Power Slide (13 page)

Why a password anyway? That didn’t seem like him. I could hear Guthrie laughing and saying, “Who’d give a shit what I wrote?”

In the closet were more clothes—
his
clothes—slacks and shirts on hangers, jeans on hooks, and on the shelf some sweaters stuffed up there. The one in front was a green heather number that looked familiar. Had he worn that last year? Or the year before? Or was it just a green sweater like thousands of others? I pulled it down to sniff the neck. The others fell with it.

Behind them was an Oscar.

A gold-plated statuette. The real thing.

What was that doing here? Stuntmen don’t get Oscars. Even stunt coordinators don’t. The hoity-toity Academy of Motion Picture Arts voted against an award for best stunt coordination twice. No way would an Oscar come into Guthrie’s possession, much less be hidden on his closet shelf.

I reached, stretching high. Not high enough.

Dents be damned. I jumped up, swiped, and knocked the statuette to the floor.

Outside brakes squealed. And again.

I grabbed Oscar and ran for the kitchen door.

I leapt from the steps down to the canyon side, doing a controlled slide down the dry grass. Too much noise. Too obvious. Catching a branch, I swung sideways. The gun smacked my thigh. Her gun. Could I be more red-handed? But I didn’t dare toss it, not till I knew who was running toward me.

The front door slammed against a wall. “In here!” a man yelled.

Yelled. So, at least two people.
I had to get back to the car and out of here. But the little house nearly filled the lot. A hedge, eight feet high and full of brambles, ran beside it. There was no way out but in the gauntlet between it and the building, right under the bedroom window where they were.

“Just find the goddamn keys! Okay, so look in the kitchen. Use your brain!” one of them yelled.

Keys? I had Guthrie’s key. But of course they wouldn’t be looking for the house key when they were already inside. Safe deposit box? What?

I couldn’t go downhill. This was fire country, the underbrush already dead dry. My every step would crunch.

From inside I could hear movement, voices, but no more words. Sweat ran down my face, pasted my hair to my neck, my shirt to my back. My breath sounded like a locomotive. Who were they? Police? Friends of Guthrie’s wife? Who?

An interior door slammed. Bathroom? Kitchen?

My foot slipped on the brush. The breaking brush crackled like the Fourth of July. I rammed my knees together to keep from sliding. The
men were six feet away from me. They could be out the back door in ten seconds.

“What was that?”

“Hey, that’s a car out there. We gotta move!”

These guys weren’t the police! Who were they?

“They’re coming down the steps. Move it, kitchen door!”

I jerked back. Both my feet slipped. The brush beneath them thundered. I didn’t dare budge. But I couldn’t stay here.

The door sprang open.

Nowhere to hide! I had to divert them. With one look down at the recipient’s name, I grabbed at a branch, jumped hard to dig in my feet, lobbed Casimir Goldfarb’s shiny gold Oscar toward the brush at the far side of the door. Then I ran.

“Hey, over here!”

I barely saw them as I raced up alongside the house. I started around the front and caught myself just in time. Midway up the stone steps to the street was a uniformed cop. Behind me men skidding, shouting. I could wait and hope. Nope, last resort.

I eyed the cop. Was he here for Higgins or responding to Guthrie’s wife? I still could barely even
think
that word. Odds were he wouldn’t know her. I could trot out from my hiding place, trembling—boy, that’d be easy—and say I was she, I was Guthrie’s wife. It’d be the smart move. A lot better than jail.

But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Even if I got six to ten to regret it.

The cop was beyond the end of the garage. He could see the house, but not the rope hanging from the garage roof to the car engine on what must once have been lawn. At least it wouldn’t crackle under my feet. I shot him one more look, but he was facing the other way, toward the shouts of the chase downhill. Moving oh so carefully I crossed the dirt, took hold of the
rope, and pulled. It held. I grabbed it tight and climbed hand over hand.
Thank you, gym sweat!

