The Best American Mystery Stories 2004

Dick Lосhtе Low Tide

From Flesh and Blood

Shay studied the customer’s driver’s license. It had been issued by the State of California approximately two years before. It stated that the name of the woman standing across the counter was Noreen Waldman and that she’d been born eighteen years ago. Her photo indicated that in the period of time since she’d posed for the DMV Noreen had gone through a few changes. The brunet bangs and rosy cheeks had been traded in for a platinum rooster cut and a chalk-powdered face accentuated by jet eyebrows and purple-black lipstick. Instead of a pressed schoolgirl blouse, Noreen was wearing a boutique-tattered T-shirt over latticed black spandex tights.

The bank was located on LA’s Sunset Strip, an area not known for its conservative style of dress, but the girl was pushing it, Shay thought. And her orchid musk was almost as toxic as sewer gas.

But she did have a body on her.

“That’s a screamin’ corsage,” Noreen Waldman said, pointing a black fingernail at the violet flower pinned to Shay’s blouse. “I’m going org just looking at it.”

Shay responded with a brief, patronizing smile. She placed the ID on the marble counter and picked up the check Noreen Waldman wanted to cash. It was for the sum of fifteen hundred dollars and no cents from Aristo Escorts, Inc., made out to “Nasty Wald.” Shay looked at the girl and raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Nom de business,” the girl said.

Trying to ignore another blast of the orchid musk, Shay turned the check over. It was properly endorsed. “How would you like it?” she asked.

“In my hand.”

“I mean, in what denominations, large or small?”

“Like my men, big and hard.”

Shay fell the blood rising to her face. She glanced at her cash drawer and saw nothing larger than hundreds. The bank had a prescribed limit to the amount a teller was allowed to keep there. The big bills were in a drawer below, near the carpet. Shay bent down and retrieved three five-hundred-dollar notes.

Nasty stared at the bills on the marble counter. “Can’t you find me a Grover down there?”

Trying to hide her annoyance, Shay drew back two of the bills and hunkered down again, exchanging them for a one-thousand-dollar note from the bottom drawer.

Nasty smiled at her, folded the crisp bills once, then twice. Watching Shay watching her, she slid them inside the front of her tights. “My bank box,” she said. “Big bills keep it nice and smooth.” She touched herself. “Wanna feel?”

Shay stared at her without expression or reply.

“Well, c’est la vie,” Nasty said, and blew her an orchid-scented kiss.

Shay watched the girl strut to the door.

“You okay?”

Taylor, the security guard, was standing at the counter in his gray uniform, bolstered pistol on his hip. His ordinary, almost handsome face registered concern.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Problem with Morticia?”

“Nope.”

“Smells like a two-bit whore,” Taylor said.

“She’s a little more expensive than that,” Shay said.

“Strictly low tide,” Taylor said. When Shay didn’t respond, he added, “You know, what’s left on the beach after—”

“I got it,” Shay said.

He made her nervous. She hadn’t seen anything about it in the rule book, but she assumed the bitchy bank manager wouldn’t be too crazy about tellers yakking it up with the bank guard during business hours.

“Flower looks better on you than it did on the vine,” he said, pointing to the violet bud.

“It was sweet of you.”

“It’s called a Princess,” he said. “You up for a taco at lunch?”

She’d been working at the Sunset branch for only eight days. Her second day, she’d made the mistake of letting Taylor share her table at the Mucho Taco down the block. She’d thought he might be able to bring her up to speed on gossip about her coworkers and the manager, Sylvia Berg. But Taylor, a stolid man in his mid-forties whose half-day security turn was supplementing a retirement check from the army, seemed totally indifferent to office politics.

He was one of those God-and-country guys, full of talk about honor and integrity and all that happy horseshit. But he apparently-had a thing for her. That morning he’d brought her the flower. A proud part-time security guard. Jesus!

“No taco today, Taylor,” she said.

“Tomorrow?”

“We’ll see.”

She was watching him reluctantly amble back to his position near the door when a considerably more appealing figure caught her eye. Young, wearing an expensive Italian-cut cocoa-brown suit, narrow in the waist, broad in the shoulders. Deep-tanned, with blond hair that, combed straight back, was long enough to whisk against the collar of his black silk shirt. His eyes were hidden behind very dark sunglasses so thin and smoothly curved they resembled a burglar’s mask.

She was amused by the overall effect. Buccaneer businessman.

He was headed toward her when, suddenly, a rumpled, bearded figure plunged in front of him clutching a deposit slip and a wad of cash. The buccaneer businessman shrugged and moved to the teller on her right. Greg something. She could remember the teller’s full name if she concentrated.

