Forty Thieves (12 page)

That part solved itself a few days later, at the next meeting of the task force. He came into the conference room and sat down, and she came in a moment later and sat down beside him. All through the meeting he wondered how to broach the idea of seeing her alone. When the meeting ended, they both took an exceptional amount of time packing papers into file folders and briefcases, while others left the room. When it was safe he said, “I’d like to talk to you for a moment,” but she replied by placing a business card in his hand. She said, “Then call me.”

He nodded and walked out, and took a few paces to think it over. She’d had the card ready in her hand before he had spoken. As he took it he had seen the standard police business card, but he had also seen a personal number written in a fine, tight script.

He dialed the handwritten number about an hour after the shift ended. She said, “This sounds like the police force’s most eligible bachelor.”

“Right. I’m sick of that,” he said. “I called to see if you would marry me.”

“I think we should start with something less risky. How about dinner and a movie? If we don’t like each other during dinner we can skip the movie.”

He said, “That sounds safe. What kind of movies do you like?”

“I don’t care. I’ll sit through anything that doesn’t have cops in it, or lovable thieves. I don’t care if it’s got British actors whacking each other with swords, just so it’s not like work.”

“And for dinner, is there anything you don’t eat?”

“Surprise me. If I hate it, I’ll have something to complain about and I won’t have to strain my brain for stupid small talk.”

“I’ll pick a place from the Health Department warning lists.”

“There should be a lot of tables on short notice.”

“Cheap too. Want to give me your home address so I can pick you up?”

“Okay. It’s 5-9-9-5 Montevideo in Sherman Oaks, apartment B as in Bravo.”

“I know the building. Adobe brown stucco on top and wood brown below. I got a homicide in the apartment on the left in the back once.”

“That’s apartment D,” she said. “It’s kept the rent low. If it hadn’t happened I’d have had to kill somebody here myself.”

“Maybe it’s good that we didn’t solve it. See you at six thirty.”

They went to dinner and got so deeply engaged in conversation that they forgot about the movie and went to her apartment. They talked from the moment they arrived at her door until he left at 2:00 a.m. When she let him out the door she said, “Thanks, Sid. That was the best first date I ever had.” She watched him nod, but he said nothing, so she added, “I thought I was pretty fun. Aren’t you even going to kiss me?”

“I figured you’d find a way to let me know if you thought that was a good idea. You brought up the permission issue the first time we met.”

“We’ve been talking ourselves hoarse all night. You couldn’t find four words to ask?”

He took her into his arms and gave her a long, gentle kiss. When he pulled back, she was still standing in the doorway with her eyes closed and her head tilted up toward him. After a second she opened her eyes. “I guess you’d better get going.”

“Didn’t like it?” he said.

“Liked it too much,” she said. “See you.” She shut the door.

Tonight, as Sid lay on the mattress beside her, he spent a few seconds thinking how glad he was that his captain had put him on that task force years ago. Then his mind returned to the events of last night.

In spite of his exhaustion it was hard to get his mind to stop going over and over the situation they were in. He and Ronnie had made no progress yet on the murder of James Ballantine. They had barely caught up with the information the police compiled right after the crime. Yet there were two potential killers out there at this moment who wanted Sid and Ronnie dead, and their last attempt would have killed them if it hadn’t been for sheer luck. The Abels hardly ever drove the Volvo with the steel in it for work anymore. They’d only done it last night because the BMW had taken a rifle bullet through its windshield. He still hadn’t seen the shooters, or heard their voices, or even identified the make of their car. He kept reminding himself that lying here awake was getting him nowhere. He needed to sleep. The only way to get rid of the killers was to solve the murder. But solving the murder required going out and interviewing people, and going out would expose them to the killers. Only after he had followed the circle enough times did he slip into sleep.

