Hawk stood at the kitchen counter, sorting through the day’s mail. “There’s a message for you on the machine,” he said.
“Oh?” she said. “Who was it?”
He began leafing through the new Mother Jones magazine, not even bothering to look up as he said, “Dave Haggerty.”
“Uh, okay,” she said, a flush of embarrassment washing over her face.
And now he did look up, and then said in a very even, very quiet voice, “What’s the deal, Sal?”
She met his gaze. “I just saw Scotty Atkins. He said Bea Preston had gotten rid of Charlie’s lawyer. It’s probably about that.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, looking back down at the magazine, turning a page. “Listen to the message.”
“Hawk,” she began.
Now he looked at her straight, a furrow of pain between his eyebrows, lips pressed tight. “Later,” he said.
Dave Haggerty. He was one for crossing lines. What was on that message? Whatever it was, something had put hurt and distance in her lover’s eyes. She could feel Hawk stepping back, withdrawing. The fear of losing him seared through her.
She touched his arm.
“Go listen to your message,” he said. “Don’t, Hawk. Don’t do this. Dave Haggerty cares about those kids. He’s also a potential donor to my center,” she said. “Edna’s putting on the pressure.”
He took a breath. “This isn’t about Edna. It isn’t a work thing,” he told her, putting down the mail and walking to the refrigerator. “I think I’ll just have a sandwich for dinner and then go to my office. Got a lot of work to do.”
“Hawk,” said Sally. “Please. Don’t pull away from me. You care about this too.”
“Right now, actually, I don’t, Sally,” he answered. “It’s eating you alive, and I can’t compete. I don’t even want to.”
“You don’t have to compete,” said Sally. “You saw Charlie. For God’s sake, you saw Brad Preston’s body! Somebody sent those pictures to you. We’re both in this.”
“And wouldn’t it be better, in pretty much every way, to leave this to the cops?”
“It would be easier,” Sally admitted. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why Dave called.”
His eyes bored in on her. “The man’s hitting on you, Sally. What are you going to do?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“You’d better do something,” he told her, opening the fridge and turning his back on her.
She went to the phone and punched up the message.
“Hello, beautiful woman. Dave here.” His hypnotic voice. “We’ve got a problem. I need to see you as soon as you can get away.”
Yeah. That crossed the line.
The last time she’d seen that kind of hurt in Hawk’s eyes, he’d been standing by her bedroom door, covered with snow. It was the middle of a winter night. And she was naked in bed. With somebody else.
She’d never expected to regain his trust, let alone his love. Years and years had passed before she’d seen him again.
Even a man as sane and strong as Hawk Green had a fragile side. How could she hurt him again?
But what could she do?
She heard the front door slam.
She could call Haggerty back, but she was hardly in the mood.
She could try to find out more about the parties and the drugs. Aggie Stark doubtless knew a lot more than she’d been telling.
The idea of pounding on a fourteen-year-old didn’t have much appeal.
She could call Bea Preston and ask why she’d gotten rid of the lawyer. Now there was a really pleasant prospect.
Sally was out of gas.
She poured herself a glass of sauvignon blanc. A big glass. Then she went into the bathroom, opened the tap, dumped in enough lilac bath potion to submerge the entire bathroom in perfumed bubbles. She got a steamy suspense novel and, after a minute, her cell phone. If a long and very indulgent soak didn’t make her feel better, she could call Delice and vent. Or maybe, when she’d relaxed a little, she’d call Hawk and see if she could coax him into coming home to talk it out.
The combination of warm, fragrant, foamy water, cool wine, and Hollywood writing had her dozing in no time. She awoke with a start, just in time to save the book from following so many of its best-selling predecessors to a watery grave.
But it wasn’t just the weight of the downward drifting paperback that had wakened her. Had she heard the front door open and close?
Her spirit lifted. Maybe Hawk had decided on his own that it wasn’t a good idea for them to spend an evening by themselves, getting madder, or more defensive, at least farther apart. Maybe, any minute, he’d open the bathroom door, give her a pleading smile, propose joining her in the tub.
Footsteps in the front hall. Damp as she was, the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She knew the sound of Hawk’s footsteps, and these were different. Unfamiliar. Oddly tentative, as if the person who’d entered was tiptoeing, trying not to be heard. And nobody was calling out to see if anybody was home. Something was very, very wrong.
She leaped out of the bathtub, sloshing water and bubbles on the floor as she hurried to lock the door.
Not a moment too soon. Her splashing around let the intruder know she was there. Running footsteps, pounding, and in no time, the terrible noise of somebody strong trying to wrench the bathroom door off its hinges.
Sally lunged to the floor for her phone. Standing naked and dripping, as far from the door as she could get, she called 911. “This is Sally Alder. I’m locked in my bathroom and there’s somebody trying to break in. Listen!” She held the phone out so that the operator could hear the banging. “You’ve got to get out here right now!”
The dispatcher asked for her address.
