by R. J. Jagger
It was self-defense.
She’d do it again.
She’d do it again a hundred times.
That wasn’t the issue.
The issue was, even though it was justified until the end of time, she still couldn’t get the picture of his destroyed face out of her brain.
Who was he?
Shade had a pretty good idea what happened. Someone saw her and London together on the streets. London wasn’t bringing her in, she was acting more like a companion or a friend. That couldn’t be tolerated. The CIA sent a new person in, Jack Mack.
Unlike London, he was a local.
She got out of the shower to find London sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. “Get in the shower, then we’re heading out.”
London stretched.
“To where?”
“To visit the apartment of our new friend, Mr. Jack Mack.”
“What for?”
“To find out who hired him.”
“I can already tell you. The CIA hired him, same as me.”
“I know that,” Shade said. “I want a name or phone number or someone specific. I want to see if the words Penelope Tap are written down anywhere.”
London shook her head.
“Forget specifics. There’s too big a chance the cops will show up.”
“They have to figure out who he is first,” Shade said. “They don’t have his wallet, remember? I do.”
London wasn’t impressed.
“They have his car. He’s a local. That means they might even personally know him.”
“True, but they won’t be going anywhere until they get a donut or two down the hatch. We’re going now.”
London headed for the shower.
Over her shoulder she said, “Just for the record, you’re no fun to wake up with.”
“So I’ve been told.”
It turned out that Jack Mack lived on the third floor of a ratty apartment building sandwiched between two used car dealerships on east Colfax, neither of which could afford an electric sign but could afford tons of wooden ones to shine floodlights on.
The ugliest was a large piece of plywood with red painted letters that said, Big Sale! Today Only! It was faded with years of sun and wind. Pigeons sat on top and dropped their droppings down the face.
“Big sale today,” Shade said. “We better hurry up.”
London smiled.
No cop cars were sitting outside the apartment building. Everything looked normal. Shade parked on a side street two blocks off Broadway and said, “We’re up.”
The building had an elevator.
A cardboard sign was taped on the door.
Broke.
They headed up the stairway, not talking.
Just after they passed the second floor, steps came down. Turning around would be suspicious. They held their course and intersected with a muscular man in a white sleeveless undershirt. He took a drag from a cigarette and ran his eyes up and down them as they passed. He was about to say something—Hey, baby, or something equivalent—but didn’t.
The encounter was too fast.
The drag on the cigarette ruined his chance.
From below, Shade could feel him looking up, studying her ass.
At the third floor she whispered to London, “Keep going.”
They went to the fourth, hung quiet for a minute to see if the man was coming back, then walked down to the third.
Jack Mack’s rat hole was at the end the hall.
The door wasn’t closed all the way.
It was actually ajar an inch or so.
This wasn’t the kind of place where you’d do something like that. It was more the kind of place that you’d make sure the lock was locked three times before heading out.
They listened and heard nothing.
Shade made her voice as innocent as she could and said, “Anyone home?”
No one answered.
She looked at London, giving her a chance to stop her.
Instead of doing it, the woman simply shrugged.
Okay.
This was it.
They both pulled their guns out of their purses and headed in.
96
F riday evening Wilde showed up at Senn-Rae’s with two bottles of wine and enough cigarettes to get him through the night, unsure if she’d slam the door in his face or pull him into the bedroom by his tie.
She did neither.
She let him in, got two glasses out of the cupboard, filled them with ice and said, “Follow me.”
She took him to the roof.
There she retrieved two folding chairs from behind a ventilation duct and set them up at the west edge where the parapet was only a foot high.
A seriously stunning sunset unfolded over the mountains, fifteen miles or so to the west. A shorter building blocked most of the direct view of 16th Street but none of the sounds.
The Friday night buzz was palpable.
Electric signs were on, growing more and more prominent as the night descended.
Wilde sat down, filled their glasses and took a deep sip.
The wine was sweet.
He was more of a beer guy but tonight wasn’t about him.
“I don’t know what your day was like but it was better than mine,” he said.
“Why, what happened?”
“I spent an hour digging a dog and a woman out of a grave,” he said.
“The same grave?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Well, I didn’t know it was a grave when I started digging.” With that, he gave her all the details and, at the end added, “I sifted around in the dirt thinking the matchbook would be there. If it was I couldn’t find it.”
“So what’d you do with the body?”
“Put it back where I got it.”
“You reburied it?”
“Right, the dog too,” he said.
“Why?”
“In case the guy’s monitoring the place,” he said. “We’re getting closer. I don’t want him to know it.”
