Midas

“A lot of things haven’t been proven yet. But let’s go with it for a minute. Let’s just say it’s justified, that they’re heavily in debt and they tried to hide it, that they screwed around with pension funds. Let’s just say they’re Enron. I heard a good case made for that. Plus, in a separate suit, they’re being sued for illegal dealings with terrorist-supporting countries.”

“Nice company.”

“Yeah, they’re sweethearts. But it’s not hard to see why someone wanted Collins dead.”

“Why?”

“Because he was going to talk.”

“To who?”

“To the Feds. . Wait, hold on a second.” He went back to his computer, called up his file on the case. He didn’t find what he was looking for, went on the Net, back to the New York Times site. He went to a story in their files that he’d looked up before, one that had had the names of the people killed in the Harper’s bombing. He scanned the list and the brief bios that went along with them. “Damn!” he said, when he came to what he was looking for. “He wasn’t just going to talk to Justice. He was going to talk to Elliot Brown.”

“Who’s that?”

“The New York City comptroller. He was killed in the explosion, too. I’ll bet the house he was one of the people at Collins’s table that day.”

“All right, so he was going to talk. Who’d want to stop him? I mean, stop him badly enough to kill him.”

“The Justice Department.”

“Jay, I’m not following. I thought you said he was talking to the Justice Department.”

“Yeah. But he was talking to the lower levels. The investigators. It’s a higher level that wanted him to keep quiet.” She waited for him to say more. Finally, he sighed and said, “He was going to blow the whistle on the attorney general. On Stuller.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I just know he’s involved. Stuller and Dandridge both.”

“Jesus, Jay.”

“Yeah.”

She got up, went to the kitchen, came back with two more beers. When she offered him one, Justin shook his head. “How ’bout we split it?” she said, and he nodded. She took a long sip, offered him the bottle. He took a quick hit and passed it back to her.

“I just want to get this straight. You think the vice president and the attorney general of the United States have something to do with the three terrorist attacks this month?”

“Yeah, I do. I don’t know whether they’re involved or they’re covering something up. But they’re connected.”

“Jay-”

“It’s why Hutch Cooke was killed. It’s why his plane was rigged. Because he could link things to Dandridge.”

“You think he knew what was going on?”

“I don’t know. But even if he didn’t, he could’ve figured it out at some point. If I had to guess, I’d say he already did. But either way, he was a loose end. And these guys definitely don’t like to leave anything loose laying around.”

“What was Cooke doing? He didn’t fly Collins or Elliot Brown here, did he?”

“No.”

“So what’s his connection?”

“I think he flew whoever’s responsible for the Harper’s bombing.”

“The guy who killed himself?”

“No. The guy behind the guy who killed himself.”

She took this in, stayed quiet while she mulled it over. “Why here?” is what she asked finally. “Why East Hampton or East End Harbor?”

Justin shook his head. “There has to be a reason. I just can’t connect it. But here’s what I think: that someone from Justice set the meeting up with Collins and Brown and that same person specified the place. Hutch Cooke flew somebody into town and either he made the connection, after the explosion, that he’d flown in the bomber, or whoever he was working for realized that he might figure it out. Once that was in the air, they couldn’t risk having him around anymore.” He stood up, paced back and forth across the living room with quick, hard strides. “I’m close,” he said. “It’s so close, but I can’t put it together.”

“But you will.”

His eyes closed with fatigue, he nodded, and murmured, “Yes. I will.”

When he opened his eyes, Reggie said, “I’ll be right back.”

“What?”

“I’d like to go home and get something. Will you wait here?”

“Where am I gonna go? And what the hell are you going to get?”

“Something that’ll make you feel better.”

“Hard drugs?”

“Better,” she said.

He smiled, plunked himself down on the couch. On her way to the door her hand brushed his arm. It was a friendly gesture, a touch of support, but it also sent a sexual charge up and down his spine. That charge kept him frozen where he was for the few minutes it took her to cross the street to her house and then back to his. She didn’t knock when she returned, just opened the door and stood in the doorframe. She didn’t seem to have anything with her and he looked puzzled.

He could hear the exhaustion in his own voice when he said, “I thought you were bringing something.”

“I did. Two things, actually.”

He waited. She reached into her pocket. Pulled out a toothbrush.

Then she reached into her other pocket. Pulled out a pair of handcuffs.

Reggie cocked her head and shrugged. He remembered the hunger in her eyes that he’d seen the day before. It was there again, even deeper and more rapacious. Without saying another word or even glancing down at him, she walked past him and headed up the stairs.

Justin stayed behind for just a moment. He felt the exhaustion rise and leave his body.

It was replaced by his own hunger, one as powerful as the one he recognized in Reggie. It had been there for quite a while, he knew, but now he realized it had to be sated. And when he realized that, he stood up slowly and, led by the hunger, followed Reggie Bokkenheuser upstairs.

She was already on the bed when he moved into the bedroom, and she asked him to undress her. She slowly put her arms up into the air and let him pull her shirt up over her head and hands. She had full breasts that seemed to explode out from the restraint of her clothing. She leaned forward and kissed him. Her tongue was thick and filled his mouth. He started to pull away but she didn’t let him. Her tongue stayed inside him, and she slowly pushed him down, climbing on top of him, straddling him, letting her breasts graze over his chest. He reached up and undid her belt buckle, unsnapped her jeans, slowly slid them down her legs. They were firm legs, and shapely. They shifted and he went to pull her boots off, but she shook her head, she wanted to leave them on, so he slid her pants down and over her two-inch heels.

She turned over, stretched luxuriously across the bed, her movements slow and easy, and he saw that she had a small tattoo of a butterfly on her back, right below her right shoulder, and one of a bird in the small of her back, stretching down to the top of her buttocks. She turned back to him now, the carnivorous expression had spread to her lips, and she wrapped herself around him, enveloping him, practically smothering him, as if they were longtime lovers who’d been apart for months. Her body seemed instantly familiar to him. They fit together well. They couldn’t stop kissing, their tongues exploring, but more than that, also linking and connecting them together.

Their faces were close together, she was staring straight into his eyes, and she nodded, a sign that he