Shadow Woman

5

Linda sat beside Earl in the front seat and watched each shopper pull into the big parking lot, drive up and down a couple of aisles, coast between two diagonal slashes of white paint, then go through the ritual of checking the whole car: the mirrors to be sure the car’s ass wasn’t hanging out far enough to get clipped, the passenger seat to collect purses or glasses or hide a bag they bought in the last mall from the smash-and-grab crowd, then the lock buttons. The excruciating sameness of it was getting on her nerves. People were as predictable as gophers. You knew the next three things they were going to do before they did.

The car smelled like dogs, that nauseating dog-food smell they exuded from every pore. Earl had used the car instead of the truck again. She decided not to say anything, because it would spoil the next hour.

Earl was brilliant in his own way. Raising and training attack dogs was a great sideline for a detective agency that didn’t do much business. In a city the size of Los Angeles you could pick up any breed you wanted from the pound for the price of the shots, which was up to sixty bucks now. Some of them had papers. You trained the dog to sit, heel, shit outdoors, and maul people, and you could sell it for fifteen thousand.

But Linda was ready to work now, and that was Earl’s fault too. He had trained her practically from childhood to his rhythms. He was only really alive when he was hunting. Between times he only played at it and got more and more irritable.

Seaver was precisely on time, as she had known he would be. He was one of those guys who seemed to see himself as though he were still in the military. For the ones like him, that wasn’t some kind of interruption in his existence but his initiation into manhood. She saw him pull the rental car between the diagonal lines, but he didn’t behave like the others. He was out and walking as soon as the keys were out of the ignition. He still carried himself straight, only now there was a little gray at the sides of his short hair. The aviator sunglasses he used to wear had been replaced with plain black frames, but the gray summer suit with the bright white shirt still had that animal-in-clothes look because it was cut too snugly and the collar was too tight, the way the army had taught him to dress.

He got into the back seat and Earl drove off. “Hello, Cal,” said Linda. “You’re looking good.”

“You too,” said Seaver. She knew that he had thought of a compliment, but he had pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth because he had known better than to say it in front of Earl.

“Let’s go to Ivy at the Shore,” said Seaver. “We can talk business while we’re on the freeway, and then eat in peace.”

“When’s your plane out?” asked Earl.

“Four o’clock,” said Seaver. “If I’m back in my car by three, I’ll make it. If not, I’ll take another flight.”

As Earl accelerated down the ramp onto the San Diego Freeway Seaver stared at the bottom of the first overpass. Some time soon it was going to be a bad idea to transact this kind of business on a freeway. Already the California Department of Transportation had tried placing cameras on the overpasses so when there was a traffic jam they could see what had caused it. And lately thieves had put machines on the bridges to capture cellular phone numbers and codes they could program into clones. He opened his coat, took out a thick manila envelope, and handed it over the seat to Linda. “In there is all the information I have about a target I want found and taken out.”

Earl glanced at the unopened envelope. “What is all that?”

“Photographs, a surveillance videotape, two audiotapes—one on the phone, one live—his employment history. I thought I could save you some time.”

Earl smiled. “He must be important.”

Seaver felt a distaste for the tactics of bluff and barter. “The price is going to be three hundred thousand for him. We’ll cover legitimate expenses.”

“Hear that, Earl?” said Linda. “No illegitimate expenses this time.”

“I mean,” said Seaver, “that I’m not the client. I just picked you for the job. If it’s too outrageous, the client is capable of getting rid of me and hiring somebody else to deal with you.”

“I hear you,” said Earl. “Why is this guy worth that much? Does he have something I have to bring back, or what?”

“No,” said Seaver. “He’s got information in his head. He can’t hand it off or sell it, because nobody else can testify to what he saw. He’ll have to be alive to do it.”

Linda smiled at Seaver and he thought about what a strange creature she was. She had what used to be called cupid’s bow lips, big, liquid green eyes. The smile would have been merely beautiful if it had been prompted by something else, but death seemed to excite her, and when her pulse went up the eyes got more green and there was a delicate flush in the pure white complexion. Her face was hypnotic, and the need to keep looking at it was like an itch. “Smell something, Earl? A Green Beret, right? No, I know. C.I.A. Forced retirement.” She turned the eyes away, toward Earl, and the blond hair hid them like a curtain.

When she took the light of that face away from him, the frustration made Seaver involuntarily suck in a breath through his teeth. He quickly dispelled any hint that he had been thinking about anything but business by blowing the breath out through his lips in a contemptuous huff.

“The price is high because the client doesn’t ever want to think about him again. I hire you, and you handle it. The end,” said Seaver. “I don’t think he’ll put up any resistance. But I have no idea where he is. When he disappeared, he had professional help, so he’s probably got reasonably good cover in place.”

“How long ago?” asked Earl.

“Day before yesterday, about midnight, he drove out of Las Vegas. We don’t know anything about the car.”

“So the trail’s cold. What about the professional help?”

“We don’t have much on that, either. It was a woman, mid-twenties to thirty, tall, dark hair, probably brown eyes, but there are two versions. Very fit.”

Linda laughed aloud, her voice somewhere between a taunt and a seduction. “ ‘Very fit.’ ” She imitated a man’s voice the way a child would have: “Have I ever told you you’re very fit? I want to look deep into your probably-brown eyes.”

“She beat the shit out of one of my security men,” said Seaver. “But even he said she was pretty. He didn’t volunteer it, because it wasn’t what he remembered most about her, but he didn’t deny it.”

