“What type is that?”
“Those willing to pay for sex.”
That brought one of her whoops of delight. “Oh, doll baby. You really do need to learn the ways of the world. There isn’t a man alive who isn’t about one cocktail away from blowing everything he has in his life for a secret poke.” She winked. “Especially if it’s with me. I don’t care who or what he is, I’ll lead him to the trough, and I guarantee you, he’ll be snout deep in all that forbidden fruit before you know it. Men are easy. It’s women that are hard. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because they’re so much smarter. Like you for instance.” She pulled her legs up underneath her and went up on all fours. Then she started toward me, doing a slow, seductive tiger crawl across the couch. Her hands and her knees sank down into the soft cushions so that when she was right next to me, it was hard not to tumble into her.
Angel up close was such a vivid presence, she was almost too much to take. Her size. Her scent. The way her eyes shone. Tristan had said it best. She was always hungry, and I was just figuring out how famished she seemed tonight. She was almost purring. “You never answered my question.”
“What was—”
“Have you ever been naked with another woman?”
“I’ve never had sex with another woman.”
“But you’ve thought about it, haven’t you?”
I was trying to stay a step ahead of her, trying to figure out what answers she would want to hear. But in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help thinking that I had started something I wouldn’t be able to stop, something that wouldn’t go well for either one of us. “Maybe.”
“That’s what I thought.” She curled her legs beneath her and sat back, which had the advantage of moving her half an arm’s length away. “When you close your eyes alone at night in your bed, you think about it, don’t you? About the way a woman’s lips would feel touching your skin or a tongue that knows what it’s doing, all warm and wet and exactly where you want it.” She started moving her hands over her own body, caressing herself. “Does this get you hot? Because I’m all hot now, sugar. I think you should stay here with me tonight.”
She pushed closer and put her hand on my thigh. I watched her do it. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t pull away. I felt her fingers through the fabric of my jeans. It didn’t turn me on. It didn’t feel erotic. It felt like business.
“If I stayed with you tonight, you would introduce me to your programmer?”
The heat was coming off her in waves. I imagined I could hear the blood racing beneath her skin. She was revving. “Put your tongue in my mouth right now,” she said, “and I will give you whatever you want.” She tried to kiss me. I turned my head. When her hand began to creep into forbidden territory, I put mine over it.
“You know, Angel, I keep trying to treat you with respect. I keep trying to maintain a professional relationship with you, because you say that’s what you’re about. But the truth is, you’re a whore, plain and simple.”
She pulled away. I turned to find her staring at me. Then she pulled her hand off my thigh. “What did you just say?”
“I’ve come to you with a good marketing strategy. I’ve provided you with important proprietary information from your most aggressive competitor. I’ve even screwed a man for money because you said to. I’ve done everything you asked and more. What’s your response? You will only trust me if I have sex with you. I’m beginning to think you have trust issues.”
“Did you … did you just call me a whore?”
“You think like one, you act like one, you make decisions like one. You hate yourself like one. That’s why you can’t trust me. You can’t understand anyone who would give you something and not expect sex in return.”
She was still kneeling on the couch next to me, holding perfectly still. The only sound in the room was the hissing of the gas fueling the fire. She didn’t seem horny anymore. She seemed speechless.
“So what happened to you? Were you molested by your father? Raped by your brother? What was it that turned you into such a cliché? Or do you even know?”
“You’d better stop right there.”
“Am I hitting close to home? You like poking around in other people’s psyches and you’re good at it. It’s probably what makes you good at your job. But when the game turns around, you run. You’re scared.”
“I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“All you do is hide. Behind your big tits and your makeup and your fancy clothes and your money. You’ve had fun dissecting me and making me strip for you. Come on out here into the light and show me what you’ve got.”
“Ooh. Are we going to play doctor now? Should I stretch out on the couch for this part? I’d much rather stretch you out. I could make you forget all about men.” She tried to sound sultry, but she was off her rhythm.
“That’s not going to work with me. I want to know about you, but I don’t want to have sex with you. Can you grasp that?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to do business with you. You know better than anyone how important it is to understand your client. I’m trying to understand you.”
She stared for a long time before letting her shoulders relax. She put her elbow up against the back of the couch and rested her head against her hand.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing what?”
“Nothing happened to me. I saw the way the world worked and I made a choice. That’s all.”
“How does the world work?”
“When I was fifteen years old, I had to take a job in a department store after school, because my daddy was such a dumb bastard that he couldn’t support his own family.”
I recoiled slightly, the way I always did when I heard one person call another one dumb, and especially someone they were supposed to love. But I also thought that maybe, just maybe, this could go in the direction I wanted it to.
