Contract Null & Void

Chapter Twenty-one

Ballard woke at 8:00 A.M. in Amalia’s bed with a stinging sense of loss, realized it was because she was not beside him. He got up, padded nude and barefoot through the little apartment. Coffee was made, she’d burned a cigarette or two with her toast.

No note. Then he saw the happy face drawn on the front page of the morning Chronicle in red felt-tip and was suddenly happy himself. Had the night with her been as incredible as it had seemed, or... He wrote “Tonight?” under the happy face with the same pen, dressed, headed home. He’d maybe catch a couple more hours sleep, change and shower, before going out again.

He still had no leads to Danny, and he was sure his In basket at DKA would be stuffed with new assignments and memos on the old ones. A good omen, perhaps, his car was where he had parked it, unscathed, not even a ticket under the wiper blade.

Through the frosted glass of the front door on Lincoln Way he saw movement in the hall. Kearny was still bunking in at his place — unless Jeanne had taken pity on poor Ballard and let her husband back into the house.

But when he unlocked the door and opened it, he was looking at Takoko Togawa’s little round face. Her hair was wet and she wore only a towel. Usually she would have covered her mouth and giggled, then fled down the hall to the safety of her own minuscule apartment. Not today.

“You catch me,” she said solemnly, her eyes big.

“Catch you?” asked Ballard densely.

“In hall. In towel.”

She paused in the open doorway of her apartment, looking at him. No giggling. Face very solemn. Then she smiled. It was a smile unlike any he had ever seen on her face before. As she disappeared around the edge of the doorway, the towel happened to slip. He got a fraction of a second of slender glowing ivory legs, rounded curve of haunch, then she was gone like a dream. But the final corner of the towel remained in the open doorway.

He took a step, another down the hall, stopped. The door was still open. The invitation was clear. After two years of pursuit, she was ready to be caught.

Except. Except Amalia. Last night had been... had been...

What was happening to him? He fell in love a lot, but last night, Amalia... Surely that had been different... Somehow he just... couldn’t betray the night, even though there was no reason to think that Amalia felt the same way he did...

Of course she did. It had been too intense, physically and emotionally, for her not to.

Down at the end of the hall, the final corner of the towel was drawn from view. Then an exquisite golden arm stretched across the open doorway and a tiny hand grasped the doorknob and slowly, gently, as if it were part of some elaborate tea ceremony, pulled the door shut.

Ballard heard the latch click. He wanted to rush down the hall, knock on that door, beg Takoko to let him in for the shared ecstasy he had sought for two long years...

Instead, full of sorrow at lost opportunity and pride at newfound constancy, he unlocked his door and went into his cheerless little apartment.

To find goddam Dan Kearny still asleep in his bed.

He went down the hall for his shower, forgoing further rest to avoid strangling the man to death in his sleep.

Dan Kearny rolled over and looked at the cheap alarm clock on the stand beside the bed. Noon. Five hours of shut-eye. Once, five hours would have been plenty of sleep. Now he felt exhausted, old. Sitting up all night on that ridiculous guard duty at the Rochemont estate was what had done it. Ridiculous, yes; but the old lady was paying enough to make it all right.

Almost all right.

He tapped out his home number as he did every morning. Jeanne picked up on the third ring. He spoke very quickly, in an untypical rush of words. “Honey, don’t hang up before—”

Click.

Goddammit, he’d get dressed and drive over there across the Bay Bridge and have it out with her. It was his goddam house, wasn’t it? She was his wife, wasn’t she? Why in Christ’s name couldn’t she just tell him what was wrong, instead of...

No. Wrong.

Ballard must have been there while he was asleep; the coffeepot was still hot. He poured a cup, sat at the counter sipping it, wishing there was a doughnut or sweet roll or something to dip in it. Damn, that was good coffee!

All his life he’d gone straight at things like a charging bull, but if he did that now he would lose her, lose his marriage, lose everything — hell, probably half of DKA, too — if he didn’t figure out a different way to go at this. You couldn’t force your way through it. You had to treat it as a minefield, you had to cautiously inch your way on all fours...