But her new customer wouldn’t let her. He shoved his money and deposit slip at her. “I furry it up, honey,” he said. “Got things to see, people to do.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Shay.”

The teller, Greg whatever, was calling her. His face was pale. Silently he showed her a slip of notepaper. His customer, the buccaneer, was smiling at her.

“What part of ‘hurry it up’ don’t you understand?” her customer asked nastily.

“Y-yes, sir. Just a second.”

The neatly typed note read: “My partner is watching with gun. Take two stacks of $500 bills from bottom drawer. Place on counter. No alarm, no harm.”

Greg was at his bottom drawer, complying with the request.

Shay searched the room. Business as usual. Taylor stood beside the front door, pointing a customer toward the area known as the platform, where the bank’s service reps sat. Sylvia, the manager, was absent. Probably in the alley catching a smoke. Great timing.

Shay bent down and found two stacks of five-hundred-dollar bills. Twenty-live to a stack, tightly wrapped. Twenty-five thousand dollars.

“Hey, honey,” her customer said. “What the hell are you doin’? I said I’m in a hurry. Chop-chop.”

Then there was a softer voice, almost a whisper. “One more peep out of that hairy mouth and my partner will shoot you in your fucking head. Dig? Good boy. Now, I’ll take that off your hands.”

Shay arose. The buccaneer businessman was standing next to her customer, his back hiding his actions from Taylor. No one else in the bank seemed to notice that a robbery was taking place. The bearded customer stood wide-eyed and frozen as the blond man added his bills to Shay’s packs and slipped the combination into his inside coat pocket. Then he took a sideways step and retrieved Greg’s packets.

“Thanks for your cooperation,” he said quietly. “Stay chilled for five minutes. My partner will leave and nobody bleeds.”

He turned and calmly walked toward the door. He stumbled on the way and Taylor grabbed him and helped him regain his balance. The blond man smiled gratefully and Shay could see his lips form the words “Thanks, Officer.”

Then he was gone.

Shay, Greg, and the bearded customer stood like statues for about a minute, with the tension growing nearly unbearable. Then the bearded customer threw himself to the floor, shouting, “It’s a robbery, goddammit!”

Faces turned their way. Taylor was the first to react, charging toward them, hand on holster. He scowled at the customer in the fetal position on the floor.

“It was the guy in the brown suit,” Greg said in a rush. “With the shades.”

“His partner’s here with a gun,” Shay said.

Taylor scanned the frightened and startled faces on the scattered customers. “Not likely. Hit the alarm.”

“Done,” Greg shouted at Taylor, who was racing to the front door. “And he’s got a dye pack.”

A dye pack. Shay couldn’t believe it. She’d pegged Greg as a total wuss. But he’d had balls enough to slip the buccaneer a dye pack along with a stack of real bills. Two to three minutes after exposure to the microwave signal at the bank doors, the dye pack would explode, covering the buccaneer with red paint, dyeing that long blond hair, sending blinding tear gas past those expensive sunglasses, maybe even scorching that expensive suit.

Convinced that there was no longer any danger, the bearded customer rose to his feet just as the branch manager, Sylvia Berg, approached from the rear of the bank. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

“We’ve been robbed, Sylvia,” Shay said.

“Dammit.” The bank manager wheeled around, looking at the startled customers. “Where’s my security?”

“He ran off after the guy,” Greg said.

Sylvia pursed her lips, then turned to Shay. “Your station?”

“And Greg’s.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five thousand,” Shay said.

“Twelve thousand five hundred,” Greg said, adding smugly, “and a dye pack.”

“You were carrying that much? You know the bank’s policy—”

“The robber made us get it from the bottom drawer,” Greg said.

“He knew about the bottom drawer? I have to call Mysner.” Joseph Mysner was the bank’s head of security.

The bearded customer said, “You in charge?”

“Yes, sir. I’m the branch manager, Sylvia Berg.”

“Well, Sylvia, you’re out another nine hundred bucks, too. That’s what he took off me.”

“The robber took your money, Mr....?”

“Calusia. Chick Calusia. Yeah. He took my cash. And it’s this broad’s fault.”

Sylvia’s unblinking, birdlike green eyes shifted to Shay.

“My fault?”

“If you’d got off your ass and deposited my cash, I’d of been out of here.”

“Shay?” Sylvia asked.

“I’m sorry. This ‘gentleman’ started to hand me his deposit — which was for only six hundred dollars, by the way — and that’s when the robber—”

“Excuse me, sister. You move like you’re being paid by the hour. I was standin’ here for ten fucking minutes waiting for you to get it in gear. And the amount was nine hundred fucking dollars.”

