Any Minute Now (33 page)

“Oh, God, oh, Jesus. It's true then, it wasn't a nightmare. I killed all those American Marines.”

“Well, that's the thing.” Charlie crouched down beside the two men. She spoke to them both as she held up the dog tags, jangling them one against the other. “I've been looking at these tags and I can tell you there's something horribly wrong.”

 

34

As a child, Julie had never been alone. Her sister, Bridget, had been her constant companion. But as an adult, Julie was alone. She had no friends, she and her husband barely spoke, and her occasional nights with Cutler were a complete sham. She and her sister hadn't spoken in five years, the result of a terrible misunderstanding that, to this day, Julie could not recall clearly. But even in her extreme distress there was no way she could see herself knocking on Bridget's door, even if she had still been living where she had been five years ago—with Bridget no sure thing.

But there was Orrin, Bridget's ex-husband, who had cried on her shoulder for weeks—no, make that months, she thought—after the very messy breakup. He had trafficked in the knowledge that she and Bridget didn't get along; he had no girlfriend, no female friends at all, so far as Julie could tell. So she had come at his summons, had dinner with him, sat on his sofa, held his hand while he poured out his anguish. Evening after evening after evening.

Orrin worked for the attorney general's office, one of those jobs for life, therefore his whereabouts were as predictable and unchanging as the rock of Gibraltar. That simile accurately described Orrin's personality. Bridget had apparently found him boring. Julie wondered why she had married him in the first place, but even before their estrangement her adult relationship with Bridget was never intimate enough for Julie to ask the question. For Julie, Orrin was something of a landmark in the turbulent sea of conspiracy and secrets in which she often felt herself drowning.

So, leaving Sydny's bloody apartment, it was to Orrin's she went to seek shelter from her own private storm. It was near to daybreak when she rang his bell, but even at that ungodly hour she knew he wouldn't be asleep. Instead, he'd be working out on his rowing machine. She just hoped he wasn't already in the shower, unable to hear the bell. But a moment later, her anxiety was alleviated when she heard his voice, metallic and thin, asking who it was.

“Julie,” she said, her mouth up against the microphone grill.

“What the fuck are you doing here at this hour?”

Not
Are you all right?
“Can I come up?”

There was a moment's silence when her heart threatened to pry apart her ribs and leap out of her chest. She kept looking behind her like an idiot. She could swear she smelled gunpowder and Sydny's blood on her clothes, though she had washed herself thoroughly before wiping her prints off everything she remembered touching. That meant retrieving the latex hood from under the sofa where she had thrown it. By that time, she'd heard the sirens of approaching police cars. In Sydny's neighborhood, where a gunshot was never heard, the neighbors would have likely mistaken the shots for a car or truck backfiring. Julie was safely out the basement back door when they swarmed the building's entryway.

“Orrin?”

She expelled a shuddering breath when the front door buzzed and she pushed through into the lobby. She took the elevator up to the sixth floor, went down the deserted and silent hallway. The door to his apartment stood open, and she stepped inside.

Orrin lived in Foggy Bottom, that odd area of D.C. that lay in the down low between George Washington University and Georgetown. It was inhabited almost exclusively by federal civil servants; he fit right in with all his neighbors, which must please him no end, Julie thought as she closed the door behind her.

Orrin padded out of the kitchen. He was in a thin robe, his feet bare. His face glistened with sweat; he must have just finished his turn on the rowing machine. He held a mug of hot tea, which he handed her. He did not comment on what she felt sure was her bedraggled state.

“Okay,” he said, after she had taken her first sip, “you come knocking on my door at six in the morning. What the hell's up with you?”

She perched on a stool at the open-plan kitchen counter, curled her hands around the hot mug. Orrin looked no different from the last time they had had dinner. He was a sandy-haired man with a soft face, kind eyes, and a mild manner. Inoffensive was how she would sum him up.

