by R. J. Jagger
“What we’re doing is probably a felony or something,” Alabama nodded.
“Add it to the list of reasons I’m going to end up in hell.”
She smiled.
“How long is that list?”
“Ballpark?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, two or three miles.”
“No way,” she said. “You’ve put two or three miles on just since I’ve known you.”
“Thanks for noticing.”
“You’re welcome.”
They dumped all their goodies into a pillowcase and left. On the walk back to Blondie, Alabama said, “Now what?”
“Now I make an excuse to see Senn-Rae and get her out of the office so you can have a look around.”
“That’ll be two break-ins in one day for me,” she said. “That’s not a personal best, in case you’re wondering. Not even half a personal best.”
Wilde knew he should smile.
He didn’t though.
He was too preoccupied thinking about something they found in the house.
73
E arly evening in a rented Ford Customline, Jundee and Fallon swung by Rebecca Vampire’s stoic Capitol Hill residence, which turned out to be just three doors down from the governor’s mansion. It looked like a castle dropped into a park and then surrounded by a six-foot stone wall with spikes on the top.
“I’ve seen smaller countries,” Jundee said.
“Like Transylvania for instance.”
He smiled.
“Like all the ’Vanias put together. Whatever she’s doing, she’s doing it right.” A beat then, “If we get busted in there, we’re in some serious trouble. She’s got to have connections to beat the band. She’ll make sure we fry.”
“Then let’s forget it,” Fallon said. “This whole briefcase thing is cursed. We ought to just take the one we have, burn it at the stake and call it a day.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We need to figure out if it’s a bomb.”
“You already said it is.”
“True, it is, we do know that, at least I’m pretty sure we do. But we also need to know who had it, how they got it and where it was going. I don’t know if it was our bomb being smuggled to the Russians, or theirs being smuggled to us, or what.”
“Why do we care?”
“Because we need to know who the players are before we jump into the game.”
“What game?”
“Whatever game is going on,” he said. “The only thing I know for sure is that the stakes are high. That means there’s money to be had. I’m not talking about wallets full of money. I’m talking about wheelbarrows full of it. Big, overflowing wheelbarrows.”
“I still say forget it.”
“Look, you can live twenty lifetimes and not get lucky enough to get even one chance like this,” he said. “We got that chance right out of the box. Do you really want to walk away from it?”
She retreated in thought.
“Yes.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Fallon grabbed his forearm and squeezed.
“This isn’t a game, Jundee.”
He frowned.
“Look, we’re either in this together or we’re not,” he said. “We need to get that decided and we need to do it right now.” He paused. “So what’s it going to be? Are we going to be partners and do what it takes to see this thing through or did we topple over the cliff back there for nothing?”
She exhaled.
“We’re going to rot in hell.”
“Does that mean you’re in?”
“I think it does.”
“No thinking.”
“Okay, it does.”
Jundee swung around the block and drove past the place one more time. The driveway gate was open. The woman’s car was parked on the cobblestone next to a fountain up near the house.
“We’ll bide our time until dark,” Jundee said. “The briefcase is in there, I can smell it. It will be too big to fit into a safe. She’ll have it hidden somewhere but it won’t be in a safe.”
“Jundee, you’re a lawyer.”
“And?”
“And if you get caught you’ll be disbarred.”
“I don’t care.”
“Yes you do.”
“Okay, I care but it’s worth the risk.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I’m always right.”
Fallon watched the mansion disappear behind them, then the corner of her mouth turned up ever so slightly.
“Except for when you talk,” she said.
Jundee laughed.
Right.
Except for when he talked.
Then he got serious.
“I’m glad that car hit you down on Larimer Street. If I ever find the guy who was driving I’m going to buy him a beer.”
74
S hade wiped sweaty palms on her legs, exhaled and locked eyes with her captor. They both knew that the time had come. Shade didn’t know how it would end, only that it would. From the expression on London’s face, she didn’t know either. The next few minutes would tell it all.
Shade drank what was left of the cherry-coke.
An ice cube fell into her mouth.
She chewed.
“That means sexual frustration,” she said. “Chewing ice.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It relieves the tension.”
Shade reached across the table and put her hand on London’s arm. “Do you know why you were chosen for this job as opposed to every other person in the universe?”
“No. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Because you have two priors,” Shade said. “They don’t want me back alive.” A beat then, “I’ve been in this establishment before. There’s a window in the ladies’ room. I’m going to go use the facilities. After I do, I’m going to climb out that window. You can shoot me or not but that’s what I’m going to do. I’m staying at the Kenmark Hotel, room 318. If you decide not to shoot me, meet me there tonight at eleven.”
