Shadow Woman

4

The boardroom for Pleasure, Inc., overlooked the Polynesian water slide. Somebody had once joked that the architect’s plans had been folded and the contractor hadn’t noticed. It sounded true because mistakes in Las Vegas were not little slipups that made a few chips fall between the floorboards. They were hideous, gargantuan blunders, like building a billion-dollar casino on ground that was a foot lower than the adjacent square mile of parking lots, so the whole place got inundated with water in a flash flood every five years. But the location of the Pleasure Island boardroom had been no mistake; it had been a suggestion from Calvin Seaver, vice president for security.

Seaver stepped from the elevator and stared out through the double layer of one-way glass at the beautiful waterfall and the rocks and the lush tropical plants and flowers. He saw a pair of boys—he guessed eight and ten years old from the memory of his own boys—and then the father, a guy in his late thirties with a little baby fat around his middle and a U.S.N. anchor tattoo that showed he wasn’t troubled with neck pains from holding up his brain. They stood on the platform ten feet from Seaver, waiting for something. He guessed it was Mom. And there she was. Not bad. A trace of cellulite in the haunches and sag in the tits, but nothing for her to worry about. She plunked down at the top of the slide with them, and all four went slipping down, around, under the waterfall, and out of sight. Good for them.

Seaver was trained to feel a presumptive hostility, watching the guests for some sign that they were going to cause a need for his services, but the reason he was the best was that he could tell the sheep from the goats. These were sheep. They wouldn’t know how to cause trouble, because it wasn’t in their nature. During their stay they would never know that he was watching over them, protecting them while they played and while they slept, making sure that nothing disturbed the artificial tranquility around them.

Those four were evidence that things were going beautifully. They would stay maybe five days. Mom and Dad would get a taste of canned glamour and carefully controlled risk. The boys would spend some time in the virtual-reality arcades, getting the feel of paying money to get excitement, and ensure Pleasure, Inc., of repeat business for the next fifty years. The family would pay Pleasure, Inc., more than they spent on this year’s taxes to their home state, and then they’d be gone.

The goats were different—card counters and con men and shortchange artists and call girls and pickpockets—always trying to fade in among the sheep, but restless. He knew half of them by sight, but he didn’t need to. He could detect it in their eyes the first time he saw them. They were hungry. He had sensed something too eager in Pete Hatcher’s eyes early on, but he had misinterpreted it. His mistake was in accepting the bosses’ assurances that all Hatcher was after was pussy.

He glanced at his watch and moved on down the hallway. Seaver was probably the only one who could see this part of the complex clearly when he looked at it. The elevators and the long, narrow hallway gave his people plenty of time and means to isolate anyone who had some business that wasn’t on the board’s agenda. The double panes of one-way glass kept anyone from amplifying the vibrations to pick up a conversation or using any sort of photography. Being next to the water slide ensured that nobody who wasn’t wearing a bathing suit could get close, and anybody scanning with a directional microphone from a distance would pick up the waterfall and eighty customers talking about nothing.

It wasn’t the sort of security that an underground room would have, but it had worked well enough so far. What he was worried about these days was some kind of futuristic emergency—some loser driving a car bomb through the front entrance, or some Japanese cult releasing nerve gas in the climate-control system. He had consultants working on countermeasures, but so far nothing they had brought him was good enough to bring to the big guys. All the plans involved lots of rebuilding to make space for some strategy they could not guarantee would work.

The big guys were never reluctant to spend money on remodeling. What they hated was having to shut anything down while they did it. But Seaver believed in outside consultants, and he was confident that they would solve these problems, one by one. Security was a matter of batting down specific threats. Nothing worked all of the time for all purposes.

He opened the door to the boardroom, stepped inside onto the thick carpet, and quietly took a seat at the enormous rosewood table. The door closed silently behind him. The automatic closer had been Seaver’s idea too. The time when people were going in and out was a gaping breach in the room’s integrity. Anyone who managed to defeat the other obstacles could learn a lot by picking up a few seconds here and there and studying what he had heard.

