CHAPTER 7

It didn’t take much browsing on the Internet to find Earl Winslow. CEO of a major oil company, on the board of directors to several major corporations, a big donor to the modern art museum; he had a high-priced box at the 49ers stadium where he entertained an A-list of celebrities. In his forties, a handsome man with a wife much younger than he was, she was a real looker, prominent in photos of art openings at the museum.

There were pictures of the two of them, smiling for the camera, him in a tailored suit that fit perfectly, and she wearing a form-fitting dress that showed off her body. This was a woman who spent time at the gym, I thought. All of which probably meant that he didn’t have a nine-to-five schedule. But there had to be regular forays out of that fortress where he lived. I would have to make it a routine to ride the bicycle on Carmel Avenue. Ride up to Phoenix Lake. What I should do was to buy myself an off-road bike, the kind that you saw on the trails around Phoenix Lake. Buy that and a helmet and I could make my pass around Earl Winslow’s compound a regular event, just another middle-aged man on a bike trying to reduce the flab in his legs.

I could vary the routine by parking the bike next to the post office in Ross, locking it to the bike rack on the sidewalk, walking up to Carmel Avenue, strolling past the gate. If I tried it at various times I was sure to spot him. Fix him with my egret eye.

I bought the bike at the bike shop in Fairfax and began with an early morning ride. It took a week before I saw him coming out of the gate. He drove a Mercedes.

S-class, and a quick check told me it cost a hundred thousand dollars. Silver gray, it purred out of those gates, Winslow at the wheel, and he didn’t give me a second glance. Ten o’clock in the morning. It took another three weeks before I was able to pin him down. Ten o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays, like clockwork. He had some kind of appointment on those two days. But I continued to make the rounds for another month before I was sure that this was a regular schedule. There were other departures, but they came at odd hours, often with the wife in the car as well. The wife drove a Porsche 911, yellow, and there was, as I suspected, a black Range Rover in the third bay in the garage.

So it would be a Tuesday or a Thursday.

I bought the gun from the shop in Santa Rosa. It was the Glock G43, a little over six inches long, weighing slightly more than a pound unloaded, less than a pound and a half loaded, nine millimeter, with a magazine of seven rounds. I took a class in shooting it, went to the gun range with a young man from the gun shop, put on earplugs and fired at a circular target, then at an outline of a man. I didn’t do well. I imagined the target to be Winslow, and sighted carefully, but the recoil of the gun raised my aim. It took half an hour before I could hit the target.

“You’ll be OK,” the kid said. “Everybody has problems at first.”

But I knew that I would not be raising the gun and firing at a distant figure. I would be next to him in his car, pressing the gun to his body. Missing the target didn’t bother me. I was going to hold the gun to Winslow’s head. It was small enough to fit in my jacket pocket and it had the look of a pistol that meant business. The gate would open and he would pause until it was fully open, then come slowly through the gate, pause before he entered the street and that was the moment. I would open the passenger door of his Mercedes and slip inside and I would press the gun to his temple and tell him to drive. And he would protest and I would jam the muzzle at his skull, hurting him, and I would lower the gun and press it into his crotch and say to him, “Drive this fucking car or I will blow off your balls and your cock,” and I would press the gun more tightly against him. I wouldn’t need any target practice for that.

The gun was black, had some plastic parts that contributed to its light weight, and it fit easily into my hand. I could understand how some men could become entranced with such a weapon. There was a power that was transmitted to my brain when I held the gun steady and pulled the trigger.

Now I was ready. I needed to pick a day, and it occurred to me that it would be appropriate to pick a day that corresponded to my daughter’s death. The date, April 7, didn’t fall on a Tuesday or a Thursday. This year it was a Wednesday, which suited me perfectly. An early April Tuesday or Thursday would mean that the North Beach at Point Reyes would be little used. With any luck, the weather would be foul, foggy, cold. Perhaps even rain. April was too soon for the summer crowds. An empty beach with a pounding surf was what I wanted. A surf that was unforgiving, that would tumble his body like a leaf in the rapids of a spring river, that would suck him down, vomit him back up and suck him down again, pressing tons of water on his helpless body. A surf that would slam him against the wet sand, break his arms and legs, leave him like a wet rag. And if the weather didn’t cooperate, than I would use another day. And if he didn’t appear outside his gate, I would use another day. I would remain motionless, watching his every move, waiting for the opportune moment to strike.

I had taken to looking for egrets. I saw them in the marsh behind College of Marin, alongside Highway 37 in Sonoma County, in the tidal flats, and at the edge of the bay behind the shopping mall in Corte Madera. Always, they were still. Sometimes they were solitary, a single egret standing in the marsh, waiting. Sometimes they were in pairs or more, white strokes in the green grasses, all of them still, waiting.