Disclaimer and acknowledgments are in the prologue. Here, however, is where I remind you to make sure your seatbelt is fastened. ;)
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Chapter 6
July 30, 2008
Eppes residence
Don poked his head inside the front door. "'Lo?"
He was met with silence. Well, the driveway was empty, and since the garage was used for parking chalkboards rather than vehicles, he wasn't surprised that no one was home to answer. Still, it figured that now that he could finally show up at home, everyone was away. He shut the door behind him and turned the lock, leaning back against the door and weighing the keys in his hand. Maybe he should just head back to his place; he could drink a beer and watch the game there as easily as he could here. But there was something about home that appealed right now after the last couple of weeks. Home might be people as much as a place, but there was still something about the warm interior of his childhood house that was soothing after a rough case.
He tossed the keys on the entry table and wended his way through the dining room. There was a white sheet of paper on the table and he paused to read it. "Charlie," it said in Alan's firm scrawl, "Got a call that a friend was sick…back by ten." Don looked at his watch. That was an hour away yet. Oh well, he'd at least have someone to talk to before long.
As he walked into the kitchen, the wind outside was rustling the leaves and a tree branch scraped on the roof. Charlie needs to take better care of this place, he grumbled to himself. Not that he'd do any better if it was his place, but his brother had a responsibility to all three of them to keep the family house in good shape. Loose tree branches could lead to loose shingles, and once the rain started up again in a few months, that could lead to leaks in the roof.
He shook his head as he opened the fridge and grabbed an amber-colored bottle. Sounding more like your old man all the time, Eppes, he thought with a smirk. There was a plate sitting on the middle shelf with squares of light brown cake covered with creamy icing, plastic wrap around the whole thing. He unwrapped it enough to snag a piece, then tucked the film back in place. No one would even know a piece was missing.
Munching on the carrot cake, he strolled back into the living room and plopped down on the couch, setting the bottle on the coffee table. A few minutes later, he was watching the Dodgers winning a game for once, the tension that had been knotting his shoulders for days starting to seep away. He gradually started to relax, a corner of his mind wondering if he was going to be awake by the time Alan got home.
The television flickered through a series of commercials, but the last one caught his eye. It was a preview for the eleven o'clock news, the perky news anchor announcing the end to the FBI's search for a wanted killer, but not providing any more information -- at least until viewers tuned in after the ballgame. Don snorted. He was curious to see how this would appear on the news. What did the average citizen get to see of the cases he worked on, anyway? So far, it looked like they got to see misinformation. It wasn't like the FBI was done searching, just the L.A. Field Office.
Late last night, Liz had gotten a hit on one of Gillis's aliases. He'd used it to rent a car in Palmdale, seventy miles north of L.A. When they faxed a photo to the rental car agency, they'd confirmed it and said he'd asked for directions to Las Vegas. The car was eventually tracked to the parking lot at McCarran International Airport, but not until mid-afternoon. So a team of agents out of the Vegas office were spending the night combing through lists of outbound passengers and hours' worth of surveillance recordings. Don's first impulse had been to hop in the car and drive up there himself, but his conversation with Charlie had been weighing on his mind. Was he really using Gillis's case to avoid thinking about everything that had been going on here in L.A.? Maybe he was better off letting the locals handle this and getting some distance on it himself, literally as well as figuratively.
Then, at about five in the afternoon, a call came in from the LAPD. A young woman had been found dead yesterday in San Pedro with a single hole from a .22 in her forehead, and it had taken the cops a little while to make the connection to his case. Which made one more failure to put on his list, one more person who would be alive if he hadn't let Gillis out of his grasp so many times. Colby and David were tracking down who she was and why she'd been a target, but suddenly he couldn't take it anymore. He'd been running around waiting to get shot at for five days and it had all been for nothing. Worse yet, by focusing their resources on him, they'd missed the real target. He'd spent fifteen minutes chewing out his team for that, with the promise of more later, before storming out of the office.
Then he'd driven around for an hour or two without any particular destination, passing by Robin's place before remembering she was out of town, pausing outside his own apartment but inevitably coming home. He'd never been in any danger, had never needed to stay away, had worried Dad and Charlie for nothing. Now, of course, they weren't here to apologize to. He took a long swig of beer and leaned his head back, propping his feet up on the coffee table.
