Stop the music!
And now he stood beside her under the bright lights of his gas pumps- and the crap game was forgotten.
“Is that what I think it is?” The man gazed lovingly upon her engine. “Oh, yeah.” He looked up at her with a wide grin. “Girl, what have you done? A Porsche engine in a V o lkswagen Beetle?”
And how had she done it?
Even if he had been cold sober, this problem would have given him a headache. It might have been possible to modify an old model with the engine in the rear, but this was a new Beetle with front-wheel drive, built for an engine under the hood. No kind of engine could work in the damned trunk. Yet there it was.
He had to take three paces back to see how this magic trick was worked. The silhouette of the car was slightly off, elongated, but otherwise a perfect job. The girl had fabricated a VW Beetle onto the frame of the 911 Twin Turbo Porsche. Before he stopped to wonder why she had done such a thing, he had already moved onto the problem of the convertible’s roof: that tall hump of a ragtop might cut into the speed, but not by much. Now how would this counterfeit body affect the Porsche’s performance in cornering?
“Hey, girl? If you take a curve too fast, you’ll roll this car. You know that, right?”
Advice and gasoline were all that he could offer her. The tall blonde preferred to work alone. By frosty glare and body language, she had taught him to keep his greasy hands off her immaculate engine.
“You got some time?” he asked. “I could put on a roll bar.”
The girl shook her head. No sale. She selected another tool from a lambskin pouch and worked on the mounting for a wiring harness. He guessed there was a rattle that annoyed her. Well, it would never do that again. She made it that tight, stopping just shy of stripping the screws.
“Girl, you might wanna think it over. If not here, then get one somewhere else.” It was not her money he was after; he only wanted to keep this youngster alive. She appeared to be the same age as his daughter. “With a roll bar, you’d have a sporting chance to keep your pretty head if the car flips over.”
And damned pretty she was with her milk-white skin, her cat’s eyes and those long red fingernails. The girl in blue jeans was downright unnatural; real people never looked this good at close quarters. And so he guessed that she was not from his part of the world, but maybe from someplace straight up and past the moon. Hers were the greenest eyes he had ever seen. If asked, he would not be able to describe their color in terms of any living thing. Electric, he would say. Yeah, electric green and bright like a dashboard light-not human at all. And he thought she might be carrying a gun beneath her denim jacket.
His gaze had lingered too long on that bulge where a shoulder holster might be. Her eyes were on him now-so cold. She seemed to be looking at him across the distance between a cat and a mouse, and he knew that this was all the warning she would ever give him. He had his choice of two creatures: she might be a stone killer, and then there was his own kind. “You’re a cop, right?” The mechanic pulled a wallet from the pocket of his grimy coveralls, and he did this slowly-no sudden movements to set her off. He showed her the identification of a retired Chicago police officer.
Her face gave away nothing, not her next move, not anything at all. The situation could go sour at any second. If he had guessed wrong about her, he might wind up dead. In his sixtieth year, his reflexes had slowed. But now, as a sign of trust, she ignored him once more and turned back to a perusal of her engine.
He began to breathe again.
“I was on the job for thirty-five years.” He faced the bastardized car, and his voice carried just a touch of sarcasm. “Thought I’d seen it all.” Still attempting to make conversation, he said, “Nobody would ever figure you for a V o lkswagen type. Not your style, girl. It’s a car for people my age, burnout rock ’n’ rollers who could never get past the sixties. Hell, this should’ve been my car.”
The Porsche beneath the fabricated shell explained a lot-on several levels. A true VW convertible was a happy little vehicle with no hard edges, a cartoon of a car, and it got a smile everywhere it went. He took the young blonde’s measure again. Cosmetics-like this fake car body hiding a killer engine-could never so neatly disguise what she was. And if this young cop believed that she could work undercover, she was dead wrong. But he could think of no other explanation for a civil servant driving a car with an engine that cost the moon and the stars-unless the kid was on the take.
Her dashboard had another modification that never came from the factory. He made another foray to draw her out for a chance at shoptalk, and he meant copshop. “Well, I see you got a police scanner. Me, too.”
She studied her engine, forgetting that he was alive.
He tried again. “So… you know about the murder on Adams Street?… No?” Did silence mean no on her planet? “They found the body right in the middle of the damn road. Real piece of work. I heard the cop chatter on my scanner.”
“ Adams Street and what?”
“ Michigan Avenue.” He had a gut feeling that she already knew this address, but his guts had lied to him before, and a bullet fired when his back was turned had forced his retirement from the Chicago Police Department.
Casually, as if opining on the weather, the girl said, “And there’s something peculiar about the crime scene.”
Though she had not asked him a question, he gave her a slow nod to say, Oh, yeah. This one’s about as peculiar as it ever gets. Aloud, he said, “I bet that’s why you turned out tonight. Am I right?” Force of habit from the old days, he would always chain one odd thing to another: this strange young cop, this bastard car with New York plates-this crime. “A serial killer, right? And New York ’s got an interest?”
Oh, how he missed the Job, his old religion of Copland.
The young blonde packed up her tool pouch and closed the trunk on that fabulous engine. The fuel pump rang its bell-the gas tank was full. She handed him a platinum credit card, giving him second thoughts about her status as underpaid police. She waited in silence for her receipt.
As she was driving off, though he had no hope of being heard, he called after her, “You be careful out there!” His eyes traveled over darkened buildings where innocent people lay sleeping. “And the rest of you stay the hell out of her way,” he warned them in a lower voice-in case he had guessed wrong about-what was she called? He looked down at his copy of the credit card receipt and read only one name. “Well, don’t t hat beat all?”
American Express called her Mallory-just Mallory.
The mighty storm front, born in Chicago, had cut a sodden path eastward. It rained on a patch of the Jersey coast, and then, like many another tourist, it crossed the George Washington Bridge, entered New York City – and died.
Only a few drops of water pocked the windshield of a sleek black sedan as it rolled out of a SoHo garage and pulled into the narrow street. The traffic was light, and this was good, because Detective Riker was hardly paying attention to the other cars as he rode out of town.
After another check on Mallory’s c redit cards, he learned that she had bought a late supper in South Bend, Indiana, still traveling west on Route 80, and leaving no doubt that Chicago was her destination. With one cellphone call, Riker had activated the anti-theft device installed in her car. And then he had bartered his soul to the Favor Bank to bury the paperwork on her surveillance. Given her straight route and likely point of entry, her LoJack’s s ignal had been picked up when the car crossed the state line into Illinois. And, thanks to a police car tracker in Chicago, Riker knew that his partner had stopped awhile at a gas station in that city-even before she had used her credit card to pay for fuel. Though she was definitely in flight, he took some comfort in her use of traceable credit instead of cash. And she knowingly drove a car equipped with a LoJack device; this alone spoke well for the theory that she had not murdered Savannah Sirus.