Damage Control (12 page)

20

M
ARSHALL
C
OLE
R
ECLINED
against the pillows, legs spread, hands gripping the sheets. The woman’s head bobbed rhythmically between his knees. At the foot of the bed, the television glowed blue in the dark motel room. Cole groaned, but it was more from frustration than from pleasure. Since the incident in the motel, with Larry King getting shot and all, Cole had been unable to relax, unable to stop looking over his shoulder, unable to close his eyes without seeing the man with the black sunglasses, unable even to enjoy a good blow job.

The woman sat up to catch her breath and massaged the muscles in her jaw. She grabbed his erection with her hand and roughly stroked him as she reached down the side of the bed to retrieve her longneck Budweiser. “You think it’s gonna happen anytime this century, Marshall?” She took a pull off the beer, and a stream rolled down her neck between pert breasts.

Unable to see the television, Cole grabbed her head and lowered her back onto his erection, trying to concentrate. The beer had not dulled the throbbing pain in his ankle from the fall out of the bathroom window or helped him forget the haunting image of the man. He reached for his bottle on the nightstand and finished it while listening to the newscast. The goddamned weatherman was blathering on about the forecast for the rest of the country. Who gave a shit? How many people in Washington really cared that it was 85 degrees in Los Angeles or balmy in Hawaii? Talk about rubbing everybody’s noses in it. Cole figured they could cut the forecast by two to three minutes and give the extra time to sports, which always came last and was always jammed for time. If he owned the station, he’d put sports first. Hell, it was the only part of the news that wasn’t bad news.

“Come,” the woman said with aggravation. “Come, Marshall, come. I can’t go all night.” Cole lowered her head back in place.

When the weatherman finished, Cole opened his eyes, but the station had cut back to the two newscasters, a man and a woman behind a desk having a fucking yukfest. Cole closed his eyes. Another news story—what they called a “filler” before the sports. Blah, blah, blah. What Cole cared about was whether the Mariners were still three games back of the Angels in the American League West. The boys had won six straight, and Cole wanted to know if the streak had reached seven. The Mariners were about the only thing he cared about in Washington. Rained too fucking much. He was going back to southeast Idaho, where it was dry, even in the winter, when it snowed.

Cole started to drift off, the alcohol making him sleepy, hearing intermittent bits of the news story. He concentrated on his groin. If he timed it right, he could come just before the sports. He heard cheering and opened his eyes, fearing he’d fallen asleep, but it was just some dumbass in a suit mingling his way through a crowd. About to close his eyes again, he suddenly saw the face. Then the woman’s head bobbed up, blocking the television. Cole sat bolt upright and forced her head to the base of his shaft. A chill ran through him. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered.

The woman grunted. Cole ignored her. Then she bit him.

“Shit.”

Cole grabbed her by the hair and threw her off the bed, scrambling forward, holding his dick in his hands. The face on the television was gone; he was looking at the news anchor’s big head.

The woman got up from the floor, slapping at him with both hands. “Goddammit, Marshall. Fuck you. You’re an asshole. What is wrong with you? You can beat your own self off.”

Cole held her away with one arm, bending her wrist backward as he changed channels to search the other broadcasts. The newscast on Channel 5 went to the sports desk for a quick teaser. Then it went to a commercial.

21

I
SWEAR TO
G
OD
, he’s going to explode.” Linda sounded both concerned and amused as she reported to Dana on Marvin Crocket the following morning. “I just hope he doesn’t have a heart attack and need mouth-to-mouth, because if that’s the case, somebody better call the coroner.”

For Dana to have been AWOL an entire afternoon and now tardy the following morning was, to Crocket, open insubordination. Given that he wanted to fire her, it was also ironic that his biggest fear was undoubtedly that she was out interviewing with other law firms and scheming to steal his clients. “Tell him you can’t reach me. Tell him I have my cell phone turned off.” Dana smiled, thinking about the reaction that would get. Then she ended the call and did turn off her phone.

She stepped from the car and crossed Harrison Street in a drizzling rain, pushing through the heavy doors of the stucco building near Seattle’s city center. Drills buzzed like a horde of mosquitoes, and she detected a faint metallic odor that reminded her of the dentist’s office. Three Korean men sat hunched at cubicles, deft fingers working drill bits and blue flames over fine pieces of jewelry. Dana approached an unfinished wooden counter nicked and charred by cigarette butts and pen and pencil markings. She asked the woman behind the counter if she could speak with Kim, uncertain despite years of patronage whether Kim was the Korean owner’s first or last name. Everyone, it seemed, just called him Kim. Kim had been her mother’s wholesale jeweler and had set Dana’s engagement ring and wedding band. Each anniversary, she returned to have him add a single small diamond. Over the years he had also worked on earrings, bracelets, and a watch, repairing clasps or adding brackets.

