Strip

by Thomas Perry

  Spence gave her a long, gentle kiss. When they backed apart, she kicked the sweatpants away from her ankles. He began to remove his own clothes and step away from them toward her. She backed into her bedroom as he advanced. The bed had not been slept in, so when they reached it they moved to opposite sides and tore the covers open together. Kira hurriedly yanked open the top drawer of the nightstand, tore a wrapped condom off a long strip, and put it in Spence’s hand. She had the air of a woman committing one last act before being swept away in a flood.

  They met in the center of the bed, eager and uninhibited, always in motion. After a time they ended breathlessly and lay together for a few minutes, letting their hearts slow to a normal rhythm. Then he got up, stepped to her dresser, and tore the next condom off the strip before they came together again in the center of the bed, almost like opponents in a fierce contest.

  After two hours they lay on their backs staring up at the ceiling, touching only slightly at the hip and the side of the foot. She said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “Do you do this kind of thing often?”

  “Never. But suddenly this morning I felt like my life was changing—that big things were happening that I couldn’t control, so I had to go along. I took a guess that it was you.”

  She snuggled close and put her arm across his chest. “That’s so…”

  “True?”

  “No, false. But this has been so, I don’t know, primal. When I think about it now I feel as if I’m going to faint.” She brought her leg across his thigh, straddled him, and stared down into his eyes.

  “You don’t seem faint,” he said.

  “The good kind of faint. It brings its own revival. I’m beginning to revive.”

  “So am I.”

  “How long can you stay?”

  “I don’t have to be at work until midnight”

  “Oh,” she said, then closed her eyes. “Oh.”

  5

  JOE CARVER STOOD in the Citibank branch in Studio City and watched the pretty teller count out the hundred-dollar bills. They were the cash advance on the business credit card he had stolen from Manco Kapak’s wallet while he was waiting for Kapak to return from the shower.

  It was taking a long time for the teller to count out four hundred bills, and the wig, mustache, false eyebrows, and dark makeup were all hot and itchy. Carver didn’t worry that the long wait might be dangerous, because the unseen people who had verified the card and approved the transaction wouldn’t blink at a charge of forty thousand dollars from Kapak’s company. That was probably about the size of his company’s weekly liquor bill. And Carver wasn’t trying to hide the charge forever, just until he got outside. After that he wanted Kapak to see it and howl.

  He was confident that Kapak would be occupied with the fate of his Hummers until at least lunchtime. After that he would be trying to make decisions about how to do Carver permanent harm. He wasn’t going to walk into a random branch of a random bank and see Carver using his business credit card.

  Carver was taking the money only out of annoyance anyway. When he was making his way into the bamboo forest behind Kapak’s house, he had heard a shot, looked back, and seen Kapak standing by one of the tall, narrow bedroom windows, still naked, with a gun in his hand. His eyes were not on Carver, they were turned up to watch big sheets of glass falling.

  Carver had gone through the grove of tall bamboo, over the back wall, and out to the next street. But he had been brooding over the sight since he had seen it. Stealing the business credit card from Kapak’s wallet had been a small precaution. He had not formed a genuine intention to actually use it, only had a vague idea that if he had to pay Kapak off, he might use the card and pay him with his own money. But as soon as he’d heard the shot, he had changed his mind. The card was going to help him send Kapak the message that attacking Joe Carver was a bad idea.

  The little teller behind the bulletproof glass counted out the last ten bills and looked pleased with herself. She put the first two stacks in the tray under her window and waited while he picked them up and put them into his canvas bag. Then she put the last two stacks into the tray. As he put away the rest of his money, he said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Kapak.” That was what he liked the best.

  Carver knew he had very little time, and that he needed to be moving. He walked out of the bank into the warm sunshine along Ventura Boulevard. At the first corner, he crossed to the south side, and then went over to Cantura Street. It was much quieter as he walked along in the shade of the overarching branches of the sycamore trees. Carver made his way east to the end of Cantura, then turned onto Ventura again, and walked the last three long blocks to the zone where the used-car lots began. He stepped inside the gate of the first one, because he saw just the car.