“There was a dress in stock that I wanted to wear to the freshman dance. It was a teal green with a sweetheart neckline. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and there was no way on God’s green earth I could pay for it. I was going to steal it, but then one day the store manager saw me pawing it. He was this dickhead who wore short-sleeved shirts where the sweat stains under his arms never quite came out. His oldest daughter was in school with me. He told me I could have the dress if I went to the back room and sat on his lap. I remember he had this pocket watch he used to wear. It was a gold watch and he wore it on the end of this cheap old chain. I never did understand that. The chain got caught under my thigh, that’s what made me think of it. He came in thirty seconds.” She smiled. “I came home with my dress, and I wore it to that dance, and I had a blast. After that, I could get anything I wanted if I went with him to the stockroom. Easy as pie.”
“That’s your life-altering moment? You fucked a man for a dress, and that set your life on the course it’s on?”
“Not really. I fucked a priest. That’s probably what did it.”
“You…” I looked at her more closely. She stared into the fire.
“You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”
“I was raised Catholic,” I said.
“I knew it. I can always tell.” Her voice had gone all dreamy. “Dried-up old men in collars and nuns in burkas, they teach you that sex is dirty and anyone who engages in the sins of the flesh is a filthy heathen who will rot for eternity in hell. What do they know? They’ve never gotten any in their lives. The only priest that ever taught me anything worth knowing was the one who stuck his dick in my mouth.” She gave me a half smile. “He taught me everything.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged as though revealing this much had left her with a chill. “I went down on him, up on him, inside and out with him. It’s the ones who know they’re doing wrong that make me the hottest.”
“Did you ever tell anyone?”
“Tell them what?”
; “That you were molested?”
“Doll, if there was any molesting going on, it was me doing it to him. I was what you’d call an early developer. He couldn’t resist me. No man ever could and I needed it, too.”
Right. “How old were you?”
She offered a gentle smile. Her face softened. She rested her hands on her thighs. She looked as tranquil as I’d ever seen her. She dropped her head and looked as though she were in some kind of meditative pose. I almost wanted to reach out to her. Then she raised her head and I saw into her eyes. Something had gone off inside, some kind of light had been extinguished. She stared right through me. When she spoke, her voice was scarily dull, completely devoid of emotion.
“So tell me, Alexandra, does any of this get you hot?”
“Molestation? Not generally.”
“Because you won’t let it.” She started to come at me again, moving slowly. She reached over and started to play with my hair, running her hands through it and pushing it behind my ear. “You know what your problem is? You’re all about control. You need to lose control, or have it taken away from you. Then you could just lie back and enjoy.”
“That would be rape, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, that would be rape. Don’t you ever fantasize about being raped? Taken against your will with all choice removed. No choice means no games, no angst, or confusion, or questions. Just giving in. Letting go… and enjoying. It makes it so easy.”
“That’s not one of my fantasies.”
“Taken by someone more powerful and more experienced than you are. Someone who would know what you wanted before you did and would do it to you even when you said no. Someone who would make you do… things… to her… that you’ve never done before.”
The smile was still there, but tighter, cruder, and deeply unsettling. She moved her hand to my face. This time when she touched me, it set off an adrenaline surge that ripped through my bloodstream with one clear message: run.
I tried to get up. She put her knee and all her weight on my thigh and locked me down. At the same time, she grabbed my wrist, wrenched my arm around, and held it up between us like half a turkey wishbone. The come-on was over. The pretense was gone. Now we were down to the pure, unvarnished conflict that had been there between us all along.
“You’ve been trying to get close to me, sugar.” Her smooth-as-maple-syrup voice was back. So was her attitude. “Is this close enough?”
“Angel, all I was doing was—”
“You bitch.” She twisted my arm half a turn in the wrong direction. It hurt like hell. “You think you’re so smart. Did you find out what you wanted to know? Do you understand your client now?”
I did understand some things. First, that there wasn’t much point in engaging in discussion. I could look into her eyes and see what I hadn’t seen before. Second was that it wasn’t the sex that turned her on. It was the manipulation. She got off on making people do what they didn’t want to do. She liked making them uncomfortable and ashamed, how she might have felt giving a blow job to a priest. Sadly, I understood too late that making her feel that again would result in this kind of reaction.
“You’re nothing but a whore like me. What’s your price? What will make you do what you don’t want to do?”
She was now stroking my forehead with her free hand. I tried to figure out if I could push her off. Probably not. If I could twist out from under her. Doubtful. If I had any advantage at all. Not really. Not physically.
“I could force you,” she said.
She looked crazed, like an animal. It reminded me of something I had read about wolves, about how the weaker wolf in a fight can save itself by offering its throat, giving the stronger animal the choice to rip it out. Or not. All I had left was to offer her my throat.
I let the wave of pain in my arm subside and tried to talk slowly, with some semblance of confidence. “I know you could force me. I know you could hurt me, and I believe you would. If that’s your plan, then do it. Otherwise, let me go.”
She stared into my face and twisted my arm again, this time approaching the limit of what my normal skeletal structure could endure. My fingers went completely numb. Tears sprang to my eyes. It was as if her shell had fallen away, leaving something truly scary to look at. It was raw physical desire and a bottomless pit of loathing, for herself and everyone else. I wasn’t sure which was fuel for the other, or even if one could be separated from the other.
