Flesh Wounds

by Stephen Greenleaf

  Lattimore pushed a button that activated a transmitter. “Antonio, please come to the Reality Room. Mr. Tanner requires further persuasion.”

  A moment later, Antonio showed up, Glock in hand, to stand guard as Lattimore unhooked me. Antonio was small and shifty and wired. The other guy had seemed disgusted by Jensen’s hobby, but this one obviously reveled in it.

  When we were out of the little black room and back in the parlor, Lattimore issued instructions. “Take him to the pool house, Antonio. Show him how vulnerable his friend Ms. Evans is. Then convince him to tell me who made the tape he brought with him this evening. He will be more amenable if the menace is to Ms. Evans rather than himself.”

  Antonio nodded and gestured with his gun. “This way.”

  I could only do as I was told.

  We weren’t out of the room when a beeper went off. Antonio picked a hand mike off his belt and spoke. “Hernandez.”

  The voice on the other end was loud enough to escape his earpieces. “There’s an incursion at the pool house.”

  Antonio activated some speaker.

  “Armed?”

  “Unknown.”

  “How many?”

  “One confirmed.”

  “Purpose?”

  “Unclear.”

  “What’s your location?”

  “Command and control.”

  “I’m on my way. I’ll handle—”

  “Shit. Now there’s someone at the gate.”

  “Who?”

  “Van. Purpose unclear.”

  “ID?”

  “Not yet. Wait. They say they’re from Erospace. The porn store. They claim they’re making a delivery.”

  Antonio glanced at Lattimore. Lattimore shrugged. “Doubtful. I suspect a coordinated assault.”

  “Possible.”

  Antonio looked at his boss. Lattimore only shrugged again. Antonio took it as clearance to issue instructions.

  “You wait for the van,” he told Tacoma in command and control. “I’ll take the pool house. I’ll leave Tanner with J.L. and—”

  “Is that smart?” Tacoma interrupted.

  Antonio looked at his boss. “Perhaps not. I’ll take them both to the pool house. You join up as soon as delivery is effected and the van is off premises.”

  “Roger.”

  Antonio hooked the mike on his belt and handed Lattimore his pistol, then pulled a second one out of his boot. It was chromed and tiny, as lethal as plutonium. “If he gets out of line, shoot him in the belly,” he instructed. “Keep shooting till he falls down, but stop unless he produces a weapon. If he has a weapon, keep shooting till the clip is empty. Clear?”

  Lattimore’s eyes gleamed happily. “Clear. Roger wilco.”

  Antonio whirled on his heel and marched down the hall like a middle manager caught in a merger. Lattimore herded me after him. I lagged back so I could speak without being overheard by the point man.

  “If someone dies in this, your world will fall apart.”

  “What world?”

  “The blackmail with the women and their daddies. The special clients. The erotic art gallery and the titty bars. All of it. In a murder case, clout doesn’t count.”

  He was unperturbed. “No one’s going to die. And even if they do, it won’t be murder, it’ll be self-defense.”

  “It won’t wash, Jensen. There’s too many of us. Once you start, you can’t stop killing until you’ve killed us all.”

  “All who? What’s going on? Who’s the intruder at the pool house?” His voice trembled with uncertainty, a ten-year-old in trouble.

  “I don’t know who it is,” I said. “But I do know the van really is from Erospace.” And I was sorry for putting them at risk. “If your goons mess this up, you’ll go down with them. Respondeat superior, Jensen.”

  “I … How do I know they’re really Erospace? It’s after midnight. This could be some kind of invasion.”

  “Who would want to invade you?”

  “Certain people in the multimedia industry want me eliminated as a competitor. I’m a threat to several established empires. There are vast sums involved—mergers, technological breakthroughs, federal licenses. I—”

  “Enough talk,” Antonio interrupted to the front of us. “Wait here.”

  He ducked into a room and came out with a Tech-9 assault weapon. “Let’s take a dip,” he joked mordantly, and herded us out of the house.

