by John Lutz
There, on the right side of her neck, was the mole, usually invisible behind her ear from this angle.
She leaned in closer, turning her head left at an extreme angle while looking right, so she might have a better view.
Larger.
The mole, or brown spot, or whatever it was, was definitely larger than it had been the last time she’d checked.
No. Not definitely.
She realized she was hurting her ear and released it and leaned back away from the mirror.
This was stupid, this constant self-examination. Her mother and Milton Kahn had driven her to this state of mind with their idiotic harping on the mole. Or spot. Or whatever it was. If she was going to keep examining it, she should wait at least a few days so it had time to become larger and she could actually see a difference.
As she started to turn away from the mirror, she couldn’t help herself. She folded her right ear forward and looked again at the mole. Or spot. Or whatever it was.
Not larger.
Not definitely.
What is it?
Something to worry about. That was for sure. You go around day after day and think you’re healthy and secure, and all the time something’s working on you, against you, without you even suspecting it. It could appear harmless, simply a part of you that you’ve gotten used to, but it could kill you as surely as a safe falling on your head, and almost as suddenly. Like your own body deciding it had lived long enough so it was time to turn on you. On itself.
Pearl let her ear flop back in place.
Don ’t be so morose. Don’t think that way.
But she knew it was true. Life could be like that, end like that.
In a boarded-up imported dry goods warehouse in the East Village, Vera Doaks’s hollowed-out corpse dangled motionless in the darkness. Her internal organs were reduced to a coagulated hardened mass an inch thick on the concrete floor, inedible now even to the rats and insects. Other than considerable damage to the feet and hands, the corpse itself was only moderately eaten on, as it was a tricky task even for a resourceful New York rat to traverse the crossbeam and make its way down the rope that bound the ankles. What was left of Vera Doaks was beginning to take on the look of dry mummification.
31
Some rich men have a certain subtle sheen, as if over time gilt had rubbed off on them. Thomas Rhodes was such a man. He was accustomed to the best, and it showed. He looked like a component of the wealth and luxury surrounding him.
He drew a small white card from his pocket and checked again on the room number that had been given him, then rode the elevator to the thirtieth floor of the Eastin Hotel in Times Square. After decades of reversal, the Eastin had been recently renovated and brought up to its present high-end luxury standards. In fact, the decor was almost decadent. Gold-flocked wallpaper, wide crown molding, veined marble, and ornate chandeliers seemed to crowd one another even in the hotel’s vast spaces. On one of the elevator walls was a Rubens print in what appeared to be a museum-quality gilded frame.
Now in his mid-fifties, Rhodes was still lean and fit, his graying hair combed straight back from a widow’s peak, his tailored suit a black chalk-stripe material set off by his gold and black striped tie and the flash of white cuffs and gold cufflinks when he moved his arms. He looked exactly like what he was, a very successful banker.
There was another passenger in the elevator, a small man in a gray business suit, who obviously found himself in awe of Thomas Rhodes’s near presence. Rhodes was used to such reaction and barely glanced at the man. The fellow’s shoes were cheap imports, his watch a gold-plated imitation. He hardly mattered.
Rhodes set his wingtip Barker Black shoes in a wide stance and waited for the high-speed elevator to settle before striding from it out into the plushly carpeted hall. He looked neither left nor right.
Finding the room number he’d been given, he checked his Patek Philippe watch to make sure he was on time to the minute, then knocked.
The man who almost immediately opened the door was slightly shorter than Rhodes, slightly leaner, and had dark hair neatly trimmed and combed to the side from a perfect part. He was wearing a well-cut dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a blue and gray silk tie with a perfect Windsor knot. His face was as lean as his body-hawklike-even with hooded brown eyes. Despite his rather predatory features, there was a professorial aura about him. Even a courtliness.
The one thing, the pertinent thing that Thomas Rhodes noticed about him, was the way his eyes took in Rhodes standing in the doorway. They were unimpressed and unafraid.
