Pro Bono

Chapter 24

24

W hen Warren walked in the door, he could hear Vesper and Martha in his office talking. He went to the printer on Martha’s desk, scanned the signed settlement agreement, and sent it to Martha and himself, and then walked through the conference room to the back room and put the original into the safe. A moment later he heard Martha’s voice say, “Holy crap, Charlie.”

Vesper and Martha both came into the conference room. Martha said, “I knew it would be good. You had them tied up and boxed in. I just didn’t think it would be that good or this quick.”

“They were pretty eager to step on this before the word got published somewhere. They also didn’t want to have the SEC, the FTC, the FBI, and the rest of the alphabet descend on them before they could clean up the mess and institute safeguards. The easiest part of this was to pay Vesper, so they’re getting that out of the way.”

“Congratulations, Charlie,” Martha said. “I’m proud of you.” She walked toward her desk in the outer office.

Vesper closed the door, turned to him, and said, “You not only got both companies to give the money back, but together you got them to give me five million bucks. I insist that you take the pay you earned. I looked it up online and the article said it was thirty-three to forty percent.”

“I told you before we got started that I was doing it pro bono publico—for the public good. If nobody fights back when people are being robbed, it just keeps happening. The Bar Association recommends every lawyer do at least fifty hours of pro bono work every year, and I was behind this year anyway. I also think it’s only the fair thing to do after Copes and Minkeagan snatched you to get to me.”

She shrugged. “I’ll have to strain my brain to come up with ways to thank you.”

“After we’re sure this case is really over, buy me dinner. Or tell your friends I’m a good lawyer.”

“I’ll think about it some more.”

Pat Ollonsun came home late for the second evening. He was exhausted. He usually arrived home in the late afternoon, when both Christina and Zelda were at home and unavoidable. They seemed to be in every room at once.

As soon as Christina came to know what he had been doing he would lose her. She would be making airline reservations with her phone on speaker to keep her hands free to pack two suitcases at the same time.

He didn’t want to wake her up with the sound of the garage door opening, so he coasted onto the house’s little parking lot behind the garage and turned off the engine. He listened to the road noise and closed the car door when he heard a motorcycle go by on Mulholland. He went in the back door into the dark kitchen. He could see the blue light above the dishwasher door, showing it was running, so Chris had cleaned up after dinner and moved on.

Maybe she was in Zelda’s suite helping Zelda with her homework. That was another advantage to marrying a woman from a rich family. They were certain to have expensive educations, so they knew how to do just about anything the kids were learning, or could teach themselves to do it.

He went up the back stairs from the kitchen. The second set of stairs was an old-fashioned thing to have in a modern house, but the houses in this complex had been designed for people who were likely to have live-in servants. He climbed the stairs as quietly as he could, stepping slowly and shifting as much of his weight as he could to the railings. He made it to the second floor, looked down the hall, and saw that Zelda’s suite at the far end of the house was dark, and so was the master suite at the near end. He was relieved. They both were asleep. It was still possible that they had been interpreting his absences as minor variations in the market-dictated hours of a financial advisor.

He took off his shoes and walked quietly to the master suite, opened the door, and stepped into his walk-in closet. He took off his coat and pants in the dark, and then heard, “Pat?” behind him. He turned. “You startled me,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

She said, “Are you kidding? Do you think I’ve been sleeping peacefully when my husband has been missing?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been missing. I slept beside you last night. I just had to get to work early today and stay late tonight. I’ve been dealing with some things that took a lot of time and attention.”

“What the hell, Pat? Francesca called me before dawn to tell me all about how you and Ron had fought off robbers. You could have told me yourself, but you didn’t. I don’t know what I did to deserve to be humiliated in front of my sister, but I guess I’ll find out in the fullness of time.” She flipped the switch and they were bathed in searing light. She stopped a foot from him and stared at his face. “Jesus. You look terrible. Have you taken an hour from this oh-so-important business to go see a doctor?” She was wearing a gray silky nightgown that clung to her, and he could not ignore how beautiful she looked, and how angry.

“I haven’t seen a doctor, but my face looks worse than it is. I’ve kept it clean, and I’m sure it’s all superficial.”

“Pat, you could have all kinds of things—a fracture of an eye socket, a concussion, even a brain bleed. You don’t know.”

