Bannerman's Law (37 page)

”
I won't run
,”
said Ca
r
leton the elder. ”I can fix it.
This was all Henry's fault. You know that. And you know
I fixed him
.”

He had stepped nearer. Barbara swung the MP-5. He backed away.

“
The files don't matter. They were only copies. No
one saw you reading them. Only Ruiz and you say she's
dead. No one saw you take them. Only that old woman.
If you'll leave her, let me produce her, I can make them
believe that you have nothing
.”

Carleton the younger sighed deeply.

“
Can he
?”
she asked.

“
Just take her. Take her and go
.”

“
What would he do with her
?”

“
He could not allow her to be questioned. Not Nellie. Not the other members. And, I expect, not me
.”

“
But you're his son
.”

“
So was Henry
.”
Dunville picked up a stone and
tossed it. He cocked his head toward his father.
“
Do I need to tell you who his mother is
?”

Barbara stared.

From behind her, out of sight, came the impatient tap of a horn. Her husband, she knew, would have his ban
dages off by now. She was anxious to see. Her own would go next.

Carleton the elder was talking again. Arguing. She
heard only bits of it. No denials about Nellie. A dismissal.
That she, poor sic
k
Nellie, had been used to breed him
was a detail of no consequence. Barbara thought about m
others and their babies. She saw, in her mind, the child
she might have had once, but now could not.

Barbara turned downhill. She took a few steps, then
slowed. She felt tears on her face. Her shoulders straight
ened. Barbara looked at the sky.

She turned and fired.

She emptied half her clip.

“
It looks
.
.
.
good
,”
Nellie told him.

There was not much swelling. No angry lines of su
tures. The skin was pasty, damp to the touch, and the thick
stubble of beard made him look like a vagrant. But these
were nothing that a bit of sun and a razor could not cure.
She brushed at his flattened hair, arranging it with her
fingers.

The left eye was the last to be uncovered
.
The lid and
lashes were smeared with a yellow ointment but, once
wiped clean, its appearance was almost normal.

“
Can you see with it
?”
she asked.

Weinberg dabbed at the eye with cotton.
“
It's blurred.
But I think it's clearing
.”

Nellie pulled back.
“
You don't look very Jewish
,”
she
said.
“
You look like George Bancroft
.”

He peered into the rea
rv
iew mirror.
“
Who is George Bancroft
?”

“
He plays gangsters, mostly. Or he did. That's what you look like. A gangster
.”

“
Wonderful
,”
Weinberg grunted.

She ran a finger down the clip of the Ingram. “George used
tommy guns. Not these stubby little things
.”

Weinberg glanced down at the seat. The left eye, he
noticed, seemed to lag behind. He also noticed that his
wife had taken the silenced MP-5. Just in case, he sup
posed. Al
l
she was to do was start them walking in a
direction where they were not likely to find a telephone.

“
Where we gonna hide out
?”
Nellie asked, affecting
a gun mo
l
l accent.

Weinberg grinned.
“
For tonight we'll find a motel. Get
some rest. After that, we'll see
.”

”I know a place. W
e
could go to Tom's ranch. We
could camp out by the lake
.”

“
Um
.
.
.
maybe something a bit more comfortable
,”
he suggested.

Nellie heard the hesitation. And she saw his eyes. ”I
know
,”
she said, a bit sadly.
“
It's been a while
.”

But she had just been there. She was there, with Tom,
because she didn't want to be in Carleton
Dunville's
of
fice. And she could go there again, any time she wished.

“
How about a boat
?”
she asked.
“
We lived on one for six weeks once. I was doing a movie about rumrunners
.”

Weinberg pursed his lips.
“
That's actually not a bad idea
.”

He was prone to seasickness. It was in his file. They
would remember it, and probably not expect him to go
anywhere near water. A cabin cruiser, well appointed,
could probably be rented for cash with no questions asked.
It was one of the benefits of the drug culture. Pay cash and
you're presumed to be a dealer. And, therefore, left alone.
Nor is a boat, in a place like Marina Del Rey, all that
easy to approach unobserved.

“
Yes, Nellie
,”
he said.
“
That might be an excellent
idea
.”

₂₇

It took only minutes to find Yuri's car.

The Hertz tag with hi
s
keys gave its description and
the plate number. The two women waited for a break in
the traffic. More police cars were arriving. Molly recog
nized the detective, Huff, whom they'd seen at Lisa's
apartment. The two FBI agents might not be far behind.
Molly eased into the street and turned in the direction of
Beverly Hills and the telephone in their bungalow.