This time there was no meeting of the Management Team. The only ones in the room were the big guys themselves, Bobby Salateri, Max Foley, and Peter Buckley. They met this way more often than people would think, to talk without the twenty upper-level functionaries who ran housekeeping or finance or public relations or security.

Peter Buckley first deigned to notice Seaver. “Morning, Cal.”

“Peter,” said Seaver. Then he added, “Bobby, Max,” as the others saw him. Then he waited. They took their time, and it was a compliment to him.

“Having water misters all over the place is okay this year. It’s okay next year,” said Salateri. “How does it look ten years from now? I mean politically?”

“It’s not exactly all over the place,” said Foley. “It’s just on the golf courses. The sun shelters are already plumbed. It’s just a matter of installing these little fixtures around the roof. That’s thirty-six misters. They’ll make the players feel cool and comfortable.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Salateri. “It’s nothing, really. But every single time some TV station does a report on wasting water I see footage of misters over some hot dog stand.”

“The estimate says the trees around the shelters will catch some of the water and the shade will keep the mist from evaporating as fast. If there’s ever rationing, it’s just that much more water grandfathered in.”

“That’s a point I hadn’t thought of,” said Salateri. “I can buy it on that basis. How about you, Peter?”

“Sure,” said Buckley. “If things really get stupid, we’ve got something we can give away: Pleasure Island shuts down misters to save water.”

“I’ll have them go ahead,” said Foley. He turned to Seaver. “Little problem last night, huh, Cal?”

“Yes,” said Seaver. “I wish I had some excuse. I don’t.”

“So where does that leave us now?” asked Buckley.

“Hatcher wasn’t on any flight leaving McCarran, or a train. A bus is too haphazard for him. He undoubtedly drove out. If he had the sense to keep driving, he could be in Chicago by now.” He reached into his breast pocket. “My resignation is ready, if you want it.”

“Stick it in your ear,” said Salateri. “This isn’t the fucking army, where you get to resign your commission and hand in your sword and go write your memoirs. We’ve got a parasite that could eat us alive. We need you more than we did yesterday.”

“Thank you,” said Seaver. It was the only thing Salateri had ever said to him that could have been a compliment.

“How did he lose your people?” asked Foley. “Maybe that’s the place to start.”

“He met a woman at the Inside Straight for the midnight lounge show. The Miraculous Miranda picked him out of the audience, made him disappear a couple of times, and brought him back. The last time, she didn’t. He probably slipped out the stage door. My men got suckered. They followed the woman and a decoy out of the show, then lost the decoy too. The woman was a pro. She got them to watch her for an hour, then split them up and cornered one of them in the elevator. She left him with a broken leg, a broken nose, and some damage to his eye.”

“A professional what?” asked Salateri. “Boxer?”

“I don’t know what term she uses on her business cards,” said Seaver. “But I don’t think Hatcher could have set this up for himself. I don’t know what part in this Miranda played—maybe just picking him out of the crowd was enough, and magicians will sometimes do that as a favor if you send a waiter backstage and ask. Maybe—”

“It doesn’t matter,” interrupted Buckley. “I’m not about to start grilling Miranda, and I hope you’re not.”

“Only if you asked me to,” said Seaver. “If she knows anything, there’s no reason for her to tell me, and no way I can make her. If the woman is a pro, then Miranda probably doesn’t know much.”

Salateri shrugged and made a face of distaste. “I’ll see if I can talk to Vincent.” He sat quietly for a moment, then noticed the others staring at him. “Why not? You think if Vincent Bogliarese wanted to do us harm he’d do it this way—have his girlfriend sneak the guy off in a puff of smoke? Get real. He’d send eight hundred guys in shiny suits to pull our guts out and set fire to them.” He added, to no one in particular, “I say that, of course, with the greatest respect, and in confidence. The man is a friend of mine. I’m not saying he’ll find out anything for us, but it won’t hurt to ask.”