“I guess you’re right. I’ll go to the doctor tomorrow.”

“I hope you didn’t wait long enough to get an infection.” She pivoted and he watched her walk off toward the big bed. She sat down on the bed so hard she bounced, then pulled the covers up to her neck and turned to face away from him.

He said, “Do you want to talk?”

“No, Pat. I don’t want to talk. I wanted to talk earlier. Now I want to sleep.”

He turned off the light. He had been anticipating a big explosion that would obliterate the family. He had a sudden urge to tell her everything—or at least more—and end the dread hanging over him. This silent treatment was a one-night stay of execution.

He looked in her direction for a few seconds, wishing. Then he put his pants and coat back on, picked up his shoes, and walked out of the bedroom. He went back down the stairs and sat at the kitchen table to put on his shoes. He took out his phone and texted Ron Talbert the words, “Call me.” Then he went outside and sat in his car.

His phone rang and he answered it. “Hi, Ron.”

“What do you want, Pat?”

“I just talked to Christina for the first time since our little squabble. She went to bed not speaking to me, but she bought the story you told her sister, so we’re not into a deeper discussion of this mess yet. All she seems to be mad about right now is that I dropped off her radar for a day and didn’t call her to tell her the lie you made up before she heard it from Francesca.”

“You’re welcome,” Ron said. “I guess you’re okay, then. You seem to be living a charmed life.”

“I got fired, Ron. They had me escorted off the premises. Their legal hatchet woman told me they know everything. They’re paying off Vesper Ellis and her lawyer Warren to keep it all quiet until they’ve had time to clean up the mess and pay back the others.”

“Are they turning you in to the authorities?”

“She told me they didn’t plan to, but she reminded me that they’re not doing it for me. It’s only for the benefit of Great Oceana. They’re trying to make things look like a chain of honest mistakes, no humans involved.”

“I can’t believe your luck.”

“Not believing it is the point. It won’t work. The time is going to come in a few days when they need to throw me in the fire.”

“I’m already in the fire,” Talbert said. “The only reason I’m free right now is that my boss tipped me off that the company was being sued and her bosses were freaked out and using my name a lot, so I should sneak out. She said she’d pretend I was at the doctor for my face.” He sighed. “I’m really stuck, Pat. The life I’ve been living and working for is over. I’ve been looking at countries that won’t extradite people to America. They’re awful. Some are just giant prisons run by dictators and the others are backwaters. Fran would never go with me and take the kids to live in any of those places. I spent some time this afternoon thinking of killing myself.”

“Come on,” Ollonsun said. “That’s crazy. And how do you even plan to do it?”

“I got a gun today.”

“You did? Just like that, in one day?”

“Do you remember my cousin Tim, the one who died in an accident? He was a gun guy. He had at least a hundred of them when he died. I went and asked his wife, Tina, if I could have one of them to remember him by.”

“Amazing.”

“Why? You have a gun.”

“Yes, I do,” Ollonsun said. “I bought it the legal way.”

There was a long silence.

“What?” said Talbert.

“I just had a thought.”

“What’s your thought?”

“That we’re in terrible trouble, about to lose everything—our families, all the material things we have, our jobs, our pensions, our chances of ever getting a job in financial services again. No, of ever getting any decent job again. Our freedom. But right now, tonight, while we’re sitting here feeling sorry for ourselves, we have one last chance to turn things around. It’s only going to exist until some judge issues a warrant for our arrests. It’s like sitting on a pile of explosives. In the instant when the spark comes, we’re dead.”

“It’s our own fault.”

“It’s our own fault if we sit here waiting for it to happen. But what if we got rid of the spark? What provides the spark is Vesper Ellis and her very bright, greedy young lawyer. Do you think if they weren’t threatening our two companies with exposure, Great Oceana and Founding Fathers would be about to get us arrested? No. They would quietly fire us, but they would never turn us over to the police. Doing that amounts to turning themselves over to the federal regulators, and ultimately getting fired themselves.”

“Are you really—”

“Yes, I am,” Ollonsun said. “I headed us for this a long, long time ago. It was my fault. I admit that. But now is a different situation. We have wives and children who depend on us, and need us. These people are endangering our lives and the futures of our families. It comes down to: Are we going to let our enemies kill us, or are we going to make our enemies die instead? Simple. We have guns. We have tonight. After that, we’ve got nothing.”

