by Tim Green
Her window hummed down, too, but she kept her eyes on the highway and the ramp at the bottom of the hill.
“I thought you were with them,” Jake said.
She was breathing fast and though her hands gripped the wheel, her arms were trembling.
“Yes and no,” she said. “I don’t think they followed us.”
“I doubt it,” Jake said. “How yes and how no? You can’t have it both ways.”
She turned her attention to him. “Let’s not sit here. Follow me and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what you really want to know, and then you can leave.”
Zamira put her window up and the Mustang into gear. Jake followed her for a couple of miles, into a suburban neighborhood to a modest colonial with white siding and black shutters. It stood shoulder to shoulder with similar houses on a tree-lined street. She drove into the garage and he pulled in to the driveway beside a dented white compact. She waited for him in the shadows, asked him to come inside, then closed the garage door behind them.
She unlocked the door to the house, motioning Jake through the small kitchen and toward a couch in the living room. The place was full of furniture, but there was something sterile about it, as if it had all been ordered off the showroom floor.
“Drink?” she asked.
“Vodka if you have it. The whole bottle. Maybe a beer chaser.”
She took two Michelob Ultras from the refrigerator and a bottle of vodka from the cupboard along with a glass and set it all down on the coffee table. She sat on the other end of the couch and drew one foot up underneath her as she raised her drink. Jake poured two quick glasses of vodka, knocking them off.
“Stuff like that makes me thirsty.” His hands shook.
She held out her bottle. He picked up the other beer and clinked it against hers, took a swig, and waited.
“Better?” she asked.
“Yup. Nice car you have for a secretary,” Jake said, looking around. “Nice place, too.”
“The car is from a friend,” she said. “That would have been stupid.”
She kicked off her shoes and put her bare feet up on the coffee table, crossing her long legs. Through the worn and faded jeans, Jake could see their muscular outline. She unzipped the baggy gray sweatshirt and pulled it to the edges of her shoulders. Now, below her snug peach T-shirt and above the low-cut jeans, he could see the bones of her hips and the dark crescent of stomach. With one hand, she undid the ponytail in her hair and shook her head so that it cascaded around her shoulders. One long lock fell across the bad side of her face and she smiled at Jake as if it wasn’t there.
“Last time we got to this point, I woke up with a headache and people trying to kill me,” Jake said, taking a swig of beer.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said, looking down, her voice quiet. “They wanted me to get your extra key.”
“Christ, that’s how they got in. They shot at me.”
“They told me they only needed to go through your things,” she said. “I never would have done it if I’d known.”
“Guess you made up for it,” Jake said, smiling at her until she returned it.
“It’s never a good idea to mix business with pleasure,” she said, her smile growing.
“You have to be kidding.”
“Not yet.” She shook her head and picked up a notepad and a pen off the table next to the couch where the phone sat. She scribbled something down, ripped the top sheet from the pad, and handed it to him.
“This concludes our business,” she said. “So, now you can relax.”
It was a name, Van Buren.
“How’s it done?” he asked, holding the paper up in the air.
“Sam’s family,” she said. “That’s them.”
36
HOW DO YOU KNOW? Sam came from Albania. What’s this name?”
Zamira shook her head.
“I heard them talking today,” she said. “When they shut down the office, they moved me to a small office over the social club. Sam came from a very important family. The Van Burens. The Van Burens.”
“What about you?” Jake asked. He realized now what was wrong with the place. There were no pictures on the walls. No knickknacks on any of the shelves. No books. No magazines. It reminded Jake of a set. The only lights on were the ones in the room where they sat. Beyond the windows and even in the hall to the front of the house, everything was black.
“To get out of my country, you had to work,” she said. Her fingers strayed to her face and she ran the tip of a finger down along the thin white scar. “A girl can work for seven years in a jerk shack, a massage parlor, and then she’s free in America. That’s what they tell you.”
She made a motion with her hand.
“I get the idea,” Jake said. “And you?”
She shrugged. “My parents and my two brothers were all killed. I was thirteen. We didn’t have much, a small house outside Tirana. Some goats and chickens. But my father, he pounded it into my head, that for a girl it was better to be dead than a prostitute.
“So I’m stubborn,” she said. “I got here and I wouldn’t do those things. They thought they could beat me into it. Finally they took it. That’s when they cut me. But a whore who won’t do what she’s told isn’t worth a nickel. They would have killed me sooner or later, except that everything else, I would do. No matter what it was, I did it and I did it well and they kept finding things that needed someone like me to do, a young girl who wasn’t afraid. After a few years, Lukaj brought me to Syracuse. They gave me a place. I worked hard and never had any problems.”
She looked him in the eye and said, “One of my jobs was to get the babies, from Tirana. They had the paperwork, and I pretended to be the mother. I was glad. To help those babies. I knew that Cakebread was finding good homes. People with money. People who cared.”
“And Sam?”
Zamira closed her mouth and where the scar ran through it, Jake thought he saw a twitch. Her eyes glimmered. She sniffed and turned away, then took a deep breath.
