CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jeanette hadn't been expecting him to call her at all, let alone later that very same day. She'd figured he would try to run, try to hide from her, and had admitted to herself that if he did, her chances of actually finding him again were slim.

So she had been downright shocked when the cell phone chirped while she picked unenthusiastically at an early dinner. She hadn't eaten lunch, and only coffee and half a toasted bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, yet she wasn't the least bit hungry.

She didn't like this. Didn't like not being in control. Hated elements of random chance. Hated flukes and freaks of fate. This was why she never went to Las Vegas.

Even as a child, she had developed an abiding distrust of games that relied on the luck of the dice or the draw. She couldn't stand having her next move determined by a random number, to be told by the fall of the dice where to put her piece on the board.

And now, this. This random chance, this freak of fate. One instant of bad luck – to be spotted and targeted by Scoot the purse-snatcher – and everything was hanging by a thread.

Bigfoot, for all of his apparent Neanderthal wit, had proved to be either clever or lucky. Or both. Whichever, he had found the kid called Scoot and agreed to follow him home.

Feeling like an oncoming disaster had been narrowly averted, Jade tore into the rest of her meal with a voracious appetite. She was at a seafood place by the lake, which she had chosen more for the view than for the cuisine. But now that her taste for food had returned, she devoured the grilled shrimp and the blackened salmon and the Cajun-flavored rice.

Out on the water, clean white sailboats moved serenely across the deep mirror-green water. Closer to shore, some fools on powered watercraft zoomed and sped … the rich, nautical version of skateboard kids, and if she'd been out on her boat enjoying a peaceful Saturday afternoon when one of them whizzed by, she'd be tempted to pick them off with a harpoon gun. Or a torpedo.

She could see the baronial estates of Palmyra Hills, picture windows turned to shimmering gilt by the sun, the grounds so painstakingly manicured that they made her own once-a-week landscaped yard look like the wilderness. Even the mansions right on the lakeshore, mansions with cordoned-off swimming areas, boasted pools as well.

Her place was nice. More than she needed. She certainly didn't need a fourteen-bedroom palatial monstrosity with custom everything and half a dozen live-in staff. She would have rattled around like a button in a clothes dryer. She didn't want servants who might notice and remark upon the odd hours she kept.

Still, the palatial homes were nice to look at. Nice to dream about. Nice, even, to aspire to, if she ever decided that she needed to raise her fees or take on ten jobs a year.

Provided, that was, she could salvage this job and not have to go groveling and apologizing to Rayburn and his employers.

Bigfoot had not called back by the time she finished her dinner, so she ordered coffee and a slice of key lime pie for dessert. Impatient now, she kept checking the phone to make sure it was on, that it was getting a signal. Every time she checked it she worried she might have turned it off by accident, and had to check it again, until she had to push the phone to the other side of the table, close her eyes, and take some nice deep steadying breaths.

When she opened her eyes, she was looking at her target.

Jeanette blinked.

He was still there.

The man from the photographs.

She had only given them a cursory look, but she had a good memory for faces. It served her well in her chosen career.

Of course, in this part of town there might be hundreds of good-looking blond men with bronze tans, athletic bodies and megawatt smiles. Almost as many men like that as there would be women. But it was him. She was sure of it.

He and a gorgeous brunette in a red cocktail dress were being shown to a corner table. Her target was dressed with casual "I'm rich so I can do what I like" insolence, foregoing a suit in favor of comfortable linen pants and a plum-colored polo shirt. His hair was tousled and his tan was more golden than ever, as if he had just stepped off his sailboat … or out of an aftershave commercial.

His date did not look as though she had stepped off a sailboat. His date looked as if she had been in a salon since eight a.m., getting worked on by a team of experts borrowed from Nicole Kidman. She had a flawless café-au-lait complexion, ebony hair, and the large, striking, deep sapphire-blue eyes of a Disney cartoon princess. The diamonds in her ears and around her neck were simple and tasteful but still might have financed a trip to Europe. The young woman looked passingly familiar to Jeanette, as if she'd seen that face before, perhaps on the cover of a magazine or in a movie.

Sipping her coffee, Jeanette watched the couple take their seats. Her nerves were yammering, but outwardly she was cool as ever.

Here was that very element of luck she had just been thinking about. Random chance, pure coincidence. He had come right into the very restaurant where she was having dinner. And here she was without the gun.

Not that she would have shot him even if she'd had it. She couldn't haul a gun out of her purse, blow him away and run for it. For one thing, her car was in valet parking. For another, she chose the time and place. That had always been the way, that was the way, that would always be the way she did this.

