Startled, the browser turned into the first stream from the spray bottle. Sweet-tasting chloroform wet the girl’s pink lipstick and the tip of her tongue, whispered up her nostrils. Her eyes went wide but rolled back in her head before she could cry out. Jane got one arm around her and held her against the refrigerator to prevent her from folding noisily to the floor, put the spray bottle on the counter, and lowered the unconscious girl to the ceramic tiles.
Chloroform was highly volatile. Already it had evaporated from the blonde’s lips. Traces glistened only around the edges of her nostrils. What she’d inhaled would keep her out for several minutes. Maybe long enough, maybe not.
Jane tore two paper towels from a nearby dispenser. She folded them together, spritzed one side lightly with chloroform, and placed the barely dampened side over the girl’s face. The makeshift mask fluttered slightly with each exhalation. Jane watched long enough to be sure there was no breathing problem.
Then she put the spray bottle in an inner jacket pocket, drew her pistol, and returned to the archway between kitchen and family room. He was still sitting in the overstuffed gray sectional, feet up on a coffee table, enthralled. On the TV, one guy on a motorcycle chased another guy on a motorcycle along a highway, weaving among numerous other speeding vehicles, in a scene that required the brain of a titmouse to write and a demented genius to stage.
The cacophony masked what sounds she made as she circled behind him. When one of the motorcycles went over a cliff and the other one shrieked to a halt at the brink, the bombastic music faded to a mere ghost of sound, to emphasize the long death drop.
Jane said, “Got any Oreos, Bobby?”
Surely her voice wasn’t identical to that of the anesthetized blonde on the kitchen floor, yet he didn’t react to her question except to gesture impatiently with one hand and say, “Yeah, yeah,” as he watched the plummeting motorcyclist narrowly escape death when what had appeared to be a backpack proved instead to be a parachute from which bloomed an acre of life-saving silk.
She rapped his head with the barrel of the .45, and he said, “What the hell,” and turned and saw her and sprang off the sofa and nearly fell into the coffee table.
“You tried to nail me in the park. Then you stuck it in my eye with the last item about Shenneck. ‘Weird brothel’ and nothing more. I have questions. Lie or evade—you get a bullet in the head. Got it, Robert? Jimmy? Whoever you want to be?”
8
* * *
IN THE FAMILY ROOM, the movie had gone from stunts to romance. The sex had fewer sound effects than the chase scene, softer music.
In the kitchen, the adult Kewpie doll, who had once been Jimmy Radburn and had always been Robert Branwick, sat in a dinette chair, his hairless and rubber-smooth android hands folded on the kitchen table. His baby-smooth face paled with fear, but his gray-eyed stare glinted like a pair of ice picks.
Jane had screwed the sound suppressor onto the pistol. As she intended, the silencer intimidated him no less than the gun itself did. He took it to mean she was serious.
On the table lay a notepad and pen that Jane had taken from the counter under the wall phone.
She stood between him and the blonde, who breathed shallowly under her paper-towel mask. “Shenneck’s brothel has a website?”
“It’s Dark Web. Like the gig we just closed up. Except it’s so dark it makes us look like we were Walmart. The Web address isn’t officially registered, it’s a blind pig.”
“Which to you means what?”
“It piggybacks the domain system, dot org, but nobody managing the system sees it. The site name is a long series of random letters and numbers, so no search engine can take you there. Hundreds of millions of possible combinations. Typing such a long random address by chance is epsilon. You’d need centuries even with an automated search. In short, you can’t get there unless you already have the address. Friends tell friends, I guess.”
“How did you get there, Jimmy Bob?”
“Maybe one of my clients didn’t adequately protect his address book.”
“While you hacked someone for this guy, you hacked him, too.”
“Win, win.”
In her sleep, the blonde snorted, and paper towels fluttered over her face.
“You know the address?” Jane asked.
“It’s forty-four random letters and numbers. It’s bletcherous. I can’t memorize something like that. Hardly anyone could.”
“You’ve got it in your files from Vinyl.”
“But they aren’t accessible right now. We’re down. Remember?”
“Have you been to this dark site?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me.”
“You get a black screen. Then the name Aspasia.”
“Write it down. And don’t make me pull teeth.”
Printing the name on the notepad, he said, “I looked it up. She was the mistress of the mayor of Athens or something, like in four hundred B.C. Then the screen gives you eight languages to choose from. A worldwide operation. In English you get three promises—‘Beautiful girls. Totally submissive. No desire too extreme.’?”
“Sounds like your dream bordello, Jimmy Bob.”
“It says one more thing that’s too creepy—‘Girls incapable of disobedience. Permanent silence assured.’?”
“What—you use her, then they kill her?”
“I said it was too creepy. I’m not the sleaze you think I am. Then there’s the membership fee. A serious bignum. Like joining some ultraexclusive country club. Three hundred thousand bucks.”
“Bullshit.”
“They don’t make it impossible to find the place just so they can pull a practical joke. The guy whose address book I raided could afford that a hundred times over.”
“How do you know Bertold Shenneck’s involved with it?”
“The guy who had the address is an investor in Shenneck Technology. He has office, home, cell, and all kinds of alternate phone numbers for Shenneck. He didn’t list Aspasia under Aspasia. He listed it under ‘Shenneck’s playpen.’?”
“Write the guy’s name down.”
“You’re bustin’ my balls here.”
“Not yet. But I’d be happy to do the job. Write it down.”
Scowling, he printed the name. “William Sterling Overton. He’s a lawyer, a shakedown artist, wins huge settlements. Lives mostly in Beverly Hills. Married twice to hot actresses. Dates supermodels. If he also needs Aspasia, he must be so saturated with testosterone, you could wring it out of him like water from a sponge.”
“You have millions, Jimmy Bob. You sure you didn’t sign up?”
“I don’t pay for sex.”
“That can’t be true.”
“I don’t. Not anymore. Anyway, I’m not in these guys’ league.”
“How does a new member pay the fee? Doesn’t seem like something any rich freak would want linked to him by a paper trail.”
“Screen said, ‘Anonymity assured. Tracing payment impossible.’ Plus people like Overton have foreign accounts, paper corporations.”
“You didn’t get payment details? Tell me true now.”
Staring into the muzzle of the .45 instead of at Jane, he said, “Before they lay out the payment arrangements, they ask who you are, who referred you. I could’ve used Overton’s name as my sponsor, but I figured they have the referral before you call. If you claim a referral they don’t have, you’re in deep shit with megabad people.”
“You’re a hacker genius,” Jane said. “You go in anonymous.”
“Maybe not with these people. Maybe you go that one last step, and they have a dragon with a long tongue, it licks all the way back to where you are and takes a taste. Because when I tried the site a day later, I didn’t even get the name Aspasia. The first screen just said, ‘Die,’ went black, stayed black. I never went back again.”
“So you don’t have a physical address for this brothel.”
“You’d have to be a member to know it.”
Elsewhere in the house, a toilet flushed.
The sound was muffled but unmistakable, possibly originating from a downstairs powder room off the hallway to which the nearby kitchen door stood open. Someone had won a war with irregularity after a nice long sit-down with a magazine.