“That got us through the week?”
“Yeah. The owners, they loved that.”
“They ask about closing dates?”
“Hot to trot, yessir.”
“What’d you give them?”
“Like we planned, twenty days.”
“They bought it?” George smiled, thinking of the owners of the big ranch-style house in Rancho Santa Margarita, sitting in the barnlike place with fresh carpet just laid down and no buyers.
“I told them the whole thing was looking pretty fine. The guy went ahead and moved out.”
“Where to?”
“Boston. No way he’s gonna run back here, check things out. He’s got a brand-new job to deal with.”
“So what’s next?”
“That’s why I wanted to talk. Fuji waffled on us.”
Miller was a medium-size man in his early thirties with a way of wetting his lips and then smacking them when talking about money. Beneath the round face lounged a pudgy body. All appetite and no real work, George thought. Shave your percent from somebody else’s property and stuff it into your gut.
“So? I told you they wouldn’t go all the way.”
“Your frame’s still holding, that’s okay.”
A slight anxious grin flickered across Miller’s face, a placating reflex. Afraid his whole house of cards would crumble too fast. His imagination watching the bucks fly away. And all the time not knowing that he was helping out with the Lord’s work, through George.
“So let it ride.”
“Uh, I’m wondering if you got a backup.”
“I might.”
You had to let them come to you. George took a long drag on his Camel and let the smoke trickle out through his nose. This made Miller sniff and readjust the air-conditioning vents.
He’d learned this sideline in Arizona. It was easy to front for a real estate agency, on properties that could make a quick score. Executives needing to move, disoriented widows and widowers, impending bankruptcy cases squeezing out of a property before the court grabbed it. Bruce Prior would make a bid on the house, showing proper financial backing—assets and liabilities in order, a clear TRW credit check, no civil litigation outstanding, no liens or judgments against him. The escrow would go smoothly until the last minute. By that time the homeowner had made arrangements, probably bought another house, maybe had already scooted.
Then a problem would show up in Bruce Prior’s financial profile. Surprise, surprise, excess debt. Usually buried down in a few personal loans that he hadn’t listed; after all, nobody can remember everything when reporting all that paperwork, right? Tsk, tsk. The deal would fall in escrow.
George never saw the people involved, never even walked through the property. He just acted as a foil for the paperwork machinery. He pocketed half his fee when the deal was signed, the second half when it fell through. Within a month or so, the homeowner would be desperate. Then the real estate firm could slide in with a lowball offer. The mark would snap it up. By that time, the agency would have a client ready for a quick sell at a slight markdown.
This had worked in Arizona for a while, until the market busted. But southern Orange County was rich, dumb rich, and George stood to get an easy twenty thousand here. He’d heard that a lot of the upscale mansion market down here was cash freighted out of the insurance crisis, so these people were basically in the same business he was. Fair game.
And perfectly routine. No crime in making a bid, right?
There was no way to tie George to the realtor company. Not even Fuji could work backward from Bruce Prior to him.
“My boss, he’s jumpy.”
“Slip him a Valium.”
“The Fuji paper, it’ll stand how long, you figure?”
“Maybe another week.”
“You sure?”
George turned sideways in the Cad bucket seat. His jeans caught on the decorative buttons in the fake leather and popped one off. He loomed over Miller and looked at him for a long moment, taking a drag on the Camel. “I’m sure. That’s all I guaranteed.”
“Yeah, I remember.” Miller looked around nervously, but there was nobody else at the view point. A hawk spiraled by at eye level, a thousand feet above the canyon floor. Being seen together was a bad idea, and George had not wanted this meeting. Guys like this could never stick to a plan.
“You want another week, I might let you have a Dreyfus backup.”
“You could? Listen, I’d really appreciate a favor on this.”
“It’ll cost you.”
“Oh.” Miller blinked, coughed, but didn’t say anything about the Camel. George figured he was already in heavy with his boss on this and the waiting was making him jittery.
“Look,” George said with his friendly voice, “Fuji’s slow because they still haven’t got their patterns set up with Tokyo. Language problems, some accounting stuff.”
None of this was exactly top secret; he had read about it in a banking trade magazine, right off the shelf at the UCI library. But hardly anybody read those. Guys like Miller wanted the inside play but never did their homework.
“How much for the Dreyfus?” Miller’s voice was tight now.
“Y’know, pal, I can see this is bothering you. So I’ll give you the Dreyfus.”
“Huh? You will?”
“Sure. Next time we do business, remember that.”
“Oh, I will. Hey, I will, Charles.”
“I’ll fax you the details. A money-market checking and a tax-free bond. Carrying about twenty-five thousand.”
“Great. That’ll give us some margin.” A big phony grin.
“You bet.”
George got out of the Cad and walked away. He didn’t like spending any more time with contacts than he had to. Better to run the money transfer game from home. But he needed to build up a cash reserve for what was to come, and a real estate scam was a fast way to do it. He needed time to think and plan and the cash to do it with. Miller seemed square enough to count on, too. Not really smart, but probably too scared to cheat.
