Page 36 of Pro Bono

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At seven thirtyA.M., Warren wrote a note:

“Dear Vesper, I’m going to the office to do a little work and get ready for my meeting. Please keep the door locked and the curtains closed for now. There’s food in the refrigerator and you can call me anytime.”

He set it on the kitchen counter beside the coffee.

He was out the door and headed downstairs for his rental car before it occurred to him that he should have reminded her that both of their phones could still be tapped, and she should use the burner, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t the sort of person who would forget that. He went to the edge of the garage opening to see whether the two surveillance cars had moved from Vesper’s block to his, but he didn’t see any parked cars with drivers in them this time, so he went to the rental car, drove out to the street, and then went around the block to be sure he hadn’t missed anything before he turned toward the office.

Warren couldn’t help thinking about Vesper Ellis as he drove.

He had felt he was being normal and professional to maintain his distance from her. He still had a clear picture in his mind of Vesper with the big bath towel wrapped around her when she’d peeked out of the bathroom door to talk to him, and then the feel of her hug two hours later. He’d felt that as a client she was trusting him to stifle any thoughts that led in that direction. Now he felt he’d offended her by stepping away. It had all been clumsy and bad. Reevaluating the mess also forced him to picture her again, to remember the sound of her voice, to feel the hug again. Pushing her out of his mind gave him a foretaste of the feeling of loss.

Approaching the office building helped sweep the topic away for the moment. He parked in one of the visitors’ spots on the floor below his reserved space, went upstairs, and opened the office. He went over the two lawsuits again, signed the final copies, and put them in Martha’s inbox. Then he went back to his own office and began to read through the backlog of paper and computer messages that had accumulated over the past two days.

He looked particularly for any communication from Founding Fathers Vested, the company that hadn’t yet responded to his complaint. He was curious about why they hadn’t responded quickly to head off the possible scandal. There was nothing yet.

He was expecting something from the office of Mr. Foshin, Great Oceana Monetary’s vice president for legal affairs, too, but what he was expecting was delay. So far there was nothing from Great Oceana, but the timing they would probably prefer was just before the one o’clock meeting, to inflict the most inconvenience on him.

He moved on through the routine business. It was interesting to see how steady the demand was for wills, divorces, contracts, minor lawsuits, and the like. He had already told Martha to warn these potential clients that he was fully committed at the moment, but that he hadrecommendations of several other excellent firms who specialized in those matters.

When Martha and her dog Alan arrived at the office, she said, “Good morning, Charlie. Need anything for your meeting today at Great Oceana?”

“Thanks, but I think I’ve got everything I can use. I’m expecting Mr. Foshin to either get sick or be running late so I’ll only have five minutes or so before he leaves to catch his plane. Every delay he can cause helps them.”

At twelve fifteen, Warren began to gather the papers he would take with him to the meeting. Then he remembered that his professional-looking briefcase had been stolen, so he took the backpack that he sometimes used as a carry-on for flights and began to pack it. He included two years of monthly reports from Great Oceana on Vesper Ellis’s account with plastic clips on the most damning pages, copies of the letters he had sent the Great Oceana Monetary offices so far, and a copy of the lawsuit he was ready to file. He didn’t plan to show all those papers to Mr. Foshin, but if he changed his mind, he’d have them.

The attorneys for a major company should be good enough to recognize when they had no defense and be inspired to start talking seriously about settling. He put on the lightweight sport coat he had selected. Martha nodded her approval. Then he picked up the MacBook Pro that had been left charging on a shelf and slid it into the big pocket at the back of the pack.

He put on the pack to test the weight, decided it was tolerable, and left the office. He rode the elevator down to the level where he had parked the rented Honda. He set the pack on the floor in front of the passenger seat, got in, and drove up to the exit from the garage. When he approached, he saw that the wooden barrier arm was down across the threshold. Hecraned his neck to see if an attendant was around to raise it, then got out of the car to see if he could do it himself, leaving the motor running and the driver’s door open.

He didn’t let the lowered barrier unnerve him, but he didn’t want some malfunction like this to make him late. He stepped forward to examine the place where the arm connected to the machine. Some of them he’d seen were bolted, and others had some simple mechanism to disconnect. He reached the arm and looked down at it, when he heard a voice behind him say, “Hold on, Mr. Warren.” He felt relieved—help had come—but the relief lasted only a second before a strong hand grabbed his arm and jerked him backward.

Warren shrugged his right shoulder to free his arm and pivoted to the left to face the man. He pushed the driver’s door into him, knocking him backward, then charged into him and pushed him down onto his back, pivoted into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and accelerated through the opening, snapping the wooden arm and sending it spinning into the street.

