Any Minute Now (4 page)

“I wish I could, Flix,
emmis
. But I'm gonna do the next best thing. I'm gonna find us a new armorer.”

“Good luck with that,” Orteño said morosely. “Sandy was the best I've ever seen.”

“Maybe,” Whitman replied, “but I think I've got a line on someone even better.”

Orteño stared at him. “You're freakin' kidding me.” He shook his head. “I tell you, don't screw with a Latino in pain.”

“Hand to God.”

“There is no God.”

“And this coming from a Catholic.”

“Lapsed, baby, lapsed.” Orteño made a face. “If God had witnessed what we've seen on the field of battle and done nothing, he'd be one sonuvabitch.”

“Sixteen angels just lost their wings.”

Orteño guffawed. “Like I care,” he said. “So who's the candidate?”

“Party by the name of Charlie Daou.”

“Never heard of him. He ex-military?”

“Not a bit of it,” Whitman said. “Charlie wouldn't be caught dead in the military.”

Orteño's expression darkened. “What? He's not patriotic?”

“Not enough money in it.”

“So that's why you think he'll come and work for us.”

Universal Securities Associates paid very well, indeed, even for a field consultant, as they were euphemistically known, and especially for the Red Rover team.

“That and other reasons,” Whitman said vaguely.

Orteño wriggled himself into a more upright position. “Care to share?”

“Charlie and I go way back. I can be pretty persuasive when I want to be. I think it'll work out.”

Orteño nodded. “Have at it then, my man. Make us whole again. The best medicine for both of us is to get back to work.”

Whitman rose, bent over the bed, until his forehead touched Flix's.

“True dat.”

*   *   *

The night was clear and almost balmy. Whitman ate at his favorite Thai joint, where they knew to serve him food they themselves ate, one dish more incendiary than the next. Afterward, he repaired to The Doll House, where, amid wretched shadows, he watched Sydny pole dance while she fucked him with her doe eyes. He paid more for aged, sipping tequila and still more for double-shots that weren't watered down. When Sydny's routine ended, she took him for a private lap dance that unaccountably did nothing for him.

“What's the matter, honey?” she said in her husky, honey-drip voice. “Bad day at the office?” He had told her he was a skip tracer because with his physique accountant just wouldn't cut it.

He lifted her bodily off him, handed her a wad of bills, and set her aside. Outside the club he took a deep gulp of air, wondered what the hell he was doing. By that time, it was hard on midnight. Time to take the bull by its very dangerous horns.

The last time Whitman had seen Charlie Daou was three years ago, and it wasn't an evening he often cared to remember. Every once in a while, his third right rib still pained him; Charlie was left-handed.

Charlie lived in a top-floor apartment on Massachusetts Ave, NW, in Cathedral Heights. The building looked like something out of a horror story, part-Gothic, part–Ottoman Empire, with fancy cement work and faux-medieval flourishes like a bell tower straight out of
Vertigo
. Charlie's apartment, to the left of the tower, came complete with a terrace sporting a Moorish-style arch.

Whitman hadn't exaggerated: Charlie loved money above almost anything else. He'd never been able to figure that one out. Whitman rang Charlie's buzzer, but there was no answer. Typical. He followed a tenant in, being as charming and unassuming as he could to allay any latent fears of a mugging. In fact, he asked about Charlie, but the tenant just shrugged.

Whitman took the elevator up. The tenant exited at the third floor; Whitman continued to ascend to the top. In front of Charlie's front door, he heard the bell ring hollowly inside. He knocked, just to make sure. Then he retraced his steps to the hallway window, an old-fashioned affair with grimy, wire-laced panes and a frame that had been painted over so many times it had lost its original shape. The half-moon metal lock, however, was easy enough to open. There was a good reason for that. He lifted the window up, reached around beneath the concrete abutment below, ripped the key and its bit of duct tape off the underside.