  After a test drive, he made an offer for a year-old Toyota Camry. He liked the car because it was black and nondescript. It was the kind of car that could get left in a parking lot and found only after every other car in the lot was driven off. He paid some of Kapak’s cash for it.

  All Joe Carver had wanted was to stay safe so he could start a new life here in Los Angeles. He had owned a restaurant and bar in Chicago for years, and now he wanted to start a similar business here. He could hardly expect to do that if a powerful man kept sending thugs out to find him. He had done his best to make the problem go away. He had simply evaded them, stayed out of sight, and waited for the threat to pass. He had thought that maybe Kapak would run into the real thief, or the source that had made Joe Carver the suspect would lose its credibility. Kapak himself could get into trouble of some other kind and get arrested or killed. Not only could anything happen, but if a man waited long enough, it usually did. Carver had waited a month, but nothing had happened.

  He had done his best. He had taken a big risk to go to Kapak unarmed and show him his face, so Kapak would know that Carver wasn’t the man who had robbed him. He had politely asked Kapak to start leaving him alone.

  Within minutes Kapak had shot at him from behind. There was no way to make a simple truce with Manco Kapak. The man didn’t care that Carver had done him no harm. Now he was going to have to learn how expensive it was to persist in a wrong decision.

  Carver drove to a Big Five sporting goods store and picked out a Remington Model 870 twelve-gauge shotgun with a short barrel and a magazine tube that held eight shells. He couldn’t imagine Kapak sending fewer than eight people next time if he sent any. Carver drove to Griffith Park to find a lonely parking lot beside a small picnic grove so he could take it out of its box and load it with double-ought buckshot. He laid it in the trunk under a mat and put the rest of the box of twenty-five shells in the plastic bag, then flattened the boxes and burned them in one of the picnic grills.

  He drove to Sherman Oaks, parked in the lot of a grocery store, and walked to a Wells Fargo Bank branch. He opened a checking account for an entity called the Fortuna Company, deposited five thousand dollars, and received a sheaf of temporary checks.

  His next stop was the Westfield Mall. He used Kapak’s card to pay for a hundred American Express gift cards at two hundred dollars each, then bought a new wardrobe of suits, shoes, and informal clothes, the most expensive he could find.

  The next series of purchases were simply an effort to drain as much money out of the card as possible before the account was shut down. He bought diamond jewelry and high-end wristwatches for men and women from two different stores. He was aware that there was a federal law that would prevent Kapak from losing much money through a stolen credit card, but he also knew that the charges would horrify and enrage Kapak. Carver took everything he had bought out of the bags, hid the large items in the car trunk, and stashed the rest under the front seats.

  Carver had bought enough so he felt he had to move to another shopping center. He had estimated that he could keep charging until late afternoon, so when he got to the Glendale Galleria, he decided it was time to run
a check. He went to the food court and ordered a dozen cookies, and handed Kapak’s card to the teenager at the counter. The boy ran the card, waited for the approval, and then handed it back to Carver with an apologetic expression. “Sorry, man. This isn’t any good. Would you like to cancel the order?”

  “That’s okay” Carver said, and handed him the cash for the cookies and a tip. He decided the boy looked too embarrassed for a simple declining of credit. Some other message must have come up on his machine like “Confiscate card” or “Call the police.” Carver hurried away and slipped out of the Galleria through the big Nordstrom store that opened into the parking garage. He looked at his watch. It was just 4:00. He’d had a pretty good day. He had a gently used car for free, still had thirty thousand cash and twenty thousand in American Express cards, some very nice clothes, about sixty thousand dollars in jewelry, and a loaded shotgun.

  As soon as he was two miles from the Galleria, he took off the uncomfortable fake hair, eyebrows, and mustache, and then used hand wipes to rub off the dark makeup from his face, neck, and hands as he drove. He stopped at a grocery store and used cash to pay for a roll of duct tape, a box of kitchen matches, two hundred feet of clothesline, and a can of charcoal starter.

