Pell gripped his pistol, feeling that a huge irritation was about to be relieved. He suddenly felt aroused.
He couldn’t wait to get Jennie back to the Sea View. Maybe they wouldn’t make it all the way to the motel. He’d take her in the backseat. Pell now stepped back into the shadows of a large, tangled tree beside the door, enjoying the feel of the heavy gun in his hand. A minute passed. Then another. He knocked again. “Mr. Reynolds?”
“Pell, don’t move!” a voice shouted. It was coming from outside, behind him. “Drop the weapon.” The voice was Reynolds’s. “I’m armed.”
No! What had happened? Pell shivered with anger. He nearly vomited he was so shaken and upset.
“Listen to me, Pell. If you move one inch I will shoot you. Take the weapon in your left hand by the barrel and set it down. Now!”
“What? Sir, what are you talking about?”
No, no! He’d planned this so perfectly! He was breathless with rage. He gave a brief glance behind him.
There was Reynolds, holding a large revolver in both hands. He knew what he was doing and didn’t seem the least bit nervous.
“Wait, wait, Prosecutor Reynolds. My name’s Hector Ramos. I’m the relief—”
He heard the click as the hammer on Reynolds’s gun cocked.
“Okay! I don’t know what this is about. But okay. Jesus.” Pell took the barrel in his left hand and crouched, lowering it to the deck.
When, with a screech, the black Toyota skidded into the driveway and braked to a stop, the horn blaring.
Pell dropped flat to his belly, swept up the gun and began firing in Reynolds’s direction. The prosecutor crouched and fired several shots himself but, panicked, missed. Pell then heard the distant keening of sirens. Torn between self-preservation and his raw lust to kill the man, he hesitated a second. But survival won out. He sprinted down the driveway, toward Jennie, who had opened the passenger door for him.
He tumbled inside and they sped away, Pell finding some bleak satisfaction in emptying his weapon toward the house, hoping for at least one mortal hit.
Chapter 35
Dance, Kellogg and James Reynolds stood in his dewy front lawn, amid pristine landscaping, lit by the
pulse of colored lights.
The prosecutor’s first concern, he explained, was that no one had been hit by his, or Pell’s, slugs. He’d fired in defensive panic—he was still shaken—and even before the car had skidded away he was troubled that a bullet might have injured a neighbor. He’d run to the street to look at the car’s tags, but the vehicle was gone by then so he jogged to the houses nearby. No one had been injured by a stray shot, though. The deputy in the bushes outside the house would have some bad bruises, a concussion and very sore muscles, but nothing more serious than that, the medics reported.
When the doorbell rang and “Officer Ramos” announced his presence at the front door, Reynolds had actually been on the phone with Kathryn Dance, who was telling him urgently that Pell, possibly disguised as a Latino, knew where he lived and was planning to kill him. The prosecutor had drawn his weapon and sent his wife and son into the basement to call 911. Reynolds had slipped out a side door and come up behind the man.
He’d been seconds away from shooting to kill; only the girlfriend’s intervention had saved Pell.
The prosecutor now stepped away to see how his wife was doing, then returned a moment later. “Pell took all this risk just for revenge? I sure called that one wrong.”
“No, James, it wasn’t revenge.” Without mentioning her name—reporters were already starting to show up—Dance explained about Samantha McCoy’s insights into Pell’s psychology and told him about the incident in Seaside, where the biker had laughed at him. “You did the same thing in court. When he tried to control you, remember? That meant you were immune to him. And, even worse, you controlled him—you turned him into Manson, into somebody else, somebody he had no respect for. He was your puppet. Pell couldn’t allow that. You were too much of a danger to him.”
“That’s not revenge?”
“No, it was about his future plans,” Dance said. “He knew you wouldn’t be intimidated, and that you had some insights and information about him—maybe even something in the case notes. And he knew that you were the sort who wouldn’t rest until he was recaptured. Even if you were retired.”
She remembered the prosecutor’s determined visage in his house.
Whatever I can do…
“You wouldn’t be afraid to help us track him down. That made you a threat. And, like he said, threats have to be eliminated.”
“What do you mean by the ‘future’? What’s he got in mind?”
“That’s the big question. We just don’t know.”
“But how the hell did you manage to call two minutes before he showed up?”
Dance shrugged. “Susan Pemberton.”
“The woman killed yesterday.”
“She worked for Eve Brock.”
His eyes flashed in recognition. “The caterer, I mean, the event-planner who handled Julia’s wedding.
He found me through her. Brilliant.”
“At first I thought Pell used Susan to get into the office anddestroy some evidence. Or to get information about an upcoming event. I kept picturing her office, all the photos on the walls. Some were of local politicians, some were of weddings. Then I remembered seeing the pictures of your daughter’s wedding in your living room. The connection clicked. I called Eve Brock and she told me that, yes, you’d been a client.”
“How’d you know about the Latino disguise?”
She explained that Susan had been seen in the company of a slim Latino man not long before she’d been killed. Linda had told them about Pell’s use of disguises. “Becoming Latino seemed a bit far-fetched…but apparently it wasn’t.” She nodded at a cluster of bullet holes in the prosecutor’s front wall.