“Sylvia, that’s not—”

“We’ll discuss this in a—”

Sylvia was interrupted by the sound of gunfire from out on Sunset. All conversation stopped in the bank. People turned toward the front door, curious, afraid.

A young man with spiked hair and tattoo-covered arms banged against the door, backed up, and tried again. This time he got it open. “Call the cops,” he shouted, ducking down, hands protecting the back of his partially shaved head. “There’s a dude out in the street, wailin’ with a gun. Crazy. Covered in red paint.”

Shay’s heart skipped a beat.

Ignoring Sylvia and the bearded man, she rushed to the teller gate, fumbled it open, and headed for the front door. She heard Sylvia calling her name. Screw her.

Shay stepped from the bank to a glare-bright, shockingly subdued Sunset Boulevard. Traffic had stopped. People were pressed against the sides of buildings. Everyone seemed to be staring at the red-dye-stained figure sitting in the middle of the street, keening in pain, hands pressed against his tearing eyes. His discarded gun was at his side.

It was the bank guard, Taylor.

Taylor’s eyes stung so much his mind wasn’t working. One side of his chest seemed to be aflame. His eyes felt like they’d been hit by acid. He knew he was down and in trouble. He just couldn’t sort out what had happened. Had he been shot? Stabbed? Maybe he could start to figure it out if he opened his eyes. But they hurt so bad. What hurt even worse was that he’d fucked up, dishonored himself.

He was brought back to some semblance of reality by a woman calling his name. He recognized the voice. The beautiful teller. Shay.

“We’ve got to get you out of the street,” she said.

Car horns began to blare.

He nodded.

She bent beside him, guided his arm around her shoulders. “Up we go.”

Even through the pain and confusion he was vitally aware of her body rubbing against his as they struggled. Then he was up. Not quite balanced, but up. She hugged his waist, her firm breasts pressing against his arm as she walked him slowly toward the bank. His eyes were wet, still burning, but he was catching up to the situation. “My gun,” he said.

“In the street. I’ll get it in a second.”

“Christ! Did I shoot anybody?” he asked.

“Not that I can see,” she said, propping him against the front of the bank.

Blinking through the tears, he watched her blurred image run back into the street, bend down, and retrieve his gun. What a goddamned woman! And what a goddamned disgrace he was.

They fired his ass, of course.

Taylor’s chest was tender from the dye pack, but the skin wasn’t even broken. An optometrist from the neighboring discount glasses store checked his eyes and bathed them in some kind of fluid.

The burning had just about disappeared when the bank’s head of security, Joseph Mysner, showed up with John Pinella, the head of American Guard Services, the guy Taylor worked for. Mysner looked like a college footballer gone to seed, big, balding, and red-faced. At about half his size. Pinella was a sleek, olive-complexioned man wearing a wrinkle-free pinstriped suit and a faintly amused smile.

Taylor sat quietly in the bank’s conference room while Sylvia Berg and the two men discussed his pathetic response to the robbery. They all seemed to be on the same page: he’d fucked up royally. He couldn’t disagree.

When the bank reps left to “confab” with the arriving FBI agents, Pinella sighed and shook his head. “You really fucked the duck, my boy.”

Taylor looked down at the bright stains on his hands. He had them under his chin, too. “Guess that’s why my face is so red, huh?”

“It’s the gunplay I don’t get,” Pinella said. “That the way you did it in the MPs? Shoot first?”

The question shook Taylor. But there was no way Pinella could know about the way he did it in the MPs, no way anyone alive could. “I never took a dye pack to the chest and face before,” he said. “I coulda sworn I’d been hit by incoming. Cap.” Pinella liked his men to call him Cap.

“That’s the other thing. You let the goddamned perp slip the pack into your jacket pocket.”

Right. That’s what really galled him. The son of a bitch had played him. Just like the towelhead had played him that night in Kuwait City. But he’d found the Arab scam artist again and regained some of his self-respect. He felt his fury rising, but this wasn’t the place for it. He took some deep breaths and said, “You think I like being played for an asshole. Cap?”

Pinella’s face softened a little. “Guess not,” he said.

“It’d be nice to get out of here. Go to bed and nurse my wounds.”

“Not gonna happen, guy. Not for a while. You got cops to talk to, and FiBIes, and paperwork like you’ve never seen. Lucky nobody got hurt.”

“Except me,” Taylor said. “Maybe I should check in with a lawyer.”

Pinella frowned. “Don’t piss me off. Taylor. You already put us in the soup. Be a good boy and we’ll find you something to do. Night watchman. Something.”