Twenty minutes later, nearing the parking lot of the
Beverly Hills Hotel, she spotted a short, white-haired man
in shirtsleeves, with powerful arms and the face of an
unsuccessful boxer. He stood near a car with its hood up,
as if waiting for road service. Molly pulled to the curb
behind him. She blinked her lights.

John Waldo glanced up once, then again, noting the make
of car she and Ca
rl
a appeared in. Without a word, he closed his hood and started the engine. He made a U-turn. Molly
followed. She knew that she was being led to where Ban
ne
rm
an was staying.

“
Could he know
?”
she asked Ca
rl
a.

Car
l
a looked at the dashboard clock. Not quite an hour
had passed since the first policemen appeared. ”I don't
think so
,”
she answered. Not in time to have sent John
Waldo for them. She flipped on the radio and found a
news station.

Molly drove for another fifteen minutes, no bulletins
from Burba
n
k, until Waldo's car signaled a turn into the
parking lot of a Holiday Inn in Brentwood, not far from
the UCLA campus. She followed it to the rear of the inn where his headlights picked up the form of a much larger
man in a red windbreaker who seemed to be strolling
aimlessly.

Waldo swung around him and stopped. His trunk
popped open. Molly watched as Billy Mc
H
ugh reached
into the trunk and lifted two suitcases from it. She could
see that they were heavy. The bags, which she was sure
contained clean weapons, strained at their handles. Billy
closed the trunk. The car drove off. Neither Molly nor
Carla bothered to memorize the plate number. Waldo
never, while in the field, drove the same car two days in a row. Although he often slept in them.

Quickly parking Yuri's car, she and Carla followed
Billy, who was now walking toward the back entrance of
the Holiday Inn. He climbed one flight of inner stairs and proceeded down a corridor, rapping on a door as he passed
it. He continued on. The door opened as Molly and Carla
passed it.

They saw Banne
rm
an's smile. Nice suit and tie. Just
another traveling businessman. They saw those eyes, curi
ously gentle
,
but he also saw theirs and the smile faded.

“
Come in
,”
he said quietly.
“
What's new with Claude
?”

By the time the Lexus passed Ventura, Su
mn
er Do
m
m
erich was sure. It could not be coincidence. He knew
where the two men were going.

They would get off at Santa Barbara, make two rights,
follow the signs toward Montecito but then go left at the t
op of the hill. Domme
ri
ch had been there once today
al
r
eady.

For the most part, he could only see the driver. He was
keeping to the middle lane, being careful not to go more
than five miles over the limit even though the man in the back must have been bleeding all over the seat. Dommerich didn't blame him. It would be really dumb to go shoot someone, which he was pretty sure he did
,
and then get
stopped for speeding.

Dommerich never sped. Six different times he had girls
in his car and he had had to be just as careful. He would
keep them in the well of his front passenger seat, all
scrunched, covered with pizza boxes, because the well was
easier to clean than seats. You could hose it out. But a Lexus probably had leather seats so that wasn
'
t so bad.
And another reason he never sped was that his company
fired anyone who got a ticket while on a delivery.
At one point a Corvette with its high beams on passed
both of them. Just then, the other man's hand had reached
up, trying to grab the driver's shoulder, but it seemed to
have no strength. It just sort of laid there, twitching a
little, until the driver knocked it away with his elbow.

The driver, he now saw, was trying to talk on a cellular
telephone. Dommerich moved closer, halving the distance
between them. He knew he wouldn't be able to hear but
it was fun to get closer anyway because he was pretty
sure that the driver would be talking about him. Or about
what he found back in Burba
n
k. What Hickey looked like.
Smiling up at him. All dead.

The only thing he still felt a little bad about was that
they must have shot
Carla's
friend. The first one must
have walked in on hi
m—m
aybe the door was still open and he saw the smile drawn on i
t—a
nd he saw
Carla's
friend standing over Hickey and he thought he must have
done it. But
Carla's
friend must have heard him coming
and shot him, too. In the throat. And in the shoulder, it
looked like.

Dommerich shivered. He didn't like guns. They really
bust you up. A knife is so cool and clean, and if you're
careful, it doesn't kill until you're good and ready. And
it's quiet.

Ahead, the man driving put the phone down. The Lexus
sped up just a little. The sign said eight miles to Santa
Barbara. Dommerich wondered how much cellular phones
cost these days. He had a CB radio once but it got stolen.
If he had one of those phones he could be calling Ca
rl
a
right now to ask if her friend is okay and to tell her he was following the two who walked in on him and that
they must be friends of
Hickey's
because they're going to
the same place Hickey went to before.

