Dead Aim (29 page)

He tried to separate the logical question from his grief and anger, but he could not. The part of the story of Mark Romano’s death that he and Lydia had both ignored was that Mark Romano had not been the only victim. When Detective Berwell had told them that a family nearby had been killed the same night, he and Lydia had let it go by; it was sad, but it had not seemed to have anything to do with Catherine Broward. But if Lydia’s final theory was right, and the person who had killed Mark Romano was Catherine, then it was a crucial fact. Somebody had shot four innocent people to keep them quiet, and Catherine would never have done that.

He was looking down again, so he was a bit surprised when he raised his eyes and saw two people walking along the wet sand toward him. One was a man in late middle age, dressed in baggy shorts and a nylon jacket, his head covered by a cap of netting with a bill like a baseball cap. The woman with him was half his age and attracted Mallon’s attention because her features seemed to be slightly exaggerated: she was short and had wide hips and large breasts, and her face had a wide mouth with full lips, and big eyes.

He stared at them while they were still far enough away so that he was sure they could not tell he was staring. They seemed to be opposites: the man was all bundled up to keep off the sun and the wind, but the girl was walking along comfortably in a black two-piece bathing suit, letting her curly dark hair blow in the wind as she approached.

Mallon felt frustrated when they came too close to permit him to stare anymore. Even with his eyes hidden by his sunglasses, it would be too obvious. He directed his gaze out past the next curve in the
shoreline, toward the sea. It was then that he thought about the boat. It had been out there since the man and the woman had rounded the point, moving so slowly that Mallon could sometimes hear an unevenness in the distant engine sound that indicated it was running just above a stall. It was a small cruiser with a low, streamlined profile, a white hull, and a cabin that probably held only one bunk on each side. He could tell by the deep register of the engine that it was overpowered, and part of him was waiting for it to do something to justify the power: drop a pair of skiers into the water, or suddenly roar out toward the islands. As it bobbed on a wave, he saw a glint of glass near the stern that must have come from binoculars.

He constructed a story to make sense of it: the old boy was very rich, some billionaire who was well known to people who kept track of billionaires, but whose existence was absolutely new to Mallon. People like that visited Santa Barbara all the time, and quite a few of them had houses there. That explained the young girlfriend or wife, and it explained the boat out there, moving along at a slow walk with the couple. It carried servants with the old man’s heart medicine and Viagra or, more likely, security people who were using binoculars to study the shore for danger. From out there it was easy to see everything before, behind, and above them, while still preserving the illusion that the two were alone. He glanced to his left at the man and the woman as they passed.

His eyes, by preference, moved to the girl, but the man was in motion, and that attracted Mallon’s attention. His right hand, the one in his jacket pocket, was coming out. The girl reacted in a surprising way: she grasped his biceps, as though to keep the man from falling. The hand came out anyway. The man twisted away from her toward Mallon, and she lost her grip.

The man started to bring his hand up across his belly, toward the side Mallon was on. The girl was behind him now, and she was backing away like a wary cat. Then Mallon saw that the hand held a gun. It
was a heavy, solid-looking chunk of metal, a semiautomatic pistol with square corners and a muzzle that looked huge to Mallon, like the end of a pipe.

Mallon was instantly aware of the vast emptiness around him. The distance to the next point was a hundred and fifty feet, the backtrack to the last one was twice that far, and he would be running in loose sand. Behind Mallon was the Pacific, a stretch of empty horizon that stretched around half the planet. The only place for Mallon to go was toward the man.

The man was still off balance, and he brought the gun around his body clumsily. Mallon leapt, both hands in front of him. He struck down the man’s forearm with his left fist, and brought his right into the man’s face. It landed on the man’s cheek with a smack, and he punched again quickly and reached for the gun.

The man’s body abruptly jumped and contorted, and Mallon got the impression he had heard the bang only afterward. The man dropped to the sand on his arm, covering the gun hand, but Mallon had the thought that he must have accidentally shot himself instead of Mallon. Then the body jumped, and Mallon heard the second shot.

Mallon looked up toward the young woman for an explanation, but she was doing something unexpected. She lowered her arms, and only then did he realize that what she had been doing behind the man during the struggle was waving them. She was looking at the ocean, and he followed her eyes to see what she was staring at.

The boat was moving closer now, roaring toward the beach. He saw a figure kneeling low near the bow, resting a rifle with a scope on the gunwale. He felt a moment of gratitude: the sharpshooter had undoubtedly saved his life. But then the rifle fired. The shot plowed into the cliff behind him, and he dived to the sand beside the body. He saw a hand move from the trigger to grasp a bolt and cycle it to put a new round in the chamber. The boat was pounding over the waves, the bow rising on each crest, then slapping down with such a jolt that the man in the bow could not hold the rifle steady.

Mallon looked to see if the girl was taking cover, but she was sprinting into the ocean. She had already made it down the beach and was still running, her knees high and the water nearly to her waist. She used the last of her momentum to dive over an incoming wave, and then swam. The boat swung in close to shore just beyond the line of breakers. The man crouching in the bow put down his rifle and moved along the rail to the stern as the boat glided close to the swimming woman. He rested his chest on the gunwale, took both the woman’s forearms, held her as though they were two trapeze artists, and pulled her up into the boat. Both of them lay low, nearly hidden by the side of the boat as it quickly swung out toward the sea, accelerated to full speed, and angled around the point out of Mallon’s sight.

