“Finish it,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse at the navel. She fished for the wire he was attempting to pass her.
She asked, “Would it help if I unbuttoned my pants?”
“Not unless you have twenty minutes to spare,” he teased.
“Ha, ha,” she said, trying to sound like that hadn’t fazed her.
He tested the tape, and it held. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine,” she said.
“Mind your own business.”
“When a man has his hand down my pants, it most certainly is my business.”
“You’re playing with me.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Absolutely. I love to see you squirm.”
“I’m not squirming.”
“Of course you are.”
He grunted.
Again she teased him. “Finish the job and get your hands out of my underwear.”
“You’re nervous. That’s what this is about, right? Your nerves?”
“You really know how to woo a girl.”
“Woo?”
The tape finally held. Her fingers caught the wire he passed and she drew the small mike up inside her blouse. She unbuttoned yet another button of her blouse and clipped the lavaliere to the elastic bridge connecting the cups, turning to face him as she buttoned herself. For a moment she allowed herself to believe he blushed with the sight of her.
“You have a real way with the women,” she said.
“That’s what they say.”
She brushed herself off, smoothing the blouse.
He looked a little too closely and pursed his lips, bunching his mustache. She’d never liked mustaches much.
“A cry for help,” he said, repeating a possible explanation of Walker’s behavior that she had raised at an earlier meeting.
“If I have it right-and remember, I may not-then there’s a psychological progression Walker’s going through, a decline that has everything to do with what is more than likely confusion over his relationship with his sister; Neal’s stealing Mary-Ann from him; Neal’s abuse of Mary-Ann; the subsequent murder; and then Walker’s transference of his need to protect Mary-Ann over to me. Transference comes in all flavors, John, from lite to extra-strength. He latches on to me. He follows me. For reasons known only to him, he has chosen me to represent Mary-Ann in his life. Maybe he’s just trying to gather the courage to tell me something. I don’t know. Maybe he saw more of the murder than he’s shared with us. That wouldn’t surprise me-his guilt over watching them in the first place preventing him from telling us exactly what went down. It would also explain his conviction to see Neal put away for this crime.”
“But Hebringer and Randolf?”
“I’m not pretending I have the answers,” she said, unbuttoning her pants and tucking in her shirt, the act itself implying an immodesty that clearly surprised him. “I could be way off base with any of this. My original thinking was that he didn’t know anything more about Hebringer and Randolf than what he’d read in the papers, but that he recognized a way to bait me into meeting him.”
“I’m still camping on that side of the river,” LaMoia said.
“But the way he made this meet-preempting what was to be an attempt on my part to arrange something inside, something contained, something that worked better for us … and the fact that Lou likes Walker being positively IDed for having been in the Underground, and then this guy getting away from Lou and Bobbie down there … and Lou never liking coincidences and suddenly thinking Walker could either have something on Hebringer and Randolf, or might even be a part of it himself …
and here we are.”
“Here we are,” LaMoia echoed.
She felt his objection to her playing this role and appreciated his restraint in not verbalizing it. Doing her damnedest to appear collected and composed, she said calmly, “Listen, John … I think we pushed him over the edge with Neal walking away from the probable cause hearing and with my subsequent attempt to distance myself from him. It was a bad judgment call on my part. If he misses Mary-Ann as much as I think he does, then at some point he will come after me. This level of obsession leads to abduction. It’s my turf. I know what I’m talking about,”
she said, answering his head shaking no. “It could be for something as innocent as a confession-confiding his guilt about knowing more than he’s told us-or something … more serious.
And if he should get me-”
“He will not get you.”
“-you need to think unconventionally, something you’re good at. Neal’s apartment is a possibility. The family home-this place he lost when the business went bad. A trawler is entirely possible.” She met eyes with LaMoia and lowered her voice. “These places hold significance for him. He’ll take me to someplace that holds significance.”
“He will not-”
“If you guys lose me,” she interrupted, “I’d check those places I just mentioned first. The Aurora Bridge after that.”
“Jesus … you’re as sick as he is.”
She continued in her businesslike tone, “If I go missing, John, don’t do it by the book. Promise me that. Time’s the enemy, okay? He’s an organized personality. He knows what he’s doing. He lives to control the situation. When he senses he’s lost control, as he did earlier, he takes action. That alone separates him from what you guys think of as ‘loonies.’ Trust me, if he should get me and then lose control of the situation …” She couldn’t complete that thought, even in her own head. “Just find me, John. And fast. However you have to do it, just find me.”
“Cross my heart,” said the all-time rule breaker.
LaMoia opened his arms, an improbable invitation from a guy like him. She stepped forward cautiously, afraid he might make a joke of it. But he didn’t, and so she held herself close to his chest, the thumping of his heart like timpani. She tried to think of something amusing to say, to cushion the moment for them both, but the feeling of his arms around her, of that absolute sense of safety, lodged a walnut in her throat and she couldn’t get a word out. She squeezed, and he squeezed her back, and for a fleeting moment there was absolute peace in her world.
Driving now past the ALL NUDE storefronts, a wino walking unsteadily behind a grocery cart filled to overflowing, the tourists intermingled with the city’s subculture, neither acknowledging the other, she marveled at the tolerance, at the coexistence of two such diverse cultural strata. She felt herself being injected into this, like a vaccine into tainted blood, down through Pioneer Square where groups clustered around street musicians, where gray-haired hippies sold trinket jewelry from the tops of cardboard boxes and college kids waited in lines outside the music clubs.
“Test, one, two,” she said into the empty car.
Her dash-mounted Motorola squawked and called back, “Copy that, Decoy.”
She hadn’t liked the moniker assigned her for this operation, but it wasn’t her place to comment on it.
A few turns later, she pulled into the church lot marked PRIVATE PARKING STRICTLY ENFORCED-VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED, and slipped the cardboard permit onto her dash before locking up. She wore her hair over her ears in order to cover the tiny ear bud that carried the network of radio traffic surrounding her surveillance. She tested the gear once more as she dumped her keys into her purse. “Okay, boys, I’m all yours.”
“Copy that, Decoy,” the calm voice returned softly in her ear. No jokes from dispatch. No humor. These radio operators were the grumpy librarians of police work.
She reached the overhang and the door in the side of the church that led down to the Shelter at five minutes before ten, five minutes ahead of schedule. The sky opened up with a drizzle that felt like the misters over vegetable stands in supermar-kets. She thought sarcastically how perfect it was to further complicate things with the added hassle of the rain-traffic would slow, long-distance surveillance would be more obscured, and any right- thinking person would seek some kind of shelter from it, making the undercover roles harder to play effectively
