Murder Season (31 page)
She hurried down the hall, found the guest room, and switched on the lights. As she entered, she saw two boxes of cleaned shirts on the bed and several pairs of men’s dress shoes by the chair. An open suitcase was set on the trunk by the window. She pulled the closet doors open and counted five business suits on the rack, along with one that was wrapped up and had probably come from the dry cleaners with the two boxes of shirts on the bed.
She was overdosing on the moment now. Choking on it.
She started to pull the plastic away from the suit. Slowly at first, then ripping at it with her fingers when she saw the pinstripes. Her face flushed with heat, her eyes reeling back and forth across the fabric until they zeroed in on the left lapel and found the mark.
Cobb’s mind was beginning to skip
through time again.
He’d spent the last hour gazing at the sunset and daydreaming about a ribeye steak, a glass of Cutty Sark, and a night under the sheets with Betty Kim. After wasting the day watching Bennett fool around in his garage, Cobb thought he deserved a reward of significant proportions. If it came down to a single choice, he would have saved the food and whisky for later, and picked door number three. Betty Kim. But it was a Friday night; he knew his life was on the line, and he saw no reason why he didn’t deserve all three.
He dug the bottle of Tylenol out of his pocket and gave it a shake, but only one caplet fell out. Grimacing at the empty bottle, he popped the pill and knocked it back with what was left of his bottled water. His back hurt. He’d spent most of the day hiding in the brush overlooking Bennett’s McMansion with his elbows pinned to the ground.
He raised the field glasses up to his eyes, found Bennett in his four-car garage, and adjusted the focus.
The man was still washing his fucking car—a gray BMW with tinted glass. He’d been at it for hours. It didn’t make sense to Cobb—taking a day off from work and devoting it to a car. Especially on a day when his wife took off with the kids. A day when everything inside the man should have been ripped and scratched.
His cell phone started vibrating.
Cobb looked at it on the ground, saw Gamble’s name on the touch screen and smiled at the thought of her. He liked the idea of knowing her and working with her. He liked the idea that his first impression of her had been the wrong one. He liked the fact that the movie inside his head had stopped playing ever since he realized who she really was. That he wasn’t alone anymore. That the dead bodies he could see piling up when he closed his eyes had stopped staring at him and stopped taunting him.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Bennett’s,” he whispered.
“Is he still agitated?”
Cobb sensed something different in her voice and took another look through his field glasses. Bennett had popped open the trunk and was removing the carpet.
“You could call it that,” he said. “His wife took off with the kids. They had suitcases.”
“And what’s he doing about it?”
“Washing his fucking car.”
She didn’t say anything after that. Just a long stretch of silence.
“You need to get out of there,” she said finally. “You need to make sure he doesn’t see you.”
Cobb raised the field glasses again, but couldn’t locate Bennett. The door between the house and garage was open now.
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s Bennett, Cobb. He’s the killer. He’s the one.”
“What happened?”
“You need to get out of there. I’m with detectives from the Sheriff’s Department. Bennett murdered Debi Watson last night.”
She gave him Watson’s address in West Hollywood and told him that Vaughan was on his way as well. He could hear the worry in her voice.
“You need to hurry, Cobb. It’s not safe. You’ll see what I mean when you get here.”
He slipped the phone into his pocket, his mind skipping through those beats again. He tried to shake himself clear, but it didn’t work. He could see Debi Watson’s face the way he had seen it when they prepped for the trial. But as he tried to focus on the image, it began to shift and change until he found himself staring at Lily Hight laid out on the floor of her bedroom.
The place where his nightmare began.
He could remember how his chest locked up when he first walked into the room and saw her there. He could remember the feelings he felt. The sounds of her mother and father weeping that carried through the house from downstairs. He remembered sitting with Lily while he waited for the coroner to arrive. He remembered that he didn’t want her to be alone. That he had stroked her soft blond hair.
Cobb raised the field glasses for one last look. The door between the house and garage remained open. Bennett was still inside. Pushing himself off the ground, he grabbed hold of the tree and climbed to his feet.
And then he heard the shots. There were three of them. They seemed loud.