  When he reached the neighborhood where Kapak lived, he began to drive up and down the streets. The next step was going to take some thought and study. If only he knew who had really robbed Kapak, none of this would be necessary.

  6

  JEFFERSON DAVIS FALKINS lay on the spine-snapped couch under the big window in Lila’s apartment, feeling the faint motion of air across his bare chest and bare feet and bare legs up to the place where his baggy khaki shorts began.

  The couch smelled like dog, and because he had been sleeping on it, he supposed he did too. He sat up. The sun must be very low now, because to the east he could see the hint of the deep indigo rising from somewhere beyond the curve of the earth.

  Eldon the dog raised his head and turned to Jeff, knowing that in a minute Jeff would probably insist on getting up and spoiling the community and comfort of the couch. Eldon sniffed the air, learning things from it that he kept to himself. All Jeff could tell was that he had not sniffed anything that worried him, like the approach of hostile strangers. Jeff shifted his leg and the heavy dog stood up on all fours, stepped down from the couch to the filthy yellow shag rug, and trotted off. A few seconds later the scrit-scrat sound of his toenails announced he had arrived in the kitchen. Falkins could hear Eldon’s long tongue lapping the water in his dish.

  Jeff didn’t hear Lila say anything to Eldon, so he called out. “Lila?” There was no response, so he said it louder. “Lila!” He stood up, rubbed his stubbly chin, and joined Eldon in the kitchen. The note was on the kitchen table. To Mr. Jefferson Davis Falkins. Went to Work. You should try it sometime. That was perfect Lila. She had such a superstitious reverence for work that she capitalized it. Her respect for it transcended even her attachment to arithmetic. She worked the evening shift at the Siren Club from 4:00 until midnight five nights a week and made so little that she couldn’t have afforded to eat at that club without tips. She was slim and pretty and naturally blond, so she at least got good tips, but that was beside the point.

  Jeff went into Lila’s tiny bedroom, opened the small closet that she let him share, and began to move aside the pile of shoes on the floor. He found the white laundry bag he’d left there, carried it to her bed, and poured out the bills. Most of them were small now—ones, fives, tens. That was chump money, not the kind of money you could flash. If he wanted to show off and buy a bottle of Cristal at a club, he would have to count out around fifty five-dollar bills, even more at some places. It completely defeated the purpose of buying the Cristal at all. Over the past month, he had spent hundreds of dollars every night buying dinners, champagne, the occasional hotel room for a few hours.

  He plucked the twenties and the two fifties out of the pile and stuck them in his wallet, then dutifully gathered the smaller bills and made them into a four-inch stack. He went to Lila’s dresser, found a black elastic hair band, slipped it over the stack, and tossed it on the bed. He began to open drawers, found a pair of black stockings still in a package. He opened it, lay the stockings out on the bed, put a pair of high heels where the feet would be, put a black bra up above, and put a big pair of sunglasses above that to indicate the eyes. He took her nail scissors and cut the cardboard backing from the package into the shape of a heart, wrote “I love you” on it in lipstick, and placed it in a strategic zone above the stockings. In the lowest drawer of her dresser, he found her leather gloves, put them on either side of the effigy, and put the stack of bills in the right glove.

  Two last items had fallen from the laundry bag—his Browning .45 Hi-Power pistol and the spare magazine. He checked to be sure the gun and the extra magazine were both loaded, the way he had left them. If Lila had found them sometime while he was out, it would be just like her to unload them and think she was making him safe. No, she hadn’t found the gun. He clicked the safety off and on again, put it into the inner pocket of the leather jacket hanging in the closet, put on a pair of jeans, a blue shirt, and a pair of running shoes.

  He took the jacket and turned off the lamp by the bed so when Lila came in she would turn on the light and see what he had left for her. He stepped out to the kitchen feeling good. He had been feeling bad—uncomfortable, at least—about letting her pay for everything when he had a bag full of money, and this was the last chance to throw some her way. As of now, there was no bag of money.

  That meant today was the day to go out and get something to fill the bag again. He went to the door, picked up his keys from the sideboard, and pulled his gloves and ski mask out from under the couch.

  Eldon walked to the door, stood still, and stared at him patiently.

