scribbled a note and handed it to Seaver, who glanced at it: “Give Seaver whatever he wants. P.B.” Buckley folded his hands across his belly. “Who is this guy?”
“It’s a Mickey-and-Minnie team. I’ll talk to them today.”
“Just don’t bring them here,” said Salateri. “I don’t want to meet anybody like that.”
“And if you’re going to hire them, don’t call them from here, either,” said Foley. “A year from now I don’t want some prosecutor going down the hotel phone bills and finding their number.”
Seaver nodded. “Of course. I’ll be flying to Los Angeles to talk to them in person. There are just a couple of things I should tell you. They’ll give me a price, but expenses will be on top of that.”
“This goes without saying,” said Buckley. “What else?”
“Once they leave their house, it’s done. I won’t be able to call them off. They’ll keep at it as long as it takes, and they won’t check in with me or be any place I can reach them. If we find out tomorrow that Pete Hatcher was the most loyal employee the world has ever seen, it’ll be too late. He’ll already be dead.”
“I guess this is the time to ask.” Buckley looked at his two partners. “Are we all sure we aren’t going to change our minds?”
“I’ll chance it,” said Foley.
They both looked at Salateri. He knitted his brows and held up both hands. “You know it would be too bad if we were just being paranoid. I mean, an innocent guy suddenly has his bosses decide he’s the enemy, and then they get him tossed in a Dumpster somewhere. But he already knows we had him watched, and he knows we were considering getting rid of him. If he was our friend, he’s not anymore. What good would he be to us now?”
Linda Thompson sat in her bedroom and rubbed the creamy mask onto the perfect white skin of her cheeks and forehead, staring into the lighted mirror. This one was blue, and it left three small round holes for her eyes and mouth. The white towel wrapped around her blond hair above her blue face made her look ghostly in the intense glow of the makeup light. She walked to the bed and lay down to wait. The blinds were closed, but the window behind them open, so they clacked back and forth in the dry, hot southern California breeze. She opened her robe and let the air blow across her naked body while it dried the facial mask. She had already covered herself with lotion, and the air made her skin tingle.
Linda was beautiful. She had never been anywhere since she was nine when somebody had not mentioned it, or looked at her in a way that made mentioning it seem like saying it twice. She knew it was the kind of beauty that was startling, because it seemed to take up space of its own. It was the initial premise of every transaction she had with other people. They didn’t seem to understand that it wasn’t a gift. It was a torment, because it was perfection, and maintaining perfection was a lot of work. Linda hated work.
It was only eleven in the morning and she had already done five point five miles on the stationary bike, worked for an hour on the exercise machines, and done a half hour in the pool. She knew she would have felt less bereft now if she could have had four fried eggs and a half pound of bacon, which was what Earl had eaten in front of her before he had gone out to work the dogs. Linda had not eaten since the cracker and asparagus last night, and Earl had thrown that nauseating mess into a pan in front of her and set off a racket of sizzling and popping and smelly grease. When she had said she didn’t want any he had given that crooked smirk and eaten all of it himself. Wolfed it down, was the expression, and it was made for Earl.
He was tall and lean with big knuckles and a jaw that showed what he was: ten generations of white trash in assorted depressing hollows out of God’s line of vision in the South, and probably the ten generations before that being the same thing in England, all twenty generations of them screwing with people only one or two branches over on the family tree, so they were all completely devoid of common consideration and never gained an ounce.
The air seemed to tear itself apart with a sound that wasn’t quite a bark but a scream. She sprang from the bed amid low growls and the howl of the hound as it turned to defend itself. Linda didn’t have the patience to run down the hallway to the living room, into the dining room, and out the door, so she raised the blinds, sat on the windowsill, swung her legs out, and jumped to the grass. She sprinted toward the kennel, muttering to herself, “He’s absolutely retarded.”
When she reached the high chain-link fence she could already see the bloodhound backed into the corner trying to keep the Rottweilers away from his hamstrings. His left ear had been chewed, and there was blood dripping from his muzzle.
Earl was standing in the corner of the pen, absently rubbing the bristle of his unshaven chin as he watched the big, heavy black dogs hurl themselves at the hound.
Linda spoke loudly enough for him to hear. “Call them off, Earl.”
He turned slowly and looked at her, but she didn’t wait. She barked, “
“Oh, it’s you,” said Earl. “The face didn’t ring a bell.” She traced his line of vision and found herself looking down. She hastily closed the robe and tied it.
“What are you doing?” she asked wearily.
“Trying to see how two of them work when they’ve got something cornered.”
“They bite the hell out of it until it bleeds to death. What more could you possibly find out?”
“I wasn’t sure. That’s why I did it. Now I know.”
“And?”
“It might come in handy some time. I think I could beat two of them. Don’t know anybody else who could.”
“So what are you going to do with this thousand-dollar purebred bloodhound you brought home a week ago? You can’t enter it in a show now that it’s all chewed up. You can’t even put it out to stud.”
Earl glanced at the dog cowering in the corner of the exercise yard, not daring to move. He shrugged. “Science.”
Linda walked into the house and opened the cupboard beside the sink. She pulled out the Heckler & Koch .45 A.C.P., pressed the button at the rear of the trigger guard to release the magazine, and checked it. She had to be sure Earl hadn’t left it unloaded the last time he had pissed her off. No, there was a full load of ten Federal Hydra-Shok hollow-points. She slipped the big pistol inside her robe, clamped it there with her left arm, and stepped out the door.
When she reached the kennel, he had already let the bloodhound out of the pen into the run, and he was busily giving the Rottweilers chunks of red steak. She walked beside the fence of the long, narrow track to the spot where the bloodhound was lying on its belly trying to lick some of the gashes in its chest, but not really able to. She flicked off the safety, pushed the muzzle of the pistol through the links of the fence, aimed at the dog’s round, bony cranium, and blew it apart.
The report of the big pistol brought Earl around the kennel into the exercise run. He looked at her blue face with the staring eyeholes, but he didn’t speak.
She answered him anyway. “Any vet who got a look at him would have called the police.”
He said, “You going to bury that?”
She had already started back across the lawn. Her blue mask had hardened, and now it burned against her skin as she whirled and snapped, “You know goddamned well I’m not.”
Linda walked back into the kitchen, released the magazine, and left the pistol on the counter for Earl to clean. She knew if she cleaned it, he would clean it again. In her bathroom, she gently washed the mask off and patiently, thoroughly rubbed moisturizer from the tiny jar onto her face with her fingertips, staring into the mirror over the sink.
That was Earl. She had no doubt that he had figured out how to kill two Rottweilers attacking him at once. But the part that made him Earl Bliss was that if he hadn’t been sure, then tomorrow or the next day she would, likely as not, find him out there in the pen with a Ka-Bar knife doing it. He was a severe annoyance between jobs. He could not rest.
She knew that this afternoon he would be out in the Angeles National Forest sighting in the new rifle for the fourth time. It was a British Arctic Warfare suppressed military sniper rifle with an olive-drab stainless-steel barrel and a Schmidt & Bender 50-millimeter scope. Everything about it was adjustable, from the pull and travel of the trigger to the recoil absorption of the butt plate, so Earl would spend days and days adjusting them. The plain A.W. military-issue model started at over three thousand dollars, but the suppressed model with the silencer was highly illegal and had probably set him back five times that, because he had never told her what the Mexican cop