Even standing out in the hall it was obvious to Rhodes that the room was very cool. The man ushered him in, smiling slightly and offering his hand. “Martin Hawk,” he said.
“And you know who I am,” Rhodes said. Might as well get on top of this conversation from the start.
“Oh, indeed I do,” said Hawk in his softly modulated voice. “Thomas Rhodes, Stanford honor student, Harvard MBA, successful career at Cartner-Whimer, inventor of the bottom-up leveraged buyout, now president emeritus of Rhodes and Finkman Finance.”
“Not so emeritus,” Rhodes said pleasantly, careful not to show his surprise at this man knowing so much about him.
“Yes,” Hawk said, “you’re still quite active in the business, when you’re not away on safari or stalking game in Canada or Alaska. No children. Married Gail Cromartie in nineteen ninety-two, divorced in ninety-nine. Presently Gail is living in London, while you reside here in New York in a condo in Benton Towers on the Upper East Side. You have homes in the Hamptons and in Sarasota, Florida, where your boat, Striver II, is docked.”
“Yacht,” Rhodes said.
Hawk smiled, his hooded eyes steady. “I stand corrected. The yacht is outfitted for deep-sea fishing as well as luxury. You hold the record for largest ocean pike, I believe.”
“Have for twelve years.” Rhodes felt his composure slip a notch. “You’ve done your research.”
“I hope you’re not offended.”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Please sit down, and we’ll discuss the reason you’re here.”
Soon Rhodes was seated in a satin-upholstered wing chair across from Hawk, who sat relaxed with his legs crossed in a brown leather easy chair. His wristwatch was visible, an undoubtedly genuine Rolex. Rhodes was sure his shoes were Savile Row. Both men were sipping twenty-year-aged Macallan single-malt scotch whiskey that Hawk had already poured.
“You’ve been recommended by a former client of my company, Quest and Quarry, Mr. Rhodes,” Martin Hawk said, in his level and cultivated voice-not an English accent but almost. The voice went with the man’s obvious polish.
Rhodes resisted asking who was the source of the referral. Hawk almost imperceptibly nodded, as if to say he approved of Rhodes playing his cards close to the vest. It was unsettling.
“You are a hunter, Mr. Rhodes. On various safaris and expeditions, you’ve hunted the most dangerous animals on earth. Now you have the opportunity to hunt something even more dangerous than the tiger, the only animal that doubles back and lies in wait for its stalker. This tiger will be armed as you are-and also hunting you. Your, and his, expertise in the bush will be neutralized by the terrain, so you and your fellow hunter will start even, with identical weapons-small and untraceable twenty-five-caliber handguns. A condition of the hunt is that after you take your prey, you remove his weapon as your trophy and return it to Quest and Quarry, so there’ll be no evidence of our involvement or unconventional business arrangement.”
Rhodes sipped his scotch. “Well, that’s quite a bit to take in.”
Martin Hawk sat patiently and waited. At this point, a few clients had gotten up and walked out. Not that they knew anything they could prove. But their refusal to do business did necessitate changing hotels, being extra careful for a while. Hawk didn’t figure Thomas Rhodes for one of the walkers.
“I’ve been reading the papers,” Rhodes said, “watching the news.”
/> “Have you now?”
Neither man mentioned the. 25-Caliber Killer.
Rhodes took another sip of the excellent scotch and said, “So far so good. Tell me more.”
“The terrain is Manhattan. You’ll be in separate hotels that you must leave and not return to between nine a.m. and midnight. This is important: within your respective hotels, each of you is out of season and safe.
“Your prey will be a predator like yourself, a tiger who yearns for the ultimate hunting experience and is willing to pay for it. Participants pay a hundred thousand dollars each. When the survivor presents his trophy gun as proof of his opponent’s death, returning it with his own weapon to Quest and Quarry, he receives a full refund plus fifty thousand dollars.”
“The money is inconsequential,” Rhodes said.
“Of course it is. Though not to some of our clients. But it isn’t about the money.”
