The Girls He Adored (26 page)

So what other information did Pender have? He asked himself what salient facts would have gone into that report that Agent Pastor had requested, and was now about as likely to get as he was a blow job from the attorney general.

Easy: Dallas. The Sleep-Tite motel where you could call for a number-one girl to make boom-boom. A number-one girl named . . . what was it . . . think back . . . no,
go
back . . .
pussy's pussy . . . call the desk . . . tightest little piece I ever . . .
Ann something . . . Ann Tran!

Where to? Suddenly Pender had the answer to his first question.

F
OR HER DAY AND AGE,
and taking into account her profession and the corner of the world she lived in, Irene Cogan's sexual experience was somewhat limited. She knew everything that people did, she just hadn't done much of it herself. And what she had done, she'd done with Frank—she'd remained a virgin until shortly after they became engaged. Their sex life was fulfilling, if not adventurous, a phrase that might have been applied to the rest of their marriage as well. The last time they made love was the night before he died. It was sweet; the next morning he was cold beside her. She hadn't made love to a man since, except in her dreams.

And now this. While Max handcuffed Bernadette to the steering wheel, Irene took a blanket from the trunk, spread it across a bed of pine needles, and stood beside it—for some reason it seemed important to her not to be lying down waiting for him. Then he was standing before her, face to face, and it was as if she were back in that dream of the operating theater, where they were naked, and he'd dropped to his knees and kissed her to orgasm.

If he drops to his knees, I'll die, she thought. Instead he took off her red wig, tossed it into the bushes, then leaned forward and kissed her. She realized he wanted her to open her mouth, to kiss him back. And she should have, she knew she should have—two lives were at stake—but she just couldn't bring herself to do it. She averted her face; or rather her head turned itself away from him— that was more how it felt.

“Even better,” he whispered into her left ear, which she'd unwittingly presented to him—at these close quarters there was no escaping intimacy. He brought his hand up, splayed those smooth,
bony fingers across her left cheek, and shoved gently, turning her around, all the way around until her back was to him. One of his arms was around her chest, the other behind her, fumbling; she heard a zipper.

He was pressing the length of his body against her now; if he had an erection, she couldn't feel it. He grabbed the waistbands of her slacks and running shorts, and tugged them down to her lower thighs, his weight still pressed against her.

She toppled forward, her pants around her knees; the strong arm around her chest supported her, lowered her gently. Then she was on her hands and knees and his weight was on top of her, his arms around her. He slid his hands under Mrs. Bill's polyester blouse and pulled up her jogging bra to caress her breasts. She could feel his penis pressed against her panties, her homely white Olga panties. He began humping, rubbing his still soft penis against her buttocks, but making no attempt to lower her panties or enter her. Then he withdrew his hands from her breasts and began slapping her across the shoulders and the back of her head.

It didn't last long, a minute, maybe two. He moaned; his weight came off her. As she crawled on her hands and knees to the edge of the blanket, she heard him swearing under his breath. When he didn't come after her, she stood up, pulled her shorts and slacks up over her panties, rearranged her bra, started to turn around. His face was red; he was wiping his hand on his jeans.

Premature ejaculation, thought Irene, turning away again quickly, before he caught her looking. Frotteurism. Erectile dysfunction. Her inner voice had turned self-protectively clinical.

“I changed my mind,” said Max after another minute had passed. “It'd probably screw up our therapeutic relationship, don't you think?”

And that was that—it was over. Of course it would never
really
be over. Irene's neck and shoulders still stung from being slapped, and her breasts retained the sense memory of those slippery smooth fingertips. But she'd been preparing herself for far worse, so along with the shame and anger was an enormous sense of relief. And he'd never entered her, never been inside her—for some reason, that made more of a difference than she ever could have imagined.

Another cause for relief: afterward, Irene managed to talk Max into leaving Bernadette behind, arms cuffed behind her and ankles tied, but otherwise unharmed. He'd even helped Irene make the
girl as comfortable as possible, gathering armfuls of pine needles to make a bed, and spreading a blanket over them.

“I promise we'll call somebody to come get you as soon as we're done with Maybelline,” Irene promised Bernadette loudly, as Maxwell returned to the car to fetch a second blanket from the trunk. Then, whispering: “You'll be safer here.”

“Don't worry about me—I can get loose, I know I can. I've seen people do it in movies—you work your hands behind your back and under your legs. I can walk back to the county road, somebody'll come along. Plus there's a good chance my mom reported me missing and they're already looking for the car. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you.”

“I'll keep mine crossed for you.”

“Thanks for what you did back there—I'll never forget it.”

“That's all right. I'm just sorry—”

But Maxwell had returned. “Get in the car, Irene. I want to check these cuffs, and give Bernie here a word to the wise.”

This next part would be the trickiest for Max. He knew how the Bucharest thrust worked theoretically—he'd have to get behind Bernadette and slip the blade of the boning knife between her first and second cervical vertebrae—but he'd never actually attempted it himself. None of the alters had. And the timing would have to be perfect—he'd have to do it while Irene's back was turned. Nor could he let Kinch out to handle this one—subtlety was not Kinch's strong suit.

But if Max did pull it off, Irene would never know, and Bernadette would scarcely feel the knife. Of course, even if she did, she'd have neither the time nor the neural connections to enable her to cry out.