“I don’t know, Pat. This feels really drastic.”

“Ron, you told me less than five minutes ago you had begged your cousin’s widow for a gun to kill yourself. That’s not drastic?”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“Pick me up in your car. I need to get some things together.” He hung up and waited for a few seconds for Ron to call back and abandon him, and then went to the garage and picked up the unopened can of turpentine from the row of paint, brushes, rollers, and things leftover from the painters.

Patrick Ollonsun and Ronald Talbert sat in Talbert’s black SUV about two hundred feet from Charles Warren’s condominium. Ollonson said, “The ones on the first floor have to be one, two, three, and four. Then it goes five and six in front, and seven and eight in back. Second floor, right front has to be his.”

“His lights are still on,” Ollonson continued. “He’s probably working late up there, figuring out how to destroy somebody else’s life. I read that he’s big in the divorce business. He’s even probably up there getting ready to sleep with the latest divorcée.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Talbert said.

“What? You hadn’t thought of that yourself? Do you think after you lose Francesca she’s just going to stop living or dissolve into thin air? She’s young and pretty and healthy. She’ll have about fifty years of life ahead of her. She’s also going to be a woman with three kids and a mortgage, and she’s nowhere near stupid.”

“I just didn’t need that right now.”

“Maybe knowing it in advance will help. I factored it into my misery inventory as soon as I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get past this Vesper Ellis thing. I’ll bet Christina has been thinking about a future without me even before this. She’s been talking to me in a sort of snide way for months. And she keeps buying this incredible lingerie and wearing it—the low-cut, clingy kind you can sort of see through. I think she’s reminding me what a prize she is, and at the same time, telling me what a disappointment I am. Wait until she knows everything.”

“Fran hasn’t been that way at all.”

“I’m not losing sight of the fact that Warren is hurting Fran and Chris too, maybe more than us. Speaking of that, you did bring the keepsake you asked your cousin’s widow for, right?”

“It’s in the glove compartment,” Talbert said.

“I hope you thought ahead to buy some ammunition.”

“Tim had a box of it on the same shelf of the gun safe, so she gave it to me too.”

“I hope you thanked her.”

Talbert didn’t want to relive the searing experience of asking her and then feeling her contempt, so he said simply, “I did.”

Ollonsun opened the glove compartment and took out the pistol. “A Colt Python .357 Magnum. That ought to do it.” He opened the box to reveal the bullets. They made Talbert think of hornets in their compartmented nest. Ollonsun said, “I’ll load it for you.” He opened the cylinder and pushed six bullets into it and then clicked it back into the frame. “There. All ready to go.”

They watched and waited. At seventeen minutes after twelve the timer in the living room socket clicked over to the next minute and the light in the window went off. At twenty-three minutes after, the timer in the spare bedroom clicked and cut the power to the reading lamp there, and that window went dark. “It looks like he’s going to bed,” Ollonsun said. “Let’s give him a little time to actually get to sleep before we make our move.”

“That’s one of the things I’ve been wondering about,” Talbert said. “What, exactly, is our move?”

Ollonsun shrugged. “We’ve lost our jobs, we’ve lost the chance to work in finance again. But the worst thing is still on the table. Right now, the odds are that both Great Oceana and Founding Fathers are going to decide that their best hope is trying to pay off the clients and make it like nothing ever happened. The problem is that even though the bosses see it that way, this woman and her lawyer are refusing to let it go away. I did everything I could to avoid things getting to this point, but now the only way to make our problem go away is to make the people go away. You know that now, right?”

“I guess I do. But frankly, I started by shaving little slices off some accounts that the owners never even missed. And it seems like no time at all, and here I am with a loaded gun in my glove compartment waiting to murder a man I’ve never even seen. And then her too, right?”

Ollonsun sighed. “You may recall that I hired people to just scare them off, so we had a chance to avoid it coming to this.”

“You gave them my money, and all they seem to have done was disappear with it.”

“I’m just saying that my motive all along was to avoid getting ourselves directly involved. But sometimes you have to do what’s necessary to survive.”

“Yes,” Talbert said. “I think that’s true. And it’s why I’m here. I think we should decide exactly what the plan is before we go get him.”