Sally gave it. “They’re on the way!” she shouted, hoping the prowler was paying attention. Then she went nuts. “That was the sheriff’s office, you fucking creep, and they’re going to be here in about ten seconds!”
The pounding stopped.
Sally froze. She desperately hoped the guy—a guy, surely?—was half as scared as she was now, but wouldn’t that set him running as fast as he could? Maybe she should have tried to stall him until they came, so they could catch him in the act of breaking into her goddamn bathroom?
Silence. She waited a fraction of a second, listening hard for the sound of footsteps moving away from the door. Nothing. She was shaking so hard her teeth were rattling. And she was still bare-ass naked. She wrapped a towel around herself, working for a little warmth.
Still nothing.
And then a clicking noise, followed by the clunk of metal on the wooden door. Stop. Hey. What was that sound?
Terror struck. She dived behind the toilet. The door splintered. The full-length mirror next to the bathtub shattered, glass spraying everywhere.
Her ears were ringing so hard, she almost didn’t hear the siren.
She did, at last, hear the footsteps running away, as she squeezed herself into the space between the toilet and the wall.
That was how Dickie Langham found her when he surged in, minutes later. He hauled her to her feet, held her at arm’s length. “Are you hurt? Anything? Anything, Sally?”
She burst into sobs.
“Come on!” he said. “If you can tell me, spit it out. Sally...” He began to run his hands down her arms, eyes moving over her body to check for injury.
She clung to the towel, knotted under her arms. “I-I-I-, I’m f-f-f-f-f-f-f...”
“Oh fuck,” said Dickie, ascertaining that she wasn’t bleeding, nothing was broken. “Oh Jesus, oh God, oh fuck, oh Christ,” he said, pulling her into a crushing, incredibly comforting bear hug. “Oh God, Sally. How the fuck...”
She hugged him back, the towel hanging in there, partly due to the lack of space between them.
And then Hawk was there, and Dickie let her go, and Hawk wrapped her up, and there was quite a bit of crying going on.
By the time Scotty Atkins and the crime scene team arrived, she was bundled up in sweats and wool socks and felt slippers, shivering at the kitchen table while Hawk put on the kettle for tea, and then came back to sit down and hold her hand. “It’s my fault,” he kept saying. “I shouldn’t have left. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d stayed.”
“This isn’t your fault,” Dickie said, unwrapping a stick of gum and chomping down. “The responsibility belongs entirely to whoever fired that gun. Now, Sally, you have to stay calm here and tell me everything—every single living thing—you can remember about what happened.”
“How the hell do I know?” she said. “I was nodding off in the bath when somebody came into my house. I locked the door and called 911 while whoever it was did his best to rip the door off.”
Dickie’s lips curled upward. “It’s not everybody who takes their phone into the bathtub,” he said.
“It’s not like I can’t go anywhere without it,” Sally said. “But, well, Hawk and I had a fight. I was thinking about calling him from the tub.”
“Too much information,” said Dickie.
“You asked,” Sally shot back.
“Well, anyway, maybe it’s good you had that fight. So can the guilt,” he told Hawk.
Hawk just shook his head.
“Now give me the details,” said Dickie.
So she went over it for him, trying hard to recall the sound of the footsteps, of first the clicking, then the thunk of the gun against the door. And when Atkins emerged from the bathroom, leaving the crime scene guys to complete their meticulous work, she recounted every detail all over again.
“We found the slug,” said Scotty, “embedded in the Sheetrock behind where the mirror was. It’s messed up, but judging from what it did to the door and the size of it, it looks to me like a three-eighty.”
“Nice,” said Dickie. “Very nice.”
“What does that mean?” Sally asked. Everything she knew about guns could be put in your eye.
“You say you heard a click first, before the sound of the gun on the door?” Scotty asked.
“Yes,” said Sally. “I’m sure.”
“There’s a kind of gun called a three-eighty, very popular with the street punk crowd,” said Scotty. “Nice little death machine you can put in your sock. The bad little kids love ’em because they’re cheap and small with a lot of stopping power.”
“Stopping power?” Sally said.
“Yeah. Like about twice as much as a small caliber weapon of about the same size,” Scotty explained. “That’s why they’re so well liked.”
“Oh,” she said weakly.
“But they’re not real reliable, and that appeals to the kind of moron who gets a rush out of wondering if he’ll blow his hand off when he pulls the trigger. Lots were, and are, sold illegally,” Dickie added. “People generally refer to this kind of cheap gun as a ‘Saturday night special.’ There are a bunch of gun manufacturers, in a kind of ring surrounding L.A., that specialize in making cheap handguns for gang-bangers. Cops call it the ‘Ring of Fire,’ ” Dickie said. “This one company, Bryco, used to make a hell of a lot of three-eighties.”
“What’s a lot?” Hawk asked.
“Couldn’t say for one company,” Dickie said affably. “But I heard one estimate that the Ring of Fire companies make a million handguns a year, and more and more of them are three-eighties.”