“This is a dangerous game you’re playing.”
He raked his hair back with his fingers.
“You’re the one who got me into it, remember?”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I wish you’d let me fire you.”
“That isn’t going to happen,” he said. “If you want to give me a bigger retainer, though, that would be fine.”
She frowned.
“I thought you were protecting me because you cared,” she said. “Now I see you’re just in it for the money.”
“Not just the money,” Wilde said. “The other thing too.”
“Which is what?”
“Sex.”
“Sex?”
Right.
Sex.
“If you’d like to make a payment tonight, that would be fine.”
“By payment, you don’t mean the retainer.”
No.
He didn’t.
“I mean the other one.”
She gave him a kiss.
“How big of a payment are you looking for, exactly?”
He opened his arms wide.
“About this big.”
“That’s pretty big.”
“Yes it is.”
Senn-Rae grabbed his hands and pulled them even wider.
“How about something like that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something like that might kill me.”
That was last night.
Now it was morning and he was still alive, he shouldn’t be but he was. He crawled out of bed without waking Senn-Rae, lit a cigarette and headed for the shower.
When he got out, the woman was still sleeping.
Her naked body lay on top of the sheets, bathed in a soft morning light.
If there was anything more beautiful in the world, Wilde had never seen it.
He wanted her.
She was the one.
He knew it before but knew it even better now.
He gave her a kiss on the cheek and headed for the office.
97
F allon woke in a cold sweat. It was the middle of the night—one or two or three in the morning, she didn’t know, all she knew is that it was still pitch-black outside. She needed daylight to come. She needed to get this night over with.
Jundee swung his arm around her.
“Are you up again?”
“Sorry.”
“It’ll all work out, I promise.”
“Okay.”
He kissed her.
“That’s my girl.”
He rolled away, curled into a ball and snuggled into the pillow. Almost immediately his breathing got heavy and rhythmic.
He might have killed a man a few hours ago.
They’d find out tomorrow.
Fallon couldn’t stop replaying it in her head. After she ran down the stairs, Jundee came after her. The intruder—the male one, the gorilla—heard either one or both of them. Fallon got out of the house okay. Jundee didn’t. He got attacked with furious fists.
Then a gun fired.
Jundee looked at the explosion just long enough to see a woman pointing the weapon at him.
“Don’t!” the man shouted. “You’re going to hit me!”
In that microsecond, Jundee bolted for the back door and made it out. The attacker pursued, with a knife in hand. Jundee stayed ahead for fifty steps then got caught.
The blade swung at his face.
He pulled back.
The knife slashed across his neck.
He’d been cut.
He could already feel the blood.
Then something snapped.
He wrestled the knife out of the man’s hand and threw it as far as he could. The man kept coming.
He kept attacking.
He wouldn’t give up, ever.
They ended up on the ground wrapped around each other. Jundee got the man’s head in his arms and twisted as fast and as hard as he could.
The man’s power weakened.
Jundee broke loose and ran.
He didn’t know if he’d killed the man or not.
He doubled back and encountered Vampire in the front yard. “She’s in the house.”
He bolted upstairs.
Fallon was in a room at the end of the hall.
She was alone.
The other intruder, the female, was nowhere to be seen.
The safe was only half drilled, still closed and secure.
“Come on!”
They ducked out the back, made it to Jundee’s house and cleaned the wound on his neck. Then they curled up in each other’s arms and went to sleep.
That was last night.
Now it was two or three hours later, the middle of the night. Fallon flopped onto her back and wondered if she was crazy enough to actually do what she was thinking about doing.
She was.
Damn it, she was.
She got out of bed without waking Jundee, got dressed and grabbed his car keys.
Then she headed out the front door, closing it gently behind her.
The night was cool and crisp.
A dog somewhere out in the darkness barked twice.
98
S hade took a chance on whether Wilde would be in the office on a Saturday and got lucky, finding him alone except for a cat. “Got some information for you.” She pulled two cigarettes out of her purse, lit them and handed one over.
Wilde took a long deep drag and blew a smoke ring.
“Tell.”
She informed him about the London encounter yesterday which didn’t result in either of them being killed, followed by their attempt to meet up with Mojag last night, which did result in someone being killed.
A man named Jack Mack.
“Jack Mack,” Wilde repeated. “Never heard of him.”
“He’s a local,” Shade said. “Me and London paid a visit to his apartment this morning. From what we can tell, he’s nothing more than a two-bit punk with a record as long as your dick.”
