No one looked at them as Will and Blow made a swift exit through the kitchen and out to San Bruno Avenue. There was a gap in a fence leading to an area just under the freeway overpass, where it was dark and noisy.
Blow was saying, “Man, you’re too paranoid. I could sell you this shit inside a police station and there’s nothing anyone could do about it.”
“I like privacy,” Will said.
“To each his own,” said Stevie Blow. “Anyway, you’re gonna love this stuff.”
He was sorting out his packets when Will took his gun from his waistband. He held the gun by the grip, stuck the barrel into an ordinary plastic shopping bag, a plastic sleeve that would contain the shell casings and GSR.
Will aimed and then fired twice.
The sound was muffled by the suppressor; two little puffs, like popcorn kernels exploding in an air popper.
Stevie Blow dropped his merchandise, flattened his palms to his chest. He looked at the blood on his hands, then brought his eyes to Will. He said, “Whaaa?”
“You’re guilty and you’re dead, that’s what. I feel bad for your parents, though. I’m sorry for them.”
Will put a shot into Stevie’s forehead, watched him fall, then dragged the body over to the wall and propped it in a sitting position between piles of bagged garbage.
As he headed toward his wife’s car, Will felt no sadness for Stevie Blow. He was thinking about his own boy, how in twenty minutes he’d be turning off Link’s TV and then getting into bed beside his dear wife.
He wasn’t going to lose any sleep tonight.
Chapter 88
I HEARD A phone ringing from far, far away, then someone was shaking my arm, saying, “Lindsay, wake up.”
I was jerked out of a deep well of sleep.
“What’s up?”
I was in the passenger seat of the unmarked car two hundred yards from Will Randall’s yellow house. The house was dark and Randall’s SUV was still in his driveway.
“What time is it?”
“Just after one thirty,” Conklin said. “Brady called. There’s been a shooting in the alley behind Zeus. A drug dealer took some shots to the head and chest.”
“Randall couldn’t have done it. Could he?”
Conklin repeated what Brady had told him: a busboy had seen two men pass through the kitchen. The one identified as the victim was known to the busboy as a dealer. The second man was six feet tall, dark-haired, and looked like the narc who’d busted the busboy’s cousin five years before.
“The busboy was shown a photo array,” Conklin told me, “and tentatively identified Randall. He couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.”
William Randall was dark-haired, six one, and had spent five years in Narcotics — but I was staring at his car. It hadn’t moved.
Randall must have left the house by the back door, taken some other vehicle to Zeus, and shot the dealer while I was taking a snooze. It was quite possible.
We had agreed not to use the radio, so I called Brady on his cell, told him I wanted to go into Randall’s house, see if our man was missing or if he was asleep in his bed.
Brady said, “If Randall is home, treat him with all due respect. He’s Meile’s pet.”
What if William Randall was home and had committed tonight’s shooting? That meant he had most likely committed all of the shootings we attributed to Revenge.
The Randall house was full of kids.
What if Randall took his children hostage?
What if he decided to make a stand?