Thank you, Lord, he offered to the sky. Things were going right for him now. The truck accident hadn’t worked as well as it might, and on top of that the news item about it hinted that maybe they knew it was no accident.
Better not try anything like that again. Somehow he had always known it would have to be a serious, solemn undertaking. He was sure the Reverend knew that, too, although he understood that Montana could not implicate himself with even a telling word. Very well. That was how it had to be for those who would soldier in the secret legion of the Lord.
He watched a hawk balancing high on the clean wind. It took its effortless time, hovering, waiting for the right moment. Then the plunge, arrow-straight.
George dropped the Camel and ground it out with his heel.
Thank you, Lord. With this money in hand to pay for his computer intelligence work, he could devote himself with full and deliberate energy to his Calling.
4
KATHRYN
By night, the Marble Cathedral resembled an abrupt mountain bursting from the murky ground. In the park around it the trunks of gnarled oaks seemed like a twisted gloomy forest, stooped below the vast peak.
Kathryn followed Alex into this foreboding, inky woodland, wondering just why she was doing this. He had been decidedly odd this evening, bursting into laughter in the middle of the restaurant, talking fast and telling jokes, and then making her drive by the UCI biology department on a mysterious errand, and now here.
“No,” she said, and stopped beneath a pepper tree.
“Huh?” All his attention was on the plastic picnic cooler he carried with his free hand. “Come on.”
“I said no—not until you tell me what’s going on.”
“Shhhh!”
“Don’t shhhh me. Where are we going?”
“Around back, to the big dining hall.” He hurried on and she had to follow him into the shadows or lose him for sure.
Piercing
white beams artfully lit the cathedral from below, bringing out the soaring lines. She had to admit it was striking, in a kind of tacky way. How did such lofty works come from such small minds as Reverend Carl Montana’s? She knew the answer—donations of tens of thousands of hopeful people, “love gifts” from folks who needed a sense of place and mission in life, relief from the raw edge of the world. Montana reached through the phosphorescent fairyland of TV and plucked forth a rain of little gifts—only a five- or ten-dollar bill in each envelope, but a torrent of envelopes every day. There was a believer born every minute.
“See any guard?” Alex whispered.
“Uh—no. Is there one?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.”
They had reached the edge of the shadowy grove. Beneath the pale moonlight lay long, rambling two-story buildings with wide concrete walkways connecting them.
“That’s the dining hall on the left. We head right. See those low windows?”
He started walking quickly before she could respond. She dashed after him, trying to look in all directions at once. They reached the windows, which were mercifully shadowed by a spreading old walnut tree. Hulls crunched under her feet. The broad windows were used to slide groceries in from the driveway, she guessed. She looked anxiously around, liking all this less with each second, and heard a tinny pop.
“There. Knew my prankster days weren’t a total waste.” Alex put a shim in his pocket and raised the window smoothly. Grunting, he stepped through it, finding the floor with his foot. “Piece of cake.”
“It seems to me your prankster days are still going on,” she whispered, but his head had already disappeared into the blackness beyond.
Her eyes flicked over the still, moonlit scene beyond. It now seemed brooding, ominous. Not a place she wanted to stay while he had his loony fun inside. She stooped and slid through the window.
A hand touched her arm. “Here, hold the penlight.”
The faint beam revealed a standard institutional kitchen. An aroma of pine-scented disinfectant. Steel cabinets, wide wooden counters, big grinders and slicers and blenders, chromed appliances, massive supply bins, deep steel sinks.
“Down at the floor!” he whispered when she raised the beam to look around. “In here.”
He led her into a long gallery-style preparation area lined with wooden cabinets. “This is a good place. Help me with the cooler.”
She knelt. Alex grinned at her, put his hand on the cooler lid, and yanked it up.
Inside were—cockroaches.
Not the small, black creatures she knew and hated. These were immense, the size of her hand. Nightmares straight out of her childhood fever dreams. Giant horrors that seemed to move sluggishly as her flashlight hand trembled.
“Ah! Oh!” She jerked to her feet.
“Quiet! They can’t hurt you.”
Alex put both arms around her, and somehow that stilled her instant impulse to run back to that window, flee screaming across the cathedral grounds—guard or no—find the car, drive to the airport, and fly to the other side of the planet. But just barely.
“They’re harmless, believe me.”
“No insect is harmless. Not that size.”
“They’re asleep.”
“Cockroaches never sleep. Ever walk into your kitchen and turn on the light? They’re there. Waiting.”
“Geez, I didn’t know you’d have such a reaction.”
“To insects from Mars?”
“South America. They’re giant cockroaches from South America.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Nope, it’s brilliant. A good ol’ buddy of mine at UCI was telling me about some he had left over after he’d finished some studies on them, and at the party the other night Sheila said just the right words, and—ta-daaahh! Science strikes again.”
Her heart had ceased its attempts to escape her chest and run away on its own. “They’re… hideous.”
“You’re not giving them a chance.”
“Alex, you are a madman.”
“Look, they’re beauties.”
Her flesh had also stopped trying to crawl off her body and start a new career. After all, Alex had a Ph.D., he knew what he was doing, right?
