CHAPTER FOUR

"Hey, lady, you okay?"

"He stole her purse, did you see that?"

"Anybody get which way he went?"

"I'll call the police."

"No!" Jeanette was on her feet in a flash.

She yanked at the hem of her skirt, which had ridden up most of the way to her waist. Her pantyhose were run in long ladders down the backs of both thighs and the heel of her left hand was scraped raw from where she'd instinctively flung it out to try and break her fall.

The people who had come rushing around her moved back, but they still formed a curious gawking ring. Jeanette couldn't see over or past their heads, and cursed her lack of height as she craned her neck trying to see the skateboard kid.

Gone. Gone like a damned mirage.

"Ma'am? Did he hurt you?" This from a kindly-faced older gent with finespun white hair, no doubt in reality the ruthless president of some cutthroat board of directors.

Cell phones had materialized in many hands – had, most likely, already been in hand. Several had fingers poised to dial 911.

"My purse," Jeanette said. Her fists clenched, causing a stinging line of pain across the scrape. "Which way did he go?"

"That way," a severe black woman in a burgundy linen suit said. "Went right past me and almost ran me down."

"Miss, let me call the police," said the man who'd first made the offer. He was tall and youngish and prematurely balding, bespectacled. He held out his phone to her with the air of a knight pledging his sword and honor to a damsel in distress.

A cluster of other skateboard kids had gathered a short distance away, observing developments. Some were snickering. Others had the sullen, wary look of those ready to be blamed for everything.

Jeanette shoved through her protective circle of lunch-lemmings and stormed toward them. They saw her coming, and for an instant their snickers and sulks were replaced by alarmed surprise.

"Who was that kid?" she demanded of the nearest.

Up close, he was not a kid at all but a hulking hairy twenty-something Bigfoot with long stringy dark-red hair, unshaven bristles on his chin and rusty tufts bursting from the collar of his old faded Guns & Roses tee shirt. A bike leaned against the hip of his chain-draped black faux-leather pants. A hand that was all scabbed knuckles and clunky silver death's head rings rested on the handlebars. The smells of sweat, B.O., stale pot smoke and McDonald's grease seemed to hang around him in a cloud.

Bigfoot topped Jeanette by over a foot and was more than double her weight, but the furious, fearless way she got right up in his face caught him totally off guard. "Fuck'f I know," he mumbled.

"What about the rest of you?" She scanned them, feeling like green sparks must be snapping from her eyes.

A skinny black kid, whose pants hung down so far that his plaid boxer-briefs were exposed, scratched the undershelf of his chin. A porky Goth chick with hair dyed the black and pink of a box of Good-n-Plenty was suddenly fascinated with her fingernails – blood red, and painted with tiny silver ankhs. A dark-haired teenager who might've been good-looking if his complexion had not been in revolt glared down at his unlaced sneakers and said something under his breath that Jeanette thought might have been the C-word.

It was as if the line of battle had been drawn in Century Plaza. Finally, for once, the opposing forces were clearly defined and facing each other down.

On one side, the lunch-lemmings stood together in their suits, with their briefcases and cell phones and power ties, haughty with righteous indignation.

On the other side were the skateboard kids, in their defensive, angry cluster. They shot venomous looks at the older crowd.

Jeanette hated them all, and if she'd had that machine gun right here and now, she might have chopped every single one of them, lunch-lemming and skateboard kid alike, into mincemeat where they stood.

But she didn't have a machine gun. She didn't have a gun at all.

The purse snatcher had everything.

Call the police? And tell them what, exactly? That her purse had been stolen, and it just happened to contain an envelope of cash, a firearm, and a folder of information that might as well have had "assassination instructions" printed on the cover?

Exhaling a long breath between tight lips, she turned away from the skateboard kids. If she had to look at their willfully stupid, stubborn, drug-using, self-indulgent bratty faces any longer, she would lose it.

She stalked back to the other side. Forced a smile for the benefit of her balding would-be Galahad. "Could I please borrow your phone?"

He gave it to her, now with the air of a knight whose lady-love has conferred upon him a silken scarf or other token of her favor before the big joust.

"Are you sure you're not hurt?" the kindly older gent asked. "I saw that miscreant knock into you."

"A few scratches," she said, showing the heel of her left hand.

"Did you have much in there?" asked the burgundy-suited black lady. "I had mine taken a few months ago. All my credit cards, my phone, everything. Best call the credit card company. And a locksmith while you're at it, because now that no-good punk will have your keys and your address."

"Ah, he'll just grab the cash and plastic, and throw the purse in a trashcan somewhere," another man said.