Key-ryst. Night goddamned watchman. If only he could get his hands on that fucking Mr. Slick, he’d... aw, what the hell!

Taylor staggered from the conference room in search of cops and/or feds. He desperately wanted to do what he had to and get the hell away from the bank, from the scene of his humiliation and failure.

He wasn’t sure how he fell about seeing Shay, but he needn’t have worried. She wasn’t in the main room. Probably off somewhere being questioned. Debriefed. He hated jargon like that. It was one of the things he didn’t miss from the MPs.

Shay had expected to stay the full day at the bank, but she was out and away by three in the afternoon. And once again at liberty.

She’d asked for it. There was about an hour in which she sat around waiting to give her deposition. And another hour, roughly, before the representatives of law and order were finished with her. At that point she and Sylvia got into a discussion about Chick Calusia and the amount of his deposit.

“Since the robber took Mr. Calusia’s deposit slip with his money,” Sylvia had told her, “it’s your word against his.”

“So?”

“So we’re depositing nine hundred dollars into Mr. Calusia’s account,” Sylvia said. “And, to minimize the bank’s exposure to possible legal action initiated by Mr. Calusia, you’re going to personally apologize to him for any inconvenience or indignity he may have experienced.”

“I don’t think so,” Shay said.

“This isn’t a discussion. If you wish to continue working here at the bank—”

“Fuck the bank,” Shay replied. “Fuck Mr. Calusia and, Sylvia, especially, fuck you.”

Shay was feeling remarkably alive as she drove through the afternoon traffic. She was approaching the house when she recognized a woman driving past in a periwinkle-blue Miata convertible, her short platinum hair dancing in the wind.

It took a few seconds for Shay to weigh the odds of her crossing paths with Nasty Wald again that day. She didn’t put much stock in coincidence.

Taylor was lying on his couch in his underwear watching TV when the door buzzer sounded. He’d been there for nearly an hour, sipping vodka from a half-gallon plastic jug and trying to get his mind off the humiliation he’d suffered. On the small screen a woman in a dress cut down to her pierced navel appeared to be singing while a shirtless stud, standing behind her, kissed her neck and ran a hand the size of a phone book down her firm thigh. Taylor had the sound turned down as far as it would go. He hated contemporary music. But he was a big fan of videos.

He’d seen this particular one before and he knew that as a result of the stud’s rubbing, or something, the singer’s nipples were about to burgeon under the gauzy gown. Whoever was at his door knocked.

Annoyed, he called out, “Go away.”

“It’s me. Shay.”

Taylor grabbed the remote and clicked off the TV right in the middle of the nipple shot, then rolled off the couch. “Minute,” he told her. He looked down and saw that he was poking out of his Skivvies. He staggered to the bedroom and grabbed a ratty striped bathrobe from the floor where he’d dropped it a couple of days ago. When he got to the front door, his fingers struggled with the slip lock before it came free.

Then she was standing in the doorway. Outlined by the dim lighting in the hall, she reminded him of the way women looked in movies when he was in the first throes of puberty. The Angie Dickinson kind of blonde — full-bodied, golden-haired, the back-light adding an irresistible air of streetlamp mystery.

She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on earlier at the bank. But her blouse had lost its press, its top buttons were undone, and her legs were bare under her skirt. “Okay if I come in?” she asked.

“Wha — oh sure. Yeah.”

He was embarrassed by the place. It was a cheap furnished apartment in a lousy section of town. But she didn’t seem to care about the surroundings, one way or another. “I was worried about you,” she said.

“I’m okay.” He kicked sections of the morning paper out of the way, opening a path to the couch. “Sit down. Can I, uh, get you something?”

“Maybe later,” she said. “Right now, you should get dressed and come with me.”

“What?”

“You stoned, Taylor?” she asked, not reprimanding him, merely curious.

“I’m okay,” he said, a little defensively.

Her eyes dropped to his crotch and she smiled. “I guess you are glad to see me,” she said. His dick was poking through the robe.

Mortified, he tucked himself away.

She moved closer and to his surprise and pleasure placed her hand on his erection. “That’s some icebreaker,” she said. Then she rose on tiptoe to kiss him. Her lips were soft and moist and he felt them part as her tongue slid past.

His battered body shivered as her pelvis rubbed against him, her tongue exploring his mouth. Then she pulled away, breathing heavily. “That was... good for openers,” she said.

He reached for her, but she danced away. “Not just yet. There’s something more important for us to take care of.”

“I don’t think so,” Taylor said, reaching for her again.

“I know where he is,” she said. “Right this minute.”

