As she reached the door to the kitchen, it opened toward her. A waitress came out, balancing on one arm a tray of food-laden dishes.
“Kitchen, honey,” she advised Linda. “Employees only.”
“Sorry. I was looking for the restroom.”
“There you go,” said the waitress, indicating a door to the right.
Linda stepped into a lavatory that smelled of pine disinfectant and wet paper towels. She waited a moment, left the room, and went into the kitchen, where the smells were markedly better.
Past ovens, past a long cooktop, past deep fryers full of hot oil, smiling at a short-order cook, nodding at another, she traversed two-thirds of the kitchen before a man with large ear lobes rounded a tall storage rack and almost collided with her.
She would not have noticed the size of his lobes if he had not worn studs: a tiny silver rose in the left, a ruby in the right.
Otherwise, he looked like a bodybuilder with a soap obsession and exhaustive knowledge of every detail of every Quentin Tarantino movie: pumped, scrubbed, and nerdy. Pinned to his white shirt, a name tag declared DENNIS JOLLY/NIGHT MANAGER.
“What’re you doing here?” he asked.
Because he blocked the narrow aisle and she could not slip past him, she said, “I’m looking for the back door.”
“Only employees are allowed here.”
“Yes, I understand. Sorry for the intrusion. I’ll just use the back door and be gone.”
“I can’t allow you to do that, ma’am. You’ll have to leave the kitchen.”
In spite of the earrings and his red necktie, he managed to appear solemn and mantled in authority.
She said, “That’s what I want to do. I want to leave the kitchen by the back door.”
“Ma’am, you’ll have to leave the way you came in.”
“But the back door is closer. If I go out the way I came in, I’ll be in the kitchen longer than if I just use the back door.”
By now, Tim might have driven out of the parking lot. If Kravet didn’t follow the Explorer, if he came into the coffee shop looking for Linda, she needed to be gone.
The manager said, “If you don’t have money to pay your check, we won’t make an issue of it.”
“My date is paying the check. He thinks I’m in the ladies’ room. I don’t want to leave with him. I want to leave on my own.”
Dennis Jolly’s scrubbed-pink face paled, and his dishwater eyes widened with alarm. “Is he violent? I don’t want him back here, angry and looking for you.”
“Look at you. You’re way pumped. You could handle anyone.”
“Count me out. What do I need to handle anyone for?”
She changed tack. “Anyway, he’s not violent. He’s just a creep. He’s all hands. I don’t want to get in his car again. Just let me out the back door.”
“If he comes back here and you’re not here, then he’s going to be pissed at us. You have to leave the way you came in.”
“What is wrong with you?” she demanded.
“So he’s all hands,” said Dennis Jolly. “If he’s not violent, he’s just all hands, you let him drive you home, he cops a few feels, gets some boob, it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
She glanced back through the kitchen. No sign of Kravet.
If she didn’t get out of here soon, she would not be waiting for Tim when he drove up at the end of the alley.
“It’s not nothing,” she repeated.
“When he gets you home, you can cut him off at the knees there, then he’s not pissed at us.”
She closed the one step between them, shoved her face close to his, seized him by the belt, and in maybe one second flat, slipped the tip out of the keeper loop—
“Hey!”
—yanked the prong out of the punch hole, and freed the belt from the buckle.
Slapping ineffectively at her hands, he said, “Stop, what the hell you doing, hey!”
He backed off, but she stepped aggressively into him, found the tab on his zipper and yanked his fly open.
“No, hey, hey.”
Linda stayed in his face as he stumbled backward, pressing him along the narrow aisle, clawing at his hand as he tried to close his zipper.
“So what’s the problem?” she demanded, spraying spittle with the p in problem. “All I want to do is cop a little feel. You shy, Denny? It’s just a little feel. It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m sure it’ll be a very little feel. Are you afraid I won’t even be able to find it, Denny?”
The night manager knocked against a prep table, and a stack of dishes slid to the floor, shattering with the hard clatter of thick cheap china.
Prying at his protecting hand, trying to get in his pants, she said, “Has anyone ever tied it in a knot for you, Denny? You’ll like that. Let me tie it in a knot for you.”
