hooker, but he had no compunction about spending or even wasting Dean Johnson's money. Easy come, easy go.
He looked at his own computer screen and quickly found a girl who looked like she might talk.
'No, no, take your time,' Johnson urged. 'Look it over. See how she looks on top. Take a test drive.'
'No, this is good,' Unger said impatiently. He hit Select, and the computer shut down automatically. 'I guess they don't want you changing your mind.'
Unger threw down the rest of his drink to preserve his present state of mind. His nerves were starting to wear away at his buzz. He peered casually over his friend's shoulder and looked on as Johnson cried out every other minute for him to 'Look at this.' Suddenly the redhead appeared in the doorway. She was staring disdainfully at Unger.
'This way,' she said, motioning to him with a jagged smile.
Unger was led around the corner and down another hallway. He could tell from the seamless curves in the dress that the hostess wore no underwear. Despite a slight sag she wasn't half bad, an old whore with a knack for business. It was evident that she owned the place. Unger knew enough about prostitution to know that anyone with a joint like this had to be hands-on or else be robbed on a nightly basis.
The hostess showed Unger into a dimly lit bedroom. The walls were faux-painted to look like faded marble. The king-size bed stood in the center of the room, its four bronze posts nearly scraping the ceiling.
'Have fun,' the redhead sneered in a husky voice as she shut the door. Seconds later another door opened on the opposite wall and there she was, just the same as she looked on the screen, a tall Barbie doll blond with long, straight hair, a prodigious chest, and thick pink-bubblegum lips. She wore high white pumps and a tight white nurse's uniform, right down to the old-style headpiece.
'Goddamn,' Unger uttered, taking a step back.
She smiled at him and stood waiting.
Unger swallowed hard and said tentatively, 'Do you mind if I ask you some questions?'
The blond smiled pleasantly back at him. She crossed the room and took his hand in her own, putting the other gently against his cheek.
'You're nervous,' she whispered. 'Don't be afraid. You can ask me anything. We can talk.'
She led him to the bed and they sat down side by side.
'First of all,' he began, trying hard to catch his breath and feeling every bit a fool, 'do you take pictures? I mean, could someone come in here and do things and have pictures taken and keep them, digital pictures?'
'We can do that,' she said, rising from the edge of the bed.
'No,' he said, holding her arm. 'Not for me. I just wanted to know if someone could do that, and I wanted to know if you've ever seen a man, a professor named Lipton, around here. He might have done some things and had some pictures taken.'
The blond glanced quickly at the side door. She gave him a pout and said, 'We can't talk about other clients…'
'I know,' Unger said. 'I just figured, you know, between you and me, you might just let me know if it was possible that he was here.'
She leaned close to him, and her fingertips gently descended the front of his shirt until they found his crotch. Unger stopped her hand. His heart thumped uncontrollably.
'Anything's possible,' she whispered, her lips brushing his own.
He could smell the fresh smell of strawberry shampoo in her silky hair.
'I'm an FBI agent,' he blurted out.
The girl froze.
'I just want to get some information. This isn't a bust or anything. I just want to know if you saw this guy I was talking about.'
A piercing shriek on the other side of the wall startled Unger so badly that he jumped clear off the bed. A din of crashing and shouting followed the scream, or whatever the initial noise had been. Unger found his Glock, crossed the floor, and yanked open the door. He peered cautiously into the hall. A tall figure backed out of the next room down, shouting unintelligible obscenities back into the room.
'Hey!' Unger shouted, stepping into the hall. 'Hold it right there!'
The man, who was fully dressed, turned toward Unger. His face boiled with rage and his bright blue eyes gleamed madly amid the wrinkles of his tan face and wavy blond hair. Unger recognized him instantly as Lipton, the man Bob Bolinger was so desperate to find. It was so bizarre Unger felt he must be in a crazy dream. Lipton marched purposefully toward him, a deranged man with no regard for the agent's gun staring him in the face.
'Stop right there, asshole!' Unger shouted, his voice shaking hysterically. He was acutely aware of the situation. If he pulled the trigger on a weaponless man in a situation like this, his whole career was over.
'Stop!' he shouted fiercely, but Lipton was right next to him now and he shoved Unger aside with disdain, continuing his march down the hall and muttering inaudibly to himself.
In a panic, Unger ran to the door Lipton had come from. The room was nearly empty and more spacious than his had been. It was lit with psychedelic black lights. In the middle was a girl strapped facedown to a kind of gymnastics horse. Her hands and feet were chained to the floor, and Unger dashed in to see if she was still breathing. His heart raced. She looked like she was dead.
Unger grabbed a handful of the girl's hair and lifted her face off the horse. A steady stream of obscenities told him she was fine. He let her head drop back to the padded leather horse and looked around the room. There was a table off to the side that had been dumped over. Scattered across the floor were whips and chains and other instruments, whose purposes were a mystery to Unger.