Eight hands up I swung into the garage exactly as the engine was meant to. I just caught myself before slamming into a cover stretched over a car. I caught my foot under the bumper and eased myself down to the floor, quietly but not silently. I barely dared breathe, straining to make sense of the thrashing around outside. I was safe—for the moment. But no way could I let the rope loose to swing back like a hand signaling,
Over here! Over here!
The bumper would do. I pulled up a corner of the cover and the whole front came loose, revealing a green Mustang GT fastback from the late sixties. Despite everything, I almost whistled. This was one great old car. It had dents but otherwise was so well preserved the paint had barely faded. A
Bullitt
car
.
Poor Guthrie! He must have spent ages on it. For an instant I pictured him squealing around a San Francisco corner like he was Bud Ekins or Steve McQueen
.

Could it be the real
Bullitt
car? No license plate—that meant nothing.

No time for fantasies! Still, I couldn’t let it go. I checked the VIN on the dashboard, willing myself to remember it, as I pulled the cover back on.

The garage was crammed. Outside the shouts were coming closer. Had the cop nabbed the other guys? I eased back, closer to the hole I’d come in through. I still couldn’t make out what they were saying. But my impression was that not much in the way of criminal apprehension was taking place.

Whatever. It wouldn’t be long till someone was peering in here.

I eased next to the car. At the door, I stopped and tried to catalog sounds. No brakes were grinding or tires squealing now. I peered under the door, trying to get a fix on the action. And then, dammit, another patrol car pulled up.

The last thing I wanted, after getting myself out of Guthrie’s house and avoiding the two guys inside, was to wait here, cringing in this dusty, dirty garage until someone opened the door. But that’s what I was going to have to do.

GUTHRIE’S GARAGE WAS not only filthy and filled with spiders, it was hot. The sun had been searing outside, but in here, under a dark roof, with no air circulation, it was a sauna. I swabbed my face and neck with a paper towel, but I was dripping before I wadded it up.

The sensible thing to do—if
sensible
could be used in relation to anything about this mess I’d gotten myself into—would be to find a perch above the garage doors so when they opened, I’d be ready to swing down and run. But I’d be damned if I’d gone through all this just to come up empty. I crept to the far end and stood next to the hole I’d climbed through. The front door of the house was visible, but no one was going in or out.

There were so many questions. Nothing made sense. For one thing, why were all these cops still here? They’d lost the guys who’d routed me. And they didn’t seem to be searching for me, not that that was much comfort. Were they going over the house? Who’d called them? Guthrie’s wife? Or had they caught the call from Higgins and arrived to find the burglars? Were they waiting for backups . . . and her? Lots of options, none good.

“Move it! Kitchen door!” Those weren’t the instructions of a guy comfortable with the police. It wasn’t likely that Rex Redmon would have
given me the key and then called the goon squad. Which left, as I’d assumed all along, the woman with the gun.

Crap! How long had the miserable bastard been married?
Damn you! If you were here this minute I’d smack you black and blue. How long had you been lying to me, a year? Five years? The whole time? But you weren’t satisfied with that, were you? You had to up the ante and say you—say you were as close to loving me as you’d ever managed. Why! Dammit, why? And what was it that put Leo in the picture? Why talk to him? About two-timing me?

But then there was John. He was next on Guthrie’s agenda and that conversation sure wasn’t going to be about stringing me along.

Wait a minute! Melissa had answered the door with a pistol in her hand. There was nothing threatening about me. So, who was she expecting or avoiding? Or what was she hiding?

What the hell was going on here?

A cop in uniform trudged out the door of the house. Poor guy looked worse than I felt. He looked like he’d been in the shower, like he’d done chin-ups there, a thousand of them.

He was motioning to his buddy on the steps.

Oh, damn, they were settling in to guard the scene.

I leaned closer to the window, straining to make out their words.

“—switch off. You on this here porch, me in the car to start. Every twenty minutes.”

“All fucking day?”

“Like I make the rules? Yeah.”

“Hey, I didn’t sign on to—”

“Write a note to the brass. Put it on pink paper, while you’re at it.”

The second guy muttered something, but the one on his way out was already headed for the steps and his car.

