How big was that battery? Small enough to have drained in just twenty-four hours? Honeycutt’s house was laid out cleanly enough. I knew where the den was, I knew where the breakers were. Most people put their alarm boxes somewhere easily accessible. Kitchen, probably, or hallway. There should be time.
I went into the office. Julia was holding the thigh harness and holster. She blushed bright red when she saw me. I put a tape in the answering machine, then switched on the fax machine and dialed.
“That’s your number.”
“Yes. Did you find the satchel?”
She lifted it. I nodded. The phone rang, the machine took it, the fax whined and shrilled and beeped. I dialed again, and again, until I had nearly five minutes’ worth of electronic noncommunication on tape. I slipped the tape and a Sony Walkman into the satchel.
“We should go now. Eight in the evening is the best time for breaking and entering.” Our break-in would have to be traceless if Honeycutt’s suspicions were not to be aroused.
I carried the satchel out to the Saab. We took Highway 280 instead of the interstate.
“Take your jewellery off and put it in the glove compartment. You don’t want to lose an earring at Honeycutt’s and have to go back.” She complied silently.
The road surface was just-laid blacktop and we’d left streetlights behind a mile or two back. The drive was smooth; the night rushed by like water. Everything was black and white. We could have been exploring the bottom of the sea. Julia seemed to have withdrawn into herself.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked after a while.
“Jim was my friend.”
“There’s more to it than that. More than his death on your conscience. Most people would mourn and leave it at that. Look at your life. You have money—not as much as you grew up with, I suspect, but you’re more than comfortable. You’re an art dealer, a corporate art dealer. You don’t even deal with the artists direct, just galleries and auction houses and agents. Yet you have studied at least one martial art; at some point you took a self-defence course that you regard seriously enough to make changes in your everyday life; you’ve obviously studied defensive driving. Why?”
“To be prepared. For violence.”
Not nearly the whole truth. “And are you?”
She looked at me then. In the backwash of the headlights, her eyes were sheened like a Persian cat’s. “I don’t know.”
There is never any way to know. It happens so fast. A snap of your fingers and the world is different. Most encounters are decided in five or six seconds and if you freeze, you can die. I wasn’t sure there was a way to explain.
“Have you ever been in a situation?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been shocked? I mean had terrible news or seen something awful happen right in front of you?”
“Yes.”
There was pain in that answer. “That’s how it feels when everything goes wrong. It’s as though someone with a knife tried to slice your mind free of your body and everything just automatically starts shutting down. Surprise, shock, whatever you want to call it. The trick to surviving is to believe what your body is telling you, instantly, and then act. Don’t stop and think. There simply isn’t time. In the first split second, getting moving, reacting, is what counts.” She was nodding, and I knew she wanted to understand but I didn’t think she did. “Put your hand palm down on my thigh.”
To her credit, after a barely perceptible hesitation, she started to lay her hand on my thigh. Without looking at her, without giving her a hint of what I was about to do, I slapped it, hard.
She whipped the hand away, incredulous.
“Your first reaction is to pull away, and glare, but imagine if I really meant it. You can’t afford to stop and wonder at it, to try work out why, you just have to accept it and take steps to make sure I’m not going to be in any state to do it again.” She sucked at the back of her hand. Her breasts were rising and falling, faster and faster. Now she was angry. Adrenalin. “That slap hurt but it won’t leave a bruise. If I’d given you a black eye that would have hurt, but no permanent damage. A two-by-four across the ribs might crack a few but you would still be able to run or hit someone. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? Pain is just pain. It’s a message. You don’t have to listen. Sometimes you can’t afford to listen.”
“The Nike school of martial arts. Just Do It.” Her face was perfectly smooth, unreadable, but then she huffed down her nose, half amusement, half cynicism. “Nike was the winged goddess of victory. How appropriate.”
“We hope.”
“Are you expecting trouble?”
“Not particularly.”
We were driving through Smyrna now. I pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall. “Time to apply some camouflage.”
We walked to a party store, where I bought two bunches of Mylar balloons, then to a wine shop. “What champagne do you like?”
“Why ask me?”
“I could buy something cheap and throw it away, or get something nice and you could drink it afterwards. It’s a legitimate expense, so you’ll end up paying, whichever way.”
She chose a Mumm’s brut. I paid and we bobbed with the bottle and balloons along to a pharmacy. I asked the pharmacist for latex gloves. He gave me, the bottle and Julia a knowing look. Julia blushed very, very slightly, and lifted her chin. She moved like a cheetah as we left.
We put the balloons in the backseat and draped my jacket over them so they wouldn’t float about.
“In a perfect world, how would you hit that pharmacist?”
“Jern,” she said without hesitation. Palm strike. “Right to the nose.”
I like a woman who knows her own mind.
We left the lights of Smyrna behind and once again were whipping through the dark, the Saab following the white line like a tracking dog. The night was alive with scents: jet fuel from Dobbins Air Force Base just over the rise, fading heat of blacktop, the musk of Julia’s hair. There was a sharp, smoky undertone to her scent now; adrenalin was pumping and she was beginning to tense up. My muscles were loose and warm and my heartbeat steady and strong.
“Almost there. Get some gloves on.”
She shook out the gloves and her breathing quickened as the faint aromas of talc and latex filled the car. The sense of smell is the most primitive of all, wired directly into the crocodile brain that knows only the basic urges of sex and survival. It conditions very quickly.
I steered with one hand, punched Honeycutt’s home number into my phone with the other. It rang until the machine picked up. I hung up. No one home, or at least no one was answering the phone. And then we were there, pulling into the driveway, crunching over the gravel. It looked smaller without all the people milling about on the lawn and dim light showing only from the kitchen and one upstairs room. I turned off the car, snapped on gloves, turned to Julia.
“Look happy, in case there are observers.”
She carried one bunch of balloons and the champagne. I had the other bunch in one hand, satchel over my shoulder. I looked around, up at the windows, at the door, as if trying to work out if this was the right address for the party. No neighbours’ lights were flicking on.
The entryway had two steps and was lit with soft yellow, two locks, both at waist height. He had made it very easy.
“Keep close.” The lock gun’s rubber-sheathed handle was slippery against the latex gloves. I had to steady it against my ribs. Using Julia’s body as a shield, I shoved the prongs into the first lock.
“Pretend to ring the bell.” The lock clunked, I moved to the second. “Pretend again.” Julia obliged. The second lock thunked back. “When I open the door, follow me in, and smile, just in case. I’ll disable the alarm. You push the door to, and stay just inside. Be very, very quiet.”