The Lexus signaled. Off the ramp. Two right turns.
Dommerich smiled. He'd been right. But suddenly, on this
dark part of the street, the Lexus pulled to the curb. The driver turned in his seat, on his knees, and reached down
into the well behind him. Dommerich couldn't stop. The
man was looking up at him. He went on past and kept
going, around a bend and then, out of sight of the Lexus
,
he turned up the hill. The best thing to do, he decided, was to go right up near those gates, turn off his lights,
and wait.

It was not s
o
much that he noticed the black Mercedes
coming down the hill. It was more of an afterimage. A
woman, blond, had been driving and she had white tape
across her nose and chin as if her face had bee
n
cut up
and then put back together. And she'd looked at him.

Dommerich felt a thrill of fear. In the afterimage, she
seemed all the more like a ghost. One of his college girls.
And then in the back there was this other white ball, a
face, totally covered with bandages, just like Claude Rains
when he was invisible and couldn't make himself visible again. Dommerich remembered the way Claude Rains unwrapped his head, starting from the top, and there wasn't anything underneath.

Dommerich was scared. There were other shapes in the
car but he couldn'
t
make them out. If he had dreamed
this, he would have thought that it was all six girls, their faces taped together, in this black car from hell, and they
had him, the invisible man, in the backseat, wrapped up i
n bandages so he wasn't invisible anymore, and they all
had knives, and
.
.
.

He punched his head. It drove away the thought.

Ahead, on his right, were the gates. There was some
activity there. He thought he'd better not get too close.
On his left, almost across from them, was a big house and
there must have been fifteen cars parked outside it. He
heard music. Sounds of a party. Dommerich swung off Tower Road and into the oval driveway of the house. He
got out of his car, gathered two empty boxes, and pretended to be checking an order slip.

The gates were shut but just behind them he could see
men in gray uniforms struggling with a little truck that
seemed to have gone off the road. He could hear the rev
ving of the engine and the whirring of tires. Three or four
men were pushing it. Another man, who must have been in charge, wasn't doing anything but yelling.

They had just heaved it back onto the road, sideways,
blocking it, when the white Lexus appeared. It pulled up
to the gate. The driver stuck his head out, shouted some
thing. The man inside, in charge, held up a hand telling
him he should wait. They were still maneuvering the truck,
trying to straighten it. It stalled. Dommerich could hear
the engine grinding.

The man in the Lexus got out. He walked up to the
gate and stuck his arm through it. The man in charge
seemed surprised
.
Then angry. He raised his hands, then
said something over his shoulder. The guards hesitated.
He yelled at them. One shrugged. They pushed the truck
off the road again. Seconds later
,
the gates swung open
and the Lexus sped through. Dommerich watched the tail
lights disappear.

Wait
’ll
he tells Ca
rl
a.

Wait
’ll
she hears that he knows where she can find the
two men who walked in on her friend and shot him. Proba
bly. That they must be
Hickey's
partners. That they proba
bly know all about why he robbed her sister, and killed
her, and tried to blame him.

But Carla knew better. She was his friend. She said so.

He still wasn't real sure she meant it. Not enough,
anyway, that he'd take a chance on meeting her
someplace.

But after this, who knows? Maybe.

In her whole life, Su
mn
er Dommerich would bet, Ca
rl
a
never knew anyone who could do the things he could.
And already did. In her whole life, she never had a friend like him.

For thirty minutes, Bannerman listened about Yuri, and
Sur La Mer, and especially about Claude, wishing, not for
the first time, that he had never let Carla out of Westpo
r
t.
There was a soft rap at the door. Susan answered this
time, greeting Leo Belk
i
n with a handshake and a touch
of both cheeks.

He was a man of middle-age, average height, balding,
rumpled in dress. To
r
toiseshell glasses, and a pipe Ban
nerman had never seen him light, added a scholarly ap
pearance. His expression, normally one of detached
amusement, was now grave.

Susan led him into the room. The television was on,
the sound low. A network film had already been inter
rupted twice by fragmentary reports of the events in Bur-
bank. Even now, a crawl came across the bottom of the
screen suggesting that the Campus Killer had chosen a
male for his eighth victim. Details at ten.

“
Yuri i
s
alive
,”
said Belkin to no one in particular.
“
There is hope. He is very strong
.”