“We have to be open-minded. I brought the turpentine and a lighter in case there’s a chance to make it look like a household fire. Even having it look like arson would do, because arsons are usually done by the owner for insurance. Not only would Warren be a suspect, but so would the other seven condo owners.”

“That’s a problem, though. We might be killing eight people, or however many people live in the building.”

“We have pistols. We can shoot him. A lawyer like him must have a hundred enemies. It’s possible he has a gun too, so we can’t hesitate. We find a way into his place, rush into his bedroom, and open fire right away. The .357 magnum you have has much more stopping power than a nine millimeter like I have, but that means it will have a kick, so be prepared for it. Hold it in both hands and put a round in his chest. Ideally the second round goes into his head, and we go out whatever way we came in. We can take a few seconds to steal whatever we can see—his wallet, watch, computer, that kind of thing.”

“Wouldn’t it be smarter and safer to use a rifle and fire through a window? No prints, no DNA.”

“Have you got one with you?”

“I don’t own one. My cousin’s revolver is the only gun I’ve ever owned.”

Ollonsun looked at his watch. “We’ve got tonight. I don’t know if we’ll have tomorrow to get this done. I think it’s time to go do it.” He opened the glove compartment and held the revolver by the barrel so the handgrip was in front of Talbert. He stared at it for a moment, then reached out to accept it. They both put on the medical masks and baseball caps and got out.

They walked across the front of the building. There was a front entrance that had a heavy conventional lock and a keypad that might be an intercom or might be an electric second lock. Just past that was the garage entrance, which had a big garage barrier made of steel bars. They could see cars in most of the spaces, but they had no idea which one was Warren’s, and no idea what to do with that information if they had it. They went past the door, turned at the corner of the building, and found themselves in front of a steel door set into a fence with spikes on top that made it around eight feet high.

They kept going past the building and then the next one, and then the next, which was older and had an open walkway. They followed it to the back of the building, which had a pool and a patio. At the other side of it there was a door in the cinder block wall separating it from the next property. It was locked, but the wall was only five feet high, so they scaled it and then crossed the next patio with a pool to another wall. This one was more like seven feet, but they moved a metal table beside it, climbed on the table, and made an even easier crossing to the back of Warren’s condominium building. They found a door at the rear corner of the building near the enclosure that hid the dumpster. Ollonsun tried the door and he was surprised when it opened into the garage. He could see the street through the bars of the garage door from there.

They went into the garage and found a door that led to a half-story staircase. They climbed it and saw doors with the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 on them. They found the next flight of steps that led to the second floor. The first door on the left was 6. They moved close to it.

“The lock’s not like the others,” Ollonsun whispered. “Look at this. There’s a steel guard so you can’t jimmy it.”

“It looks like the door’s new, too,” Talbert whispered. He leaned close and sniffed it. “Fresh paint.”

“He’s ready for this,” Ollonsun whispered. “It’s like he knew we were coming.”

Talbert gestured to Ollonsun to come and began to descend the steps. They went all the way back down to the garage. They closed the door to the building, went to the corner of the garage, and crouched behind the last of the parked cars. Talbert said, “We could wait here until he comes out to get into his car and shoot him then.”

“I don’t know,” Ollonsun said. As he came closer he stepped across an empty parking space, then stopped. “Look at the floor. The spaces are marked with condo numbers. The two that are empty have sixes painted on them. He’s not even here. I’ll bet they’re at her place.”

“You’re probably right,” Talbert said. “Let’s head for her house.”

Talbert drove up the block where Vesper Ellis’s house was. “Which one is it?” he asked.

“The one with the big trees and the brick facade and the two chimneys. Number 43501.”

“Okay, I see it.” Talbert slowed his car down and crept along the pavement. They both craned their necks to see as much as they could.

“We should go around the block and park out of sight of any cameras on this street,” Ollonsun said.

Talbert went around the block to pull up in front of a house on the street behind the Ellis house. He turned off the lights and the engine. “Okay. What now?”

“Just leave the lights and engine off while we figure this out,” Ollonsun said. “Can you see the upper floor windows from here?”

“They all look dark to me,” Talbert said. “If he’s with her, they’re asleep.”

“That’s perfect. Let’s get out and take a look around.”

