Someone Always Knows Read online

  I returned to my car, made a U-turn, and parked a few houses down on the opposite side of the block. Adjusted my side-view mirror so I had a good view of the Macy house. Below, the city thrummed to its own distinctive beat: the faint roar of freeway traffic; people calling their children and pets inside; music of various sorts. Brakes screeched, horns blared, sirens wailed. Life was going on down there, and here I sat with what so far was a dead-end case.

  Most people don’t understand that a lot of a private investigator’s work involves dead ends: A promising lead turns up and you follow it doggedly, but it takes you nowhere. You sit in your car, run out of food and water. Or you bring too much water and end up having to pee in ludicrous places. You park facing the wrong way, and the subject sneaks around you easily, but you don’t realize he or she has gotten away till the next morning. You’re bored out of your mind, your butt aches, but you don’t dare get out and exercise or play a DVD. You attempt to fantasize, but if your dreams involve what you used to do in the backseat of a decades-old Chevy, they’re pretty hard to fit into the front seat, even of a brand-new luxury car.

  God, the night was black! I didn’t often conduct surveillances any more, and it had been a while since I’d had to contend with such dark, lonely places. I flashed back to a long-ago confrontation on the US-Mexican border south of San Diego, where I’d had to kill a man. That had been one of the darkest nights I’d ever experienced, but I’d felt strong. Last night at the ranch, when I’d taken a short break from reading Hy’s journal to walk in our meadow and looked up at the stars over the high desert, I’d felt a measure of comfort. When I’d made my first night flight, the sky had been black, with clouds scudding across it, and it had welcomed a fledgling pilot. But here, with the lights of the city fanning out below, the night felt impenetrable, and I felt profoundly alone.

  A few cars passed, but none of them stopped. A motorcycle buzzed by, its driver trailing a long white scarf. A man walked a blond lab, but displayed no interest in me. A shabby pickup truck rattled past. I felt like I was like a computer in sleep mode: waiting, waiting, waiting…

  10:02 p.m.

  After a while I broke one of my own rules and got out of the car and took a walk along the block. It sloped sharply to the south, then rose to another precipitous height. All the time I kept my gaze on the Macy house. A couple of cars passed, but neither turned into Macy’s driveway.

  Was Macy coming home, or had he perhaps gone to meet Renshaw in another part of the city or even someplace farther away after shopping at the Mission Street Safeway? My assumption was that he’d been doing his grocery shopping and then would head for home. But he hadn’t.…

  Until now. Finally.

  I watched as Macy’s Honda edged into his driveway and parked far back on the concrete pad. I couldn’t see whoever got out, but after a moment a man’s figure appeared, lugging a couple of bags to a side entrance.

  After some fumbling with keys, he went into the house. I watched as a light came on behind closed blinds in a room I supposed, by the number of exhaust pipes in the roof above it, was the kitchen. After a few seconds the light went out, leaving the place as deserted-looking as before. He hadn’t bothered to put away his purchases. Or to turn on any more lights.

  Why? What was he doing in the dark?

  When I came home to my empty house late at night, what did I do? Turn on lights and leave them on until I’d made sure everything was secure, even though I have a good alarm system. I’d check for messages, maybe take a look at the TV news in case I’d missed one of our all-too-frequent catastrophes. I’d use the bathroom, brush my teeth, sometimes take a shower.

  Maybe I was overly fastidious.

  Maybe Macy was drunk or careless.

  Or maybe he’d spotted me and hoped I’d go away.

  The hell with that!

  I crossed the empty, echoing street. Went up to Macy’s door and rang the bell, keeping my thumb on the button.

  It took more than a minute for the door to open. Macy looked out at me with owlish eyes.

  “Mr. Macy, I’m Sharon McCone, a private investigator. I need to talk with you.”

  “At this time of night? About what?”

  “Gage Renshaw, among other things.”

  “Who?”

  “Come on, Macy. Your friendship with Renshaw is well documented.”

  “Friendship? What’re you talking about?” Beads of sweat stood out on Macy’s high forehead now. His eyes jerked to his left.

