Mortal Faults (27 page)

46

Tess and Crandall were checking out the crowded bistro down the street from the hotel, looking at every slender, dark-haired woman in the shadowy, buzzing hive, when Hauser’s voice came over their radios.

“LAPD’s responding to a nine-one-one from the Brayton. Some kind of disturbance, altercation between a man and a woman, and something about a gun.”

“Shit,” Crandall said.

Tess was already moving. She pushed her way out of the restaurant, nearly knocking over a waitress burdened by an overloaded tray, and then she was pounding down the sidewalk, Crandall not far behind.

***

Abby almost lunged for the gun, but instinct told her that if she did, Andrea would fire. At this range she couldn’t miss.

Instead she said quietly, “Andrea. No.”

Andrea held tight to the pistol and didn’t answer.

Across the lobby someone saw the gun and screamed.

Distantly Abby wondered where Andrea had gotten the gun. The revolver from the kitchen had been confiscated by the authorities.

“You’re not a killer,” Abby said in the tone she would have used to soothe a skittish animal. “You know that now.”

“I’m not.” Andrea’s words came through gritted teeth. “He is.”

Abby’s glance flicked to Reynolds. He stood unmoving, his face bare of expression. He wasn’t looking at the gun. His gaze was locked on Andrea’s face.

There was movement around the lobby, people ducking for cover, seeking exits or places to hide. If Reynolds had wanted anonymity in this meeting, he’d lost any hope of it now. He was on center stage, visible to everyone.

“I know what he is,” Abby said. “You don’t have to be like him.”

“Keep quiet, Abby.”

“Give me the gun.”

“
Keep quiet, I said!
”

Andrea shrieked the words, their echo volleying across the tiled floor. A child in a remote corner of the lobby started to cry.

Abby braced herself, expecting the violence of Andrea’s outburst to be punctuated by a blast from the gun. It didn’t happen.

“We’re leaving,” Andrea said, her voice lower, almost normal.

Abby nodded. “That’s a good idea. Let’s just go.”

“Not you and me. Me and him.”

Reynolds narrowed his eyes. “I’m not going with you.”

Andrea stepped forward and rammed the gun into the side of his neck, her face inches from his. “You are.”

Reynolds’ mouth worked slowly. “You goddamned crazy bitch.”

“If I’m crazy, you made me that way. Now walk.”

“Where?”

“Where’s your car?”

“Hotel garage. Level two.”

“To the elevator, then.”

“What about the money?”

“Leave it.”

“It’s fifty thousand dollars.”

“Leave it.”

He moved toward the elevators, Andrea staying close to him. Abby trailed behind.

“Go away, Abby,” Andrea said.

“This is a mistake.” Abby tried to find the right words. “You don’t need to do this. You can have justice now.”

“I don’t want justice. There is no justice. How could there be?”

“Then what’s the point of this?”

“He’s got to suffer.”

“We can do that to him. The law can do it.”

“Since when have you ever cared about the law?”

Abby had no answer to that.

They reached the elevator bank. The nearest doors parted as soon as Andrea pressed the Down button. The compartment was empty. She ushered Reynolds inside and pressed B-2.

Abby knew she ought to let them go. It might be suicide to follow. But the thing was, she’d always had this obstinate streak of responsibility. It would get her in trouble one of these days.

She stepped in before the doors closed.

***

Tess reached the hotel entrance and stopped running. The reflected sun gleamed off the glass doors, dazzling her. She squinted against the orange glare.

Whatever was going on inside, she had to enter the building the same way she would approach any other hostile environment. It had been years ago when she’d undergone her training in Hogan’s Alley, the fake town used by Bureau recruits at Quantico, but it came back to her now.

“I take the lead, you cover me,” she said to Crandall as he arrived at her side. His weapon was drawn and she was mildly surprised to find that hers was, too. “We clear the room in stages, staying close to the walls, never out in the open. Okay?”

“At least this time you’re not leaving me in the backyard,” Crandall said.

They went in together, moving fast across the tiled floor to a group of potted palms that offered cover. Tess scanned the lobby, saw people running here and there, clerks at the registration desk making frantic phone calls, security guards racing for the stairs.