Red-faced, sputtering, frantically back-pedaling, his super-buffed physique working against him—too much bull wedged in the confines of a rodeo corral—he tripped himself and fell.
Resisting the urge to give Mr. Jolly a cheerful kick, Linda stepped between his splayed legs, then over him, and hurried toward the end of the kitchen.
“You crazy bitch!” he shouted in the breaking voice of a squeaky adolescent.
Three doors faced a vestibule, and logic suggested the one in the back wall would be the exit. Instead, beyond lay a refrigerated food locker.
The door to the left revealed a small, cluttered office. The one to the right opened onto a janitorial closet with sink.
Realizing her mistake, she returned to the first door, yanked it open, and entered the food locker, which proved to be a refrigerated receiving room. A door at the farther end gave access to the alley.
A pair of big Dumpsters flanked the back entrance. They didn’t smell as good as the bacon, burgers, and buttered muffins.
Here and there, a caged security light above a door poured a puddle of light on the pavement, but for most of its length, the alleyway funneled through deep shadows and seemed to be a gauntlet of threats.
Rattled by the encounter in the kitchen, she hurried half a dozen steps before she realized that she had gone left instead of right. She turned toward the farther end of the alley.
As she was passing the door to the coffee-shop kitchen, she heard a car pull in from the nearer street, behind her.
Cluttered with Dumpsters, the service passage could accommodate only one vehicle. She stepped out of the way, figuring to let the car pass.
The engine didn’t sound right, riddled with knocks and pings, and the engine wasn’t the worst of it.
She looked back and saw a car with a single headlight, canted to port because one or both of the driver’s-side tires were blown. Shredded rubber flapped, a steel wheel rim rasped on blacktop, the chassis bounced on shot springs, and something—maybe a muffler—dragged on the pavement, spawning flurries of sparks that flew like fireflies from under the vehicle.
In the fall of light from a security lamp, she recognized the white Chevrolet sedan.
How Tim had done this, she didn’t know, but she knew that he had done it. He thought that he had left the Chevy totally disabled, but lame and spavined life remained in the old plug.
Kravet had tumbled to the trick. He knew she had gone out the back of the coffee shop. He had come for her.
As she turned toward the kitchen entrance, Dennis Jolly flung the door open, his thick neck swollen thicker with indignation, tiny jewelry gleaming in his big ear lobes.
If she tried to return to the restaurant, he would block her, and he might even hamper her here with the intention of giving her a piece of his mind.
“If he sees you,” she warned, “he’ll blow your brains out.”
Her tone of voice, Jolly’s high regard for his own skin, and the hellish clatter of the Chevrolet convinced the night manager to retreat an instant after he appeared.
Like the pale horse of the Apocalypse, the sedan roared and lunged, spitting sparks,
and Linda ran.
Fourteen
Shoulder-slung purse pinned to her side with her right arm, left arm pumping rhythmically as if to pull her forward, Linda ran.
Couldn’t have outrun a car in good repair. Might have a chance against the crippled Chevy. Anyway, no option.
Try the back door at one of the businesses along the alleyway? Most were shops. Offices. Here a dry cleaner. There a nail salon. Closed at this hour. But a restaurant and a couple of bars were still open at ten till eleven.
If she dodged into a place where people were gathered, Kravet wouldn’t come in after her, wouldn’t kill everyone in a barroom just to get her. Too risky. Bartender might have a gun. A customer might be armed. Security video might record the whole thing. Kravet would back off, wait.
Should she stop, however, and find a door locked, she’d be dead. The sedan so close behind. No margin for error. She’d be run down, smeared along a building wall.
Judging by the sound of it, the Chevy was gaining on her. She’d had a thirty-foot lead, now twenty at most.
The south end of the alley remained a perilous sprint away, and her legs felt heavy, clumsy. She regretted the bacon cheeseburger.
Crushed underfoot, an empty soda can clamped to her shoe for one step, two, three, breaking her gait, then scraped loose and clattered away.
A cacophony of self-dismantling Chevrolet swelled behind her, and she expected to feel the twisted front bumper nudge the backs of her legs. When the noise seemed as loud as it could possibly get, the tumult abruptly cranked tremendously louder with a ripping shriek of metal clawing metal. Maybe the car sideswiped one of the Dumpsters.
