“Ah, I see.”
“Don't get me wrong. Wasn't the money that made him quit.”
“Then what?”
“He said I'd given him what he needed, he didn't want any more.”
“What he needed?” she asked.
“Enough Tae Kwon Do for what he wanted to do.”
“Did he say what he wanted to do?”
“Nope. Kick someone's ass, I guess.”
Eddie was really pushing himself now, ramming his feet down on the StairMaster, pumping and pumping, so much sweat on his body that he appeared to be coated in oil, droplets spraying off his hair when he shook his head, the muscles in his arms and across his broad back bulging almost as fiercely as those in his thighs and calves.
Sitting in the chair about eight feet from the man, Holly felt as if she were ringside at some sleazy strip club where the gender roles had been reversed. She got up.
Eddie was staring straight ahead at the wall. His face was creased by lines of strain, but he had a dreamy, faraway look in his eyes. Maybe, instead of the wall, he saw the endless stairwell in the Empire State Building.
“Anything else he ever told you that seemed … interesting, unusual?” she asked.
Eddie didn't answer. He was concentrating on the climb. The arteries in his neck had swelled and were throbbing as if evenly spaced, small, fat fish were schooling through his bloodstream.
As Holly reached the door, Eddie said, “Three things.”
She turned to him again. “Yeah?”
Without looking at her, his eyes still out of focus, not for an instant slackening his pace, speaking to her from the stairwell of that skyscraper in distant Manhattan, he said, “Ironheart's the only guy I ever met who can obsess better than I can.”
Frowning, Holly thought about that. “What else?”
“The only lessons he missed were two weeks in September. Went up north, Marin County somewhere, to take a course in aggressive driving.”
“What's that?”
“Mostly they teach chauffeurs for politicians, diplomats, rich businessmen how to handle a car like James Bond, escape terrorist traps, kidnappers, shit like that.”
“He talk about why he needed that kind of training?”
“Just said it sounded like fun.”
“That's two things.”
He shook his head. Sweat flew, spattered the surrounding carpet and furniture. Holly was just out of range. He still didn't look at her. “Number three — after he figured he had enough Tae Kwon Do, the next thing he wanted was to learn guns.”
“Learn guns?”
“Asked me if I knew anyone could teach him marksmanship, all about weapons. Revolver, pistols, rifles, shotguns …”
“Who'd you send him to?”
He was panting now but still able to speak clearly between each gasping breath: “Nobody. Guns aren't my thing. But you know what I think? I think he was one of these guys reads Soldier of Fortune. Gets caught up in the fantasy. Wants to be a mercenary. He sure was preparing for a war.”
“Didn't it worry you to be helping someone like that?”
“Not as long as he paid for his lessons.”
She opened the door, hesitated, watching him. “You have a counter on that contraption?”
“Yeah.”
“What floor are you on?”
“Tenth,” Eddie said, the word distorted as he spoke it on a deep exhalation. The next time he breathed out, he also issued a whoop of pleasure along with his wind. “Jesus, I have legs of stone, fuckin' granite, I think I could get a man in a scissor hold, crack him in half with my legs. You put that in your article, okay? I could crack a guy clean in half.”
Holly left, closing the door softly behind her.
In the main room, the martial-arts class was even more active than when she had entered. The current exercise involved a group attempt to gang up on their Korean instructor, but he was blocking and throwing and whirling and leaping like a dervish, dealing with them as fast as they came at him.
The brunette had removed her silvery jewelry. She had changed into Reeboks, looser shorts, a different T-shirt, and a bra. Now she was doing stretching exercises in front of the reception counter.
“One o'clock,” she explained to Holly. “My lunch hour. I always run four or five miles instead of eating. Bye.” She jogged to the door, pushed through it into the warm August day, and sprinted out of sight along the front of the shopping center.
Holly went outside, too, and stood for a moment in the lovely sunshine, newly aware of how many of the shoppers, coming to and going from their cars, were in good physical shape. Having moved to the northwest almost a year and a half ago, she had forgotten how health conscious many southern Californians were — and how aware of their appearance. Per capita, Orange County had a lot fewer jowls, love handles, spare tires, pot guts, and pear-shaped bottoms than Portland.
Looking good and feeling good were imperatives of the southern-California lifestyle. It was one of the things she loved about the place. It was also one of the things she hated about it.
She went nextdoor to the bakery for lunch. From the display cases, she selected a chocolate eclair, a creme brulee tart with kiwi on top, a piece of white-chocolate macadamia-nut cheesecake with Oreo-crumb crust, a cinnamon wheel, and a slice of orange roulade. “And a diet Coke,” she told the clerk.
She carried her tray to a table near a window, where she could watch the passing parade of taut, tanned bodies in summer gear. The pastries were wonderful. She ate a little of this, now a little of that, savoring each bite, intending to polish off every crumb.
After a while she realized someone was watching her. Two tables away, a heavyset woman, about thirty-five, was staring with a mixture of disbelief and envy; she only had one miserable fruit tart, a bakery junkie's equivalent of a Nutri/System multi-grain cracker.
Feeling both a need to explain herself and a certain sympathy, Holly said, “I wish I wasn't doing this, but I can't help it. If I can't do anything else, then I always binge when I'm horny.”
The heavyset woman nodded. “Me, too.”
She drove to Ironheart's place on Bougainvillea Way. She knew enough about him now to risk approaching him, and that was what she intended to do. But instead of pulling into his driveway, she cruised slowly past the house again.
Instinct told her that the time was not right. The portrait of him that she had constructed only seemed to be complete. There was a hole in it somewhere. She sensed that it would be dangerous to proceed before that hole had been painted in.
She returned to the motel and spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening sitting by the window in her room, drinking Alka-Seltzer, then diet 7-Up, staring out at the jewel-blue pool in the middle of the lushly landscaped courtyard, and thinking. Thinking.
Okay, she told herself, the story to date. Ironheart is a man with a sadness at his core, probably because of being orphaned when he was only ten. Let's say he's spent a lot of his life brooding about death, especially about the injustice of premature death. He dedicates his life to teaching and helping kids, maybe because no one was there for him when he was a boy and had to cope with the deaths of his mother and father. Then Larry Kakonis commits suicide. Ironheart is shattered, feels he should have been able to prevent it. The boy's death brings to the surface all of Ironheart's buried rage: rage at fate, destiny, the biological fragility of the human species — rage at God. In a state of severe mental distress bordering on outright imbalance, he decides to make himself over into Rambo and do something to fight back at fate, which is a weird response at best, absolutely nuts at worst. With weight lifting, aerobic endurance training, and Tae Kwon Do, he turns himself into a fighting machine. He learns to drive like a stuntman. He becomes knowledgeable in the use of all manner of guns. He's ready. Just one more thing. He teaches himself to be a clairvoyant, so he can win the lottery and be independently wealthy, making it possible to devote himself to his crusade — and so he can know just when a premature death is about to occur.