Cold Springs(45)

When Norma turned, she realized the police had been closer than she realized. Red lights pulsed through her windows, casting blood-colored squares onto her ceilings.

John stopped at the Palace of Fine Arts. He couldn't face the Golden Gate Bridge traffic yet. He knew Pérez would question him, pester him as soon as he got home—and he wasn't ready for that.

He paced under the huge dome of the pavilion—the pink Grecian columns lit up for no one, the park desolate and empty, cold rain falling outside.

He set up his laptop on a trash can.

He didn't realize how on edge he was until a vagrant slipped from the shadows, attracted by the glow of the screen, and wheedled, “You got a little extra, mister—”

John's .22 was in his hand, the muzzle pushed under the old man's grimy, bearded nose, John saying, “You want something?”

“Whoa!” The bum's eyes went completely schizoid, skipping right off the top of reality like a river rock. “Whoa, f**k.”

He backed away, white palms melting into the darkness. Not until he was a tiny smudge of shadow on the far side of the lake did he yell, “Happy Thanksgiving, ass**le!”

John expelled a laugh that sounded crazy, even to him. He slipped his gun back into his coat pocket.

He was going to shake to pieces. He was a test plane at the edge of the sound barrier, the bolts of his wings starting to rattle loose.

Oh, God, Norma. What had he been thinking?

He shouldn't have seen her tonight. He'd told himself he needed to check her computer one more time, just for insurance. He needed to make sure the passwords hadn't changed.

But that wasn't why he'd waited for her, why he'd picked up dinner and lit candles and put on her favorite music.

He'd been hoping for the courage to tell her the truth. He thought if he looked straight into her eyes, he could confess what he had been sucked into, how hopelessly entangled he'd become. He would explain that his motive had been pure—he just wanted to save his daughter.

Norma would understand instantly. She'd grip his hands across the table, her face beautiful and compassionate in the candlelight. She wouldn't condemn him, wouldn't call him a monster. She'd talk the problem through with him until he figured out another way to save Mallory, and himself.

It would be so different than it had been with Ann—that last horrible argument of their marriage, when he'd tried to tell her about the letters from Samuel, only to have the conversation deteriorate into one more shouting match about why Ann should quit her job, why they should put Mallory in another school, get her away from Race. Finally, his patience had snapped—his years of frustration and rage discharged in a single brutal slap across his wife's jaw.

There could be no forgiveness for that. No second chance.

Once you lose control, women never trust you again. Norma had made that clear tonight, with the fear in her eyes.

He stared at the computer screen, the wireless connection accessing a bank account halfway around the world.

Bitterness tasted like cheap whiskey on his tongue.

Why the f**k not?

The calls had all been made. The setup was perfect. All it took now was a single e-mail.

“He ain't going away,” Pérez had warned him that afternoon. “You throw more money at this Samuel, play his easy f**k—you think he'll ever leave you alone?”

Pérez had been loading his gun at the kitchen table, pushing nine-millimeter cartridges into the magazine with the care of a pharmacist counting pills. “All I need is two plane tickets, Boss. I got a friend can help. We get the girl back, teach this Chadwick a lesson. Then you call this son-of-a-bitch Samuel's bluff. He shows his face, I blow him the f**k away.”

Pérez's plan had appeal.

But it wasn't the real reason John was hesitating.

He hated to admit it, but he had begun to see the wisdom in what Ann had done, calling Chadwick. At least Mallory was out of danger. At least she was far away from the Montroses. And after all these years, dreaming of destroying Ann, now that it was within his reach, he found it hard to do.

John could close the laptop, drive home.

The police he could handle. He had started pulling strings already on the Talia Montrose problem, letting a few well-placed friends in Oakland know that a certain homicide sergeant needed help distinguishing a concerned citizen from a suspect. The only person to fear was Samuel. And what could Samuel do to him—expose his past sins? That meant nothing to him anymore, as long as his daughter was safe.

The screen asked for a prompt.

How long would it take—ten minutes? Less. He had planned so well.

Across the Bay, the Sausalito ferry was coming back from its final evening run. He imagined his father at the Embarcadero docks, forty years ago, sitting on his toolbox, wiping the grease off his forehead with the back of his hand while he waited for the boat. He would be bone-tired, having worked repairs since six in the morning, but he'd still have energy to sit with John, tell him stories about the Pacific War. When the ferry docked, he would have exactly ten minutes, from 7:50 to 8:00, to do a final check on the engine before sending it back across the Bay, where it would dock in Sausalito for the night.

“That boat is no fool,” his father would tell him, tousling John's hair so he would smell like engine grease for a week. “Works here, but sleeps up north with the rich folk.”