Ventura'sops that judging from the flushed face and big smile when she
left, Mrs.
Morrison was not being custom-fitted for moccasins--unless she was
doing that with both feet in the air while lying on Duncan's couch.
Ventura saw no reason to mention this to his client.
Ray Duncan, twenty-seven, had been a resident of the town for more than
ten years, long before the Morrisons had moved there, and a background
check of the man showed nothing more illegal than a couple of traffic
tickets and a dismissed bust for a single marijuana joint in Seattle
when he'd been eighteen.
Mrs. Morrison's extramarital activities weren't relevant to protecting
the client. Yet, anyway.
'Situation?' Ventura asked.
The man to whom he was speaking looked to be about sixty, gray and
grizzled, wearing a fisherman's vest and floppy-brimmed canvas hat,
overalls, and boots, and a pair of binoculars and a digital cam
dangling from around his neck. A battered copy of Peterson's Guide to
Birds of North America stuck out of a vest pocket next to a small
flashlight.
The older man laughed.
'Well, let me see. About thirty minutes ago, something that looked
like a big rat ran behind the garbage bin over there. Maybe it was a
nutria or a possum--zoology is not my strong suit. And fifteen minutes
ago, a light went on in the bathroom of unit number five, stayed on for
two minutes, then went out. What else? Oh, yeah, a couple of real big
mosquitoes buzzed me. That's as good as it's gotten.'
Ventura gave him a tight professional grin in return.
'You rather be shooting it out with the Mexican drug dealers again?'
'No/but if they were all as exciting as this one, I'd have to start
taking Viagra just to keep my attention up.
This is going to be a cakewalk.'
'You said that about the Mexicans at first.'
The older man looked at him.
'You expect things to warm?'
'Highly likely, though probably not for a while yet. I'll keep you
apprised.'
Ventura drifted away, a man out for a late night stroll, meandering
toward the next station, a couple hundred yards away.
As he walked, he considered the client and the situation again. He had
no problems with what the client was doing, that was his business and
not Ventura's, save how it affected the job. Ventura didn't think much
about morality.
He had his own ethical system, and it didn't match that of most
citizens when it came to what they did, or why they did it. From his
viewpoint, he was mostly, well... amoral about most things--when you
had killed as many people as he had, the rules just didn't seem to
apply to you in quite the same way as they did to normal people. He
knew what sociopaths were, and he wasn't one.
He had loved, had hated, had felt the usual emotions. He had been
engaged once, but she had broken it off because she wasn't ready to