“During that time,” she said, “there were some babies that came from someplace else. I remember because I didn’t go to Albania for several months. I asked back then if I wasn’t getting the children anymore and they told me that Cakebread found an easier way to get babies right here, in America.”
“How do you know Sam was one of them?”
“I didn’t, until today. I heard them talking about you and Sam,” she said, “and I heard them talking about the Van Burens. You know the Van Burens?”
“The political family?” Jake said, his insides tightening. “The Van Burens? Are you kidding?”
“On the Hudson River,” she said. “Rhinecliff. Some estate. There’s no other, right?”
“I have Sam’s papers.”
“Lukaj could get papers from Albania to say anything. Every time I went over, they gave me a new passport to come back. I’m sure Sam’s papers were like the rest, very official. I don’t know who, I always met the same man, Amin. He always had the papers.”
“What about now? What about you?”
She stared at him, then moved closer and touched his face. Her voice dropped to a whisper.
“You have what you want. No more business,” she said, kissing him.
“What about the goats?”
“What goats?”
“Your goats. What were their names?”
“Funny.”
She slipped out of the sweat jacket, and through her shirt he could feel the strong contours of her back. She took his hand and moved it up underneath her shirt to the lace of her bra. A hot current shot through Jake’s center, making it hard to breathe. She pulled away, breaking the kiss, and took his hand. She led him upstairs and took off his coat.
When she dropped it to the floor, the gun clunked on the wood. Zamira took it from the pocket, held it up, pinching the trigger guard between her fingers and laughing. Jake stiffened.
“Not much of a gun, is it?” she said, setting it besid
e a hairbrush on top of her dresser.
“Would you think badly of me if I said, ‘It’s all in the way you use it’?”
She laughed and moved in close, put her hands on his chest, and pushed him back onto the powder-white comforter of a big four-poster bed.
Zamira straddled his hips and leaned over so her hair fell around their faces and her nose touched his. They kissed and she unbuttoned his shirt, then removed her own. Jake reached up and cupped his hands, feeling through the lace while she shimmied out of her pants, giggling as she reached for his.
When he was naked, she lay beside him and he ran his fingertips over the contour of her hip. She put her arm around his neck.
In a whisper, she said, “Be nice.”
Jake recoiled.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, touching his face with the back of her fingers.
Jake pulled her naked body tight to his, holding her and listening to the sound of his own breathing. He took a deep breath. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
37
TWICE THROUGH THE NIGHT, Jake woke and clung to her in the softness of the sheets. When he opened his eyes the third time, vertical rays of sun had stabbed their way through the curtains and he slid out of the bed without waking her. He dressed quietly, studying the lines of her face, her full lips and their hint of a smile, the long dark eyelashes, and the scar that marred its perfection the way a jagged crack would ruin a china vase.
Downstairs, he found the pad and pen by the phone and wrote I WILL BE BACK. COFFEE/SHOWER.
He set the note down on the kitchen table where he was sure she’d see it, then got into his car and headed back to his new hotel so he could shower and change for the uplink shot with Nancy. He put on his dark blue suit with a powder blue shirt and a green tie. When he got off the elevator, he cased the lobby before darting through it. He checked the rearview mirror repeatedly on his way to the shoot.
He got there in plenty of time and Muldoon had everything set up. Jake looked over the final scripts and nodded his approval. He did a couple of dry runs, glancing down at the script for help until he had it cold. While they waited for Nancy in New York, Muldoon asked about his investigation. Jake gave Muldoon a conspiratorial smile and said he didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up yet, but that things were still on track.
When the shoot was over, Joe Katz got into Jake’s ear over the satellite and told him about an important story he wanted him to throw together, quickly. He explained that his own boss, the president of Galaxy Television, had a daughter at Syracuse University who had just won a cell phone movie contest and that she was getting an award that afternoon.
“I guess Oliver Stone is speaking to the kids and he’s presenting it, so you can get the two of them together,” Katz said.
“I thought you said it was important,” Jake said. “Oliver Stone is a dipshit.”
“It’s the boss’s daughter.”
“He wrote Conan the Barbarian,” Jake said. “Did you know that? A cell phone movie? Jesus, Joe.”
“He asked for you specifically, Jake. What am I? Your fairy godmother? Do I have to keep turning pumpkins into gold for you?”
“Pumpkins to gold? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Whatever. We’ve talked about it too much already. We’re going to lose the uplink. Good work on the bunker man. Nancy loves it.”
“Oh boy, now I’ll be able to sleep at night,” Jake said, but Katz didn’t even hear him. The audio in his earpiece went dead and he pulled it free, unclipping it from its cable and sticking it into his pocket before unclipping the mike and handing it to Skip Lehman.
He told Muldoon about the president’s daughter. The producer nodded as if he already knew and said he’d do the legwork to set it up. Jake asked if Muldoon could give him an hour or two to get breakfast before they did the voice-over work. Muldoon said no problem, they could meet at the sound studio at SU at eleven, then do the interview in the afternoon, so Jake got into his car and headed back to Zamira’s.
