“So, you people are running hookers out of LA? That explains what’s been going on with the numbers.”
“Has her revenue declined?”
“Angel’s revenue never declines. It just hasn’t been going up as fast as before.”
Prostitution. An unlimited market driven by infinite demand. No wonder it was the oldest profession. Angel’s business was under heavy attack by a direct competitor, and she was still growing, only at a slower rate. I wondered what the depressed growth rate might be. Twenty percent? Fifty?
“We’ve heard about you in LA, Stewart.”
“You have?” He puffed up a little.
“We’ve heard that you’re the key to Angel’s success.”
He let out the long and lonely sigh of the unappreciated. “She couldn’t do anything without me. Until she found me, she was so small-time.”
“My only question is why put up with her?”
“What do you mean?”
“She takes all the credit for your work. She talks about you as if you’re some kind of trained monkey. You know what she calls you, right? Sluggo?”
His face clouded over, and his jaw jutted out. Stewart didn’t have much of a poker face. “Sometimes she pays me with sex.” He pouted. “That’s the only reason I stay with her is…is because she’s a great piece of ass.”
“Uh-huh.” I pulled back so that less of me touched less of him. He was lying about Angel, and I didn’t want him getting any ideas about me. At least none beyond the ones I wanted to give him.
His fingers hovered over the keys for half a second before he started pounding. His keyboard was dirty and his mouse stained dark from what must have been thousands of touches from his right palm, but the second he started typing, he became a different person. It was as if his hands on the keys completed a circuit, and the power that ran through the computer animated him as well. The slouch fell out of his shoulders, his breathing steadied, and everything about him was more grounded and confident.
“What do you want to see?”
“I want to see how your data are stored and organized, how you keep track of customers, activity, payments, schedules—”
“I’ll show you the tables and whatnot, but I’m blocking out all the data.”
“Without the data, I can’t get a good sense of how your system works.”
“There is no way I’m showing you anything about clients or hookers. No way. I don’t work for you, and I’m not giving up the goods until I see some green.”
Perhaps the whinier version of Stewart would have been preferable. I knew one thing: he was my last option, and I wasn’t leaving without that list of hookers.
I sat back in my chair and checked out my thumbnail. “You probably don’t have what we need, anyway. We have pretty advanced ideas of what we want to do.”
“Advanced?” He snorted. “What is it you think you need?”
“History. We’d like to keep a database of all of our clients’ activity to use for a loyalty program. Does Angel have that?”
“She doesn’t. I do. I know everything every one of her clients has done, where, when, and who with.”
“That’s sensitive information. We would want to make sure it’s totally inaccessible, for obvious reasons.”
“No one can get into my system. No one can hack me.”
“Why not?”
“Because”—big sigh, total exasperation—“I have firewalls on top of firewalls on top of firewalls. I designed and built them myself. If I ran Microsoft, they would never have any of those dumb security failures they have.”
“Can I see how you store the data?”
“Like I said—”
“I know, no names. Just the structure of the tables.”
He came into the program through a back door. There were no input boxes or other customer interface screens. Instead, he showed me a lot of tables and templates with rows and columns that had labels but no data. No names.
Stewart might have had the social skill of a sixteen-year-old, but he was clever about system design. I told him some of my ideas for the frequent fucker program, and he knew exactly how to implement them and, in some cases, improve on them.
“All we have to do,” he said, “is to assign an ID number to each customer, see? Some kind of a tag so that we can trace all their activity. Then we add a column to the customer tables.”
“Like the airlines’ frequent flier IDs.”
“The airlines’ programs are retarded. Mine would be a whole lot better.”
We worked our way into an uneasy truce based on his desire to strut his stuff and, I noticed, just how much contact our knees made. It was like flipping a switch. The more I rubbed up against him, the more forthcoming he was.
“We’re thinking of setting up a performance management system.”
“What’s that?”
“A way to evaluate the performance of the providers.”
“You mean the hookers? Like how many different ways they can do it?” He giggled and rubbed his shoulder against my upper arm. I got even closer, going with him on every subtle shift his body made.
“Sort of. Like how much revenue they generate and how many new customers they bring in. Some of the girls are really energetic. They work hard, generate lots of revenue, and bring in new customers. I would want to know who they are so I could reward them properly. Any ideas?”
“That’s easy. I’ll show you.” He stroked a few keys. “I can show you without giving you the names.”
He built a table with a column for standard rate, one for what he called average revenue per hooker, one for dates per hooker, and one for revenue earned to date for the year. Instead of names, he used numbered rows, from one to thirty-two.
“I can sort it any way you want. How do you want it?”
“Highest to lowest by rate.” I figured that way, the elites would be grouped right at the top, and they were. Only one woman made $2,500 per date. It had to be Angel. Several were just below her at $1,500 to $2,000, and on down the list in descending order.
“Now, can you put in a column that shows the date of each woman’s activity? And the city?”
“What for?”
“I want a way to tell who works how often and who travels the farthest.”