  I glanced that way, but saw nothing in the darkness behind him. “What are you so afraid of?” I demanded.

  “Afraid? I’m not afraid of anything. You’re bothering me late at night, invading my privacy—”

  “Tell me about Renshaw and I’ll go away.”

  “I can’t!”

  “You can, and you will.”

  I moved forward, putting my left hand on the partially open door. Macy braced it against me. I pushed it, and suddenly the resistance eased. Macy’s mouth popped open in surprise. A hand came out of the darkness, gripped my upper arm, and dragged me into the foyer.

  A familiar raspy voice said, “I’ll take care of her, Don.”

  Renshaw.

  The son of a bitch had been in the house the whole time.

  11:20 p.m.

  I tried to wrench away, angry with myself for having been caught off guard this way. The anger gave me strength and I almost broke his grasp. He tightened it, jerked me around, and slammed me face-forward into the foyer wall. At the same time I heard him growl at Macy to turn on the light, to shut and lock the door.

  Macy did as he was told. I struggled in the sudden brightness, but Renshaw had me pinned with one hand and the weight of his body. “Well, what have we here?” he said, and I felt him reach under the hem of my short jacket and pull my .38 from the waistband of my pants. Then he released me, stepped back. I turned away from the wall to face him.

  He stood with his feet planted, holding my gun in one hand and a small-caliber automatic in the other. Two-gun Renshaw. My stomach muscles clenched, and not only because both weapons were pointed at me.

  God, he was a caricature of his former self. Once perfectly groomed, he now smelled of stale sweat, of tobacco, of fried food, of generally bad hygiene. Two buttons were missing from his plaid shirt, and in between I could see tufts of matted gray-black chest hair. His eyes, which had always been keenly intelligent, bulged and blazed with a maniacal light, their whites threaded with broken blood vessels. Yellowed teeth showed through a self-satisfied smirk.

  “Gage…” Macy’s voice was a nervous squeak. He was afraid of Renshaw, and with good cause.

  “Shut up, Don. Go turn on the light in the living room.”

  Macy immediately hurried through an archway to our right. Light bloomed in the room beyond.

  “All right. Now go get the bracelets from my bag.”

  Bracelets?

  “Why, Gage? What’re you—”

  “Don’t ask questions. Just do it!”

  The burly man bobbed his head, disappeared into the rear of the house.

  “Surprised to see me, huh, McCone?” Renshaw said.

  I didn’t reply.

  “Didn’t figure I was here, did you? No better place to hole up the past few days with my computer, get everything set on my big deal.”

  Sitting in the dark like an animal in a cave. He really has gone around the bend.

  “Well, I’m glad you showed up,” he went on. “Saves me the trouble of having to go hunting for you.”

  I didn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer.

  “What’s the matter, McCone? Cat got your tongue?”

  Fuck you, Gage.

  He chuckled, then gestured with my .38. “Into the living room. Go on, move.”

  I moved. The living room was a pack rat’s lair, crammed with mismatched and haphazardly arranged furniture and miscellaneous objects: here a rusted lawn mower, there a shopping cart filled with baled newspapers; here an o
ld thick-bodied TV set on a sagging metal stand, there a cardboard carton overflowing with empty bottles. Books, both hardcover and paperback, spilled over the floor. Rolled rugs leaned against one wall, a large cracked baroque mirror beside them.

  Macy came back down the hallway, stopped next to Renshaw.

  Renshaw said to me, “Hold it right there. Take off your jacket and drop it on the floor.”

  I obeyed.

  “Macy, check it for a weapon.”

  Macy scuttled forward, picked up the jacket, and shook it. My car keys fell out, and he snatched them up and pocketed them.

  Renshaw motioned with my gun. “Turn all the way around. Arms out. Slow.”

  I did that too. I was wearing a bulky sweater with no pockets and a pair of jeans. He could plainly see that I wasn’t carrying any other weapon.

  “Now go over to the fireplace. Stand with your back to it.”