This much activity wouldn’t be going on if an armed confrontation was still in progress. She stepped into view and grabbed the first person who came sprinting past, a bellman.

“Where’s the individual with the gun?”

“The woman? She took the guy into the elevator. They went down.”

“What’s below this level?”

“Parking garage. It’s two stories.”

“Was there one woman—or two?”

“Two. And the guy they took—someone said they recognized him from TV.”

“Who is he?”

“A congressman, they said. From around here, I think.”

Tess let him go.

“
Two
women,” Crandall said.

She nodded. “Yes. Two.” She turned away. “Damn it, Abby. Damn it to hell.”

***

“I told you to go away,” Andrea said as the elevator descended.

Abby faced her. “I’m not leaving you.”

“You should. You don’t know what I might do. I might kill you, too. I might kill both of you, then myself.”

In the brassy lights of the elevator car, Reynolds’ skin was shiny with sweat.

“Why would you do that?” Abby asked.

“I don’t know why. Why does anybody do anything? Nothing happens for a reason. Nothing makes any sense.”

“You aren’t yourself, Andrea.”

“So who am I?” Andrea released a brief, disconcerting little laugh. “Tell me that, Abby. Who am I?”

The elevator doors opened on level two of the underground garage.

“Out,” Andrea said.

The order was unnecessary. Reynolds was already stepping out of the compartment, the gun still riding his neck.

Abby had several options. She could draw her gun from her purse, but if she did, Andrea would kill Reynolds, and Abby would have to kill or wound her. Or she could jump Andrea and wrest the gun away. She was a trained fighter, and Andrea was not. But the struggle would leave Reynolds unattended, and there was a chance he was armed, as well. If he was, he wouldn’t miss an opportunity to take out both women.

The remaining option was to talk Andrea down. It hadn’t worked so far, but it still seemed to be her best move.

“Why don’t you let me take it from here?” she asked softly.

Andrea didn’t answer. To Reynolds she said, “Which way is your car?”

“Over there. End of the line. The blue Mustang coupe.”

“Walk.”

Reynolds hesitated. “You’re not going to kill me.”

“I’m not?”

“If you were, you’d have done it by now.”

“You think so?”

“I know you. You can’t pull the trigger.” He studied her and nodded. “You won’t.”

Andrea snapped her arm down and fired once into Reynolds’ thigh.

Reynolds didn’t scream. He merely dropped to a kneeling position, his pants leg blooming with a maroon flower of blood.

Andrea pivoted, faster than Abby could have expected, and pointed the gun at her. “Don’t try to stop me.”

Abby slowly released her hand from the clasp of her purse.

“I’ll kill you both,” Andrea said. “I’ll kill anybody. I swear I will. A person can only take
so much
.” She swung the gun toward Reynolds again. “Get up.”

“You shot me,” Reynolds said, as if this were new information.

“Get up!”

He struggled to his feet. His pants leg clung to his skin, some of the material actually blown inward by the gunshot, glued to the wound.

“Walk to your car.”

With pain, Reynolds obeyed. Abby started to follow. Andrea waved her off with the pistol.

“No farther.”

“I can’t let you go,” Abby said.

“You don’t have a choice.”

“Andrea—”

“You’re not part of this, Abby. You never were. It’s me and him. That’s all it’s ever been.” Andrea’s voice hardened. “If you follow, I’ll shoot you.”

Abby stayed where she was. She watched as Reynolds led Andrea to the Mustang.

“Keys,” Andrea said.

“They’re in my side pocket.”

“Just get them.”

He reached into his pocket, fumbled briefly, and produced a key ring.

“Open the passenger door and get in. Then slide over. You’re driving. I’m sitting next to you.”

“I’m losing blood. I might pass out at the wheel.”

“If you do, we’ll both die. We’re probably going to die together, anyway. Isn’t that the way it should be, Jack?”

Reynolds looked back at Abby, yards away, his glance a silent plea.