“Um…okay.” He whipped up a comment column that included the information. I checked for the date when I had taken the pictures of Angel and Sally. When I saw that the two hookers at the top had been in Pittsburgh on that night, I could barely contain my delight. This was exactly what I needed, data that could be matched to flight schedules and the surveillance photos we’d taken to tell a story that was compelling, traceable, and incriminating.
But only if it included the names of the women.
The clock in the lower right-hand corner of his screen read twelve forty-fiveA.M. I’d been there for two hours already, and I had taken him as far as he would go on the promise of a bungalow on the beach and a couple of cheap feels. To get the good stuff, I knew I would have to offer him something he really wanted, something for which he had no good defense.
I leaned over the arm of my chair to look at the screen and put myself well into his personal space. He took a deep breath, his face inches from my hair.
“Would you print all those out for me? I want to take them back to my people to show them what you can do.”
As the pages began to roll off the printer, I pulled one off and set it on his lap. “You know what would be really helpful for us? To see the names of these women, so we know who to recruit to our side.”
“I can’t do that.”
I pressed on the rows at the top with my finger. That was about mid-thigh for him. “We would be interested in these women.” I ran my finger down the page, which happened to be up his thigh. “But not these.”
He sucked in a breath that caught in his throat. I turned my upper body toward him. “Come on, Stewart. Let me see our competition. Angel doesn’t have to know.”
“I c
an’t.”
“Can’t…” I put my hand full on his thigh, and he jumped. “Or won’t?” He held perfectly still. He didn’t even look as if he were breathing.
“You said she sometimes paid you with sex. I know that’s not true, Stewart. She won’t let you near her women.”
“So?”
“So, maybe we can work out a side deal. An exchange of services, so to speak.” I let my fingers begin that slow climb again, up the inside of his thigh, moving steadily until I was close enough to feel his response. I’d never done anything like this with someone to whom I didn’t have at least a passing attraction. I had to be careful not to push too far too fast. He was pretty excitable. “You’re the one with all the power, Stewart. She needs you”—I gave him a little tweak—“as much as you need this.”
As his desire surged, so did my own sense of confidence, and for the first time, I started to understand what Angel knew. Sex was power, but power was the aphrodisiac. There was nothing about Stewart to get hot about, but making Stewart do what he didn’t want to do, that was hot, and when he reached for the keyboard and started typing, I felt almost as flushed as he looked.
I tried to get hold of myself by mentally mapping out the exhibits I would spin for Harvey out of this solid gold information. Angel was about to get slam-dunked, another thought that was nearly orgasmic, yet another indication that I had to get off this case, and fast.
Stewart finished and leaned back. I looked at the screen, and they were all there. Angel’s name was right at the top. Below were Sally’s and Charlotte’s and Ava’s and the rest. I slipped my hand off his leg, and he gasped again. I moved it up and laid it on his soft chest, a touch that elicited a low, ragged groan from him. “Print those out for me, baby, and make me a diskette.”
He couldn’t move fast enough. He typed in the commands, copied the files, and handed me the diskette. Then he got up and left, which made more room for me. As the pages rolled from the printer, I pulled them off one by one and tried to think if I dared ask for anything more. It was too late. I had to get going.
Where was…I turned around to find where Stewart had gone. He was on the edge of his bed peeling his clothes off. Uh-oh.
“Stewart, stop.”
“Why?”
I slipped the printouts into a file folder, dropped the disk into my pocket, and gathered everything together. I stood up and faced him, faced the result of my deception. He was already naked from the waist up, which was highly distracting, considering the way he was shaped.
“I misled you, and I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“I’m leaving now.”
“You’re—” He reached up and scratched his left shoulder with his right hand. “Aren’t we going to fuck?”
“Not tonight. I need to get this stuff to my clients. The faster they see it, the faster you get your offer. Think of it that way, and…” I inched toward the door. “Thanks for your help. You’ll be hearing from us soon.”
Chapter
33
THE LAST EXHIBIT SHOT OFF TOHARVEY VIAe-mail around three in the morning, East Coast time. He was so nervous I decided to stay up in case he called with more questions. I did, in fact, stay up, but not awake, and when I heard the neighbor’s door slam and opened my eyes, it was six-thirty. The last time I remembered checking the clock was at three twenty-five.
I went into my room and fell onto my bed without bothering to change. The next time I was conscious was after eleven. When I sat up, my neck was stiff. I couldn’t turn it to the left without sending shooting pains down my back, and I wondered if I would have to make only right turns all day. I also wondered about the nagging feeling that kept tapping me on the shoulder, telling me I was supposed to be somewhere. It was as if I could feel it, but when I whipped around to see it, it was gone. I chalked it up to oversleeping.
It was eight o’clock on the West Coast, which meant that Harvey’s presentation was in progress. I probably should have felt nervous in sympathy with him, but I didn’t feel much of anything. There was no more that I could do. I thought I should have felt more satisfaction. We were going to nail Angel. But all I felt was spent—physically, emotionally, and mentally. I felt like one of those climbers standing on the summit of Mount Everest. To me, they always looked as if they were dying. They had spent so much of themselves to get there, there was no way to enjoy it. They didn’t always get back all that they had spent, either.
