slicker. There was no local net for it to link to in New York, but Julia had been working on story files during the flight, so she hadn’t wanted to pack it away.
Plus, she thought, it was a lot safer on her hip than in her luggage. The black-market price of an Ericsson T4245 Flexipad was probably upward of two or three million bucks.
That’s why the first piece of hand luggage she’d unpacked was her trusty SIG Sauer, which she’d made a great play of openly fitting into her shoulder holster. That was at least one good thing about the 1940s. No airport security, or none that she recognized as such, anyway.
The terminal at LaGuardia—still known as New York Municipal Airport—was relatively quiet for an early evening. Her flight had disembarked, and its passengers were awaiting their baggage. A flight to the Bahamas was due out in forty minutes and one from Toronto was due in. But the place felt like a ghost town.
She was contemplating a limo run to her apartment, which was a little exciting because the interior designers should have finished the renovations by now, when her arms were pinned to her side from behind, and a sandpaper rough face pressed up against her cheek.
“Guess who!” Dan Black whispered into her ear. “Don’t hit me!” he added quickly, hopping away, just in case her reflexes got the better of her.
She jumped when he grabbed her. Her heart skipped forward a few beats, but she didn’t grab his nuts and try to rip them off, as she had last time. They were both learning. Dan, she noticed, had turned his body a little to the side, in order to avoid just such an attack.
“Hiya, sexy,” she said, beaming, her lethargy falling right away with a hot surge that started somewhere down in her thighs and ran right up through her stomach until she was sure her face was flushed bright red.
“Hello, darling,” Dan said, a tad more demurely.
Julia, however, grabbed him by the belt and wrenched him into her, keeping hold of the buckle while she slipped her other hand around to grab a butt cheek. She gave it a good squeeze as they kissed. “God, it’s good to see you,” she said.
As they parted slowly, both of her legs now firmly clamped around one of his, Dan patted her jacket where it covered the handgun. “You expecting trouble from your editor?”
“Girl can’t be too careful,” she said, smiling. “Get me home quickly, and you can take it off. Or you could leave it on, if you think you’d like that.”
“
“Really? Well, that’s a little kinky, but if you want it that way . . .”
A porter appeared, carrying her bags. Two Antler suitcases, with retractable wheels and a telescoping handle, which he clearly thought of as the greatest invention he’d ever seen. And one medium-sized backpack in jungle camouflage, still carrying one large, faded bloodstain—about which he seemed less enthused.
She tipped him what felt like a ridiculously small amount and shouldered a smaller backpack full of electronic equipment: her carry-on luggage. Then he followed them out to the limo pool.
“I didn’t expect to see you at all, Dan,” she said. “It’s so
He slipped an arm around her slim waist as they passed into the cold night air, drawing more looks—some offended, some envious. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up, telling you I’d be here before I knew I had the leave. And then you were out of reach anyway. So I figured, what the hell? It’s no fun arriving in town when there’s nobody to meet you.”
“Man, you can say that again. This city still freaks me out. I keep expecting to turn around and see my friends on every corner, but, you know . . .”
She trailed off, the weariness and jet lag—or prop lag, she corrected herself—catching up again.
“I know,” he said, kissing the top of her head.
Then they went home and fucked for three hours without a break.
“This place looks amazing, Jules!”
“It is cool, isn’t it?”
Yes, it was. Dan had never seen anything like it. Not that he’d ever thought much about design and architecture before he met Julia. Even so, he’d never imagined that an apartment could look this way. His idea of how rich folk lived was informed entirely by Hollywood. Their homes were larger; the furniture was plush. But an armchair was an armchair, whether it was a hand-me-down from the welfare, or a big leather chesterfield in the Vanderbilt drawing room.
The stuff in Julia’s apartment, however . . . even the way the rooms were laid out . . . it was . . . Well, words failed him.
He hadn’t noticed it at first, when they’d spilled in through the door, hands all over each other, clothing already half-undone. They’d made love standing up, half-undressed, right inside the entry hall; then she’d hauled him straight into a bedroom and onto the mattress, which he hadn’t left for a long time.
Jules had disappeared to get a bottle of champagne at one point, but otherwise neither of them had ventured out of the room until much later in the evening.
After the third time, when it was going to take him a little while to recover, he’d begun to notice the bedroom in the light of the candles she’d lit.
The bed looked Japanese, like a
And the wall itself was inset at random places with boxes or something, in which Julia had set up books or little pieces of art. He noticed that some of them were faintly backlit, adding a soft glow to the light of candles that were burning on tiny white shelves that protruded from the other walls just as randomly as the insets. There was no other furniture to speak of, just two fuzzy cubes, covered in what looked like polar bear pelt. He wondered where she kept her clothes.
“They did a great job, don’t you think?” she said as they stood in the living room—or what he assumed was the living room—just before midnight.
“Where’d all the space come from?” he asked. “I’ve never seen such a big parlor before.”
Julia smiled at him with that almost-pitying look she got sometimes. He suspected it was because he’d used the word
“Well, this used to be a three-bedroom apartment,” she explained. “But I had them knock out a bunch of walls, and now it’s one bedroom with a massive open living area which flows from the kitchen down there, through the dining and entertainment space, into my chill-out zone, here.”
Dan sort of understood what she meant, but only because they were standing in the “chill-out zone,” a strange, sunken, carpeted half-moon heaped with piles of weird Arabian-looking cushions. It seemed like the sort of place Fatty Arbuckle could get himself into a lot of trouble.
A data slate hung on the wall like a picture, and he guessed the area would serve as a sort of mini movie theater. Thirty or more data sticks sat in tiny slots, on top of another small white ledge that grew straight out of the wall by the slate.
“I thought nobody was allowed to own that sort of technology without a government permit,” said Dan.
“Settle down, Eliot Ness,” she said. “That’s my personal slate. Only government-issue property is covered by the legislation. We were deploying for three months, so I brought quite a few personal items with me.”
She moved through the sunken lounge to pluck a data stick off the tiny shelf.
“Twenty-five years of
Those must have been the books he saw in her bedroom earlier. He noticed others now, tucked in recesses spotted around the massive room.
The long, rectangular “space,” as she referred to it, seemed to get harder and colder as it receded toward the kitchen at the far end of the apartment. That space was arranged around a long central bench that appeared to have been fashioned out of railway sleepers and stainless steel. He couldn’t be sure until he got down there, but it
