True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(25)
As hot as it was, he started shivering again. He’d killed a person tonight. It wasn’t guilt over taking a life that shook him up and it wasn’t because he was afraid of consequences he might face. It was the realization that he was something he wasn’t before. Before he was a screenwriter and an author. Now he was also a killer. It wasn’t something he’d trained for or expected. It was something that happened to him. Something that had changed him. He was shaking like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. How it had changed him was something he didn’t know yet and didn’t have the time to worry about. Right now he had to keep looking ahead, not backward or inward.
Steadied by his new resolve, Ian got out of the shower, removed the wet bag from his arm, gargled with Listerine, and rummaged through the man of the house’s five-hundred-square-foot closet for some fresh clothes. He quickly learned that Brooks Brothers got most of the guy’s clothing business. The guy also owned several blazers with yachting, fraternity, and golf club crests on the breast pocket, which made him a douchebag. He probably owned a few cravats, too. The guy was a little taller and heavier than Ian. But if Ian tucked in the shirts and rolled up the sleeves, they fit fine, especially over his cast. He had to keep his own shoes, though, because the guy had tiny feet.
Ian got dressed, stuffed some extra clothes, toiletries, and the Vicodin into an overnight bag, and lugged it and his trash bag downstairs, resisting the childish urge to slide down the huge curved railing of the grand staircase. The last thing he needed now was to break his other arm, too.
He found Margo emptying a huge bag of dry dog food into a pile in the center of the living room beside a bucket of water. The two dogs watched her but seemed bewildered, their heads cocked and their ears up. It was a crazy night for all of them.
“Don’t eat this all at once,” she told the dogs and then walked over to Ian. “Do you know how to crack a safe?”
“Nope,” he said.
“Clint Straker would.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he said.
“I found a big safe that’s probably full of money, hidden behind a painting. But since you can’t open it, we’ll have to settle for this.” She led him to a table in the entry hall, where she’d placed a Costco cashew jar full of pocket change. “I found it in the master bedroom closet, where they probably empty their pockets each night. There’s probably a couple of hundred dollars in there. And we’ve got this.”
She picked up a leather travel wallet that was beside the jar and handed it to him. “I found it in Mr. Barber’s desk drawer.”
The wallet was filled with euros, Canadian dollars, British pounds, and about five hundred American dollars in twenty-dollar bills.
“Good job,” Ian said. “That should hold us for a while. Now we need transportation.”
Ian headed down the hall to the garage. Margo grabbed the jar of coins and followed him.
The garage was immaculate, with white walls and a polished concrete floor. There were four cars for them to choose from, all gleaming like they were in a showroom: a 2017 two-door Ferrari twin turbo 488GTB, a 2015 four-door Porsche Panamera, a 2016 Range Rover SUV, and a mint-condition 1968 Mustang 390 GT fastback in highland green like the one Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt. The keys to the cars were on a pegboard on the wall.
Margo made a beeline for the Ferrari, reconsidered, and moved to the sensible Range Rover.
Ian shook his head. “Wrong choice.”
“It’s a big, roomy car and not something flashy that will attract the police. We can even sleep in it if we have to.”
“I appreciate the practicality of the Range Rover but we don’t want any cars with electronics that can be hacked or tracked. That rules out all the cars but one.”
He snatched a key chain with a running-pony logo on it from the pegboard and went to the Mustang. The car didn’t have a single electronic component. And if it was good enough for Steve McQueen, it would be good enough for him.
He popped the trunk and they stuffed their things inside. Then he went to the driver’s side of the car. He was relieved to see it was an automatic transmission, not a stick, which would have been impossible for him to drive with a broken arm.
It made much more sense for Margo to do the driving, especially since, technically, she was still his author escort. But he was taking charge of this operation and she was glad to let him. It allowed him to sustain the illusion that he had a master plan, which he didn’t. He was acting on panic and some of the things that he’d learned writing cop shows and Clint Straker novels. All he knew for sure was where they were headed but he had no idea what would happen after that.
He asked Margo for directions to the seediest part of town. She told him how to get there and he drove up and down dark alleys until he found an abandoned pickup truck sitting on blocks. He parked behind it and, at his direction, Margo swapped their license plates for the ones on the truck. Then Margo peeled off the current registration stickers from the Mustang’s original plates and affixed them to the former truck plates with folded pieces of duct tape from Ian’s cast. This was all done to protect their asses. Ian didn’t want to get pulled over by the highway patrol for driving a stolen car or having expired plates. They tossed the Hefty bag full of Ian’s bloody clothes into a trash bin, and as dawn began to break on the Jet City, Ian drove onto the I-5 South.