She laughs as her prisoner's eyes widen and tears flood her puffy red lids. This is the first the lamb's heard mention of a man.
"Now you quit your bawling, honey. You need to look pretty, and right now you're looking like shit."
The lamb blinks hard, the gag making wet noises with each agonizing, rapid, shallow breath. Bev steers the boat closer to shore, cuts the engine and drops anchor. She picks up the shotgun and scans the trees, checking for snakes. Satisfied that the only one in harm's way is her prisoner, she lays the pump-action shotgun on top of the tarp and places a boat cushion on the floor just inches from her "cute little catch of the day," as she continues to call her. Bev digs in her beach bag and pulls out a plastic squirt bottle of insect repellent.
"What I'm going to do now is take off your gag and untie you," Bev says. "You know why I can be that nice, honey? Because you ain't got nowhere to go but overboard, and if you think about what's in these waters, you ain't likely to want to go for a little swim. Or how about the fish box?"
Bev opens the lid of the coffin-sized fish box. It is filled with ice.
"That'll keep you nice and fresh if you decide to get rowdy. And you're not gonna do that, are you?"
The woman vigorously shakes her head and dryly says "No" as the gag comes off. "Thank you, thank you," she says in a shaking voice, wetting her lips.
"Bet your joints are hurting like hell," Bev says, taking her time untying her. "My man Jay tied me up once, my ankles and wrists tied up tight together behind my back until I was bent like a pretzel, just like you. It turned him on, you know." She tosses the rope on top of the tarp. "Well, you'll find out soon enough."
The woman rubs her raw ankles and wrists, trying to catch her breath. She reminds Bev of a cheerleader, one of those athletic blondes with pure prettiness, like those in Seventeen magazine. She wears small horn-rimmed glasses that make her look smart, and she's the right age, late thirties, maybe forty.
"You go to college?" Bev asks her.
"Yes."
"Good. That's real good." She disappears inside her thoughts for a moment, a slack expression on her fleshy, weathered face.
"Please take me back. We've got money. We'll pay you whatever you want."
Bev's meanness snaps back into her eyes. Jay's smart and has money. The woman is smart and has money. She leans close to the woman, the whine of mosquitoes loud beneath the trees. Not far away, a fish splashes.
The higher the sun gets, the hotter it is, and Bev's Hawaiian shirt is damp with sweat.
"Money's not what this is about," Bev says as the woman stares at her, hope fading from her light blue eyes. "Don't you know what this is about?"
"I didn't do anything to you. Please just let me go home and I'll never tell anyone. I won't ever do anything to get you into trouble. How could I, anyway? I don't know you."
"Well, you're getting ready to know me, honey," Bev says, laying a rough, dry hand on the woman's neck and stroking it with her thumb. "We're getting ready to know each other real good."
The woman blinks, wetting her chapped lips as Bev's hand works its way down, touching the hollow of her neck, then down lower, exploring wherever she pleases. The woman sits rigidly and shuts her eyes. She jerks when Bev reaches under her clothing, unhooking her bra in back. Bev starts squeezing the insect repellent, rubbing it on the lamb's naked body, feeling her luscious, firm flesh tremble like Jell-O. Bev thinks of Jay and the bleached area of the floor beneath the bed, and she shoves the lamb hard, slamming her head into the outboard motor.
55
AT THE CORNER OF 83RD and Lexington, a delivery truck struck. a pedestrian-an elderly woman.
Benton Wesley overhears excited talk in the gawking crowd as emergency lights flash, the block cordoned off in yellow crime-scene tape. The fatal accident occurred less than an hour earlier, and Benton has seen enough gore in his life to walk swiftly past and respectfully avert his eyes from the body trapped under one of the trucks back tires.
He catches the words brains and decapitated, and something about dentures lying on the street. If the public had its way, every death scene would be pay-per-view: Five dollars for a ticket, and you can stare at blood and guts to your hearts content. When he used to arrive at crime scenes and all the cops would move out of the way to allow his expert eye to take in every detail, he had the right to order unauthorized people to leave. He could vent his disgust as he pleased-sometimes calmly, sometimes not.
He surveys the area from behind his dark glasses, his lean body moving along the crowded sidewalk, cutting in and out with the agility of a lynx. A plain black baseball cap covers his shaved head, and he backtracks toward Lucy's headquarters, having gotten out of a taxi ten blocks north instead of directly in front of her building or even near it. Benton probably could walk right past Lucy and say "excuse me," and she would not recognize him. Six years it has been since he has seen or talked to her, and he is desperate to know what she looks like, sounds like, acts like. Anxiety presses him onward at his determined pace until he nears the modern polished granite building on 75th Street. A doorman stands in front, hands behind his back. He is hot in his gray uniform and shifts his weight from leg to leg, indicating that his feet hurt.
"I'm looking for The Last Precinct," Benton says to him.
"The what?" The doorman looks at him as if he's crazy.
Benton repeats himself.
"You talking about some kind of police precinct?" The doorman scrutinizes him, and homeless and wacko register on his jaded Irish face. "Maybe you mean the precinct on Sixty-ninth."
"Twenty-first floor, suite twenty-one-oh-three," Benton replies.
"Yeah, now I know what you're talking about, but it ain't called The Last Precinct. Twenty-one-oh-three's a software company-you know, computer stuff." You sure?
"Hell, I work here, don't I?" The doorman is getting impatient, and he glares at a woman whose dog is sniffing too close to the planter in front of the building. "Hey," he says to her. "No dogs doing their business in the hedge."
"She's just sniffing," the woman indignantly replies, jerking the leash, tugging her hapless toy poodle back to the middle of the sidewalk.
Having asserted himself, the doorman ignores the woman and her dog. Benton digs in a pocket of his faded jeans and pulls out a folded piece of paper. He smooths it open and glances at an address and phone number that have nothing to do with Lucy or her building or the office that really is called The Last Precinct, despite what the doorman thinks. If the doorman happens to relay to her, perhaps in jest, that some weirdo stopped by asking for The Last Precinct, she will go on the alert, get very worried. Marino believes that Jean-Baptiste knows Lucy's company by that name. Benton wants Marino and Lucy on the alert and worried.
"Says here, twenty-one-oh-three," Benton tells the doorman, shoving the piece of paper back in his pocket. "What's the name of the company? Maybe the information I was given is wrong."
The doorman steps inside and picks up a clipboard. Running his finger down a page, he replies, "Okay, okay, twenty-one-oh-three. Like I said, some computer outfit. Infosearch Solutions. You want to go up, I gotta call 'em and see an ID."
An ID, yes, but calling isn't necessary, and Benton is amused. The doorman is openly rude and prejudiced toward the scruffy stranger before him, no longer mindful-as many New Yorkers aren't-that the city's greatest virtue in the past was to welcome scruffy strangers, desperately poor immigrants who barely spoke English. Benton speaks English exquisitely when he chooses, and he isn't poor, although his funds are regulated.
He reaches inside his jacket for his wallet and produces a driver's license: Steven Leonard Glover, age forty-four, born in Ithaca, New York, no longer Tom Haviland because Marino knows him by that alias. Whenever Benton has to change his identity, which he does whenever needed, he suffers a period of depression and meaninglessness, finding himself once again angrier than is necessary and all the more determined to prevail without burning with hate.