“Yes, you’re right, I can surely afford to take care of your worries. Trust me.”

There were no other cars in the small parking lot. Johnny cut the engine and sat back, rubbed his hands over his face. “Hey, I’m sorry I got so freaked out. I wasn’t expecting the crazy trouble we ran into. I mean, there were cops all over that neighborhood. Like they were waiting for us. They were waiting for you, weren’t they? How’d they know you was coming?”

I’d hoped they’d be there, that’s what made it interesting. He smiled.

He rubbed his hand over his shoulder where one of the agents had shot him, nearly missed his Kevlar vest and hit his neck. That was close. He pictured a big dark guy, and a woman, red hair, lots of wild red hair. He’d find out who they were. He’d taken out the other agent, Stone, a clean shot to the heart, a clean shot to the back—unless he was wearing Kevlar as well. With that guy’s streak of luck, and that was surely all it was, Makepeace imagined that he was.

“I didn’t know you was going to blow up that house, you never said a word about blowing up no house. Hey, just look out at the ocean. Ain’t it beautiful? Clear as a bell—I never understood why they say that. How’s a bell so clear?”

“A church bell, Johnny.”

“Whatever.”

“Yeah, look at it, Johnny,” Makepeace said, and pulled out a length of silver wire.

CHAPTER 54

Wednesday evening

Cheney said, “No, Julia, you’re not going anywhere, forget it. You’re only safe here at the Sherlocks’ house. No one knows where you are.”

“Cheney, listen to me. My house is a smoldering ruin. I don’t know what if anything can be salvaged. I’ve got to deal with the insurance people, with the clean-up people, with the arson investigators from the fire department. And I don’t have any clothes to wear.” She looked down at the pair of turquoise blue sweats she was wearing, courtesy of Evelyn Sherlock. The legs ended two inches above her ankles.

Cheney had to admit she looked faintly ridiculous.

Ruth said, “Don’t worry, Julia. I’ll get you some clothes tomorrow. Cheney’s right. You need to stay close.”

Savich walked into the living room, his cell in his hand. He looked at each of them, then asked Sherlock, “You remember how little Alice described a ring on the getaway driver’s marriage finger? And Tuck said she was describing a Masonic ring?”

“Yes, why?”

“The Pacifica police found it on the finger of a dead man who had been garroted and left in a small dark-blue Ford at a beach parking lot outside of Pacifica. The cops picked up on it and called Frank right away. The Ford was all souped up, the detective told Frank—probably the getaway car.

“The guy,” Dix said, “who was he?” He lightly scratched the flesh around the stitches in his arm.

“They identified him as Johnny Booth, not an upstanding citizen, as you’d expect. Two felony counts on him for armed robbery and pimping, served a total of nine years in San Quentin. He was once booked for killing a liquor store clerk, but got off. Vice thought he’d left California because of the three-strikes law.”

Sherlock said, “Makepeace doesn’t like loose ends, does he?”

“Maybe he’s just cheap,” Ruth said. “Didn’t want to pay the guy his fee.”

Cheney’s cell phone rang. He nodded, and walked out of the living room. When he came back, he looked shell-shocked. He said, “Makepeace has been busier than we thought. That was Frank again. He just heard from the police in Atherton that Sol-dan is dead. He was found lying back on the silk pillows in that exotic room of his wearing his red silk robe, a deep gash in his throat where he’d been garroted. Frank said he’d been smoking his hookah and reading Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. He’d been dead only about an hour, the ME said. Ancilla, his assistant, found him when she got home from an AA meeting.

“Evidently the murderer slipped behind him, looped the wire around his neck, and that was it. Since he’d been smoking all evening, according to Ancilla, it couldn’t have been very hard to sneak up on him.

“But once Makepeace had the wire around his neck, Soldan did fight. The ME says it looks like there’s skin under Soldan’s fingernails, probably from Makepeace.”

Ruth said, “Makepeace has got to be a mess—bullet wounds, a scraped face from that newel post exploding, and Meissen’s fingernails—and the guy’s still going.”

Julia said, “He’s got a powerful need.”