Dark Time: Mortal Path (10 page)

She stripped, tossing her clothes into a laundry bag—it cost thousands of dollars more per year in

“tips” for her laundry service to ignore the occasional bloodstains and to repair knife holes, supposedly obtained during martial-arts training—and stepped into the shower.

“Low cycle.”

Dozens of jets arranged along the walls of the shower sprayed her with warm water, encasing her body in a bubble of fine mist. A delicately scented soap mixed with the water.

She scrubbed her hair with a shampoo scented with herbs, and stood while the shower rinsed her and 32 z 138

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then dried her with warm air. The shower could be programmed to be a lot more intensive, but that was for another time. She was looking for comfort.

Running her fingers through her damp hair, Maliha considered meditating but put it off. Underneath one of the windows was her sleeping space, where the carpet ended, leaving an exposed neat rectangle of wood flooring. On it was a tatami mat, woven of straw and ninety centimeters long, as required by Japanese tradition. She’d adopted the mat after a lengthy stay in Japan during which she added to her martial-arts skills. She unrolled a thin futon onto the mat and crawled on.

“Lights out.”

In this place, she was free to let her thoughts wander, to be vulnerable.

Maliha’s heart held more than the ache for the people whose lives she’d taken. It held the longing for a normal life, the kind of life she’d begun in the seventeenth century. A life enriched by a loving husband, a baby, a home that wasn’t an armory, the scent of healing herbs defining her life instead of the scent of blood. As a demon’s servant, those thoughts had meant nothing to her. Now her heart was open to the prospect of love, but would it be fair to a man, much less a child, to bring them into the kind of life she lived? To share the uncertainty of her life and the necessity of redemption, the randomness of her aging?

Her three close friends were a family of sorts. Amaro, saved from gang violence in Brazil. Xia Yanmeng, a refugee from the Chinese Cultural Revolution who had been in prison with a death sentence when she spirited him out of the country. Hound, a Vietnam vet whom she had saved in the jungle and protected thereafter. Yes, she loved them, because love had so many ways of expressing itself. But the ways of love and trust between a husband and wife and between mother and child seemed just beyond her grasp.

For centuries she’d walled herself off from a serious relationship with a man. She’d been mortal for more than fifty years, and not a brick of that wall had given way.

Tears leaked from her closed eyes.

Her phone chimed, the landline only a few people knew about. She ignored it, letting the call roll to her answering machine.

“Pick up, Winters. I know you’re there. If you don’t talk to me, you’ll never hear about last night, and it was s-w-e-e-t.”

Maliha wiped the tears from her eyes and hesitated. It was her friend, Randy Baxter, whom Maliha thought of as her parallel self in the normal world. Randy was twenty-eight, intelligent, not nearly as devoted to her exercise regimen as Maliha, and tended to take her horoscope a bit too seriously. She worked as a business analyst in a Chicago corporation, but intended to quit her job and start a green company any day now. She claimed to be the Mother Earth type and looked the part, favoring long cotton dresses and letting her naturally curly hair cascade over her shoulders. Randy had a fresh, no-bullshit attitude that appealed to men, and she exuded sexiness like a female moth drawing her mate to her with pheromones. A few blinks of her long, golden eyelashes, and men didn’t stand a chance.

“Pick up! Five, four, three…”

Maliha rolled off the mat and grabbed the phone before Randy finished her countdown.

“How was your date with Rip?”

“Couldn’t stand it, could you?” Randy said.

Maliha sighed. Rip was the nickname of Randy’s latest guy, so named for his well-developed six-pack. Randy tended to name all of her men by their body parts.

Maliha foraged in the refrigerator and come up with half a bottle of wine.

What else? Of course. Microwave popcorn. Just the thing with wine.

She took a hit from the wine bottle while listening to Randy begin the date report. The microwave binged.

“What’re you fixing? You’re not making s’mores, are you?”

“No,” Maliha said. She was smiling. “Just some popcorn. We’ll have s’mores again soon.”

“Damn straight we will.”

Maliha perched naked on a stool at the kitchen counter, bottle and bowl at hand, and put Randy on the speakerphone. Warmth started to spread through her from the wine.