Abby shook her head. She couldn’t help him. Andrea was in control of this situation. Andrea, who had been in control of nothing in her life for the past twenty years.

Reynolds slipped into the car, groaning as he maneuvered into the driver’s seat. Andrea slid in beside him, shutting the door.

The headlights and engine came on, and the Mustang backed out of its slot and sped away.

47

The garage had two levels, as the bellman had said. “We have to split up,” Tess told Crandall. “You take level two, I’ll take level one. Use the stairs—elevator’s too dangerous. If she’s waiting outside the elevator, she can shoot you when the doors open, and you’ve got no cover.”

“When you say
she
, do you mean ...?”

“I don’t know. It could be either one of them. They’re working together, obviously. I wouldn’t have believed it, but...” She shook her head. “Get going. Take those stairs.”

She pointed to the nearest stairwell. Crandall ran off. Tess thumbed her radio’s transmit button and told Hauser she needed backup. “And get on the phone to the main desk, tell them to hold off using their security guards in the parking garage. We don’t need extra bodies down there.”

Extra bodies—perhaps not the best way of putting it.

She reconnoitered the lobby and located another stairwell. It was better to use two different approaches to the garage. That way she and Crandall were covering more territory. If the women decided to double back, using the stairs, there was more chance of intercepting them.

 
She ran to the stairwell. The lobby was a scene of utter confusion. People were racing all around her, some yelling into cell phones, others calling for family members they’d lost track of. She had the impression that security was evacuating the building, or at least the ground level. That was okay. It would keep the guards out of the garage, anyway.

She opened the stairwell door and went in, beaming her pocket flash down the shaft.

Abby was down there somewhere. Abby and Andrea.

Two felons. Two killers.

And the two of them had to be stopped.

***

Reynolds had been scared there for a few minutes. He could admit that much. For a moment he’d been certain the crazy bitch would pull the trigger and cut him down.

Death as such didn’t scare him. Everybody died. But to die in a hotel lobby, shot by his ex-lover in a scandal that would ruin his reputation forever, to be remembered only as a D.A.-turned-congressman who’d diddled a legal secretary and gotten his brains blown out—that prospect terrified him. Life and death were unimportant, but pride mattered.

Now the fear had left him, and even the throbbing pain in his leg seemed distant and unimportant. He saw a way clear of this mess. A way to save himself and make everything right.

“I can’t believe you’re kidnapping me,” he said, pitching his voice loud.

Andrea was silent. He risked saying more.

“My Mustang is pretty distinctive. The police will be able to spot it.”

“I don’t care about the police.”

“We’ll be lucky if we even get out of the hotel garage,” he said, again too loudly.

“Stop shouting.”

“It’s the gunshot. My ears are still ringing. I can’t hear myself think.”

He steered the car forward between the ranks of concrete pylons under the glare of fluorescent lights. He’d done what he could. Now it depended on Shanker.

Reynolds had done more than retrieve his keys when he’d reached into his pocket. He’d touched his cell phone and activated the speed dial. If he’d done it correctly, he should have placed a call to Shanker, who was sitting in his van on level one of the garage, waiting for Reynolds’ signal.

If Shanker had heard the few words he’d just spoken, he ought to be able to figure out what was going on—and to do something about it.

All that was needed was a momentary distraction. Reynolds leaned forward in the driver’s seat and felt the comforting weight of the gun under his jacket, the gun he had taken from the wall safe in his home office before driving to L.A.

He only had to get the pistol out of Andrea’s hands, or pin her down so she couldn’t fire. Then with her gun or with his own, he could take her out. One bullet to the head, and that would be the end of Andrea, formerly Bethany, the mother of two of his children, and the bane of his life.

And the beauty of it was, no one would blame him. The angry altercation in the lobby would actually work to his advantage. He had multiple witnesses to testify that the woman had been behaving in an irrational and violent manner, that she had held a gun on him and marched him into an elevator. He had the wound in his thigh to prove she was serious.

He was a victim, for God’s sake. Andrea Lowry was a crazy woman with a history of mental illness, institutionalization, and violence. She had been stalking him. She had finally tracked him down in the Brayton—he could invent a convincing reason for being there. Fortunately he’d been able to defend himself.

