As he and Dubose get up from the sofa, Jergen says, “It’s what we do. Don’t worry about us. May we have the keys, Reverend Gordon?”
The minister glances at the whisky, forgoes a taste, gets to his feet, fishes a set of three keys from a pocket, but hesitates to relinquish them. “What if they’ve got guns?”
Jergen holds out one hand for the keys. “We don’t believe they’re armed.”
“Yes, but what if they are? Couldn’t a SWAT team seal off the building and wait them out? Wouldn’t that be safer?”
“Preacher, listen, just give us the keys,” Dubose says in a tone of voice that always makes him look even bigger than he is.
“If someone were shot,” says Gordon M. Gordon, “that would have terrible ramifications for the Mission of Light. Bad publicity, lawsuits, liabilities.”
Reaching under his coat to draw a pistol from the belt holster in the small of his back, Dubose says, “The only liability at the moment is you,” and he shoots Gordon once in the head.
The reverend seems to fold down into a pile as if he is not a thing of flesh and blood, but an inflatable figure like those that some people add to their Halloween decorations—Face Wound Guy—to terrify the kiddies. He lies billowed and folded with an incurvate countenance, between the armchair and the footstool, taking up less space in death than seems consistent with his size when alive.
Carter Jergen indicates the gun. “Is that a Glock twenty-six?”
“Yeah. Loaded with full-jacket hollow-points.”
“Obviously. But there’s something different about the grip.”
“A Pearce grip extension. It really improves the draw speed.”
“It’s a drop gun?” Jergen asks, by which he’s inquiring if the pistol has no history and therefore can’t be traced.
“For sure. We give it to that little shit Sanjay Shukla, and when this is done, Preacher Gordon is just one more kill credited to our writer friend.” For the moment, Dubose returns the compact auto to the small of his back. “I tried to let the talky sonofabitch preacher make nice with us.”
“I know,” Jergen says. “You gave him every chance.”
“It was up to him.”
“It always is,” Jergen says as he picks up the keys that were dropped by the dead man.
Dubose says, “You touch anything?”
“Just the doorbell. And I already wiped it.”
Taking one last look at the dead man, Dubose declares, “After all this, the Shukla brats damn well better be hiding over there at the church.”
34
The theater lobby was about twenty feet square and drenched with ornamentation. The concave ceiling featured coffers brightened by trompe l’oeil paintings of dawn skies ablaze with cerulean blue, coral, and golden light. Each luminous figuration on the chandeliers was of creamy glass shaped like some large-petaled mythical flower. Gilded bronze appliqués and alabaster inlays brightened columns of black marble surmounted by highly ornate capitals. The walls were paneled with ruby silk.
Surrounded by this excess of French décor, dressed for bad electronic dance music in a twenty-first-century hook-up bar, Ms. Petra Quist sat erect in the office chair, as if it were a weird minimalist time machine that had transported her to Paris in 1850.
“I don’t hate Simon,” she repeated.
Sitting face-to-face with her captive, Jane said, “I despise him, and I haven’t even met him yet.”
Looking as if she might spit again, but subverting the urge into a sneer of contempt, Petra said, “Maybe you’ve got an anger problem.”
“You’re right about that,” Jane agreed. “Some days I think I don’t have nearly enough of it.”
“You’re a seriously crazy bitch, you know?”
“I respect the opinion of an expert.”
“What?”
“Come on now, girl. Simon is a slimeball, and you know it.”
“If you really never met him, what’s your problem?”
Instead of answering, Jane said, “So Sugar Daddy gives you everything, huh? Money, jewelry, clothes, limousines to ride around in, all the usual compensation.”
“Compensation? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Doesn’t matter what I mean, what I think. What matters is if you’re clear-eyed about your situation or deluded.”
Although only twenty-six Petra had been drinking for enough years and in enough quantity that she’d developed a tolerance for booze that allowed her to rock the clubs with her girl crew for six hours and, though hammered, nevertheless appear almost sober. But the conversation had quickly gotten too complex and too intense for her blood-alcohol level. “?‘Situation’?”
Leaning forward, with genuine—if vinegary—sympathy, Jane said, “Are you so easily deceived, you think your relationship with him has a long, rosy future—or do you realize you’re a whore?”
Considering the dictionary of crude obscenities that this girl had hurled at Jane while raging after her with a broken bottle in the kitchen, her reaction to this comparatively genteel insult was proof that she did indeed harbor illusions about how Simon Yegg regarded her. Hatred knotted her lovely face. Unshed tears of hurt and anger shimmered in her eyes. She spat at her captor again and missed as before.
“If you keep that up,” Jane said, “you’ll dehydrate. Do you know dehydration kills?”
Petra sprayed words instead of saliva. “Who do you think you are, bitch? What gives you a right to judge me? If there’s a worn-out stinking skank sitting here, you’re it.”
“He’s never going to marry you, girl.”
“Shows what you know. He’s getting me a ring. He says he’s not the marrying kind, never has been, but I’ve melted him, melted his heart. So shut your ignorant, filthy mouth and just go away.”
“As for his not being the marrying kind,” Jane said, “I’m sure his four wives would agree with him.”
More martinis than were prudent now required Petra to process any fresh bit of important data through a brain that effortlessly produced obscenities and lies and self-deceit but that needed to explore a new fact in the manner that a lifelong blind woman, by touch alone, might feel her way to an understanding of the purpose of a mysterious artifact. She moved her tongue around her mouth as though searching for words and finally found a few. “What a load of crap, four wives, you think I’m stupid?”
“He marries rich women and takes them for most of what they have, breaks them psychologically if he can, and throws them away.”
Although Petra interrupted with expressions of disbelief, Jane told her about Sara Holdsteck, the ice-water baths, the contempt of the men urinating in the tub, the Tasering, and the rest of it. “Other wives were gang-raped by his associates. To break them, make them relent. He didn’t really need their money. He’s rich himself. It’s some kind of sick sport to him.”
“There aren’t four ex-wives,” Petra insisted. “There aren’t four or forty or even one. You’re a liar, that’s all.”
“One of them is agoraphobic, so afraid of the world, she can’t leave her little house. Two of the others were eventually murdered, maybe because they started to regain their self-esteem, work up the courage to confront him about what he’d done.”
Petra closed her eyes and sagged in the office chair. “You’re such a rotten liar. Just a lying liar is all you are. I’m not gonna listen anymore. Not letting you in my head. I’m deaf. Stone deaf. Go away.”
“Your life depends on listening, girl. I’m using Simon to get at his half brother, a very bad guy with powerful allies.”
“He doesn’t have a brother, half or whole.”
“A miracle—she hears. His brother is named Booth Hendrickson. They don’t advertise it, because Booth and his pals push government business to Simon’s enterprises. The limo company is the least of it, but he has a fat contract to drive Justice Department officials and other D.C. muckety-mucks when they’re in Southern California.”
Eyes tight shut, lips pressed together, Petra Quist pretended deafness, twenty-six years old going on thirteen.
“You think you won’t tell me what I want to know about Simon, but you will. One way or the other, you will.”