had asked for it. Earl always needed the latest and fanciest piece of equipment, and then he had to take it completely apart and put it back together to see exactly how it worked.
That combination of constant self-improvement and morbid curiosity was what she would have extracted as the most horrible part of Earl, but she could not even hold that thought firmly, because it was also the best part of him. And cutting things away from him wasn’t possible. Earl had no surface, like other people: he was the same all the way through, like a chunk of steel. All you could do was move your head to look at the same qualities from different angles. That was how she had come to love and hate him at the same time.
He looked at everything the same—dismantling gadgets, testing the dogs to see how they worked, or her. Every time he heard or read or saw something that could be done to a woman’s body, he would do it to her, watching with an expression between detached curiosity and, maybe she just hoped, fascination, to see how it affected her: to see how she worked. The result didn’t seem to matter to him in any emotional way. It didn’t matter if he had her panting like a bitch in heat, crawling to him and begging for more, or sent her whimpering into her room to lock the door for three days. He didn’t take care to repeat the good things to make her happy, or avoid things that would remind her of something that had hurt her. He just wanted to see how she worked.
She had let him put her in a dark mood, and now she began to construct a fantasy about him. He would come in from burying the bloodhound. He would go to the sink in the kitchen to wash his hands. She would come in behind him while his hands were engaged and wet. She would put her left hand on his shoulder softly to show him she didn’t give the dog issue undue importance, then use it to tousle his hair while she freed her right to reach into her robe.
But he was Earl, so it would take him a half second to realize from the feel of her fingers or the sound of her breathing that something was up. She knew she would not be able to say anything or he would hear the tension in her voice. She would use that half second to tighten her fingers on his hair, jerk his head back, and bring the fillet knife across his throat. She had been composing these little plays about him since she was in high school, when she first went to work filing and running errands at his detective agency, and as she had known it would, this one began to change.
He would sense her excitement instantly and give that little snort of a laugh as his right hand shot up like a striking snake to catch her left. The knife was still hidden under her robe, held there by the tie-belt on the outside, and she was afraid it would fall out, so she turned away and leaned her hip against the edge of the green marble surface of the island in the middle of the kitchen to keep it there.
The move gave him an idea, so he reached around her and pulled the belt of the robe so it opened, and put his big hand between her shoulder blades. He pushed her forward and she felt the shock of the cold, hard marble, first on her breasts, and then her belly, and the hard corner of the marble against her pelvis. She had no choice but to wriggle farther onto the marble to keep the fillet knife flat under her belly so it wouldn’t slice her open or clatter to the floor, only that brought her buttocks up and parted her legs, and she had to hold herself absolutely rigid to keep from moving against the blade. And he—
The ring of the telephone beside her bed was like something breaking. She snatched the receiver off the hook and punched the button that was lit. She was too annoyed to see which number it was, so she said, “Linda Thompson.”
“Hello, Linda.” She recognized the voice, and her anger began to turn into hope. “Can you and Earl meet me someplace for lunch?”
A job, she thought. Thank God.
5
Linda sat beside Earl in the front seat and watched each shopper pull into the big parking lot, drive up and down a couple of aisles, coast between two diagonal slashes of white paint, then go through the ritual of checking the whole car: the mirrors to be sure the car’s ass wasn’t hanging out far enough to get clipped, the passenger seat to collect purses or glasses or hide a bag they bought in the last mall from the smash-and-grab crowd, then the lock buttons. The excruciating sameness of it was getting on her nerves. People were as predictable as gophers. You knew the next three things they were going to do before they did.
The car smelled like dogs, that nauseating dog-food smell they exuded from every pore. Earl had used the car instead of the truck again. She decided not to say anything, because it would spoil the next hour.
Earl was brilliant in his own way. Raising and training attack dogs was a great sideline for a detective agency that didn’t do much business. In a city the size of Los Angeles you could pick up any breed you wanted from the pound for the price of the shots, which was up to sixty bucks now. Some of them had papers. You trained the dog to sit, heel, shit outdoors, and maul people, and you could sell it for fifteen thousand.
But Linda was ready to work now, and that was Earl’s fault too. He had trained her practically from childhood to his rhythms. He was only really alive when he was hunting. Between times he only played at it and got more and more irritable.
Seaver was precisely on time, as she had known he would be. He was one of those guys who seemed to see himself as though he were still in the military. For the ones like him, that wasn’t some kind of interruption in his existence but his initiation into manhood. She saw him pull the rental car between the diagonal lines, but he didn’t behave like the others. He was out and walking as soon as the keys were out of the ignition. He still carried himself straight, only now there was a little gray at the sides of his short hair. The aviator sunglasses he used to wear had been replaced with plain black frames, but the gray summer suit with the bright white shirt still had that animal-in- clothes look because it was cut too snugly and the collar was too tight, the way the army had taught him to dress.
He got into the back seat and Earl drove off. “Hello, Cal,” said Linda. “You’re looking good.”
“You too,” said Seaver. She knew that he had thought of a compliment, but he had pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth because he had known better than to say it in front of Earl.
“Let’s go to Ivy at the Shore,” said Seaver. “We can talk business while we’re on the freeway, and then eat in peace.”
“When’s your plane out?” asked Earl.
“Four o’clock,” said Seaver. “If I’m back in my car by three, I’ll make it. If not, I’ll take another flight.”
As Earl accelerated down the ramp onto the San Diego Freeway Seaver stared at the bottom of the first overpass. Some time soon it was going to be a bad idea to transact this kind of business on a freeway. Already the California Department of Transportation had tried placing cameras on the overpasses so when there was a traffic jam they could see what had caused it. And lately thieves had put machines on the bridges to capture cellular phone numbers and codes they could program into clones. He opened his coat, took out a thick manila envelope, and handed it over the seat to Linda. “In there is all the information I have about a target I want found and taken out.”
Earl glanced at the unopened envelope. “What is all that?”
“Photographs, a surveillance videotape, two audiotapes—one on the phone, one live—his employment history. I thought I could save you some time.”
Earl smiled. “He must be important.”
Seaver felt a distaste for the tactics of bluff and barter. “The price is going to be three hundred thousand for him. We’ll cover legitimate expenses.”
“Hear that, Earl?” said Linda. “No illegitimate expenses this time.”
“I mean,” said Seaver, “that I’m not the client. I just picked you for the job. If it’s too outrageous, the client is capable of getting rid of me and hiring somebody else to deal with you.”
“I hear you,” said Earl. “Why is this guy worth that much? Does he have something I have to bring back, or what?”
“No,” said Seaver. “He’s got information in his head. He can’t hand it off or sell it, because nobody else can testify to what he saw. He’ll have to be alive to do it.”
Linda smiled at Seaver and he thought about what a strange creature she was. She had what used to be called cupid’s bow lips, big, liquid green eyes. The smile would have been merely beautiful if it had been prompted