  The fireplace was one of those small ornamental ones you find in old houses like this, carved with the kind of curlicues and flowers and cherubs’ smiling faces that had adorned many a Victorian parlor. Along both sides were long, slender vertical posts of marble cemented into the brick facing.

  “Go ahead, Don, cuff her to one of those posts.”

  A jangling sound. Christ. Now I knew what Renshaw had meant by bracelets.

  Macy moved over beside me, snapped one cuff around my right wrist and the other around the marble post.

  “Search her,” Renshaw said. “See what she’s got in her pockets.”

  Nervously Macy patted me down. I stood stiffly, submitting to it with my jaw clenched.

  “Nothing, Gage.”

  No, not a damn thing. My purse was locked in the car.

  “Okay, Don. Now you get out of here, go wait in the kitchen while I have a little time alone with our guest.”

  “But the appointment…we’ve got to leave pretty soon.”

  “I know it. Just do what I told you. This won’t take long.”

  Macy went away again.

  “Well, McCone? Anything to say now?”

  No.

  “Don’t you want to know about my deal? Sure you do. It’s big, the biggest one I’ve ever pulled off, thanks to those bearer bonds.”

  He had lowered his voice into a confessional mode. He was going to tell me his whole story to feed his out-of-control ego. Of course it didn’t matter to him what he revealed, because he intended to kill me.

  “You know about the bonds being in the old house on Webster Street, right? Bernardo Ordway in Santa Iva told me they might still be there. He’s been peddling information to me for years; has quite a cottage—pardon me, hacienda business going for himself. He said those bonds were a kind of family folklore with the Smithsons; their nerdy son ran away years ago, got put in prison for something he pulled in San Diego. But as soon as he got out he hurried up here to look for them. He’d been sniffing around the house for quite a while before I sent Macy there to see what he was doing. Too bad for him he ran into Don.”

  Macy. So it was Macy, not Renshaw, I saw running away from the burning house.

  The crazy light grew brighter in his eyes. “Aha! You figured it was me you chased that night, huh? Me who killed the Smithson guy. You should’ve known better, McCone. I wouldn’t’ve panicked like Macy did, knocked the guy out, and then torched the place. No need for all that.”

  He was right, I should have known better. Renshaw never did his own dirty work when he could find someone else to do it for him.

  “Not that it matters now,” he went on. “All that matters is that I got the bonds. Ordway brokered them for me down in Mexico. Half the face value, a million five in cash, less Ordway’s commission. Tonight’s when I collect from Ordway’s representative. That’s what Don was doing before he got here, setting up the meet. We’ll go in his car with me on the floor in back, just to be safe. Jesus, I’ll be glad to get out of this crappy house full of junk and mouse shit. It ought to be condemned.”

  I stood as still as the marble I was cuffed to. He was in the mood to gloat, as many megalomaniacs do, and he’d lost all sense of logic, perspective. He didn’t need any comment or prompting from me, but I asked, “What’re you going to do with the money, Gage?”

  “What do you think I’m going to do with it?”

  “Live luxuriously, I suppose.”

  “More than that. I’ve already hired myself a hacker, guy named Maloof, better than that boy wonder of yours, the best money can buy. He’s pulling up everything in M&R’s files, a lot of other people’s confidential files as well. Info on all sorts of nasty secrets that people in this country’ll be grateful to pay to keep covered up.”

  So that’s your bottom line. But what you don’t know, you crazy bastard, is that M&R has the details of your failed arms deal and the FBI’s warrant on you. And we took care never to enter a word of those files into our computer system.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  I didn’t reply.

  His mouth tightened with anger. Men like Renshaw don’t like to be stonewalled. He’d once been the unflappable partner at RKI, bringing calm to highly charged situations, dealing smoothly with panicky clients. But that was the old Gage. This nutjob was the exact opposite, as volatile and deadly as a stick of dynamite with a lighted fuse.

  “I could kill you right now,” he snarled, “only I’m not going to. You think you’re such a goddamn ice maiden, but you’ll sweat plenty before I’m done with you. So will that bastard you’re married to, because he won’t know if you’re alive or dead until I get good and ready to tell him.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you want me dead and Hy to suffer? What did we ever do to you?”