Another day gone and I’m still alive. Take that, Rabishu, and stuff it!

“So what did Rip do next?”

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T
he buzz of her intercom woke Maliha at 8 A.M.. She buried her face and tried to ignore it.

“Ms. Winters, you have a visitor.” It wasn’t Arnie’s voice.

“Mmm.”

Correctly interpreting that she’d asked who it was, the voice answered, “It’s Mr. Amaro Reese. He’s on your approved list.”

She lifted her head and told the bellman that she’d expect Mr. Reese in ten minutes.

“I’m afraid he’s already on his way up. He has unconditional access.”

Maliha dressed and took the stairs down to the thirty-ninth floor, taking with her the envelope Arnie had given her the night before. There was no one waiting in the hall outside her public condo’s door, so Amaro had beaten her there. He had a key and didn’t hesitate to use it.

In the kitchen of her condo, she found Amaro licking his fingers, having polished off a croissant.

“You have any more of these?” he asked.

“No, but I can have some brought up. They’re from the bakery in the building.”

He rubbed his belly. She laughed and placed the order, and then ground some coffee beans. Her favorite, Kopi Luwak, was an expensive, ongoing gift from a former lover who hoped to get back in her bed. The coffee was rare because the beans were hand-collected from the Sumatran forest floor after having passed through the intestines of civets, catlike mammals. Amaro liked it, but she’d never told him the origin of the coffee. Some people reacted negatively to the whole idea.

While the coffee was brewing, Maliha noticed the envelope she’d put on the counter and opened it.

Inside was a photo of her in her car that must have been taken before she went to Atlanta. It didn’t have the grainy appearance of a photo taken through a telephoto lens, so it must have been taken from close by.

Drawn boldly across the image was the letter
S
, in red marker.

Creepy. I’ve had stalkers before. Must have picked up one, maybe a fan of my books. The poor
thing has no idea who he—or she—has targeted.

She tucked the photo into a drawer before Amaro spotted it.

The bakery package arrived. She put the croissants on the kitchen table and poured cups of coffee.

“So what do you have so far?” she asked.

“For one thing, Nando and Hairy were doing a lot of work behind my back. I’ve turned up four clients for Nando and three for Hairy. They had two clients in common, Advanced PharmBots, Inc., and Shale Technology Services. PharmBots is a North Carolina firm, run by Diane Harvey, that makes equipment used in hospitals. ShaleTech is named for its founder, Gregory Shale, and it’s here in Chicago.

It makes computerized control systems for power stations.”

“It’s possible that their deaths had to do with one of the clients they had in common. Were the jobs the dead coders did security tests?”

“Break-ins? Nope. These were straight coding jobs. I had a bid in on that PharmBots one. Nando and Hairy undercut my bid.”

“I didn’t know you were interested in coding jobs.”

“I’m not, but the money was good. If I’d gotten the contract, I would’ve subbed it out to them anyway. You going to talk to Diane Harvey?”

“Sure, I’ll talk to her. The Shale guy, too.”

“Ask Ms. Harvey about the lawsuit. Something’s going on with a lawsuit, but as far as I got, I didn’t pick up any details on it.”

She nodded. “No juicy tidbits about Gregory Shale?”

“You’re on your own there. Turn on that patented charm of yours.”

Maliha drained her coffee cup. “Are you planning to stay with me while we work on this?”

She saw heat flicker in Amaro’s eyes at the thought of staying with her, but he extinguished it and looked away. “Do I have to sleep on the couch?”

“Not unless you want to. There’s a perfectly good bed in the guest room. Two of them, in fact.”

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He frowned, but good-naturedly. He was flirting, hoping for an invitation to her bedroom. Rescued from assault by a Brazilian gang when he was sixteen, Amaro had recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday. Since he’d surpassed Maliha’s apparent age, he’d begun flirting with her. She wasn’t sure if he was serious or just related that way to every woman.

If I had to guess, I’d say he’s serious. Mmm, maybe I should talk to Rosie. Make that, talk to Rosie
after
she has the baby.

