He sat hunched over the typewriter, his face lined with fatigue. Coffee mugs and paper littered the desk. He grunted as she set the tray down and collected the cups to wash. She cleaned out the coffeepot and refilled it so it was ready to go again.
Dread had been building inside her ever since this morning. She kept thinking about Sunday Morning Eclipse and the massacre Matt had witnessed in Vietnam. Now she couldn’t stop asking a terrible question. Had Jake been a helpless witness to a massacre like the character he’d created, or had he been an active participant?
She wrapped her arms around herself and left the attic.
She received her first phone call from Dick Spano later that week. “I’ve got to find Jake.”
“He never calls me,” she said, which was literally true.
“If he does, tell him I’m looking for him.”
“I really don’t think he will.”
That evening, she went up to the attic to tell Jake about the call. His eyes were red-rimmed, his jaw covered with stubble, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept. “I don’t want to talk to anybody,” he said. “Keep them away from me, will you?”
She did her best. She put off his business manager, his lawyer, and all of their secretaries, but someone as famous as Jake couldn’t simply disappear, and after five more days passed, and the callers grew more alarmed, she knew she had to do something, so she called Dick Spano. “I’ve heard from Jake,” she said. “He’s started to write again, and he wants to hide out for a while.”
“I have to talk to him. I’ve got a deal that won’t wait. Tell me where he is.”
She tapped a pen on her desk. “I think he’s in Mexico. He wouldn’t say exactly where.”
Dick swore, then bombarded her with a long list of things she was to tell him if he called her again. She wrote them all down and tucked the note in her pocket.
October turned into November, and as the date for Michel’s fashion show drew near, the gossip about her broken contracts refused to die. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the phony stories she’d planted at the end of the summer about her relationship with Jake were continuing to damage her. The gossips said Fleur Savagar was nothing more than a washed-up fashion model trying to start a business on her back. None of the clients she’d been pursuing had signed with her, and each night she fell asleep only to jolt awake a few hours later and listen to the sound of Jake’s typewriter. In the morning, she used her key to check on him, and after a while, it became difficult to tell which of them was the more haggard.
She spent the day before Michel’s show at the hotel, scurrying between technicians and the carpenters setting up the runway. She drove everyone crazy with her insistence on security passes and guards at the door. Even Kissy lost patience with her, but everything rested on Michel’s collection, and Alexi had less than twenty-four hours to do his worst. Fleur called Michel at the Astoria factory to make sure the guards were doing their job.
“Every time I look out, they’re where they’re supposed to be,” he said.
As he hung up, she had to remind herself to breathe. She’d hired the best security company in the state. Now she had to trust them to do their job.
Willie Bonaday burped and reached into his uniform pocket for a roll of Tums. Sometimes he chewed them one after another to help pass the time until the daytime shift took over. He’d been working this job for a month now, and tonight was the last night. Willie thought it was a lot of trouble to go to for a bunch of dresses, but as long as he got his paycheck, he minded his own business.
Four of them worked each shift, and they had the place sealed up tighter than a drum. Willie sat just inside the front door of the old Astoria factory, while his partner, Andy, was at the back and two of the younger men were outside the workshop doors on the second floor where the dresses were locked up. In the morning, the boys on the day shift would accompany the big dress racks on the drive to the hotel. By evening, the job would be over.
A couple of years back, Willie had guarded Reggie Jackson. That was the kind of job he liked. When him and his brother-in-law were sitting around watching the Giants, he wanted to shoot the bull about guarding Reggie Jackson, not a bunch of dresses. Willie picked up the Daily News. As he turned to the sports section, a battered orange van with BULLDOG ELECTRONICS painted on the side drove past the front entrance. Willie didn’t notice.
The man driving the van turned into an alley across the street without even glancing at the factory. He didn’t have to. He’d driven by every night for the past week, each time in a different vehicle, and he knew exactly what he’d see. He knew about Willie, although he didn’t know his name, and he knew about the guard at the back entrance and the locked room on the second floor with the guards stationed outside. He knew about the day shift that would arrive in a few hours, and the dim interior lights kept on in the factory at night. Only the lights were important to him.
The warehouse across the street from the factory had been abandoned for years, and the rusty padlock at the back gave easily beneath the jaws of the bolt cutters. He pulled an equipment case from the van. It was heavy, but the weight didn’t bother him. When he was safely inside the warehouse, he switched on his flashlight and shone it at the floor as he walked toward the front of the building. The flashlight annoyed him. Its beam of light spread out in a smear-no clear boundaries, no precision. It was sloppy light.
Light was his specialty. Pure beams of pencil-slim light. Coherent light that didn’t spread out in undisciplined pools like a flashlight beam.
He spent nearly an hour setting up. Normally it didn’t take so long, but he’d been forced to modify his equipment with a high-powered telescope, and the mounting was difficult. He didn’t mind, though, because he liked challenges, especially ones that paid so well.
When he’d finished setting up, he cleaned his hands on the rag he carried with him and then wiped a circle in the dirty glass of the warehouse window. He took his time sighting and focusing the telescope, making certain everything was exactly the way he wanted it. He could pick out each of the tiny lead plug centers without any difficulty. They were clearer to him than if he’d been standing in the middle of that second-story room.
When he was ready, he gently pulled the switch on the laser, directing the pure beam of ruby-red light right at the lead plug that was farthest away. The plug needed only a hundred and sixty-five degrees of heat to melt, and within seconds he could see that the hot ruby light of the laser had done its work. He picked out the next plug, and it, too, dissolved under the force of the pencil-thin beam of light. In a matter of minutes, all the lead plugs had melted, and the heads of the automatic fire sprinkler system were spraying water over the racks of dresses.
Satisfied, the man packed up his equipment and left the warehouse.
Fleur
Chapter 24
The phone call from the security company woke Fleur at four in the morning. She listened to the lengthy explanation from the man on the other end of the line. “Don’t wake my brother,” she said just before she hung up. And then she pulled the covers over her head and went back to sleep.
The doorbell woke her. She squinted at her clock and wondered if florists delivered white roses at six in the morning but decided she wasn’t getting up to find out. She stuck her head under the pillow and dozed off. Out of nowhere, someone jerked the pillow away. She screamed and bolted upright in bed.
Jake towered above her in jeans and a zippered sweatshirt that he’d thrown on over his bare chest. His hair was shaggy, his jaw unshaven, and his eyes had an empty, haunted look. “What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you answer the door?”