Inside, he locked the door behind him. A lamp illuminated a soft oval of the living room—a triangle of a marble-topped side table and a splotch of an expensive handmade Isfahan rug. The apartment seemed virtually unchanged since he had last been here: a dinner of take-out Thai that he had criticized, sparking the fight that ended in his bruised rib and the three-year breach. Now he had returned to try and persuade Charlie to join his team. Surely a fool's errand, despite how he had made it sound to Flix. That fight had had nothing to do with Thai food or his criticism of it. Its origins lay in a different direction entirely, and, for the most part, were hidden far below the surface. Until that night.

With no reason to snoop around, he took a seat on the sofa in a spot furthest away from the oval of light. Then he settled down to wait. Any interest he might have had in snooping was mitigated by the fact that Charlie would know, no matter how careful he might be. Charlie's tradecraft bordered on sorcery.

The soft sigh of traffic drifted in through the closed windows. He could hear a clock ticking in the kitchen, the slurry of a toilet flushing in the apartment downstairs and then, briefly, water rushing. He tried not to think of what was to come, but his rib started to ache, anyway. Think of something else—anything else, he admonished himself. His breathing slowed, became deeper. He emptied himself of thought, emotion, and intent.

Silence.

Until a key ground in the lock and the door opened. A figure came through the doorway, reached around, switched on the overhead light, and stopped dead.

Whitman rose from the sofa, saw a clean-cut, handsome male in his mid-thirties. He was in a designer business suit, but his tie was gone and his collar was unbuttoned. As were the first two pearl buttons of his shirt.

“Who the hell are you?” Whitman said.

And then Charlie came through the door. “Whit,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

 

3

When Charlize Daou stepped through the door to her apartment, the man she was with faded to obscurity, at least as far as Whitman was concerned. Three years might have been three hundred for all the resemblance Charlie bore to the woman he had lived with for five incredible, fitful, combative years.

In the seconds that seemed to pour into minutes while the three principals were frozen in a tableau, Whitman breathed her into the dead place inside him that had opened up when she had thrown him out, this woman whose existence he had so successfully denied for three years. Except for that damn third rib on his right side which simply wouldn't let him alone, as if she had broken it off and wrenched it out of him before he had left. All this while he had told himself that he had frozen in her fire. Now, in a single instant, he understood how he had fed himself that fairy tale in order to keep himself from falling apart, something he would never again allow himself to do—not after his time at the Well.

She looked entirely different—and also precisely the same. How could that be? he asked himself. But as his reawakened knowledge informed him, when it came to Charlie, anything was possible. She seemed bigger, tawnier, though her hair was shorter, pulled back from her high-cheekboned face. Her eyes, so deep a brown they often seemed black, were the same—as large and wide apart as ever, curved up slightly at their outer edges. The shape of her ample lips was also the same, but she had quit wearing the violent reds and was now using nude-colored lipstick, which had the effect of making her mouth even more sensual than he remembered.

She was not a big-boned woman, nor was she particularly tall. Perhaps the change in her size was due to her shoulders, which were definitely more developed. She must have gone back to working out regularly. Whitman knew she could put most Marines down within ten seconds. Hence the rib that had never forgotten her, or the left-handed blow and the power behind it.

“What the fuck, Whit?” Charlie said now. She was wearing a mind-blowing red and oxblood Valentino with a bodice cut down to her waist that must have set her back somewhere north of seven thousand dollars, but she had a mouth like a sailor. “I mean
what the fuck!
”

“What?” he said, hands spread. “Am I intruding?”

“Duh.”

The man who had preceded her into the apartment now turned to her. “Who the hell is this, Charlize?”

Charlize? Whitman thought. Jesus Christ. Now tell me he works for IBM.

“No one, Bill.”

“Clearly he's not ‘no one.' He's in your apartment. He has a key.”

“He stole it,” Charlie said dismissively.

“Even worse,” Bill Whoever said.

“This doesn't concern you.”

“The hell it doesn't.”

She glared at him. “Let me handle this, okay?”

Whitman walked toward Bill Whoever. “Hey, Bill,” he said, “d'you work for IBM?”