He looked at Bennett’s house, reaching around to scratch the itch below his shoulder blades. Bennett hadn’t been drawn outside by the sound, and Cobb wasn’t sure what was happening. He could feel his knees giving out, his body collapsing onto the ground. After a moment, he began to notice the blood leaking out of his chest and flowing into the dusty earth. He lifted his head out of the dirt, struggling to get his bearings. The sky was spinning, the stars leaving trails as they flew through the heavens. He sensed movement behind him and to his right. As he turned his head, a shoe came out of nowhere and crushed his face.
And then it was over. No more movies playing in his head. No more channels. No more money worries. No more bills.
He’d made it. He could see Betty Kim reaching out for him and pulling him into her arms. He was living the life he’d always dreamed about, the one that always seemed so far away. He was living on Easy Street now.
His eyes fucking opened and his body
jerked its way up and out of the nosedive. He could feel himself pulling out of the death stall. He batted his eyes and looked around, grunting like an animal. He tried to think, tried to figure out what had just happened and what if anything came next.
He was alone.
Bennett’s house was dark.
He’d been left for dead.
Cobb reached for his gun in panic. It was still there, holstered to his belt. He looked for his cell phone, but it was gone. He looked again, but it was still gone. Turning his body into the streetlight, he gazed at his chest. He had heard three shots, but saw only two exit wounds. He needed help. The closest emergency room was at UCLA in Westwood. But he didn’t want Bennett to find him. He’d have to make sure the doctors talked to Gamble.
His Lincoln was parked around the corner on Highwood Street. Pulling himself to his feet, he concentrated on his balance and started down the hill. He moved slowly, crashing into bushes that seemed to jump out at him from the darkness. Something had happened to his vision. Everything seemed to be glowing. When he reached the street and a car passed, the headlights were so bright that they burned his eyes.
He pulled himself together. He was close now, just passing Bennett’s house on the right. It occurred to him that he needed to leave some kind of trail behind. Something for Gamble to follow—no matter how small—just in case. Drawing his gun, he put two 9-mm rounds in the garage door, then emptied the Sig’s mag into the living room windows until he’d shattered enough glass to light up the house and kick in the silent alarm. He glanced at his shell casings in the street, kicking them toward the curb so that they wouldn’t get run over and could be found easily.
He felt a small burst of energy after that. Reaching the corner, he saw his Lincoln in the shadows and almost tripped as he dug his keys out of his pocket. He got the door open and managed to climb in. But that burst of energy was gone now.
Cobb took a moment to catch his breath.
He thought about Bennett’s trick with the door between the house and garage, and wondered how he could have been beaten by an idiot like that. He wished that Bennett had still been washing his asshole car when he walked by with his gun. He wished that he could have greased the little prick, kicked every tooth out of his head, and hit a home run.
He switched on the interior light, eyeing the wounds in his chest and wrestling with his disbelief and terror. He needed to slow down the bleeding. Opening the glove box, he grabbed the extra napkins he’d collected after ordering fast food and twisted the paper into two tight rolls. Then he pushed them into the exit wounds hoping to plug the holes.
There was no pain. Just weakness.
And Cobb had no idea how long he’d been out. The entrance wounds he couldn’t see and couldn’t reach behind his back were probably far worse. He knew enough about blood loss and shock to see this as the last problem he would probably ever face.
He got the car moving, coasted down to Sunset and made a right. He tried to find the lane. Tried to center the car between the lines. There was a horseshoe curve ahead and it felt like a roller coaster tumbling down and around on a shaky track. Somehow he got through it by just holding onto the wheel. But he couldn’t get past the headlights shooting his way. They seemed to stick to the windshield even as the cars passed. The lights got brighter and brighter and he closed his eyes. Seconds ticked by before he forced himself to open up and look at the twisting road ahead of him.
He was losing it. He wasn’t going to make it.
And when he finally rolled down the last hill and saw the Pacific Coast Highway on the other side of his windshield, he realized that he’d made a wrong turn on Sunset. The emergency room at UCLA had probably been less than five miles east of Bennett’s house.
He started to panic. He saw storefronts. A neon sign.