  The moonlight on the pool was a gold ribbon across a black box, a favor for a funeral. The wind in the trees issued a shush of warning. The slam of the van’s door beneath the roof of the distant portico sounded like a mortar round exploding.

  Antonio looked up. “He must have shot out the pool lights.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Lattimore said.

  “Silencer.”

  I was the meat in a paranoid sandwich.

  The pool house mimicked the main building, except that half of its front was a covered porch open to the pool and the air and the other half was cut by half-a-dozen doorways that presumably led to dressing rooms. Antonio walked into the porch, looked around, then tried the door that connected the two wings. It opened silently, into an even darker chamber than the one we occupied.

  “He can’t have gotten them all,” Antonio said, more to himself than to anyone.

  At my back, Lattimore’s breaths were as hot as a hound’s. As Antonio disappeared into the inner sanctum, Jensen spoke in a harsh whisper. “He must have the access code! He penetrated the security system! It has to be Wellington!”

  If Antonio said anything in return, I didn’t hear it.

  Lattimore shoved me forward with the gun muzzle. “You first. If that asshole’s lying in wait, you’ll be the one that gets it.”

  I took six steps and stopped. The room was as dark as the chamber I’d virtually been tortured in, dark to the extent we’d become invisible.

  “Tony?” Lattimore called out fearfully.

  “Yo.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “You see anything?”

  “No. Where was the girl when you left her?”

  “Southwest corner.”

  “I don’t see—”

  A light flamed the dark, a gleaming shaft from on high, as bright as a spring sunbeam. In the center of the circle of light on the floor, Nina Evans lay on a crimson towel, naked but not captive, contorted with allure, not pain.

  “Jesus,” Antonio whispered to my front. He lowered his gun and stepped forward.

  “No!” Lattimore cried. “It’s a trick. It’s not real.”

  “Fuck if it isn’t. I’m going to cuff her and then I’m going to have me some ass as soon as we—”

  “No! It’s a hologram! We’ve been testing a portable system. Wellington’s behind this. He has to be. He fell for her and he’s come after her, the traitorous bastard. He accessed the system and he’s turning it—”

  The light went out, darkness drowning us for a second time. I kept my eyes closed in hopes of regaining my night vision, slid two steps to the side and one to the rear, then looked for Lattimore in the gloom.

  Sound exploded in the room, the spatter of automatic weapons coming from all sides amid intermittent cries of pain and warning—the indelible sounds of a firefight, the abject terrors of an ambush. Lattimore said something to my flank but I couldn’t make it out over the din. Antonio was nowhere to be seen or heard.

  A square of light flashed on the opposite wall: a man, armed and angry. Antonio swore at my flank, then squeezed off a burst from the Tech-9. His target was holding a rifle and looked ready to use it. But it wasn’t Chris Wellington, it was John Wayne, dressed as a Texas Ranger. When Antonio’s rounds struck the screen that contained him, the Duke shattered in a shower of sparks and glass and we were back in darkness.

  I used the diversion to wrest the pistol from Lattimore’s pudgy hand and club him on the temple. He fell to the ground without a sound loud enough to alarm his guard, who was still alert for enemi
es.

  A second spurt of light produced a brand-new threat—Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, magnum extended, threatening to make our day. Antonio wasted him in seconds. Then Stallone as Rambo, Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, and Bogart as Marlowe, popped into view like targets in a shooting gallery, an all-star posse as menacing as myth and makeup could make them. Somewhere along the way, Antonio stopped shooting. The room smelled of cordite and short circuits. Only Bogey still looked down on us, cynical, amused, and disdainful.

  The next light that came on was a single spot from across the room and Antonio himself was the target. He stood like a deer in the headlights, whirling this way and that, looking for something to shoot. I told him to drop his gun. When he raised his weapon and twirled my way, I shot him in the left leg. When he squeezed off a round as he fell, his victim was acoustical tile.

