Instead, she backed off and shouted to the house-control system that had so readily obeyed Petra—“Anabel, lights on!”—though to no effect. Quickly, by touch, she found the second large granite-topped island and sprang onto it, out of the pathways that the other woman knew so well. Three feet above the floor, at the approximate middle of the seven-foot-long, five-foot-wide slab, Jane poised on one knee, as if genuflecting, left hand flat on the polished stone to provide a sense of stability in the disorienting blackness. With the Heckler in her right hand, she strained to listen as someone sightless might listen to the nuances of sound that escaped the notice of the sighted.
In the cloud of astringent vodka fumes, Petra Quist cast aside any remaining prudence and forethought. Her anger escalated to an animal frenzy. She struck out even more wildly, grunting and cursing and flinging at Jane every obscene name in the vile lexicon shared by the worst woman-hating men. The thick, weaponized bottle clinked, clanked, clinked as it rapped off one thing or another, and then cracked harder against granite, spalling off chips that spilled across the polished stone with a faint, brief burst of fairy music.
When Jane sensed that her stalker had passed by, she pivoted toward the ranting voice. Having recalled the precise wording with which Petra had first commanded the house, she rose to her feet as she said, “Anabel, follow me with light,” and a bright downwash cast away all shadows.
At a corner of the island, Petra glanced up in surprise, her face distorted by rage. She remained beautiful, although this was far different from the comeliness that had turned heads during an evening of club-hopping. This was instead a terrible and fearsome beauty, as Medusa might have looked under her serpent tresses just as, by her stare alone, she excited a man into stone.
Jane kicked, and the party girl cried out when her right forearm took the blow. The broken bottle flipped out of her grasp, its glass teeth glittering as it arced onto a gas cooktop, where it fragmented and rattled down into the cast-iron drip pans.
The would-be slasher collapsed onto her back, rolled over, and scrambled up even as Jane came off the island and slammed into her, driving her backward into one of the refrigerators. Petra didn’t know how to fight, but she knew how to resist furiously: twisting, as torsional as an eel; clawing violently if ineffectively, her nail-shop acrylics snagging and snapping off; thrusting her head forward, trying to bite Jane’s face.
A knee driven into Petra’s crotch didn’t half paralyze her as it would have a man, but a blow to the pelvis bruised her vulva and sent such a shock through her body core that she shuddered and briefly lost the ability to resist. Jane upswept a forearm under that perfectly molded chin, the full brute force of her shoulder hard behind it. Petra’s eyes rolled to white like those of a doll, and the back of her head rapped the refrigerator door, whereupon Jane stepped back just enough to allow the woman to slide down the stainless steel and sit on the floor, chin on her ample breasts, unconscious.
31
Perhaps the presence of Radley Dubose standing at the front counter in QuickMart does not discourage incoming customers as much as would a blood-smeared clown with a chain saw, but Carter Jergen suspects that the number of those who suddenly decide to shop elsewhere is only slightly fewer than would have been put off by a psychotic circus performer. Radley is big; he appears arrogant and angry; and although he doesn’t telepathically transmit the words National Security Agency, anyone with a minimum of street smarts realizes that he possesses the legal authority to kick ass and a desire to do so as often as possible.
Ivan Zabotin, owner of the franchise, prefers not to have Tuong Phan, the clerk, deal with people as important as federal agents. He takes twenty minutes to get from his home to the market, however, and though he is apologetic, his expressed regrets only further incense Dubose.
Zabotin is a small man with a large head and delicate hands, which makes him seem strangely like a bearded child. Speaking clear but accented English, having emigrated from Russia, where his parents must have been oppressed by the Communists and where he apparently came of age in the marginally less dangerous society that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, he obviously fears and distrusts government. As he asks to see their credentials, studies that ID, and then escorts them toward the office at the back of the building, he smiles nervously and nods and is deferential without being so meek that his respect might seem to have an underlying note of mockery.
“Over there in Mother Russia, you were what?” Dubose asks. “Some kind of oligarch?”
“?‘Oligarch’?” the startled Zabotin echoes. “No, no, no. No, sir. My people, our living blood was sucked out by the oligarchs.”
“You own a lot of franchises,” Dubose says. “So how does that happen if you didn’t arrive in America on a three-hundred-foot yacht with a billion dollars in dirty cash?”
Zabotin’s legs seem to go weak, and he pauses at the door to the office. “My wife and I arrived with less than little. Worked hard, saved, invested. A QuickMart franchise is not a billion.”
“You have four of them,” Dubose says in the grave accusatory tone of a Star Chamber judge, as if the well-known cost of such a franchise is a quarter of a billion.
Zabotin turns to Jergen, seeking relief from this unreason, but Jergen meets the stare without expression. Because neither he nor Dubose can convincingly fake sympathy, they never play good cop, bad cop. The best that Zabotin will get is indifferent cop, bad cop.
Anxious to hurry them out of his establishment, Zabotin sits at a laminate-topped office desk and boots up the computer, explaining that the security-system recorder is shelved in the walk-in safe, but the video from any of the six cameras can be accessed from here and played back on this monitor.
Jergen specifies the three exterior cameras mounted above the front entrance to the store and gives Zabotin the precise time at which the Shukla twins, on foot, turned the corner from the main boulevard earlier in the evening.
On the desk stand framed photos of the owner and a woman who is most likely his wife, as well as others of their daughter, two sons, and the family dog. Among the photos are also a cast-plastic model of the Statue of Liberty and a brass holder with a six-by-four-inch starched-fabric flag that is always at full fly.
While the proprietor seeks the requested video and Jergen stands at his side to watch, Radley Dubose, brow furrowed, picks up the framed photographs one at a time. He intently studies the faces of the wife and children, as if committing them to memory.
Zabotin is acutely aware of Dubose’s interest in his family. His attention flickers between the screen and the big hands that seem almost to fondle the photographs.
Before Dubose puts down the photo of Zabotin and his wife, he licks the thumb of his right hand and carefully smears it across the glass over her face, as if to clear away a smudge and have a better look at her. But then, one by one, he returns to the pictures of the daughter and those of the two sons, all of them seemingly under the age of eleven or twelve, and he repeats this unsettling act in a ritualistic manner, licking the thumb and wiping it over each face, as if by an unspoken bewitchment he is marking not merely their images but they themselves, asserting some occult power over them.
Dubose’s behavior so disturbs Ivan Zabotin that his fingers fumble on the keyboard, and he must correct his errors en route to summoning the needed video.
Although Jergen finds his partner cartoonish, he is also never less than intrigued by the man. Sometimes Dubose might be Yosemite Sam, but at other times he more resembles a character from one of those edgy comic books like Tales from the Crypt.