They got out of the car and walked on the far side of the street so they could be an extra thirty feet away from the Ellis house and get a view of the whole property. They made a full circuit of the block, studying it. Then they extended the walk another half block and walked up the driveway beside the house. They looked closely at each window and through it at everything they could make out in the near-solid darkness. Ollonsun whispered, “The alarm’s probably got a cover so you can’t see if it’s on or not.”

“I think it’s most likely to be on,” Talbert whispered. “She’s a woman living alone.”

They came around the house to the upper end of the driveway and found a white hybrid Mercedes parked there. Ollonsun said, “There you go. We know she’s home. And I don’t see a car that could be his.”

They both kept going and climbed the steps to the back door. The windows were dark, but there were glowing lights on the microwave, the two wall ovens, and the refrigerator. There was also a flat square plastic object on the wall that Talbert could see reflected in the glass front of one of the ovens. There was a closed cover, but it had a red light on the left side. “The alarm is armed,” Ollonsun whispered.

“You have another idea?”

“I’ve got one that’s so simple and straightforward that it’s beautiful.”

“What is it?”

“First, we cover your car’s license plates. Then we drive it back, park it right in front of the house, and leave the motor running. It’s good that we took your SUV tonight. It’s closer to the kinds of car the LAPD uses than my sedan is. We go to the front door and ring the doorbell. We ring it and knock again and again. I’m pretty sure she’ll come downstairs to the door. She’ll look out a window or the peephole in the door. If one of us is standing on the front steps holding up an ID card she’ll yell, ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ or the equivalent. We’ll say, ‘Police, Mrs. Ellis. We need to talk to you.’ At that point most women will turn off the alarm and open the door. Bang-bang, we each shoot her, go to the car, and drive away. Mission accomplished. We throw the guns into a sewer, take the cover off the plates, and go home.”

“We don’t look much like plainclothes cops. We look like we’ve been in a fight.”

“If she doesn’t buy it, we shoot her through the door. If she just looks out a window at us, we shoot her through that. In fact, that’s a better idea. We don’t both have to be on the porch. One of us could be all ready by the nearest window, and shoot her as soon as she reaches the ground floor.”

“It should work,” Talbert said. “She knows she’s involved in an investigation, so the police might need to get in touch and maybe protect her, right?”

“Right,” Ollonsun said. “Just remember what’s at stake. This is probably going to happen fast, so don’t freeze up on me after it starts. Whatever thinking you have to do, get it out of the way now, before we ring the doorbell.”

Talbert nodded his head, then stared at the ground for about ten seconds. Then he said, “Okay. Let’s go get the car.”

They set off walking around the block toward the car. As they walked, Talbert said, “What are you going to use for your police ID? Do you have anything with your picture on it?”

“Let’s see. My driver’s license, my Costco membership. She’d recognize those. My work ID would have been perfect, but they made me hand it in.”

“I still have mine,” Talbert said. “I sneaked out before they started looking for me.”

“That’ll do.”

“It has my picture on it. I thought you would be the one on the porch. You know what to do and say. You’re taller and older too. More like a ranking cop.”

“Oh, I know,” Ollonsun said. “My ID for getting into the front gate of our housing complex looks really official, and it has my picture on it.”

They reached Talbert’s car. He opened the hatch at the back, and took a roll of electrical tape out of his emergency toolbox, stretched it across the rear license plate, and cut off pieces. It took a few strips to change the numbers on the plate—3 to 8, 1 to 7, 5 to 6. Then he gave the little lightbulb above the plate a half-turn to remove it, and then gave the front plate the same treatment. When he got into the driver’s seat of the car, Ollonsun was already sitting in the passenger seat looking at the plastic ID from his wallet with his small flashlight. He turned off the flashlight. “Ready to do this?”

“Yes,” Talbert said. “Absolutely.”

They pulled to the front of the house and parked the car but kept the motor running so she would be able to see the lighted dashboard. They stationed themselves at the front of the house so Ollonsun could ring the doorbell and Talbert would be at the front window looking in.

Ollonson rang the doorbell, then knocked on the door. He was cautious about keeping the volume of the knocking down, but he was confident that the doorbell would not be set at a decibel level that would wake the neighbors, so after a few minutes he kept pressing it over and over. He looked at Talbert standing near the side window with his revolver. He congratulated himself on the tactics, but why wasn’t she running to the door?