Taylor’s boozy, sex-revved mind couldn’t take the shift. “He?”

“The man who robbed the bank.”

He blinked. “You found him? How?”

“The freak-show girl who came in just before him. The one you called low tide. She drove by me a while ago and it got me to thinking. She made me open my bottom drawer. Then the crook showed and he knew where we keep the big bills. Anyway, she drove past and I followed her right to the bastard.

“I was going to call the police. But I got fired today, too. So I don’t give a damn about the money or the bank. But I do give a damn about you, and I hate the way you’ve been fucked over. All your talk about honor and pride, I figured you for the kind of guy who’d rather do the job himself.”

“You got that right,” he said. Goddamn, but she was one of a kind! “Where are they?”

“Get dressed and I’ll show you,” she said.

It was at that moment that Taylor discovered something new about himself. He wanted her more than he wanted revenge. “They can wait,” he said, pulling her to him.

“There’s no time,” she began. But her resistance was halfhearted. When they kissed, the fever he was feeling seemed to infect her, too. Her hand pushed his robe aside just as his went beneath her skirt.

The couch was only a few feet away, but they didn’t get that far. They made love on the hard floor, the sheets of the discarded morning paper crackling and tearing beneath them. She wasn’t wearing anything under the skirt. He slid right into her.

Taylor was nearly delirious with pleasure. When he thought about it later, he wondered if part of his euphoria wasn’t due to the prospect of getting his hands on that smug fucking bank robber.

“What do we do if they’re gone?” Shay said as Taylor’s battered pea-green Chevy bounced along the freeway.

“Find ’em again.” He liked having her with him, liked everything about her. But, in his postcoital mood, romance was losing its battle with revenge. Even with her hand on his lap.

The hand moved and he felt himself stirring. But it was the Beretta Centurion stuck behind his belt that she touched. “This isn’t the same gun...”

“At the bank? Hell no. That one’s in a bag in some evidence locker. This is something I picked up overseas.”

“You ever... use it?”

“There was a time something happened, kinda like what went down at the bank. This Kuwaiti asshole set me up.”

“What’d he do?”

“Tried to disgrace me, to make me less a man,” Taylor said. He wasn’t about to provide her with any of the details.

“Turn here,” Shay said.

The canyon road took an abrupt upward angle. As they continued following the road, the dinner-hour traffic thinned to almost nothing. The higher they went, the fewer houses they passed. The occasional streetlights did a lousy job of chasing the night away.

Inside the car, there wasn’t much conversation, until:

“There,” Shay said, pointing to a shadowy two-story wooden house tucked into a notch in the canyon wall. A shiny black Porsche Boxster was parked near a wooden stairwell that led to an upper-level entrance. A light was on deep in the house.

Taylor gave the place a snapshot glance, then continued up the canyon just far enough to be out of view from the house. He hugged the canyon wall, leaving enough room for other cars to pass if the drivers were careful. “Only the Porsche,” he said. “The girl’s?”

“She was driving a Miata. He must be alone.”

“Or they both left in her car.”

“I don’t think so,” Shay said. “If they’d gone somewhere together, he’d have wanted to drive the Boxster, right? Mr. Macho.”

“Probably,” Taylor said. “I’ll go see.” He opened his door.

She slid over to get out, too. “No. You stay,” he said. He pulled the Beretta from his belt.

“What’s your plan?” she asked, eyes on the gun.

“That’s why I want you to stay here,” he said. “So you won’t know.”

He eased the car door shut Shay’s face looked pale in the moonlight. Pale and beautiful and troubled. He leaned through the open window and kissed her on the lips. It was a cool, almost passionless kiss.

“It’ll be fine,” he said.

He was expecting her to say something like “Be careful.” Or maybe “Don’t shoot unless you have to.”

She said, “Any hint of trouble, honey, shoot the son of a bitch.”

She was definitely one in a million.

The left side of the house came within inches of the canyon wall. On the other side a high wooden gate guarded what appeared to be a narrow path to the rear. The gate was locked. That left the door at the top of the stairs.

Taylor climbed the heavy wooden steps quickly and soundlessly. As he approached the front door, he could hear music. Samba, maybe. The door was cracked an inch or so. He used the gun barrel to push it open farther.

Light filtered through a glass wall at the rear of the house. There was enough of it to illuminate a room with a few pieces of cheap wicker furniture. A couple of chairs, a matching table, a sofa with cushions of a dark color that might have been black or midnight blue. The floor was unfinished; the walls bare. The only things that suggested human occupancy were the odors of the punk girl’s cheap orchid perfume and something even more repellent.