Bill turned to him. He wasn't belligerent, as Whitman himself would have been if their places had been reversed. His expression was pure bewilderment. Poor thing.

“No,” he said automatically. “AT&T.”

“Christ, it's even worse than I thought,” Whitman said.

“What does that mean?”

Charlie, intuiting where their conversation was headed, quickly stepped in front of Bill and, before Whitman could antagonize him further, said, “Bill, it's time for you to go.”

“What? Just because this sonuvabitch is here uninvited I have to—”

“Just go,” Charlie said in a low voice that conveyed in emotion what it lacked in volume.

Whitman knew from experience that when her voice got low it was time to cover your genitals, and quickly.

She began to push Bill gently but firmly back over the threshold. “I'll call you.”

“When?” Bill AT&T said. “When will you call me?”

“When I'm good and goddamned ready.”

She never did like anyone closing in on her. Bill was in the hallway now, though not liking any of this. Too bad for him.

In a carefully manufactured softer tone, she persisted. “Bill, please just go home. I'll take care of this. I promise.” Then she closed the door, locked it, and turned, pressing her back against it. This did wonders for the halves of her breasts revealed so artfully by the Valentino. She was the most unselfconscious person he had ever come across. She could as easily use her body as a lure or as a weapon, as she saw fit.

Glaring at him, she said, “Your brass balls have grown.”

“So have yours.”

Without another word, she crossed to an Italian sideboard, poured a generous dollop of Pappy Van Winkle whiskey into one of her man-sized cut-crystal glasses. How in the world did her breasts stay inside that dress? Whitman wondered. Those Valentino tailors were goddamned wizards.

“I don't see any
añejo
tequila,” he said.

“No need. You were gone.” She approached him on little cat feet, gave him a nudge with her elbow in the precise spot where she had hit him three years ago. “Just Pappy.”

She unlatched the sliding door and went out onto the terrace. Whitman followed. There was no use fighting it, or even pausing, to give himself a modicum of satisfaction. He knew it would be fleeting; worse, it would be petty, and petty was one thing he never was with her.

He stepped out. Beyond the ornamental cement balustrade a light mist was falling, turning the night into a pointillist painting by Seurat. Droplets had silvered her hair, the tip of her nose, where the spray of freckles lay most delectably, and her lips, which were half parted, shiny with liquor. She was like a candy cane. He felt like eating her up.

“So,” she said. Her drink was already half finished. “Now that you've got what you want, why are you here?”

“A guy can't simply stop in and—”

“Cut the cute stuff.” She swung on him. “I'm not in the mood.” She took a smaller sip, and her eyes met his. “Frankly, I haven't been in the mood for three years.”

“That can change,” he said. “Everything changes.”

“Not this, it can't.”

She finished off her drink and made to pass by him to return inside. He caught her arm, stayed her. She glanced down at where he had hold of her, not hard, but certainly firmly enough to keep her in place. He took his hand away, and she moved on inside, refilled her glass.

“So how's life with Bill AT&T?” he said as he strolled back inside.

“Calm.”

“Nice.” He did not approach her; her signals were perfectly clear. “Calm is nice. If you're dead.” She did not rise to the bait, and this made him uneasy. Maybe he had misjudged the situation, misjudged her, misjudged everything, in fact. He could hear Cutler saying, “That's just like you, Gregory.” And maybe it was, which would be too bad for him. Possibly for Charlie, too. At least, the Charlie of three years ago. But he had yet to figure out how much of that person still existed.

He knew one thing though: to show any sign of weakness around her was a death warrant. So he didn't sit, but continued to stand, arms crossed over his chest, watching her drink her beloved Pappy. In their time together he had seen her put four men under the table at once without ever getting visibly high, let alone drunk. Another of her uncanny abilities.

Those were bets—high-stakes bets—not one of which she ever lost, as she moved from bar to bar, fleecing novices and know-it-alls alike. He had asked her once where she came by her drinking, to which she had replied, “What can I say? I'm a fucking fluke of nature.”

“You mean freak of nature.”

“No, baby, that's you.”