He kept ringing for a long time, but heard nothing from inside. He said to Talbert, “Go around the house. Look for lights, shadows, anything. If you see her, shoot through the window.” Talbert walked along the outer wall and peered inside each window. It took him another eight minutes to make the circuit.

When he reached the front steps again, he said, “I don’t think she’s here. Leaving her car here doesn’t mean she’s here. She wouldn’t drive it if she was on a date. She might even have gone out of town.”

Ollonsun took out a handkerchief and wiped his fingerprints off the doorbell button. They got into Talbert’s car and Talbert pulled away. Talbert said, “Well, that’s his place and her place. Maybe they’re together.”

“I’d bet on it,” Ollonsun said. “You know, I got the impression from the research my guys did that he’s sort of a specialist in finding and recovering money. He does a lot of divorce cases where the husband or wife is hiding assets, or there’s some kind of a guardian who’s skimming a trust fund. I’ll bet he’s really good at knowing when it’s time to get out of sight. You know where I’ll bet he is?”

“We looked at the houses. Where else?”

“His office. I’m not saying every one of his victims goes looking for him, but I’m sure some do, just like us.”

“His office?”

“We know that he walked out of my company and your company within the past two days carrying written agreements of some kind. My company told me they agreed to pay his client three million. If you had a piece of paper worth three million—or maybe two worth six million, where would you put it?”

“A safe deposit box, I guess.”

“Nope. These lawyers can’t be running into the bank every day to unload papers from their briefcase. They have their own safes. They’ve got to. I know the address of his building. You want me to drive?”

“Just put it in your phone and it’ll give us directions. And hand me that box of ammunition in the glove compartment.”

Vesper Ellis and Charlie Warren sat in the conference room in his law office. They had stopped at Art’s on Ventura Boulevard to get chicken matzo ball soup, pastrami on rye, and Dr. Brown’s cream soda. They had brought it into the conference room and served it on large sheets of wax paper on the conference table.

Warren had brought the original fully signed and witnessed agreements from Great Oceana Monetary and Founding Fathers Vested to put them in the safe. When he and Vesper arrived, they found that the payments from both companies had been wired to the office bank account after Martha had gone home.

Vesper said, “I’m really glad you thought of stopping at Art’s. I didn’t realize it at first, but I was starving. I hadn’t been there in a long time.”

“LA is full of amazing things to eat, drink, look at, and listen to,” he said. He froze and his gaze went upward. “Do you hear that?”

“Sounds like an elevator.”

“It is,” he said. “Every office on this floor has been closed for at least three hours, and the cleaning company doesn’t come again until Friday night.” He got up and opened the conference room door, and Vesper stood with him in the doorway to the waiting room.

They could hear the sound of low voices outside the door in the hallway. Then they saw the doorknob wiggle back and forth a little, but it was locked and wouldn’t turn. Warren took Vesper’s arm and pulled her back a step, closed the conference room door and locked it, and then began gathering the papers they had been copying and collating. He took the papers in a single pile into the storeroom at the side of the conference room, where there was a copier, a wall of shelves to hold office supplies, and some filing cabinets. He bent over and worked the combination of the safe and opened the door. He put the documents in one of the safe’s divisions, and then heard a loud thud and crack as a man threw his shoulder against the outer door of the office and the door swung inward.

On the shelf beside the papers Warren saw the two pistols he had taken from Copes and Minkeagan after they had kidnapped Vesper. He took them out of the safe, shut the door, spun the dial, pulled Vesper away from the door, and pushed the steel desk in the room up on its end in front of the door to provide a barrier.

He’d heard a voice, so there had to be at least one speaker and one listener. They could be Copes and Minkeagan turning on him, or the two men he had fought off with a golf club at his condominium coming back for revenge. They could be anybody. He found the magazine release on the first pistol, saw it was fully loaded, slid it back in, pulled back the slide and saw there was a round in the chamber, and slid it back. He had left the other pistol in the same condition.

He muttered, “I’m lucky I didn’t kill us both.”

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said.

They heard the men on the other side of the door throwing furniture in the conference room aside, and then the thud of a body against the door. The sound was repeated, but this door was different from the one in the outer office. It was steel, with a heavy-gauge lock and dead bolt.