Control. It was all about control. Having it, being in it.

The maitre-de addressed the target as "Mr. Westbrook." His date called him "Ben." He didn't look like a Ben. He looked like a Chet, or a Chip. Something preppy. But now she at least had a name for him. That was a step in the right direction.

Watching them, she caught herself wondering if the brunette – he called her "Sophia" – was the one who'd hired the job. She cut off that line of speculation fast. It wasn't her business. God, she hated these personal ones.

Maybe this was a sign. She had allowed herself to be lured into taking a personal one against her better judgment. Lured by the money, lured by the challenge she'd seen smoldering in Rayburn's cobalt eyes. And almost from the moment she'd agreed, it had all gone hideously wrong.

No personal ones.

In the old days, they'd been plenty personal. Deirdre Vaughn had been the first one to hire her to get rid of a bad husband, but she hadn't been the last. Deirdre'd had friends, and discreet word had gotten around to many an eager ear.

There had been a rash of deaths that year in that particular social circle. Husbands who slipped in the tub. Husbands who were stabbed during muggings gone too far. Husbands who were shot, presumably by muggers, when leaving the little love nests where they kept their mistresses. Husbands who didn't see to it that their cars got regular maintenance. In one memorable case, a husband whose death was ruled accidental, an experiment with autoerotic asphyxia gone tragically, humiliatingly, fatally wrong.

One of those bereaved widows had waxed remorseful, and told her friends that she wanted to confess. Jeanette had killed her. She'd hated doing it, but the act had convinced the rest of the women of the benefits of continued silence. They had quietly gone on to enjoy their insurance settlements.

That had been the end of Jeanette's connection with any of them. She was no longer a friend of a friend, doing a favor for a modest amount of cash. Even Deirdre withdrew from her. And Jeanette had vowed that from then on, she would not get involved in anyone's personal life.

The trouble was, she'd found that she had a knack for murder. And a fondness for it. There was a strange paradox in how alive she felt when killing someone else. As if it was her way of showing the world, one person at a time, that she, Jeanette Kurrell, was more important than the rest of them.

With no other burning interests, she had started taking more jobs. Building up her connections. Letting word get around. She'd started small, but she was good.

And only the impersonal ones. The ones where she only had to worry about greed, and gain, and envy. No jilted lovers. No battered wives. No broken hearts. Only lowdown dirty avarice and callous necessity. She heard a lot of speeches that went, "It's regrettable, it truly is, but …"

Businessmen and politicians were her clients these days. Corporations, too. The occasional university professor or scientist in the cutthroat world of academia. Prior to yesterday's meeting with Rayburn, her last job had involved a scientist. The poor, foolish, stubborn idealistic son of a bitch had actually invented a weight-loss drug that worked, that was cheap and safe and effective. As far as the enormously lucrative weight-loss industry was concerned, he had to go.

Having never struggled with her weight, Jeanette hadn't felt any qualms about killing him. Now, as she ordered a second piece of pie so she could watch her target a little longer, she hoped she wouldn't be sorry for that later.

By the look of it, Mr. Westbrook and Sophia were not married. Dating, Jeanette thought, and not for very long. They were still in the parry-and-riposte stage of courtship that made her think they hadn't yet slept together.

Which meant that Sophia most likely wasn't in on the murder plot. She appeared genuinely interested in and attracted to Ben, and wasn't seething with the buried fury required to crave someone's death badly enough to hire it done. She was too young, as well. A woman that young didn't think in terms of hiring a killer. If she wanted her lover dead, she'd be the one to do it herself, in a fit of passion.

If there was a Mrs. Westbrook, though … or if lovely Sophia had been seeing someone else, someone who was the jealous type …

She had to stop this. It was useless wheel-spinning, getting her nowhere and only complicating things. Her job was simple. Westbrook dead by his own gun. Rayburn hadn't specified that it should look like a suicide – in the personal ones, people didn't like it to look like a suicide because that often meant no fat payoff from the insurance company. So, that meant Jeanette was free to do it her own way.

He looked like something of a ladies' man. Flirt with him, get him alone, and pow? She'd done that before. But he did seem quite captivated by his date – who could blame him? – and might prove to be one of those rarest of men … the faithful kind.

They had drinks and appetizers, and by then the restaurant was filling up with the later crowd. Jeanette had drunk three cups of coffee, feeling the buzz, and eaten more pie than was good for her. Jon still had not called. The waiter was giving her the evil eye, clearly wanting her to shove off so he could fill her table with a couple or group whose bill, and consequently tip, would be higher.

