Larinda punched the security code into the keypad and the iron gate at the condo community entrance separated. She drove her Toyota SUV through like she belonged here, had to slow down and fall in behind a chugging six-wheeled dump truck carrying hot road tar that she could smell, giving the truck the room it deserved. Both vehicles moved timidly past a United Van Lines moving van that took up three parking spaces in front of the target’s townhouse, the front door to the townhouse closed. Boxes from the moving van were on the street, the grass, and the front steps. She cruised past the house, losing the tar truck when she eased her vehicle around a corner. She now viewed the end unit from its side, then cruised a little more, to where she could view the house from its rear. Four exits confirmed, front, side, and two out back, one to a ground level patio, the other to a deck above it. She braked the SUV, put it into park.
Binoculars up. She scanned for other rooftops visible from where she sat. Binoculars down. Binoculars up then down again several times. What she was after: sightlines and vantage points from outside the gated community that converged on the justice’s townhouse.
It was forty minutes past her popping some oxy from the new prescription. Half a pill only, her hedge against the reverend’s veracity. The abdominal pain was under control and she wasn’t dead, two good reasons for her to pop open the top to the bottle again and chew her way through a few more doses.
Feeling much, much better now.
She finished circling the block, returned to the front of the target’s condo, and double-parked next to the moving van, her flashers on. Standard four p.m. residential activity: people exercising their dogs, small children on tricycles and scooters, watchful parents. The movers continued unloading the truck, stopping to read markings on boxes then strapping the larger ones and the few furniture pieces to their backs and shoulders and hand trucks, then depositing them on the sidewalk, the steps and the porch, as near to the front door as possible. All indications were the judge wasn’t home and the house wasn’t being watched from inside or out, but this would all change soon, otherwise the movers wouldn’t have started to unload.
Her black Indian-squaw hair tucked inside a ball cap, Larinda stuffed a few sticks of chewing gum in her mouth and grabbed her sunglasses. She was good to go.
With the SUV’s lift gate open, Larinda wrote on a cardboard box then lifted it aside in favor of hefting a dwarf evergreen in a clay pot from the SUV to the curb, setting it there, next to the small city of cardboard boxes accumulating on the sidewalk. She did the same with three other potted shrubs, all eventually curbside.
One of the movers looked at her funny while she unloaded the shrubs. More than a look, a leer.
“From the community’s homeowners group,” she said to him, her chewing gum cracking. “Gifts for the new resident.”
He smiled at her, his beaming white teeth contrasted by his pleasant, cocoa Caribbean face, but he said nothing. “To welcome her,” she added. More smiling but still no acknowledgment, only the vacuous look of someone who didn’t understand a word of what she’d said. As a last resort, she’d try her Spanish.
“Gift. Un regalo. Welcome. Bienvenida.”
More leering. When she showed him a twenty-dollar bill, a miracle happened. “Si,” he said.
She pointed and spoke, making hand gestures to direct the potted trees to where they should go. “El portico, el lado, puerta trasero…” Her directions delivered, she handed him the money.
He hefted one of the pots up the steps. His back to her now, she added a box from her SUV to the city of stacked cardboard already strewn about the sidewalk.
The movers’ unloading continued, Larinda watching from inside her car, the long front porch filling up, the truck nearly empty. She flipped off her flashers and u-turned through the front gate.
In her rearview at a traffic light, for the second time in two days she watched two unmarked Ford sedans and a cop car proceed down the street toward the community’s gated entrance, this time at the speed limit. A man exited the first sedan, read from his phone as he punched numbers into the keypad. All three vehicles entered the community.
Some pieces had fit in place just like she’d wanted, she mused. Others could have only been left to chance. If she’d spent two minutes more out front of the judge’s residence she might well have been in a gunfight, and all could have been lost. A reminder that this life and everything in it would always be on God’s terms. God’s plan, not man’s, always.
Ecclesiastes 3:1. To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.
She needed to make it happen tonight. She wouldn’t get one more day to kill her.