Gideon (4 page)

He just plain was not ready to get real yet.

That had been almost a year ago. And now they were hurtling through the rain-slick streets of New York in her car and they had nothing much to say to each other. She took Madison up to Ninety-sixth and shot across Central Park on the Ninety-seventh Street Transverse. Carl lived on 103rd between Broadway and Amsterdam, one of the only blocks on the entire Upper West Side that had somehow managed to elude gentrification. It was a street of scruffy, grimy tenements where unemployed Latino men sat on stoops all day drinking cans of Colt 45 the bought from the bodega on the corner.

“Since when are you and Maggie Peterson so tight?” she asked.

“She read my novel. She liked it.”

He waited for her to be happy for him. Or even impressed. But there was nothing. She gave him nothing.

“I wonder if the gossip about her is true,” Amanda said.

“I doubt it.” He glanced over at her. He hated it when she sucked him in like this. “Okay, what gossip?”

“When she was editor of the
Daily Mirror
in Chicago, she broke up her top columnist’s marriage.”

“What, she was having an affair with him?”

“She was having an affair with him
and
his wife.”

“No way.”

“Way. Believe me, way.”

“She just wants to talk,” he said as casually as he could.

“She wants a lot of things. Including her own talk show on the Apex network. She’ll probably get it, too. She and Augmon are totally tight.” Augmon being Lord Lindsay Augmon, the reclusive British-born billionaire who had personally built the Apex empire, piece by piece: the TV network, the movie studio, newspapers in London, New York, Chicago, and Sydney, magazines all over the world, book publishing houses in New York and London, international cable franchises. Lindsay Augmon cast a wide and powerful net, and Maggie Peterson was his biggest, hungriest shark. His miracle worker. She was the woman with the sizzle. The
Mirror
had been failing when she took it over, and she raised its circulation by 25 percent in six months. From there she took two of his moribund monthly magazines and turned them into must-read trendsetters. And now she had put his publishing house on top.

“She never likes to stay anywhere for very long,” Amanda added. “She doesn’t like to manage. Her job is to come in and make a big splash.”

Carl nodded, wondering just what sort of splash Maggie Peterson had in mind for him.

“Have you met anyone?” he asked her over the clanking of the engine.

“Tom Cruise,” she answered. “It’s hot and heavy. But keep it to yourself, okay? We don’t want Nicole to find out.” She pulled a cigarette out and lit it from her lighter, filling the car with smoke. “And I swore I’d never get mixed up with a married man.”

Carl rolled down the window so that he could breathe, the rain pelting him. “When did you start smoking again?”

“Guess,” she said sharply. Too sharply, and she knew it. She softened. “How about you?”

“Never. Nasty habit. Bad for the wind.”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. And the answer is no. Starving artists aren’t very popular these days.”

“Starving artists were never popular.”

“Now you tell me,” he said, grinning at her.

““Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “It won’t work, so don’t even try it.”

“What won’t work?”

“The Granny grin. I’m wearing a Kevlar shield now. It bounces right off me.”

“Look, Amanda …” He reached over and took her hand.

She pulled away. “Please, don’t,” she said quietly. “Don’t tell me you’re confused and you don’t know how you feel. Because I’ll tell you how you feel, Carl. You feel relieved.”

He fell silent after that. They both did.

“I guess it was too soon,” she said finally. “It still hurts too much. Maybe … maybe we can try again next year.”

“I will if you will,” he said gamely.

“Done,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette.

Carl’s street was largely deserted. Thanks to the rain, the idlers have been driven inside. She pulled up with a screech in front of the beat-up brownstone Carl had lived in since he first moved to New York. He had the front apartment on the fourth floor, a studio that was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and noisy all year round. The waterbugs and the mice didn’t mind, and neither did he, but Amanda had despised it. They had always stayed at her place, which had heat and hot water and other such luxury amenities.

A very attractive young blonde was trying to wrestle an old overstuffed chair in through the front door of his building. She wasn’t having much luck. The chair was getting all wet and so was she. The T-shirt and tight jeans she was wearing were thoroughly soaked.

“New neighbor?” Amanda asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Upstairs.” He nodded. “She moved in last week.”