Just as well that she didn't have the gun. She'd been too visible here, though from the moment Sophia had walked in, it wasn't like many people were paying attention to her. She paid, left an adequate tip, and retrieved her car from the valet. Down the block, she pulled to the curb and dialed the phone she had given to Bigfoot.

Nothing. Had the idiot turned it off?

She drove around for a while, fingers drumming the steering wheel, humming under her breath, fidgeting with the radio. Nerves and too much coffee … this wasn't like her, and she didn't care for the feeling. She felt too edgy, too high-strung, too out of control. In a mood like this, she might do something stupid.

The sun went down, the city lights came on and turned the lake into an onyx teardrop in a dazzling diamond choker. She found herself by Century Plaza again. The downtown streets were full of people from opposite ends of the spectrum. Men and women in evening clothes going to the theater or opera, grubby bums panhandling on streetcorners.

When he'd called, he'd said he'd found Scoot at the skate park on Pine Street … but that Scoot was leaving. She'd told him to follow, and to call her back when he knew where Scoot lived.

But he hadn't called. Why hadn't he called? Where the hell did Scoot live? It had to be in town. Punks on skateboards didn't commute back and forth from the suburbs.

He might have lost Scoot.

Jeanette gripped the steering wheel.

If he had, if he'd lost Scoot, it would be just like him to be too cowardly to call her up and say so. He would be afraid of making her mad. And with good reason.

So … where was he, then? Was he still out there in a desperate scramble, hoping to pick up Scoot's trail again? Or had he decided that his only chance would be to cut and run?

She turned onto Prewett, which was even more garish by night with flashing neon signs everywhere. Two muscle cars were revving at a light, preparing to race. Hookers paraded up and down the sidewalks in heels and tight miniskirts, most of them too fat or too thin, smoking, chewing gum. A blood-red strobe light pulsed outside Club Dracula, where an overflow of black-clad Goths grinned inhuman vampire-grins at passers-by. A fight had broken out in front of a strip club and a trio of teenagers in gang colors had broken into a parked car.

Smiley's Motel had a large sign with a bright yellow winking smiley face, and offered "Free Adult Movies, Hourly-Nightly-Weeky Rate's, Kitchen Unit's with Frig," complete with misspellings and misplaced apostrophes. It had been dismal when she'd seen it by daylight. Now the peeling paint, weedy sidewalks and cracked windows were concealed by shadow, but not enough to make anyone mistake this place for the Ritz.

It was a two-story U-shape around a sunken patch of dirt that might have once featured a pool but now featured beer cans and crack vials. The arms of the U faced the street. Bigfoot's room was around the back.

As Jeanette's car rolled slowly past the filled slots, a door flew open and a drunken woman reeled out, shouting obscenities at a naked man in the doorway. Naked … except for the cowl, cape, and utility belt of a Batman costume.

"I fuckin' told you, you sick fuck, no sick fuckin' stuff!" the woman shrieked. "Motherfuck!"

The Eskimos, Jeanette had always heard, had something like ninety different words for snow in their language. Here on Prewett, the entire language seemed to consist of maybe two dozen variants of "fuck."

She grimaced. She used to like Batman. Had, as a little girl, sometimes thought how cool it would be to be Catwoman when she grew up. So much for fantasies. A mostly-naked Batman with a potbelly and a half-mast erection was almost enough to turn her celibate.

Bigfoot's unit was dark, but that didn't mean anything. Half the units at Smiley's were dark, and she was willing to bet that plenty of them were inhabited. By pallid subterranean creatures, maybe, or giant rats.

Two guys were sitting outside of his door. She could tell even in the poor lighting that neither of them was him. Neither was a hairy red Bigfoot. One was young, stocky, six-foot and black. The other was a scrawny, scabby little monkey.

Though she didn't have the gun, she had a gun. It was not in the glove compartment, but in a plastic box under the passenger seat. The box was a variation on the old hollowed-out-book gag, except that it had once held audio tapes, an unabridged reading of Dean Koontz's Mr. Murder. Like making the lunch reservations under Dufarge, this was another of Rayburn's ideas of a joke.

Jeanette opened the plastic box. Inside, the ridges that had once held tape cassettes in neat little slots had been cut away to provide room for a compact 9-millimeter. It was one of her favorite guns, fitting well in her hand.

She had gone home to change after her last visit here – had been tempted to burn her track suit for fear of what lice, germs and vermin it might have picked up in Jon's pigsty of a room – and was now in a smart beige linen suit and jade-green blouse. She looked like an Avon lady, a church volunteer, or a social worker.

