Deadly Pursuit

4

The morning sun splashed wide bands of orange light across Wilshire Boulevard, fifteen stories below Jack Dance’s feet.

Standing at the corner windows of his high-rise apartment, he surveyed the glittering tide of traffic flowing past Westwood Village toward the on-ramp of the 405. Beyond the distant marquees of the Bruin and Village theaters rose the Santa Monica Mountains, pasted on the sky like billows of frozen smoke, purple and gently rounded.

Jack loved Los Angeles. Yes, loved it, despite the grit and ugliness now visible nearly everywhere, despite the muttering legions of shopping-cart people who’d turned the city into a vast open-air mental ward, despite the gang graffiti on alley walls and the taggers’ slogans defacing every other billboard, despite the traffic snarls and freeway closures and unpatched potholes pockmarking the streets. Hell, despite everything.

He loved L.A. because it was his type of place: phony, crass, and exploitative; selfish, often cruel, otherwise indifferent; obsessed with flesh and money; a city that preyed on vain hopes and foolish delusions and the desperate yearnings of the unfulfilled.

He checked his watch-time to go-and drew the curtains, shutting out the sun.

Before leaving, he went into the bedroom. Sheila was still asleep, naturally. She had kicked the covers off, exposing her long, suntanned legs and tight white buns.

Jack approached the bed and leaned close. Her brown hair, prematurely accented with streaks of gray, lay across her bronzed back in a luxuriant mess. He poked her shoulder, not gently.

“Hey.”

She stirred, eyelashes fluttering, then rolled on her side and blinked at him. Her eyes were gray-green, very lovely and very safe.

“Fuck…” The word slid out of her like a groan.

Jack grinned. “Hello, sleepyhead. I’m off to work. Figured it was time for you to rise and shine.”

“Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. Oh, Christ, I hate mornings.”

“Hey, hey, that’s not the right attitude. You’ve got places to go, people to see.” Jack enjoyed baiting her, contrasting her inertia with his leaping energy, his caffeine-and-adrenaline rush. “Up and at ’em. There’s a great big world out there, and it’s waiting for you.”

“Eat shit.” She dragged the back of her hand across her face. “Give me a cigarette.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“One of my cigarettes.”

“Get it yourself.”

“God damn you, Jack.”

He bent and kissed her roughly on the mouth. “Love you, too,” he breathed in her ear.

She pushed him away, then scowled with a sudden thought. “What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

“Oh, hell. What did you wake me up for, you stupid shit? You know I’ve got Thursdays off.”

“But you don’t want to waste the whole morning, do you?”

“Like fuck I don’t.” She flung herself on her pillow and shut her eyes. “You asshole.”

“Spoken like an angel.”

“Get out of here.” Already her voice was a murmur. “Leave me alone.”

“Your wish is my command, O beautiful one.”

“Bite it,” she murmured, drifting away.

He left the room, chuckling.

Jack’s relationship with Sheila Tate, whom he’d met in a singles bar last March and had dated intermittently ever since, was perhaps not a model of romantic bliss. It was more like an exercise in undisguised mutual contempt. He despised her because she was, at heart, a whore, using sex to gain gifts and favors and money. She despised him because he knew what she was and continued seeing her. She interpreted this behavior as weakness. In that conclusion, however, she was mistaken.

He persisted in the affair, such as it was, solely for convenience. Masturbation had never done much to relieve his hormonal urges. He needed flesh and hair to sink his fingers into, needed the smell of a woman’s sweat.

And for him, Sheila was the ideal woman. She made no demands on him, expressed no curiosity about those weekends when he was out of town, performed whatever sex acts he requested, and expected nothing in return except presents of jewelry, electronic toys, and cash.

Above all, she was safe, because she was not his type.

Once, last May, Sheila had frightened him by remarking idly that she might try dyeing her hair blond. Jack had argued strenuously against it, the pitch of his voice rising as he insisted she would be crazy to become a blond, absolutely crazy.

He must have been persuasive. Or perhaps she had simply lost interest in the notion. Either way, she hadn’t done it; but for weeks afterward he had been terrified that she would walk into his apartment one evening, the transformation accomplished.

He was by no means certain he could control himself in those circumstances. And if he killed her…

Disaster. The police would be all over him like flies.

Still, it hadn’t happened, and he no longer feared that it would.

She wouldn’t look good as a blond, anyway.

Whistling, Jack left the apartment. He pressed the call button, then stood waiting for the elevator, appraising himself in the polished metal doors.

The slate blue Brooks Brothers suit had been a good choice, he decided. He always dressed conservatively, his attire selected purely for the benefit of his associates at work. He’d found that presenting a businesslike demeanor promoted professionalism and efficiency, admirable qualities even in his field.

The elevator dropped him to the underground garage, where his red Nissan Z waited in its assigned space. The license plate read DEFY F8.

Defy Fate. Jack liked the sentiment. To his way of thinking, Fate was just one more mark to be conned.

He slipped behind the wheel and eased out of his space, thumbing the remote control to lift the automatic gate. Wilshire Boulevard swept him to the freeway on-ramp. He gunned the engine and hurtled onto the northbound 405.