“I already checked in at a hotel, but I’ll move my stuff over here when I get the chance. The media’s latched on to the Geek Murders, you know. I figure it’s my job to stand up for the geeks, even though those two sons of bitches stole my code job. It’s not like anybody else will. I’m going with you to North Carolina to look into PharmBots. I’ve got a personal stake in this one.”

After he left, Maliha contacted Yanmeng’s wife, Eliu, in Seattle. She gave Eliu a brief summary and asked if she could use her press connections to set up an interview for Maliha with Diane Harvey.

“Your articles stink. You should stick to your novels. Speaking of which, don’t wait…”

“I know, I’ll get busy on it.”

Maliha opened up her manuscript on the computer and read it for a few minutes to get back into the story. Then she put herself behind the eyes of Detective Dick Stallion and got to work on
A Lust for
Murder
. Eight thousand words, one jilted wife, one dead prostitute, and a suspicious fire in Stallion’s office later, she came up for air. The book was shaping up nicely.

On an impulse, she’d added a scene inspired by the way she’d met Amaro and Rosie: Stallion rescued a young brother and sister from a street gang. Her reading public loved that kind of episode, the kind where innocence triumphed, with a shove from Stallion.

Good ol’ Dick.

The phone rang and caller ID told her it was Randy. This time Maliha answered promptly, since Randy seemed to have a sixth sense that told her when Maliha was at home but letting the answering machine pick up.

“Ahoj, příteli
,” Randy said.

“Hello to you too, friend. Do you want me to continue in Czech?”

“Nope. Just testing you. I sat next to an interesting guy at breakfast at the diner this morning, and he taught me how to say hello in case I go to the Czech Republic. He’s well-traveled.”

“So he’s not from…”

“No, silly, he’s American. But it made me think of you, because you’re well-traveled, too. In fact, he’d be great for you.”

“I don’t have any trouble finding men for myself.”

“So you say, but are they marriage material?”

“What?”

“Haven’t you thought about the big three-oh around the corner, girlfriend?”

“Occasionally.”
Except the birthday I’m facing is closer to three three-oh.

“You want to have your family while you’re still young enough to chase after the kids, don’t you?”

In a moment, Maliha was back in village jail cell, her wrists tied, puffing her breath into her stillborn Constanta in a dark, hopeless place. In a few heartbeats she leaped through the years, to land in the nursery of Candice, sitting in the rocking chair with her own sweet baby lying in her lap, a cruel vision courtesy of Rabishu.

Setting to rest the secret doubts…my baby is fine.

Toes…check.

Fingers…

Randy took the silence for assent. “See, what you need is marriage material, not just those guys you fool around with.”

Could I go through it again? With the right man…maybe so. But what kind of man is right for me?

“Hello? Anyone still on the line?”

Maliha was jogged back into the present. “You’re a fine one to talk about marriage material. Tell me about Rip again.”

“Rip, schmip. I’m talking the ring, the gown, the whole thing. You gotta think about it sometime.”

“Remember the last time you played matchmaker, Randy?”

“You mean Ollie? Okay, I’ll admit he didn’t have good hygiene. I never actually met him in person, 35 z 138

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only saw his photo on Facebook. I met Jake in person, though. He smells like a man and he’s really hot.”

Randy’s words unexpectedly triggered the thought of sweaty bodies glued together, and Maliha felt a rush of sensation radiating from her lower spine that left her wobbly on her legs. She plopped into a chair.

Wow, it has been a while.

“Oh, God, Randy, you’re not trying to fix me up with a guy you just met in a diner.”

“I didn’t say that. Did I say that? You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“I’m putting words in your mouth because I know you. You didn’t say anything to him, did you?”

There was guilty silence on the line.

“Geez, Randy!”

“Um, I hope you’re not busy for lunch today.”

M
aliha took a taxi to Al’s Beef on West Taylor in the Little Italy neighborhood. Randy had picked the place, but Maliha approved of the choice. She got there early, hoping she could check out her blind date as he arrived. As she pushed the door open, she swore that this was the last time—
ever
—that Randy was going to rope her into something like this.

A woman who’s danced in the arms of princes, and I’m having a blind date with some guy Randy
thought was hot.