“Mrs. Dana.” Kim walked to the counter through a string of beads hanging over a doorway. He wore the same outfit each time she came—black polyester pants and a white shortsleeved shirt with a pen clipped to the breast pocket. The cloth above the pocket was marked with blue ink dashes. Though Kim had to be in his sixties, he had an ageless round face free of wrinkles. His eyes were magnified behind black-framed glasses from which extended an antenna-like wire to a magnifying glass he could lower over his left lens.

“Is it time already?” Kim turned to a calendar on the wall. “Nine diamonds?”

“No, not yet.”
Probably not ever,
she thought. “We have another four months to survive.”

Kim smiled, choosing to interpret her comment as a joke. “You survive,” he said with confidence. He raised his hands and shook them. “Three years, I have many women coming to have their wedding rings made into earrings. After three years, not so many. You solid.”

“I have a favor to ask.” She reached into her purse. “I found a piece of jewelry, and I think it might be expensive. I was hoping you could tell me about it.”

Kim flipped the magnifying glass on the end of the wire into place, staring out at her like a cartoon character with one enormous black eye. Dana placed the earring in his callused hand, and he rolled it along his fingertips, then bounced it lightly in his palm as if he could weigh the stones by feel. He held the earring by the clasp and considered it like a very small fish. Finally, he turned on a high-wattage lamp and examined it under a bright white light.

“Very expensive. Blue stone is tanzanite. Rare. The diamonds are very high quality, and the setting is unique.”

“How much would something like this cost?”

Kim looked up, propping his elbows on the counter while continuing to hold the earring underneath the light. The intensity of his concentration indicated he was adding and multiplying figures in his head. “For two?” He spoke out loud but for his own benefit. “Possibly fifty, fifty-five thousand. Maybe more.”

Dana had expected the price to be high, but the number still surprised her. “That much?”

“At least.” He stood up. “You see here, design is trademarked. Make more valuable.”

“Trademarked?”

“Only one. So price could be much higher if you have two.”

“I’ve never heard of jewelry being trademarked.”

“Oh, yes.” Kim nodded decisively. “I have my own trademark.” He took a pad of scratch paper near a telephone and pulled the pen from his pocket, clicking it once and scribbling what looked like a “K” within a circle. “Many pieces my own design. You wearing one of them.” He slipped the pen back into his pocket without clicking it, leaving another blue ink mark on his shirt. He handed Dana the earring and a small magnifying eyepiece. “On back you see marking. That is trademark.”

Dana flipped over the earring and examined a small etching that, when magnified, appeared to be two “W”s interlocked by the center “V.” She knew from patent work for her business clients that there were governmental offices for the registration of trademarks. “Is there a place where the jeweler registers his trademark, Kim? Where would I go to determine the name of the artist with this trademark?”

Kim smiled. “You would come here. Lucky you.” He laughed. “Wait one moment.” He stepped away from the counter, disappearing again through the beaded doorway.

Behind her, Dana heard the sound of a drill and instinctively ran her tongue along the fillings of her teeth. Kim reemerged with a well-worn magazine, set it on the counter, and flipped through torn and dog-eared pages. He used an index finger blackened and scarred with tiny burn marks to scan the pages. When he found the interlocked “W”s, he traced it to a page number, then fanned the pages of the magazine. After another moment, he closed it.

“William Welles,” he said.

“That’s the jeweler?” Dana asked.

Kim nodded. “That is the designer.”

“William Welles,” she said, as if trying it out. Her decision to talk with Kim had not been such a long shot after all. “I’d like to find him. How would I do that?”

Kim nodded and slipped the top magazine to the side, beginning the process anew with a second magazine. Dana searched through her purse for a pen, but Kim reached for the pen in his pocket and handed it to her without looking up from the magazine. She tore off a piece of paper from the scratch pad on the counter. “If he has a telephone number, perhaps I can call before I go by.”

Kim shook his head. “You might call him today, but you not going to drive by. Not unless your car float.”

22

T
HE SOUND OF
a car door slamming caused Marshall Cole to sit upright in the chair. The television chirped at him like a bird at the first light of day. He peeked through the thick curtain pulled across the hotel window and squinted at the bright stream of sunlight. He’d fallen asleep, or likely passed out. During the night, he’d gotten up and used the gap in the curtain as a portal to the parking lot, watching intently for any sign of the blond man with the dark sunglasses. It was him. Cole was sure of it. Damn sure. Shit, how could he forget? He saw the face in his dreams every night—a fucking nightmare.

