Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [67]
After eight rings it stopped. I crossed to the desk and punched out John’s number. He answered immediately. “So you are there. You okay?”
“Yes. What’s up?”
“Your Mr. Renshaw just paid me a visit. He said—”
I cut him off. “Hang up. Get out of there and go to a pay phone. Call me back.”
Without a word he did as I told him. I locked the kitchen door, checked windows, waited. When the phone rang fifteen minutes later, I snatched up the receiver.
John’s voice spoke over a babble of background music. “Okay, I’m at a place called Pinky’s. Somebody followed me, but they haven’t come inside yet. I don’t see how they could’ve tapped my phone when Renshaw just—”
“We don’t know how long they’ve known about you; they could have been watching the house all day. We’d better talk fast. What did Renshaw say?”
“Gave me a message for you. If you go in to their La Jolla office and turn over the money he paid you, plus whatever information you’ve got on Ripinsky, they’ll call it a wash.”
Sure they would. “That’s all?”
“That’s all I let him say. I told him you and I haven’t spoken in years and threw him out.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Couldn’t tell. But I don’t think he knows about … where you are. Under his tough-guy act he seemed kind of desperate.”
That was good on one level, disconcerting on another. If the person I’d glimpsed outside wasn’t an RKI operative, who could he or she be? One of the kidnappers? One of Salazar’s “people”? Someone whose existence I wasn’t yet aware of?
“Shar,” John said, “if they can find me, they can find—”
“I know. I’m going to get out of here. I need a favor, though. I’ll put the key to my room at the Bali Kai in the mail to you. Go there and collect the stuff I left. Leave the room key in the express checkout and then take the rental car—the key’s in the room—back to the airport. Just keep my stuff at your house.”
“Will do.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you when this is over.”
There was a long pause. Then he said, “Okay, you bitch. You don’t want to meet me for a drink, screw you,” and hung up. The tail had come close enough to overhear his end of the conversation.
For a moment I fretted, then reminded myself that my brother could take care of himself. Besides, Gage Renshaw knew that leaning on John wouldn’t get them what they wanted—namely me.
I got up, took Pa’s .45 from the end table where I’d placed it before going to sleep that afternoon, and began to prowl through the house, looking out the windows. From the empty, echoing living room I spotted a cat parked down the street that hadn’t been there the past two nights—an old dark-colored Datsun, shabbier than what most of the neighbors drove. The license plate was unreadable, and a big pepper tree cast confusing shadows. I crouched on the floor by the front window for quite some time before I felt reasonably certain the car was unoccupied.
That didn’t reassure me much, though. After a few hours of tossing and turning, I gave up on further sleep. Got dressed and packed my things, plus the clothing of Karen’s that I’d borrowed, in a bag I found in the closet of Charlene and Patsy’s old room. Then I finished off the sandwich fixings and huddled in the quilts on the family room couch, waiting for the windows to grow light, for the coo of mourning doves in the canyon, for the faint hum of freeway traffic that would tell me the exodus of commuters from the neighborhood was about to begin.
Insulated as I was by thick walls and darkness, the now familiar feeling of being spied on returned. Threads of a story began to drift through my mind—one of the nightmare-provoking bedtime tales often told us by our creepy aunt Clarisse. Little remained of it except the repeated warning, echoing yet in my aunt’s dramatically pitched voice: “Beware of the wolf in the shadows. He is watchful and patient, and when he catches you he will eat you up—skin and bones and heart.”
I’d thought I was done with such