Taylor moved cautiously and quietly across the concrete, stepping down into a sunken area that had no furniture at all. The glass wall looked out on a brightly lit patio with a wooden deck and a small dark pool constructed to resemble a lagoon. A stream flowed into it from a fake waterfall that seemed to extend from the canyon wall. The music was coming from a medium-sized boom box on the deck, between a couple of cheap lawn chairs. A beer bottle was on its side near the boom box.

Satisfied that the pool area was deserted, Taylor moved to the right, where a narrow hall led to a shadowy bedroom. The odors intensified. Decaying orchids and sex and overriding them both, the nearly toxic smell of feces and urine. Holding his breath, Taylor stood at the doorway to the bedroom, getting a quick fix on it before stepping in.

It, too, drew its light from the patio, through an open sliding glass door. It was the only room in the place that looked lived in. Clothes were thrown around, men’s and women’s. A wastebasket overflowed with cleaner’s bags and wrappers. The bed looked well used, with what appeared to be black silk sheets rumpled enough for the mattress to peek through. From his position, Taylor could see nothing to account for the terrible smell.

Near the foot of the bed was a pile of loose thousand-dollar hills and a packet of money that still had the bank seal attached. If the loot was still around...

Taylor took a step into the bedroom and immediately regretted it. His peripheral vision picked up a naked arm pointing a gun directly at him from a corner of the room.

Taylor froze, then slowly raised his hands, slipping his finger front the trigger guard of the gun but not dropping the weapon. He didn’t know what else to do. He figured the robber would tell him. Or shoot him.

There was only silence.

He turned his head in what he hoped was a nonthreatening manner.

The man with the gun was the same one who’d robbed the bank and humiliated him. He wasn’t looking so good. He was naked, huddled in the corner, his skin waxy and tinged with blue. His gun arm was propped on top of a wicker table. His head rested against a wall, unblinking eyes flat and cloudy, staring at the doorway without seeing it.

Taylor was reasonably sure the man was dead, but he still took a sideways step out of the line of fire. His eyes were watering from the stench, his stomach churning, as he cautiously approached the naked body. Blood, now crusted, had flowed from three holes in the bank robber’s chest and stomach. He was seated in his own excrement, not that he minded the discomfort.

Taylor reached over the table and grabbed the barrel of the naked man’s gun. But he couldn’t pry it loose without breaking fingers. There was no pulse in the man’s neck. He was definitely an ex-human. Let him keep the fucking gun if it meant so much to him.

Taylor felt a breeze against his neck and turned quickly.

Shay stood at the bedroom door, a handkerchief pressed to her nose. In her other hand she held a gun. Everybody had one these days, it seemed.

“I... was worried,” she said, lowering the weapon. “Is he dead?”

“None deader,” Taylor said.

“I didn’t hear... You didn’t...?”

“Shoot him? No. This happened a while ago. He’s already starting to stiffen up,” he said, walking toward her. “Let’s get out of here.”

“The freak must have killed him.”

“That’s a good bet. C’mon. Before I toss.”

“Look at all the money,” Shay said behind the kerchief.

“Yeah. Stomach full of bullets and he still was able to scare her off before she could grab any of it.”

“You think that’s what happened?”

Taylor nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Shame to leave all that money.” She moved into the room. Shoving the handkerchief into a pocket, she grabbed a handful of the loose bills.

They’d been covering something small and violet.

Taylor blinked, but the violet object didn’t go away. It was the Princess flower he’d given Shay that morning.

She saw it, too. “Well, shit,” she said, and pointed her gun at him. It was a nice little Walther, he noticed. A good choice. “Better drop that piece of yours, huh, Taylor.”

She threw the money back on the pile and picked up his Beretta, A gun in each hand, she said, “Let’s take this out on the patio. It’s getting a little close in here.”

Shay followed Taylor out into a warm night and the sound of samba music and the gurgling of the fake waterfall. It was a relief to breathe, to clean some of the stench from her nostrils.

“Whoo-eee,” she said, using her clothed elbow to slide the door shut behind them. “I always knew Del was full of shit, but c’mon now.”

“What happened, Shay? You catch him with the punk bimbo?”

“You want to turn off that music?” she said. “I don’t much feel like a mambo right now.”

It took him a second to find the off button on the boom box.

“Now sit, Taylor,” she said. “We have to talk.”

“It won’t do us any good if we’re caught here with ol’ Del,” he said.

“This place is pretty isolated.”

“Miss Low Tide might come back.”

“I hope not,” she said. “Three’s a crowd. Sit.”

The lawn chair scraped against the deck under his weight.

