“It is,” she said,
“isn’t it. The research, the selection, the planning, the stalking …”
“Every good thing benefits from foreplay,”
he
said.
“The longer you wait for the orgasm, the better it is.”
They looked at the slide show some more, the new picture clicking onto the screen every five seconds.
“Stop it there,” she said.
“Her?”
“You think?” she said.
“Un-uh.”
“Too old?”
“I think we should get someone
young and pretty this
time.”
“That feels right to me,” she said.
“Feels good, doesn’t it,” he
said.
“Yes.”
He clicked on the slide show again and they sat holding hands watching the images of young men, old men, young women, old women, men and women of indeterminate age. All of them white, except for one Asian man in a blue suit.
“There,” he said and froze the image.
“Her?” she said.
“She’s the one,” he said.
“You think she’s good-looking?”
“I think she’s great-looking.”
“She looks kind of horsy to me.”
“She’s the one,” he said.
He was very firm about it, and she heard the firmness in his voice. He said it again.
“She’s the one.”
“Okay,” his wife said. “You want
her, you got her. She does look
like she’d be kind of fun.”
“That’s her house she’s coming
out of,” he said. “Rose Avenue if
I remember right.”
His wife looked at the list of locations.
“Rose Avenue,” she said.
“Memory like a steel trap,” he said.
“So tomorrow we put her under
surveillance?”
“We watch her every minute of her day,” he said. “See who she
lives with, when she’s alone, where she goes, when. Does she drive?
Ride a bike? Jog? Fool around?”
“The more we know,” she said,
“the more certain it’ll be when we
do it.”
“And the better it will feel.”
He smiled. “During or after?” he said.
“Both.”
6
Carrying a tan briefcase, Jesse stood on the big wraparound porch at 41 Pleasant Street. There were two doors
