He quickly squirted himself but good with something called Drakkar Noir. It sounded foreign and exciting. He added squirts under each arm and one quick, discreet but drenching spray down the front of his pants aimed directly at his crotch.
You never know.
C.C. scurried back to his stall and sat down, waiting. It felt like Christmas morning!
Not more than a few minutes passed when he heard the swinging doors to the bathrooms swish open and heels clicking across the tile floor.
C.C. tensed, sitting there on the toilet.
There was a light tapping at the door, and he could tell from her feet under the stall door that it was her. He opened the stall door and let her in. From where he was sitting on the ceramic bowl, Mocha looked six feet tall.
“Don’t get up, Judge, just sit back and relax. Baby got a surprise for you.”
Baby kneeled down on the tile in front of C.C., unzipped his pants, and buried her face in his lap, his right hand resting gently on the top of her head, his left palm braced against the metal wall of the stall.
She tossed her hair back and started giggling.
C.C. giggled too, his eyes nearly closed, his head rolled back, leaning against the back of the toilet.
Then he saw it-C.C. was never sure whether he caught the first few bright flashes.
Then another and another…
At first he thought he was seeing strobe lights in his head, but when he squinted his eyes open, he was staring right into an expensive-looking black metal camera attached to a long lens.
It was hanging to his left, over the side of his stall.
What? A camera in the crapper?
He jerked forward and caught something in his right hand. With much confusion, he looked at the long brunette wig he held in his hand as Mocha squirmed up to attention and began rearranging her clothes.
“No-no…Baby’s leaving. Y’all too kinky for Baby in here. Nobody told Baby ’bout no camera.” She blurted it out in a deep-pitch baritone.
Still clutching the long weave, C.C. was frozen on the cold commode seat, unable to absorb what was happening.
Looking up straight into Mocha’s nostrils, he noticed for the first time a large and distinct Adam’s apple. Not good.
Urine threatened to expel. C.C. absolutely could not wet his pants. He had to act.
With the two of them struggling to rearrange themselves in one stall over a toilet, C.C. could barely get up and zip up. The stall door flew open, Mocha flounced out, and the man attached to the Nikon jumped down off his perch on the neighboring commode seat, lid down. He had apparently been crouched there, straddling the toilet’s water with one foot on either side of the bowl, since before C.C. first came in.
“What the hell is going on, you son of a…”
Jumping down off the bowl like a monkey, he lurched directly in front of C.C. and continued to snap away…catching C.C. arranging and zipping.
Just as C.C. made a grab for him, he took off like an Olympic sprinter, not even bothering to push the swinging doors open, charging them shoulder-first like a linebacker.
The music from the VIP room blared into the bathroom as C.C. started after the guy, only to stumble and fall face down onto the cold tile floor. He got up and ran for the door. What the hell was going on?
He charged from the brightly lit fluorescent-tiled bathroom through the doors and back into the darkened club room; he couldn’t see but knew enough to head for the door.
Too late. The guy was gone.
56
New York City
“WHAT THE HELL IS SHE DOING?” OFFICER KEVIN DUNNE ASKED, as Hailey leaned into the two-way mirror and wiggled two fingers like bunny ears saying hello. “Does she know we’re here?”
“What do you think?” Lieutenant Kolker responded, lowering all four chair legs to the ground and watching her intently. “I told you, she’s a lawyer.”
Not just a lawyer, Dunne knew.
Kolker had instructed the detectives to pull up every LexisNexis article they could find on Hailey Dean.
It made them all a little edgy to learn that she was considered to be a brilliant criminal trial lawyer, perceived by many civil libertarians as a zealot, a renegade crime fighter who used all means necessary to win a case.
“Maybe she really is crazy,” Dunne’s partner, McKee, muttered, reaching for a Marlboro, contraband in the new “smoke-free zone” era.
They’d tossed that theory around when they’d read about how, out of the blue, she had packed it all in after ten years of clawing her way to the top. It was rumored she’d bid farewell to a million-dollar civil practice waiting for her.
Nobody was sure what triggered her departure. Rumors ranged from a disastrous love affair with a defense attorney in Atlanta to disgust with the jury system to a nervous breakdown following her last major trial.
Kolker was opting for the breakdown. It fit much better with his theory that Dean was motivated to kill her patients due to a mental imbalance linked to that last prosecution. The MOs were far too similar not to be connected. They thought about a third-person copycat, but between the obvious connection, the forensics taken in the field, and the other evidence Kolker developed-it added up to her. And it made a much more sexy story. There’d be nowhere else but up for Kolker after this…outsmarting a lawyer-turned-killer.
“Sure looks like she’s lost it,” Dunne agreed, incredibly uncomfortable beneath her studied gaze that laid bare their hiding place.
“Damn, it looks like she’s staring right at us.” McKee pulled uncomfortably at his necktie.
Of course, she couldn’t see them…could she?
No.
That was ridiculous.
But the way she was staring…
It just wasn’t right. They were supposed to make her nervous…not the other way around.
“Kolker, go ahead…get in there.”
“Not just yet. I’m gonna make her sweat.”
“Yeah, well, she don’t look like she’s sweating,” McKee commented as Hailey smiled into the two-way.
“Shut the hell up,” Kolker barked, and shifted his weight in his chair.
They continued to watch, studying her, trying to get a read on her emotions.
Was she nervous? Was she tired? Would she break into tears?
At last, Kolker cracked.
“All right,” he said, standing, “it’s time to play bad cop. I’m going in.”
57
St. Simons Island, Georgia
TOBY MCKISSICK STARED AT THE PHONE ON HIS DESK AS IF IT WERE LIABLE to bite him on the wrist if he reached for it, and squirmed in his seat, now noticeably slick with sweat, especially along the lower back and contoured seat.
He wanted to shoot himself. No, not himself, somebody else. He definitely wanted to shoot somebody else.
The intercom system made a second obnoxious buzzing sound, and he slumped down even further in his prized Naugahyde office chair on wheels. He pulled it as close to his desk as his stomach would allow.
He knew it was Sean, his secretary, buzzing him to tell him Floyd Moye Eugene was holding on the phone, long-distance from Atlanta.
He could pretend he wasn’t there like he normally did with unwanted and intrusive calls. It probably wouldn’t work this time.
Sean wasn’t too smart, but her legs were long as a colt’s and she had a perpetual, miraculous coppery brown tan.
Even though Sean was beautiful, her blind hero worship of him was actually irritating sometimes.
Quite a contrast to his wife. When she wasn’t at home playing bridge with her foursome, Lois made constant trips back and forth to the St. Simons United Methodist Church. The bulletin had to be written on Monday, typed on Tuesday, mailed on Wednesday. Then there were the Hand Bells Choir, the Kids’ Choir, and the Adult Choir. Lois was involved in all three, plus knee-deep in church politics. Toby still loved her in his own way, like a child loves an old teddy bear whose fur was rubbed off and eyes torn out, in other words, no longer attractive.