  “Drop it,” I said again, and fired a round of warning. This time he complied, sliding his weapon across the floor, then grasping his leg to stem the bleeding.

  Without any prompt from me, the normal lights came on and Chris Wellington and Nina Evans were standing in the doorway, arm in arm, smiling with joy and relief. She wore only the crimson towel, cinched well above her breasts: Aphrodite out of the sauna, Juno fresh from the Jacuzzi. Every man in the room wanted her, not excluding myself. I wondered how it would be to live with that sort of power and decided the person who would know best was Jensen Lattimore, living with a brain that was coveted for much the same reasons.

  “Nice special effects,” I said to Wellington.

  “Thanks. I’m glad you figured it out before they did.”

  I looked at Nina. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded and cinched her towel.

  “There’s another one roaming around,” I cautioned. “You two stay here. Make sure Tony stays down.”

  I was on my way out the door when Tacoma came through it, arms loaded down with Erospace pictures. “Hey, boss, where do you want these things? They’re—”

  When he saw my gun he stopped, then dropped the pictures and raised his hands. “I think those belong to you,” I said to Nina, then told Tacoma to lie down on the floor.

  She looked at Chris and he nodded. “We’ll take care of them,” he said.

  I spoke again to Nina. “I need to know one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know a man named Crowder?”

  She blinked and clutched her towel. “I don’t think so.”

  I described him.

  “I think he may have been following me. Why? Who is he?”

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “No.”

  “Or send him pictures?”

  “Of course not.” She shook her head, then looked at the men on the floor at her feet. “Does he have something to do with all this?”

  I told her I wasn’t sure, which was as near as I could come to the truth. Then I made myself dig deeper.

  “One last thing,” I whispered, low enough so no one could overhear. “Did you sleep with Ted Evans?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “That’s crazy.”

  I was amazed to find myself relieved.

  CHAPTER 29

  “One last thing,” he says, this strange man who came into the room a prisoner and now seems to be in charge. “Did you sleep with Ted Evans?”

  She shakes her head. “That’s crazy.” Why would he ask such a question? Who could he know? What does he want?

  The man turns to Chris and asks whether to call the police. Chris looks at her and repeats the man’s question.

  “No,” she says quickly. “Not if he stops what he’s doing. Not if he gets help for Mandy.”

  Everyone looks at Lattimore, who looks capable of little except apprehension.

  “If he goes to trial for blackmail and extortion,” the stranger says, “everything in his computers will probably come out. The stuff in Richter’s system, too. A lot of heartache for a lot of people for something short of murder.”

  Chris takes her hand and kisses it. “We can just leave if you want. If it’s okay with you, it’s okay with me.”

  She gives him a squeeze in the affirmative. “So we just walk out of here?” she asks.

  The stranger nods. “But make a stop on Capitol Hill some time today. Let them know you’re safe.”

  She nods, then wonders how he knows where she lives or used to, how he knows there are people out there who worry about her. “Who are you, anyway?” she blurts as she wonders at his oddly putrid smell.

  “A friend of the family.”

  “Ted’s?”

  “Peggy’s.”

  “Oh.”

  For the first time, the man seems nervous and unsure. “Peggy’s a wonderful woman. If you give her a chance, she’ll be a good stepmother. And a good friend.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s been my friend for fifteen years.”

  She nods her head, not knowing what it means, not knowing if she will or won’t do what he asks, just knowing that she doesn’t want this man to know any more about her than he already does, which from the look in his eyes is too much.

  The little house looked even more decrepit than on my first visit, the spires of downtown that loomed in the distance a perpetual monument to Dale Crowder’s descent into crapulence and torpor. I knocked on the door, expecting to reencounter Mabel’s hostile bulk, but there was no answer.

  The door was ajar so I stuck my head inside and called out. No response, except for the musk of spoiled food and spilled booze that wafted at me from the doomful clutter of the interior. I couldn’t hold it against them, since I’d smelled that bad myself before I dropped by the room and cleaned up.

