Blood Of Angels (3 page)

The three of us held secrets it would have been better not to know. That was why our life was this way.

We went for long, long walks in the woods, cooked healthy food on a barbecue I'd made out of flat rocks. Nina laughed when she saw it, pointed out I'd somehow made it in a half-assed Prairie style. It worked, though. With all the walking and helping Patrice and others with manual work, I was in the best shape I'd been in for years. The injury I'd received to my shoulder five months before didn't trouble me any more. While I'd lost some pounds Nina had gained a couple of ounces, and — though she was never going to be called anything more than slim — it suited her. We'd been on a couple of road trips too, driving east and south more or less at random. They made us feel less like we were in hiding. We had to go down to LA on two tense occasions and on the second of these fetched a few things from Nina's house, a precarious structure perched in the less fashionable side of the Malibu Hills. We couldn't stick around long enough for her to put the place on the market — in the unlikely event anyone would want to buy it — and in the end we secured it and left it as it was.

Which, in a way, was what Nina was talking about. Fundamentally everything was still the way it was, however much I might want to pretend otherwise. We had boarded up our windows but the world was still out there. Nina had a job, for a start. A serious job. Her negotiated leave of absence had been stretched to the point where it squeaked: she was going to have to either resign or go back. My own position was more fluid. I had worked for the CIA, some years before. I specialized in media surveillance. In the end, they let me go. Actually, as my friend Bobby had been fond of pointing out, I walked — just ahead of a mandatory polygraph test.

We talked around the subject for a while but we could sense this hiatus breaking, and neither of us wanted it to. It had been like being held in a giant's warm hand for a spell. We could feel that hand lowering, preparing to put us back down.

'We'll decide something,' I said. 'But for tonight life could be worse. I sit here with you and I don't feel I'm lacking much.'

'Well who would? I am, quite literally, a peach. Attractive, smart, even-tempered. The perfect companion in all ways.'

I raised an eyebrow. 'I'm not sure I'd go that far.'

'No? Name a failing.'

'Well, you shot your last boyfriend.'

'It was an
accident
.'

'Yeah. So you claim.'

'I do. It was.' She winked. 'But it won't be next time.'

I laughed, and the question went back to hide under its rock for a while longer. We sat out there on the porch, talking and watching the lake darken to a void, until it was too cold and we went inside. Later we lay in bed together and I listened to the trees and Nina's breathing as she slept, until I could no longer tell the sounds apart and I was asleep too.

Five months may not sound like much, but it made this one of the longest relationships I'd ever had. It still felt mildly miraculous to me. It felt like somewhere I could live. I didn't say anything about the email I'd received, nor about the second — with exactly the same subject and message — which arrived two days later. I deleted this one and buried the other deep in a folder. Simplicity has not been a feature of my life, nor the sense of having a home. I fought their departure in the only way I could. By hiding.

For a few more days, it worked. It was only on the morning when a car pulled up the track towards Patrice's cabin that I accepted nothing — no smile or white lie or overblown salad — would be enough to stop the world coming to find us again.

The call came at just after eleven in the morning. I was down near the lake, screwing around with some big pieces of old, grey timber I had salvaged from an afternoon helping patch a barn. I had thought maybe I could make a rustic table out of them so we could eat close to the lake without having to drag the small one off the porch. In my heart of hearts I knew we could not be eating outside for much longer, and I further suspected that anything I made would not long stand the rigours of supporting anything heavy, like a full glass of wine. I heard the three short beeps of Nina's cell phone ringing in the distance but didn't give it much thought. The cabin didn't have a phone. If one of our acquaintances in the area wanted to get hold of us, it was her cell they called. I kept clattering around, holding bits of wood together in a speculative fashion, until I looked across to see Nina standing on the porch, white-faced.

'It's Patrice!' she shouted. 'Someone's coming.'

I dropped the tools and walked quickly back up to the cabin. My head felt clear, my chest cold. 'How many?'

'One vehicle. So far.'