The jacket's pockets were roomy, so she slipped the gun into one and kept her hand on it as she got out of the car. If need be, she'd shoot through the pocket. It would wreck the jacket, but she could live with that.

The black kid said something to the scabby monkey, and they both laughed. They had crude, sneering, sexist laughs.

"Is Jon around?" she asked.

Her tone, indifferent and unafraid, took them aback.

"Haven't seen him," the black kid said. He stood up. "Haven't smelled him neither. But hey, baby, what you need him for?"

The other guy, the scabby monkey who looked fifty but was probably only a hard-used thirty, only stared at her. He had hard, starving junkie's eyes and several days' worth of stubble.

Inspiration struck. "I'm his new parole officer," she said dryly. "Mind stepping aside so I can see if he's home?"

The black kid threw a guilty look down. There on the cracked and weed-grown sidewalk in front of the door, strewn between where he and the scabby monkey had been sitting, was an assortment of drug paraphernalia. He looked back at Jeanette and drew himself up in a macho posturing stance. Daring her to bust them.

His bravado was so transparent it was funny, but she didn't want to push him. Pushed by a small white woman, a kid like this could turn mean. She acted as if she didn't notice the stuff on the sidewalk.

"What happened to Ramirez?" the scabby monkey asked.

"Ramirez?"

"Jon's old parole officer."

She sensed a trap, and said, "I don't know anything about that. I'm just here to do my job. I'd appreciate it if you'd move, so that I can."

"Tellin' you, he ain't here," the black kid said, but he shuffled out of her way. "Hey, Weasel, man, I'm thinkin' like Abraham Lincoln it's time we beat feet 'cause I could use me somethin' to eat. Whatchoo say?"

The scabby monkey – Weasel – didn't move. He ogled Jeanette, but his eyes were so empty and dead that it was like being leered at by a corpse.

She stepped up to the door, thinking that if Weasel laid a finger on her, she would stomp her heel into his crotch. She'd have to disinfect her foot and burn her shoe if she did, which would be a shame because she liked these shoes. But, like the linen jacket with the gun in the pocket, she could buy a new one if she had to.

At the last minute, Weasel did hitch himself sideways. She rapped on the door and raised her voice. "Jon?"

There was no answer, not even the tense hush of someone holding his breath and hoping she'd go away. Of course, it was hard to tell with what sounded like orgies and barroom brawls going on in the rest of the units. She knocked again.

"Told you," the black kid said.

Jeanette didn't get the impression that they were hiding anything either, at least, not anything about Bigfoot. He wasn't here. She could try getting a spare key from the manager – the parole officer story would probably hold up in a place like this – but it would be no use.

"If you see him," she said, "tell him I was here. I'll try him again tomorrow."

"You can try me anytime, baby," the black kid said, regaining some of his swagger now that she was leaving without busting them for possession, or possession with intent to sell.

She wanted to smile and tell him that if he called her 'baby' again, she'd shoot him in the eye. But she ignored him, and walked back to her car. The vehicle's engine caught with an almost relieved sound, as if it knew that it would have been stolen, stripped, or at the very least spray-painted with gang tags had Jeanette left it unattended much longer.

With no other ideas at the moment, she headed for home.

Where the message light was blinking on her answering machine.

"Hello, Jade." A voice like rough velvet.

Her heart momentarily stopped.

He knew. Somehow, incredibly, unbelievably, Rayburn knew.

Then a few things occurred to her in quick succession – Rayburn was just doing his Charlie's Angels shtick, which he reserved for times when he was in a good humor. Rayburn surely wouldn't have been in a good humor if he knew about her troubles. Further, this was the plan. This was the routine. She had set it up herself.

According to the routine, Rayburn or one of his associates would contact her, via this private, unlisted number she kept only for her jobs. No specifics, just a query-call to see if she was available and interested. A meeting would be set up. At the meeting, the vital information would change hands. And then, sometime in the next day or two, she'd get another call.

This call. This preliminary follow-up.

Normally, she would use that intervening time to go over the information and make her preliminary plan. When the follow-up call came, she could ask further questions to refine her plan.

"Are you there?" Rayburn's voice asked on the recording. He waited a few beats, then went on. "I was just calling to check in, but I'll have to try and reach you again later. I do hope everything's going well. And that you're still thinking about it."

Despite everything else, Jeanette flushed. His dinner offer. She had almost forgotten. Understandably, perhaps … it would have to take the biggest disaster of her professional career to drive thoughts of a date with Rayburn out of her head.

"Talk to you soon," he said, and there was a click as he hung up.

**