“Here, let me help you get settled,” he said, kneeling behind the girl and tilting her head forward to spread the vertebrae.

“Thanks.”

“Don't mention it.”

F
OR ONCE, TRAVELER'S LUCK
was with Pender. Not much Saturday traffic from Monterey to San Jose, oldies on the radio, no trouble returning the Toyota at the airport, plenty of seats left on the Southwest flight, plenty of time to fill out the forms required to bring his weapon onboard. And on the connecting flight to Dallas's Love Field, Pender even had room to stretch out for a much-needed nap—he hadn't slept but two or three hours in the last twenty-four—before the plane touched down.

Love Field. Was it possible for a man of Pender's age to hear the name and not think of Jack Kennedy? Pender had been nineteen at the time of the assassination. His first year at college. He was still living at home, still driving the '53 Plymouth his folks had given him as a graduation present (it was the only car they could afford), struggling to cover his expenses by holding down two jobs ( washing breakfast dishes at Dan's Deluxe Diner, and pumping gas at the Flying A), chronically short of sleep, time, and money—and yet he found himself looking back on those years with considerable nostalgia. The past was like an old whore, he had read someplace— the farther away you got, the better she looked.

At the Enterprise counter, Pender rented another Corolla— about all that was left on a Saturday evening. He asked the gal if she'd ever heard of the Sleep-Tite Motel. She hadn't, but looked it up for him, then gave him directions reluctantly—apparently it wasn't in the best of neighborhoods.

Pender treated himself to a steak dinner at a restaurant with steer horns mounted over the entrance, and located the Sleep-Tite shortly after nine o'clock. A downwardly mobile strip. Twenty
shabby units painted a faded pink, two wings of ten rooms each with the office in the middle. ACANCY ACANCY ACANCY blinked the neon sign, a rusting, smartly raked post-Deco affair that looked as if it should have been holding up the canopy of a drive-in restaurant back in the fifties. OOMS were $26 a night. Hourly rates available, no doubt.

Pender parked the Corolla in front of the office window where the desk clerk would be sure to see it. Thanks to the carjacking epidemic that began in the early nineties, rental cars were no longer marked as such, but anybody who paid attention to that sort of thing would know the provenance of a clean, white, late-model Toyota. Single guy in an airport rent-a-car late at night equals traveling salesman—the very identity Pender planned to assume.

Apparently the corny hat and rumpled plaid jacket didn't hurt the disguise any—the middle-aged Asian man behind the desk greeted Pender without interest or suspicion.

“What c'I do fo you dis e-ven-ing, nice room twenty-six dollah, tv, no cable, local call free.” All in one singsongy breath—sounded like a Chinese accent to Pender.

“Here's the deal, friend,” he said, putting his elbows on the high counter and leaning toward the man confidentially. “I have a buddy back home, told me he got the best blow job he ever got in his life from this Veetnamese gal in the Sleep-Tite Motel in Dallas last June—and believe me, this is a man who knows his blow jobs. So I figured, as long as I'm in town . . .”

“One year long time. Big turnover. Whassa name?”

“Not sure. He might have used Max or Christopher or—”

“Not
his
name, man,
her
name.” The desk clerk rolled his eyes.

“Ann Tran, something like that.”

“Dunno. I'll ask da girls, see wh'I can do. Twenty-six bucks for the room. In a'vance.”

“I'll pay cash—just make sure it's the same girl who did my friend—otherwise you're wasting her time.”

“Yeah sure, same girl,” said the man carelessly. But there was a watchfulness in his eyes that hadn't been there before.

Anh Tranh, five feet two inches tall, eighty-five, ninety pounds tops, heavily made-up and wearing a peach-colored halter top and a short, tight, lime-green, vinyl-looking skirt, came waltzing into room 17 of the Sleep-Tite Motel chattering away like a Saigon street whore.

“Hey, G.I., any frien' your frien', frien' a mine. I give you extra special numbah one suckee suckee, same like him, fitty dollah, long time, hunn'ed dollah boom-boom, whaddaya say, G.I.?”

Pender closed the door behind her, reached for his wallet, flipped down his badge.

“Have a seat,” he said, nodding toward the bed.

“Oh, bite me,” the girl replied, in an unaccented Texas twang. “What's the problem, Wong forget to pay off Vice this month? Or you just lookin' for a freebie?”

“I'm not Vice, I'm FBI, and I need your help.” He had a copy of Casey's mug shot in his wallet; he showed it to her.

“Christy,” she said without hesitation, though she hadn't seen him in over a year. She sat down on the bed. “Wha'd he do, kill somebody?” More intrigued than resentful.

“Lots of somebodys.” It had suddenly become obvious that Anh Tranh was wearing transparent panties under the short skirt. Pender, who hadn't had sex in months, forced his eyes upward, past her bare midriff and tiny haltered breasts to her face, which was sweet and round as a lollipop. Pretty little thing, if you scraped about half that gunk off her face. “What's with the fuckee-suckee talk?”

“Pretty good, hunh? I ain't even 'Mese—I'm Cambodian. But we get a lot of guys your age, you know, 'Nam vets, they eat that shit up, come back for more. It's like, nostalgic. Hey, did you know your head was bleeding?”

Pender reached up—he'd removed his hat upon entering the room—and touched the bandage gingerly. It was wet, and when he looked at his fingertips, there was blood on them. “Son of a bitch,” he said.