would get to know the neighbors that Violet had more or less shunned. She would
make friends. By God, she would. And she wouldn’t let Streck intimidate her. She
would learn how to handle other problems that came along as well, and in time
she would be a different woman from the one she was now. A promise to herself. A
sacred vow.
She considered unplugging the telephone, thus foiling Streck, but she was afraid
she might need it. What if she woke, heard someone in the house, and was unable
to plug in the phone fast enough?
Before turning out the lights and pulling up the covers, she closed the lockless
bedroom door and braced it shut with the armchair, which she tilted under the
knob. In bed, in the dark, she felt for the butcher’s knife, which she’d placed
on the nightstand, and she was reassured when she put her hand directly upon it
without fumbling.
Nora lay on her back, eyes open, wide awake. Pale amber light from the
streetlamps found its way through the shuttered windows. The ceiling was banded
with alternating strips of black and faded gold, as if a tiger of infinite
length were leaping over the bed in a jump that would never end. She wondered if
she would ever sleep easily again.
She also wondered if she would find anyone who could care about her— and for
her—out there in the bigger world that she had vowed to enter. Was there no one
who could love a mouse and treat it gently?
Far away, a train whistle played a one-note dirge in the night. It was a hollow,
cold, and mournful sound.
7
Vince Nasco had never been so busy. Or so happy.
When he called the usual Los Angeles number to report success at the Yarbeck
house, he was referred to another public phone. This one was between a
frozen-yogurt shop and a fish restaurant on Balboa Island in Newport Harbor.
There, he was called by the contact with the sexy, throaty, yet little-girl
voice. She spoke circumspectly of murder, never using incriminating words but
employing exotic euphemisms that would mean nothing in a court of law. She was
calling from another pay phone, one she had chosen at random, so there was
virtually no chance that either of them was tapped. But it was a Big Brother
world where you didn’t dare take risks.
The woman had a third job for him. Three in one day.
As Vince watched the evening traffic inching past on the narrow island street,
the woman—whom he had never seen and whose name he didn’t know—gave him the
address of Dr. Albert Hudston in Laguna Beach. Hudston lived with his wife and a
sixteen-year-old son. Both Dr. and Mrs. Hudston had to be hit; however, the
boy’s fate was in Vince’s hands. If the kid could
be kept out of it, fine. But if he saw Vince and could serve as a witness, he
had to be eliminated, too.
“Your discretion,” the woman said.
Vince already knew that he would erase the kid, because killing was more useful
to him, more energizing, if the victim was young. It had been a long time since
he’d blown away a really young one, and the prospect excited him.
“I can only emphasize,” the contact said, driving Vince a little nuts with her
breathy pauses, “that this option must be exercised with all due speed. We want
the deal concluded tonight. By tomorrow, the competition will be aware of what
we’re trying to swing, and they’ll get in our way.”
Vince knew the “competition” must be the police. He was being paid to kill three
doctors in a single day—doctors, when he had never killed a doctor before—so he
knew there was something that linked them, something the cops would pick up on
when they found Weatherby in the trunk of his car and Elisabeth Yarbeck beaten
to death in her bedroom. Vince didn’t know what the link was because he never
knew anything about the people he was hired to kill, and he didn’t really want
to know anything. It was safer that way. But the cops would link Weatherby with