Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective by Don Pendleton Read Free Book Online

street. I had left the Maserati a block back and came up on
his blind side by foot. The car displayed a rental company decal
and was parked some fifty feet off my driveway; the window on the
driver's side was down and the radio was playing soft music with
the sound of KBIG, a popular "easy listening" L.A. station; the guy
looked half asleep.
    I slid the Walther around the doorpost and
nuzzled it into his ear as I said, softly, "Bang—you're dead."
    He sure was. Already. Throat cut, ear to
ear. And not too long ago. Whoever did it was either as quiet as a
cat or was able to approach as a friend: a blood-soaked sniper's
pistol equipped with silencer and scope lay in his lap; death had
indeed come, here, as a total surprise.
    So much for my hastily
conceived plan of action, concocted during the journey through
Topanga Canyon. I had hoped to have a bit of gentle conversation
with this guy—a very candid conversation, at gunpoint—which could
get directly into the heart of whichever "misunderstanding" had
sent him to my door. The only thing left of that idea now was to
elicit as much information as possible from the corpse. But it was
such a messy one, and I did not want this guy's blood on my hands
or any bloody fingerprints anywhere. I did manage to get the coat
open and to extract a slim wallet from an inside pocket without
violating the scene in any visible way. But I learned little from
the wallet, except that Gavinsky was traveling under the identity
of Walter Simonds. He carried a Maryland driver's license and a
couple of credit cards under that name. Except for several large
bills, there was nothing else. I replaced the wallet in the inside
coat-pocket, then went to the other side of the car for a look at
the glove compartment. Car rental papers in there were under the
same name. The car had been rented at Los Angeles International
Airport. An area map, supplied by the rental agency, had been
marked with a highlighting pen to show the route from LAX to
Malibu. The car had been checked out at seven-twenty that morning.
That did not compute. Why had Gavinsky marked a route from LAX to
Malibu even before I was into the case? And, if his visit had
nothing to do with the case of the missing scientist, then what was
it concerned with? Why had he been sitting there just outside my
door all day with a sniper's piece in his lap? Obviously the guy
had been dispatched to dispatch me. But, for God's sake,
why?
    Ignorance can be bliss,
yes. This guy had missed me by just a few minutes, probably. I had
left home at about a quarter after eight, for the meeting with
Souza. Gavinsky could have arrived on the scene by eight-thirty,
easy, a paid assassin, settling into the wait for his pigeon with a
scope and a silencer. If I had gone straight home from Griffith, I
would have walked blissfully ignorant into a simple hit. But who
wanted me hit? And why? On the other hand, who had hit the hitter?
And why? Surely not... No. This was not Greg Souza's style. If he
had wanted the guy out of the picture, and if he could get close
enough to slit his throat, then he would have chloroformed him or
hit him with some exotic state-of-the-art chemical, driven him up
into the hills somewhere, torched the car and shoved it over the
side. I'm not saying that Greg would do something like that, but
that's the way he would do it. Greg went to the same schools that I went
to.
    I did some housekeeping around the scene
just to make sure there was nothing of me left behind, then I got
the hell away from there and took the beach way into my place,
threw some things in a bag, got the hell out.
    My hands were shaking so I
had a problem unlocking the Maserati. I fired her up and did a
quick, quiet U-turn, went on down for a few blocks, pulled over to
the curb and did a quick fix on my nervous system—chemicals, yes,
but from the right brain, not from any streetcorner physician. Took
about forty seconds to get the rhythms into a strong alpha pattern;
another twenty