But Cava kept his eyes on her body. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. Her breasts looked soft and round and jiggled every time she turned. Her hips were wide and curvy. When she bent over to fluff the pillows, he felt his dick get hard and push against his pants. He had seen her before, but only from a distance. Only wearing a business suit or jacket to protect her smooth tan skin from the cold. From what he could tell, she didn’t appear too thin. All things being equal, the blonde in the black underwear smoothing out the silk sheets was just about perfect.
For some reason a memory from his youth surfaced. A good one.
Cava had grown up on the East Coast, just a few blocks from the prep school Holden Caulfield was rumored to have attended in one of his favorite books, The Catcher in the Rye. Beneath the railroad bridge in the center of town, a barber kept his shop in a small space he rented over the movie theater. Cava could remember his mother dropping him off with his best friend every six weeks or so. How the strange old man took two hours off in the middle of the day and laid on the floor to rest. How he showed everyone the weird box doctors had placed inside his chest to keep his heart beating. How he liked to talk about women when no one’s parents were around.
He tried to think of the old man’s name, but couldn’t place it. Still, he remembered the day that he and his best friend were alone in the shop. The day the barber had told them that the art of a great fuck was a matter of physics. And the whole thing came down to how much meat a woman had on her bones. He liked full-bodied women, he said. The more full-bodied, the better because there was nothing good about a woman’s hip bones. And he liked doing it on the floor. He called it the secret to his success. The key to making it all work. Losing the soft mattress and doing it with a full-bodied woman on the floor.
Cava remembered giggling. That feeling of racy uncertainty because he and his friend were still too young to really know what the word fuck meant. From the electricity in the air, the dreamy smile on the old man’s face, it seemed more than likely that anything to do with getting laid was a good thing. All the same, it was a new world still lingering on the horizon. Still too far off to touch. It would take a few years before Cava understood that the old man had been a wise man and everything he taught them that day was true.
The thought vanished. Chased away by a sudden rush of panic.
The blonde was staring at him. Frozen in her tracks and standing on the other side of the bed. Fixated on him with her mouth open and her blue eyes as wide as blue eyes go. Cava had seen it before. That look that she could tell the future. That things were about to get dramatic.
Even worse, his meds had kicked in just as his luck ran out. He could feel his chemistry coming to a boil. An overwhelming bout of foreign body sensations mixed with a heavy case of those intense urges he had read about in the car-sexual urges coupled with other urges. If he went by the book it was time to call his healthcare professional immediately.
She took a step toward the bedside table. But instead of reaching for the phone, her hand dipped down to the drawer. Cava lunged across the bed, spotting the gun as the drawer slid open. Wrapping his arms around her chest, he yanked her away from the weapon and they tumbled onto the floor. She yelped and started punching him as he rolled on top of her. Soft glancing blows weakened by fear and trembling. He could smell her skin. Her soft beautiful skin. And as he tried to quiet her legs and figure out what the hell to do, he thought about the hour he had spent searching the house while she was getting ready for work. He wished that he hadn’t seen her. Wished that he hadn’t caught the scent of her perfume from the top of the stairs. Wished that he didn’t have to do what he knew he had to do.
She would be a casualty of war, he decided, a domino in the middle of the pack that had no more meaning or relevance other than its position and timing. Its need to fall. There would be more guilt to deal with. More medication and more sleepless nights. Another ghost on another chaise longue on that beach in Coronaville.
He looked down at her face, everything in slow motion now. She had ripped open his shoulder bag and was tossing the money all over the room. She was saying something to him. Something he couldn’t quite hear with so much going on. Curiously, the scissor kicks had stopped and she had wrapped her thighs around his buttocks. As he tried to concentrate, tried to lock in on the Zen moment, he became aware of his erection again. It was still there. Still hard as a rock. And when he gazed into her wild eyes, he caught the fire in them and knew that she could feel his dick, too.
She grit her teeth. Ran her fingers down his arm and dug her nails in. Took a swing at him.
All of a sudden life was complicated again. A hodgepodge of mixed signals that he didn’t have time to figure out. The Fates had arrived and he needed to make his move. He needed to end this. If the guilt got too crazy, he could always spend the night counting hundred-dollar bills. .
24
Lena had been late for her meeting with Art Madina. Fifteen minutes late. Not from the drive downtown, but from an unexpectedly long sleep. A big dreamless sleep so heavy and so blank that she had no idea how she finally broke back to the surface and opened her eyes.
She had gone to bed before the power was restored and fallen asleep before she could reset the time on her clock radio and switch on the alarm.
And it had been late. Long after Bobby Rathbone had given her the bad news and gone home. Long after two glasses of wine and another half a cigarette helped her think it all through.
She had come to a decision last night to leave the bugs in place. Her house would remain hot-wired except for the low-tech bug in the handset. The feel-good bug that she was meant to find. After ripping it out of the phone, she killed it with a hammer on the kitchen floor. And when the electric company got around to turning the juice back on, Klinger and his sidekick would no longer be burdened with loud music. By all appearances, everything would be back to normal, and the dynamic duo could listen in and think that they were outsmarting her.
For Lena, this was the quickest way back to her case and what really mattered. And it was easy enough to avoid Klinger’s camera by using the shower upstairs in her old bathroom.
But none of that was really on her mind as she followed Art Madina inside the cooler and the door snapped shut behind them. None of what happened last night really mattered right now.
Madina switched on his flashlight, checking toe tags in the darkness and rolling gurneys out of the way as he searched through the crowd of dead bodies. The dank air was just above freezing, her breath vaporizing before her eyes and thick as smoke. After ten long minutes, they found Jane Doe resting in the far corner beneath a thin sheet of translucent plastic.
Madina handed over the flashlight and pulled the plastic away. Time, even in a temperature-controlled setting, had a way of changing things. Although Lena’s first instinct was to turn away, she held her ground and looked at the corpse.
“If something was missing, how much would it be?” Madina asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know.”
“What did he do with it?”
“We found a meat grinder in the garage.”
Madina turned and gave her a long look. “You’re not serious.”
“We can’t tell when it was last used,” she whispered.
Several moments passed. Then Madina took charge of the flashlight and panned the beam over the victim’s wounds.
“My problem with all this is that it’s such a neat job, Lena. So surgically precise. This guy went to med school.”