He smiled. 'Peanut butter on a Ritz cracker. Some guy is selling them down in the courtyard. Had people lined up around the building like they were buying tickets to the mainland.' He offered her one. 'Cost me the whole roll of duct tape for three of them.'
Tracy took the offered cracker with its thin smear of peanut butter. She could see the chips of peanuts. 'Crunchy,' she said appreciatively as she waved it under her nose and inhaled deeply. The smell opened the salivary glands at the back of her tongue. She bit a small corner off. Not too much at once. Make it last. The Ritz cracker was a little stale, but it didn't matter. She chewed slowly, nodding her head. 'Oh God, it's almost better than sex.'
'And more fattening.'
Tracy eyed Eric as she finished off the remains of the cracker. 'Any luck?'
'Not yet. Somebody thinks they know somebody who has a friend who may know something if I've got something worth trading for the information. They're just jerking my chain.' He settled into a plush chair, a 1920s reproduction of a seventeenth-century French chair to match the beds. He looked pensive as he ran his finger along his scar and stared out the window at the orange tentacles of dawn creeping along the Halo.
Tracy thought he looked disappointed, hurt, and for a moment she wondered if she'd done something wrong. Or was he just reacting to lack of news about Fallows and Timmy? Her own heart clenched at the sight of his anguish, and she felt good realizing that her involvement with Eric was an acrobatic feat that Angel would never be able to duplicate-one that required more emotional agility and had more danger than any amount of leaping and tumbling.
Almost as if he knew what she was thinking, Eric stood up, walked over to her, and kissed her on the cheek. Then on the lips. Suddenly Tracy remembered that she, too, knew the ways of lightness, of flying. She kissed him back.
He sat next to her on the edge of the bed. They were both quiet for a few minutes. Tracy hummed the theme to the McDonald's commercial.
'What do you think he's doing to her?' she finally asked.
Eric polished the brass mechanism of his crossbow with the corner of the blanket. 'Remind me to find a hunk of wax for the bowstring before we leave this place.'
'You're not answering the question. What do you think he's doing to her?'
'Whatever it takes.'
'Torture, right?'
He shrugged. 'She won't offer the information for free.'
'Jesus, Eric, what have we become?'
Eric looked over his shoulder at Tracy, her young face wrinkled with concern and guilt. She was pulling at a piece of skin around her cuticle, studying it as if she were performing brain surgery. Eric spoke in a low, steady voice, lifting her chin up so their eyes were locked. 'I told you about Angel. But I spared you some of the details because I thought it better if you didn't know. Maybe I was wrong.' He took a deep breath. 'You have to remember that she was a self-made woman of great wealth in Vietnam. Nothing stood in her way. I've seen some of the people who tried to resist her, people Angel 'persuaded' to give her information. She personally cut the eyelids off a sixty-eight-year-old woman who wouldn't tell where her son, a business rival of Angel, was hiding. She sewed together the lips of one of her servants because he told his cousin how much she'd spent on a pair of shoes. She didn't like her employees to give anything away about her.'
Tracy swallowed. 'I'm not sure that justifies us.'
'Maybe not. But don't worry, she's tough but not stupid. She knows she has no choice but to tell Blackjack everything.'
'I just can't believe Blackjack would do that kind of thing. He's a doctor, for Christ's sake, even if he is playing at being a pirate.'
Eric smiled, smoothed a strand of hair from her forehead. 'You underestimate him, Trace, like you sometimes underestimate yourself. People can be hard when they have to. Like that home run swing you cracked against Angel's spine when she dashed for the door. Ever thought you could do that?'
'I wasn't thinking at the time.'
'Exactly. Your instincts took over when your conscience didn't want to deal with the problem. You're going to find that happening more and more from now on.'
She frowned distastefully. 'That's a horrible thought, Eric.'
'Perhaps.'
Another knocking at the door. 'It's me,' Blackjack said. His voice seemed different. The impish lilt in it was gone. It sounded flat and drained. 'Coming through.'
The door opened and he shoved Angel into the room, pulling the door closed behind him.
'Christ,' Tracy gasped, wincing at the sight of Angel.
Angel stood in the middle of the room, her eyes glaring defiantly. She resembled a small animal that had been chased through thorny thickets until she could run no longer. Her mouth was bracketed by crooked lines of dried blood down her chin that made her look a little like a ventriloquist's dummy. A large blue bruise swelled under her right eye, stretching the skin taut. Her narrow neck was bruised in a pattern of four fingers on one side of the throat and a thumb imprint on the other side.
'Keep him away from me,' she screamed, pointing at Blackjack. Her accent was more pronounced than before. 'He is crazy. He tried to kill me.' She rubbed the bruises on her throat.
Blackjack looked away from her. Guiltily, Tracy thought. Flopping down into a chair, he plucked a pen and pad from his pocket and tossed them onto the bed between Eric and Tracy. 'She's ready.'
'Yes, I will draw your map,' Angel sneered. 'But I will also draw one for Rhino. He will kill all of you.'
Eric handed her the small pad and Bic pen. 'Right now, Rhino's the last person you'll want to see. If he finds out you killed Alabaster and stole the map behind his back, he'll do things to you beyond even your imagination.'
She stared at him silently, then opened the note pad and began drawing.
'I wanted her to do the map in front of all of us,' Blackjack said. 'That way we can keep everything aboveboard. Okay?'
Eric gave him a funny smile. 'Appreciate the thought.'
'Let's just get it over with and get the hell out of here,' Tracy said.
Angel scribbled away on the pad.
'One other question,' Tracy said, standing. 'What do we do with her once we have the map?'
'I promised her we'd release her,' Blackjack said. 'Any problems with that?'
Angel stopped writing, looked up at Eric.
Eric turned toward Tracy. 'You have any problem with that?'
'I don't know,' Tracy answered, avoiding looking in Angel's direction. She could feel the woman's dynamic presence there like a hot wind. 'How do we know the map will be accurate? She may be lying.'
'Good point,' Eric said.
'I destroyed the original map,' Angel said. 'But this is the same. I swear.'
'You'll pardon me,' Tracy said, 'but your assurances aren't quite enough. I mean, what happens when we go to God knows where and find nothing there but a couple of iguanas sunning themselves on the hood of an Edsel?'
Blackjack nodded. 'There's an element of chance involved, sure. But she also knows that we'll make sure Rhino knows what she'd done with Alabaster. That'll mean he'll be after her as well as us. California just ain't that big anymore. Where's she going to hide?'
'We can always take her with us?' Eric suggested. He was looking at Tracy in such a way that she felt as if the decision was up to her. She would decide Angel's fate.
'You promised to let me go if I drew map,' Angel hollered. 'You made bargain.'
'Did you?' Tracy asked Blackjack.
Blackjack shrugged.
'Okay, we'll stick to the deal.' Tracy shifted her eyes to meet Angel's. 'And we'll rely on her good sense, knowing what will happen to her if she lies.'
Angel bent back over the map, the Bic fine-point pen scratching against the paper.
