Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

flicked—“it’s off. See the red dot?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s how you know you’re in trouble.”
    He put the safety back on and tapped the muzzle with a fingertip. “This end shoots bullets.”
    “Ya think?” she said sarcastically.
    “So don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill.”
    She took a quick breath. “Got it.”
    He put the butt of the gun in her hands, automatically making sure that the muzzle didn’t point anywhere important. The weight made her hands sag for a second before she recovered.
    “Heavy,” she said.
    “Yeah. I keep thinking about a Glock, but I’m used to this one.”
    “A Glock?”
    “A kind of gun. Real light compared to this. Plastic instead of metal.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “No. Point my gun at that window.”
    She lifted the weapon so that the muzzle was centered on a window about eight feet away. Rain lashed across the glass in the kind of sudden winter downpour that always took southern Californians by surprise.
    “Put your finger over the trigger and pull back,” he said.
    It took a moment, but she managed.
    “Bang bang, he’s dead,” Ian said, plucking the gun from her hands and returning it to the holster. “Lesson over.”
    Lacey’s cheeks flushed. She opened her mouth to give him hell, but he was already talking.
    “If you have to use this gun it will be because I’m dead and a man is coming at you,” Ian said, meeting her anger with dark eyes, watching her go pale at his words. “Point and shoot and keep shooting until you’re out of bullets or you’re dead. Nothing fancy about it. Just killing, pure and simple, because the second choice is to be killed. No training on earth can prepare you for it, and thinking a short lesson in a hotel room is going to make any difference is a good way to end up stone-cold fucking dead.”
    “You’re trying to scare me.”
    “The phone caller was trying to scare you. I’m trying to educate you.”
    “By telling me I’m helpless?” She dropped the tasteless turkey sandwich on the table. “Gee, thanks, I feel ever so much better informed.”
    Ian quit pretending to eat and dumped his own sandwich on top of the salad. “You think you’re the only one who’s scared? I’m spending a lot of the time in a cold sweat, thinking of all the ways someone can kill and get away with it. I want to haul you to Rarities and leave you there until I catch this bastard.”
    “Without me, how are you going to catch anything but a cold from all that sweat?” she asked sweetly. “You can’t offer anything to make galleryowners prick up their ears and dig in their memories. You don’t have personal memories and questions that threaten someone enough to make him—or her—commit arson and murder. You don’t have anything but a gun, and that won’t make this cockroach come crawling up out of the bathroom drain to tell you his life story.”
    She was right, so Ian stuck with the part of the argument he had a chance of winning. “I never said you were defenseless. You’re better armed than ninety-nine percent of the population.”
    “You just pointed out that I can’t shoot a gun so I—”
    “I’m not talking about guns,” he cut in.
    “Then what are you talking about?”
    “Brains. I’ll bet brains against bullets anytime, anywhere but a turkey shoot. This isn’t a turkey shoot.” Please, God, keep it that way. It’s always been staged in the past, wrecks and fires and drowning. No bullets . “You’re smart.”
    “I’m scared.”
    “That’s smart. So let’s put our smarts together and see if we can come up with this killer before he comes down on us.”

Corona del Mar
    Monday night
62
    T he raincoat-shrouded man moved quickly toward the electrical wires. No matter how many urban or suburban codes were written to keep things pretty, buried wires had to emerge somewhere in order to connect buildings to the basic necessity of the twenty-first century: electricity. The deserted storage yard was in an area zoned for light industry, so various wires were allowed to climb in unsightly tubes right up the outside of the buildings—and the gatepost.
    Bolt cutters sliced through tube and wires with gratifying ease. As required of all public areas, electronic locks opened the instant the power went out. It was a simple safety measure to ensure that people caught behind gates or doors by a fire weren’t trapped by the very security devices that had been intended to keep them safe.
    The