Mallon looked down at the man in the sand. He knew he had to find out if the man was alive, but he did not want to touch him. He turned his head to stare around him—up and down the beach and out onto the water—at first to verify that it was really over, and then in the hope that people had heard the rifle and were coming to help him. He was alone. He knelt down.

He touched the man’s back, felt no breathing, then moved the hand up to his neck, with the vague intention of feeling the carotid artery for a pulse. But the man was lying face down, and Mallon wasn’t sure what he was touching. The neck seemed loose, like the neck of a dead chicken. He pulled his hand away and it was covered with a bright streak of blood. He looked at it, wiped it on the back of the man’s jacket, then realized that new blood appeared there. Pushing it down saturated the cloth.

Mallon slid one hand under the shoulder and the other under the hip, and rolled the body over. The man’s eyes were open and the jaw slack. The front of him had sand stuck to it from the forehead to the feet. Mallon could see down the half-open front of the jacket that the rifle bullet had torn through him and emerged, spraying blood and bits of flesh into the lining.

Mallon stood and looked away for a moment, then looked back and
noticed the gun pressed into the sand. The sight brought back his confusion. At first Mallon had been sure that the man had been bringing the gun around toward Mallon’s chest when the rifle shot had killed him. Maybe he had been wrong. Had the man seen the rifle appear on the boat and tried to defend himself by firing a few rounds at it? And who was he? Why had he been carrying a gun on the beach? Mallon stepped closer to the body, then dropped to his knees on the sand again. He took two deep breaths and began to search the body. He patted the pockets of the man’s shorts, and then the jacket pocket, and reached inside to be sure. There was no wallet. There were no keys.

Mallon stood and looked out at the ocean again. Far off, nearly at the horizon line, there were tiny white specks that he knew were boats. Probably one of them held the woman and the man with the rifle. He had to get to the police. Mallon turned and began to run back up the beach toward the city.

When he reached the turn around the point, the tide had already come in far enough to have completely covered the sand. Now the waves were breaking against the big rocks at the base of the cliff. He ran into the surf and came to the curve. The next swell was bigger, and it came at him from a different angle, whipped by a strong west wind. It lifted him off his feet and pushed him sideways into a rock. He took a step ahead as it receded, and felt it tugging hard at his legs, drawing him out to deeper water with it. The second wave collided with him and tumbled him over so that he sat down and rolled once as it hissed and sizzled over his head. He held to the cliff and waited, then lunged forward around the point.

The going was easier now, and the waves hit him from behind, propelling him more quickly up onto the wet sand at the high-water mark. He broke into a run again, staying on the hard, wet stripe where he could run without digging in and fighting loose sand. The tide was coming in fast. At the next curve, when he ran down into the surf the
water reached his chest, but he pushed off, let the first wave float him, and swam around the point, then sloshed out and resumed his run.

He reached the wide, dry section of beach. Ahead of him and to the right he could see the volleyball nets, and beyond them, the cars gliding along Cabrillo Boulevard. He turned toward them and strained to keep up his speed, trying to reach the grassy area near the road, where there were people. But now he was winded and the sand was loose and dry. Running on it was harder and slower. Once his foot didn’t clear the sand and he tripped, but he got up and ran on.

He came to the volleyball nets. He shouted, “Hey! I’ve got an emergency,” as he came to the back foul line, but his voice was breathy and strained, and it sounded to his own ears like a casual comment rather than an alarm. The young man who had just served stole a quick glance in his direction, but his eyes did not seem exactly to see Mallon, only to note his position as a possible obstacle, then return to the ball. The other team tipped the ball up once, then again, this time lofting it above the net to set for their center forward man to spike.

Mallon kept going. At the edge of the grass along the road, he saw three young women getting out of a car. He was afraid to run at them, because he knew he must look wild and deranged. He walked toward them and said, “Please, if one of you has a cell phone, please call the police. I’ve just seen a murder.”

O
ne of the cops was about forty, and the other was in his twenties. Mallon had seen him before, a blond man riding a bicycle on State Street in a uniform with short pants and short-sleeved shirt that showed chunky reddish forearms and calves covered with fuzzy blond hair. The purposeful way they got out of their car and stepped toward him, fiddling with the gear on their black leather belts, made it look as though they were preparing to subdue him.

They both stood close to him and the older man said, “Did you place an emergency call, sir?”

“Yes,” Mallon answered. “I asked this young lady if I could use her phone.” He turned to indicate to her that she should join them, but he didn’t see her. “She must have left.”

The two cops looked around them, and seemed to notice the volleyball people who had gathered on the grass nearby. The older cop put a big hand on Mallon’s shoulder and conducted him closer to the police car, while the younger cop took a step toward the gaggle of young people, not saying anything, just swinging both hands, palms upward, in a sweeping motion. They turned and walked off toward the volleyball court marked on the sand, having understood from the young
cop’s signal that order had been restored and nothing else of interest was going to happen.

Mallon fought to overcome the air of imperturbability that he sensed in the police officers. “I was walking on the beach, maybe half a mile up that way. A man—an older guy—and a young woman were coming toward me from the other direction. The man pulled a gun out of his jacket. There was a boat offshore, and somebody with a rifle shot the man. He fell down, and the person shot him again. The woman ran to the water, swam out to the boat, and they took off.”

“Why?” asked the older cop. “What was going on?”

“I don’t know,” said Mallon. “I don’t understand any of it.”

“Is the man who was shot alive?”

“No,” said Mallon. “Not alive. He’s definitely dead. There’s a big hole through his back and out his chest.”

“Where’s the body now?”

“I left it there. He was dead, and I knew you wouldn’t want a murder victim moved.”