There was gunfire. Warren could see the door vibrate three times, as bullets pounded the metal around the lock. He pulled Vesper down with him on the floor behind the upended desk while three more rounds pounded against the door.

There was silence, while Warren and Vesper waited. She whispered, “What do you think they’re doing?”

“Trying to figure out if there’s another way to hit us.”

“Is there?”

Outside the building, Minkeagan and Copes were in their most recent car watching the office of Warren & Associates. Since Charlie Warren had been attacked by the two thugs at his apartment and Minkeagan and Copes had intervened, they had been observing him very closely. They had a certain expectation of the men who had attacked him. Charlie Warren had beaten them badly with his golf club, and they were sure those two hadn’t forgotten it. The question was whether they would do anything about it.

Minkeagan said, “What did you hear? Was that three shots?”

“Let’s go,” Copes said.

They got out of the car and went across the street to the office building. They ran down the sloping driveway to the elevator, tried pressing the button, but the machine was dead. They tugged on the door to the stairway, but it wouldn’t budge. Minkeagan said, “We’ll have to bypass the switch lock.”

Copes took out his knife, turned a screw, and popped the metal cover off the elevator controls. He and Minkeagan had taken an advanced class in Ely on rescue for firefighters, so they knew how to get power to an elevator if the problem didn’t involve fire.

On the sixth floor, the gunfire resumed. This time the bullets weren’t hitting the door to the back room. They were aimed at the wall to the right of the door, in three-round volleys. The door was steel, but the walls were plywood, two-by-fours, and plasterboard. The bullets that hit the spaces between two-by-fours pierced the wall. Most of them hit the upturned steel desk, punched through the steel bottom of the lowest drawer and expended their force ricocheting among the upper drawers and desktop. A couple pierced the wall and hit the opposite wall.

Warren saw a series of three that did this, and he realized he could sight from the hole in one wall to the hole in the other and know roughly where the shot had been fired from. He waited, saw three new holes appear in the wall, aimed at the wall and did his best to place five rapid shots on that line of bullet holes. He heard another volley beginning, stepped to the other side of the desk, and fired four more in that direction.

The gunfire through the wall stopped. Warren changed pistols so he had the one with a full magazine in his right hand. He listened, but heard nothing he could identify. He looked at his watch, stood with his back to the wall and facing the steel door and the entry holes.

Vesper said, “What’s happening?”

“Not sure,” he said. “I might have hit one of them, or scared them off. But I think they’re reloading and waiting for me to open the door to see what’s up so they can kill me.”

They waited and listened, but a sound had to be loud to be audible through the wall.

They stayed where they were for five minutes, and then five more, and then Vesper said, “Do you smell something?”

“Yes. It’s like smoke.”

After a few more seconds she pointed at a bullet hole in the wall above Warren’s head. “Look!”

There was a thin wisp of smoke seeping through the hole. Warren stepped close to the steel door, held his hand near to it, and then cautiously touched it and pulled his hand away, then let his hand stay on it for a second. “It’s not very hot yet, but there’s definitely a fire. We’ve got to get out,” he said. “Here. This gun has about seven rounds left, ready to go. If you see a man, and he’s not me, pull the trigger. We’ve got to stay as low as we can because the smoke will be filling the upper half of the room. We’ll have to take the stairs. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Ready?”

“No choice.”

He crawled to the edge of the door, very softly turned the knob for the dead bolt, then looked at her once more, held up three fingers, two, one, swung the door open, and lunged through it into the conference room with the pistol in a two-handed grip.

The men were gone. Warren moved to the door into the main office. He could see that the men must have poured an accelerant onto the furniture and wall of the waiting area. Bright flames wavered and sparked in that area and were moving across the space where the door was broken open and left hanging on one hinge. “Hurry,” he whispered, and tugged Vesper into the open gap and over a foot of low flames into the hallway.

A door down the hallway opened a few inches, a hand holding a pistol emerged, and Warren yelled, “Drop the gun and get out of the building! It’s on fire!”

The pistol roared, and Warren could see a spray of bright sparks. He fired three times into the dark, empty space where the gun was, the door opened farther and a man toppled outward onto the floor. A second man fired at Warren from the corner where another hallway met this one.

