Piers nodded.
“Where?”
“Somewhere over in Gardena.”
“She’s moving around.”
“Maybe not,” Piers said. “Maybe she’s just moving the drop around.”
Lace frowned and chewed on her lower Up. “What’s it been now, two months?”
“About”
“God damn it, I want to do something.”
“Silk made the rules.”
“If I could just talk to her.”
“She doesn’t want you involved.”
“I’m already involved. I’m her sister, damn it.”
“I had those private detectives, remember? They thought they were getting close and then she found out and made me call them off.”
“Those assholes. I don’t blame her. Look, I just want to see her and talk to her. Maybe we should go at it from a different angle, another approach.”
Piers sighed. “Two guys I’ve just met. They might do. As you said, a new approach.”
“Where’d you meet them?”
“On the beach.”
“Just like that?”
Piers sighed again and nodded. “Ebsworth’s checking them out. You can meet them this evening. They’re coming over for drinks.”
“What’re they like?”
“Well, one’s sort of tall and fat and Chinese, and the other one’s sort of tall and skinny with scars on his back.”
“Where’d he get the scars?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do they do?”
“Well, they play the market a little.”
“Oh, swell, marvelous. What else?”
“I don’t know, but somehow I’ve got the feeling that they go in for chancey stuff.”
“How chancey?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You didn’t say anything about Silk to them.”
“No.”
Lace frowned, took another swallow of her coffee, and then placed the cup and saucer on the bedside table. “Well, we’ve got to do something.”
“I know,” Piers said. “It’s interfering with my sex life.”
She grinned at him. It was the crooked, charming grin that was almost her trademark. “Nothing wrong with your sex life last night, old man.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the fucking,” he said. “Hell, I’m fucking Lace Armitage. That’s what fifty million guys out there dream about — as they damn well should. But afterwards I like a warm ass for my cold feet.”
“What do you want me to do, he there wide awake and stiff as a board all night so you can warm your feet?”
“You could take a pill.”
“A pill’s not going to cure what’s wrong with me,” Lace said, staring at Piers.
He shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about that.”
“You want to talk about it? If you want to talk about it some more, I will.”
Piers shook his head again, a small, pained expression on his face. “Talking about it never does much good, does it?”
She shrugged. “Not much. I just keep on making the same mistake over and over.”
For a while they were silent, both thinking about some of those past mistakes and the men they involved — men whose names filed through Piers’s mind in perfect chronological order.
Lace knew how to break the somberness of his mood. She threw back the covers and swung her feet to the floor. She was naked, and Piers experienced the same pleasant shock with which the sight of her still affected him, even three years after he had first seen her, as she liked to describe it, bare-assed and buck naked.
At thirty-two, Lace Armitage’s body was still almost perfect, at least in her husband’s opinion, although there were some who carped about the high breasts being a bit large and even argued that the long legs were a touch thin. But no one had ever faulted the smooth, perfect shoulders or the narrow waist that rounded out into the melonlike hips that she could make roll, when she was fooling around and talking Arkansas, “like two bull pups under a blanket.”
But if her body was nearly perfect, there was enough wrong with her face to make it haunting if not beautiful. People remembered that face. To begin with, there was all that thick auburn hair, which grew so that it was nearly always flopping down into those green eyes. The eyes were probably too green and too large and set too far apart, although they had to be that far apart to rest properly on those high cheekbones, which were so produced that they would have made her face seem hollow had it not been for her wide mouth with its sensual, almost too thick lips that seemed to promise all sorts of interesting oral sex. Except when she smiled. Randall Piers called it her “fuck tomorrow” smile, and it was what people remembered about her most and made them wish that they knew somebody who could smile like that.
She moved over to her husband, tousled his gray hair, leaned down, and kissed him on the crown. He put his arm around her, squeezed one of the cheeks of her buttocks, and kissed her on the stomach.
“I’ve got to go pee,” she said.
“You always make it sound like a news flash,” he said.
She started across the room toward the bath.
“Papa always told us that the body had certain natural functions that—” The closing of the bathroom door cut off the rest of her sentence.
Piers waited, knowing that when his wife came out she would finish the sentence as if there had been no interruption. It was the way her mind worked. Sometimes she would start a thought one week and finish it the next. If you didn’t pick up on it, she would look at you as though you were a fool. She had never once looked at Piers that way, because he was certainly no fool and had the kind of mind and memory that could connect up his wife’s thoughts even if their beginnings and ends were separated by as much as a month, which occasionally they were.
When Lace came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a white cotton voile robe with small buttercups woven into it. “—they shouldn’t be any more embarrassed about than a car’s backfire,” she continued. “People have to cough, hiccup, fart, sweat, cry, pee, and move their bowels, Papa always said, and if England hadn’t tried to pretend that none of these things existed, it would probably still be the greatest country in the world.”
“I don’t quite follow his last thought there,” Piers said.
“Well, I didn’t either, but Silk said she did. If they find her, they’ll kill her, won’t they?”
Piers’s mind worked quickly, the way it always did. “Her” was Silk, of course. “They” — well, he wasn’t absolutely sure who “they” were, although he had a fairly good idea.
“Your sister’s a very smart, competent woman,” he said. “She laid down the rules and we agreed to play by them.”
“That was two months ago.”
“They’re Silk’s rules and it’s her life.”
“I want to talk to her. I’ve just got to talk to her. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“These two guys, what makes you think they might be able to find her?”
Piers shrugged. “Mostly hunch, I guess.”
Lace stared at him and then smiled. “Is it one of those real gut ones that you get sometimes?”
He nodded.
“Down in here?” She bent over and poked him in the stomach.
“It’s not located any one place, dummy.”
“You know what I mean.”
“It’s a real strong feeling, but I could be wrong.”
“What’s it like?” she said. “I mean, why do you think they might be able to find her?”
“Well, it’s simply this feeling I have,” he said slowly, “that these two guys are the kind who just might know where to look.”
Chapter 5
It was three minutes until two when McBride turned his yellow 1965 Mustang convertible left off the Pacific Coast Highway and started down the narrow, winding asphalt lane that led to the Paradise Cove pier.