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As she shifted the cold compress to better cover her aching eyes and block out the seedy motel room, Wallis Jane Lisborne reflected that Marjorie Hopkins was a woman who had deserved to die.
The two first met at a busy coffee bar up the street from Wallis’s downtown Sacramento apartment. Wallis had just finished her morning workout, and Marjorie had just dropped her two-year-old at preschool. Both needed caffeine to jump-start their day.
Marjorie, in her early thirties, had straight dark hair pulled back in a pink velvet bow. Her round gray eyes with dark lashes were magnified by chunky red-framed glasses. She was chubby, but in an “I’m a busy mom, I’ll get to the baby fat later” kind of way. In contrast, Wallis, more than ten years Hopkins’s senior, was hard-bodied from years of sustained effort. Her well-tended form was her meal ticket in LA—no stunt or stand-in jobs without it. Her soft brown close-cropped locks, artfully highlighted with gold, were styled straight from a magazine, and she wore the latest, hippest clothes, even if she could only afford a few now that she was a desk jockey. Working for a temporary agency, currently placed in a law office as a file clerk, she was a far cry from her Hollywood stuntwoman days.
The third time they ran into each other, Wallace stepped in line directly behind Marjorie. It was rush hour. There were eight people in front of them. Marjorie turned, pushing her glasses back up on her nose as they threatened to slide all the way down. She smiled at Wallis’s now-familiar face. “We seem to have the same schedule.”
Wallis made a point of looking past Marjorie to the counter, avoiding further eye contact in the hope the chitchat would stop there.
“I couldn’t believe my little girl today. First it was a tantrum over breakfast. Suddenly she doesn’t like bananas. I mean, who doesn’t like bananas? What two-year-old doesn’t, anyway?” Hopkins’s face was animated, her bobbing head causing her to have to adjust her glasses again.
The line edged slowly forward. Too slowly for Wallis.
“Then she wants an apple, and we don’t have any. She’s screaming ‘appies, appies, no nanas.’ That’s what she calls them, appies and nanas. So cute, but I couldn’t be late to work.”
“Uh-huh.”
“My husband, Bryan, took over for me. He’s so sweet. He knows we’re expanding at work, and Shauna wanted her pink fuzzy socks. They were in the laundry and . . .”
Seriously, socks? Wallis decided a good offense had to be better than her wilting defense. Any topic was preferable to nanas and fuzzy socks. And if this gabby woman’s office was expanding—she thought that was what she’d heard her say somewhere in her endless narrative—maybe there was a job in it for her that didn’t take the temp agency’s 25 percent off the top. Not likely, but you never knew unless you asked. “So your office is expanding? Are you hiring?”
“Oh, no. I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Public Health,” Marjorie replied, switching topics without taking a breath. “We’ve been crammed into temporary space and our physical office is expanding. Despite having to share a desk, and all the commotion about the move, at least my work is going well. I’d been looking at hands-free cell phone and car accident data, and I realized there was a good project there . . .”
Too bad, no job opportunities.
Wallis had nearly tuned out completely when Marjorie began to describe with some excitement—clearly she’d been dying to talk about it with someone—the initial results of her rough analysis of her data, that hands-free phones were worthless as a safety measure in the car.
“I’ve been checking and cross-checking. I don’t want to share it with my supervisor until I’m sure. The industry will attack it, so it has to be just right.” Marjorie’s mouth was still running—which tests she planned to do, the variables—but Wallis Lisborne didn’t need to hear anymore. She quickly and easily made what should have been an unthinkable decision.
“Marjorie,” she began, employing her most sincere, take-pity-on-me expression, “I know so few people in town. I’ve only been here a few months. Do you think we might go for drinks or dinner? I know you have Shaina, but . . .”
“Shauna. It’s okay, so many people make that mistake. I wanted to name her Tara, but Bryan just loves the name Shauna . . .”
Wallis tensed. If I pull on her ears hard enough, maybe her tongue will fall out. Instead, she managed, “Shauna, such a beautiful name. How about Thursday after work?”
“Bryan has softball. Maybe, let’s see . . . tonight? I mean, if it’s not too last-minute. I know Bryan will be home, I’ll have to ask him, but I bet he’ll want to. He’s always telling me I should take a girls’ night out.”
Their coffees were ready.
“Why don’t we meet at Broads and Bards?” Wallis asked. “Sixteenth and
Q. You know it? Seven p.m.”
“Well, I’m not sure, it seems fine, but what if I can’t make it, let me get your number and—”
“My mobile’s on the fritz. I’ll go, and if you can’t make it, no problem, I’ll grab a drink on my own and we’ll try another night. At least it will get me out of the house.” Pulling from her acting workshops, Wallis gave a convincingly pitiable expression and then looked conspicuously at her watch. “See you tonight.”
* * *
IN THE END IT HAD ALMOST been too easy. The rental car, the sharpened knife in her purse. A sandwich and a cold beer first at the busy bar alone, blending in. “Marjorie, nice to see you. The most amazing thing, someone painted a mural on the back wall of this place. You have to see it, animals in the jungle, a spaceship . . .” Then leading Marjorie to the back of the restaurant, where Marjorie started babbling the moment Wallis stopped speaking.