As if the blast of sound blew her forward, her pumping legs felt lighter, and her feet seemed to be winged.
Even as the noise soared in volume, its proximity declined, and she realized that she had smelled the overheated engine for a moment, smoking oil like dragon’s breath at her back, but smelled it no longer.
Daring to glance over her shoulder as she ran, she saw the sedan had sideswiped a Dumpster, had become locked to it. Kravet tried to accelerate out of the hang-up, but the metal wheels of the big trash bin gouged the blacktop. Dragged along a building, hinged lid banging up and down like a crocodile’s mouth, the Dumpster cast out a jetsam of half-digested trash, shaved off showers of stucco, ripped loose a door frame.
Racing ahead, leaving the car behind, she was safer with every step, or so she told herself. Out of the alley, into a new street, she almost blundered in front of a hurtling car in the nearest of the two westbound lanes.
She looked east, desperate to spot the Explorer, but it didn’t appear in the sparse flow of oncoming traffic.
Behind her, in the alley, the boom-bang-shriek of destruction fell suddenly silent. Kravet had given up on the sedan.
He would be coming now on foot. He would have a weapon. He would shoot her in the back.
Staying close to the curb, Linda ran east in the street, hoping to see the Explorer appear ahead of her.
Fifteen
Krait almost drove her down, but then the Dumpster.
A lesser man, whose emotions were not exquisitely balanced by his intellect, might have succumbed to rage. In fury, he might have shot at the woman through the windshield, although angle of fire and distance allowed little hope of a mortal hit.
If Krait had not been made for this work, he had nonetheless fallen to it as naturally as an acorn falls from branch to forest floor. No lesser man could have been as successful at the job as Krait had long proved to be, and he did not believe that any man existed who was his equal at it.
Indeed, moments arose when he wondered if he was a man at all, for he could honestly say, based strictly on rational analysis and logic, applying fair and sincere standards of judgment, that he was apart from humanity and superior to it.
This was not one of those moments.
When the car came to a stop, he twisted the key in the ignition, but the engine did not shut off. Freakishly, the damage had disrupted this one function of the electrical system.
From under the car rose the astringent odor of spilled gasoline. No doubt the idling engine or a shorting wire would conspire in some fashion to set the Chevrolet afire.
He sighed, annoyed that the universe had been organized in such a way that his will was sometimes thwarted. Well, no one had promised him a rose garden; in fact, quite the opposite.
Because of the Dumpster hung up on the car, Krait could not get out through the driver’s side. When he slid across the seat and tried the passenger’s door, he discovered that it was firmly jammed, maybe because the frame had torqued.
He could have clambered into the backseat and tried that door; however, he had sufficient experience to know when the cosmos was dealing him a bum hand. That door, too, would be inoperable, and by then he would be afire, which would be ironic, and amusing to some, but a distinct impediment to the completion of his mission.
Drawing his SIG P245, he fanned three shots at the windshield, which fractured and dissolved like a sheet of ice. The gun was loaded with .45 ACPs, so a round might travel the length of the alley and take the throat out of a passing pimp, young mother, or priest, depending on his luck.
Holstering the weapon, careful of his hands, which were vital to his work, he squirmed across the dashboard, out of the Chevy, and onto the hood with as much dignity as he could muster.
The woman had reached the end of the alleyway and had turned left or right, out of sight.
Taking swift strides, Krait went after her, but he did not run. A pursuit that required running was probably a pursuit already lost.
Besides, a running man did not appear to be a man in control. He might even give the impression of being panicked.
Appearances are not reality, but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can cover a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.
Appearances were the currency of Krait’s profession.
Striding swiftly but not running, with his cultured smile in place, he reached the end of the alley and stepped onto the sidewalk along the main street. He glanced right, looked left, and saw the Explorer angled to the curb, the woman boarding it.
At fifteen yards, with the SIG P245, he could at least shoot the numbers on a range target and usually place a ragged cluster.
The Explorer was maybe thirty yards away, thirty-five, so he strode east along the sidewalk, closing on the target.