“She’s not,” Amanda said.

“Not what?”

“Wearing a bra. That
is
what you were thinking, isn’t it?”

He turned to stare at Amanda. “It might surprise you to learn that I’m not always thinking what you think I’m thinking.”

Her eyes searched his face carefully, as if she was trying to memorize how it looked. “You’re absolutely right,” she said gravely. “That would surprise me.”

“Watch out for the pothole,” he warned her as he climbed out. It was a broad, deep one in the middle of the block. It was really more of a crater. And, of course, she accelerated right into it. Would have lost a hubcap, too, if she’d had any hubcaps left to lose. Carl watched her cross Broadway and disappear down the street, feeling rueful and glum and dissatisfied and lonely. He shook it off and started inside. But the chair and the very wet blonde were in his way.

“You’re not planning to carry that thing all the way up to the fifth floor by yourself, are you?” Carl asked his new neighbor.

“I sure am,” she replied. She possessed a soft, cotton-candy voice and the biggest, bluest, most arresting eyes that Carl had ever seen. Her silky blond hair glistened with moisture. She wore hot pink lipstick and matching nail polish. She was a tall girl, nearly six feet in her steel-toed Doc Martens. “I found it around the corner on the street. Can you believe someone was throwing it out?”

The chair was covered in green vinyl. And huge. Not to mention hideous.

“I can’t believe anyone bought it in the first place,” he said.

“Well, I think it’s perfect. Particularly because I don’t have a chair and I need one. Only it won’t fit through the damned door.” She began chewing fretfully on her luscious lower lip.

Carl stood there thinking that it had been a long time since he’d dated a woman who wore hot pink nail polish. Come to think of it, he had never dated a woman who wore hot pink nail polish. Amanda’s nails were unpainted and bitten to the quick.

“Sure it will,” he said bravely. “We just have to angle it, that’s all.” He bent down and grabbed an end, trying as hard as he could not to stare at her nipples, which protruded right through her wet T-shirt, large and rosy and in his face.

“That is very nice of you.”

“No problem,” he grunted. “Neighbors do these things for each other. That’s what holds this cruel, dirty city together. Besides, if I don’t help, I can’t get in out of the rain.”

Together they angled it through the vestibule and wrestled it to the bottom of the stairs, where they dumped it. It was heavy and ungainly.

“I’m the Granville whose buzzer is right below yours, by the way. Carl goes with it. What goes with Cloninger?”

“Toni. With an
i
.”

“Nice to meet you, Toni with an
i
. You new to the city?”

“Just moved from Pennsylvania. I’m an actress. Oh, God, that sounds so funny to say out loud, doesn’t it? I want to be an actress. Mostly I’ve just done some modeling and stuff. And taken a ton of classes. How about you? Do you model, too?”

“Keep talking to me like that and I’ll curl right up on your welcome mat and never leave.”

“There’s another thing I have to do—get a welcome mat,” she said, smiling at him.

She had a wonderful smile. It made the entire lower half of his body feel like it was suspended in warm Jell-O. He took a deep breath, sizing up the logistics of chair and stairs and banister. “Okay, I’ll push, you pull. On three. Ready?”

“Ready. Did I remember to say this was real nice of you?”

“You did. But feel free to keep right on saying it.”

He pushed, she pulled, and somehow they managed to force the big, horrible, overstuffed thing all the way up to the second-floor landing, where they rested. Only three more flights to go.

“Can I ask you something personal?” she said, huffing and puffing. “I keep hearing this
ba-boom, ba-boom
noise coming from your apartment every morning. What exactly are you doing?”

“Banging my head against the wall. I’m a writer.”

She let out a laugh, which was just as wonderful as her smile. It was big and easy and genuine. “I’ve never lived over a writer before. This may take some getting used to.”

“Oh, you’ll learn to love it. In fact, pretty soon you’ll wonder how you ever got along without me.”

She eyed him with flirty amusement. “Seriously, what
are
you doing?”

“It’s my heavy bag. A sixty-pound Everlast. I work out on it every morning.” He picked up his end of the chair. “You never know what might come up.”

His lower back was in spasms by the time they reached the fourth floor. “I’m feeling uncommonly generous. Why don’t you just leave this at my place? You can come visit it anytime you want.”