“I could force you,” she whispered again, “if I wanted.”
She twisted until we were both shaking. When I finally cried out, she let go of my arm and backed off of my thigh.
I was on my feet instantly. When I dropped my hand to my side, the blood rushed back in, making my fingers hurt as if they were throbbing against a thousand needles. I grabbed my things and started backing out the front door.
“Twelve,” she said, without looking at me.
“Twelve what?”
“I was twelve years old.”
I left her sitting alone in the dark, staring into the fire.
I could barely keep my car on the road on the way back to Boston. After I had blown out of Angel’s place and buckled in, a wave of delayed adrenaline had washed through me. I had started shaking and sweating and hadn’t stopped. Felix heard it in my voice when I called him.
“What’s the matter, Miss S? You sound freaked out.”
That was the perfect description. “I just had a disturbing experience.” At least I was out of the cabin, but I was out without the contact information for Sluggo. “Did you get e-mails and attachments from a guy named Djuro Bulatovic?”
“They just came in. What are they?”
“They’re the original blackmail correspondence to Arthur Margolies. I was hoping you could use them to track back to Web Boy. I need to get to him fast. You’re my only option now.”
“Maybe,” he said. I heard his keys tapping. “I’m looking at it, and it won’t be that straightforward. Let me get to work, and I’ll get back to you.”
I didn’t want to hang up, but I wasn’t sure what else to say. “Felix, can you stay on with me for a little while?”
“Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Sure thing. Did I tell you about the boarding pass printer problem I’ve been working on?”
Chapter Thirty-two
Harvey left on the three-fifteen p.m. departure to Orange County the next day. I stood in one of the windows and watched him take off. We had decided it was best for him to go on without me. He could do the client briefing on his own. Felix had worked through the night trying to find Web Boy. He thought he was close, so I stayed behind to try one last-ditch effort to get what we knew was out there. Harvey had set midnight in California as the absolute deadline for adding new information to the presentation. If I couldn’t come up with anything new by then, he would go with the case we had.
I watched the aircraft rumble down the long concrete launch pad and lift into the afternoon sky. I had to force myself not to try Felix again. I knew he was working as hard as he could. Every time I stopped at a light all the way home, I had to resist all over again. There was no way I could stay in my apartment and not call him, so I went for a run. The phone was ringing when I got back.
“Hello?”
“I’ve got him, Miss Shanahan.”
“Felix, you’re my hero.” I know he was dying to tell me how he’d figured it out, but I didn’t have the time. I found a pen and my notepad. “What have you got?”
He gave me the address of Stewart Belkamp, a.k.a. Sluggo, a.k.a. Web Boy, the Dark Hacker. Without Angel to introduce me, I’d had to come up with another way to get in to see him. I had one. I just hoped it would work
“Felix, can you send an e-mail that looks as if it came from Monica?”
“Sure. Piece of cake.”
“Remember, you have to fool Web Boy. He’ll probably check to make sure it came from her account.”
“No problem. What do you want Monica to tell him?”
“T
he Dark Hacker is about to get an offer he can’t refuse.”
Angel had said she didn’t like being with Stewart Belkamp because he had a tendency to drool all over her. The second he opened his apartment door, I knew what she was talking about. He had a tuber-shaped body, frizzy red hair, and a starchy complexion. He was probably in his mid-twenties, but he stared with the slackjawed lust and overblown impudence of a sixteen-year-old boy who had learned everything he wanted to know about women from Maxim magazine.
“You’re Stewart?”
He talked around the wad of bagel in his mouth. “Who are you?”
“Jane Doe.”
I stepped past him and into his standard, no-frills, new-construction apartment, which was located near the heart of the Cambridge tech and biotech centers. He wasn’t well fixed for things to sit on, but he had lots of toys to play with—a big-screen TV sat flanked by two high-end speakers and a bookcase full of video games and DVDs.
“Where’s your computer?”
He couldn’t maintain eye contact but couldn’t keep his eyes off various other body parts. Of course, he did think I was a hooker, so maybe I was fair game. “It’s in the back. Where’s Monica?”
“She decided not to come. Let’s get to work. We have a lot to do.”
He shoved in front of me. “How do I know you won’t tell Angel I’ve been talking to you?”
“Because I work for the women in LA, and our goal is to put Angel out of business. Why would I want her to know we’re courting you?”
“Courting me?”
“Monica told you, didn’t she? I’m here to look over your system so we can decide if we want to hire you. According to everything we hear, we want you working for us.”
He stuck his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans but didn’t move out of the way.
“Stewart, have you ever considered living in California? Maybe a little bungalow on the beach? It’s warm out there all year round. I think you’d like it.”
“You’re a… you’re one of the hookers?” From the way he was checking me out again, it wasn’t hard to figure out what he was considering.
The Alex Shanahan Series Page 98