L.A. DOG AND CAT.
He pulled over and groaned when he noticed that the lights were on and someone was inside. He jacked open the door and got out. His gun was in his hand—his Sig Sauer—and he didn’t know why. And his balance was off—the air was still—yet it felt like he’d walked into a stiff wind.
He reached the door. He was surprised about that. Through the glass he could see the vet doing paperwork behind the front desk.
Cobb knocked on the glass. It was a weak knock—more of a tap, really—but the vet looked up, pointing at the sign in the door and mouthing the words, “We’re closed.”
Cobb groaned like an animal again.
We’re closed
.
The vet had said it louder this time. Loud enough for Cobb to hear his voice through the glass.
We’re closed
.
He thought that he might vomit, but fought it off. He tried to get his head straight, but knew with certainty that he had no chance. He looked at the door—the wood frame and the wood panels below the glass. Then he took two steps back and charged forward, driving his shoulder into the lock.
The door burst open and the vet jumped to his feet.
Cobb raised his gun. “If you say ‘We’re closed’ one more time, I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head off.”
The vet’s mouth dropped open. Cobb could see him staring at the napkins pushed into his chest. The blood wicking through the paper and dripping onto the floor like a couple of leaky pipes.
“I’m a police officer,” he said. “And I need your help.”
The vet tried to speak, but stumbled on his words. He looked young. Thirty-five with light features, wearing jeans and a lab coat. The tag over his pocket read
DR. FRANK.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” the vet said.
Cobb shook his head back and forth, almost losing his balance. “I’ll bleed to death before it gets here. You gotta do it. You gotta help me.”
“But I’m a veterinarian,” he said. “I take care of animals.”
“I’ve been an animal most of my life, Doc. And this isn’t exactly a request.”
Cobb realized that he’d emptied the gun’s mag into Bennett’s bullshit dream house, but flicked the muzzle in the vet’s face just the same. When he saw Frank’s eyes widen slightly, he knew that it had worked. The Sig was a good-looking piece. Cobb had always admired it.
“Okay, okay,” Dr. Frank said. “Let’s go. Let’s do it.”
He grabbed Cobb’s arm and helped him into the back room. There was a stainless steel table here and the tiles on the walls were the same color blue as Gamble’s eyes. Cobb took this as a good sign, but had to admit to himself that good signs were selling cheap right now.
Dr. Frank lifted him onto the table, then slipped his hands into a pair of vinyl gloves. He pulled off Cobb’s shirt and started working on the wounds. He worked quickly, like a medic in the field, and Cobb wondered if the guy had ever served.
“You’ve gotta tell me what happened,” the vet was saying. “I need to know what I’m dealing with.”
Cobb looked up at him. He was the right age, and he didn’t look scared anymore.
“Three shots fired behind my back,” he said. “I count two exit wounds. I’m hoping one of the three missed. I lost my cell phone, Doc. If something happens to me—”
A wave passed over his body. A big one with a lot of roll to it.
It felt like he was sinking in a sea of exhaustion. He tried to keep talking. Tried to convey the situation as best he could. Tried to give the vet the real deal in broad strokes and tell him that Gamble was in danger. But he wasn’t sure he was making much sense anymore. He wasn’t even sure if he was really talking.
Lena was weaving through heavy traffic
on the west end of Sunset Boulevard on a Friday night. She didn’t know how fast the car was moving because she hadn’t checked the speedometer. All she knew was that the car couldn’t go fast enough. She glanced over at Vaughan in the passenger seat.
“It’ll be okay,” he said.
Over the past hour every time she’d looked at him, Vaughan had said the same thing.
It’ll be okay
.
She had waited for Vaughan at Debi Watson’s house in West Hollywood and walked him through the crime scene with detectives from the Sheriff’s Department. Vaughan had spent the day rooting through the district attorney’s computer system with Keith Upshaw. They’d found something and he wanted to talk about it. But Lena’s mind was on Cobb. She couldn’t stop worrying about him. He was supposed to meet them at Watson’s house, but he never showed up. When she tried calling him, his message service kept picking up after a single ring as if his phone had been turned off.