Warren glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a plain white van slide forward along the curb behind him and across the lot exit. Warren turned to the right and accelerated into traffic, and by the time he could look in his mirrors again he was too late to see where the van had gone.

He drove along Wilshire to La Cienega, turned south, and kept checking the mirrors for the white van. It was only a few blocks to West Olympic, but the way contained a continuous row of restaurants and stores, and pedestrians walking to and from them, and there were traffic lights and congested stretches. He made it to Olympic, and he knew the Great Oceana office building was only a few blocks from that corner. He had just had at least two men try to keep him from leaving his office for the meeting by stopping his car. They were sure to be looking for it now.

When he passed a public parking lot, he pulled the black Honda in, selected a parking space next to a tall SUV, where it would be hard to spot from the busy Boulevard, took off his sport coat, folded it into his backpack, got out, and put the backpack on. He took a ticket from the attendant, and began to walk along Olympic at a brisk pace. He tried to make himself part of the steady stream of people on the sidewalk, and not stand out. He had changed his appearance a bit by taking off the sport coat.

He didn’t look back up the street over his shoulder, which could get him noticed. He looked at the street ahead to watch for the van to pass him, and he kept wondering who those men could be. When men had been watching the Ellis house, he hadn’t seen a van, and he had been too far away to get a look at their faces, but he suspected that these two were connected with that group.

As he walked, he heard, faintly at first, a single set of footsteps coming up the sidewalk, shoes hitting the pavement some distance behind him. He thought it might be time to look back, but at first decided to resist the impulse. If the van was about to pass by along Olympic, then both men would see his face. And even if they were far behind, nothing helped a pursuer spot a person better than having him look to see if he was being chased. But then the footsteps grew louder, and soon he heard a man’s panting breaths. He began to turn. As he did, a hand grasped the strap of his backpack and jerked him back.

Warren spun and freed an arm from his pack, and when the arm came around, he hooked it into the man’s jaw. This was the same man who had grabbed him at his office building. The blow rocked the man sideways and made him raise his hands to his face. Warren ran at him, pushing the backpack against his chest. The man retreated backward, but after three steps his feet weren’t moving fast enough, and he fell overbackward onto the sidewalk. Warren saw the man start to get up, and realized his right hand was reaching into his jacket.

Warren turned and began to run. After three steps he had his arms through the straps of the backpack again, shrugged it up onto his back, and ran harder. He accomplished only about fifteen more steps before he felt an impact pound his back and hammer him ahead a step.

It was only then that he realized he had heard a shot. He needed to run a few quicker steps to recover his balance and avoid falling forward, and as he did, he understood what had just happened, and his alarm goaded him to a sprint. The man had freed his pistol from his coat and shot Warren in the back. As Warren ran, he wondered if he was one of those shooting victims who was dying but didn’t know it at first because he was in shock.

It didn’t matter what was enabling Warren to run. He was glad he could do it. He heard two more shots, but he didn’t feel anything. He reached the next corner on a green light and dashed across the street, and as he did, he saw theWALKsign begin to flash. He glanced behind him, and he could see the man with the gun was up and running after him, but now he was almost a whole block behind. Warren judged that the light would turn red before the shooter reached the corner, but he could also see that his decision to look back seemed to have made the man speed up.

He was beginning to think more clearly now. He was sure that what must have happened was that the man’s first shot had hit his backpack, and the assortment of stuff in it had diminished the bullet’s energy enough so it hadn’t reached his back. It would have pierced the backpack’s fabric, then hit the laptop, and if it had gone all the way through the metal case, the screen, the circuitry, the keyboard, and the other metal side, it would have needed to pierce at least two reams of paper to get to his folded sport coat and then the inner side of the pack.

As he reached Tillis Avenue, which seemed to be the final cross-street before the Great Oceana office on Olympic, time sped up. The white van arrived at the same intersection, Olympic and Tillis, less than a second later. Warren’s momentum had already carried him out into the street, and he saw the driver spot him and glance ahead up Olympic to see if he had time to make the left turn to hit Warren as he tried to run across the open pavement. The driver decided to chance it, and swung to the left toward Warren. There was the loud blare of a car horn and the squeal of brakes as the driver of a car coming toward the van on Olympic tried to stop to avoid hitting it.

The front of the white van appeared to expand as it roared onto Tillis Street toward him. He took two steps and dove, landed on a dusty patch of weeds and grass, and struggled to his feet as the white van streaked past behind him. He saw the shooter was in the passenger seat, and guessed the van’s driver would try to stop and let the shooter out.

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