“You say used to?” Sally asked.
“Yeah,” said Scotty. “Bryco went bankrupt a couple years ago. Some kid got shot by his babysitter and ended up a quadriplegic. Faulty safety on a Bryco three-eighty. By the time the courts were done with it all, the company owed the plaintiff, like, twenty-five million dollars. Naturally, the owner scooted.”
“Where to?” Sally asked.
Scotty almost smiled. “Florida,” he answered. “Land of Sunshine. But the point is, there are still plenty of guns coming out of the Ring of Fire, and hundreds of thousands of these little sweethearts floating around on the market. You could buy one off the Internet this afternoon and have it here by tomorrow, and nobody’d pay any attention.”
“Until you shot somebody,” Hawk said.
A moment of silence.
“How much do they cost?” Sally asked.
Dickie snorted. “A working model, at a legal dealer, maybe one hundred and fifty dollars. For the less fastidious purchaser and seller, maybe fifty dollars and a bag of weed. And of course, there are websites where they ask no questions, make no guarantees about whether the fucker will shoot, and the price goes down to something any kid working a pizza delivery route could easily afford.”
“And easily buy, no questions asked,” Scotty added.
“Jesus Christ,” said Hawk.
“Hey,” said Dickie, “you’d be surprised how many pizza boys are packing. They never know, when they come up to somebody’s front door, what kind of lunatics might be inside.”
“I’ll remember that next time I complain that they didn’t put the anchovies on my pie,” said Sally.
“You might think about getting yourself a nice heavy wooden door for that bathroom,” Scotty said. “That thing blew a hole the size of a golf ball in your piece-of-shit hollow core door.”
Sally sagged.
Hawk took a breath. “Enough. Why would some little scumbag come into my house and shoot at my girlfriend? She’s currently on a crusade to save every punk and punkette in the Rocky Mountains.”
“We’ll find out,” Scotty said.
“Emphasis on we,” said Dickie, aiming a look at Sally that she was sure he used on his kids, probably with excellent effect. “Not you. Not either of you. You’re through. You will not go tearing around town looking for assholes. Consider yourself extremely lucky to have survived this encounter with one of them.”
The teakettle whistled. Hawk brought Sally a mug. She put her hands around it, warmed her icy fingers. She nodded. “I take your point.”
“About those pictures,” said Hawk. “There has to be a connection. And there are other people in them. Maude Stark. Aggie Stark.” He hesitated almost imperceptibly, though Sally noticed. “Dave Haggerty. All kinds of people in crowds.”
“We’re on it,” Scotty said.
“So what do you do?” Sally asked. “Go around looking for some little shit in big saggy pants with a camera phone in his pocket and a fucking gun in his sock? And let’s see, maybe a sweet little Palm Pilot so he can schedule his robbing and shooting and terrorizing and pick up text messages from his homies? Man, these days you can carry enough high-tech gear to run a small war without even maxing out your pants pockets. Especially considering the size of the pants.”
“The pants,” said Dickie, “are functional.”
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” said Sally. “We know that Billy Reno wasn’t the one. He’s in jail, right?”
“Sure,” said Scotty. “But he has friends, you know.”
“And enemies,” said Sally.
“Don’t concern yourself,” Dickie said, warning in his voice.
“What about Charlie? Doesn’t she have enemies?” Sally asked. “Doesn’t she need protection?”
Dickie slumped in his chair. “You have no idea,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Sally said.
Dickie and Scotty exchanged a glance. “Bea Preston took her out of the hospital. It happened about an hour ago, when my deputy was down in the cafeteria, getting a cup of coffee and, unfortunately, taking the time to flirt with the girl who was working the steam table. Just like that. The floor nurse called right after they left. Said she tried to stop them, but Bea wouldn’t listen.”
“Was Charlie conscious?” Sally asked. “How did they get her out?”
“Seems she woke up,” Dickie said. “She’d been in and out, according to the nurses, and Bea barely left her side the whole time she was there. They took her out in a wheelchair.”
“How could they?” Sally’s voice rose, tinged with a hint of a shriek. “She’s a witness in a murder investigation.”
Dickie looked down at his hands, then looked back up. “The nurse said Bea told her she wasn’t satisfied with the care her daughter was getting in the hospital. Said she was taking her to a private facility where she would get what she needed.”
“I just bet,” Hawk said.
“Was it just Bea, or were there more people with her?” Sally asked.
“Just Bea,” said Dickie. “And the nurse said it looked like Charlie was going along with it. But then, if it was me zoned out on horse tranquilizers and nerve bombs, I don’t reckon I’d put up much fuss when somebody told me they were springing me from the hospital. I guess, whatever else might be, I’d be grateful for that.”
“Maybe,” said Sally. Or maybe not. Brad Preston had, after all, died a well-to-do man whose immediate family consisted of his daughter and his second wife. The terms of his will might affect how much gratitude Charlie had toward her stepmother.