The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [27]
His skin pricked with the pins and needles of fear.
The house was quiet. Of course it would be, wouldn’t it, he thought, if someone were waiting with a gun. While I crouch here, naked and dripping and just wanting to lie down and cry. Okay, okay, get on with it. Get dry, get some clothes on, and get going. First things first. Let’s make sure we’re all alone in the house.
The first couple of steps were the hardest. He straightened up and walked past the big picture window. He checked behind the breakfast bar, then walked down the hallway and looked into the bedrooms and the baths. He was alone in the house. Where had all his new little friends gone? Off somewhere waiting for all the nasty blood to drain out of the filter system? Pretty damn smart, shooting him in a hot tub. So little to clean up.
They were so damn confident they had left his clothes right there in the guest bedroom where he had shucked them. His vinyl bag also. That struck him as odd. Why hadn’t they taken his belongings along with them and dumped them? Maybe they were waiting to get rid of them along with his corpse.
He checked his bag. They had clearly gone through it, but hadn’t taken anything. All his nice burglar stuff, his book, even the two grand in cash were all there. Strange, but true.
He took a towel from the bathroom rack and dried himself. Now what would Graham tell me to do in this situation, he asked himself. Easy. He’d tell me to get the fuck out of here, lay low, and call in for help. “No job is so important,” the gremlin had told him more than once, “it’s worth dying for. Believe me, son, the client wouldn’t do it for you.” None of the usual jokes or insults, just a straightforward command: Save your ass.
So, according to the Gospel According to Graham, Book One, Chapter One, Verse One, he should waste no time and haul his butt out of there. But he was beginning to get past the fear into something else: anger. He was starting to get goddamned good and pissed off that they had tried to kill him—would have killed him if he hadn’t leaned over to splash a little water on his face—and he wanted to get a little of his own back. They had made the worst kind of fool of him, set him up in the worst kind of way. Betrayed him.
The absurdity hit him. How could they betray me, he thought? It would be like Christ pulling a pistol on Judas after the kiss.
Nevertheless, he was angry. And scared. Someone had tried to kill him and he didn’t know why and that was a dangerous situation. He put on the black sweatshirt, jeans, and tennis shoes he had packed in the bag, then smeared some black greasepaint on his face. If they were out there somewhere wanting to put a bullet in him, he could at least make it a little harder on them. Then he opened the window and threw his bag out, put both hands on the top of the sill, and swung through, falling gently into some shrubs. It took him ten minutes to find just the right tree, a tall, thick cedar with a low-hanging limb. He hauled himself up on the limb and climbed as high as his fear of heights would let him: about another ten feet.
His perch gave him a nice view of the Kendall household, which was what he wanted. He especially wanted to see what would happen when someone came to dispose of a body that had disposed of itself.
Three hours is a long time on surveillance, but particularly long when you’re literally up a tree. Neal cursed everyone he could think of, starting with Joe Graham, the Man, Levine, Pendleton, the Kendalls, and concluding with one Li Lan, a true artist in every sense of the word. She painted some pretty pictures, all right.
He was still thinking about her when the car—a dumb Saab, naturally—pulled into the driveway, and the Kendalls got out.