like a member of our family. Almost a god-uncle to me.”
Megan nodded her awareness. “There’s a guy that replaced him on the board of directors, A. R. Baxter — that’s Andrew Reed, great-great-grandson of the famous privateer — FYI. He’s constantly wanting to reevaluate and clarify points of contractual agreement. He’s a stubborn pain, and it makes for long, hard days of meeting with our own lawyers and executives.”
“Is Baxter the reason for your conference this afternoon?”
Megan shook her head.
“That’s a different can of worms,” she said. “I felt we needed another huddle to work out a plan for making nice with the Pentagon.”
Julia looked at her. “Because of what Tom Ricci did in New York,” she said.
Megan nodded, sipped away at her coffee. Again, the subject of the abduction hung unaddressed between them. Ricci had assembled the Sword task force that had tracked Julia to the cabin in Big Sur. He had pressed the search and gotten her out himself and left the man who’d led the hostage-takers dead. But Ricci alone knew exactly how that man died. Ricci alone was in the room with him, behind a locked door, in the minutes before he died. And what Megan wanted to say now, and didn’t, was that whatever occurred behind that door had seemed in some indeterminate way to spiral out into what took place those many months later in New York City.
“Tom’s name is bound to come up, sure,” she said instead, trying with her even tone to reduce his importance as an issue, make it sound as if he wasn’t at the very center of things. “We’ll have to decide what to do about him when Pete gets back from the islands.”
“Has anybody been in touch with him since he was suspended? Anybody from UpLink, that is.”
Megan regarded Julia for a few seconds, struck by the too-light, almost singsong quality of her voice right then, thinking maybe more than one of them here wanted to downplay the matter.
“Pete’s tried calling him,” she said. “Not with any success, though. At least these past few weeks.”
“He doesn’t answer his phone?”
“Doesn’t answer, doesn’t return messages, won’t give us a clue what’s going on with him.”
Julia tilted her head curiously.
“That seems kind of odd,” she said.
“Come on.” Megan couldn’t hide her skepticism. “Tom Ricci being incommunicative?”
Julia was looking at her.
“I mean Pete not going to see him where he lives,” she said. “I’d always heard they were tight.”
The expression on Megan’s face went from skeptical to just plain blank. She was unsure why that hadn’t entered into her thought processes. But it hadn’t. She didn’t know what to say, and found herself glad to see Julia reaching for slice number three, apparently satisfied to let the whole thing ride. Besides, a quick glance at her watch told her it was almost time to get going.
She drank some more coffee, ate some more scone, examined herself for crumbs again, discovered a few tiny specks on her skirt, and was brushing them off when she noticed that one of the burger-munching teenagers at the nearby table had turned to watch her, his attention glued to her hand as it moved over the lap of her skirt.
She drilled a cold stare into him and he snapped his eyes away.
“Did you get a load of
Julia chewed a mouthful of pizza, swallowed.
“That’s amore,” she said.
Megan made a face. “What?” she said. “Getting ogled by a high school kid with acne on his cheeks?”
Julia shrugged.
“At least he didn’t hold the bun,” she said with a sly grin.
Devon’s nightly set at Club Forreal would begin with a shadow dance.
A minute or two before she made her entrance, the DJ would key up something with a heavy beat and a smooth walking bass, and the lights would pulse in rhythm over and around the empty stage. Then she would step from the wings in a slight, clingy bikini top and sarong that gave her an illusion of nakedness in silhouette.
She was limber and acrobatic getting into her dance. As the men around the stage watched her slink out in front of the screen, they would realize she wasn’t all skin, and that would build on the tease while her movements became more explicitly sexual. The stage was large, with a couple of runways, and she was skillful at using every inch of it.
Most nights Devon’s set went two songs. The opening song would be the longer of them, giving her a chance to warm up the crowd with her bit behind the screen, and then come out and strip off her bikini top while dancing in the swell of lights and music. She called that her first reveal. At the pole Devon would work her flesh hard, sliding, pumping, swinging her body.
The second number in her set would have a quickened tempo, and midway through she would peel away the sarong.
Club Forreal had booze on its menu. This meant the house dancers could go topless but not nude. Under California law, nightclubs that entertained with full nudity were restricted to serving nonalcoholic drinks. The men who came to watch Devon and the other girls weren’t happy about it, but the alcohol loosened them up for a good time, and Devon, when she writhed free of her sarong, would leave little to the imagination in a G-string that was almost invisible, and that made for an easy tradeoff.
At his table in the third row from the stage, Tom Ricci finished his Chivas and water, caught the eye of his waitress, and made a pouring gesture over the glass, holding his thumb and forefinger apart to indicate he wanted his next one heavier on the scotch. She smiled her understanding and waggled toward the bar in her racer shorts.
Ricci turned to watch Devon emerge from behind the screen.
He had seen her dance perhaps twice since the night they had met here, when her name was still Carolina to him. Carolina was her professional alias. It was posted on the schedule outside the club’s entrance, and above her gallery photos on its elaborate Web site, and announced from the DJ booth as the music got cranked for her set. It was also the name that customers used when they tapped the maitre d’s shoulder to request a private dance with her. Ricci had once asked how she had chosen it, and she’d told him it was borrowed from the state where she had grown up. She did not specify whether that was North or South Carolina, and he hadn’t pursued the subject. Their involvement was a fair give-and-take that sometimes relieved the emptiness inside each of them. But she gave away nothing extra, and neither did Ricci.
Now the waitress came over with his fresh drink. Ricci paid, tipped, noticed her lingering by the table. He raised the glass to his lips and swallowed. The scotch was warm in his mouth and then going down his throat. She’d done okay with the proportions, he thought, and nodded.
She smiled at him and left and he turned back toward the stage and watched Devon heat up her set.
The sarong in which she was costumed tonight was a dash of metallic fabric with black and blue horizontal bands and long, shiny fringes that would flap over her left thigh. In her bellybutton was a silver serpent pin, its tiny jewel-eyed head dangling downward. Ricci guessed between sixty and a hundred other men had their eyes on her as she slowly untied and shed the wrap. That didn’t bother him much. The woman up there in the colored lights almost could have been anybody. She seemed unsolid, a projected image. Only in glimpses could Ricci see Devon in her. Something she did on stage would remind him of something she had done when they were in bed together — a toss of her head, a contortion of her waist, a wanton curl of her lips — and Ricci would wonder whether it had been practiced even during their sex, and if it came from the inside out or the outside in.
Mostly that was the extent of his feelings as he watched. A curiosity rather than jealousy or possessiveness. It was an emotional remove not so different from what he felt toward Devon when they were together. The stage just seemed to frame and accentuate things for him.
He sat and drank more of his scotch.
Club Forreal was a garish island of neon and stucco outside Santa Clara on Highway 101, El Camino Real.
