The coastal fog hadn’t reached Beverly Hills. The day remained warm. The light, refreshing breeze came scented with jasmine.
Jane waited. Waiting could be more stressful than action, even when the action involved a pumped and pitiless giant with a shotgun.
At 3:30, from her large handbag she extracted the LockAid lock-release gun and put it on her lap.
She slipped her hands into the black-silk gloves with the decorative silver stitching.
Twenty minutes later, the quiet of discreet wealth gave way to the growl of money loudly celebrated in the twelve-stroke engine of an Italian racing legend. Out toward the front of the house, tires lipped a thin squeal off blacktop as the Ferrari executed a turn too sharp, too fast from the street into the driveway.
Lock-release gun in one hand, purse in the other, Jane sprang off the patio chair. She stepped to the kitchen door, put the purse down, and inserted the LockAid’s thin pick into the keyway. She wanted to get the noise of the automatic pick out of the way before Overton entered the house.
As the garage door rumbled up, a shrill continuous warning tone sounded throughout the residence. Depending on how the alarm system might be programmed, Overton had one minute—at most two—to enter a disarming code in the keypad mounted on the wall beside the interior door that connected the garage and the house. If he didn’t enter the code, or if he entered a second disarming code that signified he was under duress, Vigilant Eagle would have armed guards and maybe a dog en route, with the local police in their wake.
By the time the Ferrari drove into the garage and the throaty engine choked off, all the pin tumblers in the lock were cleared, and the knob turned freely.
Jane picked up her handbag, dropped the LockAid into it, and stepped into the house. With the alarm shrilling throughout the residence, she closed and locked the door.
The muffled clatter of guide wheels following their tracks issued from the adjacent garage as the sectional door descended.
She hurried across the spacious kitchen, through a swinging door, into the ground-floor hallway. Doors to the left and right.
Dining room on the left. No.
On the right, a home gym full of circuit-training machines. Three walls featured floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Nowhere to hide that he wouldn’t see her reflection the moment he opened the door. No.
Above the alarm came the digital tones of the disarming code as Overton entered numbers in the garage keypad.
A half bath. No. It might be his first stop.
A soft ka-chunk. the door closing between the garage and house.
A step-in closet. Housekeeping supplies, a vacuum cleaner. Yes. She eased the door shut, put down the handbag, drew her pistol, and waited in darkness.
17
* * *
IN COURT, HE IS MR. OVERTON, and elsewhere he is usually Bill or William, but among his closest friends—and in his own mind—he is Sterling.
This week has brought him a legal triumph: the settlement of a class-action case that will further enrich him, make the law firm that bears his name more greatly feared than it already is, and even to some extent benefit his clients. His leisurely lunch with Andre has been as usual satisfying both as to the cuisine and the company. For a culinary master who insists on the purity of all ingredients, Andre has a deliciously impure sense of humor.
In the kitchen, Sterling goes to the Crestron panel by the back door, which controls all the house systems. He calls up the security screen. He doesn’t intend to spend part of the afternoon outside, so he presses the key labeled H, which activates the perimeter sensors at doors and windows, but not the interior motion detectors.
The recorded voice of the system robotically declares, “Armed to home.”
Sterling is in a festive mood. He calls up the through-house music system and from his playlist selects SALSA. The irresistible beat reverberates through the house, and Sterling moves with the music as he goes to the refrigerator and gets a bottle of Perrier.
He prefers instrumentals to other forms of music, because no matter how good the songwriter, half the lyrics will inevitably be sentimental bullshit that annoys him. He does, however, include tunes that are sung in languages he doesn’t speak, because he can’t be irritated by words he doesn’t understand.
Carrying the Perrier, he pushes through the swinging door and sings a duet with the Spanish-language vocalist as he makes his way along the downstairs hall. He has learned the lyrics phonetically and mimics them with no idea of what he’s saying.
Climbing the stairs with something like a samba step, Sterling is amused to think that the judges before whom he has appeared would be amazed to see this playful side of him, as would the defendants’ attorneys he has eviscerated with trial strategies as razor-edged as filleting knives. He is a merciless tiger in the courtroom, as he is also with the women who submit to him, the only difference being that the women like his toughness and the defense attorneys do not.
His fourteen-hundred-square-foot bedroom suite is a Moderne masterpiece, inspired by the residence once owned by the Mexican actress Dolores del Río, a classic built in 1929 and still standing at the end of a Santa Monica Canyon cul-de-sac. Since childhood, he has been fascinated by Hollywood. He would have been an actor, a leading man, if he hadn’t been drawn to the law. He is enchanted by the power of the law and by the infinite ways that the system can be manipulated to achieve any desired end.
In his large walk-in closet, he changes into a red-accented blue polo shirt by Gucci and blue pants by Officine Générale, barefoot in his private world. Later, he will shower and spend a long, intense evening at Aspasia, doing what he does best.
As he steps out of the closet, softly singing salsa, it seems that Aspasia has come to him. He is face-to-face with the most remarkable-looking girl, hair aniline black and eyes so hot-blue they look as if they could boil water as efficiently as gas flames.
She is holding a spray bottle, as though she wishes him to sample a new men’s fragrance from Armani or Givenchy.
He is for an instant frozen by surprise. Then he startles backward a step, and he is surprised again when she sprays his lower face. Something sweet-tasting but with a faintly bleachy odor wraps him in sudden darkness.
18
* * *
STERLING DREAMS OF DROWNING, and at first he is relieved to wake up.
Salsa enlivens the moment, though he never goes to bed with such festive music playing. His vision is blurred, and a chemical taste makes him grimace, and for a moment he can’t determine whether he is standing or sitting, or lying down.
He blinks, blinks, and as his vision clears, some of the mist lifts from his mind as well, but only some of it. He is lying on his back on the bathroom floor, of all places, alongside his prized Deco-period antique bathtub.
When he attempts to move, he realizes that he is restrained. His wrists are bound one to the other with a heavy-duty plastic cable tie. A second tie loops from the first to a third, and the third is secured to one foot of the tub, which stands on balls gripped in the wicked claws of stylized lion paws.
His ankles are likewise shackled to each other and then, with more looped cable ties, to the stainless-steel drainpipe of the bathroom sink.