  “What did you do? Jesus! Years ago Ripinsky screwed up a major deal for me in Southeast Asia. Then when the two of you merged your companies you made absolutely no effort to find me, bring me back into the fold. And when I came back from south of the border and looked you up, still no offer to compensate me for my rightful share. Instead you’ve been scrambling to get rid of me, get something on me that’ll make it impossible to claim my share.”

  His share! My God! As if he were entitled to anything from us!

  “Gage, in the first place, after you disappeared we thought you were dead. You left without a word—”

  “You hoped I was dead. You two smart operators and your crack team of investigators could’ve found me easily enough if you’d tried. But no, Gage was gone and you rejoiced in it. Well, now it’s my turn to rejoice. And that’s just what I plan to do.”

  Macy appeared in the archway. “Gage, it’s almost midnight.”

  “Yeah, all right.” Renshaw backed away, paused, then held up my .38 and smiled slyly. “Nice little piece you’ve got here, McCone. Know what I’m going to do with it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Just watch.” He crossed the room to where a large, clear glass vase sat atop a file cabinet a dozen feet from me and dropped the gun inside it. “Right where you can see it the whole time you’re waiting for us to come back.”

  He laughed, went to join Macy. “Yell your head off,” he said to me then. “There’s nobody close enough to hear you. Struggle all you want, tear your wrist to bloody shreds, but I guarantee you won’t get free.” He laughed again, and then the two of them were gone.

  As soon as I heard the sound of Macy’s car pulling out of the driveway, I slid the cuff on my bound wrist up and down the support post from top to bottom. Marble has a reputation for solidity, but actually it cracks easily enough if you can find a flaw in it.

  But there was no flaw in this piece. No cracks, no chips, not even a hairline fracture.

  The cuffs themselves had a cheap look, as if they’d been bought at a surplus equipment store. I ought to be able to pick the lock if I could find something to use, or to wrench the mechanism loose by continually pulling and yanking on it.

  Wrenching didn’t work.

  Rens
haw had been right: I couldn’t get free.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22

  1:05 a.m.

  Oddly enough, through all this time and chaos, my watch had not stopped. Its luminous dial reminded me that the window of time before Renshaw and Macy returned was growing smaller by the minute. I had to get loose.

  But how? How?

  My wrist was already bloody from all the futile yanking and twisting I’d done over the past hour. No escape that way. I had nothing I could use to pick the handcuff lock. My jeans were of the stretchy zipper-less style, so I couldn’t even use the pull tab. And my boots were also pull-ons, with low square heels.

  If only there were some heavy object within reach that I could use to smash the marble post. Only there wasn’t. The closest pieces of furniture were an overstuffed chair to one side of the fireplace and an old scratched-up credenza on the other. Sitting on the hearthstones, as I was now, I could reach the credenza by stretching out my leg, but it was too heavy to move and there was nothing on it I could dislodge that might be of use.

  For the dozenth time my eyes roamed over the room, avoiding my .38 in the big glass vase on the file cabinet. Damn Renshaw. The nearness of the gun was the torment he’d intended it to be.

  Stapler on the arm of the overstuffed chair. Could I stretch out far enough to reach it? No. And even if I could have, the stapler didn’t look heavy enough to break the marble.

  The only other possibility was that floor lamp in front of the credenza. I hadn’t been able to reach that either, but I had nothing to lose by trying again. It was one of those old, heavy metal ones with a faux onyx base and legs like little lion’s paws, and a stained glass shade. If I could manage to bring it down and break the shade, maybe I could use a shard somehow.…

  I wriggled around on the hearthstones, pulling, stretching body and legs. Still couldn’t quite reach the lamp. By all but tearing my arm out of its socket, I managed to gain the necessary inch for my flattened foot to touch the base. The lamp teetered slightly, then stood pat.

  I hated those lamps! There had been one next to the keyboard in my piano teacher’s house the year my parents cajoled me into taking lessons. I hated those lamps almost as much as I hated pianos—