“Lie back,” she said. “That way we can talk without me worrying about you making some stupid macho move.” She perched on the edge of the remaining chair. “First off, I didn’t kill Del. It must’ve been the psycho bitch. I saw her driving away.”

“You Del’s wife?”

“No way. We played around a little. That was about three years ago, when I was still an honest, underpaid teller at a bank in Arizona. Del picked me up in a bar. He fucked me and together we fucked the bank. Then we fucked more banks. Once I wised up a little, saw the kind of fella he was, I ended the romance. Too many deadly diseases out there. Del couldn’t keep it in his pants and he didn’t believe in rubbers. Since then, we’ve just been business partners, me getting jobs at banks and him robbing ’em.”

“How does Miss Low Tide fit in?” Taylor asked.

She shrugged. “My guess is he picked her up today. It was just like him to be hustling tramps on the street in front of a bank he was about to rob.”

“Why’d she shoot him? Lovers’ quarrel?”

“Who the hell knows? Maybe she saw the money, tried to kill him but screwed up. He was able to get his own gun and chase her off.”

He had his head cocked to one side, looking at her with an odd smile. She suspected he was wondering if she was bullshitting him, if she’d been the one who’d put the holes in Del. Was there something on her face for him to read? Maybe that she’d left the bank earlier than Del had expected and saw the crew-cut bitch driving away. That the goddamned house had been reeking of the stink of orchids and their lovemaking. That fucking Del hadn’t even bothered to put his clothes back on or change the sheets.

Could he tell that Del, the insatiable bastard, had thrown her down on that still-damp bed and fucked her and then gone out to the patio for the beer that he’d been drinking? Could Taylor see it in her eyes that she’d put her clothes back on, found the money and one of Del’s several guns, and called out sweetly for him to come back to the bedroom?

He’d been at the patio door, smug and with a hard-on, when she shot him twice. But the bastard didn’t fall. He staggered toward her and she lost it. Dropped the money and shot him again. He fell on the bed and she thought that had to be the end of it. But as she moved toward the fallen loot, he rolled over on the bed. In his hand was his gun, the one he slept with.

She stumbled back without the cash, firing again as she ran from the room.

Breathless, she paused near the front door, considering the situation. She’d shot him what? Three, maybe four times? How long could it take for the blood to run out of him?

There was no sound from the bedroom. Just the fucking radio music out on the patio.

“Hey, Del,” she called out. “How’s it hanging?”

“Come on in and see, baby.”

Shit. He didn’t sound that weak. So what? She could outwait him. Then grab the loot and drift away. But... the cash was minimal, compared to the more than four hundred grand Del had stashed away in bank boxes across the state. He used to joke that he wasn’t stealing the money, he was merely moving it around from one bank to another. She’d made it her business to keep track of the locations and the various fake names he’d used. And she could do a fair job of imitating his handwriting. But she couldn’t stand in for him. She needed a man to front the deal.

That was when she’d thought of Taylor.

She was a little startled when he asked, “Why’d you come to my apartment, Shay? What am I doing here?”

“I’ll level with you,” she said. “At the bank I thought you were a nice enough guy, but there wasn’t anything there for me. Then Del messed you up. When I saw you like that, blind and in pain, I felt... I’m not sure what I felt. But it was something... different. Intimate.” The weird thing was that she wasn’t lying, exactly.

“That’s good?”

“Yeah. Intimacy. Something I’ve been missing.”

“It’d help me to believe that,” Taylor said, “if you put down the guns.”

She hesitated, then thought. What the hell? She needed him, needed his cooperation. Considering the sort of lovesick way he was looking at her, she didn’t think she needed the guns. She placed them on the deck. “Better?”

“Much.” He leaned forward and picked up her Walther. Sniffed it and smiled. “Sorry, but I had to make sure.”

“I know,” she said. The gun she’d used, one of Del’s many, was resting at the bottom of the canyon. She stood slowly. “Maybe we’d better collect my stuff, clean up a little, and get going.”

“There’s no hurry, like you said.” He shifted his legs to make room for her.

She sat down, facing him. She felt a slight unease because she couldn’t quite read his mood. But she was a firm believer in her sexual attraction. She was convinced she could seduce him into joining her in collecting Del’s loot. She placed a hand on his arm. “After the... incident at the bank today,” she said, “I wanted to stay with you while you were recovering. But Sylvia and that security guy insisted I go with them.”

She tenderly touched one of the red splotches on his neck. He closed his eyes, apparently enjoying her touch. “What happened after you left the bank?” he asked.

“I drove here.”

“Del was alive?”

