Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 111, No. 1. Whole No. 677, January 1998

Events in a Snowstorm by Raymond Steiber

© 1997 by Raymond Steiber

Raymond Steiber is as mysterious as his writings. When we asked him for some biographical notes he wrote: “I think ideally the author shouldn’t even exist for the reader — the story should just happen as if it came out of nowhere.” So we cannot tell you anything about him except that he also writes novels. (Interested? Try St. Martin s Press).

It was snowing when Sue Corwin turned out of the parking lot of the Grand Union and she felt her rear wheels break loose. A brief loss of traction — nothing more than that — but she tightened up anyway. Slick roads did that to her now. Slick roads summoned up the image of Ted’s Bronco, the front and side smashed in, the windshield gone, the steering wheel a twisted oval.

The snow came down harder. The wiper blades swept back and forth, barely able to keep up. She switched on her headlights, more to be seen than to see. It was going to be a big one, she decided. The first big snow of the winter. She’d always looked forward to the first snow. You threw an extra log in the woodstove. You brewed a cup of herbal tea. You snuggled up on the sofa with a good book, glancing up now and then to watch the progress of the storm. Winter was her quiet time. In the real-estate business you made your money in the spring, summer, and early fall. Then winter came and everything slowed to a crawl and you discovered other pleasures — rather guilty pleasures in this age. Tending the house, trying out new recipes on Ted, loafing. There was a lot to be said for loafing. It was the nifty little secret the housewives of the earlier part of the century had kept from their husbands.

But now — now winter felt different. It felt bleak and lonely, and as she turned into her driveway, the old frame house looked cheerless in the failing light.

She got the groceries out of the backseat and carried them up to the house. I ought to have a dog, she thought. Something warm and nonjudgmental to greet me when I open the door. But the spaniel had been with Ted that day and shared his fate. A state trooper had found her bloody and wimpering in the snow Reside the wreck. And the trooper had put her out of her misery, risking a dressing-down from his superior for drawing and firing his weapon.

She turned on the lights. Lights in the living room, lights in the kitchen. It didn’t help much. The basic fact was that she was alone.

She put on the tea kettle, then stood in front of the window while she waited for it to heat. The house wasn’t on the lake. It stood on a rise well back from it. But you could see the lake and the mountains beyond, too. Not just now, though. The swirling snow had made them do a disappearing act.

The phone rang, jolting her. It was the office phone, not the one in the living room. She went on through and picked it up without bothering to turn on the lights.

“Hi,” a voice said.

“Who is this?” But she already knew who it was. She knew from the reaction in her chest.

“It’s Ben. Ben Marciano. I had some business up in Albany and I thought I’d swing by and see you.”

She glanced out the window. “It’s not the best weather for it, Ben.”

“Don’t run me off now, I’m halfway there. We could have a meal at that place by the lake — Eddie’s. It’s not exactly the Four Seasons, but then I’ve never been in the Four Seasons.”

She hadn’t seen him since late in the fall. There’d been a snow that day, too, but then the sun had come out again and by late afternoon it was gone.

“Do you think you can make it in that car of yours?”

“It’s light. It rides right up over the snow. And it’s got frontwheel drive. And what the hell, if I end up in a ditch, I can always walk.”

She surprised herself by laughing. “We’d need a blowtorch to thaw you out.”

“Just stick me by the fire till a warm puddle forms. So is it all right to stop by?”

She hesitated a moment. She wasn’t going to say no, but she was like everybody else, she had to play the game.

“Well, I guess,” she said.

And wasn’t that well done — just the right amount of disinterest. She wondered at her guile. And she hadn’t had any practice in years. Maybe it came with the chromosomes.

“I figure six-thirty, seven o’clock,” he said.

She thought about Ted. She thought about the fatal slide. “Don’t force it, Ben.”

“Don’t worry. I’m indestructible. Don’t you know that?”

She put down the phone. Out in the kitchen the water was boiling briskly. She made her tea. Then she went upstairs and did something that made her blush in spite of her thirty-five years. She changed the sheets on the bed.

It wasn’t that the car was in the ditch. It was that it was in the ditch with one door hanging open.

Ben gentled the Probe to a stop on the slick road. Then he set the brake and hit the emergency flasher button. He climbed out from behind the wheel. He had thick black hair and one of those faces women like — a little hard, though, around the eyes and mouth. He lit a cigarette and approached the car in the ditch. It was a blue Toyota four-door and it sat at a ludicrous angle with the right-hand headlight buried in the snowy bank.

