With dusk rapidly coagulating behind the overcast, dark clouds having spent their fireworks, the sullen storm washed sour light upon the San Fernando Valley. Pursued by an armed security guard, Jane splashed through racing water that carried litter along the wide, shallow swale in the center of the alleyway. Past a dumpster, at a steel door labeled VALENTINO RISTORANTE / DELIVERIES, she sought entrance and was rewarded.
Beyond lay a receiving room, maybe twenty feet wide and ten deep. Concrete floor and walls. Empty metal shelves to the left and right. An inner door that probably led to the kitchen, the aroma of garlic on the air. They would not be open for dinner yet, but the staff would be on site, preparing.
She stepped to the left and put down her handbag and stood against the wall. The door swung toward her and thudded shut.
If the guy coming after her wasn’t a policeman moonlighting for a private security company and if he wasn’t former military, if he was the usual cop wannabe who had qualified for an armed-response license, he would be too eager to prove himself. With an abundance of enthusiasm but little hard experience, he would charge in here under the assumption that she was bent on getting away through the restaurant and out the front door.
If he was a wannabe, she hoped only that he didn’t burst into the receiving room with his pistol ready. Some of these junior G-men lived to draw down on you, and some were half afraid of their guns.
The lever handle rattled, the bottom flap of weather stripping scraped across the threshold with a sucking sound, the door opened away from Jane, a wind-thrown spray of rain spattered into the receiving room, and there he was, two feet from her. He alerted to her presence when she pressed the spring-release button and, in a fraction of a second, deployed the collapsible umbrella in his face.
He cried out in surprise, perhaps not at once realizing what exploded at him. As black and sudden as the umbrella was, he might have thought that here came Death incarnate, wings flaring to enfold him. He stumbled sideways and fell.
Jane threw aside the umbrella and stepped on the fallen man’s balls hard enough to make him wish he had long ago been neutered. “Don’t make me hurt you worse,” she said, keeping her foot on the jewels. She need not have been concerned, because the crotch shot had robbed him of all strength. She bent and tore the pistol from his holster, stepped back, and aimed the weapon at him as the outer door fell shut. “Stay on the floor. Take off your pants.”
Shocked pale, wheezing in pain, he needed to hear her make the demand again before he understood, but he didn’t scheme to delay.
As the security guard shucked off his pants, the inner door opened and a middle-aged man with regal Roman features appeared, dressed in white and wearing a chef’s hat, evidently having come to see what the commotion was about. His expression was that of anyone into whose hand had been thrust a stick of dynamite with a burning fuse.
When the chef started to retreat, Jane swung the pistol toward him. “Stay where you are or take a bullet.”
“Please don’t, I have a dependent mother,” he pleaded, raising his hands, holding the inner door open with his body.
On his back on the floor, the guard struggled to get his rain-soaked pants off over his shoes, which might have struck Jane as farcical if she didn’t have to worry that, back in the library, the Egyptophile had already phoned the police.
To the chef, she said, “Pick up that umbrella and close it.”
He did as she said, and the guard freed himself from his pants.
“Chef, throw the umbrella over there by that handbag on the floor. Don’t even think about throwing it at me.”
He would have been a champion at horseshoes. The umbrella hit the handbag.
To the guard, she said, “Off with the boxer shorts.”
“Jeez, don’t make me.”
“You know who I am?” she demanded.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“So I’m desperate. Naked or dead. Your choice. Quick.”
He skinned out of the shorts.
“Get up.”
Wincing, sucking air between his clenched teeth, he needed the metal shelves to pull himself to his feet. He couldn’t yet stand straight.
“Pick up your pants and shorts,” she ordered. “Open the door, throw them out to the middle of the alley.”
He did as she required, and when she told him to sidle over to the chef, he obeyed that command as well, though he declared with inarguable sincerity that he hated her.
Blocking the outer door from fully closing, Jane said, “You’re breakin’ my heart,” and picked up the handbag and umbrella with her left hand. “Chef, do I smell braciole?”
“It’s a special tonight.”
“Sure wish I could stay for it.”
She slipped out of the receiving room, tossed the guard’s pistol into the dumpster, and ran through sheeting rain that seemed colder than it had been two minutes earlier. Wind had blustered up in her brief absence, now that the door of night was swinging open, and it gusted along the alleyway, huffing like some phantom herd that had spooked into stampedes across this territory centuries before the first human being had set foot on it.