'What the hell's going on?' the redhead demanded. She stood in the doorway with a small black handgun of her own. 'What are you doing?'
'Hey,' Unger said, raising his firearm in surrender. 'It wasn't me. I just came in here to see what was up. She's okay, though. That was Professor Lipton.'
'I know who it was.' The redhead glared. 'Go back to your room.'
She turned and stormed away.
Unger stood frozen for a moment, collecting his thoughts. He passed the lounge where he'd last seen Dean and wondered that he'd seen no sign of him in the hallway. Apparently, his friend was like the rest of the clientele, more concerned with his privacy than with jumping to anyone's rescue. Unger had gone to the scream instinctively, but now his motives were purely selfish.
He'd seen people get lucky, and from a distance he'd studied luck, longing for it his entire career. This was James Unger's chance, and he wasn't about to let it slide. He could pick up Lipton's track here and now and take full credit if it turned out he really was the killer Bolinger claimed. There were no guarantees, but from what he'd heard, Bolinger's theory just might be true. Unger had presumed all along that the case was a dead end because Lipton had most likely fled the country.
Now he knew that wasn't the case. With some careful maneuvering, Unger could turn this whole thing into the chance of a lifetime. Maybe it was his turn now. After all these years, maybe it was just his turn. Unger felt a transformation coming over himself. The old thrill, the moxie, the drive, it all came back to him in seconds and he felt like he was twenty-five again, in his first year with the bureau.
There was no sign whatsoever of Lipton. The old whore was sitting at her desk, smoking hard on a Pall Mall and trying to look as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She looked critically at Unger and blew a vicious stream of smoke toward the ceiling.
'It's over,' she said dully. 'You want your girl back for another go?'
'No,' Unger said, nervously at first, then with more authority, 'I want to talk with you.'
The redhead snorted derisively. 'I'm not paid to talk.'
Unger's face burned. Then he opened his wallet and slapped his badge down on the desk in front of her. 'I am.'
The redhead raised her eyebrows in mock concern. 'Oh, I've never seen one of those before,' she said sarcastically.
'You better look closer, lady,' Unger said, feeling the rage of so many years of disappointment building up inside him. 'I'm not one of your local dicks.'
'No,' she said caustically, 'you're an out-of-town dick for sure.'
Nevertheless she looked more carefully at his badge, and the fact that he was a Fed seemed to make an impression. 'So what do you want from me?' she asked, a little more cooperatively.
'I want to know what you know about Lipton.'
'He's a client and we don't talk about our clients. Isn't that comforting?' she said, raising an eyebrow.
Up close now, Unger could see the haggard wrinkles beneath the thick coating of makeup. She was a smart-ass old whore, a lowlife, a common criminal, and she was standing in the way of the only chance he'd ever come close to at breaking a big case, at being someone people pointed at and said, 'There goes James Unger.'
'Let me tell you how this can work,' Unger said, looking around apprehensively before he circled the desk. His heart leapt into his throat, and he seemed to be almost outside himself, but he was going to do this. With a sneer of his own, he snatched a handful of her hair, twisted the course red strands in his hand, and slammed her head down against the surface of the desk in one quick move. Then he bent down himself, putting his face inches away from hers and speaking with quiet, trembling malice. 'This can work the hard way, or the easy way.
'Here's the hard way,' he said. 'I call in the locals and have them freeze everybody and everything in this whole fucking building. I then get a search warrant from a federal judge-which is about as hard for me as getting a pack of bubble gum-and I tear this fucking place apart from top to bottom. I arrest your ass for aiding and abetting a criminal suspect, and I call up my friends over at the IRS to lock on to you and every fucking john in your records for the rest of their lives. That's the hard way…'
Unger took a gasping breath, afraid of what he was doing, but too committed to his course to go back now.
'You getting the fucking picture?' he asked angrily. 'By the way, so you know, I'm here on business.
'I tracked Lipton here,' he said, as much to himself as to her, 'who is the subject of an FBI investigation, so don't think you've got anything over me, lady.
'Now, the easy way,' Unger said, breathing a little easier now. 'You take me back into your little office and you give me everything, and I mean every fucking thing you've got on Lipton. You do that for me and I walk out of here a happy man. The next time you hear from me is when I'm giving a press conference on CNN when I nail his ass.
'That sound good?' Unger asked pleasantly. He liked his new role and the power he felt.
She nodded and he let her go. Unger stepped back and the redhead got up. She looked at him fearfully and it made Unger smile. She straightened herself briskly, then led him through a door in the wall behind the desk. They were in a small office with a beat-up metal desk, a computer, a phone, and a large glass ashtray that