  “Yeah, what the hell. I’ll take you out for a few minutes before I go.” He took the leash off the hook behind the door and snapped it onto Eldon’s collar, then pulled some plastic bags off the stack Lila kept by the door for walks.

  Eldon went out ahead of him, and his step seemed livelier and more youthful than it had before. Eldon was no puppy, but walking seemed to make him happy. Jeff followed the dog. He went down the sidewalk to the curb, then across the street with a slight diagonal to the left, and Jeff decided he understood. To the left were the little women’s stores that Lila liked, and the coffee shops. The dog apparently didn’t realize there was anyplace to go to the right. Jeff tugged his collar in that direction once, and the dog turned and eagerly headed to the right.

  Eldon stopped now and then to sniff each object along the way and then to work up some urine to mark his trail, but otherwise he was all for the road ahead. Eldon was Lila’s dog, but since Jeff and Eldon had both been living in Lila’s apartment at her discretion, they shared a certain feeling of fellowship. Lila had that strange female mixture of emotions about taking in useless creatures and raging fits of hormone-fueled ferocity that made her shout and throw things and slam doors.

  Eldon and Jeff liked peace. One of Lila’s sudden rages a month ago had caused Jeff to stumble on his new profession, robbing people who did their banking at night. Jeff had weathered her anger that day until she slammed the door shut on her way to work. He had contemplated the situation and begun to wonder if she was simply trying to drive him off so she didn’t have to throw him out. Then he wondered if her nasty mood was because she had another man she wanted to move in to take his place.

  Later that evening he turned off the television and drove to the club where Lila worked. She was a waitress at Siren, one of Manco Kapak’s clubs. Since it was a strip club, he had assumed that the atmosphere would be charged with pheromones and that a beautiful girl like Lila would be mired in temptation—the attraction of a really pretty girl who worked in a place that sold at least the idea of sex, and at times, pretty much the actual commodity, must be overpowering, he thought. Men must be hitting on her at a frightening rate. All of these dumb
, half-drunk guys probably thought that the waitresses were strippers-in-training, at the very least.

  Jeff went in, pretended to watch the show from a dark, remote table in the bar area, but actually watched Lila. He couldn’t spot any boyfriends hanging around waiting for her to get off work. She didn’t treat any customers as if she had ever seen them before. She was a waitress in a place where men got drunk and loud and gave big tips, but she was still a waitress. Early in the evening, she had to serve actual meals. Later on she had to concentrate mainly on carrying a tray through a tight, clumsy crowd without spilling the drinks—mainly heavy beer glasses—then making change and noticing the next customer who wanted a fresh drink. And being in a strip club, where other women were all over the place uncovering their particulars, didn’t appear to make her feel especially romantic. In fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect. After Jeff had completed an hour and a half of surveillance on her, he got distracted by one of the acts for a minute, and Lila caught him.

  She told him that if he thought she was going to work her ass off so he could sit in the bar wasting money paying other women to show him theirs, he was out of his mind. She was pretty mean about it. She followed him all the way to the front door, yapping at him like a little dog until he escaped.

  Afterward, while he was walking across the parking lot to the back, where he had hidden his Trans Am, he happened to see a man he figured was Lila’s boss, Mr. Kapak. He was coming out the kitchen door at the back of the building carrying a maroon canvas bag with a zipper on it. It was the kind of bag he’d seen store owners holding in the business teller’s line at the bank. The man got into a Mercedes and drove off.

  Jeff started his car and followed him. It was a dark, quiet summer night, and he drove with his window open, listening to the silence. He realized he knew exactly what to do. He parked his car on a residential street that was out of range of the cameras mounted on the bank. He took his gun from under the seat, pocketed the ski mask he’d used to rob a liquor store in Arizona, and ran up the alley between the commercial buildings along Ventura Boulevard and the Los Angeles River’s concrete channel. All he did was come up behind the older man beside the bank’s night deposit, stick the gun in his face, and take the bag away from him. He stepped back into the alley behind the building, ran for the car a street away, and drove back to Lila’s apartment.