She wouldn’t be around to tell her side of the story. Only Abby remained to be dealt with, and she was already in trouble with the law, or so she claimed. Even if her story had been bullshit, there was a fair chance he could get to her before she could do him any harm. With both women out of the way, there would be no one to refute his version of events.

He could make it work. Hell, he could come out of this a hero. The crusading D.A. would now be a fighting congressman who’d taken on a stalker and won. He might be able to parlay this into a run for the senate. And for a senator from California, a slot on a presidential ticket was not an impossibility.

Or he might just be getting lightheaded from blood loss. But one thing was certain. If he had a chance to finish Andrea, he would take it. He would do the job his hired thugs had botched twenty years ago. He would kill the bitch at last.

***

The Man was in trouble. That much was obvious.

Shanker put the van into gear and barreled out of his parking spot.

The voices on the phone had been faint and slightly garbled, but he’d made out enough to know that Reynolds was being forced to drive out of the hotel garage, and that he had been shot or at least shot at, and that the shooter was a woman.

Abby, of course. It had to be. The bitch had pulled off another double cross.

But this one would be her last.

***

Reynolds was pulling close to the exit ramp when he saw the gray blur of Shanker’s van in his rearview mirror. The van was
 
gaining fast.

Things were about to get interesting.

He tightened his grip on the wheel. A trickle of perspiration oozed down his neck. It was cold, as cold as the muzzle of the pistol still pressed against his skin.

“What’s the matter, Jack?” Andrea was looking at him with a suspicious, quizzical eye. “What’s going on?”

He didn’t have to answer. Shanker answered for him.

The van swung out from behind the car, pulling alongside like a wall of gray metal looming out of nowhere.

Andrea saw it. Her mouth opened in the beginning of a shout.

With a scream of tires, the van veered sideways, slamming solidly into the Mustang’s front end.

Instinctively Reynolds hit the brakes.

Too late.

The Mustang folded up against the van’s backside, rocking Reynolds and his passenger in their seats.

Neither of them was strapped in. Reynolds hit the steering wheel as the airbag deployed, smacking him in the face and retracting instantly. He was dazed momentarily but shook it off and spun in his seat to face Andrea. The passenger side airbag had crumpled in her lap, and the gun once held to his head was dangling from limp fingers.

He grabbed for it. She snapped alert and threw a clawing hand at his face, but he wedged himself closer, ignoring the shout of pain from his leg, and wrapped his fingers around the hand holding the gun.

Their eyes met, and he saw hopelessness and resignation in hers, submission before a superior adversary, acquiescence to the essential injustice of the world.

That was when he knew he had won. Prizing the pistol out of her grip was only an afterthought to his triumph. He pulled it free and jammed his forefinger between the trigger guard and the trigger, the barrel arrowed at her face.

***

To Andrea it was all strangely familiar, the gun in her face and the certainty of death—but really there was nothing strange about it, because she had died like this once before, hadn’t she? The memory was suddenly keen and sharp—the explosion behind her ear, the rush of white light that surprised her because it wasn’t darkness.

And her last thought—Jack did this.

That thought came back to her now, and with it came a surge of furious indignation at this man who had already taken everything from her, and who dared to take even more.

She twisted away from him as the gun went off, a purplish blast clouding her vision, the shot missing her and tearing through the headrest of the passenger seat.

“Fuck you, Jack!” She heard a crazy woman screaming and realized it was her. “Fuck you!”

She lashed out with her fists. She beat him in the face. The gun lurched toward her but she batted it away and flailed at him, and one of her swinging blows caught him in the thigh where the bullet had struck.

Then he was the one screaming.

His cries brought her back to herself. She had to get out of this car. She had to get away.

She flung open the door and clambered out into the ugly fluorescent glow, the word
ugly
beating like a flap of wings in her mind—this basement world, like catacombs, an ugly place to die, all concrete and shadows.

