Marred only by the fact that he had nowhere to go.
51
Fooling them had been easy.
Because the cops weren’t thinking like he was. They were reacting.
Not being creative.
After his NASCAR race to flee from shotgun-lady Dorella Muñoz Elizondo, Jon Merritt had not sped to any highways, but instead lessened pressure on the accelerator and steered to nearby John Adams High. He parked behind the gym and examined his wounds. The bruises and welts from the rubber slugs were dark and gaudy but he could function. Merritt climbed from the vehicle, leaving the engine running and the window open. Then he’d walked away, trying to assume a normal gait, into the neighborhood of frame houses and postage-stamp yards.
The school had been on his beat when he was just starting out at FPD. The place was now populated by the same gangs and unaffiliated shits as most institutions of lower learning—kids who could be counted on to get into trouble, for no reason other than they wanted to get into trouble.
And a favorite sport was helping themselves to someone else’s vehicle.
Technically, to be convicted of grand theft auto—a category of larceny—you needed theintentto permanently deprive the owner of the car. This was sometimes hard to prove, so you’d charge the perps with the offense of joyriding, which was basically borrowing the car and planning to return it after you’d driven the vehicle to hell and back.
Jon Merritt didn’t care what the teenager would be written up for. A gangbanger would chop it for parts. Somebody else would want to see what an F-150 could do off road. Yet another would just want to cruise around until he found a good place to make out, or more, on a threadbare blanket in the bed.
Merritt was just leaving the grounds when he saw it go down. The Ford had sat, running, for merely one minute, when a skinny kid with a bad complexion and a ratty sweatshirt, emblazoned with the logo of a long-ago rock group, walked past. He paused, looked up and down the parking lot, and in a flash was inside and skidding across, then out of, the lot.
Now, head down, Merritt hiked the backpack higher on his shoulder and continued to limp along the sidewalk under the rows of elm. Now that he had a moment of peace, he looked at his phone and examined his texts. After escaping from Sunny Acres, his ex and daughter had disappeared once more. There were no clues to their whereabouts.
He sighed in anger.
This meant that he’d have to start plowing once more through the litter he’d picked up in her house. How much paper remained?
A thousand sheets and scraps.
But first he needed wheels.
He walked for another six endless blocks, when he noted an elderly woman parking her shiny dark blue Buick, an older model, in the driveway of a modest house. She climbed out, took a bag of groceries from the backseat and headed up the walk.
No one coming out to help her. So she lived alone, or at least was by herself at the moment.
Odds of dogs? At her age and frail state, any canines would be little yappers, not rotties or pit bulls.
Sidewalks deserted, the street was free of vehicles.
She walked to the front door. Drawing his gun, he followed.
He stepped silently into the living room, which hummed with the white noise of the modest HVAC system. He smelled lavender and lemon and some cleanser. Ah, it was ammonia. He recalled a case from years ago, a house not unlike this one. A wife had tried to kill her husband by mixing ammonia with other household chemicals, making a dangerous gas. She’d knocked him out then, as if he’d fallen, hit his head on the corner of the counter. She then poured the lethal potion on the floor. He remembered being impressed with her ingenuity—up to the point she neglected to dispose of the hammer she’d brained him with. Her fingerprints and his blood got her thirty years.
Merritt’s eyes took in a collection of tiny figurines. Animals mostly. White porcelain. Very meticulously crafted. He particularly liked the elephant.
He made his way silently toward the kitchen, where the woman was humming a pleasant tune. It was familiar, from a Broadway show, but for the life of him Jon Merritt couldn’t place it.
52
Standing at the massive raw-oak front door of the large contempo house, Allison Parker rang the chime. Melodic tones, three of them, sounded from inside, reminding her of the note made by running a moist finger around the rim of a glass.
The angular, glassy place was impressive and she nearly asked Hannah what she thought of it. Then remembered she was mad at the girl.
Bitch...
Footsteps, a shadow. The slab of wood swung open and Frank Villaine was filling the doorway, looking down at mother and daughter. He was smiling. The man was very much as she remembered: huge, bearlike, bearded, brown hair thick and with a few gray strands, but no more than when they’d known each other years ago.
“Well, hello.”