"And," Zelda said, "I want your centerfolds to stop lying about their waist sizes. Nobody has a twenty-two-inch waist. That is such bullshit!" Veronica giggled in spite of herself.
Loeffler was not amused. During the lecture, he had gathered up his clothes and gotten dressed. "Do you realize who you're fucking with, here?"
Nancy said, "Maybe you don't realize who we are."
"WORSE would be my guess."
"That's right."
"I'm not afraid of you."
"You should be," Toni said. "We can mobilize letterwriting campaigns that will get your magazine pulled from every convenience store in the country. Picket lines to keep your employees from getting to work. Media coverage that will have the fundamentalists all over you like flies on shit." She nodded toward Nancy and her camera. "Not to mention breaking up your marriage."
Loeffler sat down to put his shoes on. "If you'd come into the office like reasonable human beings and discussed this, I might have listened to you."
Martine said, "I've been trying for an appointment for three months. Don't pretend you're interested in our `input."' "Okay, then, I won't." He started for the door, then turned to look at Zelda. She was still naked and had been following him around the room. "And put some clothes on," he told her. "Looking at those muscles makes me sick."
Zelda didn't change expression. She merely leaned back, still smiling, and threw a side kick that snapped Loeffler's neck. His body hitting the floor was the only sound in the room. Veronica thought of the carnage in the bank and Hannah's swinging corpse. She thought she might pass out. She made herself kneel next to Loweffler's body and reach for a pulse in his throat.
Zelda slapped her hands away. "He's dead. Trust me."
"Jesus," Veronica said.
"Sorry," Zelda said without conviction. " I wasn't thinking."
"Zelda, for Christ's sake," someone said.
"You really are a loose cannon," Toni said.
Nobody but Veronica seemed particularly shocked or upset. Nancy looked at Veronica and said, "Uh-oh. Trouble." Toni took Veronica's hand and pulled her to her feet. "Give me your room key. We take care of this. You get across the street and catch a train home. Can you do that?" Veronica nodded.
"Shit," Toni said. "Nancy, you go with her. We handle this."
After they were out of the city, somewhere around Forest Hills, Nancy said: "Are you okay?"
"It's so weird. It's like… like it was all a dream or something."
"That's right," Nancy said. "That's all it was. Just a dream."
It was all over TV the next day. Loeffler's body was found in an alley near Penn Station, apparently the victim of a robbery.
That evening, Nancy came up to tell her they were in the clear. "You don't need to know how they did it," Nancy said. She seemed radiant with success. "But they got him out, and there's nothing to connect us with him at all."
"Doesn't it bother you?" Veronica asked. "That he's dead?"
"Look, I'm not crazy about violence either. But you have to remember. The guy was scum. With him dead, his daughter takes over GF amp;G. It becomes a women's corporation, and that's going to make things better for women everywhere." Veronica remembered Loeffler's childlike energy, the way he threw himself into sex with unrestrained enjoyment. She remembered the flowers he'd always brought her, his sense of humor. "I guess," she said.
The next Saturday, one of the women brought in photos of Zelda and Loeffler that she'd printed up herself at work. They were passed around to much laughter and admiration.
There was a nervousness behind the bravado. Veronica felt it, and the others probably did too, but no one mentioned it. Veronica left the meeting early, and the next Saturday she stayed in her room. No one came to invite her downstairs, and Nancy never mentioned W O. R. S. E. again.
Donald-whoever he was-had put Veronica off her feed. She left Close Encounters and went home, put a frozen dinner in the micro, and turned on the news. They had a feature story on the Rox, a follow-up on the unsuccessful park ranger raid back in February.
"Admit it," the reporter said to some man in a ranger uniform. "Those kids could have done a lot worse if they wanted. It was like they didn't even take you seriously. A few people got shot up, but that was all. They made fools out-of you."
"Mister," the ranger said, "you don't know what's out there on that island. It's worse than you could ever imagine. Just pray to God you don't ever find out."
Veronica had saved one photo of Hannah. It had been sitting on an end table, but she'd gotten to where the constant sight of it was a reproach. Now she took it out again and sat down with it in front of the TV She realized she had never cried for Hannah, not once in the sixteen months since her death. With that thought, the tears came.
Jumpers, she thought. They made fools of all of us.
She turned the TV off. She couldn't seem to get herself back together since that man in the restaurant. It was the past come to haunt her. Like all hauntings, it was something she'd brought on herself. It was something she'd left undone. For over a year, she'd been pushing it away, but the questions had been there all this time, fighting to get out.
She walked nervously around the apartment. She wasn't going to be able to sleep tonight, not in this state. She had to do something, no matter how small, to buy off her conscience. She sat down and dialed Nancy's number.
"Hello?"
"Nancy?"
"Yes?"
"It's Veronica." After the odd terms they'd parted on, she didn't know how Nancy would react.
"Yes?" she said again, this time nervous, reluctant.
" I don't mean to bother you. It's just… there's this question I always wanted to ask you. It's about… it's about Hannah."
"Go on."
Veronica could picture her standing on the faded carpet in the hallway, back stiff, eyes staring straight ahead, waiting for some inevitable ax to fall. "Ichiko told me W O. R. S. E. paid for Hannah's lawyer. I just wanted to know… I mean… how did you know she was in jail?"
"You mean, did she use her one phone call to call us, instead of you? Is that what you're asking?"
"I guess so. I mean, she told me she was through with all of that."
"She was. She didn't call us. Latham, Strauss did."
"They called you?"
"It was Latham himself. He said they would provide Hannah an attorney free of charge, but they didn't want that fact to get out. They wanted us to say we were paying for it. It wasn't an offer I was willing to refuse at the time."
"How did he know where to find you?"
"I have no idea."
"Really? You don't have any ties to Latham?"
"We'd talked about targeting Latham for an action. Believe me, it was as much a surprise to us as it was to you." After a few seconds, Veronica said, "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Life goes on. You know?"
"I know," Veronica said.
When she hung up, her hands were shaking. Latham. She's seen him on TV: elegant suits, razor-cut hair, eyes as cold as a winter sky. Jerry's brother was the Strauss in Latham, Strauss, and he'd told her stories about him. He was so inhuman that Jerry's brother had wondered if maybe he was a secret wild card, that the virus had somehow killed all his emotions. Just the idea that he could somehow be mixed up in Hannah's death was terrifying. It was like opening up a tiny box and finding everything in the world inside it.
There was nothing left to do that night. She went to bed but didn't sleep. Instead she lay awake, seeing Latham and Hannah. And Nancy.