the Viking Funeral (2001) (22 page)

"Where?"

"AAT rented me a separate villa at the Ritz-Carlton, down by the tennis courts. How 'bout there? Lou should still be at the hotel, packing. That way, if we need to adjust anything, you'll be handy."

"Okay."

She put the car in gear. They pulled out from under the date palms, shot down Bob Hope Drive, and turned right again on Highway 111. Lisa St. Marie was holding her head erect, her shoulders straight. She seemed lost in thought while she drove: intense, hard an
d b
eautiful, no flirtatious nonsense now. She had turned back into a very busy executive on an important lung-destroying mission.

Shane wondered if she was planning to blow the Prussian general to get the deal done.

Chapter
28.

HER ROOM WAS full of shiny masonry, Italian terra-cotta, and Spanish tile. Expensively framed but marginal abstract art hung on the walls. Like everything else in the desert, this junior-executive suite had a pastel-peach color scheme. Except Lisa's suite was without the magnificent views of the valley or the golf course. Shane could see a lit tennis court out the main window and hear the steady thunk-thonk of a singles match, mixed with energetic grunts and squeaking shoes. The match was obscured behind a green screen that hung on the chain-link fence a few yards from the window. The shadows danced and lunged on the colorful canvas like ghostly memories.

Lisa was still with Petrovitch. Shane looked at her telephone and again considered makin
g a
call to Filosiani. But he didn't want the LAPD number to show up on her bill, so he decided to wait. Instead, he took the opportunity to get to know her a little better.

He started his search where most cops do-- in the bathroom, where you often learned personal secrets. Lisa's bathroom was no exception. She had the standard beauty aids: eye shadow, makeup brushes, and Vaseline; two round metal hairbrushes, each tangled with honey-ash strands. He pulled several loose. There were no dark roots--a natural blonde. Lipsticks by Langome: Iced Amethyst and Bronze Fire. No eyewash or contact-lens case, so it seemed the jade-green color came direct from the factory. Then he found two small, brown plastic compacts stuck way down in the webbing of her cosmetic travel case. The powder inside was not from Revlon, but Colombia. Fine and white, it dusted the mirror. Shane ran a wet index finger across the stuff and tasted it....

Bingo. El
Diablo!

Lisa St. Marie kept that high-strung motor of hers redlined with toots of Inca whizbang.

Shane closed the compact and put it back where he found it.

Welly he mused darkly, there are worse things than snorting coke..
. Y
ou could always punch a round through your girlfriend's heart.

He moved through the rest of the place.

The closet contained mostly expensive designer stuff. She either did very well at All
-
American Tobacco or General Puffengut
s b
ought her a lot of high-priced collectibles. The shoes were strictly from the Imelda Marcos shelf: Prada, Charles David, Manolo Blahnik.

Her jewel case was locked inside the flimsy key-locked room safe, which Shane opened easily with his picks. The case was just a small leather box, but with impressive contents. Shane wasn't much at appraising jewelry and wished he had Murray Steinberg there to scan them with his loupe, but they looked authentic--expensive settings glittering with designer elegance.

He closed the safe and kept snooping.

The refrigerator was where he found Lisa's moonwalking kit. The heavy artillery was tucked in the freezer compartment behind the ice trays: amphetamines, methamphetamines, and, oh yeah..
. S
ome MDMA2. So maybe Tremaine had called that one right. Maybe Lisa had sabotaged the deal with Jody so she could knock down the price with Shane.

There were also some tabs of something that Shane thought looked like LSD, making them the only ingestibles. This was gyro-hydro, but there was no needle. Lisa didn't do her cooking in a spoon. She didn't violate that perfect alabaster skin with track marks. Everything in here but the acid and the Ecstasy went up her nose.

He closed the refrigerator and wandered back into the living room. The tennis game had finished, so Shane slumped into the big, overstuffed club chair by the window. He was bone-tired, and without planning to drift off, he was suddenly somewhere else..
. A
sleep, but maybe not; dreaming, but it felt terribly real..
. L
ike he had passed into some other dimension intact, summoned there for an audience and a scolding.

She was dressed in her sergeant's uniform, the one she had worn at the Medal of Valor ceremonies, and she was still holding the medal in its beautiful leather case.

"Shane, we can never make this work-- You know that, of course. " She was scowling at him, but there was also disappointment.

"Why, Alexa..
. W
hy can't we?"

"Because there's darkness in you. Whether it's because you were abandoned by your mother..
. L
eft at that hospital as an infant, or because police work made you cynical isn't important anymore. Darkness is darkness, no matter where it comes from. And it's been there as long as I've known you. Even when we laughed, it was there, hiding behind your smile, frightening me."

"Alexa..
. N
o..
. P
lease..
. I
can change."

"It never would've worked. Never. We were kidding ourselves."

"No..
. N
o, it could have, because I loved you. I still love you."

"God decides these things," she said sharply, standing in the beautiful pulpit now, preaching down at him. He remembered that pulpit. As a child, he had gone to the Episcopal church each Sunday with the Deans, looked up in wonder at its carved perfection, studied it while sermons droned. It was ornate and encrusted with symbols. Angels with their wings outstretched held the corners of the desk aloft. On its polished surface rested the powerful book of words. A scroll was carved on the front face of the pulpit. He'd wondered what important truths were on that document, what overpowering wisdom. He went up and tried to read the scroll, but the letters were only tiny scratches in the polished wood; like so much of his early life, only there for effect. "God makes these choices for us," Alexa continued. "You went your way, I went mine. "

"No..."