  I backed out the door and strolled down the path toward the back. Even before I got there, I knew what I would find, the result of a sudden stillness in the air and a sweetish hint of putrefaction that overpowered the whiff of decay that had trailed me from the house.

  They were lying at the doorway to a small shed, his body half in and half out of the crude wooden outbuilding, hers prone in the dense weeds, her dress hiked above her puffy thighs as though she was about to go wading. She had hit him with an iron skillet, hard enough to dent his skull at a point just above the ear. He had retained enough consciousness to retaliate by slashing a rusty sickle across her throat. The sickle was still lodged there, buried halfway in the folds of her fatty flesh, dried blood bathing its crusty surface with a blackish lacquer. The scythe must have destroyed her larynx, among other things; as a final badge of abandonment, no one could have heard her scream.

  The smell of cheap liquor rose off them like a fog and a variety of dusky arthropods and pasty maggots were feasting on their flesh and blood, two trails of which mingled in a discarded tin of cat food that lay halfway between the corpses. I put my handkerchief over my nose and stepped over and around the bodies and entered the tumbledown shed.

  Although I’d expected something like it, the contents were still overwhelming. Every surface was covered with photographs of Nina—informal snapshots in mundane settings, elegant poses cut from magazines, artful studies suitable for the finest galleries, the mugging shot he’d swiped at Richter’s, and some furtive snaps I suspected had been taken as Crowder trailed his daughter through the streets of Seattle, trailing what remained of his life, trailing his only legacy. One by one, the photos weren’t all that shocking, but pinned side by side and wall to wall, the effect was disorienting, a blizzard of the face and figure of the woman who was known to the world as Nina Evans, known in every venue outside this pathetic shed as someone else’s offspring.

  The chair that Crowder had placed in the middle of his montage was worn to the nub from use. The stack of Bud cans just beyond it suggested the brand of sacrament; the pile of cigarette butts proclaimed the degree of devotion. She was his goddess, he was her high priest. As with all great faiths, the worshiped and the worshiper never exchanged a word.

  Paternal prid
e was one way to look at it; grotesque obsession was another. Whatever the psychologists might call it, I felt certain that the only way Dale Crowder could have amassed the extensive collection, in addition to stalking his daughter for months, was to burgle Gary Richter’s storehouse. Richter must have caught him at it and been killed in an ensuing struggle. Or perhaps Crowder had lain in wait to murder Richter out of rage at the exploitation of his daughter, even though the pictures on the wall suggested Crowder saw Richter’s work in much the way Jensen Lattimore saw it, as a salve for some internal burn. Those were the options I planned to present to Lieutenant Molson, at any rate, options that let everyone off the hook but me, for the knowledge I was taking with me back to San Francisco.

  I was making my way back down the path when a car pulled to a stop behind mine. The car was a rusted 240Z and the driver was Jeff Evans. We met in the thorny thicket that was Dale Crowder’s front yard.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “I can tell you right now you won’t find Nina. She doesn’t even know about this place.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. She still thinks Teddy’s her daddy.”

  “How did you find out otherwise?”

  “Something Mom let slip. She called Ted an impostor once. It got me thinking, and I’m a good enough reporter that it didn’t take me long to learn what she was talking about.”

  “But you kept quiet.”

  “Hey. From what I could see, the incest taboo was the only thing keeping Nina and Teddy out of the sack; it seemed like a good idea to keep up the charade. You find her?” His concern overpowered his nonchalance.

  “Yep.”

  “Where is she?”

  “With a guy named Wellington.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He saved her life. She’s grateful. It may not be enough to last a lifetime, but it looks good for the next few months. How’d you get along with Crowder?”

  Jeff glanced at the dilapidated house. “It was rough at first—he’s a sot and he carries a heavy load of rage and self-pity. But he helped me understand some things that Mandy was going through, with her addiction, I mean. He even had some suggestions how to help her. He’s pretty savvy about the street stuff when he’s sober. Where is he, down at the Juneau?”