Max Foley looked at Seaver. “It looks to me as though we really have to handle this ourselves, Cal. This screw-up is yours, but the underlying problem isn’t. It’s ours, the three of us. We picked out Hatcher, we misjudged him, and we trusted him with a lot of things we shouldn’t have.”

“That’s right,” said Buckley.

Salateri nodded sadly. “He was smart, easy to be around, he behaved like a man. Now we’re in trouble, and we don’t even know what kind.”

“We can guess,” said Foley. “No matter what he thinks he’s going to do now, at some point he’s going to end up in the hands of the F.B.I.” He added, “Unless he doesn’t.”

Buckley leaned back in his big chair. “Do we have anybody on our payroll who can take care of this kind of problem?”

“No,” said Seaver. “We’ve been very careful not to hire anyone like that full-time. They’re not the sort of people you want to have around year in and year out. Other employees figure out what they’re there for, and so on.”

The three men sat in a row and looked at him. “You’ve been in the security business for a long time,” said Foley.

“And a cop before that,” added Salateri.

Foley continued. “Yes. You must know someone who would be able to do it. I mean a full-service specialist, who can find him and handle the rest.”

“There’s someone I can probably get,” said Seaver. This was going to be the delicate part. He wasn’t sure they knew what this involved. “I’ll need a lot of cash. Maybe a hundred thousand to start, and more later.”

“Cash?” said Buckley. “Well, hell, Cal. Cash is what we do. Go downstairs and give this to Eddie.” He rapidly scribbled a note and handed it to Seaver, who glanced at it: “Give Seaver whatever he wants. P.B.” Buckley folded his hands across his belly. “Who is this guy?”

“It’s a Mickey-and-Minnie team. I’ll talk to them today.”

“Just don’t bring them here,” said Salateri. “I don’t want to meet anybody like that.”

“And if you’re going to hire them, don’t call them from here, either,” said Foley. “A year from now I don’t want some prosecutor going down the hotel phone bills and finding their number.”

Seaver nodded. “Of course. I’ll be flying to Los Angeles to talk to them in person. There are just a couple of things I should tell you. They’ll give me a price, but expenses will be on top of that.”

“This goes without saying,” said Buckley. “What else?”

“Once they leave their house, it’s done. I won’t be able to call them off. They’ll keep at it as long as it takes, and they won’t check in with me or be any place I can reach them. If we find out tomorrow that Pete Hatcher was the most loyal employee the world has ever seen, it’ll be too late. He’ll already be dead.”

“I guess this is the time to ask.” Buckley looked at his two partners. “Are we all sure we aren’t going to change our minds?”

“I’ll chance it,” said Foley.

They both looked at Salateri. He knitted his brows and held up both hands. “You know it would be too bad if we were just being paranoid. I mean, an innocent guy suddenly has his bosses decide he’s the enemy, and then they get him tossed in a Dumpster somewhere. But he already knows we had him watched, and he knows we were considering getting rid of him. If he was our friend, he’s not anymore. What good would he be to us now?”

Linda Thompson sat in her bedroom and rubbed the creamy mask onto the perfect white skin of her cheeks and forehead, staring into the lighted mirror. This one was blue, and it left three small round holes for her eyes and mouth. The white towel wrapped around her blond hair above her blue face made her look ghostly in the intense glow of the makeup light. She walked to the bed and lay down to wait. The blinds were closed, but the window behind them open, so they clacked back and forth in the dry, hot southern California breeze. She opened her robe and let the air blow across her naked body while it dried the facial mask. She had already covered herself with lotion, and the air made her skin tingle.

Linda was beautiful. She had never been anywhere since she was nine when somebody had not mentioned it, or looked at her in a way that made mentioning it seem like saying it twice. She knew it was the kind of beauty that was startling, because it seemed to take up space of its own. It was the initial premise of every transaction she had with other people. They didn’t seem to understand that it wasn’t a gift. It was a torment, because it was perfection, and maintaining perfection was a lot of work. Linda hated work.