“One more flight, Charles.”

“Carl.”

Her place was a studio like his, but the ceiling was lower and it felt even more cramped. She had very little in the way of possessions: a bed, a dresser, a TV, a cactus that looked dead, although Carl wasn’t exactly sure how you could tell with cactus plants. There was still some stuff in cartons. The chair went in an empty corner, facing the TV.

“The least I can do is offer you a beer,” she said gratefully.

“The least I can do is accept,” he replied waiting for her to move toward the refrigerator. But she made no move toward anything. “I don’t actually have any beer,” she admitted.

“Do you always make such empty offers?”

“It’s not empty. You know Son House?”

“The blues bar down on Ninth Avenue?”

She nodded. “I wait tables there most nights, eight to two. Stop by and I’ll treat you to a brewski. Deal?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it,” he said. He looked at this gorgeous creature not two feet away from him. Then he pictured Amanda, angry as ever, hurtling through the pothole. “Okay, I thought about it,” he said. “It’s a deal, Toni with an
i
.”

The twin-engine Cessna touched down on runway three at Nashville International Airport exactly, to the minute, on time. No one seemed to notice. Certainly not the ground-control radio operator, who kept the plane sitting there for twenty-three minutes, until the pilot called in for the second time, saying, “This is Cessna November Sixty Gulf Charlie. How many times do I have to tell you that I need to go to Mercury Air Service?” “Sorry, Charlie,” the operator responded. “Busy day today. I forgot all about you.” And certainly not the line service attendant at Mercury, the fixed-base operator, who, after the Cessna had finally been given clearance to taxi over there, took seven and a half minutes before coming out to marshal the plane into its parking space. And most definitely not the painfully thin man behind the desk in the FBO terminal, who kept the pilot waiting another four minutes before taking the order for twenty-five gallons of fuel in each wing tank.

No one seemed to care except for the Cessna’s pilot and sole passenger, H. Harrison Wagner, who was traveling today under the name of Laurence Engle.

Harry Wagner believed in punctuality. It greatly bothered him that no one else in the whole wide world apparently gave a shit whether anything arrived on time or left late, was real or fake, was done well or poorly or, for that matter, was done at all. To Harry, that was intolerable. But there was much about the world that H. Harrison Wagner found intolerable.

Not the least of which was the job he was about to perform.

Harry was not particularly proud of the life he’d led up to this point. He loved his work—the excitement it provided, the freedom it gave him, the respect it could engender. And he was thrilled by the erotic world he’d managed to enter through the bars and clubs he frequented at night—the games he played, the bodies he touched, the lust he caused and felt. But his entire existence was dependent on deceit. For too many years, each day had been but another lie to survive. If there was anything he felt good about, it was his strength. He had learned to live with his lies and learned to live with them alone, separate and always distant from the world around him.

Until now. Now he was no longer alone. Now he was vulnerable. He was no longer strong. That’s why he was about to cross the only line he’d so far managed to avoid crossing.

That’s why, for the first time in his life, Harry Wagner was about to kill another human being.

It would have been easier to fly into Oxford airport. But Harry was not interested in easy. Even in these circumstances, he was interested in
right
. That’s why he’d flown to Nashville. The Oxford airport was closer to his real destination, but it was small. In case anything went wrong, he would need anonymity. And distance. And then, of course, some things were done right in Nashville. The Loveless Cafe had the best breakfast anywhere in the country. The music played by the true pickers late at night down in Printers Alley was still real and heartfelt. he loved genuine country music, the sentiments, the lyrics, the emotion. Loretta Lynn was his favorite. And he owned everything George Jones has ever recorded. Hell, he even had Conway Twitty magnets on his refrigerator back home. His ex-wife once told him that the real reason she’d left him was those damn magnets. But he knew that wasn’t true. There were many other reasons. Too many.

Unfortunately, the city was merely a stopping-off point today. Fly in. Change mode of transportation. Reach destination. Find target. No time for even a quick layover. Perhaps on the way back. He could go to that little bar he’d discovered during his last trip. The place where he’d fallen in love. If twenty-four hours of passion could constitute love.