Wilde smiled.
“He must have started in the 1800s.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “The point is, he’s not the kind of guy the CIA usually hires to do jobs. The fact they hired him means they wanted me out of the picture yesterday. They didn’t even have time to fly someone into town.”
Wilde flicked ashes into a tray.
“So what’s the rush?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I do know one thing. They wouldn’t sit back and see if he got the job done or not. They’d have someone en route just in case he blew it. That person will get into town today.”
“That’s not good but it’s only half of it,” Wilde said. “The other half is that the cops will be looking for you. Did you leave a trail?”
“Not that I know of,” she said. “It was pretty dark. The guy was a scumbag. Do you think the cops are really going to be looking that hard?”
Wilde shrugged.
“They might, if they think another scumbag did it and they can get two for the price of one.”
Shade tilted her head.
“Well, if they catch me, at least I know a good lawyer.”
“Who’s that?”
“Someone named Stuart Black,” she said. “That’s the one my friend Mack used to stay on the streets.”
Wilde froze.
“Stuart Black?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, there were papers in his apartment.”
“What kind of papers?”
“You know, correspondence, bills, payments, that kind of thing. Why? What are you making that face for?”
He told her.
Stuart Black’s phone number was written on a piece of paper he found in the house of Jennifer Pazour, a pinup victim.
Shade mashed what was left of her butt into the ashtray and lit another, two actually, one for Wilde.
“What’s weird,” she said. “This guy’s name, popping up in two places.”
Wilde pulled a book of matches out of his pocket and set it on fire with the cigarette.
Tail scampered into the corner.
“You just took a life out of that cat,” Shade said.
“He’s still got three or four.”
“Well, then, don’t worry about it.”
The flames caught the flap of the matchbook and rose higher. Wilde watched them burn.
“Earth to Jack,” Shade said. “Are you there?”
He shook the fire out and threw the remains in the ashtray.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
Stuart Black may well be the pinup killer.
Wilde could feel it building like a storm in his blood.
“Look,” Shade said. “The reason I’m here is because I might end up dead today, or arrested, or who knows what. I want to be sure you find Visible Moon if something happens to me.”
Wilde nodded.
“I already promised you that.”
She blew smoke.
“I’m going to be looking for Mojag today,” she said. “I may or may not end up finding him. If I don’t, I want you to help me meet up with him tonight. If I disappear between now and then and don’t get back to you by this evening, I want you to do it on your own. Let me tell you how to do it. You’ll need to find his truck and meet him there at ten. It’ll be parked within a couple of blocks of here.”
“What’s it look like?”
She told him.
“You’ll meet him, if I don’t show up?”
Wilde nodded.
“I will.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“And hope to die?”
“And hope to die twice,” he said. “Good enough?”
She nodded.
99
W hen Shade left, Wilde headed over to Senn-Rae’s and told her about his theory that Stuart Black might be the pinup killer.
She wasn’t impressed.
“I see the connection to the Pazour woman since his number was written down,” she said. “That’s the only connection I see though. So what if he did defense work for some two-bit scumbag who took a potshot at this other client of yours. How does that tie him to the pinup murders?”
“I think he has Visible Moon,” Wilde said. “She’s either a victim or a victim-to-be.”
“She’s not pretty, right?”
“Right.”
“All the pinup victims were beautiful, right?”
“Right.”
“Do you see where I’m going with this?”
He did.
He didn’t care.
“What I’m going to do is get this Stuart Black guy on the phone,” he said. “I want you to listen to his voice and see if he’s your mystery client.”
She shrugged.
“Okay but don’t expect anything. I can already tell you you’re off base.”
“You’ll be honest with me if it is him, right?”
“How can you even ask me something like that?”
“Does that mean, yes?”
She shook her head.
“For a smart guy you sure know how to say a lot of dumb things.”
He nodded.
“It doesn’t come natural,” he said. “I have to work at it. Where’s your phone book?”
She pulled it out of a drawer.
Wilde looked up the lawyer’s number and dialed.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Damn it.
No answer.
“It’s Saturday,” Senn-Rae said.
Right.
That it was.
Saturday.
He checked the phone book again to see if the man’s home number was listed.
It wasn’t.
He grabbed his hat and dipped it over the left eye.
“Where are you going?”
“To his office.”
“He won’t be there.”
“That’s why I’m going.”
“What are you going to do, break in?”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” A beat, then he added, “The things I do for you. You should be impressed.”
“Are you doing it for me or the retainer?”
He opened the door, turned and said, “Yes.”