They really put it in there, he thought. It’ll take a wrecker to get it out.

The door that hung open was on the passenger side. It had only gone partway and then jammed against the bank. There was just enough room for somebody to squeeze out, and he could see footprints there, half filled with new snow. A funny thing about those footprints. They didn’t circle back to the road. They tracked straight off into the woods.

Epauletes of white were forming on the shoulders of his black leather jacket. He took a drag off the cigarette. Filthy habit, but he was too much of a nicotine degenerate to quit.

He circled around the back of the car and slid through the open door. Right away he knew it was a renter, and a recent one at that. There was none of the usual clutter people leave behind when they use a car day in and day out. He opened the glove compartment and found nothing inside but the owner’s manual in its plastic sleeve. That made it certain it was a renter.

He’d been holding the cigarette outside the car. Good thing, too, because its absence from the interior allowed him to detect the faint odor of a woman’s scent. The tracks outside appeared to be those of a man. So there’d been two people in the car and they’d taken off in different directions.

Funny how when you were trained for it, when it was your profession, you could sense when things were wrong. Abandoned car in a ditch on a snowy night — you saw it all the time. And all it meant was that the driver hadn’t been able to handle the conditions. Incompetence or overconfidence — the two abiding traits of the human race. Yet the second his headlights had picked out the Toyota he had known that it was more than that. And now, as his eyes drifted to the upper edge of the windshield, his hunch was verified.

The snow layering the outside of the glass had partially obscured it. That was why he hadn’t spotted it the moment he’d slid inside the car. A dime-size hole with a spiderweb of cracks raying away from it.

So there’d been a third person in the car — probably in the backseat. And he’d had a pistol. And he’d used it at least once.

It was dark out now, coasting toward seven-thirty. She thought: Ben should’ve been here by now.

She went to the window. It was getting impossible out there, a constant slant of snow. She couldn’t even tell where the road was anymore. She tried to remember the last time she’d heard a car go by and couldn’t.

He’s stuck somewhere, she thought. Let it be that and nothing else. He’ll call me, tell me he can’t make it — like Ted should’ve called and hadn’t.

It got to be a quarter of eight and still there was no sign of Ben. She kept going to the window. She would’ve made herself a cup of tea, but she’d had so much already that her kidneys were floating.

She went out into the kitchen anyway. And that was when the back doorknob rattled and there was a soft, tentative knock.

A little thrill went through her — what the French call a frisson — and it wasn’t very pleasant. She had the feeling that whoever it was had been standing outside the door for some time, trying to figure out whether anyone was at home. Then he’d tried the knob and just at that moment the kitchen light had come on and he’d had to switch to a knock.

Ted had owned a hunting rifle and also a pistol. But after his death it had all been put in a trunk, and the trunk had gone up in the attic. So as far as weapons went, she was naked.

Kitchen knife, she thought. Then she realized how ludicrous it would be to open the door on a neighbor holding it in her hand.

Then she had a better idea. She flipped on the back-porch light. Then she pushed a chair against the counter and got up on it and opened the window over the sink.

He swung his face around and stared at her as she stuck her head out. He was a skinny guy with a short blond beard. His hair was blond, too, and thinning in front even though he couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. There was snow caked on his pants legs and snow in his beard and eyebrows and he looked utterly wretched.

He gave a shake of his head as if to unlimber his neck and began talking. “Hey, look, could I use your telephone? I put my car in a ditch and I need help.”

“Why’d you come to the back door?”

He waved a hand behind him. “I came out of the woods. I saw the lights down here and cut across a field and got all tangled up and now I don’t even know if I ended up the same place I headed for. So could I use your phone?”

There was an almost pleading look on his face. He was shivering and miserable and didn’t look dangerous at all. One of those people who make a mess of everything, even taking a shortcut on a blizzardy night.

“Wait a minute,” she said.

She climbed down off the chair. She thought about the knife again, then dismissed the idea as foolish.

He came into the kitchen, dripping snow and watching her worriedly with pale blue eyes — as if she might consign him once again to the mercies of the blizzard.

“How far did you walk?”

His eyes seemed to blank out on her. “How far? I don’t know.”

She handed him a kitchen towel. “You’d better dry your head.”

“What? Oh yeah. Sure.”

“Then we can go in the living room and you can use the phone.”

“Phone. Yeah.” As if it had just now occurred to him. “Is there, like, is there a taxi in this town?”

“Don’t you want a wrecker to pull your car out of the ditch?”

“That can wait — I got to get someplace.”