But now that she was here, now that he had asked her the hundred-million-dollar question, she had no idea what to say. Gee, Orrin, I just shot a man—a high-level NSA agent, at that—after being introduced to bondage, discipline, sadomasochism by a new friend—a pole-dancer. The story would have seemed incredible to her if she hadn't just lived through it. But she had to tell him something, didn't she?

“A friend of mine was shot to death last night.” It was the truth, though hardly the whole truth, and certainly not the reason she had come to him at this hour instead of going home.

“Gee, that's too bad, Jules.” He ruffled the top of her head as if she were a little girl. “Tough luck, huh?” He picked up his mobile, his fingers moving over the screen. “What was your friend's name?”

She felt a clutch in her stomach. “She … It's not important.”

“It might help me find…” He looked up. “I mean, there's no police record of a female being shot to death in the last twenty-four hours.” He turned the mobile so she could see the screen. “Jules, are you sure this happened?”

“What?”

“I mean that you didn't—you know—imagine it.”

“What? You think I'm a two-year-old with night terrors?”

He shrugged, waggled the mobile in front of her. “I'm just saying.”

She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. He'd been happy to cry on her shoulder every night, but now, when she needed him, he was treating her like a child, anxious for no good reason. “It happened, Orrin, and now nowhere feels safe anymore.”

“Well, come on now, kiddo, don't be silly.” He held up a finger. “Hold that thought. Gotta answer this text.” When he had finished he looked up. “Now where were we? Oh, yeah.” He waved a hand at her. “Your apartment is as safe as Fort Knox. Nothing's changed, I promise.” Now he sounded annoyed by rather than disinterested in the interruption of his morning routine.

She shivered. “I can't warm up.”

“Of course. No, I understand completely.” But he was already glancing at his watch; already, no doubt, toting up his schedule for the day.

The old Julie would have shrunk back, made her apologies, and left with her tail between her legs, feeling kicked to the curb, sick at heart. Heading straight on toward a majorly depressing day. But this was the new Julie, the one who had donned the latex hood, the one who had lived through a scene from
The Story of O
, whom Sydny had taught a thing or three about the nature of sex and power.

This new Julie said, “Listen, Orrin, I need a place to stay for a while.”

“What?” His head came up from answering another text, and he frowned deeply. “Well, I dunno, Jules. I mean this is my busy time at the AG's—important cases pending, lots on my mind…”

“I'll be no trouble, cross my heart.”

“I'm sure.” He didn't sound sure at all. “But, no, sorry. Jesus, if Bridget ever found out…” He allowed his voice to trail off, the shit, as if confident that she would supply the words he didn't have the courage to say.

She didn't. She wouldn't.

Instead, she rose off the stool, padded to where he stood, so close to him she could smell the sweat drying on his skin. She took the mobile from his hand, toggled it off.

“What? Jules, what are you doing?”

She put her face up to his. Her lips parted. “What does it look like?” she whispered.

He took a step back, encountered the wall. She came after him, silent as a wraith. Then she reached out, her fingers slipping between the sides of his robe, finding him naked underneath.

“What does it
feel
like?”

“Jules, I—”

But her lips sought his mouth; his semi-hard penis throbbed like a second heart beneath her fingers. She felt rather than heard his deep groan of surrender, and something inside of her lit up like a flame. For an electrifying instant, she felt Sydny inside her; and then came the seawater wash of realization: it wasn't Sydny she felt deep inside her, it was herself—her own true self, liberated at last.

Slipping to her knees, she parted his robe, took him into her mouth. His eyes closed, his head went back so hard it cracked against the wall. Above her, she heard him breathing out her name, which changed to “Jesus” and back again, until the two names merged into one strange, sex-sound that meant something only to him.

She brought him to the brink of satisfaction, then withdrew her lips, tongue, throat.

“What-what are you doing?” he said in that thick, sex-charged voice men get when their primitive reptile brains have taken charge.

