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Step said, “Daniel, give us the names, or I swear to God, I’ll kill you. I’ll burn you to death. Right now, right here.”
“Please... don’t, please...”
The man in the chinos came back, squatted again, the end of a lit cigarette dangerously close to the captive’s gas-soaked shirt. He said, “Give me the names, Daniel, or you burn.”
Daniel began to cry uncontrollably, his body writhing and shaking, and the man in the chinos waited patiently, said, “Give me... the names. If you give me the names, we will walk away from you. We will not take the tape off. If you can’t get it off, then you’ll die here like a bug in a cocoon. But, we’ll give you that chance. On my word. On my honor. If you refuse, then you burn.”
Silence, a beat, then, “Loren Barron.”
“Spell.”
“L-o-r-e-n B-a-r-r-o-n.”
“And the woman?”
“Brianna Wolfe.”
“Spell.”
The body spelled the name.
“And their location?”
“Los Angeles? I don’t know the address, I’ve never been to their house. We always met at the place in Venice. The bar.”
“Okay,” said the man in the chinos. “I believe you.” He patted Daniel on a knee, stood and said to the other two, “Leave him. Let’s go.”
The three men walked back toward the vehicle, side by side. Ten feet short of the truck, the man in the chinos spun, drew a pistol from beneath the sport coat, and fired a single shot at the taped-up captive.
One of the other men whistled and said, “That’s some good shooting, Mr. Step.”
“Not that good,” Step said. Daniel had been hit just to the left of the bridge of his nose. “I’m out of training. I was shooting for his forehead.”
“But a one-shot kill,” one of the hard men said.
“Yes, but I fired too quickly. I didn’t want him to see it, to fear it, so I tried to move too fast and missed my target. I need some work,” Step said in his excellent English. He scratched the side of his face, gestured with his gun toward the body. “Listen, you two. If you want to go into business, you should know that this is bad business, this killing.Badbusiness. Badforbusiness. Sometimes necessary, but not often. Keep that in mind.”
He looked at his Rolex, which glittered gold in the sunrise. “Get the shovels. He doesn’t have to go deep; nobody will ever find him here. Then let’s get back. I promised Victoria I’d come out to the club and watch her ‘Old Girlfriends’ tennis match.”
Six
As Daniel was being murdered in the Mojave, Letty was getting out of bed, again, five minutes before the alarm went off. She killed it, cleaned up, and dressed. Again, when she left the bathroom, Baxter was sitting on the edge of his bed, elbows on his thighs, peering at the carpet.
Letty said, “Thirteen minutes.”
He looked up. “Are we in a hurry?”
“Yes. Harp has a nine o’clock class in Control and Dynamical Systems, whatever that is. He’ll be getting up soon and I want to talk to him before he goes to class.”
Baxter was out of the bathroom in thirteen minutes, and they were out the door in seventeen. On the way across town to Caltech, Letty said, “Banging.”
“What?”
“I’m going to use your crude sexist language on him, to add some weight to his predicament,” she said.
“Crude, yes, sexist, no,” Baxter said. “Predatory women are known to bang innocent young seminary students for their own animal purposes.”
Letty shook her head, watched the landscape go by: after three days in the car, including two days in the desert, it seemed unreal, too lush, too LA, too Disney-like, like one of the Seven Dwarfs might pop out from behind a fire hydrant.