Mind whirling, she made herself look into the ice chest again. The huge things were not black, like regular cockroaches. Each had a technicolor swirl, intricate markings arcing across the carapace. In full daylight they might even be gaudy. A few stirred, antennae wobbling.
“Okay, they’re not completely horrible. So you have a box of giant insects. So?”
“Touch them.”
“Touch?”
“Notice that they’re not moving much?”
“If they had been, I’d be in Iowa by now.” She gingerly put a finger on one of the hard shells and felt biting cold.
“I stacked them in on top of ice. Easy way to control them. At that temperature they’re immobile. Standard insect defense against a cold snap—hunker down and wait it out.”
He lifted two out and popped open one of the kitchen storage cabinets. “Guess what we’re going to do?” he asked, grinning evilly.
She awoke in the predawn stillness, and for a moment didn’t know where she was. Then memory flooded in, and she felt Alex’s warmth next to her. His arms enfolded her, and he snuggled against her spoon fashion, an endearing position. Maybe his shifting had awakened her.
She let her mind glide back over the night, sailing across soft memories of passion aroused and sated. The number and ferocity of her own climaxes had shaken her. And they were different, too. One she recalled like a flash of lightning, unexpected and crackling. Another built slowly, almost against her will, as if her body had a hunger she did not know and was going to fulfill it no matter what.
And that had been the second night, not the first. She had to admit that she had a pattern with men, a tendency to lose the fervor of the first lovemaking. She found that they settled into a routine, using the same set rituals and approaches. That robbed the act of its spontaneity and undercut the tingling thrill of it.
But not this crucial, second night. They had been great, each eager and accommodating. Somehow the exhilaration of planting the bugs on the Reverend Montana’s sacred soil had translated, back in her apartment, into trembling eagerness. Am I so blasé I only get turned on by danger? A risk junkie?
But no, that had merely gotten them started. Their wondrous silky couplings, the artful work of hands and mouths, her own gloriously sought impalements—those had come from some deeper wellspring. Someplace splendid and powerful beyond words.
Having to be tender with his broken arm had somehow helped. It gave them a game, wounded soldier and accommodating nurse, which they made jokes about but that somehow quickened every response. She sighed, luxuriating in the loose contentment of her body.
A distant, muffled scraping. There it was again.
Instantly she knew that this was the sound that had awakened her. In the trusted warmth of her own bed she knew the familiar sounds of her neighborhood. This was not one of them. And intuition told her that it was close.
Lightly, reluctantly, she slipped from the sheets. Her feet sank into the cool carpet, and without searching for something to throw over herself she traced a half-seen path through the gloom and into her living room. A distant street lamp cast eerie silver-blue blades of light through the far window. She stood listening. Nothing.
Then a shadow slid across the window. It was moving as though from the side of her bungalow. A sharp shadow, which meant it was close.
A man. The head and broad shoulders shifted, and she knew with a corkscrew chill up her spine that he was looking at the window, into this room, at her.
He stood unmoving for three thuds of her heart. A solid, monolithic silhouette. Utter silence, hanging in the air. Then he turned, and in profile she glimpsed strong features, impassive, and the specter slipped across the window, and he was gone, speeding away as he left.
Her chest hurt and s
he realized she had stopped breathing. The whole long moment had frozen her in place. She heaved a gulp of air into her lungs and the world started up again. She felt the cool night air and heard again the faint ticking of the kitchen clock.
Slowly she crept to the window and looked out. Nobody. The silent street of parked cars and well-trimmed lawns told her nothing. The man must have sprinted to be gone so quickly.
She stood for a long time studying the street and trying to explain to herself the sense of foreboding that coursed through her. The shadow had summoned up deep fears from far back, memories of rough boys in high school who had once terrorized her, of the squinting gaze of men on street corners, of all the casual small dreads that a woman encountered in her passage through a world of hovering threat. Was that it? Just a trill of feminine caution at a passing shadow?
No, the specter had been something more. A prowler, maybe. She tried to reassure herself that he had been just another random intrusion of the chaotic world. A symptom of Life In The Big City.
But it wouldn’t work. Something ominous and utterly implacable had flitted across her mind when she saw that shadow. Something somber and brooding. It would not go away.
Something familiar, somehow.
She shivered and walked quickly back into her bedroom. With relief she slipped into the sweet-smelling, musky embrace of Alex, who had not even awakened.
“Watch,” Alex said. “That’s all we do.”
He jammed his hands in the pockets of his jeans and made a show of sauntering down the broad sidewalk. They were a block from the Marble Cathedral. It towered above the Garden Grove rooftops like a cooled extrusion from a subterranean volcano.
“Great breakfast,” Alex said, twirling a toothpick in his teeth. “I love that restaurant.”
“You eat like a farmer,” Kathryn said. “Steak and eggs. Heartattackville.”
“I was rewarding myself,” he said blandly. “Man’s got to do that.”
“I thought that was the dainty woman’s role.”
“Different department. You took care of that last night.”
“You had a hand in it, as I remember.”
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