"It's done. The deal is closed."

"No, Alexa, not yet."

Suddenly, somebody touched his shoulder.

He opened his eyes. It was Lisa. She was standing over him, dressed in a black linen coat.

"I said, The deal is done, and who the fuck is Alexa?"

"Hi," he said, still troubled by the nature and content of the dream. "Nobody..
. O
ld friend. She's dead."

"Mr. Puffenguts will do the deal as negotiated." Lisa smiled. "Papa Joe is writing the contract over in Lou's suite. If you sign it before you leave, the ball is back in play." "Oh..."

"And now for the celebration." She held out a bottle of champagne she'd been hiding behind her back.

"I don't like champagne much." His hea
d w
as clogged; the heavy sleep and troubling dream lingered.

"How 'bout this, then?" she said, and let the coat fall off her shoulders. She was standing naked in front of him, wearing only her high
-
heeled pumps.

"Jesus," he said, and struggled to sit up in the heavily upholstered chair.

"You showed me yours.... How do you like mine?"

She turned and showed him her gym-trained glutes. Sexy and very beautiful..
. N
o denying that.

"My... I..."

"Your what?" she said, smiling. And then, before he could say another word, she dropped into his lap and put her arms around his neck. "You can touch. Go on..
. F
eel me here," she said, then took his hand and placed it between her legs. He started to pull away but she held it there. "I need to feel you. I need for us to know each other this way."

"Why..
. W
hy is?..."

"Now for the candy kiss." Then her mouth was on his, open and hungry. She pushed her tongue between his lips; he suddenly felt something on his tongue..
. B
itter and stinging, it was dissolving, being quickly absorbed.

A candy kiss?... Cocaine?... LSD? He started to pull away, to spit it out.

"No," she said, never taking her mouth off of his. "Go with it, baby. Go with it--you'll fly." He felt the substance running off his tongue, around his tonsils, down his throat.

She had her hands on his belt and was undoing it, stripping it off.

"I need to feel you. I need to touch you, to taste you,
"
she whispered as her hand reached into his pants, stroking him.

"Goddamn,
"
Shane thought, or maybe he actually said it. He wasn't sure. He tried to pull away--at least he thought he tried..
. W
anted to have tried.

"Alexa..
. A
lexa!" his mind screamed, but all he heard were her dream-remembered words.

"Shane, we can never make this work"

"Why, Alexa..
. W
hy can't we?
"
"Ahhh...
"
Lisa purred. "That's better. You're so hard. Let me help you...," and his pants were coming down, sliding around his thighs. She took her mouth off his and found him down there..
. F
ound his traitorous erection.

"It never would have worked. We were kidding ourselves, " Alexa scolded.

"Isn't that better? Doesn't that feel nice?" Lisa whispered.

"It could have worked because I loved you. I still love you. "

He felt her lips on him, her tongue on his hardened shaft.

"There's darkness in you. Even when we laughed, it was there, hiding behind your smile. " Lisa rose, adjusting herself on his lap to face him, her hips rising up slightly, then she slid his erection deep inside her. "There," she panted. "There..
. T
here..
. H
arder..
. H
arder...

harder... Fuck me, you bastard!" Her voice guttural and craven.

Shane felt the drug inside him, spreading fire and ice.

"You went your way, I went mine. "

He wanted to scream--No!--but his mind blurred with carnal darkness.

"Now, now... Do it now!" Lisa commanded.

So he did. He released, spasming inside her. She threw her head back and rode him, moaning out loud with unabashed pleasure.

It was a chilling moment for Shane, as if the depravity that had been hovering, beating its dark wings, had finally settled on him, devouring his morality and self-respect all in one lustful encounter.

Unfortunately, it was the best sex he'd eve
r h
ad.

Chapter
29.

SHANE'S FRAGILE PSYCHe fell in on him. He remembered Lisa's kneeling over him, feeding him something..
. M
aybe more pills, or tabs; he wasn't sure. He vaguely recalled signing the agreement, the paper swimming in blurred vision, and Lisa's voice
,
musical but furry. He wasn't sure how he got back to Papa Joe's house. He had a momentary recollection of Lisa's dashboard clock, wondering if it could really be four A
. M
. He guessed she'd driven him. His mind buzzed and snapped like a broken speaker.

A few memories stood out.

The front door, with Tremaine standing in the threshold holding a .38 snubby, muttering, "You're fucked up, too?"

Jody, sprawled in a lawn chair in the bright midday sunlight, moaning and crying, then suddenly leaning over and vomiting into the pool.

Victory Smith standing over him, whispering softly: "It would be so easy now, motherfucker..
. S
o easy."

The fog he was swimming in didn't clear until almost six that evening. When it did, it was all at once, as if somebody had yanked up a shade. He was suddenly back behind the wheel, driving a swerving, disabled brain.

He was with Jody in mid-sentence when he snapped back, and Shane had no idea what they'd been discussing. His own words lingered in his head like a remembered dream: "..
. I
could do..." was what he had just said. One moment he was nowhere, and the next he was stretched out on the sofa in Papa Joe's borrowed room, feeling like shit while Jody, sitting on the bed, scanned a two-page document.

"The best you could do?" he said, throwing the papers back onto the bedspread. Shane could see his signature scrawled on the bottom.

"She jacked you up, man. I hate this deal..
. I
t was signed under duress. You're still babbling like an idiot."