London frowned.
She pulled her arm back.
Shade’s hand came off and dropped to the table.
“I can’t let you go.”
Shade studied her.
The woman was resolved.
“Do you have any family?” Shade said.
“I have a sister.”
Shade said nothing.
She let the words hang.
Then she stood up and said, “I’m going to go now.”
She got two steps when the woman said, “Hey.”
Shade stopped and turned.
“Just for your information, I hate her.”
“Your sister?”
“Right.”
“That’s too bad,” Shade said.
Then she headed for the ladies’ room.
75
W ilde dialed Senn-Rae and poured milk in a saucer for Tail while the phone rang. The poor cat must have had sandpaper for a tongue because it couldn’t wait for the flow to stop before he stuck his head in. Wilde drenched the poor thing before he realized what he was doing. With the fur matted down, the head shrank to half size. “That’s not a good look for you,” Wilde said.
Alabama stepped in from the adjacent room, pulling her zipper up.
“What are you doing to Tail?”
“Tail did it to himself.”
“God, Wilde, I can’t leave you alone for ten seconds.”
Suddenly Senn-Rae answered.
“It’s me,” Wilde said. “I need you to stop over at my office and look at something.”
“What?”
“I’ll show you when you get here.”
“It’s not something that lives behind a zipper, is it?” she said.
He laughed.
“No, something else, although you’re welcome to—”
“When?”
“Now.”
A pause.
“I’ll be there in fifteen.”
He hung up and told Alabama, “Okay, you’re up. She’ll be here at least an hour, an hour and one minute if I make love to her.”
“You can last a whole minute?”
“It’s hard but I have a secret.”
“Which is what?”
“I bite my tongue and at the same time think of something unpleasant.”
“Like what?”
“Like eating bugs, whatever,” he said. “The important thing is that you don’t cross paths with Senn-Rae on her way over. Swing around her.”
“Aye aye, captain.” She headed for the door. “Try not to use up any of Tail’s lives while I’m gone.”
Fifteen minutes later, Senn-Rae rapped lightly on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. By the look on her face, she expected just about anything other than for a cat to run over and rub against her shin.
She picked it up.
“What happened to your head? Did that mean man over there do something to it?”
Wilde smiled.
“We were playing a game called Milk Head.”
“It looks like the cat lost,” she said. “What’s his name?”
“Tail.”
“Is he yours?”
Wilde shrugged.
“I think so,” he said. “You want to buy him? He’s on sale today.”
“How much?”
“A half-hour of sex.”
“In that case, I already own half of him.”
Wilde considered it.
“More like two-thirds.”
He tapped a Camel out of a pack, dangled it in his lips and struck a match. Tail jumped out of Senn-Rae’s arms and scampered into the corner.
“He’s getting better,” Wilde said. “You should have seen him the first time.”
Senn-Rae held her arm in front of Wilde’s face.
Blood was dripping out of a scratch mark.
“This is better?”
Wilde shrugged.
“I didn’t say perfect.”
He wiped her arm with a Kleenex, got serious and said, “I found out who the dead pinup girl is from the shed. Her name’s Jennifer Pazour. Me and Alabama snuck into her house this morning and looked around for anything that might identify who was in her life or how she’d been spending her time. It’s all over there inside that pillowcase.” He nodded towards the desk. “Your job is to go through it and see if any of it relates to your client.”
“Relates how?”
“Relates in any way, shape or form at all,” he said. “Did they know each other? That’s the thing I’m most interested in figuring out.”
Tail came out of the corner.
Slowly.
Timidly.
He jumped up on the desk and sat next to the pillowcase.
“Tail will help you.”
Halfway into it, Senn-Rae got a look on her face as she studied a photograph of two women—the victim and another woman, one with a raven-black Bettie Paige haircut and a seriously stunning face.
“Got something?”
Senn-Rae tapped on the stunner.
“I’ve seen this woman somewhere.”
“Where?”
She concentrated.
Her face got soft.
“I don’t know.”
Wilde took the photo out of her fingers and studied it.
“She’s pinup quality,” he said. “They both are.”
“Would it be hard to track her down and find out who she is?”
Wilde shook his head.
“Should be doable.”
76
B lanche Golden’s house wasn’t anything to brag about. Her job teaching physics at the University of Denver didn’t pay as well as people thought. The discretionary money she did manage to set aside got used to support her travel addiction. She was only thirty-eight but had already been to more places than National Geographic. “It’s the journey, not the destination.” That’s what she told people and that’s what she wanted carved on her tombstone.
People who knew her thought they knew her.
