Vegas Vengeance (15 page)

But they did agree to call Kevin Smith and tell him where he was and that he would be all right.

So he lived with them, ate with them and became so used to their nudity that after the first week, Hawker also removed his clothes so he could limp around the camp without drawing undue attention.

At first, it was a strange feeling. But he soon grew to like it. Almost as much as he came to like Wendy Nierson.

Wendy was like no other woman Hawker had ever been with. Unlike most of the hippies he'd known back in the sixties, she was a true free spirit. She was tender and sentimental and full of enthusiasm and wild interests. Whenever Hawker asked for more details on how she had “heard him calling in her dreams,” she only smiled mysteriously and changed the subject.

On the tenth night of his stay with the Spring Mountain Family, they became lovers. And he was gladdened to find that while Wendy Nierson might be a laid-back pacifist by day, she was an absolute tigress by night. After their first coupling, she told him firmly that she knew he would ultimately leave her; knew he was not a one-woman man; and, because she knew all these things, that he should feel no guilt when the day for his leaving came.

The woman could be such an enigma with her sly smiles and her gift for extrasensory perception that Hawker had, in those first days, wondered if she might be the mystery woman who had come to him that night in the Doll House.

The logistics troubled him. For one thing, how could she have made it through the tight security of the Doll House? But his suspicions were all laid to rest their first night in bed together.

Wendy Nierson was mysterious. But she was not the mystery woman. In bed, she was completely different from that unknown woman with the odd musk perfume.

It was a strange three weeks, living with the Spring Mountain Family. But a good three weeks. It was an alternative life-style that Hawker would have scoffed at in earlier times. So he was surprised at how attractive he found it. Home-grown food. Honest talk. Discussion about subjects Hawker had barely considered before.

The Spring Mountain Family, of course, had no televisions or radios, so Hawker was honestly touched when Wendy one day surprised him by appearing in camp with an armful of Las Vegas newspapers. It was through them that he anxiously traced the follow-up stories on the Iraqi mining camp.

According to the papers, the Iraqis had plotted to mine their own uranium and ship it out of the country to Iraq, where a nuclear reactor was already under construction.

Somehow, according to the newspaper, an American vigilante group had found out. They attacked and destroyed the camp. According to the few Iraqi survivors, it was a vigilante army of twenty or thirty Americans.

News of the battle brought in the FBI, and now the whole incident was under investigation. Proving to be of great help to the FBI's investigation were the alien group's records, which had been sent to Washington by an anonymous source, presumably the American vigilante group.

Nevada Mining and Assay, of course, no longer existed.

Congressional liberals raised a great hue and cry over such outrageous right wing behavior. They placed a motion before their fellows calling for a public apology to Iraq.

The motion, of course, passed.

Hawker thought about all these things as he maneuvered the Jaguar down the mountain road into Las Vegas, then turned up the drive to the Doll House. Barbara Blaine had tried to visit him twice during his stay on the mountain. The first time he was still unconscious and could not see her. The second time he was out hiking with Wendy, so he missed her again.

So now he came for both a reunion and a farewell. He was going back to Chicago because he didn't want to be around when the FBI investigation hit full stride.

Besides, his work in Las Vegas was done.

Barbara Blaine was in her suite when Hawker arrived. She wore white slacks and a pale orange blouse, and her ebony hair was braided and hung to the middle of her back. When she saw Hawker at the door, she trotted toward him with her arms thrown out.

“It's about damn time you came to see me!” She looked up at him with misty eyes, then drew back quickly when she noticed how he winced and favored his left side. “You're still hurt, James. Maybe you shouldn't be up!”

Hawker smiled and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “I'm fine. Just a little sore. But that'll be gone soon.”

“You can stay for a while?”

“Awhile. I have a plane to catch in the morning.”

“So we can talk over lunch?”

“If the lunch comes to us, we can talk all you want.”

The woman ordered food while Hawker found himself a cold Tuborg in the refrigerator—his first beer since going to the mountain. And then they sat on the patio and Hawker gave her an edited version of what had happened in the Iraqi camp, taking special care to leave out the horror of it; the sounds, the smells, the screams and the acid stink of his own perspiring fear.

Then it was the woman's turn. She told about reading Jason Stratton's journal. She described the shock of learning that the Five-Cs was built over a massive deposit of pitchblende. Then she told him about something that surprised even Hawker.

“They found Jason two days ago,” she said in a small voice.

“They?”

“The FBI. It was in the papers. They found him in a mine shaft not far from Nevada Mining and Assay. He was still in his jeep. They had sealed the shaft with rocks. He had been shot.”

“I'm sorry, Barbara.”

“Reading his journal … it was like talking to him again. It reminded me of how very valuable he was. And how much I loved him.” She looked up at Hawker suddenly. “I think Jason was my one chance at a normal life, Hawk, a life of husband and kids and a house in the country. Does that seem like a tragic thing to say?”

“No. But you're still in mourning, Barbara. Don't give up on your life yet. You may feel differently a year from now.”

She shook her head. “Maybe I will, James. But you know something of my past. I don't meet many men that I find interesting. And that's why I've decided to keep the Doll House as it is. I had to do a little research as I read Jason's journal. I found out about pitchblende, so I know just how valuable it is. I suppose I could be a millionaire many times over if I chose to have this property mined. But where would my girls go? What would I do?” She smiled at him as her brown eyes filled. “I have a chance to do some real good here; a chance to help women make their own way in the world. And that's exactly what I've decided to do. And, James?”

“Yes, Barbara?”

