Chapter 15
Back in Thousand Palms, Marty decided he’d given Emma enough time.
Keeping his headlights off, he made his way toward her place. Instead of turning into her driveway, like he’d planned, he decided to park on the shoulder, about thirty yards past the entrance. He didn’t think she’d be coming back anytime soon, but he didn’t want to take the chance.
Carefully, he picked his way across the desert and skirted around the edge of her property until he was about a dozen yards behind her home. He’d only taken a couple of steps toward the building when he realized that he’d left the dog toy and sleeping pill wrapped in a ball of cheese in his car.
“Dammit,” he groaned.
He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, contemplating whether or not to go back for it. In the end, he chose to continue to the building. If Emma had locked the mutt in, say, her bedroom, then the pill wouldn’t be necessary.
He stepped gingerly around the sagebrush and Russian thistle until he reached the edge of Emma’s property, where all the undergrowth had been cleared away.
He looked past the side of the house toward the road. Still no headlights in sight.
He grinned and moved out from the vegetation.
He’d taken three steps forward when a floodlight attached to the top of the building suddenly illuminated the entire area.
He cursed and retreated into the brush, then hunched down and scanned the back of the house.
His first thought was that Emma had a roommate he didn’t know about, who had seen him and flicked the light on. But the pair of windows at the back of the building remained dark, with no sign of motion beyond.
The light must have been triggered by a motion detector, he surmised.
He scanned the wall for a sensor, and almost immediately spotted something that was much more concerning. Mounted on the wall two feet below the light and a good eighteen feet above ground was a security camera.
“Well, fuck,” he huffed.
Marty was not a professional thief, so it hadn’t even dawned on him that she might have cameras, especially out here in the middle of nowhere.
What he did know, though, is that he was smart enough to intuit that where there were cameras, there was also likely an alarm system.
That was not something he was prepared to deal with.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit!”
About the only good thing was that while the camera might have recorded him, he was well disguised.
He glared at the back door. It was so close and yet so very far.
He needed her alarm code, but that wasn’t something he could just walk up to her and ask for.
It was possible that she had it written down somewhere, however. Perhaps in her office. In fact, he may have already seen it and not registered its importance.
He checked his watch. If he went to RRE now, he’d have plenty of time to search for the code before his meeting with Victor Popov.
He gave Emma’s building one last glance, then retraced his steps to his car and headed back to Palm Springs.
—
Vladimir watched Marty through a pair of binoculars as the guy sat in his car at the edge of the road doing nothing for more than thirty minutes.
When the vehicle finally did move, it didn’t go far before it stopped again. Only this time, instead of remaining in the driver’s seat, Marty exited the sedan and slipped into the desert.
The binoculars didn’t have a night-vision mode, so Vladimir lost track of him until a floodlight at the back of the house came on, illuminating the area enough for him to watch Marty scamper back into the darkness of the desert.
Vlad’s brow creased. “Huh.”
The next time he spotted Marty was when the dome light inside the man’s car came back on. A few moments later, the car started up and pulled onto the road.
Vladimir shoved the binoculars into his backpack, initiated a call to Popov via the wireless connection in his helmet, then took off after the odd engineer.
—
Billy and Peter were making their way back to their friends, when a large man veered into Billy’s path.
Billy tried to move out of the way but still bumped him with his arm, sending the glass the other man was holding tumbling to the ground.
“My apologies,” Billy said. “Entirely my fault.”
“Damn right it was,” the man said as he turned.
Billy recognized him immediately. It was the jerk from the golf course, Victor Popov.
It took the man a moment longer before he, too, made the connection, and his gaze hardened.
“Well, look who it is,” Popov said. “You are a very rude man, do you know that?”
“Good evening, Mr. Popov,” Billy said.
The man’s gaze narrowed. “How do you know my name?”
Ignoring the question, Billy said, “Perhaps this isn’t the right venue to work out your anger issues.” He gave Popov a quick smile. “Enjoy your evening.”
He and Peter started walking again.
“Who are you to walk away from me?” Popov snarled after him.
Billy kept going.
—
Popov seethed, watching the man who’d hit the golf ball at him stride off. Once he had been swallowed up by the crowd, Popov leaned in close to Aleksei and whispered, “Find out who that man is and where he is staying.” Whoever he was, he’d make him pay for his disrespect.
“Consider it done,” Aleksei responded, and moved off to fulfill his order.
Popov’s anger ebbed a bit at the sight of several delectable women with whom he wouldn’t mind spending some time. If they were actresses like the first woman he’d talked to, he could claim to be a movie producer again. That had been working well on her until the young guy had taken her away.
As he considered his potential targets, his phone vibrated. He checked the screen and saw that it was Vladimir. He accepted the call.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Popov, something strange just happened with Martin Lundstrom that I thought you should know about,” Vladimir said, the roar of a motorcycle engine underlining his words.
“Strange?”
Vladimir told him about Lundstrom’s strange behavior at the building in Thousand Palms.
“Whose building is it?”
“Unknown. I got the impression it’s being used as a home, not a business.”
“And you believe he was trying to break in?”
“It’s the only explanation I can think of. Do you want me to find out who it belongs to?”
“Have someone else do that. You stay on Lundstrom. I don’t want him to miss our meeting.”
“Understood.”
Popov hung up and looked for a waiter. He needed a drink to replace the one that had been knocked out of his hand.