Santa Fe Edge

38

Dolly lay in bed with Tip Hanks, her head on his shoulder and her hand cupping his balls. She had just given him the blow job of his life, judging from his reaction, and for all practical purposes he was now hers. All she had to do was keep it that way.

Dolly had made a very nice career for herself. Born Helga Swenson in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she had been a bookkeeper in a small factory for four years, and during that time she had taught herself to steal while covering her tracks. She had made only one mistake, one made by many embezzlers: She had taken a vacation.

An embezzler, she had learned, couldn’t do that, because someone else would do the bookkeeping in her absence and discover her crime. By that time, however, Helga had stolen nearly a million dollars, and she still had seven hundred thousand of it in a safe-deposit box.

She had returned from her two weeks in the islands to find several messages from her boss on her phone machine, and one from a police officer. She had immediately packed a bag and booked into a motel for the night. The following morning, she was at the bank at opening time and cleaned out her box. She drove to Chicago, sold her car, bought another from another dealer and headed west.

She was a smart girl, and she had taken the precaution of obtaining a genuine passport and a driver’s license under a new name, using a stolen birth certificate, so she made a clean getaway.

She repeated her crime at two other companies, in Kansas City, Missouri, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, then she had had a bit of luck. Departing Tulsa, she had met a man in the bar of a fine hotel in Dallas, and before the week was out she was his mistress in a nice apartment and his personal assistant. He was a consultant in the oil business and traveled almost constantly, leaving her in charge of his bank accounts, which she had looted while charging a new wardrobe to his credit cards. Since she paid the bills, he never noticed.

She had moved on to Santa Fe and met Tip’s wife in a bar, too, and after years of switch-hitting had no trouble in endearing herself. Constance Hanks had been smarter than her earlier bosses, though, and had caught her stealing cash from Tip’s desk drawer. Then she had found herself in the position of sex slave instead of sex partner, and she had not enjoyed it. She found a way out when she discovered a gun in the bedside drawer while looking for a sex toy. She planned the event carefully and surprised herself with her own coolness and lack of guilt. She had no plans to repeat the experience, because it was too dangerous, but it was nice to know she had the guts to do it if she had to.

Tip Hanks, unbeknownst to him, was now on the brink of a major hit to his financial status. His inheritance of his wife’s estate would soon result in a very large cash deposit being made into his bank account, to which Dolly was now a signatory, and she was tracking the progress on the settling of the estate.

Dolly had become more sophisticated in her techniques over the years. On a vacation in the Cayman Islands she had had a conversation with a banker and, as a result, had learned how, through a series of wire transfers to accounts established around the world, to make cash virtually untraceable, especially in the relatively modest amounts she stole. Less than a million dollars, she had learned, would not interest a Treasury or FBI agent, who would certainly have bigger fish to reel in. Still, she had managed, through thrift and daring, to amass a small fortune of nearly two million dollars, and she meant to see that it grew.

Soon she would arrange a convergence of the settling of Connie Hanks’s estate with one of Tip’s five-day trips to a golf tournament, and when he returned home he would discover that his checks were bouncing. By that time, of course, she would be establishing herself in another city, perhaps Los Angeles, in an area not frequented by golf pros.

Dolly gently left the bed of the snoring Tip and got into the shower. She had already, at his invitation, moved from the guesthouse into the master suite, and Tip was talking marriage, when a suitable period of mourning had been served. She liked Tip, but she liked his money more.

ED EAGLE WAS SITTING up in bed when Susannah arrived with flowers and magazines.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, kissing him fondly.

“Stronger,” Eagle replied. “Not so tired. I’m going to bust out of here in a day or two.”

“Maybe, sport, but you’re not going back to work just yet. I get to pamper you a little more before you do that.”

“You think we really need the cop on the door?” he asked.

“You bet your sweet ass I do,” Susannah replied. “You don’t think Barbara is done, do you?”

Eagle sighed. “I guess I don’t, and the thought depresses me.”

“Then don’t think it,” she said. “Let me do that.”

“You know, don’t you, that if you keep on shooting people we’re going to end up in court.”

“You have a point,” she agreed. “Vittorio has been a prince about it, though. He says my mistake was perfectly understandable, and I cannot bring myself to disagree with him.”

“I paid his hospital bill,” Eagle said.

“And I’ve been sending him his meals while he recuperates,” Susannah said. “Turns out he loves Mexican, and you know what a good Mexican cook I am.”

“I do indeed,” Eagle said, squeezing her hand.

“Listen, Ed, I was going to bring this up, even if you hadn’t nearly died, but do you think you’re in a position to ease up on the practice of law? I don’t mean sell the firm, just take, say, half as many cases, personally.”

“Well,” he replied, “there’s nothing like a near-death experience to make you reevaluate your existence. I don’t want to make any rash promises. Let me think about it.”

“That’s all I ask,” she said, “for the moment.”

AT THAT SAME MOMENT Barbara was getting off an airliner in Albuquerque. She collected her bags and took a taxi to the long-term parking lot and found her car there, with the ticket tucked under the driver’s sun visor. She found a decent restaurant in Albuquerque and had some dinner, then checked into a motel.

The following morning she looked for a medical supply store in the yellow pages and purchased some hospital scrubs, a white lab coat, a stethoscope and some of those awful white sneakers that nurses wear.

While in the store, she saw a woman with beautiful hair and asked who her hairdresser was. She spent the afternoon there getting a facial, a manicure and pedicure, and becoming a brunette.

It was time to get this thing done, once and for all.