There is as well the usual human debris: two ragged alkies toting everything they own, destined to spend the night in a drunken sleep, hidden in nests of park shrubbery; a long-haired stripped-to-the-waist blue-jeaned pothead so anorexic and pale that he shouldn’t take off his shirt even alone in the shower, sitting on a bench playing the guitar so indifferently that Kipp wants to take the instrument away from him and smash it….
Jimmy, a born worrier and complainer, frets that a lot of people means too many witnesses. But as smart as he might be about computers, Jimmy is ignorant about the finer points of physical assault and kidnapping. The more people in the park, the more they will be distracted by one another, oblivious to what Kipp and his crew do to the woman. And when the action starts, more people means greater confusion, which assures fewer reliable witnesses.
Kipp carries with him a small pair of powerful binoculars. He uses them every couple minutes, sweeping the park to his left and ahead, what he can see of it among the trees, checking on his people and anticipating a first glimpse of Jimmy Radburn.
Through the receiver tucked in Kipp’s right ear comes the voice of Zahid, one of the guys pretending to be a college student deep in his textbook. “Jimmy’s approaching me, a third of a block north of Santa Monica. Looks like he’s wimping out.”
“Eat me,” Jimmy says. “Should’ve packed these freakin’ bags with Styrofoam.”
Kipp says, “You wouldn’t sweat, and the lack of weight would be obvious. Anyway, if this goes wrong, she gets the bags, nothing’s in them—then she’d gas us with one phone call. Shut up and sweat.”
He doesn’t necessarily intend to kill the woman calling herself Ethan Hunt. He’ll squeeze her, learn how the gutsy bitch got the information she needed to make them dance to her tune, understand why she’s interested in all those autopsies and the dude named David James Michael. Then he’ll either waste her or not. If not, he’ll isolate her while they ease their operation out of the Vinyl space without alerting the FBI, then release her. If she’s as hot as Jimmy says, he will give her a lot of Kipp Garner to remember before he lets her go.
Little more than halfway between Wilshire and Arizona, which both terminate in Ocean Avenue, Kipp turns from the Palisades railing, moving farther into the park, to be better able to see through the clusters of trees. He stops and glasses the way ahead.
Here comes Jimmy, lugging the stuffed briefcases, metallic balloon mirroring the sun and bobbing over his head. He’s nearing Alika, where she’s peddling religious tracts with few takers.
Kipp doesn’t see any bitch, with or without purple hair, hot enough to match Jimmy’s description. That doesn’t mean she isn’t here, because Jimmy is a horndog who will jump a goat if it happens to be the only female available when he needs one, a fantasizer who will, in the telling, turn the goat into first runner-up in the Miss Universe contest.
Then something unexpected happens.
24
* * *
THE RATHER PLAIN seven-story hotel with some Art Deco details stood across from Palisades Park. The entrance gave it a needed element of style: Six steps flanked by stainless-steel railings coiled to form newel posts led to a portico where marble columns supported a curved architrave under which stood a pair of polished-steel-and-glass doors flanked by panels of art glass etched with a scene of egretlike birds standing in the suggestion of water.
At the moment, the doors were closed, and Jane stood behind one of them, watching the park on the farther side of Ocean Avenue.
Outside, on the portico, stood a doorman-valet dressed in black except for a white shirt, waiting for the next arriving guest. He was also helping Jane by keeping an eye on the park to the south, which was out of her line of sight.
She had turned in her service pistol when she’d gone on leave, and she’d been supposed to turn in her FBI credentials, too. She intentionally kept them. Her section chief, Nathan Silverman, didn’t chase her for them right away, maybe because she was one of his most successful investigators and he expected her to be tough enough to deal with her grief and return in a few weeks, instead of months. Or maybe he put a pin in it also because they had great mutual respect and were friends to the extent that the difference in their ranks, ages, and genders allowed. By the time he might have insisted on having her ID, she’d been two months out of action, had sold her house, filed a request for leave extension, and gone underground.
She assumed that her current status with the Bureau was either problematic or nonexistent.
Nevertheless, because she had little choice, she had presented her credentials to the hotel manager, a gracious woman named Paloma Wyndham, asking for cooperation in a minor sting operation. Paloma agreed to allow her to conduct surveillance of the park from the lobby, which was not busy because the hotel had only sixty luxury suites, no single or double rooms.
She had offered to have her section chief in Washington speak to the manager, which was where it could have fallen apart. But she knew that even in the current politically charged atmosphere, when people were encouraged to distrust or even openly disrespect law enforcement, the FBI was one of the few—perhaps the only—federal agencies for which most Americans still had respect. Because Jane was supposedly using the hotel only as a point from which to conduct surveillance for an hour, the manager merely Xeroxed the ID and asked her to check back when her work was concluded.
In fact, if Jimmy Radburn did not play according to the rules of their agreement, there might be more action within the hotel than Jane had led Paloma to believe. She had walked the premises earlier in the morning and knew how best to use the place.
From his post on the portico, the doorman-valet turned to Jane and gave her one thumb up, indicating that he had seen the man with the metallic balloon approaching from the southern end of the park, beyond her line of sight.
25
* * *
SWEATING, THIRSTY, WISHING he’d remembered to coat his face with sunscreen because he burned easily, muttering to himself about the weight of the briefcases, Jimmy arrives at a small grove of huge trees that canopy the walkway. He still doesn’t see anyone who might be the slut who turned his life upside down, and there are two long blocks until he will reach California Avenue, by which time he will probably be dehydrated and on death’s doorstep.
From nowhere, like a demon conjured, the rag-and-bone creature that had claimed to be a Vietnam veteran comes in a shrieking fury, having dropped his trash bag of belongings and shed his backpack, now assaulting Jimmy with bony fists like clenched talons. “Cut out old Barney’s tongue, feed it to a seagull, will you? I’ll stab out your eyes and eat ’em myself!” He is all filthy crusted clothes and tangled hair and bristling beard, wild-eyed and yellow-toothed, spraying spittle with each threat, spittle that no doubt carries with it diseases beyond counting.
Jimmy drops the briefcases to engage in self-defense, slapping ineffectually at the old man, not for the first time proving himself the furthest thing from a gladiator. The walking scarecrow has too little substance to be a danger to a grown man, but he rocks Jimmy on his heels before scrambling backward, spitting and cursing and stamping his feet like Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy tale that had made Jimmy, as a child, wet his bed when his mother read it to him.
The craziness seems to be over, but it isn’t. Along the walkway comes a fiftyish, helmeted, roller-skating Amazon in black Spandex shorts and a canary-yellow sports bra. She spins into an abrupt halt and snatches up both briefcases.