Past them, Jeanette saw that the skateboard kids had dispersed. Slunk away like the guilty scavenging vermin that they were. Rats and roaches and flies. Scavengers.

Now that the immediate drama had passed, the eager lemmings were reluctant to break up and go away, though it was no doubt high time they were back in their offices and cubicles. It seemed like everybody had a purse-snatching story, and the matter was swiftly turning into a bizarre competition for worst place.

"– wife had all the kids' pictures, the grandkids, too –"

"– been to the bank to withdraw it in cash, twenty-three thousand dollars –"

"– gorgeous suede, the perfect match to those boots –"

"Excuse me," Jeanette said with a polite smile, pointing to Galahad's phone. She moved away, turned, and examined the keypad while her mind raced, raced.

She didn't keep her real I.D. in that purse, not when she knew she'd be going out on a job meeting with Rayburn or one of his associates. That was her working purse, chosen specifically because it was roomy enough to hold the tape recorder as well as large folders and envelopes and whatever sort of weapon her employers decided to provide for each new job.

Her personal keys, thank God, were in the desk drawer of her office. So was her real purse, the bag that was really just a fat wallet with a long clip-on strap and delusions of grandeur.

The magnetic key-card to the office itself, thank God again, was in the pocket of her forest green blazer. She had dropped it in there without thinking about it, and was grateful now. She had troubles enough without worrying about that.

What to do, though? Who to call? She couldn't call the cops … but if she didn't, Galahad might notice that the police number failed to turn up in his "numbers called" log.

How had she let this happen?

Shit!

Hysteria welled, and Jeanette quashed it.

One thing at a time. One problem at a time.

God, but how could she have been so dumb? She'd gotten thinking about Kenny and Lisa-Beth, and that had rattled her composure badly enough, but then to have Rayburn rattle her even more by asking her to think about dinner with him … she hadn't been focused on her surroundings at all on the way back, hadn't gotten that little warning prickle when the skateboard kid had sped by. Her instincts, usually so keen, had been dulled, and now look at this mess!

Jeanette turned back to Galahad, who remained hovering hopefully nearby. Manufacturing a tremulous smile, she handed the phone back to him.

"I'm sorry," she said, and hitched in her breath. "I … I'll call them from upstairs. I just need … a few minutes. To … to …"

She hated to do it, hated to make even a pretense of weakness. But as his hazel eyes went all soft and sympathetic, she knew it had been the right move. He'd look at her and see a little ethereal pixie-blonde, small and vulnerable, and forget or dismiss the fearless way she had marched straight up to Bigfoot.

"I'll walk you in," he said. "Where are you going?"

"No, that's all right. You've been more than helpful already. And …" she glanced at her watch and winced. "And it's almost two."

"It's really no trouble."

Of course, it wasn't. He might already be far enough along in his fantasy to be telling the grandkids how they'd met, how he'd consoled her after the purse-snatching and walked her safely back to her office, how he'd asked her to coffee and then dinner and then the ring, the wedding, the house, the children …

Somehow, she fended off all his good intentions and the solicitousness of the others, and made her way back to the Jensen Building on her own. People took sidelong looks at her in the lobby and the elevator. She thought it was because of her crumpled skirt, the runs in her pantyhose or her disarranged hair.

But then, with a dull flush mounting in her cheeks, she remembered all that glass. All those windows. Not everyone could have been neglecting work to gaze serenely out at the scene in Century Plaza below, but dozens of people might still have witnessed her being sent skidding like a tiddlywink, and the skateboard kid's triumphant exit with her purse.

Her office had never been such a welcome sight. She closed the door, crossed the reception area's dusty-plum carpeting without switching on any lights – more than enough natural light came in to let her avoid the neat arrangement of chairs, coffee table, end tables, and loveseat – and went into the inner room. There was a closet-sized bathroom with a commode and a sink, where Jeanette did flip the light switch, and grimaced as she saw herself in the mirror.

She scrubbed her hands, chewing her bottom lip as antibacterial soap burned into the scrape like a dousing of acid. This made her start bleeding again, so she held a square of folded toilet tissue against the wound until it was only seeping. She kept a supplementary cosmetic bag on the bathroom shelf for emergency touch-ups, and fixed her hair and face.

Stepping out of her shoes, she shed the pantyhose and threw them in the wastepaper basket. She'd look strange without them, but the runs were more noticeable than bare legs would be … and at least her legs were shaved. She couldn't do much about the wrinkles in the skirt.

With the worst of the damage repaired, she met her own jade-green gaze and asked herself the question that had been beating in her head like a pulse.

"What am I going to tell Rayburn?"

**