“Yes. I told him I’d decided to end the partnership. He wasn’t happy. I was packing a bag when he grabbed me and dragged me to the front of the house. He threw me out, told me never to come back. I said I wanted my things. He laughed at me. Slammed and locked the door. There wasn’t much else I could do, so I drove away. When I reached the bottom of the drive, Little Miss Punk passed me driving up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

“I... didn’t want you to know I was involved in the robbery.” Was that true? Good lies always had a little truth hidden in them. She didn’t want to lose him. Was it more than just the money? Maybe. “I was afraid you’d throw me out, too.”

“I’d never do that,” he said.

She pressed against him, resting her head on his chest. His arm went around her shoulders. “I love you, Taylor,” she said. “It just might work, you and me.”

His body relaxed. His hand moved a strand of her hair so that he could kiss her ear. “You and me,” he whispered.

Something was definitely happening to her. She was no longer conning him. She was falling in love with him. Either that or she was conning herself.

“I don’t want any secrets between us,” he said.

“No secrets,” she agreed, curious now as to where he was headed.

“You asked me about the Kuwaiti who screwed me over,” he said. “Still want to hear the story?”

“If you want to share it,” she said.

“Seven years ago in the Persian Gulf, during my last tour of duty, about eight o’clock at night, a pretty local girl waved down my jeep near this town of Kazimah. Her boyfriend had gotten pissed at her and left her out there on the road to hitch back to Kuwait City. She was a secretary for one of the oil companies, she said. The whole thing was a lie. A setup.”

“A setup for what?” Shay asked.

“My partner, Jeb Cooley, and I were scheduled that night to guard an army warehouse. While the girl and I were... while we were at her place, her lover and some other guys bounced a lead pipe off of Jeb’s skull and cleaned out the warehouse. Nothing crucial like arms or medicine. Just cases of whiskey, wine, beer, Coca-Cola, little foil pouches of macadamia nuts — crap like that — all of it about to be sent out to temporary officers’ clubs throughout the area. Over a hundred grand in booze and snacks, worth three times that on the Kuwaiti black market.”

“You must’ve got in terrible trouble.”

“No. I told everybody I’d had a flat tire. They were suspicious, of course, and on my ass for a while, but since I wasn’t really involved in the robbery, there was no way they could find any evidence. Still, the suspicion was there. Jeb, who’d been as close to me as a brother, put in for a new partner. And that was that for my military career.”

“Why didn’t you try to catch the real thieves?” she asked.

He smiled ruefully. “That was the beauty of it. If I’d brought in the Kuwaiti who planned the break-in, the story about me and the girl would have come out. I would have gotten off the hook for the theft, but I’d have been found guilty of dereliction of duty. By keeping the lie I could at least get an honorable discharge and collect a pension.”

“So the guy who pulled the robbery walked away free and clear.”

“Not exactly,” Taylor said. “I found him and I beat him with my gun butt until my arm got tired. He never recovered.”

“You killed him?” She seemed shocked.

“Don’t you think he deserved it? He robbed me of my good name and my self-respect and he forced me to give up the only job I ever loved.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, hugging him. Then a question popped into her head. Without thinking, she began, “What happened to the g—” She censored herself.

But not soon enough. “The girl?” he asked. “What happened to her?”

“I guess. Did you ever see her again?”

“Once more,” he said. “The guy — the one I pistol-whipped to death — there’d been nothing personal in what he did. I was just somebody in the way of his plan, so he had me removed. But the girl — she made it very personal. I had no choice. I did the only thing I could.”

Shay was frowning now. She didn’t really want to know, but she heard herself asking, “Wha-what did you do to her?”

“What I had to,” Taylor said. “I did this.” He pointed her own Walther against her taut stomach.

She barely got out the word “No” before he pulled the trigger.

Taylor rested Shay’s body on the chair. Her cheek was still warm when he kissed it. He dabbed at his tears. Then he wiped the Walther clean. He wiped the power button of the boom box, too. He was glad the white-haired freak hadn’t participated in the robbery, in his humiliation. Taking a human life gave him no pleasure.

He paused for one final look at Shay. “You and me,” he said.

He reentered the dreadful bedroom and tossed Shay’s Walther onto the roiled king-size. Holding his breath, he wiped his prints from the barrel of Del’s pistol.

As he made his way to the door, he was stopped by the pile of cash. Over thirty-five thousand dollars. A nice bundle of found money. But it was stolen goods. Tainted. It offered no temptation to a man who prided himself on honor and integrity.

Taylor bent down and reached past the money to pick up the wilted violet flower. He took that away with him. He thought he’d get it laminated. Carry it in his wallet. Once the red dye and the burns wore off, it would give him something to remember Shay by.