she could see Santa Monica Pier to the south, the haze of Malibu to the north, and before her, a wide spread of blue sea. It was a great distance she had traveled—from the Mojave to the Pacific, from childhood to adulthood—yet Gavin Treat had found her.

She’d noticed that neither Walsh nor Cellini asked if her exorcism had worked, if the fear was gone now. Well, of course they hadn’t asked. Like her, they were cops—and they knew that while an old fear might fade, there would always be a new fear to take its place.

The world was full of darkness—they saw it every night and day—and where there was one Adam Nolan, one Gavin Treat, there would be others. The crawl space was always there, just below the surface of things, and this pleasant day, with its blue sky and sea breeze, was only a thin subfloor over a darker place.

She would be in the dark again—tomorrow perhaps, or next week or next year. There was no way to know.

But not today, she thought.

She lifted her head to the sun, holding that thought as a shield against all the unknowns in her future, against all the things she knew enough to fear. They were out there still, and they would find her.

Let them come, but not today.

First, let me invite readers to visit my Web site at
michaelprescott.net
. The site features book excerpts, information on upcoming projects, and other stuff.

Second, I want to thank the many people who helped me at every stage of the writing and publication of the original print edition of
Last Breath
: my longtime editor Joseph Pittman, who worked with me to develop the idea; Doug Grad, Senior Editor at New American Library, who provided me with valuable feedback and perceptive critiques as he saw the project through to completion; Carolyn Nichols, Editorial Director of NAL; Louise Burke, NAL’s President and Publisher; Miriam Goderich, who offered customarily insightful suggestions on the manuscript; and Jane Dystel, my literary agent.

Thanks, one and all!

Last Breath

By Michael Prescott

Copyright © Douglas Borton, 2001

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.