9

Nicole Hoyt hoped this would be the success that she and Ed had coming. She looked up and down the quiet night street, where the streetlamps every hundred feet or so made small pools of light on the sidewalks and a little portion of the street. Nobody was visible, and the only cars were parked along the curb. All the houses had gone dark hours ago. She watched Ed kneeling on the strip of grass by the curb. He reached into the small concrete opening in the lawn and turned the wrench clockwise to shut off the water supply to the house. Then he replaced the cover and stood.

Together they moved to the high hedge at the front of the yard. Ed lifted her into it so she could reach the chain link fence hidden inside the hedge’s foliage. She pulled herself over, and then lowered herself through the hedge with a whisper of leaves and the soft crackling of twigs. She pictured herself as a ghost going through a wall.

She waited, and Ed reached over the fence to hand her the five-gallon can he had brought, and then climbed over to join her. His transit through the hedge was louder than hers, but it was over in a moment. They crouched by the
hedge for thirty seconds to see if anyone had heard, and then walked up the driveway to the front of the house. Ed had spotted the antique leaded-glass window when he came to dig the car trap a couple of days ago. Most of the house had replacement windows that were double-pane safety glass that you couldn’t break with a hammer. But the Abels must have had a soft-headed view of the antique glass, and left it in when they updated the place. Ed used his knife to bend the lead frame, pried out a pane of the glass, then another, and another, until there was a space large enough for Nicole to fit through. He boosted her up and in, and then handed the five-gallon can in after her.

Nicole waited for a few minutes to let her eyes adjust to the deeper darkness while any sounds she’d made faded into the past. Then she walked lightly to the middle of the house, where she reached the stairs up to the two-story addition. Upstairs there was a long central hallway with bedrooms on both sides. The darkness here was relieved a bit by a long skylight that let moonlight in to reflect on the polished hardwood floor. She advanced about twenty feet, looking into rooms as she went, and then stopped. This was as far as she dared to go. If she went on trying to find the room where the Abels slept, she would risk waking them. This spot would serve her purpose. She unscrewed the top of the can and poured a pool of gasoline on the hardwood, and then watched it spread along the hall in the grooves of the floor as she backed down the stairs to the living room.

She soaked the carpet in the living room because that was the way a person awakened at night would try to get out. Next she went from room to room on the ground floor
pouring a stream of gasoline along the outer walls. When she finished the walls she had some left, so she poured a pool under the gas stove, another one in front of the back door, and the last on the floor at the front door. Since the cause of the fire was going to be impossible to miss, she left the top off the empty gas can and set it on the living room coffee table.

She stood on a chair to climb out the leaded-glass window again, gave Ed a thumbs-up signal, and kept going down the lawn. As she passed the punctured husk of the Abels’ Volvo she stopped to look inside. She silently conceded that Ed had been right. There were dozens of bullet holes in the outer side of each door, but none of the bullets seemed to have made a single hole coming through the inner side.

Nicole kept going down the driveway to the gate and looked up and down the street. The neighborhood was still quiet. The windows of the houses were dark and the air was still, so all she could hear was the occasional distant
swish
of a car a block away on the boulevard.

When Nicole was satisfied she turned toward the house and saw Ed standing at the front of the leaded-glass window, watching her and waiting. She waved to him, and then saw him step to the side of the window, strike a match, and toss it toward the open gap in the glass. His match didn’t quite make it into the house, because the gasoline fumes from inside ignited before it reached the opening. There was a sound like
whooomp
and a bright orange flame tinged with blue shot outward a few feet and then subsided.

Immediately the house began to burn. The flames streaked around the rooms and across the floors and slithered up the walls to the ceiling. Each instant made the interior brighter.

Ed ran toward Nicole along the driveway, and behind him she could see the fire growing, flames rising to light up the windows. She knew that the flames were mostly just gasoline at the moment, but the wood and fabric would be fully involved in a minute or two, and while these flames were turning the living room floor into a lake of fire, others were marching along the unseen hallway to the bedrooms in the back.

Ed reached her and they sat down just inside the fence in the deep shadow of the tall hedge. They took their MP5 assault rifles out from under their jackets, extended the stocks, pulled back the cocking levers, slid the selectors to auto, and studied the doors and windows of the house. A few seconds later all the alarms and smoke detectors seemed to go off at once.