“We don’t have any taxis. The town’s too small. It’s mainly a summer place. People from the city have vacation homes along the lake. All we get in winter is the overflow from the ski resorts.”

He blinked at her. He seemed disoriented — not from the cold or his trudge through the snow, but from something else. Then she realized what it was. He’s afraid, she thought.

“How’m I — how’m I going to get out of here? I got to get up to Saranac Lake, someplace like that.” He didn’t add, “So I’ll be safe.” But he could’ve added it.

“There’s a motor court in town.”

“No — that’s out.”

He twisted his head around and stared at the wall, then twisted it back again.

“Look, you could drive me. You’re used to this crap — you live up here. And I’d give you — what would I give you? — I’d give you fifty. Hell, I’d give you a hundred if you wanted.”

“I’m expecting someone.”

He twisted his head around again. He seemed to do that when he wanted to think — as if he were shutting her out momentarily and going into a quiet room where the ideas would flow.

He twisted his head back again. “Leave them a note. Leave it right on the front door. That’d be all right.”

“Listen — I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in, but you’re obviously in some sort of trouble.”

He blinked his eyes at her in horror. “No — what makes you think that?”

“Anyway, we have a sheriff’s deputy here and maybe, well, you might want to talk to him.”

“No — what’s going on here? I just put my car in a ditch, that’s all. What’s wrong with that? And now I want to get to Saranac Lake — yeah, Saranac. Or Placid if it’s closer.”

“Well, I’m not going to take you. I don’t like driving in this any more than you do. And I told you — I’m expecting someone.”

He twisted his head away again. She could hear him mumbling to himself. Abruptly he turned back.

“All right — we’ll do it the hard way.”

He’d jammed his hands in the pockets of his coat. She’d thought it was because he was still cold. But now the left one came out holding a pistol.

Ben had used the emergency phone in a pull-off to call the cops, and now, a quick fifteen minutes later, a patrol car pulled in. Ben slid out of the Probe and walked over to it and opened the right-hand door. Frank Bauer, the deputy who patrolled this end of the county, sat behind the wheel. He was a friend of Sue Corwin’s and maybe wanted to be more than that, and he didn’t look too happy to see him.

“What’re you doing up here?”

“I swung by to visit a friend,” Ben said.

He didn’t ask what friend — he’d already figured that out — and the look in his eyes said he didn’t like it.

“Get in, Marciano, and we’ll go look at this mysterious car of yours.”

“It’s got a bullet hole in the windshield. I thought you ought to know, Frank.”

“You’re pretty good at finding things with bullet holes in them,” he said sarcastically.

“Hey, I caught one myself once.”

They swung out of the parking lot. Bauer took it pretty fast — maybe just to put Ben in his place. But he could drive all right. He looked like he could mush through just about anything.

He shot a glance at Ben. “What do you figure about this car?”

“Not a lot. Just that the guy in the passenger seat didn’t much like being there and took the first opportunity to get out. And, oh yeah, that the guy with the pistol was in the backseat.”

“What makes you think that?”

“The placement of the bullet hole in the windshield. That’s just a hunch, though. I’m a private investigator, not a ballistics expert.”

“So what happened to the guy that got out — if you know so much?”

Ben shrugged. “He’s off in the woods somewhere. Probably an icicle by now. You sure keep the heat cranked up in this car.”

“I like my creature comforts. And if that’s a cigarette you’re reaching for, we got a policy against smoking in patrol cars.”

They came up on the ditched Toyota, and Bauer brought the car to a halt. Ditched in more ways than one, Ben thought as he saw it again.

They got out and looked at it. Bauer opened the driver’s-side door and peered at a sticker on the windshield. “It’s a rental,” he said.

“I already figured that.”

“That means we’ll be able to trace back and see who rented it.”

“If they used their right names.”

Ben walked around to the other side of the car. Bauer glanced at him once, then leaned back inside. And that was when Ben bent his knees and retrieved something from under the right front fender. He’d spotted it from the road. By the time Bauer looked up again it was already under his coat where the snow it had collected began to melt into his shirt.

“Nothing much I can do here,” Bauer said, “except call a wrecker and get this thing hauled into town.”

“What about the guy who ran off into the woods?”

“What about him?”

“That shot through the windshield might not have been the only one fired.”

“What do you think? That he’s out there wounded?”

“I don’t have any idea, Frank.”

Bauer got out his flashlight and swung the beam into the woods. Nothing but black tree trunks and white snow. The footprints weren’t even visible anymore — which meant that a body probably wouldn’t be either.