Suddenly, the elevator down the hall gave a “ding,” Warren and the second man froze for a second, the elevator door rolled open, and two men dashed out into the hallway with guns drawn. One of them was Copes, who yelled, “Police! Drop your weapons!” Minkeagan shouted, “You’re under arrest! Police! Show me your hands!”

The man lurched out from the corner where he’d been hiding, running toward them. He sprinted down the hallway, a pistol in his right hand. Warren had time to return fire one more time. He could tell that he had hit the man, who veered aside and dropped his pistol, which Warren could now see was a large revolver with a silvery finish. When the man reached his fallen companion, he went to the floor on his belly, so Minkeagan and Copes moved toward him. He picked up the semiautomatic pistol his companion had dropped, raised it to his head, and fired.

Minkeagan reached Charlie and Vesper. Minkeagan said, “What the hell? Why’d he kill himself? Who even are these guys, and why is the building on fire?”

Copes knelt by the other man who had been hit by Warren’s shots. “This one’s dead. Did he kill himself too?”

“Thank you for your concern,” Warren said. “We’ve all got to get out of the building now, you first.”

Minkeagan said, “Tell the cops you found those guns in the dumpster out back, and you were going to turn them in to the police in case they’d been used in a crime.”

“Have they been?” Warren said.

“Not if the cops don’t charge you for this.”

Copes and Minkeagan stepped over the bodies and went to the stairwell.

Warren took out his phone and dialed. He heard, “Nine-one-one, what’s the address of your emergency?”

Warren gripped Vesper Ellis’s hand as he stepped into the stairwell and began to descend. “Fifty-six, nine eighty-nine Wilshire Boulevard. The building is on fire on the sixth floor, we have two men shot, and so we need ambulances, fire, and police. My name is Charles Warren, and I have a law office in the building.”

Five hours later Charlie Warren and Vesper Ellis drove from the police station to Warren’s condominium. The world outside had taken on a faint gray color that felt like a warning that dawn was going to come sometime soon. They mumbled goodnight and went to their respective rooms and went to sleep.

It was late afternoon when they were awake and met at the kitchen table. Warren was already making coffee, eggs, and toast. “Thank you, Charlie,” she said. “I would have been happy to cook, but you beat me to it.” He poured her a cup of coffee and set it in front of her.

He shrugged. “It’s what I make most days. It’s kind of automatic.” He slid the eggs onto plates, the toast onto smaller plates.

She said, “Can I use that pad and pen on the counter?”

“Sure.” He took a step to the side, picked them up, set them in front of her, and went to the refrigerator to get the strawberry jam.

She wrote a paragraph, dated it, and signed it with a flourish, and then pushed it across the table in front of him.

He read it silently. “To whom it may concern: I, Vesper Ellis, have retained the legal services of Charles Warren, attorney at law, from May 6 through June 12. He has successfully recovered all of the money that employees of Great Oceana Monetary Investment and Founding Fathers Vested had removed from my accounts, and obtained damage payments of five million dollars for me. Since he has insisted on taking my case pro bono, he has received no pay. I thank him profoundly and hereby, as of six P.M. today, discharge him and declare him no longer my attorney.”

He walked out of the kitchen area to the living room, opened a desk drawer, put the letter inside, and closed it. Then he went back to the kitchen table and sat down to finish their food. After they had eaten, they loaded the dishwasher and started the wash cycle.

Warren went into his bedroom closet and selected some fresh clothes, set them on the closet island, and went into his bathroom to take a shower. He started the water, stepped into it, and closed the glass door. He had slept deeply, but endured several dreams that were variations on the gunfight and fire in his office and the long police interrogation afterward. He reviewed them as he soaped himself and let the warm water wash over his head and back and loosen his muscles. His eye caught something moving in the mirror above the sink, and turned. The door had opened and closed, and Vesper Ellis was standing there in a white bathrobe, staring at him.

She took off the bathrobe and hung it on the unused hook beside the glass door and stepped into the shower beside him. She said, “I hope you don’t mind. It was the simplest solution and I’m already glad I did it.”

“If I had any doubts, I would have locked the door.” He put his arms around her and drew her body up against his, and they touched and kissed and stood there sharing the rush of warm water over them. They spent a long time getting accustomed to each other, and then he said, “Any plans for after this?”

“Before we fall asleep again, I’m going to be your girlfriend.”