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They closed in as traffic thickened into LA and were only half a block away when the Tundra pulled into a Holiday Inn Express in Santa Monica.
They waited a half hour, then checked in themselves, mostly so they could park their car next to the truck. In the room, they lay on the beds for another half hour, then slipped down the stairs to the parking garage. They rummaged around in the back of their Nissan Pathfinder, while checking out the garage, then Martin used one of the keys on his extensive set of backup car keys to open the truck door.
The Tundra wasn’t quite empty. There was trash in the back, receipts, and Lawrence used a penlight to read some of them: “It looks like they’re from Florida. Or were in Florida. Looks like they took the 10 from Florida all the way here, and not long ago...”
There was nothing of interest in the glove box and Lawrence found what seemed to be drumsticks on the backseat, as well as a set of brushes, but she didn’t know what the brushes were and asked Martin, who said, “Some kind of drum thing, I think. Let’s open the bed. Push your door shut.”
Letty and Cartwrighthad been asleep for an hour when Baxter burst in and half shouted, “Up! Up! Somebody’s messing with the truck.”
Letty and Cartwright rolled out of bed, both dazed, and Baxter, looking at his iPhone, said, “They’re inside. They’re inside the fuckin’ truck!”
Letty and Cartwright pulled on pants and shoes, Baxter calling, “C’mon, c’mon...”
He went out the door, scooping up Letty’s cane as he went, and was standing in the hallway when they got out of the room, both carrying guns, and he pointed with the cane, like a magic wand: “Stairs.”
The cars were in the first level of the parking structure and they ran down the stairs to the garage door and peeked, couldn’t see the truck, eased out into the garage itself to a corner, where they could see the truck nosed into a wall. They couldn’t see anyone at the truck, but after a few seconds, they heard something rattle.
Letty whispered, “Okay.”
Cartwright whispered back: “Be ready to jump behind an engine block, and keep your legs behind the tires, if you can.”
Letty nodded and they both led off, Cartwright quickly crossing to the other side of the driving lane. As they came up to the truck, they heard a woman’s voice, almost a whisper, saying, “I dunno. What are these things?”
A man’s voice: “Some kind of drum thing, I think. Let’s open the bed. Push your door shut.”
The truck door made achunkas it closed. Letty had moved up behind a Mazda roadster, across the driving lane from the truck, and Cartwright was one car away when a woman and a man, both in dark clothing, stepped out of the space between the truck and a gray Nissan SUV and Cartwright said, quietly but distinctly, “If either one of you motherfuckers twitch, I’ll kill you.”
The couple froze, then both lifted their hands shoulder high and turned their heads to look at her, saw the gun, and saw Letty with her gun, up and pointing at their heads, and Baxter coming up behind them.
The woman blurted, “They’re the ones...” and then stopped talking.
Letty: “Yeah. We’re the ones from the marina, dipshits.”
Cartwright: “What do you want to do?”
“If we kill them, we can make it back up the stairs before anybody can react and they’ll be out of our hair,” Letty said, never taking her eyes off the gun sight. “Nobody would connect it to us—they’d look like victims of a street robbery.”
The man said, “Don’t do that, don’t...”
Baxter came up and said, “You fucked with my truck.”
Martin said, “Look, we were paid to check you out. That’s all we do. We don’t have guns or anything.”
Letty: “Bullshit. You fingered Craig Sovern for the Russians and they were there to kill him. That makes you the friends of theRussians and they’ve killed three people we know of. Sovern would have been four. You probably spotted all of them.”
She looked at Cartwright: “What do you think? Kill them?”
Cartwright asked Martin, “Where’s your car?”
“We parked it out on the street...”
“No, you didn’t. There’s no place on the street to park.”
“Well, I meant around the corner in the parking lot,” Martin said.
Baxter: “Empty your pockets. Everything. C’mon. If we find you’ve left a fuckin’ toothpick in your pockets, we kill you.”
“Who are you?” Lawrence asked.