While Nina ran back inside I reached under the porch and pulled out something long and heavy wrapped in a thick plastic sheet. I loaded the rifle quickly, my ears burning, listening for any sound from the other side of the water.

When I was done I went inside. Nina had our two handguns out on the table. 'Anything yet?'

'No,' I said, taking my gun and pocketing it. I kissed her and then hurried back outside. I stood for a second and looked across the lake again. I could now see a car outside Patrice's cabin. You couldn't get a vehicle any closer. Any person or group of persons heading our way would have to make the last two hundred yards on foot. There were only two possible routes: following the rough path around the lake shore, or cutting up around through the trees to approach the cabin from the back. Both were mine to hold.

I picked up the rifle and looped around the cabin, climbing a narrow ridge which was well hidden in trees. I kept low and went about a quarter of the distance around the lake. There was a vantage I had found which gave a good view towards the path thirty yards below, but which would be hard to spot from the lower ground. I hunkered low at the trunk of the largest tree, wedging myself for stability. I pulled the rifle up into position, got it locked into my shoulder. I had spent hours out in the furthest reaches of Patrice's land, practising. I had little doubt that from this range I would be able to hit whatever I aimed at, and no doubt whatsoever that I would be willing to try.

One car. Four men, most likely. Assuming there was not another vehicle waiting out on the road. And that other men had not been sent to come at us through the forest. If so, I would hear Nina shooting before she heard me.

After six minutes I began to hear faint sounds of approach down and to the left. Feet crunching amongst the leaves on the path, carried on the clear air. I waited, willing my heart steady and quiet, trying not to think about what would happen if I had to shoot. About where we would go, what we would do. About whether it would even be an issue, or if the best of us both would seep into the indifferent ground right here, red for an hour, brown for a few days, then indistinguishable from the other mud and dust. That last thought was easiest to push away. I have no intention of dying. Not now, not ever. I simply don't think it's necessary. Sooner or later the world will just have to see this my way.

After another two minutes I saw a flash of movement down at the bottom of the rise. Enough to tell it looked like two men, three at the most. That was either good or meant they had backup elsewhere. I leaned backward and glanced left along the ridge. I couldn't see anyone else. I turned back and waited the twenty seconds it should take for them to come level with the next sight line below. It took nearer to forty, which gave me pause. They weren't coming quickly. I didn't know what a measured approach might indicate, and you're going to want to respond very differently to caution or covert expertise. I still didn't know how many there were, either: as they crossed the second clear space a flat blade of sunlight flashed off the lake beyond, filling my eyes with yellow-white.

Then they were behind trees again. I had one more, final, window. Two or three guys — it ultimately didn't make a lot of difference. We'd still have to drag them out into the woods, lose them somewhere deep.

I stood and edged forward between the trees to a second position where the line would be clearer, and my safety about the same. A confusing shot coming from behind them might give me an extra two seconds, my position disguised by shatter-echoes from the surrounding trunks.

I dropped to one knee and sighted. I saw the first glimmer of dark clothing through the trees, five yards short of the clear space I was waiting for them to reach. Thirty seconds ticked by.

Then I heard something.

Didn't know what it was at first. Then I realized it was the sound of Nina's phone ringing again.

I froze, aghast. This was a bad error for Patrice to be making. Very bad. She shouldn't be checking what was happening. This had been agreed. If she saw someone, she called Nina. If she subsequently heard a shot she was supposed to call a friend in Sheffer. That was all. Otherwise she was just supposed to sit tight in her cabin and pretend to be out, or dead, or both.

The men below had stopped too. They must have heard the phone. They weren't in clear enough sight for me to be sure of taking one out with the first shot. Without that…

I heard a faint murmur of voices. The men deciding to go on, perhaps, realizing the distraction of the phone could only have made things worse for the people waiting for them.

They moved again, and finally they were in clear sight. Two men, tall. Both dressed in dark clothes.