She fell on the floor—more concrete—and threw herself upright, staggering toward the nearest row of columns, where cars were parked, and beyond the cars there was a door marked STAIRS, an escape route, if she could get there, but she couldn’t, of course. Reynolds would kill her first, gun her down.

She heard the crack of a gunshot. Another. Another. But she wasn’t hit. Somehow she was alive.

She stumbled between the pillars, half running, half crawling, her legs not working right, and by some inexplicable miracle she reached the shelter of a parked car and scurried behind it as the gun rang out again and again.

From her position of relative safety she risked a glance back, and then she understood. It wasn’t Reynolds who was shooting.

Abby was there, gun in hand, crouching behind another column yards away, snapping off shots at the Mustang.

This probably made some kind of sense, but Andrea couldn’t put it together, and she had no time to think about it.

She ran for the door to the stairs.

***

Abby had pounded up the stairs and was running for the garage exit, meaning to retrieve her Miata from the alley, when she heard the crash.

It had to be Reynolds’ car. He’d wrecked it somehow. And she had no doubt he would use the diversion to gain the upper hand.

She hadn’t been far from the collision. She reached it in time to see Andrea emerge. When Reynolds leaned out, Abby snapped off a series of rounds, not expecting to hit him, just laying down covering fire so Andrea could escape.

It worked. Reynolds ducked back inside the car, and Andrea was gone, and everything was hunky-dory.

From the wrecked van, a volley of shots.

Okay, not so hunky-dory, after all.

Abby threw herself flat on the concrete and rolled to a new position. Evidently the van driver hadn’t been an innocent victim in all this. He was one of Reynolds’ buddies, trying to protect his boss by taking her out.

For the second time in two days she was in a gunfight. It irked her. Variety was one of the perks of her job, but this case wasn’t offering her any.

Her revolver had used all six shots. She dumped the empties and speedloaded another six. There was a second speedloader in her purse if she needed it. She figured she would.

Reynolds was edging out of the Mustang again, the gun leading him. She took aim this time—couldn’t afford to waste any more shots—and fired once. He twisted away, disappearing into the vehicle’s interior. She thought she might have scored a hit on his shoulder or arm.

More gunfire from the van. Sounded like only one gun, which meant only one bad guy inside. He had the advantage, though. As long as she was pinned down, he and Reynolds could pop caps in her direction until one of the shots connected.

She risked a peek at the van and saw that the gunman had ventured out of the vehicle. Time to go on offense. She fired off three more shots, repelling the driver back inside the van, then sprinted out from behind the pillar and dived under the Mustang. It was a good bet that in the dim light and the confusion of battle the van driver hadn’t seen where she went.

Beneath the car she crawled forward on elbows and knees. Oil leaked from the chassis, forming a viscid pool on the concrete.

Movement from the van. It rocked gently on its springs. A pair of leather sneakers came into the view.

The driver was out of his vehicle again, edging sideways along the Mustang.

That was a mistake.

Abby gripped the .38 in both hands and fired twice at his feet. He went down. Even as he hit the ground she dumped the spent shells from her revolver and speedloaded her last six rounds.

A shot burned past her, her wounded enemy firing blindly under the car. She squeezed off three rounds and blew the gun out of his hand, which was not a hand any longer but a gushing stump. He howled like an animal and fell abruptly silent, unconscious or dead. No threat either way.

But Reynolds was still a threat. Directly above her, in the Mustang—

In time with that thought, a bullet punched through the chassis, plowing into the concrete and kicking up splinters of stone.

Son of a bitch was firing straight down through the floor of his car.

She rolled sideways, dodging three more shots that punctured the bottom of the Mustang, then fired upward into what she thought was the front passenger compartment, hoping for a lucky hit, but luck wasn’t with her, and his gun boomed back, targeting the spot where the shots had originated, missing her—but only just—as she flipped to one side. She squeezed off two more shots, and the hammer made a dry click.

Out of ammo. No more speedloaders in her purse. Not that it mattered, since her purse was gone anyway, lost in her rapid maneuvers beneath the Mustang.

Reynolds hadn’t run out. He fired again and again, and above the roar of the shots she heard him yelling, a long incoherent shout of rage.