It was only eleven in the morning and she had already done five point five miles on the stationary bike, worked for an hour on the exercise machines, and done a half hour in the pool. She knew she would have felt less bereft now if she could have had four fried eggs and a half pound of bacon, which was what Earl had eaten in front of her before he had gone out to work the dogs. Linda had not eaten since the cracker and asparagus last night, and Earl had thrown that nauseating mess into a pan in front of her and set off a racket of sizzling and popping and smelly grease. When she had said she didn’t want any he had given that crooked smirk and eaten all of it himself. Wolfed it down, was the expression, and it was made for Earl.

He was tall and lean with big knuckles and a jaw that showed what he was: ten generations of white trash in assorted depressing hollows out of God’s line of vision in the South, and probably the ten generations before that being the same thing in England, all twenty generations of them screwing with people only one or two branches over on the family tree, so they were all completely devoid of common consideration and never gained an ounce.

The air seemed to tear itself apart with a sound that wasn’t quite a bark but a scream. She sprang from the bed amid low growls and the howl of the hound as it turned to defend itself. Linda didn’t have the patience to run down the hallway to the living room, into the dining room, and out the door, so she raised the blinds, sat on the windowsill, swung her legs out, and jumped to the grass. She sprinted toward the kennel, muttering to herself, “He’s absolutely retarded.”

When she reached the high chain-link fence she could already see the bloodhound backed into the corner trying to keep the Rottweilers away from his hamstrings. His left ear had been chewed, and there was blood dripping from his muzzle.

Earl was standing in the corner of the pen, absently rubbing the bristle of his unshaven chin as he watched the big, heavy black dogs hurl themselves at the hound.

Linda spoke loudly enough for him to hear. “Call them off, Earl.”

He turned slowly and looked at her, but she didn’t wait. She barked, “Halt! Aufhören mit!” The two Rottweilers stopped and backed up until they were beside the fence.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Earl. “The face didn’t ring a bell.” She traced his line of vision and found herself looking down. She hastily closed the robe and tied it.

“What are you doing?” she asked wearily.

“Trying to see how two of them work when they’ve got something cornered.”

“They bite the hell out of it until it bleeds to death. What more could you possibly find out?”

“I wasn’t sure. That’s why I did it. Now I know.”

“And?”

“It might come in handy some time. I think I could beat two of them. Don’t know anybody else who could.”

“So what are you going to do with this thousand-dollar purebred bloodhound you brought home a week ago? You can’t enter it in a show now that it’s all chewed up. You can’t even put it out to stud.”

Earl glanced at the dog cowering in the corner of the exercise yard, not daring to move. He shrugged. “Science.”

Linda walked into the house and opened the cupboard beside the sink. She pulled out the Heckler & Koch .45 A.C.P., pressed the button at the rear of the trigger guard to release the magazine, and checked it. She had to be sure Earl hadn’t left it unloaded the last time he had pissed her off. No, there was a full load of ten Federal Hydra-Shok hollow-points. She slipped the big pistol inside her robe, clamped it there with her left arm, and stepped out the door.

When she reached the kennel, he had already let the bloodhound out of the pen into the run, and he was busily giving the Rottweilers chunks of red steak. She walked beside the fence of the long, narrow track to the spot where the bloodhound was lying on its belly trying to lick some of the gashes in its chest, but not really able to. She flicked off the safety, pushed the muzzle of the pistol through the links of the fence, aimed at the dog’s round, bony cranium, and blew it apart.

The report of the big pistol brought Earl around the kennel into the exercise run. He looked at her blue face with the staring eyeholes, but he didn’t speak.

She answered him anyway. “Any vet who got a look at him would have called the police.”

He said, “You going to bury that?”

She had already started back across the lawn. Her blue mask had hardened, and now it burned against her skin as she whirled and snapped, “You know goddamned well I’m not.”

Linda walked back into the kitchen, released the magazine, and left the pistol on the counter for Earl to clean. She knew if she cleaned it, he would clean it again. In her bathroom, she gently washed the mask off and patiently, thoroughly rubbed moisturizer from the tiny jar onto her face with her fingertips, staring into the mirror over the sink.