King had said he thought the man was Special Forces or some shit like that, but now Cole was thinking maybe the guy was more like Secret Service or, worse, a mercenary. Those dudes were the real badasses; the law didn’t mean shit to them, and they were just as well trained in all the covert shit as the Special Forces guys. They just didn’t live by any rules. They made their own. It explained how the man could appear at the hotel like a fucking ghost. He’d probably been one of those tunnel rats in the jungles of Vietnam or a sniper killing all the fucking towel-heads in Iraq. And now he was intent on killing Cole. Shit. Larry King had gotten them into a whole nest of trouble. The fuckhead. Whatever was going on, whoever the dude James Hill had been, this was bad shit. They’d killed King, and they would kill Cole. They could do it, too, people in the military. They could kill people. Make them disappear, wipe out birth records, anything that said the person ever even existed. Hell, they could make your own mother and father forget you. They had drugs to do that. Cole had seen it once on an
X Files
episode.

Cole turned from the window and felt a sharp pain in his neck. He rubbed it vigorously. Longneck bottles lay scattered about the carpet. One, partly full, lay on its side near a wet spot. Cole had indeed passed out. Shit. He pulled back the curtain again. The glare of the sun reflected off the windshields of the cars in the lot. Had the same cars been parked there last night? Which ones? He couldn’t remember. He had kept track of the cars for hours, afraid the man would pull another Houdini, but then he’d passed out. Now everything was a blur.

He patted his stomach, did not feel the butt of the automatic, and fumbled along the sides of the chair until realizing the gun was in his other hand. He stood. He was losing it, starting to panic. He picked up the bottle and drank the warm remnants in two swallows. When he burped, a burning sensation filled the back of his throat. He needed some food to calm his stomach. It felt like he’d swallowed red-hot coals. Taking a shit would be like shooting flames out his ass. He shoved the automatic in his pants and walked to the bed. Andrea Bright lay facedown on top of the covers, naked, mouth open, snoring. Her left eyeball rolled back and forth beneath the lid. Her name was what people called an irony, since she wasn’t bright by any stretch of the imagination. She was dumb as a stump. But she did give a good blow job, not that Cole could appreciate it under the circumstances. He slapped her on her ass. It brought her head off the pillow.

“Huh? What?” She brushed strands of thin brown hair from her face.

“Get up. Time to go.”

She put her head back down. “Too tired.”

He slapped her again, harder. The flesh of his hand cracked like a whip. “Get up, goddammit.”

She sat up with her arms and legs flailing and threw a pillow at him. “Fuck you.”

Cole shut off the television, gathered his brown leather jacket, and pulled a wad of cash from a pocket. He unfolded it and counted the bills on the cheap laminate dresser. He still had more than eleven hundred, close to twelve hundred. The hotels had been inexpensive. He’d been careful how much they spent.

“Where are we going?” The woman slipped on a pair of blue jeans without any underwear and sucked in her stomach to snap the button.

Someone rapped three times on the door. Cole pulled the automatic, flipped off the safety, and damn near started shooting through the hollow door. He raised one finger to tell Bright to keep quiet. She rolled her eyes and flipped him the bird. He carefully pulled back the curtain. A diminutive Mexican woman stood beside a pushcart loaded with toilet paper and towels.

“Don’t need anything,” Cole said, angry. The woman had frightened the shit out of him.

The woman spoke through the door: “You want fresh towels?”

Bright laughed and flopped on her back on the bed, pulling up her knees like it was a real riot fest.

“No!” Cole yelled. “Don’t need anything.”

“When you want me to clean the room?”

“I don’t give a shit, Señorita. Go get a taco or something. Not now.”

The woman frowned and pushed the cart down the concrete walkway. Cole waited until he heard the same three rhythmic knocks, followed by the same series of questions.

Bright pulled a T-shirt over her head and struggled to find the armholes, still laughing. “What? You think the maid is gonna shoot you, James Bond?”

“Fuck you. I said get dressed.”

She sat on the bed, pulling on white pumps. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“Idaho.” Cole slipped on his jacket.

“Fuck that. Bunch of redneck hicks in Idaho.”

“You want to stay, stay.” Cole held out his hand. “Give me the keys to the car.”

“It’s my car, Marshall.”

And therein was Cole’s dilemma. He would have liked to dump Bright and save himself the expenses and aggravation, seeing as how he couldn’t even enjoy a blow job, but he needed the car, and Bright was vengeful enough to call the police if he took it. “Then get your ass in the car.” He shoved her toward the door. “Move.”

Bright bent down and picked up her underwear and bra, holding them in a ball while retrieving her jean jacket from the chair. She pulled open the hotel door. “You’re an ass.”