“Or maybe you don’t want to bruise my pretty body before you get a chance to use it.”
Jane watched in silence as the woman—no, the girl, perhaps in some way even still a child—took two martini glasses and a cocktail shaker from a bar-supply cabinet. A bottle of dry vermouth from another cupboard. A jar of olives from the second of four Sub-Zero refrigerators. One by one, she placed the items on the first of two large center islands.
“Or maybe you’re some kind of prig,” Petra said, pausing to look Jane up and down. “Some tight-assed prude, you don’t do girls, don’t do boys, don’t even do yourself. Well, chickee, you better damn well drink, ’cause I won’t even talk to some self-righteous teetotaler let alone get naked with her. Or him. Or it.”
She turned away from Jane and went to the fourth refrigerator. She opened the door and withdrew a tall chilled bottle of Belvedere.
As the refrigerator door swung shut, Petra returned with the vodka and stopped near the island and cocked her head, regarding Jane with perplexity and disdain. “Girl, you’re fully bitchin’ top to bottom. A face for the movies, a goddess body and all. But here you are, no makeup, lifeless hair, dressed one step up from thrift-shop chic. Do you work just hours and hours every day, trying so hard to look ordinary? Are you so screwed up, you want to be homely? You must have some crazy damn story. I want to hear your story and all. Tell me your story.” With that she spoke to the house computer: “Anabel, lights out!”
In the last luminous moment between the command and the response, Jane saw the girl swing the Belvedere, and in the instant that darkness fell through the kitchen, she heard the glass shatter against the granite top of the island. The broken rim of the thick-walled long-necked bottle would make a disfiguring, even deadly, weapon.
29
Here in the final hours of Friday, just one employee staffs the QuickMart. According to the clip-on badge attached to the pocket of his white shirt, his name is Tuong, and he tells them his last name is Phan, so he’s Vietnamese American, a neat well-barbered young man of perhaps twenty-two, soft-spoken, polite. Carter Jergen imagines that Tuong, like so many of his ethnicity, works hard at two jobs and intends one day to have a business of his own. Though he might just as likely be working his way through his sixth year in college, aiming for an MBA or an advanced degree in computer science.
Whatever Tuong’s flaws may be, stupidity isn’t one of them. In spite of his humility, his keen intelligence is so obvious that it’s almost a visible aura. Nor does he have any animus toward authority, because people of his community generally go to college to acquire useful knowledge, not to learn how to man the barricades in a rage against whatever. When Tuong insists that he has no idea as to the location of the security-system video recorder, Jergen does not for a moment doubt him.
Radley Dubose, however, would not trust the pope’s description of the weather if they stood together under a cloudless sky that the pontiff called sunny. Not for the first time, hulking on the public side of the cashier’s station, Dubose shakes his NSA credentials in Tuong’s face, as a painted-and-feathered shaman might shake a brace of dried snake heads at the superstitious members of his flock to scare them into submission. He warns of the dire consequences of refusing to cooperate with federal agents in urgent pursuit of a terrorist.
In fact, the cables from all the security cameras, inside and outside the convenience store, are buried in the walls. Dubose himself is unable to follow them to the recorder.
He bullies the clerk. “It’ll be in a back room, in the office or storeroom or something. It’ll be as obvious as a cockroach on a wedding cake.”
“We don’t sell wedding cakes,” says Tuong.
As if Dubose doesn’t grasp that the American-born clerk’s first language is English, which maybe he does not, his response is thick with frustration and contempt. “Of course you don’t sell wedding cakes. It’s a freakin’ convenience store. I’m talking metaphor.”
“Or was it simile?” Tuong wonders.
“Was it what?”
“Anyway,” Tuong says, “we don’t have cockroaches. We receive only praise from the health inspector.”
Entertained by this confrontation, Jergen plucks a candy bar from a counter display, peels back the wrapper, and takes a bite with a pleasure akin to that of sitting stage-side in a fine dinner theater.
“This isn’t about cockroaches, it’s about—”
Daring to interrupt the big man, apparently having as much fun as Jergen, Tuong says earnestly, “It’s about not having cockroaches. We are very proud of our cleanliness.”
Dubose’s fists are like two five-pound hams at the ends of his arms. “I’m going back there and look for the recorder. Understand me?” Before the clerk can respond, Dubose says, “You have a gun under the counter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know how to use it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know how to leave it right the hell where it is?”
“At all times,” Tuong says, “that’s what I prefer.”
“Let me tell you, boy, if you ever pull a gun on a federal agent, you’ll be in a shitstorm.”
“I will let you tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“About the shitstorm.”
Dubose looks as if he will tear out Tuong’s lungs through his esophagus. “Time’s wasting. I don’t speak stupid, and I can’t wait around for a translator. I’m coming back there.”
Tuong Phan watches deadpan as Dubose steps to the end of the service counter, opens a gate, and goes through a door to a hall that serves whatever rooms lay beyond the clerk’s domain.
He looks at Carter Jergen. “I’ll call Mr. Zabotin and ask him where the recorder is.”
“Who’s Zabotin?” Jergen wonders.
“Ivan Zabotin owns this QuickMart franchise and three others.”
“Give him my congratulations on keeping this place cockroach-free,” Jergen says and takes another bite of the candy bar.
Tuong Phan smiles and picks up the phone.
30
Faux frost of moonlight crystalizing on the window glass, green numbers softly glowing on the oven clocks like some enigmatic code by which the immediate future might be read…
Otherwise, this seemed to be the ultimate darkness, the outer dark of souls in oblivion, the air scented with spirits, shards of glass splintering under Petra’s shoes with a sound like grinding-gnashing teeth. Thin cries issued from her each time she slashed savagely, blindly with the broken vodka bottle, counting on her familiarity with the kitchen layout to give her the advantage until, by some stroke of benighted luck, she might find a face and gouge it and permanently blind her adversary.
In the first instant of darkness, Jane had chosen not to fire her pistol. Even at close range, she was less likely to hit than miss, while the muzzle flare would reveal her precise location. Besides, she didn’t want to kill this drunk and disturbed party girl unless she had no other choice.