The phone at his belt rang, and he reached for it. "Eppes."
"Don, where are you?" Charlie asked.
"At your place," he said. "Where are you?"
"I'm at school." There was a pause. "Colby called a few hours ago."
He sat up straighter, dropping his feet to the floor. "What for?"
Charlie sounded annoyed. "He wanted to make sure I knew that Shaun Gillis is out of town and you're free and clear."
Right, that's what he'd forgotten to do while driving all over L.A.: call his family and tell them he wasn't on a killer's hit list anymore. "What's the matter, Chuck? You don't sound happy about it."
"I'm not happy that the FBI had to call and tell me instead of my own brother." He heard the creak of Charlie's desk chair, as if he were standing up. "You didn't think I might want to know?"
He let out a gusty sigh. "Look, it's been a rough day, okay? I came over and no one was home. I figured I'd tell you when you got here."
There was a pause. Then Charlie said, sounding less agitated, "Okay, I guess I understand."
"How long d'you think you're going to be there?"
A frustrated sigh. "I have to get this paper done tonight so my collaborator in London can submit it tomorrow…it'll be at least another four hours."
He looked at his watch. "Well, I don't think I'm staying here till one, so I'll see you tomorrow or something."
"Okay." Charlie cleared his throat. "I, uh, I'm glad that you're safe, Don."
A smile curled the corners of his mouth. "Yeah, me too, buddy. Have fun with your paper."
There was a soft snort. "Sure thing. See ya."
He closed the phone and stuck it back on his belt. Yawning, he rose from the couch and headed for the kitchen, figuring he could sneak another square of cake and rearrange the remaining pieces so no one noticed. At least Charlie's academic work hadn't been halted by his illicit collaboration with Pakistani academics. He frowned as he wondered for a moment if he needed to be worried about this project with someone in the UK.
Don was still pondering this as he started to push open the door to the kitchen. Then across the darkened room, he thought he saw movement -- right outside the house. He instinctively dropped down into a crouch, inching forward until he could look out of the kitchen window at the driveway, his hand down at his side reaching for the weapon that he'd thankfully left on when he came through the front door. He watched carefully, but nothing happened. Probably seeing things, Eppes.
He was about to berate himself for being paranoid when his ears caught something off to the right. It was the snick of a car door being opened, followed by a faint light briefly spilling over the driveway. Someone was climbing inside his Suburban, parked on the far side of the driveway.
He quietly dashed back to the dining room and, still in a crouch, peered out of the window next to the piano. There sat his SUV, rear door slightly ajar. As he watched, the door quietly closed.
Don dropped back from the window, trying to make sense of what he'd just seen. What kind of idiot car thief went for a vehicle with government plates? No, what kind of idiot car thief gets in the back seat? he thought, and a chill ran down his spine. He firmly shook his head. Shaun Gillis was in Las Vegas, or wherever the hell he'd flown to from there. He was not in L.A., and he was certainly not lying in wait in Don's SUV.
He stepped away from the window and back to the living room, where he whipped out his phone and paused with one finger over the speed dial. If he called this in, and it turned out to be nothing, he was going to be the butt of jokes for weeks.
If he didn't call it in, the consequences could be a lot worse.
Suddenly the phone vibrated in his hand and he punched the button. "Eppes," he said softly.
"Don, we've got a problem." It was Colby and he sounded tired.
"No kidding," he replied under his breath. "What is it?"
"Our ballistics guys finally got the results from the San Pedro shooting. Turns out it wasn't Gillis's gun. She wasn't his target."
He raised his head to look towards the driveway, as if he could see through the walls and into the interior of the vehicle outside, while his mind raced. Las Vegas was only four hours away: plenty of time for Gillis to rent a different vehicle under another name and make the drive back across the desert while the FBI was looking for him in another state. "I need you guys to get here as fast as you can," he said rapidly and quietly. "I'm at Charlie's house."
"Don?" The tiredness had been replaced with worry. "What's going on?"
