“Watch me.”
“We made a deal!”
Her eyes flashed. “The deal didn’t include no kid! This could turn out like that Limbaugh thing.”
“Lindbergh.”
“Whatever. I don’t want nothin‘ to do with it! Now let me go!”
He released her arm and she continued toward the other bedroom. He couldn’t make her stay or he’d wind up baby-sitting her and the package. He’d have to try something else, like maybe guilt. From years with Poppy he knew that guilt tended to work on her pretty good.
“Fine. Leave me hanging. Walk out and leave me with a kid I don’t know nothin‘ about. Bad enough if it was a little boy, but this is a little girl. How’m I supposed to take care of a little girl?” She stopped at the door and turned, eye’s blazing.
“Damn you, Paulie!”
“Hey, quit saying my name.”
“I oughta shout it from the goddamn roof!”
“You oughta help me, Pop—honey. We both got sucker punched on this one. I thought we were a team. It ain’t right to jump ship as soon as the going gets rough.”
She wandered around the room muttering, “Damn, damn, damn!” under her breath, over and over. That was good in a way… at least she wasn’t in the bedroom packing up her stuff.
“I don’t see why you’re mad at me,” he said. “I didn’t know a thing about this.”
She wheeled on him. “I knew we shouldn’t have trusted him! I knew it. I didn’t want to take this job in the first place, but would you listen? Nooo! You said…” Paulie let her rattle on. She was blowing off steam. In a few minutes maybe she’d run out.
Took more than a few minutes, but finally she quieted and stood there in the middle of the living room, glaring at him.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll help you out. But so help me God, this is the last time we have anything to do with you-know-who. Is that totally clear?”
“As a bell,” he said, reaching for her to seal it with a kiss.
She danced away. “I gotta see to the kid. And I like totally hate kids, you know. I ever tell you that?”
“Like a zillion times.”
“Well, that ain’t changed.”
“But you never said why.”
“I just do, is all. If I liked kids I’d‘ve had some by now. But I don’t. I’ll never have kids. Ever. You understand that?”
“Sure.” Christ, she was acting crazy. “No kids. No problem. That’s all fine with me.” He tried to lighten things up. “This one’s only on rental anyway. We get to return her in a few days or so.” Another glare, this one even meaner than the first— like she was trying to bore holes in his skull or something.
“We’d better,” she said. “Because I don’t know no more about taking care of kids than you do. What do I do with her?”
“What else? Make sure she can’t walk or talk when she wakes up… just like all the other packages.”
“Great, Paulie,” she said with a venomous glare. “Tie up a little girl. Just great!”
He watched her stalk off into the big bedroom. He was about to offer to help but thought better of it. She looked like a cranky wildcat with PMS, ready to scratch his eyes out if he got too close to her. Better to back off and let her do it her way… alone.
19
Poppy approached the blanket-wrapped lump on the bed gingerly, as if it might rear up and bite her. She didn’t want it to wake up.
A kid. Of all things, a damn kid. Well, wasn’t that where the word came from anyway? Kidnapping? What were they going to do with a whiny, crybaby kid?
Cautiously, she pulled the blanket aside to take a look. Skinny little thing. Wearing a uniform. Probably a private school. Rich kid. But that dumb red beret—where’d she get that?
Poppy knelt so she could get a look at the face. Round, kind of cute, with chocolate smeared on her lips. Nice hair… long, dark, braided. Poppy wondered what color her eyes were, but wasn’t about to pry up a lid to see.
As she knelt there, staring at the child, a strange thought came to her. How old would Glory be now? Probably about the same age. Would Glory have looked like this little thing? She’d had dark hair and…
Poppy leaned forward and pushed up one of the kid’s eyelids—just far enough and long enough to see the color—then let it drop.
Blue eyes…
Just like Glory’s…
Poppy shook herself. This was doing her like no good at all. She hadn’t thought of Glory—hadn’t allowed herself to think of her—in years.
Glory was gone. Long gone. And there was no coming back from there.
She busied herself with trying to find a way to bind, gag, and blindfold a six-year old. All their supplies were geared for adult sizes.
20
“Damn!” Snake slammed the heel of his palm against the Dataphone—in the Mayflower Hotel this time—nearly dislodging it from the wall.
He glanced around. One passerby through the lobby stopped to stare at him for a second, then passed on. Probably thought he was talking to his stockbroker.
He shackled his rage. After all, he went online through these hotel phones to avoid detection. The last thing he wanted to do here was make a scene. But damn, he really wanted to punch his gloved fist through the Dataphone’s blue screen.
He reread the Vanduyne e-mail on his Thinkpad screen one more time, just to be sure he wasn’t seeing things, then saved the message to his hard drive.
The kid’s a goddamn epileptic! All that primo inside information on Vanduyne and his brat but not one rotten mention of epilepsy, or medicine.
A defective package—the worst!
Served him right for getting involved with someone he didn’t know. In the first place, he never would have touched an upright citizen; in the second, never an upright citizen’s kid; and third, he’d never pick up a sick package—anything could go wrong.
So what did he have on his hands now? An upright citizen’s sick kid.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to— He disconnected and walked away from the phone bank before he did something stupid. When he was cooler, he came back to another phone and punched in Salinas’s private number.
“Il Giardinello.” Snake had expected to hear Salinas’s butt boy. Alien Gold. But this voice was thickly accented.
“It’s me,” he said, snarling. “Tell your boss the package has been picked up but it’s defective. Tell him I want to talk to him now.”
“Defective? What do—?”
“I’ll tell him. I’m only going to explain it once.”
“Hold on.”
Snake waited what seemed like a long time before the guy came back on the line. “He is not here right now, but he is on his way in. He says to give me your number and wait there. He will call you back as soon as he arrives.”
Snake read off the number on the phone and hung up; then he sat back and waited. He calmed himself. No snarling during his next conversation. He didn’t like Carlos Salinas, didn’t trust him, and wouldn’t be working with him if he thought he had a choice, but you didn’t snarl at a guy who had his fingers in most of the drug trade east of the Mississippi.
21
It stank in here. Carlos Salinas could barely breathe in the thick, wet, sulfurous air. And the glare from the overhead bank of 600-watt sodium lamps spiked his eyes through his sunglasses.
And yet, Carlos Salinas was impressed. Deeply impressed.
He’d come to this tiny apartment in Southeast D.C. to inspect a business opportunity. Instead he’d found… a miracle.
“Behold my own dwarf hybrid,” said their host, a thin, bearded, middle-aged ex-hippie who wore a cowboy hat and referred to himself only as “Jeff.” Carlos knew he was really Henry Walters, age 45, who lived off Dupont Circle and had been an independent drug dealer—strictly hallucinogens—for most of his adult life. “I call it Lizard King Indica Hybrid. Look at those buds, will you? I cloned out these babies barely six weeks ago and you could start your harvest right now.”