A car that would have the engine running and the air conditioning blasting loudly. Finally, my opportunity. I crept back, beside the Mustang, stepping over the mess of stuff on the floor. The place looked like Guthrie was using it for storage, not rebuilding that engine. I’d seen him work on his truck. Afterwards he always cleaned his tools and put them away. I’d watched him clean and replace them in the same order each time. He wasn’t a guy to leave his garage a mess.

But he had.

Much as I wanted to, there wasn’t time to think about this. What I needed to focus on was the cop. His air conditioner might cover the sound of me opening the garage door, but it wasn’t going to keep him from seeing the action. It would, though, keep him from hearing me make a call and setting up a scene that just could work.

I had an ace in the hole. Blink Jones, long-time stuntman and now, according to Guthrie, an all-too-fearless driver. Also, all-too-loud. Guthrie had bitched about being woken out of a dead sleep by him gearing down into the switchbacks.

I had my own connection to Blink Jones.

I called.
Pick up! Come on! Bingo!
“Blink? Darcy Lott. I need a favor. It’s dangerous and involves a fast car,” I added, before he’d said more than “Hello.”

“Where are you?”

I gave him the address.

“Guthrie’s?”

“Yep.” A spot well-known to everyone but me.

“So, what d’ya need?”

I told him. “It could get you in serious—”

“Honey, I’m sixty years old, got bones broken in every extremity, plus ribs and pelvis. I’m on six kinds of meds. The state’s not going to jail me—can’t afford my upkeep.”

“Okay, just don’t get caught.”

“Hey, I’m not called Blink for nothing. And you’re on the hook for dinner. I’ll be there in ten minutes. I’ll call you from the top.”

I put the phone on vibrate and prepared to do what I hated most—wait.

Blink Jones was a legend. Many legends. I had no idea which ones were real, nor did I care. The stories were far too good to bother worrying about facts. But the one I happened to know was true was a few years back and ended up with him lighting out minutes ahead of the authorities and me ending up with his—now my—dog, Duffy, plus a bag of burglar tools. His contact information had been on Duffy’s tag.

I started to grin, remembering . . .

Outside, a car door slammed. I listened for the slap-pause-slap of a cop heading down the wide cement slab steps. But there was no sound.

“—garage?” he yelled.

I started toward the back window. No! Too chancy. This was bad!

“Yeah,” the cop said, “while I’m still cool.”

The hell with escaping. Just where to stash the gun? Hell, where to stash
me
? Under the car? Too obvious. Out the window and down the rope? Too iffy. If the other cop spotted me I’d be cooked.

Which left a garbage bag. I unrolled the black plastic, lifted myself up on an old metal filing cabinet, squatted head down, pulled the bag over my head, and poked the smallest eye hole in history. As a hiding place this was so dicey. The old, rusty cabinet threatened to buckle. The flimsy bag
stuck to my sweaty skin and crackled every time I breathed. And I was scrunched up so tight my feet were about to go numb.

And I still had the gun!

How much time had passed? What about that ten minutes? Worse yet, if the cop was in the garage with me, my deal with Blink wouldn’t matter.

The garage door opened. My head was on my knees, arms around them, like a fat little amphora.

“Look at this mess. He could hide a tank in here.”

The other cop yelled something I couldn’t make out.

“Yeah, I don’t know either. I’ll poke—”

My legs quivered. The bag was rattling like tin in the wind.

“Hey, look at this! Guy’s got a
Bullitt
car. Good shape, too. Man, if I—”

My phone vibrated. I squeezed every muscle in my body to keep from reacting. The cop was out of my sightline. Did he hear it? They could have heard it in Vegas!

His footsteps stopped. He was listening. My hand was on the phone. Desperately, I pushed the toggle.
Please catch before the next ring! Please go silent!

It sounded like he was treading carefully among the clutter, moving toward me. I could jump him—
No, idiot! Then what would you do, after you assaulted a police officer?

Outside, brakes screamed. There was the unmistakable noise of wheels jamming hard to the side.