He didn’t expect her to still be sleeping, but he was thinking he could talk her into a cup of coffee, if not breakfast. Even though she had told him she was done answering questions, Jake had a feeling things might have changed.
When he pulled into the driveway, he was surprised to see the front door ajar. He’d come out that way and was almost certain he’d closed it behind him. He pushed it open and stepped inside, then closed it and turned the bolt.
“Zamira?” he said.
The house was still. Jake felt something creep up his spine. He went into the kitchen and examined his note. It seemed to have been moved, but he couldn’t be certain. He stuck it in his pocket, chuckled, and went upstairs. The chill returned when he reached the top step, but he shrugged it off and went down the short hall.
He froze in the doorway to her bedroom. Zamira lay spread out in her underwear, faceup on the bed. The sheets and comforter were in a tangle on the floor. Jake felt his fingernails pierce the palms of his hands. His stomach heaved and he staggered back.
The small dark hole in her temple had soaked the mattress in blood. On the wooden floor, a little brass shell casing glinted up at him, and on the night table beside the bed rested the Colt .25.
38
JAKE CLUTCHED HIS GUT and swallowed with a choke. Acid burned the back of his throat. He stepped into the room and nudged the shell casing with his toe before kneeling down for a better look. It was small, a .25-caliber. He stood and stared at the little Colt. He reached out for it, but stopped his hand before he touched it and pulled away.
From outside, he heard the distant sound of sirens. He thought of the fire trucks and crossed the little hall to the window in the front room. The sirens were getting closer, but Jake stood frozen with shock and disbelief. Through a gap in the curtain he saw a police car pull up. Two uniformed cops got out and marched up the driveway. Their squad car was parked at an angle half in the driveway, half in the road.
He darted back out, across the hall and into the bedroom. He scooped the gun up off the nightstand and picked up the casing off the floor. He went into the bathroom and yanked back the thin frilly curtains on the window. Downstairs, he could hear the knocking and the muffled sound of the men calling out.
Jake heaved the window up, stood on the toilet, and gripped the window frame, then stuck his feet out and wormed his way through. He hung from the sill for a moment before dropping to the bushes below. His bad knee sent a jolt through him. He struggled to his feet and fought through the tangle of brush. When he hit the grass, he sprinted awkwardly around the corner of the house. He paused behind a tree and saw that the cops had gone in, so he dashed down the driveway, half dragging his bad leg. He jumped into his car and fumbled with the key before stabbing it into the ignition. He slammed the car into reverse and swerved around the nose of the black squad car, spinning the wheel so the rear of his own car swung out into the street. Without even looking back, he jammed it into drive and stepped on the gas, surging up the street and around the corner.
There was no one behind him when he shot out of the housing development and onto a main road, but after he rounded the corner, he saw a dark blue sedan that had been waiting to turn in suddenly whip around and accelerate toward him. Jake stamped on the gas pedal. He wove through the traffic of the double-lane road, then fishtailed around the corner at the next intersection, working his way back toward the interstate.
The road he’d turned on was only a single-lane, though, and he quickly caught up to a slow-moving car and leaned on his horn, flashing his lights. The driver didn’t budge and Jake swung out into the other lane. An oncoming car blared its horn. Brakes squealed, and Jake flattened the gas pedal and swung back in front of the slow-moving car a split second before the crash. The car he had passed swerved and pulled over, and Jake saw the nose of the blue sedan surging up from behind.
There was a red light up ahead and a row of cars waiting for it to turn. Jake pressed on, swerved around them on the rig
ht, kicking up dust and stones and nicking a light pole with his mirror, but making it around the bend, the sound of horns chasing him. He was on another two-lane road now and he wove through traffic, hung a left on a yellow light, passed the Motel 6, and saw the highway down below. The dark blue car was still back there. He rocketed down the hill and shot into the curve of the highway entrance.
When he saw the traffic crawling up the ramp to merge onto the highway, he reacted instantly. If he stopped, they’d have him. He swung the wheel and cut left, driving off the road and bouncing down the embankment. He hit the ditch so hard that his forehead banged the windshield, but his foot was full on the gas and he came up out of it and had enough momentum to carry him out onto the highway.
There was a shriek of tires and horns, but somehow he made it into the stream, weaving through the traffic, tasting the blood that ran down his face from the bump on his forehead, and getting off at the very next ramp. There was a shopping mall there with a parking garage. He careened down into it and found a spot in one of the darker corners. He shut the engine off and sat there, trembling.
He closed his eyes and saw her lying there with blood on the bed, then opened them wide and stared at the jagged fissures in the concrete wall.
He waited, expecting any moment for either the Albanians or the police to rap a gun barrel against the car window. Visions of running through the garage filled his mind, but when he went to open the door, a weight pinned his hand to his lap. He broke down the facts, examining the evidence the way he knew the cops would. The chance that they hadn’t connected him still remained. They had a description of the car, but there was no reason to think anyone had gotten his license plate.