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“Where’s my mom?” Nikolai asked, and glanced at the pool house.
“Your mother sleeps like the dead.”
CHAPTER 19
“WE BETTER CLEAN up this food,” Masha said. “That’s why they came.” She looked at the thin dead coyote. “Very good aim. Ivan taught you to shoot?”
Nikolai nodded.
“He taught you good.”
“Thanks,” said Nikolai, with a sigh. It was nights like this one, with scary noises, when he missed Ivan the most.
Across the pool, in a dark shadow between two hedges, Boris crouched. He held close the duffle bags and watched as the doctor entered the house under the paint-splattered camera. The paint was black, the lens was black, and in the dark, it looked no different. But in seconds, she’d flip the kitchen light on and find the alarm transformer unplugged.
And she’d find Shev. Or she’d never see him coming.
Nikolai gathered the pretzel nubs from the deck. Masha disappeared into the pool house and walked out moments later with two plastic bags and wearing thick yellow dishwashing gloves. She helped the boy pick up the scattered banquet. This was perfect. If Shev could get out of the house unseen, Boris could snipe the boy dead from there.
But suddenly someone appeared from the bushes from behind the pool house. It was too dark to see her face, but she was hysterical.
“Elizabeth?” she yelled. “Hello! Dr. Parks!”
“Veronica, wait! Call her! Stop!” A man behind her yelled. He, too, appeared from out of the bushes, trying to calm down his wife.
“I am calling her!” said the woman. “I’m on my phone! She’s not picking up!” She stopped short when she saw Masha and the boy on the deck.
“You can’t barge in on her like this!” the man called.
“Oh, I can’t?” the woman said, and turned her head with disdain toward the man. “Go home, you pussy.”
In the kitchen, Dr. Parks flipped on the overhead light. Bandit was limping. His right leg was either bitten or scratched. She picked up the landline to call her vet and, despite Shev’s fears, she moved right past the unplugged alarm.
He stood in the hall and peered through the gap in the kitchen door, holding his breath.
Jeanine was the doctor’s concierge vet, and she lived two miles down in the flats. It would take her ten minutes to get up the hill. The doctor thanked her and rang off.
“Dr. Parks?” said a voice from behind, and the doctor jumped.
“Veronica!” she said, hanging up on the vet.
Veronica Burns, her next-door neighbor, had walked past Boris and let herself in through the mudroom door.
Veronica, braless, in sweats, held her phone. “Drake thought he heard gunshots. Is everything okay? Did you hear them?”
The doctor nodded.
Drake was Veronica’s husband or boyfriend. Partner? They both starred on cable TV shows the doctor didn’t watch, and were constantly calling with kind complaints: The Bel Air water was poisoning them. The pools attracted West Nile mosquitoes. The gas-powered leaf blowers were deafening their pets.
“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Parks said. “A pack of coyotes came down the hill and attacked Bandit. I shot at them to break them up.”
“What? No,” Veronica said. “Is Bandit okay?”
“He is. I just got off with his vet. She’s coming right now.”
“At two in the morning?”
“Isn’t she amazing? She’s concierge, 24/7.”