She put a hand over the woman’s mouth and the torrent of words had turned to muffled screams.
A quick, hard stab up through the heart, pulling Marjorie’s body along behind the dumpster and letting it fall in the dark by the field. Just like the scene Wallis rehearsed over and over as the stuntwoman for Gwyneth Paltrow in Dead Wrong in Chicago.
Except Sacramento wasn’t Chicago, and this time the knife was real.
* * *
WALLIS GINGERLY LIFTED the dressing on her arm, wincing at the pain. At least it didn’t look any worse. She had slathered on two tubes of Neosporin and covered both of the deep gashes with gauze, hoping the over-the-counter antibiotic would have some effect. She knew she should see a doctor and get stitches to reduce the chance of infection and improve the appearance of the wound when it healed. But she couldn’t risk it. Emergency rooms and urgent care centers would surely be alerted to watch for someone with her injuries by now. She hoped the Kane woman had her so-called pet up to date on rabies shots.
Lying down on the lumpy bed, Wallis wondered whether Maren Kane led a charmed life or if this hit had just been wrong from the start. First, there’d been the guy in the trenchcoat showing up out of nowhere at the parking garage. Then there was the little girl. Kane lived alone—the kid was a complete surprise and it had shaken Wallis. She’d never hurt a kid, not even a little bit, and didn’t think she could. Then the damn dog got out and it all went to hell.
Knives were Wallis’s weapon of choice. Simple to obtain, no bullets to load, no trigger locks to disarm. She had trained with them for stunt work in several films, including her two favorites: Knife Fight Before Dawn and Knife Fight Before Dawn II. True, the films weren’t high art or blockbusters—straight to video as it turned out—and had almost as many scenes of women having sex with one another in prison as they did of knife fighting. Still, Wallis felt it had been a good experience. Since then, she believed knives to be the most ethical way to go into combat of any kind. They required the courage to face the target up close. Wallis felt that when possible, a human life deserved that, not death from thirty feet at the pull of a trigger. But getting it done quickly and cleanly on Kane’s property meant using a knife was too risky. That approach had already failed once at Saniplaz in San Jose.
So guns it is, Wallis had concluded unhappily. Still, she had some training there, too. In Crack Shot Wallis was the stand-in for Julia Roberts, who played a crack-addicted prostitute who stalked and shot her pimp and a whole lot of bad guys. Roberts was cast against type. Wallis recalled it hadn’t done very well.
Wallis initially tried positioning herself at the top of the cul-de-sac where Maren lived, hoping to have a clean rifle shot at Maren getting in or out of her car. But the street curved just before Maren’s home, so it was around the bend and not visible from the hilltop.
On the third day of scouting for options, Wallis had finally found something promising. Stationing herself in the backyard of an unoccupied house next door—mail stacked up, owners on vacation—Wallis had observed that every evening sometime between seven and eight Maren exited the back door of her house and descended the four concrete steps to the garage at the end of her short driveway. Kane disappeared into the garage for under five minutes, then went back up the stairs and into the house, reappearing minutes later with a book that she took to an outdoor spa in the corner of her yard by the trees. The dog followed her and would lie down next to the tub while Maren Kane soaked and read.
The single most important part of this scenario from Wallis’s perspective was that Kane shut the dog in the house while she went down the stairs to the garage. Maybe the beast would run loose down the driveway if Kane didn’t.
Once, while filming an action flick geared toward the PG-13 crowd, Wallis was attacked by a rottweiler that was supposed to look vicious but be nice. It turned out to look vicious and be vicious. Twelve stitches and a staple later, she figured they would put the dog down. But the dog was a star (or at least more of a star than Wallis), so it stayed.
Kane’s dog had a similarly massive head and jaws, although it looked to be some other breed. Gun or no gun, Wallis preferred not to have it in the equation when she was taking her shot.
Yet that was exactly what had happened. She again cursed her luck. That was all it had been: bad luck.
Returning to the present, Wallis heard a door slam in the next room and the TV through the wall, canned laughter on a sitcom. She slipped under the bedspread and pulled it over her head to mute the tinny sound, but thought better of it when the musty smell of the bedding enveloped her. She got up and headed to the bathroom to wash her face. The mirror had a crack through the bottom and the faucets were rusted. The place was a complete dump, but at least the guy at the front let her crash with no ID, just an extra fifty bucks in cash.
Still, there was a silver lining. She knew her man would find her here. This was the place they had agreed upon if they ever needed it, where he wouldn’t be known. And while he hadn’t come to the room—too risky—he’d left something for her at the front desk. She looked again at the small gold box no bigger than her palm. She had been saving the contents for as long as she could, for what it meant, for what it said about how he felt about her. But she was hungry and the hunt for her must be in full force by now. Getting food would be difficult. She was certain she’d been identified—she’d left enough DNA in blood at Maren Kane’s house to flood a lab.
Wallis removed the top carefully, wanting to save the box as a keepsake. The three chocolates inside were lopsided. They looked handmade. It reminded Wallis of the fancy candy that film companies sometimes had on sets for the stars, where there might be some left over for the stunt doubles and crew.
She closed her eyes and took a bite, savoring it on her tongue. The first one tasted like hot chocolate. No, cinnamon, maybe mixed with coffee. She couldn’t wait to try the rest.