That was Earl. She had no doubt that he had figured out how to kill two Rottweilers attacking him at once. But the part that made him Earl Bliss was that if he hadn’t been sure, then tomorrow or the next day she would, likely as not, find him out there in the pen with a Ka-Bar knife doing it. He was a severe annoyance between jobs. He could not rest.

She knew that this afternoon he would be out in the Angeles National Forest sighting in the new rifle for the fourth time. It was a British Arctic Warfare suppressed military sniper rifle with an olive-drab stainless-steel barrel and a Schmidt & Bender 50-millimeter scope. Everything about it was adjustable, from the pull and travel of the trigger to the recoil absorption of the butt plate, so Earl would spend days and days adjusting them. The plain A.W. military-issue model started at over three thousand dollars, but the suppressed model with the silencer was highly illegal and had probably set him back five times that, because he had never told her what the Mexican cop had asked for it. Earl always needed the latest and fanciest piece of equipment, and then he had to take it completely apart and put it back together to see exactly how it worked.

That combination of constant self-improvement and morbid curiosity was what she would have extracted as the most horrible part of Earl, but she could not even hold that thought firmly, because it was also the best part of him. And cutting things away from him wasn’t possible. Earl had no surface, like other people: he was the same all the way through, like a chunk of steel. All you could do was move your head to look at the same qualities from different angles. That was how she had come to love and hate him at the same time.

He looked at everything the same—dismantling gadgets, testing the dogs to see how they worked, or her. Every time he heard or read or saw something that could be done to a woman’s body, he would do it to her, watching with an expression between detached curiosity and, maybe she just hoped, fascination, to see how it affected her: to see how she worked. The result didn’t seem to matter to him in any emotional way. It didn’t matter if he had her panting like a bitch in heat, crawling to him and begging for more, or sent her whimpering into her room to lock the door for three days. He didn’t take care to repeat the good things to make her happy, or avoid things that would remind her of something that had hurt her. He just wanted to see how she worked.

She had let him put her in a dark mood, and now she began to construct a fantasy about him. He would come in from burying the bloodhound. He would go to the sink in the kitchen to wash his hands. She would come in behind him while his hands were engaged and wet. She would put her left hand on his shoulder softly to show him she didn’t give the dog issue undue importance, then use it to tousle his hair while she freed her right to reach into her robe.

But he was Earl, so it would take him a half second to realize from the feel of her fingers or the sound of her breathing that something was up. She knew she would not be able to say anything or he would hear the tension in her voice. She would use that half second to tighten her fingers on his hair, jerk his head back, and bring the fillet knife across his throat. She had been composing these little plays about him since she was in high school, when she first went to work filing and running errands at his detective agency, and as she had known it would, this one began to change.

He would sense her excitement instantly and give that little snort of a laugh as his right hand shot up like a striking snake to catch her left. The knife was still hidden under her robe, held there by the tie-belt on the outside, and she was afraid it would fall out, so she turned away and leaned her hip against the edge of the green marble surface of the island in the middle of the kitchen to keep it there.

The move gave him an idea, so he reached around her and pulled the belt of the robe so it opened, and put his big hand between her shoulder blades. He pushed her forward and she felt the shock of the cold, hard marble, first on her breasts, and then her belly, and the hard corner of the marble against her pelvis. She had no choice but to wriggle farther onto the marble to keep the fillet knife flat under her belly so it wouldn’t slice her open or clatter to the floor, only that brought her buttocks up and parted her legs, and she had to hold herself absolutely rigid to keep from moving against the blade. And he—

The ring of the telephone beside her bed was like something breaking. She snatched the receiver off the hook and punched the button that was lit. She was too annoyed to see which number it was, so she said, “Linda Thompson.”

“Hello, Linda.” She recognized the voice, and her anger began to turn into hope. “Can you and Earl meet me someplace for lunch?”

A job, she thought. Thank God.