Forty yards from me. Not a head shot. Go for body mass. Be sure. I took a shallow breath and held it, sighted along the barrel. Gently applied pressure to the trigger.

I saw a flash of movement, someone walking quickly from the direction of our cabin towards the two men below. The flash was a rich brown, the colour of…

I jerked my head up off the rifle, just in time to hear a woman shouting below. Nina's jacket — so Nina's voice?

I found myself on my feet again, without thinking, heading down the hill carefully but fast, rifle still in position and finger still ready to pull — but no longer understanding what was going on.

I ran down to station myself twenty yards behind the intruders. I hit the path just in time to see Nina a hundred feet ahead, storming around the corner towards the men now caught between us. They had stopped walking. One was still holding a phone. The other turned to look at me, and slowly raised his hands.

'Hey, Ward,' he said. 'Be cool.'

'For God's
sake,
Charles!' Nina shouted at the man with the phone. 'What the
hell
do you think you're doing?'

===OO=OOO=OO===

They sat on the porch. We stood a few yards away. Neither Nina nor I trusted ourselves to be nearer them yet, though coffee had been poured, Patrice had been stood down, and the sweat on my scalp was now cold.

'We could have killed you,' Nina said, not for the first time. She was still full-blown furious, hands on hips.

'I still might,' I muttered.

The two men sat in the chairs where we normally ate. The second man, the one who'd greeted me, had said nothing so far except to decline sugar. He was rangy and tall with his hair cut short. His name was Doug Olbrich and he was a lieutenant in Special Section 1, the LAPD Robbery Homicide division dedicated to high-profile murder cases.

The first man, whose limp I had noticed even from a distance, was Charles Monroe. He was a Special Agent in Charge at one of the FBI's field offices in Los Angeles, and he was Nina's boss. I had met him only briefly, immediately prior to his receiving a number of gunshot wounds from an assailant who had attacked us in a diner in Fresno five months before. He was lucky to be alive, though he had probably spent many weeks feeling otherwise. Judging by the care with which he sat down, that time was not over yet. The man who shot him — and me too, in the shoulder — was dead. Nina had killed him in the forest a couple of miles from where we now stood, on the day we met Patrice. Nina had seen her boss only twice since, on our two brief visits to LA, when she had been required for debriefing and evidential hearings towards the trial of the killer we had caught that day.

'Why didn't you call ahead?' she said. 'By which I mean yesterday, not when you're halfway around our lake? Killing you is trouble we really don't need — however
unbelievably
appealing the idea seems right this second.'

Monroe put his mug on the table. 'Would you have been here when I arrived?'

'Of course we would.'

He didn't believe her. Olbrich meanwhile was gazing out at the trees, happy not to be involved in this part of the conversation. But I could read a good deal of tension in his face.

'And you would have taken the call in the first place?'

'Charles… oh for God's sake.' She rubbed her face with her hands, and picked her own coffee up off the rail.

'Monroe,' I said. 'What do you actually want?'

'From you, nothing. You are not an employee of the FBI, which is the organization I work for. Nina too, as I hope she recalls. You're not a cop either, and never were. I gather you once worked for another agency in what may loosely be termed "intelligence", but from what I hear that was a long time ago and you are not exactly missed. So far as I am concerned you can walk off into the forest and never come back.'

'Ward saved your life,' Nina said.

'Really? The last thing I saw was him pulling you out of the back of a restaurant and leaving me pinned in a booth. The shooter followed you. I survived by default.'

'A selective account,' I said, though privately I agreed with him. I'd been more concerned with prolonging Nina's life, and my own, than I had been with his — especially after he'd taken what I'd assumed were mortal wounds. I had found I could live with this decision.

'People,' Olbrich said, 'this isn't getting us anywhere.'

'Nina and I weren't
intending
to go anywhere,' I snapped. 'She had an agreement with this asshole which precluded him revealing our location — including to you. He's broken that already and I'm guessing that's just the beginning. You haven't come here to bring Nina's mail, Monroe, so what the hell do you want?'