“If you would like to stay here for a while … a few weeks or even longer, I'd be happy to have you. Not as a lover, but as a friend. The girls like you. I like you. It would be a comfort to us all having you around. No one would even have to know. And from the looks of you, a little more time to recuperate wouldn't hurt.”

Hawker was about to give a polite refusal but was interrupted when the door to Barbara Blaine's suite opened and in stepped Mary Kay O'Mordecai Flynn. She was dazzling in a white jumpsuit. Her red hair was combed long, and her green eyes flashed when she saw Hawker.

“Mr. Hawker, I wondered what happened to you!” Then, slightly embarrassed, she turned quickly to Barbara Blaine. “Oh, if I'm interrupting, Barb, I'll—”

“No, no, come on in, Mary Kay. I was just trying to talk James into staying with us for a few weeks.”

“Oh, that would be great, Mr. Hawker! It would be nice to have a man around for a change.” When Mary Kay realized what a revealing thing that was to say about a house of prostitution, she covered her mouth with her hand and began laughing.

Then Barbara Blaine began to laugh, a full-throated gust, like a much-needed release.

But Hawker wasn't laughing. For the first time he noticed that Mary Kay wasn't alone. Behind her stood a woman who possessed an even more spectacular beauty. Her hair was also a tawny auburn; her legs long and tanned in their white short shorts; her face perfect with full lips and high cheeks and bright blue eyes.

It was a woman he had seen before. It was the woman he had watched at the pool outside his veranda at the Five-Cs.

When Mary Kay saw what he was looking at, she got control of herself and said, still giggling, “Mr. Hawker, I don't think you've met my sister, Kelly. Or, I should say, Dr. Kelly O'Mordecai Flynn. Kelly's on sabbatical. She's been staying at the house with me.”

Before Hawker could speak, Kelly O'Mordecai Flynn was walking toward him, her hand outstretched. There was a wry smile on her face, and Hawker caught a whiff of musky perfume that he recognized from that night in the massage room. “But we
have
already met, Mary Kay,” Kelly O'Mordecai Flynn said in a Bacall-like voice, winking ever so slightly. “Haven't we, Mr. Hawker?”

Hawker looked deeply into the vixen eyes and returned the inviting squeeze of her hand. “Never formally, Dr. Flynn. But since I'm going to be staying here for a few weeks, I guess it was just a matter of time.”

Turn the page to continue reading from the Hawker series

ONE

“Take off your clothes,” ordered the woman. “I can't make any decision as long as you have your pants on. You're here for a screen test, aren't you? Well, aren't you?”

James Hawker stood just inside the door of a suite of offices on the eighteenth floor of an East Jefferson Avenue smogscraper in downtown Detroit. The woman sat at a bare desk in a nearly bare room. Behind her there was a window. Through the window he could see the steeple of the Mariner's Church and, by leaning to the left, the December bleakness of Lake St. Clair. The steeple looked very old, very delicate against the stalagmite gloom of the city beyond.

“Screen test?” repeated James Hawker. “Oh … yeah … right—a screen test. I would like to take off all my clothes and stand in front of a camera. Why else would I be here?”

In the center of the room a bank of Klieg lights and a video camera sat on tripods above an empty bed. Beyond the bed was a door. Hawker assumed the screen test the woman mentioned had to do with the making of a pornographic film. He also assumed the door led to more offices—offices he wanted to see.

“Well?” asked the woman.

“Well?” echoed Hawker.

“Well, take your god damn clothes off! The camera team is working in the back set, but they'll be breaking in about twenty minutes, and you'd damn well better be ready!”

At the desk, the woman held a Styrofoam coffee cup in one hand and a Virginia Slims cigarette in the other. She used a peanut can as an ashtray. The woman, in her late forties, had silver-blond hair cut boyishly short and owlish glasses. Hawker wondered why anyone would try so hard to look like Geraldine Ferraro.

He had followed a pock-faced man and a woman into the skyscraper, then lost them in the crowded halls. He suspected the woman to be Brenda Jacobsen Paulie. He had recognized her from the photographs in his Detroit Kidnap Victims file. In the photographs she had wheat-colored hair and a very pretty face. They had dyed her hair inky black, and her eyes were bleary with drugs and lack of sleep, but Hawker was almost sure it was the same woman.

The man was either her keeper or her kidnapper, and they were somewhere in this building—maybe in this suite of offices.

Hawker had to find out.

Brenda Paulie was only one of at least thirteen women who had been kidnapped in the last twelve months. Paulie's story was as tragic as any of them. Only twenty-four years old, she had just graduated from law school. In June she married Blake Paulie, a successful Detroit attorney. On the morning of September fifteenth, a Tuesday, the Paulies learned they were to be parents. Brenda was pregnant. They planned a celebration dinner for that evening.

The dinner was never to be.

That afternoon, just after sunset, three men wearing masks forced their way into the house at gunpoint. They beat and tied Blake Paulie, then took his wife.

The kidnapping was different from the others in only two ways: The kidnappers had taken their victim from a house rather than off the street; also, Brenda Paulie was the first victim who did not live in the crime-ravaged Marlow West suburb of Detroit.

Detroit detectives worked overtime, even on their days off, trying to break just one of the more than a dozen kidnapping cases. Finally, frustrated by a thousand deadend leads as well as the investigative restraints placed on them as officers of the law, they put out a signal for help.

They knew who they wanted—if he would just come.

Most of the detectives had heard the whispered stories of an auburn-haired vigilante ex-cop who wasn't afraid to take the law into his own hands in order to bring the lawless to justice. The vigilante's methods, the detectives knew, provided him with tremendous shortcuts. They also knew the kidnappers and their gang were likely to end up dead on the street if they tried to resist the vigilante.