“No, it isn’t. Not to a certain type of man.” Rhodes gently swirled the rich amber liquid in his glass, his gaze fixed on something outside the high window. Beyond the sun-touched buildings across the street was clear blue sky but for a few streaks of white cloud, like claw marks.
“I want you to think about this carefully, Mr. Rhodes, but I would like your answer before you leave this room. For both of us, I want you to be sure.”
Rhodes finished his scotch and stood up. Being sure was what he was about.
Martin Hawk regarded him with mild curiosity.
“Whom do I kill?” Rhodes asked.
PART II
Oh, write of me not “Died in bitter pains,” But “Emigrated to another star!”
— Helen Hunt Jackson, Emigravit
32
Lavern Neeson made a halfhearted attempt to duck beneath her husband’s slap. The flat of his hand stung her forehead instead of her cheek with a solid whap!
She put her mind, herself, on hold.
Just as well. There wasn’t time to think about defending herself. The second slap was almost instantaneous, to her left cheek and ear, causing a thousand needles of pain, a ringing sound, and the salt taste of blood. The force of the blow whipped her head to the right. Blood escaped her mouth and splattered the dresser mirror. Alongside the blood was her own face staring back at her, a mask of horror that terrified her.
She didn’t even have time to look away. In the mirror she saw Hobbs’s hand clutch a fistful of her blond hair. The horror mask image flashed out of sight as Lavern was slung across the room and onto the bed.
The pillow again!
Bedsprings sang. Hobbs was on top of her, straddling her, pressing one of the pillows-her own-almost flat against her body with one hand. The other hand he balled into a fist, and he began pounding the pillow. Lavern almost cried out with pain, but she knew that would only make it worse. The pillow would prevent bruising while his fists caused agonizing internal injury. Her body, so damaged inside, would appear unmarked.
Not her face, though. Hobbs usually couldn’t resist beginning one of Lavern’s beatings by starting with a slap or two-“to get her attention,” he’d once told her-before concentrating his righteous wrath on her body.
She kept her teeth clenched, her lips clamped, emitting only whimpers, as she heard him breathing harder with each blow. It would stop soon, she was sure. She often counted the blows, and usually somewhere between fifteen and twenty he’d become exhausted in limb or rage and stop pounding the pillow.
Eighteen!
Nineteen!
Finally spent, he gave her a final punch, just below her breasts, and then shifted his weight off her. He’d left her breasts themselves undamaged this time, knowing she was soon due for a mammogram. No point in doing something that might show up on an X-ray and prompt questions.
Lavern felt herself being turned onto her stomach, felt her slacks and panties being wrenched down. Hobbs removed her shoes. Then she heard stitches pop and felt her clothing other than her shirt being worked down over her calves and rigid feet, turning into a tangle and a clump, and yanked away, leaving her terribly exposed and vulnerable. There was a glimpse of something dark, like a great bird soaring across the room, which she knew was her wadded clothing being tossed into a corner.
Hobbs was on her then, lying full length on top of her. His right arm snaked around her neck, yanking her head back. If she tried to scream now he’d tighten his grip so she could only make a harsh rasping sound, like a crow cawing.
Lavern’s mind drew back further away from what was happening, into a quiet dark place of shelter and unknowing. A place of surrender and suspension that prey animals knew so well.
The woman being crushed into the bed felt something cold between her buttocks. Vaginal lubricant, or whatever kind of greasy substance Hobbs happened to come up with. Once it had been cooking oil. Her buttocks separated, and she felt his probing finger, then more fingers.
Wincing silently in pain, the woman understood why Hobbs abused her. In some twisted, debilitating way, while she loathed it, she couldn’t simply walk away from it, couldn’t escape it. The more he abused her, the more she must deserve it, and the more she deserved it, the more he’d abuse her. It was a cycle, like the rest of life. And like the rest of life, it had to be accepted because it simply was. Like the rest of life, it was a trap.