Traffic was surprisingly light. Slicing deftly from lane to lane, he fed a disc into the CD player and cranked up the volume. Springsteen poured out of the four coaxial speakers, howling “Thunder Road” in his raspy, street-worn voice.

Jack rapped his knuckles on the steering wheel and sang along.

Bruce was an old story to him. Jack had listened to his LPs as a high-school student in Montclair, New Jersey, twenty years ago, long before the Born in the USA album made the Boss a national celebrity. He liked the anger and violence of the early Springsteen, the scrawny kid wounded by the world and snarling back at it in furious despair.

On a humid August night in 1978, he’d listened to Springsteen for hours, huddled in his bedroom in his parents’ house, headphones bracketing his ears, till he’d gotten up the nerve for his first kill.

He had been eighteen then. At the time he hadn’t thought of it as a first kill. It was the only murder he was contemplating, the one he had fantasized and rehearsed for seven long years.

Meredith had deserved it, too. That bitch.

A chill moved through him as he remembered the ecstatic pleasure of slamming her head into the concrete rim of the swimming pool, then holding her, unconscious, under the surface till her lungs were waterlogged sacs.

Afterward, he’d been free of any impulse to kill for a long time. Having exacted his revenge, he felt liberated, unencumbered by the past.

Except that he exhibited a curious reluctance to date women who reminded him of her. He preferred brunettes and redheads. He stayed away from blonds, most particularly blue-eyed, fair-skinned blonds.

He made it through his twenties without violence. But in his early thirties he did a thirteen-month stretch at Lompoc for a bank-examiner scam. His confinement gave him time to think, too much time, and the frustration of enforced abstinence from sex seemed to draw other, darker needs to his surface.

It was then that the feelings started.

He knew no word to describe them more exactly than that. Not sexual urges, not homicidal impulses, not sadistic tendencies-yet a little of all these, mixed with something else, something indefinable.

He had always been smooth with women. He could have a one-night stand whenever he liked. But it seemed that ordinary sex just wasn’t enough anymore.

He kept remembering the reflexive muscular twitches of Meredith’s body as he held her submerged, the pops and jerks of her shoulders, the sudden heaving of her chest as she inhaled water. And once she was dead, the wet blond hair wrapping her face like ribbons of kelp, the glazed emptiness in her eyes when he peeled back the lids.

It had been the supreme moment of his life, more satisfying than any con. And he wanted another triumph like it. And another. And another.

But he was determined to do it right. He’d made a small but potentially serious mistake in carrying out Meredith’s execution. The cops had been suspicious, and he’d spent some sleepless nights before her death was finally ruled an accident.

This time there would be no sloppy screw-ups. Thirteen months in a cell had been long enough; he would never go back.

He delayed his plans until he settled on the perfect strategy-the killing of strangers in random cities far from home-and the ideal method.

His discovery of the method was pure luck. During a routine medical checkup, the nurse left him alone in the examination room for a few minutes. Restless, he looked through the drawers and found a box of unused disposable syringes. One of them went in his coat pocket, never to be missed.

Being plastic, with only a thin steel needle at its core, it could be hidden in his suit jacket and carried through an airport metal detector without triggering the alarm. It was quick and sure, bloodless and silent, and above all, intensely satisfying. He loved watching the women’s convulsions, their rolling eyes and flapping limbs.

Ronni Tyler’s death throes had been particularly gratifying. He had kissed her when she was finally dead, murmuring in her ear: “I hope it was good for you, too.”

The 405 rocketed him to the eastbound 101, where traffic was heavier and progress slow. He had nearly finished the Springsteen CD by the time he reached the strip mall in the North Hollywood district of L.A. He pulled into his parking slot at 9:25.

Of the eight business establishments in the modest L-shaped complex, Consolidated Silver amp; Gold Investors, Inc., had the largest office but the smallest sign. It was not meant to attract customers off the street.

A clamor of voices calling out buy and sell orders assaulted him as he stepped into the boiler room. The impression of frantic activity, like everything else about the operation, was a scam, a cheat; there was no mob of traders here, merely a tape loop playing sounds of a busy commodities exchange over four speakers bolted to the walls. A corny ruse, but it kept his salesmen wired while they worked the phones, and it served well as background noise during the pitch.

Jack paused just inside the doorway and surveyed his kingdom. Gray short-nap carpet, painted plywood walls, extension cords stretched along the baseboards. Half a dozen cheap metal desks and swivel chairs flanked by wastebaskets filled with old newspapers and takeout food containers. The wide front windows had been covered with Venetian blinds, now partially open to let in stripes of sun that complemented the frosty glare of fluorescent panels.

Three of his four men-he only hired men; women couldn’t sell; it was an article of faith with him-were already on the phones, pressing hard for the first deal of the day. They greeted him with smiles and waves, and kept talking. The smiles were genuine; his men respected him and liked him. Behind his back, but sometimes within earshot, they called him The Master.

Jack poured himself a mug of coffee, then sat at his desk in a rear corner, away from the glare of the windows. He wondered, not for the first time, what his men would think of him if they knew how he spent his weekends.

Perhaps they would despise him for it. But he didn’t think so. There was an undercurrent of boiling violence beneath the average scam artist’s smooth exterior.

He would never know for certain, but he liked to believe that if his men did learn the truth about him, they would respect The Master that much more.