Bauer shook his head. “I’ll need help, and where am I going to get it on a night like this? Come on. I’ll take you back to your car.”

As soon as Ben was inside the Probe, he lit a cigarette. He waited until the patrol car was gone, then he reached inside his coat and got the thing he’d found beside the car.

It was an eight-by-ten glossy — enlarged from the fuzzy look of it — and it had a heel print on the back of it where somebody’d stepped on it as they’d made a hasty exit from the Toyota. It showed a computer screen, and it looked, from the angle, as if it had been shot from above and behind. The contents of computer screens are notoriously difficult to photograph in normal light, but some sort of masking filter had been used and you could read every word and number. In the left-hand corner of the screen was a company logo that read Aerosmith. Directly below it were the first dozen lines of a computer program. It wasn’t written in anything simple either, but in some sort of compressed scientific language.

Ben thought about the angle of the shot. You’d get an angle like that from a camera mounted near the top of an office wall — say, behind the grille of a ventilation duct. Then he noticed the fuzzy black bar that ran horizontally across the bottom part of the picture. No wonder the photograph was so grainy — it hadn’t been taken directly off the computer; it was a shot of a television screen.

All at once Ben noticed how cold it was getting in the car. He also remembered that he had a rather important engagement and realized that excuses about wintry roads would only take him so far.

He got the engine started and switched on the headlights, and as he did so a car armored with snow passed by. It was a four-door, and his lights briefly flooded the driver’s seat. What the hell, he thought. That was Sue at the wheel.

For about five seconds he didn’t react. Then he shoved the gear lever into first and slewed out of the parking area.

It took him awhile to catch up on the slippery road, but when he did he saw she wasn’t alone. There was a man in the passenger seat beside her. He glanced over his shoulder as the headlights of Ben’s Probe came up from behind.

Something was screwy here — something other than Sue being out on the road when she should’ve been home waiting for him. But he didn’t know what it was until the man stared back at the Probe again. And then he only half knew it because even though a bell of recognition rang in his head, no name and no connection accompanied it.

He decided to juice things along a bit. He pulled up on the bumper of the sedan and flashed his brights on.

The guy stared back at him. Ben could see the shocked look in his eyes — as if it weren’t headlights hitting him in the face but blows from a fist.

He jerked his head toward the front of the car again and hunched his shoulders. The bastard’s terrified, Ben realized. Then he saw how tense Sue was at the wheel and figured out that the guy wasn’t a welcome companion.

The man stared back again. He couldn’t seem to resist doing it. Sue glanced sidewise at him, her hands tight on the wheel.

Holy crap, Ben thought. That’s Gary Karlin. And wheels turned and tumblers fell into place and all at once he knew what this was about — the car in the ditch, the bullet hole in the windshield, and Karlin tense as a wound-up spring in the car ahead.

Karlin tore his gaze away and stared through the windshield. But he couldn’t keep it up, and in less than ten seconds his eyes were locked on the Probe again.

Up ahead a vehicle with a flashing yellow light on the roof was approaching. It was the wrecker Frank Bauer had called.

Another sidewise glance from Sue. Her hands tensed on the wheel. Even at this distance Ben could see what she was going to do. He eased off the gas — and just in time, too.

Sue slammed on the brakes full force. The sedan spun on its axis and came to a stop with its headlights beaming into the woods. Ben just managed to get the Probe stopped before it slammed into the side of it. Sue flung herself out the left-hand door and ran toward the wrecker. Karlin made a grab at her and missed. Then he tumbled out the door on his own side. There was a steep bank on the right and he couldn’t scramble away into the woods. And the driver of the wrecker had just now applied his brakes and was sliding to a stop on the left. Karlin had a pistol in his hand. He tried to run between the wrecker and the Probe. Ben pushed the door handle down, timed it as Karlin came around the front fender, and then drove the door into his chest. Karlin’s feet went out from under him, and Ben had to reach down and grab him by the collar and drag him out of the way of the rear wheels of the wrecker.

As soon as the wrecker had passed, he slid out of the car and put a knee in Karlin’s back and then looked around for the pistol. It had skidded a dozen yards across the snow-packed road.

The wrecker had finally come to a stop, and a fortyish woman stuck her head out the window. She wore a knit cap with a baseball cap over the top of it.

“What the hell’s going on?”

“Right now, you mean? Not a thing. When you catch up with Frank Bauer, tell him I’ve got one of the guys from the car down here.”

