“Here you go, Mr. Vincent, sir. You enjoy.”
“Thanks.” I dropped the newspaper back on the counter and exchanged the plastic bag he was holding toward me for the handful of shrapnel jangling in my pocket. “Keep it,” I said, knowing the tip was around five bucks. As Mr. Kim was also the building's unofficial security guard, I figured he'd earned it.
I avoided the elevator, my usual practice, and took the fire stairs to the second floor. The stairwell was poorly lit, with a little halfhearted graffiti here and there as if the artists could barely be bothered. I knew how they felt. The place was around forty years old and going through a kind of architectural midlife crisis. The ceilings were a little low, the rooms just a bit too tight for comfort, like wearing a sweater that shouldn't have been thrown in the dryer. The place was in need of a new coat of paint, or maybe a wrecking ball, I couldn't decide which. But the rent was cheap, and Mr. Kim's bulgogi—beef in soy sauce — was a real winner.
I arrived at my apartment, put down my suitcase, and fed the key into the lock. Problem. The door was already unlocked. It was only then I noticed a faint strip of light outlining the door's bottom edge. Did I leave the place that way, unlocked with the lights on, before heading off to Japan? No, I did not. There wasn't much inside worth stealing, but that didn't mean I wanted some stranger looting it. What I did have was a small safe bolted to the floor, where I kept various articles that were valuable to me — passport, birth certificate, favorite lucky rabbit's foot, my M9 Beretta service pistol as well as a worn U.S. Army-issue Vietnam War-era Colt .45 an uncle of mine confiscated from a dead VC. I put my ear to the door panel but heard nothing within. Was the intruder still inside, or long gone? I turned the knob and pushed. The catch scraped against the plate. The hinges squealed. Shhh, goddamn it! I hunched, ready to charge. And then the doorknob was wrenched out of my hand.
“How long does it take you to ride an elevator to the second floor?” said Major Anna Masters, standing in front of me, hand on hip, wearing one of my shirts and a smile.
“I took the stairs,” I said. Anna was the last person I expected to see. She was in Germany, at Ramstein Air Base, wasn't she? “What are you—” Our bodies slammed together. Our lips found each other, tongues searching. I was instantly erect, like any good soldier should be.
“Get your clothes off, for Christ's sake. I'm hungry,” she said, breaking from the clinch.
I fumbled with my belt. “I usually dress for dinner.”
“Not tonight,” Anna replied, breathless, like she'd just run a race.
I kicked off my shoes and left a trail of socks, pants, and other items on the floor. I ripped my shirt off, the one Anna was wearing, and lifted her as I walked. Her back was hard and lean and her legs wrapped around me. I wasn't going to make it to the bedroom.
“There,” Anna commanded, gesturing at the table, which was set for dinner. I lowered her onto a place mat. She swept the cutlery away, sending it clattering among my clothes on the floor. Then she wound a hand around my neck, grabbed the edge of the table for leverage and ground her pubic bone into me. Neither of us wanted to bother with the entree. We went straight for the main course.
We had a second helping in the bedroom. Afterward, we lay in each other's arms in bed and watched the reflected neon from The 38th Parallel's sign below my window change color on the ceiling. It brought back Tokyo and, for the barest instant, the image of Dr. Tanaka rolling around in a stainless-steel tub. Professor Boyle's little inconsistency about seeing his partner leaving the party swam about in my mind. If Anna and I were working the case together, that would have been something we'd discuss. Perhaps later I could play back the recording I'd made of Boyle's statement to see if it also struck her as odd. And then the memory of Michelle Durban and our dinner in the sushi bar sprang up, along with a pang of guilt even though nothing had happened. But, if it had, I'd been outside the five-hundred-mile zone, which would have absolved me, wouldn't it?
Anna's weight shifted on me and her perfume flooded my brain. “I forgot I mailed you a key when I took this place,” I said. “When I saw the door open and the light on, I thought you were a burglar.”
Kim could have warned me. He knew Anna, and I'd have put money on him knowing she was upstairs, but he'd chosen to keep the secret. I might have to ask him for that five dollars back.
“So … haven't given a key to anyone else?” she asked.
“Handed out about a dozen. You're just lucky my harem's out of town.” I thought of Durban again.
“What?” Anna had caught the slightest twitch, or perhaps it was the slimmest surge of electricity beneath my skin. Whatever, she read it like a polygraph.
“Nothing,” I said, wondering how it was that women could do that — read a man's conscience.
“You're looking fit,” she said, tracing the definition of my stomach muscles with a fingernail.
“I've discovered Jane Fonda's home-workout video. How about you? Over the headaches?”
“Hope so. Haven't had one for a few weeks.” She sipped coffee, holding the mug between two hands like she was praying. Those headaches were bad ones, so maybe that's exactly what she was doing, praying they'd gone for the duration.
I'd been shot twice on my last case, once in the flesh under my upper right arm, the slug passing clean through the skin and missing the triceps muscle. Not such a big deal — a few stitches and purple, puckered scarring to remember it by. The other bullet, however, had shattered the humerus in my left arm — the big bone between shoulder and elbow — drilled a hole through the shoulder muscles, clipped a rib, executed a back flip with pike, and found its way into the subclavian vein, where it was then flushed through my heart. They located the slug in the bottom of my lungs. The good news, the doctors told me, was that I would live. The bad news was, so they believed, it would not be very well. I responded as I usually do to professional opinion and ignored it, in this instance the advice being to sit in a recliner rocker for the next forty years and watch sitcom reruns. Instead, I chose to do the opposite and put myself through eight hours of daily torture. Once I could crawl, I forced myself to walk. When I could walk, I tried to run. Now, most mornings, I was running twelve miles. After the run, I was doing pushups — a hundred or so. I'd more or less given up the booze and was working on my halo. In truth, I was probably in the best physical shape of my life, and I had the doctors to thank for it. Had they said I'd recover fully, I'd probably still be a pin up boy for Jack Daniel's.
Anna also had permanent injuries by which to remember our case together. In fact, she lost the big toe off her left foot due to the car accident, or should I say car crash — it had been no accident — that put her into a coma for a week. There appeared to be no physical impairment resulting from her head injury, although she was now suffering from regular and terrible migraines.
“Aren't you going to ask me what I'm doing here?” Anna inquired.
“I know exactly what you're doing here, and who you're doing it to.”
She punched me in the arm. “No, I mean in D.C.”
“So tell me.”
“I volunteered to escort a prisoner Stateside.”
“How'd you manage that?”
“Like I said — volunteered. You know, took one step forward. The opportunity just came along.”
Anna moved her head and I felt her hair slide across my chest. I pictured her standing in the doorway when I first arrived home, the hair that reminded me of melted dark chocolate flowing over her shoulders. I lingered on the image, the light from the kitchen behind highlighting her curves beneath my borrowed shirt. Anna's breasts were larger than I remembered. Back in the here and now, I cupped one in my hand. It was warm and heavy and it filled my palm, the nipple still hard with excitement from the recent sex fizzing through her cells.