I counted twelve chin-ups before she finally slowed and dropped to the mat, landing as if on springs. I had no idea how many chin-ups she’d done before I started watching, but twelve of those killers was six or eight more than I could’ve done.
She turned, saw me, came to the window with a towel looped around her neck, smiling. “Good, you’re early.”
“Good?”
“Got something for you to do while I rinse off and get dressed.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Come around front. I’ll show you.”
She unlocked the door and let me in. She wore a red-and-white striped exercise bra and jogging shorts, well-used sneakers. She looked good. She wasn’t one of those female body builders, bulked up beyond all reason, past femininity into a nightmare of gristle and weird stringy cords. As a powerlifter, she had a weight class to maintain. Too much muscle mass would have worked against her. I supposed there was a fine line to be walked there.
“Over here,” she said. She led me to her desk and handed me a job application, a 401(k) form, as if I were going to make enough to put anything away, a bond questionnaire, W-4.
“Oh, Christ, no.”
“What?”
I sighed. “Nothing.”
She put her hands on her hips. “I spent all yesterday afternoon rounding up that stuff, after I dropped you off.”
“Aw, you shouldn’t have.”
“If I’m going to hire you, Mort—”
“Yeah? I’m hired?”
“Only if you fill out those damn forms. If you don’t, you can go shovel snow.”
“In July?”
“Not my problem.” She didn’t seem in the mood for humor.
“So, what’s junior-level PI work pay these days?”
“Eighty bucks a day, take it or leave it.”
“Great. Thirty-eight eighty more than minimum wage.”
“Dallas told me you were like lightning with numbers. Don’t plan on getting rich at this, Mort. It won’t happen.”
I shrugged. “So teach me. I’ll get rich later.”
“That’s not likely either.” She opened the door to the gym. “Try to get those filled out by the time I get back.”
I sat at her desk in a swarm of rainbows. Christ, I should’ve Xeroxed the last batch of paperwork. It would’ve saved a lot of time.
She came back as I was finishing the last sonofabitching form. She had on white slacks and a sleeveless pale-yellow blouse, white sandals, coral-colored toenails, a patchwork handbag made up of swatches of pastel-colored leather cut into random shapes. She wore no makeup. Her dark hair was short and functional, still slightly damp. She was still gorgeous, still standoffish.
She glanced at the forms, shrugged, then stuffed them into a desk drawer. “I’ll worry about these later,” she said. “Let’s go. We’ll take my car.”
As if we could take mine, which was still in that parking garage, maybe staked out by NBC’s finest by now. “Where to?” I asked.
“Into the past, of course.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Well, yeah, of course.
Jeri didn’t explain until we were doing fifty in a thirty zone with a red light half a block ahead. I braced myself. If Einstein was right, neither of us was aging quite as fast as the rest of the world. But then, Albert had never ridden with Jeri, so what did he know?
“What past?” I asked.
“Jonnie’s and Milliken’s.”
“Okay,” I said, still not getting it.
“The past creates the present,” she said patiently. “Things don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen because of things that happened before. Jonnie and Milliken died because of something that took place before they died, so that’s where we look.”
Okay, that made sense. It also had a Zen flavor, something to do with those rainbows floating around her office, the palmettos, the rubber tree plant, and the sultan pants she she had been wearing the day we’d met.
“They were both targets,” Jeri said, decelerating fast enough that I thought the Porsche had popped a chute. I almost looked back to see. “Both of them. They disappeared within hours of each other, but at different places at different times under different circumstances. It’s not as if one was attacked and the other happened to get in the way.”
“That seems pretty obvious.”
“Not to everyone, if you’ve been listening to the news this past week or to one of those dumb-ass talk shows.”
I knew that, too. Theories were scurrying around like fleas on a scratching dog. You could choose from serial murder to the mafia, the IRS to Posse Comitatus to the John Birch Society. Space aliens on “Dreamland,” if you were so inclined. A few people believed Jonnie and Milliken had been abducted and autopsied by creatures out of the black hole at the core of the galaxy. These people are allowed to vote, for God’s sake, and their votes count as much as anyone’s, which should give one pause.
“Jonnie disappeared right after speaking at a fundraiser at the Sparks Nugget,” Jeri went on. “Milliken may or may not have made it home from his office that Friday night. No one knows since he’s divorced and lives alone, but his face is well known and no one saw him anywhere around the Nugget that evening. All of which suggests a psycho with a specific reason for hitting them both.”
“Or psychos.”
She shook her head. “Don’t count on it. All the world loves a conspiracy, but it’s almost never true. You can’t get two or more criminals to keep a secret for eight minutes. They’re like lemmings. One look at a cliff and off they go.”
The light changed. We whirled