The woman muttered something about nutcases and got the wrecker moving again.

Ben took his knee out of Karlin’s back and crouched beside him.

“Hello, Gary.”

Karlin jerked his head around and stared at him. “Do I know you?”

“My name’s Marciano.”

Karlin squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh hell — I do know you.”

Sue picked up the pistol. “Rats — he left the safety on. I could’ve got away from him anytime I wanted.”

Karlin was sitting up now with his back against the side of the car. “Do you think I wanted to hurt you? I just wanted to get out of here.”

Ben had lit a fresh cigarette. “Gary here was so scared that he won’t have to have another bowel movement for a month.”

Sue laughed in spite of herself — surprised at herself for being so cool when she’d hit the brakes and even more surprised when it had turned out that Ben had been in the car behind.

Ben said: “Is that the pistol that put the hole in the windshield?”

Karlin jerked his head around. “How do you know about that?”

“Hey, I’m a detective. I know about everything. I know that one of them was in the backseat with a gun and when you tried to open the door and dive out, he panicked and fired. Then the woman lost control of the car and put you all in the ditch.”

“The pistol landed right in my lap. I grabbed it just so they wouldn’t have it. Then I took off for the woods. And it wasn’t the woman driving, it was the man. The woman was in the backseat with the gun.”

Sue looked from one of them to the other. “I suppose all of this makes sense.”

“It makes a lot of sense,” Ben said. “Gary here’s an expert on miniature surveillance cameras — remote TV stuff. I’ve never used him, but a lot of investigators I hang out with have. Some businessman figures the night shift’s walking off with the store, so Gary sets up a hidden TV camera so he can catch them at it. That’s probably how you got into Aerosmith, isn’t it, Gary? Then while you were there you set up a camera for yourself.”

“How do you know about Aerosmith?”

“I keep telling you, I’m a detective. And anyway, I found your photograph beside the Toyota — the one you used to give your buyers an advance look at the goods. They must’ve liked what they saw all right. They liked it so much they decided to hijack you.”

Karlin shook his head. “I never should’ve agreed to meet them up here. But my mom lives in Saratoga, so I thought, what the hell.”

Ben patted him on the head. “Sure, Gary, you saved the cost of a hotel room. And now you’re going to save the cost of another because that’s a patrol car I see coming, and I’ll bet my socks it’s got Frank Bauer in it.”

Now it was Karlin’s turn to say rats.

“What did you whisper to Karlin just before Frank took him away?” Sue asked.

They’d driven back to her place so she could leave her car, and now she was climbing into the front seat of the Probe.

“I told him not to open his mouth till he sees a lawyer.”

“Ben—”

“No, that’s what I told him all right. That’ll give me a whole day’s jump on the police, and I intend to take full advantage of it. Let’s swing by the motor court before we go eat.”

“Eddie’s’ll be closing soon.”

“Not that soon. And I can always bribe him to stay open long enough to grill us a couple of steaks.”

He swung the car around on the slick road.

She wrapped her fingers around his arm. “What do you expect to find at the motor court? Tell me or I’ll hurt you.”

“A videocassette. But go ahead and hurt me anyway. I like it when you get mean.”

“And I’d like it if you’d level with me once in a while, Ben.”

“Figure it out. The man and the woman walked away from the car. They sure as hell didn’t trudge all the way back to Lake George or Saratoga. So where’s it likely they ended up?”

“And you want to talk to them? Tonight?”

“I very much want to talk to them, and I want to do it before they’ve had a chance to do much thinking.”

A few minutes later they were leaning against one side of the motel counter and Mary Chance, the woman who ran the place, was leaning against the other.

“They would’ve come in on foot about an hour ago,” Ben said.

“We need to tell them where the wrecker took their car,” Sue added.

“That’d be Mr. and Mrs. Yi. They’re over in unit five. You want me to call them?”

“No, that’s all right,” Ben said. “We’ll just stroll on over there. That’s where our car is anyway.”

“Now what?” Sue asked as they stepped out into the parking lot.

“Now we do some bluffing and walk home with the bacon.”

Light showed through the window of unit five, so at least they wouldn’t be waking anybody. Ben knocked on the door, then grinned at her as if they were playing some sort of Halloween trick.

A disheveled-looking Asian answered the door. If he had any spare clothes they were back at the other motel, the one they’d driven from in the Toyota.

He was short even for an Asian and looked incredibly young — in any bar you would’ve asked him for his ID. He stared at them with worried black eyes.

