He came around the room rather than directly across it, legs still shaky, supporting himself with the sink, then with the bar handle on the walk-in shower, then with a towel rack, then with the door handle.
Jane backed farther into the living room. She didn’t have the pistol in a two-hand grip, because she didn’t find him threatening and she wanted him to know that she didn’t. His mind was a field of ashes, most of his hope gone. But there were hot coals of anger under the ashfield, and any indication that she still respected him as an adversary would feed his ego and fan flames from those coals.
When he had cleared the doorway, he declared, “I need to sit down a minute,” and he wobbled toward the bed.
She said, “If why you want to sit there is the Smith & Wesson in the nightstand drawer, it isn’t there anymore.” She indicated the straight-backed chair she had kicked into the dresser and that now stood in the middle of the room. “You could sit there till you feel better.”
“Bite me, bitch.”
“Is that right?”
“Bite me.”
“Such adolescent shit. You should hear yourself.”
“I hear myself just fine.”
“You don’t really. You probably never have.”
“You’re a gash with a gun, that’s all you are.”
“And what are you?”
“I don’t need to sit anywhere.”
“So show me the safe, tough guy.”
“It’s in the closet.”
She said, “Behind the mirror, most likely.”
“You know everything, huh?”
“Not everything.”
The walk-in closet was big, maybe fifteen feet wide and twenty deep. The hanging clothes were hidden behind doors, everything else in drawers of various sizes. In the center of the room stood an upholstered bench where he could sit to put on socks and shoes. At the back wall, a full-length mirror was inlaid between cabinets.
She let him get nearly to the mirror before she stepped into the closet behind him.
He was watching her in the looking glass and saw her take the pistol in a two-hand grip. “Gonna shoot me in the back?”
“It’s an option.”
“Just like a woman.”
“Is that supposed to rile me?”
“If I’m dead, you’re dead.”
“So this is where you say you’ve got friends who’ll never stop till they find me and cut off my head?”
“Wait and see.”
“None of your friends are your friends, Billy.”
“Mirror, mirror on the wall.”
The mirror slid aside, disappeared behind adjacent cabinetry, evidently responding to those five words and perhaps to the specific timbre of his voice.
He now stood before a brushed stainless-steel panel. He leaned forward, putting his right eye to a round glass lens embedded in the steel. The pattern of each person’s retina was as unique as any of his fingerprints.
Jane heard a series of lock bolts retracting, and the steel panel whisked up into the ceiling with a pneumatic sound.
“Here’s your money, more money than you’ve ever seen.”
His body blocked her view of the contents of the safe.
“Five hundred thousand bucks.”
He reached into the safe, perhaps to pick up a bundle of cash.
“Don’t,” she said.
He started to turn to his left, bringing his zip-tied hands cross-body. He thought he was fast. He assumed she would be thinking about half a million dollars.
She said don’t, but he did, and he was so much slower than he thought he would be that when her first round took him high in the left side, just under the arm, he fired reflexively into a cabinet door less than halfway through the 180-degree arc that he imagined completing. During firearms instruction at the Academy, having worked diligently for weeks to improve her hand strength, Jane had been able to pull the trigger ninety-six times in one minute with her right hand, using a practice revolver, which surpassed the standard required by the instructor. In pitched combat, a weak hand could quickly be a dead hand. Her be-sure shot, less than a second after the first, changed the shape of Overton’s head, instantly stopped his incessant scheming, and dropped him to the floor.
19
* * *
THE WEAPON OVERTON HAD used was a customized Sig Sauer P226 X-Six with a nineteen-shot magazine. It had boomed in the confines of the closet. Even with a sound suppressor, Jane’s pistol had a voice, louder than it would have been in a larger space or outdoors. But she was confident that none of the three shots would have attracted attention beyond the walls of this well-built house.
Considering how many enemies he’d made and further considering the nature of his associates, the attorney had most likely stashed handguns throughout the residence, so that he would always be within easy reach of a weapon. The safe was a miniature armory, holding a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun, two revolvers, and another pistol in addition to the one with which he had hoped to kill her.
The pistol he had chosen not to use was a Colt .45 ACP. The engraved name of one of the finest custom shops in the country at once intrigued her. The gun had evidently been completely rebuilt and among the improvements were Heinie night sights. There was also a silencer for it.
If the pistol had been used in a crime, Overton would have disposed of it. She might have found the replacement for her Heckler & Koch, which was now tied to two killings. They were killings in self-defense, therefore neither of them a murder, but even if all this turned out better than she hoped, she wasn’t going to spend ten percent of the rest of her life in a courtroom, explaining herself.
Among Overton’s collection of expensive luggage, she found a leather tote bag with a zippered closure. She put the Colt and the silencer in it. She added two boxes of ammo. And his smartphone.
Overton had lied about the half million. The safe contained a hundred and twenty thousand. Twelve banded packets of ten thousand each. She put the money in the tote bag.
She had noted earlier that the only security cameras in the house were in the ground-floor and upstairs hallways. Each was ceiling mounted behind a plastic bubble. Night-vision capability.
She had thought the recorder might be in the safe. It was not. Nor was it anywhere in the master closet.
After a fifteen-minute search of likely places, using Overton’s house keys, she opened a locked door in the garage, found a storage room, and located the recorder in a cabinet. From the machine, she ejected a disc that saved images for thirty days before recording over them. She put it in the tote with the money and the gun.
Before she had entered the house the first time, earlier in the day, she had put on the black gloves with silver stitching. Never having taken them off, she could have left no fingerprints.
She had not taken a drink from any glass, had not shed a drop of blood, leaving nothing that would give them an easy DNA match.
Inevitably, she had lost a few hairs in the house. But CSI had to find them, which wasn’t as easy as it was portrayed on TV.
She almost went back through the house to turn off the lights, so they would not burn all weekend and perhaps make someone curious, suspicious. She could not do it. She surprised herself that she could not do it. Dead men do not get up and walk again. She did not believe in ghosts. But she could not do it. Let the lights burn.
She left by the back door and locked it with Overton’s keys. She dropped the keys in the tote bag and zippered the bag shut.
Walking residential streets at night in Beverly Hills was viewed by the local police as an all-but-certain sign of criminal activity, especially if the suspect in question was carrying a bag larger than a clutch purse. She had to walk to the end of the block and around the corner, where she had left the Ford Escape. If she happened to come to the attention of the city’s finest, she was screwed, because she would not shoot a cop.
As Jane stepped off Overton’s driveway and onto the public sidewalk, the moon watched blinkless, a milky and accusing eye.