Like a shriek in the dark, the loud, high-pitched beeping of the fire alarms woke Sid, and he sat up and reached out to touch Ronnie and reassure himself that she was still there. She clutched his arm once then let go.

Sid stood, stepped to the wall, felt for the light switch, turned on the lights, and then climbed the stairs and gingerly touched the doorknob. “The metal’s hot. The house must be on fire.”

“Are you sure? I don’t smell smoke.”

“Smoke rises, so it’s not down here yet.”

“We’d better get dressed,” she said, and reached for the clothes she had folded and left on the workbench. She tossed his clothes to him.

He stepped into his jeans and put on his running shoes and T-shirt, then stuck the pistol into his belt and the spare
magazines in his pockets. He handed Ronnie her pistol and spare magazines.

She pocketed the ammunition. “You know, we probably won’t need these. It could be something normal. A short circuit. I was exhausted, and I could have left the coffeepot plugged in.”

He said, “It’s time to get out of here.”

She looked up the stairs. “We can’t go that way,” she said. “I guess it’s got to be the other way into the yard.”

They made it to the steel door across the basement just as the light went out. The fire alarms had gone off with the light, and the quiet was a relief. Sid unbolted the door and they went through and closed it behind them. They climbed the concrete steps to the cellar door. Ronnie tugged on the bolt.

Nicole Hoyt watched the doors and windows while the fire burned, but nobody came out. The fire alarms had melted into silence as the fire grew, but they had apparently been loud enough to raise some of the neighbors. Lights came on in houses along the street, and Nicole knew people would be calling the fire department. She waited for Ed to notice, and then realized that he already had. In the light from the fire she could see the muscles in his jaw working. They had wanted to stay long enough to shoot the Abels as they tried to escape from the fire, but time was passing. He looked up the street at the houses again.

“That’s it,” he muttered. “Time to go.” He stood.

They both moved to the hedge a few feet apart, put their MP5 rifles against their bellies and zipped their jackets over
them, then pushed the foliage aside, reached in to grasp the fence, and pulled themselves up and over.

They both trotted around the corner of the street to their car. They got in and Ed drove them out of the residential streets onto the boulevard and then to the parking spot in the alley near the office building they had chosen. They got out and stepped to the back of the building.

Ed had already prepared the way into the building hours earlier. He had used a crowbar to pry the shield away from the lock and a flexible shim to pop the door open, and then taped the latch bolt down so the door would be ready when they arrived. He opened the door and they were in. He pulled the tape off the lock, and they ran to the first-floor elevator, rode it to the top floor, and then climbed the stairs to the roof access door.

They stood on the roof and stared down at the quiet street, which was now lit up with a waving, flickering light from the flames. They both took out their rifles, found firing positions, and studied the Abels’ house. After a few seconds Nicole said, “I can see the house and some of the yard pretty well because of the fire, but I still can’t see anybody coming out.”

“I can’t either,” Ed said. “A lot of times when you try to burn somebody out at night, the smoke kills them before they wake up.” He kept watching in silence for a full minute before he added, “There’s also the fact that all houses burn different. Sometimes the space in the center for the open-beam living room channels the heat up into the peak and it burns like instant hell. They could be crispy critters by now.”

“Should we test?”

“Yeah. Get ready.” Ed shouldered his MP5 and aimed at the shadow of a big tree in the Abels’ yard.

The silence was shattered by a shot, and Sid saw dirt kick up twenty feet from either of them. They both crouched. “Don’t fire back!” he called to Ronnie.

“I can’t. I don’t see them.”

“They don’t see us, either. They’re trying to draw fire so they’ll spot a muzzle flash.”

They waited for a few seconds, and there was another shot. This one hit in the shadow of a tree on the left side of the yard.

“That time I saw the flash,” Ronnie called out. “They’re on the roof of that office building over on the boulevard.”