By the time I dragged myself out, it was eleven-twenty. I was headed for the shower when I thought to wake up my computer and check my calendar for whatever important thing I was supposed to be doing. When I clicked up the activities for the day and saw what it was, I froze, then grabbed my backpack and flew out the door, wearing the clothes I had slept in and an expression of sheer panic.
Four people were already lined up at the Boston Police Department shooting range when I stumbled in. They had their weapons ready and their headgear in place. The officer conducting the test patrolled the platform, arms folded over the clipboard trapped against his chest.
He barely acknowledged me when I approached him, which made for an awkward pause as I tried to catch my breath. “I’m…”Breath… “Alex…”Breath… “Shanahan.”
“You’re late.”
“Yes, I am, and I’m…”Breath… “Sorry.”
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t have to. Every cell in his pressed-uniform body said it for him. What kind of an idiot shows up for her range test late, smelling like a locker room, and looking as if she’d slept in her clothes? I had done exactly what Tristan had told me not to do—screeched into the Moon Island parking lot late, rattled, and unprepared. If we had still been friends, he never would have let me do this.
The large-boned, dour-faced officer waited. I figured the fewer words, the better. “I’m a flight attendant, and I had a difficult time setting up this test around my flight schedule. I’m sorry to disrupt things. Will you allow me to take it even though I’m late?”
Either he appreciated the direct approach, he felt sorry for me, or he wanted to see if a flight attendant could shoot. I wasn’t sure which it was, but he pulled out his clipboard and made a notation. “Take the last target. You’ve got two minutes to set up.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much.”
It took the whole two minutes to get settled and two seconds to realize what a mistake I had made. As soon as my hand closed around the .38, I knew I should have rescheduled. My shoulders ached, my hands felt weak, the gun felt heavy, and I could not picture any set of circumstances under which I would pass this test today. I hadn’t fired a shot, and I’d already failed, and I knew it.
When I got the signal, I squeezed the trigger, the gun kicked, and the round was on its way. It missed. I let out a long, slow breath and tried to adjust. Squeezed off another round. Missed. The weapon was like some alien object with a foreign mass and shape that I’d never touched before. I wanted to stop, to tell them right then and there that I could shoot. I really could shoot. I had worked and practiced and refined my skills, but this was a bad day, and I had made a bad decision by racing over here, and could I go away and try another day?
Round three, and it was getting worse. I was starting to shake badly. The cumulative effect of the exhaustion and the missed shots was adding up to a weight I couldn’t bear.Grow up, I told myself.Pull yourself together. If you’re this intimidated by the cops, how will you fare with the bad guys who are not just laughing at you but trying to kill you, to boot?
I aimed the fourth round for the bull’s-eye and squeezed off four, five, and six in quick concession. I was perfect. Not a single one had hit the target. If I could have run out of there, I would have, but I managed to remove my gear, gather my things, and not look at a single soul as I walked out the door. I had failed the test. I didn’t need anyone to tell me.
Harvey called in the early afternoon when I was unpacking from my last trip so I could use the suitcase for my next one. I had dumped t
he contents on the floor, right onto the pile of dirty clothes that had overwhelmed my laundry basket. I was sorting the lights from the darks and the dry cleaning from everything else, when the phone rang.
“Alex, we did it. We nailed it. We knocked it out of the park.” Harvey was so filled with enthusiasm and clichés I almost didn’t recognize him.
“They were so impressed with us. You were absolutely right about those last exhibits. They made the case so effectively that even I could not mess it up. I wish you could have been here, too.”
“I think it worked out the way it was supposed to.”
“Is everything all right? You sound down.”
“I’m okay.” I thought about telling him about the test, but he sounded too happy. He wouldn’t get it, anyway. “I had a disappointment this morning. I’ll get over it.”
When it occurred to me I couldn’t tell the light clothes from the dark, I got up to turn on a lamp and realized the blinds hadn’t been opened for weeks. I pulled the cord and welcomed the sun and the world back into my bedroom.
“Carl has promised me a check for the balance of what they owe us before I leave here tomorrow.”
“You’re on a first-name basis with Mr. Wolff?”
“He wants to take me to dinner tonight. I think he might want to talk about more work for us.”
“Are you serious? The same people who wanted to fire us two weeks ago are not only paying us but offering more work?”
“I told him we would be happy to entertain any proposals.”
“We’ll have to see if we can squeeze him in. That’s…astoundingly good news, Harvey.” I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in success. I had someplace to be. “Not to spoil the mood, but when do they plan to take Angel out of service?”
“The issue is being discussed, but I think immediately, if not sooner.”
“Good. They should move fast before the word gets out and Angel has a chance to mount a counterattack, which you know she will. The rumors are probably already flying. Not to mention the sooner she’s gone, the sooner I can quit being a flight attendant.”
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