After landing, he walked ahead of Felicity through the buzzing beehive of LAX. He hoped he looked like any traveling businessman in his lightweight sky blue suit, white shirt and maroon tie. He still wore combat boots, but he had shined them to a high gloss. He brushed a determined red cap aside, taking their two suitcases and the three small gun cases by himself. Felicity followed, now dressed in the full tan skirt, plush brown blouse and rope sandals he picked up for her. Yes, they were a convincing tourist couple.
The automatic doors opened before him, and he stepped out into air as hot and humid as the atmosphere he left behind in Mexico. Not the same though, because the air there carried a hint of sweetness from the foliage, whereas Los Angeles air, even this far outside the city, was thick with the petroleum and ash stench of smog. The heat seemed worse too, but only because he was wearing a tie now.
Between jets taking off and automobile engines running he could barely hear his own thoughts. Felicity pointed to the long line of taxis waited at the curb, and he marched toward the lead cab. The taxi pulled forward to stop in front of them before they reached the street. They slid into the air-conditioned back seat and the slim black man up front jerked the car out into the dense traffic. Felicity leaned forward to give him an address in the Manhattan Beach area.
For scenery, their trip rivaled the average hospital wall. The view was of one continuous freeway choked with cars, each mile looking suspiciously like the last. Morgan was oblivious to his surroundings, and figured Felicity would be too. After all, she had seen it all a million times before and, like his, her mind was surely occupied with other things.
Morgan did not recover from his personal reverie until their cab stopped in front of a huge, contemporary structure that had been built as close to the coastline as such a building could stand without sliding into the ocean. Felicity thanked the driver when she paid him, and Morgan noticed that she was a generous tipper. Grabbing the small suitcase and one gun case before Morgan could, she led the way into the lush, luxurious building. The lobby was appointed in stainless steel with gold accents. A uniformed security guard sat behind a marble counter. While Felicity stopped to chat with the guard Morgan read the wall-mounted directory. Most of the building, he learned, was devoted to professional offices. The top three stories held apartments.
The velvety decor mildly affected him, but other things impressed him much more. The building and its uniformed employees were quiet. A woman wearing a jumpsuit and apron was polishing a table at the side of the lobby, although the place already looked clean. A repairman stepped out of the elevator, maybe the reason Morgan saw no sign of maintenance needed anywhere. The place emanated efficiency.
Morgan and Felicity stepped past the maintenance man just before the doors slid closed. Even the elevator moved silently. At the end of the rocket ride, the elevator whispered open at the top floor, the twentieth. Two apartment doors faced each other there, separated by a central tropical garden that was illuminated from a wide skylight above. He could not remember ever seeing the bird of paradise plants indoors before. Their blues and reds and yellows and oranges glowed as brightly as they ever did in their natural setting, their petals yawning like the birds’ beaks that gave them their names.
Felicity strode to the door marked “number two” in fancy scrollwork. Next to the doorknob, an electronic cipher lock presented three rows of four numbers each. Felicity pushed eight buttons in a certain pattern, much like dialing a telephone number on a touchtone telephone. After the subtle click sounded, she turned the knob and opened the door.
Morgan followed her into a cavernous space. Felicity touched a light switch revealing a huge, sparsely furnished, sunken living room. He judged the room to be twenty-one feet wide by twenty-eight feet deep. The marble tiled mezzanine under his feet continued around three sides of the room. He stepped down three steps into deep plush carpet that matched the walls. The color wasn’t really pink, but not quite red either. He thought he may have seen it on a paint pallet in a hardware store with a name like dusty rose or something of the sort. He couldn’t imagine anything more feminine. The furniture was plush, a velour texture that added to the feeling of softness the room exuded. Directly to his right stood a round oak table with three nicely padded chairs. In front of him, a hand rubbed oak cube filled in as a coffee table. Beyond it stood a very long and inviting sofa. Some searching of his memory produced a name for the color of the furniture. Mauve. Maybe. Ordinarily he would just call it tan, but in this case the specific shade seemed to matter. Behind the sofa, up on the mezzanine level, an array of stereo equipment looked out from behind glass doors. While he stood rooted, three steps past the door, Felicity crossed the room and stepped up to the bar beside the stereo cabinet. She reached into one of the upper cabinets, rattling glasses.
The kitchen area was to the right of the sofa, and an overstuffed easy chair stood off to its left, almost in the corner. He continued to pan left to take in the wall on that side, and as he did his eyes widened in wonder. To his surprise, there was no wall to his left.
On closer inspection, that wall was a series of glass panels, running from floor to ceiling, each three feet wide. Sheer curtains hung at each end. Morgan was staring out at a twenty-one foot vista of the Pacific Ocean. Rarely nonplused, Morgan had to admit that the view totally overawed him. For the first time in years, he was reminded of just what money can buy.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Felicity asked. “I get all the light. And I practically own the sunset.” Felicity’s voice had taken on a slightly Californian, almost valley girl accent that mixed oddly with the Irish tones he had detected before. She was pouring something over ice while he continued his turn around the room. Landscapes and still life paintings in a variety of sizes hung on the wall behind him in a random pattern. The huge centerpiece, an oil painting of windmills, unexpectedly changed to a field of pansies. On closer inspection, what looked at first like a huge painting was in fact a forty-two inch plasma television screen. Someone had programmed it to display a rotating collection of art, probably from a disc in the DVD player below it.
“By the way, Morgan, do we have a business deal?” Felicity asked, bouncing down the steps back into the living room. She extended her hand, with a drink for him.
“I’m still deciding.”
“Oh come on,” Felicity prompted, seizing a cellular telephone lying on the floor of the deck behind the couch. She walked around in front of the glass wall, sipping slowly. Watching her there, dwarfed before the Goliath moving mural, he thought this woman must be in love with the sunset.
“Oh, I don’t know, Red,” he said, sipping from his own glass, and reacting to the sweetness of its contents. Bailey’s Irish Creme over ice was not one of his regular choices. “Maybe I can help you recover your fee if it requires any rough stuff. How about fifteen percent of what we collect, plus my expenses?”
“Fine,” Felicity replied, “but don’t call me Red.” While she dialed the telephone, he dropped the suitcases and bounded easily up to the marble level behind her to stare out at the boundless view. He felt as if he had landed on top of some private mountain. The sky was infinite in all directions, with only one small bank of cotton ball clouds over on the left. There was no hint of the city behind them. In the distance a gull slid across the wind lazily, banking and playing the currents like a seasoned hang glider. Below, foam swirled around a body surfer as he was caught in what looked like a giant washing machine.