The woman knew that Hobbs was as helpless in the cycle as she was. Knowledge was supposed to be power, she thought. It didn’t work that way for her. Knowledge was only more of a conundrum. As the one who understood, it was her responsibility to stop what was happening, yet she didn’t. She couldn’t. That meant, in an oblique but very real way, that she was the one to blame. The one who deserved to be punished.
Hobbs removed his left hand, and she watched from the corner of her eye as he wiped his greasy fingers on the bed-sheet. Then he used the hand to grip himself. She felt his weight bear down harder on her, felt the pressure that was impossible to resist as he guided himself into her.
Hobbs preferred anal sex. It hurt more.
In the morning he’d assure her that he loved her, and she’d believe him because it was true. She knew it was true.
It had been a long time since a man had professed love for Rosa Pajaro, who was fat, forty, and tired. Lifting the stacks of sheets and pillowcases to the top shelves of the hotel storage closet sent a dull pain along the base of her spine.
She wondered sometimes how she’d come to this situation. It seemed that only yesterday she’d been one of the prettiest girls in her village of Tojano in Oaxaca, Mexico. Then had come her affair with the American engineer. A year after the affair had begun, her beautiful daughter Sara was born. Their daughter, though the American never claimed the girl publicly.
Then had come Sara’s illness and the medical bills. The American was by then dead, after an infection from a wound incurred in an auto accident on a winding mountain road. He had been drunk, and on his way back to town after an assignation with a married woman. Rosa could never forgive the woman, but she’d long ago forgiven the American.
Rosa’s mother was now watching and caring for Sara in Tojano. Rosa, her dark eyes dimmed and weary, her olive complexion coarsened and seamed, her black hair lank and graying, had made her way to America to work, having bought forged papers with money the American had left her.
Hard years had passed like cards being shuffled in a deck. Now here she was working as a maid in the Antonian Hotel in Manhattan, having replenished a storage room with freshly laundered linens. Ever the optimist, Rosa rubbed her sore back with both hands and reflected on how wonderful the fresh linens in the small room smelled from the perfumed detergent the hotel laundry used. Rosa liked that part of her job that dealt with the clean linens. The soiled linens were, of course, a different story.
She was about to go back out into the hall, when she heard a sound as if someone had been slapped, only louder.
The storage room was off a corridor that ran the length of the hotel’s east side, where there was a little-used exit out in
to a passageway between it and the side of the Honeysuckle Restaurant next door. Rosa hesitated in pushing the storage room door open with the cart she’d used to transport the linens, and instead eased the door open about six inches with her hand and peered out into the quiet, carpeted hall.
So little used was this corridor that she expected to see no one. Instead she saw two men. One was on the floor, the other bending over him. As Rosa watched, the man who was standing lowered himself on one knee and removed something from one of the pockets of the man on the floor. She was sure it was a gun, and realized the sound that she’d heard had been a shot. The kneeling man placed the fallen man’s gun in his own pocket. Then he straightened up and looked up and down the corridor.
And saw Rosa.
He didn’t hesitate. He strode toward the storage room.
Rosa thought about screaming, but realized no one would hear her. Instead she decided to shut and lock the door.
But of course there was no lock on the inside of the storage room door.
It opened quickly, the knob yanked from her hand so suddenly and violently that it hurt.
He was tall and fierce looking. She saw that his big hands were empty. He’d left the gun he’d taken from the other man in his pocket. He simply stared at her with cold blue eyes.
Then he smiled. He raised his forefinger to his lips in a signal for her to be quiet, and to remain silent about what she’d seen. Then he turned and walked back toward the man on the hall floor.
As she watched, he again bent over the prone man, gripped him beneath each arm, and pulled him backward, toward the door leading outside. He glanced at Rosa and again raised his forefinger to his lips. Then he dragged the other man out through the doorway and into the night.
The door swung shut. She knew that it automatically locked and couldn’t be opened from outside without a key.
She told herself she was safe, but she didn’t feel safe.