Ben flashed a leather folder at him — the one that held a card that identified him as a private investigator.

“My name’s Ben Marciano and this is my associate, Mrs. Corwin. I think we need to talk, Mr. Yi.”

The Asian backed up, mainly because Ben forced him to. Now Sue could see the woman. She stood beside the bed in bare feet with a ruined pair of stockings clutched in one hand. She was a lot taller then her husband and maybe a few years older.

“Are you police?” the man asked.

“Private type,” Ben informed him.

“What does that mean?”

Ben smiled at him. “Haven’t you seen any American movies, Mr. Yi?”

If he had, Sue thought, he would’ve watched private eyes doing all the things they never did in real life — pulling guns, jumping malefactors, breaking and entering — and maybe that was the idea Ben wanted to plant in his mind.

“I think you better get out,” the man said.

“Uh-uh. You took a shot at somebody tonight, and that’s serious business.”

At that point the woman spoke up. Her English was much better than her husband’s. She might have been a bit smarter, too — but not smart enough.

She said: “I didn’t mean to fire the pistol. We were afraid. We had money and that man might have done anything.”

Yi tried to shut her up with a violent wave of his hand, but she went right on.

“Did I kill him? Is he dead?”

“She’s confused,” the man said desperately. “We did nothing. She had blow on head. When car skidded.”

“You didn’t kill him,” Ben said. “But you sure scared him. Now let’s discuss the videotape — because that’s what I’m really interested in.”

The man made a noise in his throat like a grunt — as if Ben had just hit him in the stomach. The woman bunched the stockings in her hand. Ben merely smiled.

They’re fresh off the boat, Sue realized. They think everyone over here runs around with a pistol — even Ben probably, who never touches one. So they carried one of their own to the meeting with Karlin and made a mess of everything.

Ben put his rump on the arm of a chair. “I won’t ask who you’re working for in Shanghai or Taipei or Hong Kong. Probably some uncle or grandfather who’s got an interest in the computer business. But I’ll tell you who I represent — a company called Aerosmith — and they want Karlin’s videotape back. And if you think I don’t know all about it, let me tell you what’s on it. It shows a programmer scrolling through a proprietary computer program and you can read every line. If your boss gets hold of it, he’ll be duplicating it and selling it all over Asia and maybe North America as well. Now you can deal with me or you can deal with the cops, but one thing you can’t do is get out of here. You’re stuck till morning.”

The man clenched and unclenched his fists. “What happens if we give back tape?”

“Well, bye and bye you’ll probably get a visit from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But if you get on a plane quick you can even avoid that.”

At the mention of the INS their faces fell. Apparently they liked it over here — even if you did have to tote a gun. But maybe they’d even liked that part of it.

“You won’t give us money?”

“What do you think?”

“But we went to a lot of trouble! We took risks!”

“Seems to me it was Gary Karlin who took all the risks. All you did was ride around in a warm Toyota and then run it into a ditch. Now are you going to deal with me or are you going to deal with the cops?”

The woman butted in then, in Chinese, her voice rising several octaves more than was necessary. She’s giving him hell, Sue thought. Probably chewing him out for screwing everything up. Then the man appeared to give her some of it back. Ben let it go on for a while, then did some butting in of his own.

“Are you two finished yet?”

“Yes. Finished,” the woman said shortly.

There was a shoulder bag hanging from the back of a chair. The woman walked over to it and retrieved a videotape from one of the pockets. The man made that grunting noise in his throat again. Then he repeated it as she handed the tape to Ben.

Ben stood up. “This better not be a bootleg copy of Pretty Woman,” he said.

“It’s what you want. Now please, leave us alone.”

A minute later they were back out in the wind-driven snow of the parking lot.

Sue took Ben’s arm. “What if that really is a copy of Pretty Woman?”

“What the hell — I’ve never seen it. But if it’s Karlin’s tape, then Aerosmith’s going to be happy as hell to get it back.”

She shook her head. “You always manage to make a buck out of these things, Ben. Even out of a car stuck in a ditch.”

He didn’t answer, but she knew what he would have said if he had. That it wasn’t just the money, it was the fun of turning a trick on Karlin and a couple of amateur program thieves and maybe on Frank Bauer as well.

Later — much later — after the snow had stopped, in fact — she lay in bed and watched blooms of frost form on the windows. The bedroom was growing colder, but the bed itself was an oasis of warmth and she could feel Ben’s breath as it caressed the nighttime tangle of her hair. Her Ben, she thought. And held that notion as she drifted off to sleep.