Day Four
July 24, 1952
Thursday Morning
Wilde woke up, not in a bed. He was behind the steering wheel of Blondie, parked on the side of a street. The sky was lighter than midnight but not by much. A bona-fide dawn was still an hour away. He stretched and rubbed his eyes. The street was quiet, eerily so.
He stepped out.
His legs were heavy.
The thin Denver air was cool.
No one was around.
He walked over to the bushes, unzipped and took a long, heaven-sent piss. The bullet missed him last night. It also forced him into a panic dive. By the time he got to his feet, the sprint was on. The other man was faster and that was that.
Wilde was stupid.
He was stupid beyond belief.
He should have made the cab driver tell him where he was going to drop London off. Was Wilde smart enough to ask that simple little question? No, he wasn’t, because he was the stupidest man on the planet. So now there he was, having no idea where London was.
The other man knew, though.
He knew only too well.
Wilde hadn’t planned for that contingency. He had planned to the point of capturing the guy, but not for failure.
That was stupid.
He had run over to Colfax then east towards town until he was able to flag down a taxi. He took it to his house, got Blondie, dropped Alabama off at a hotel just in case the guy had been following London earlier in the day and had figured out who Wilde was, then started crisscrossing the city, hoping by blind luck to stumble across London.
That stumble didn’t happen.
He checked her house.
She wasn’t there.
He parked down the street and kept an eye on her front door. Midnight came and went, then one, then one-thirty, then longer. He must have fallen asleep at that point.
He zipped up.
Back at Blondie, the gun and knife were sitting on the passenger seat. He grabbed the gun, tucked it in his waist and headed for London’s front door.
It was unlocked, just like they’d left it when they ran out last night, just like he left it after he checked the place last night.
Two doors down, a rough dog barked.
Wilde stepped inside.
The air was still and quiet.
“London?”
No one answered.
“London? You here?”
Silence.
The lower level was as before. He headed upstairs, not bothering to take the gun out of his belt. London’s bedroom was vacant.
Wilde sat on the edge of the bed.
She was dead.
She was dead because he was stupid.
He flopped back and closed his eyes.
He thought he was tough.
He was wrong.
He was just a guy who did stupid things and got people killed.
He needed to get out of the PI business.
He needed to get out of Denver.
He needed to put all this behind him and hope to never get anyone else killed.