Suddenly, Kearny felt better. He had a simile made sense to him, made it okay to take things slow with Jeanne, puzzle out what she needed. Minefield. He could live with that idea.

Where was he with the Rochemont thing? The would-be killer broaches formidable security defenses, gets by two pretty damned skilled investigators serving as guards, creeps upstairs to kill the sleeping Paul with a pickax — and suddenly it’s Three Stooges time. The head flies off the ax. The handle bounces away. Nobody is hurt. Inga not only screams so loud she brings the troops running, she identifies the attacker as an ex-lover computer nerd who promptly becomes Houdini at eluding the cops.

Paul’s car is shot up. Paul’s new car is blown up. Kearny’s car is almost rammed while Paul is in it, shots are fired... But as he’d told Giselle, shot up without Paul in it, blown up without Paul in it, not quite rammed, not quite shot. And the man doing all this wasn’t the man Inga had identified.

Not yet enough to start asking the clients hard questions. But plenty to start asking the hard questions elsewhere.

First, go down to the office and raise a little hell there, then go back out into the field himself.

O’B was stone-cold sober and feeling great. Not even a beer for breakfast. He’d left both car and truck parked in Tony d’Angelo’s driveway when he’d got home after midnight, so tired he could hardly see.

After unfastening his company car from the towbar he finished the condition report on John Little’s longbed. Then he drove to the post office, picked up the DKA mail from the box, and had a bacon-bacon cheeseburger with curly fries and a medium Coke at Jack-in-the-Box. Two spoons of sugar in each cup of coffee. Cut off the booze, you craved sugar.

Cut off the booze. Scary idea.

So was waking up with your nose in the floorboards of your car and your tongue tasting like used toilet paper, believing you’d been buried alive.

At the little printshop three doors down from the fastfood joint, a cheerfully rotund man with snapping eyes and receding black curly hair was inking one of the presses in the small cluttered room behind the counter. The place smelled of ink, paper, hot metal, and photo-developing chemicals. How long would he be lasting in the Internet Age?

O’B, who had decided a frontal assault on Blow Me Baby’s instruments would only end in disaster, laid down a half sheet of stationery with some hand-printed lettering on it.

Next, he laid down a page torn from the showbiz daily paper, the Hollywood Reporter, bragging about a $100-million-plus domestic gross for a big-star movie. The ad proudly bore the logo of the studio that had produced the film.

Finally, O’B laid two $20 bills on the countertop.

“Playing forty questions?” asked the printer.

O’B tapped his finger on the printing on the half sheet of paper, then on the logo in the ad.

“I bet you can’t print me up half a dozen business cards with this copy in the middle of the card and this logo in the top left-hand corner in two hours for forty bucks,” he said.

The twenties disappeared. “You lose,” said the printer.

Back at Tony’s after giving him the particulars, O’B checked for overnight faxes and phone calls.

Two new assignments and a closeout on one of his open files; he’d left his card stuck in the door and the guy had rushed into the bank and brought the account current. Probably thought that way he’d duck the collection charges. Sorry, Charlie. They just go onto your balance: at the end of the contract, no pink slip until you pay them all off.

A fax from Kearny, just a big scrawl across the sheet of paper: SHOOT THE ROTTWEILER. SHOOT THE SUBJECT. SHOOT THE MOON. GRAB THE TIRES.

The bastard had gotten his last report, telling what had happened to Tony and why, but did it touch him? It did not. He probably was waiting to enjoy the look of disgust on the paramedics’ faces when they had to give O’B mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after Nordstrom and his dog were through with him.

O’B simmered down. Tomorrow for the tires. Tonight for Blow Me Baby and their equipment. Today...

Today, pick up his new business cards, and then, after he opened the mail from the p.o. box...

“Shit,” he said aloud in the silent office.

It was a REPO ON SIGHT for a TV/VCR/entertainment center. His contract had been declared null and void. The subject: a man named John Little at 98392 Fallen Tree Road.

Yesterday his truck. Today his TV.

Maybe the poor bastard’s wife hadn’t really left him at all. Maybe the minister that married them had repossessed her.