Reaching up with clawed fingers, she drew him down to her, placed him so that he was supine on the floor. She undressed slowly, sensually, showing him bit by bit what was in store for him. Then, straddling him, she moved up his body until she was over his face. Engaging her powerful thigh muscles, she lowered herself until she was just above his mouth. Her lips curved in a smile of incipient delight as she quoted from Lewis Carroll, changing only the gender: “‘He opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words “EAT ME” were beautifully marked in currants.'”

She dug her fingers into Orrin's damp hair, lifted his head to her. Soon after, her eyes closed in ecstasy, and it was only after she had ridden him through three orgasms that she let go of his head. She heard him gasping, making little sobs, imploring her to give him what he wanted.

So she did.

Afterward, he wanted her to lie in his arms, but she rose, stood over him like an Amazon, and said, “Orrin, I have a service to ask of you.”

“Anything, Jules,” he said, staring up at her in wonder and stupefaction, his eyes still half-glazed with lust. “Anything you want.”

 

35

The orthopedic surgeon had assured St. Vincent that he would have no dreams while he was under the anesthetic, but either the sonuvabitch had lied or some unusual aspect of St. Vincent's brain ruled out sweet oblivion.

He lay in the surgery of the NSA safe house in Virginia. The trouble was he felt anything but safe here.

While the surgeon was removing the bullet from his shoulder and picking out bone fragments with a Jansen forceps, St. Vincent was visited by the figure in the black latex hood, its horns distended, the eye-zippers glittering. The figure itself moved so fast it was merely a blue-white blur, sexless and ageless. It was the hood, and what lay beneath the hood—a bull's head? a crow's?—that he was fixated on. That unknown face frightened him as nothing had since his boyhood amid the Louisiana bayous, the tortuous trees, the gray nooses of Spanish moss, the things that roamed by the cold light of the moon and the stars.

It exacerbated the sense in him that he had never outrun his childhood, never outrun the intimate sessions with his mother, or his mother's murderous intent, when she took him with her, made him an accessory to a murder she believed she'd willfully and happily committed. He could not escape the feeling that by bringing him to witness the shooting, his mother had made him as culpable as she, had bound him to her with a spiderweb from which he was incapable of breaking free. All of this memory-sense had been triggered by the sight of the figure in the black latex hood—as if it were an avenging demon sent by Preach to destroy him. And the figure exposed something else, buried even deeper inside him: his guilty fear of divine punishment for his time alone with his mother …

When he awoke, hours later, it was to the sight of King Cutler standing by his bedside. Cutler, seeing him awake, poured some iced water, hit the pedal on the bed to elevate St. Vincent to a sitting position, and handed him the plastic cup.

St. Vincent drank gratefully, ignoring the pain in his heavily bandaged shoulder.

“We need to talk,” Cutler said, placing the empty cup beside the water pitcher on the swing table. “You up for it?”

St. Vincent narrowed his eyes in distaste. “What d'you think?” He wanted nothing more than to spit out the caustic taste of bile his nightmares had left in the back of his throat.

Cutler peered at him. “I'd assumed you'd be sedated.”

“I don't do sedation,” St. Vincent snapped. “Clouds the mind for days I can't afford to miss.” He gestured with his head. “Bring me up to date.”

“The apartment has been sterilized. The woman's body has been disposed of. It's like it never happened.”

“The Metro Police?”

“As far as they're concerned the 911 call never happened.”

“And the neighbors?”

“Calmed and placated. So far as they're concerned the girl went out of town to be with her ill mother.”

“And the gunshots?”

“What gunshots?” Cutler said. “Oh, you must mean the truck backfiring outside the building.”

St. Vincent could not hold back a grin. “Excellent job,” he said.

Cutler, keeping his expression neutral, thought, I am sick to death of cleaning up after him. The messes he leaves behind are extraordinary. “What were you doing at that woman's apartment anyway?”

“The less you know,” St. Vincent said.

“Indulge me, this one time.”

“Teaching Whitman a lesson.”

Cutler frowned, shaking his head. “That was a mistake.”

“Opinions are like assholes: everyone has one.” St. Vincent's eyes lit up. “She was one of his sexual partners—one he valued quite highly.”