“She sounds interesting,” said Earl.

“Oh, now I’m getting jealous,” said Linda. The lips came together like a kiss in a studied pout that Seaver knew should have been repellent but made him wish that Earl were dead. She brightened again. “Got her on tape, or any fingerprints? She might be the way to find him.”

“Sorry.”

“She would have been the one to leave the car for him,” said Linda. Her voice was wheedling now. “She was there before he left Las Vegas, and she must have stayed somewhere.”

“I know,” said Seaver. “I’ve had my men watching surveillance tapes for twenty-four hours, and she hasn’t turned up. The first time anybody saw her was the night she took off.”

Earl Bliss swung onto the Santa Monica Freeway and watched his rearview mirror. Nobody in a car behind them seemed to change his mind and follow. The others said nothing while he pretended to be considering the offer. After a decent interval he said, “We’ll get started on it after lunch.”

* * *

It was after dark. Linda could hear him out in the kennel, giving the dogs their dinner. She had already heard him call Lenny on the phone and tell him they were leaving and to pack up and move in at seven in the morning. Linda walked through the house to make sure everything was as it should be. Windows had to be closed, valuables hidden away, checks written for the bills. She took the Heckler & Koch .45 out of the cabinet by the kitchen sink and the Para-Ordnance P-14s from the bedrooms, the den, and the garage and locked them in the gun cabinet behind her closet. Lenny would just stumble onto one of them and blow a hole in something. If he had some kind of trouble while they were gone, he would be more likely to survive it with the gun he always brought with him. Anyway, with a couple of the dogs running the perimeter he’d be safe enough. Nobody cared enough about Lenny to kill him.

Earl always left most of the packing to Linda, because she was the woman. She supposed that meant she was too fastidious to put dirty clothes in by mistake.

She heard his heavy feet on the walk outside, then heard them clomping into the hallway. She called, “You want to take these Colts, right?”

He came in and looked at the pistols she had taken out of the gun cabinet and set on her dresser. They were Colt Model 1911A1s, the most common handgun in the United States, and probably the world. Colt had made them since 1925, over a million of them during World War II alone, and other manufacturers at least that many. The government had kept issuing them for forty years after that, and every army and police force in the Western world had carried some copy with minor variations. The sheer age meant the cops had lost track of most of them long ago, and ballistics identification was a fantasy. Seven .45 rounds were plenty if you didn’t plan to have anybody shooting back, and the bulk of the gun was only a problem on the way. You could drop it after it was fired.

Earl said, “These will do fine.”

She could tell by the look on Earl’s face that it was time for the ritual to begin, so she started. “I’m worried.” She had to be the one who said the first words, because he liked it that way.

“There’s a lot to worry about,” he said. “This is a big job, and it won’t be easy.”

“I could tell as soon as Seaver started talking,” she fretted. “He didn’t want to look in my eyes. You spent the afternoon on the computer. Didn’t you find anything?”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Seaver didn’t miss much. No criminal record. No marriages, no out-of-town property. The only car he owned is the one that’s still there. I found court records for probate when his old man died. He inherited a few bucks, and there were no other close relatives mentioned in the will.”

Linda frowned. “Not much for us there. It will be hard.”

“But this is one we’ve got to win,” he said. “The money is good. If we do this one, it will get better on the next one.”

“If we blow it, Seaver’s bosses will send somebody to look for us.” She knitted her brows. “He as good as said that, didn’t he?”

“It’s a Las Vegas hotel. It’s got to be Mafia.”

“Got to be,” she agreed. “We do it right and we get lots of jobs and lots of money. We fail—don’t find him, or try, and botch it—and they’re not going to leave us alone.”

“It’s an important job. More important than anything we’ve ever done. Life or death.”

It was working, and Linda could feel it. Already her breaths were quick and shallow, and her stomach had little quivers in it. The adrenaline was pumping into her veins. She could see Earl’s eyes were beginning to get that narrow long-distance gaze. She searched for a way to turn up the pitch, and found it. “We’re starting out dead, really. Because they already have us—know who we are, where we live. They’ll kill us unless we get him.”

That seemed to work for Earl. “He’s got our life. We’re dead until we get him. We have to find him to take it back.”

Earl’s anger transported Linda. Her energy was beginning to crackle out in little bolts of rage. “And who the hell is he to do that? He knew he was going to die—deserved to die—but he decided it wasn’t going to be him. It was going to be somebody else.”

“He knew what he was doing,” said Earl. “He knew there would be somebody who had to come along and clean up the mess he left. Somebody like us would be put in his place, in a deep hole, and have to dig their way out of it.” His throat was choked with anger.

“Oh, he’s not worried about us,” she muttered. “He’s someplace laughing at us. Both of them are. That woman who got him out of Vegas. They think they’re smarter than anybody who would need the money bad enough to come for them.”

Earl stood up and began to pace. “Not just smarter. Better than us. Like even if we did luck onto him it wouldn’t matter, because he’d beat us.”

Linda’s pulse was fast, hard, and strong now. She was transfixed with hatred and fear. Her jaw was clenched and her long fingernails were jabbing into the palms of her hands, leaving little red crescents. She could see the veins standing out in Earl’s neck. He was moving again, too full of energy to keep still. He was picking things up and tossing them into his suitcase. He seemed to see what a mess he was making of it, so he went and gathered the two Colts from the dresser and headed for the door. He stopped in the doorway and said, “Just be sure you’re ready by six.”