He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes till ten. Alan wasn't likely to arrive at ten on the dot, but there was no way he was allowing the possibility of his father walking into a confrontation with Shaun Gillis. And since the older man usually kept his cell off when he wasn't using it to make a call, Don didn't have any way of warning him. "I think I just saw someone climb in my car. It might be Gillis."
"Whoa." There were sounds in the background of Colby scrambling to his feet and slamming desk drawers. "Get out of there, Don."
"Can't -- I don't know when Dad's coming back." He paused. "Just hurry, okay?"
"We'll be there in fifteen," Colby promised, hanging up.
Don folded the phone shut and hoped he'd just made a paranoid fool of himself.
Five minutes later, his hopes were dashed. Heart in his throat, he'd moseyed from the back door out to the garage, taking his time and making sure anyone in the SUV could get a good look at him. Once inside, he'd turned on the light and moved around, again fighting the instincts that told him to stop making such a good target of himself. On the bright side, if it really was Gillis and he'd secreted himself in Don's car to try and abduct him rather than coming into the house, that meant he wasn't keen on taking a shot that the neighbors might hear. Still, it was hard to force himself to move around and make noises when he had good reason to believe that there was a killer only a few yards away.
The garage door faced the driveway, with a side door perpendicular to the main façade. After a minute or two of making himself heard, he ducked down behind a pile of boxes near the side door, finally drawing his weapon and surprised at how much comfort the heft of it gave him. He crouched down, prepared to wait.
As it turned out, it didn't take long. He saw the shadow thrown by the outside yard light before he saw the person, but the gun leading the way into the garage was definitely a .22. And the man holding it was definitely Shaun Gillis.
Don swallowed back his nerves and forced himself to wait another moment. Once Gillis was inside and had moved a few more steps, he would be past Don's hiding place, but not yet confused as to where Don had gone to. The killer took one slow step, and then another. One more --
And Don shot to his feet and extended his weapon so the barrel rested right at the back of Gillis's neck. "Drop it," he snapped.
Neither of them moved for a moment. Then Gillis slowly raised his hands, the Browning in his right hand pointed towards the ceiling. Don snatched it and ejected the magazine, tossing it away while he jammed the empty pistol into the back of his waistband. His heart was racing, adrenaline sharpening his senses, making the wind rustling the trees outside that much louder, the smell of chalk that much stronger. He risked a quick glance to his watch. Ten minutes till Colby and David showed up. "Hands on top of your head," he commanded.
Gillis obeyed without a word. With his back to Don, he couldn't see the other man's face. But looking straight ahead, he could see his reflection in the side window and he realized with a chill how carefully the killer was watching him. "Kneel down," he barked, pressing harder with the gun. "Cross your ankles." He knew some of the tension was bleeding through into his voice; he could hear how taut it was, and he knew the other man would hear it and recognize it for the fear it symbolized. He added, "You made a mistake, Gillis. Shoulda been more quiet getting into the car; I would have never known you were there."
The man slowly dropped to one knee as Don's gun tracked downwards, now aimed at his back. He reached behind him for his handcuffs. "Hands behind your back," he said, grabbing Gillis's left arm to help him along. He snapped the cuff around his left wrist and was reaching for the right when it happened.
A sudden gust of wind whistled through the garage and tapped a tree branch against the roof of the house. The unexpected sound distracted Don enough for Gillis to gain the advantage, and a few seconds later Don was flat on his back, looking up into the barrel of his gun and the satisfied expression on the man who held it.
A bolt of pure terror shot through him. This really was why Gillis was still in town -- his team had been right.
Shaun Gillis was here to kill him.
"What are you waiting for?" he growled with all the bravado he could muster, wishing he hadn't been so careful about unloading the Browning before taking possession of it. There was still the backup piece at his ankle, but it was going to take something more than a tree branch to get Gillis's attention away from him.
He tried everything he could think of, but he didn't have much to work with. He felt like a trapped animal watching the hunter approach, knowing that Gillis was enjoying the fear that he could no longer keep completely off his face, the fear that was paralyzing him where he lay.
He hoped his teammates would get here before Alan did; better that they find him than his own father. And one final, grim thought crossed his mind.
At least it'll be quick.
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