They were half right.
She had a second half, a carefully hidden half, that almost no one knew about.
Last year, that other half got her into trouble.
She ended up needing a lawyer.
The lawyer she got was a man named Jundee.
She had to tell him secrets.
He got her out of trouble.
More importantly, he did it in a way that her secret life remained secret. She paid him every cent he had coming, but that didn’t mean she still didn’t owe him, not to mention that he still knew what almost no one else knew.
At 7:47, a rap came on her front door.
Standing there was Jundee and a strikingly beautiful younger woman. In Jundee’s hand was a briefcase. It looked like it had been shot to death. He wiggled it and said, “This is it.”
She held the door open.
“Come in.”
They ended up at the kitchen table where the professor carefully went through the documents, particularly those portions referenced in the key. Jundee and Fallon stayed quiet and let her concentrate.
Ten minutes passed, followed by thirty more.
Then the woman leaned back in her chair and looked at Jundee and said, “How much do you know about fission bombs?”
He tilted his head.
“I know that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he said. “I know we’re in an arms race with the Russians. Other than that, not much.”
“Hold on.”
She pulled a bottle of red wine out of a kitchen cabinet, filled three water glasses half way and handed one to Jundee and Fallon. After taking a long swallow out of hers she said, “Let me give you a little background.”
Jundee took a sip.
The wine was cheap and sweet.
“Okay.”
“The atomic bombs that we used on Japan in the war were developed under something known as the Manhattan Project, which was basically a joint venture between the United States, Canada and England, led by American physicist Robert Oppenheimer. The scientific knowledge was centralized at a secret laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The goal was to develop a fission bomb. That goal was met. The end product was the atomic bomb which was eventually dropped on Japan and led to the end of the war.”
Jundee nodded.
“Okay.”
“Shortly after we bombed Nagasaki, the United States government released an official technical history of the Manhattan Project, mostly to justify the huge expense,” she said. “In hindsight that was a mistake. The Russians used that report as a blueprint to develop their own atomic bomb, which they tested on August 29, 1949, latter dubbed Joe-1.”
Jundee took a sip of wine.
It dropped into his stomach and tingled his blood.
“I’m with you,” he said.
Good.
Very good.
“Anyway,” Golden said, “the Russian’s bomb totally took us by surprise. We knew they’d eventually develop it but had no idea it would be so far ahead of our projections. Within months of Joe-1—I think it was January 1950—President Truman sent the United States into a crash program to develop a super bomb, which was projected to be a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb. It would be based on hydrogen fusion. That was the official start of the nuclear arms race. The best scientific minds were brought back to Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project had been developed.” She exhaled. “There’s been a rumor floating around the community that they were getting close. The problem, as I understand it, was to separate the fusion and non-fusion components of the weapon and use the radiation produced by the fusion bomb to first compress the fusion fuel before igniting it.”
Jundee raised his hands in surrender.
“Hold on,” he said. “I was with you until that last part.”
“What I’m saying is that these documents—to
gether with the ones that are missing, meaning the ones from the second briefcase—appear to give the blueprint for a hydrogen bomb.”
“One that actually works?”
“Unknown,” Golden said, “but my suspicion is, yes. A good portion of these documents appear to give the answer to the one remaining technical issue, namely how to use the radiation to compress the fusion fuel before igniting it.”
“Wow.”
Right.
Wow.
“If you can find the rest of the documents, I’ll be able to give you a definitive answer.”
77
I n the ladies’ room, Shade splashed water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror. At any second, London could storm through the door and pull a trigger. Shade didn’t want to get the bullet in the back. She wanted it in the heart. She wanted to be facing the woman when it happened. She wanted to see the finger squeeze on the trigger. She wanted to see the bullet as it came out. She wanted to know the exact second she would die. She didn’t want to be surprised.
A second passed, then another.
The door didn’t open.
Without drying her face, she walked over to the window and pushed it up. It didn’t budge, then she saw why—it was screwed shut.
She punched it with the palm of her right hand, making contact just enough to break the glass but not so powerful as to not be able to pull back at the exact right time.
The glass shattered.
There was no blood on her hand or wrist.
Jags stuck out from all four sides.
She pulled her tennis shoe off and knocked them out, then threw the shoe out and climbed into the opening, keeping as much weight as she could on the outside edge of the sill where the jags couldn’t shred her. The plan was to twist around and drop to her feet. That wasn’t going to work. There wasn’t enough room to swing her legs around. She protected herself as much as she could with her arms and dropped down headfirst.
Her face hit the ground but not with full impact.
There.
She was out.
She was free, in an alley.