Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [118]
Limping now, he walked under the pier. Concrete piling crusted with barnacles. Cigarette butts floating on the water. Voices from the pier echoed around him. Vietnamese fishermen trying for dinner, casting their lines with easy flicks of their wrists. Skaters and skateboarders rolling. Music, music, music … Keep walking. The Queen Mary closer now, the railings edged with silver. Three smokestacks stark against the sunset.
Everything would be different if the girl hadn’t walked out of the bathroom back at the house on Pomona. She hummed as she closed the door behind her, clutching a baby. Must have been changing it when the killing went down. It … he, she, whatever. Yancy didn’t know from babies. What he knew was taking down dopers and getting away clean.
Yancy tried to make her disappear, make her go back into the bathroom, pretend she hadn’t seen anything. Mason knew better. He had his faults, but he knew what he had to do.
The girl stood there, mouth moving like a fish, no sound coming out. Eyes shifting from the bodies on the floor to Mason. She half-turned her body as Mason raised his pistol. Half-turned her body, as though that would protect the baby.
Maybe that’s why Yancy had done what he did. Stupid thing. No explaining it really. Just as Mason tightened on the trigger, Yancy shot him in the head. He shot PJ too, but not before PJ shot him four times. Kid was quick, you had to give him that. Three of PJ’s rounds hit Yancy in the vest, but the impact of the rounds twisted him, and the fourth bullet slipped under his arm, bounced around inside him, tumbling like a load of laundry in a dryer. Good thing PJ liked a 9mm Glock. All the young guys did. That’s what they saw in the movies. Yancy preferred a .45. He felt the comforting heft of the .45 in his jacket with every step. Mean gun, no grace to it, but one shot in a vital area and you were dead. Case closed. 9mm had no stopping power. Man could walk forever with a 9mm slug in him. Yancy was proof of that.
The girl was unhurt. Hysterical, of course. She found her voice after he killed Mason and PJ, the girl screaming so loud he could hardly wait to leave.
Funny … he had made such rapid progress toward the Queen Mary at the beginning, but now he seemed to be moving slower and slower. He walked along the edge of the water, where the sand was hard-packed. He kept walking but didn’t seem to be getting any closer. It was like … he was being allowed to approach his goal, get it in sight, but there were limitations. Like the Queen Mary was off limits. Going to be dark soon. At this rate … he was never going to get there.
He just wished he could figure out why he did what he had done at the house on Pomona. Killing Mason … how could he explain that? Mason was making the right move. The girl had seen them. Could ID them. Rules were rules. Mason followed the rules … it was Yancy who had broken them. PJ was a hothead and Yancy knew he wouldn’t work with the kid again, but Mason and he had partnered for three years. Mason had thrown him a party when Yancy killed his twelfth man. His first dozen. Mason made a big deal about it, rented a suite at the Four Seasons and hired a couple of hookers for each of them. Top-quality ladies too. Mason talked too much and stank up the car with fish tacos and jalapeño burritos, but Mason was dependable. Yancy was the one who’d had a change of heart, and that bothered him. It was like his whole life up until now was wrong somehow.
The girl didn’t remind him of anybody. She wasn’t particularly pretty or gentle or sad or any of that other crap that always made the movie bad guy spare her life. And that bit about her trying to protect the baby … he didn’t even like babies, and besides, that was just a reaction on her part. No courage or nobility to it. She probably didn’t even know what she was doing.