The P245 featured a six-round magazine. He had three rounds left, no spare ammo.
Because originally he had been supposed to make the woman’s murder look like the aftermath of a violent sexual assault, he had not intended to shoot her. He had seen no reason to pack a lot of fire power.
The situation had changed.
He had closed to within twenty yards when evidently they saw him. The SUV shifted into reverse, arced into the street, and backed eastward at high speed.
If any westbound traffic had been behind Carrier, he would have collided with it or would have been at least fatefully delayed. But on this night, the infinite wheel of the cosmos revolved in harmony with him, and he reversed all the way to the intersection, where he executed a slick fishtail turn and sped south on the cross street, out of sight.
Even this development did not elicit a snarl of rage or a curse from Krait. Frustrated but smiling, he holstered the pistol once more and continued to stride along the sidewalk, though not as swiftly as before.
If he stood apart from humanity and ranked superior to it, as on other days the evidence suggested that he did, he nevertheless had a rightful place in this sorry world. In fact, he occupied an exalted position. He sometimes thought of himself as secret royalty.
As a high prince of the earth, he had an obligation to conduct himself in a fashio
n suitable to his station, in a manner always decorous and becoming, with style and grace and quiet confidence, radiating at all times an aura of power and unrelenting purpose.
He changed course, heading south, and crossed the intersection. His intention was not to follow the Explorer on foot, but merely to put distance between himself and the alleyway in which the sedan burned like pitch in perdition.
When the police found the car, they might cruise the surrounding blocks, looking for suspicious pedestrians. Although he was immune to their authority, Krait preferred not to complicate his situation by tangling with them.
Sirens rose in the east.
Not running, never running, Krait increased his pace, striding with quiet confidence. Chin raised, shoulders back, chest out, he proceeded in the posture of a prince on an evening constitutional, lacking nothing more than a silver-headed walking stick and a retinue of retainers to complete the image.
He progressed almost a block as the sirens swelled louder and closer, and then another block as they receded into silence.
Eventually he found himself in a neighborhood of respectable two-story homes. In this pleasant southern California night, the Victorian gingerbread, basketweave brick chimneys, and steep gabled roofs made the houses appear to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Krait halted under the flowered limbs of a jacaranda, at a driveway in which four issues of the local newspaper were scattered in clear weather-resistant delivery bags.
Usually, if someone went away on vacation without remembering to arrange a hiatus in newspaper deliveries, a neighbor would pick up the accumulating issues to prevent potential burglars from recognizing an easy target. That no one had done so suggested that the people at this residence had not lived here long enough to establish mutually supportive relationships with their neighbors or were not well liked.
In either case, this house offered a sanctuary in which Krait could refresh himself and arrange to be re-equipped. He would need these accommodations only a couple of hours, and the odds were low that the owners would return during that brief window of time.
If they did return, he could deal with them.
He gathered up the newspapers and carried them to the front porch.
Lattice panels twined with night-blooming jasmine shielded the porch from the neighbors. The perfume of these flowers was too rich for a man of his simple tastes, but the screen of greenery served him well.
With a penlight, he examined one of the panels of glass flanking the front door. He found no indication of alarm-system magnetic tape.
From a holster smaller than the one in which he carried the pistol, he withdrew a LockAid lock-release gun, a device restricted for sale to law-enforcement agencies.
If he were forced to choose between going without a pistol or without a LockAid, he would have surrendered his firearm with no hesitation. In less than a minute, often much less, a LockAid could spring all the pins to the shear line in the finest deadbolt ever manufactured.
A gun was not the only tool with which he could fulfill a job assignment. He could kill with a wide array of weapons, with a host of everyday objects that most people would not view as weapons, not least of all with the steel spring inside the roll bar of a toilet-paper dispenser, and of course with his bare hands.
The LockAid, however, not only facilitated Krait’s work but also granted him entrée everywhere, a right and a power no less complete than that of any ancient king, before the advent of parliaments, when no door in the kingdom could be barred to His Majesty.
He was as sentimental about his LockAid as a lesser man might have been about his dear old mother or his children.
Krait had no memory of a mother. If he’d ever had one, she must be dead, but he was willing to entertain the notion that, in addition to all the ways he was