Sleight of Hand

CHAPTER Two

Death can take many forms. There is the bullet between the eyes, poison secretly administered, or a free fall from a forty-story building, but Dana Cutler was convinced that the most horrible way to die was from boredom. At least a bullet in the brain was quick.

The lives of fictional private eyes are filled with danger and excitement, but Dana’s life was a succession of stakeouts during which she sipped coffee from a thermos and prayed her subjects wouldn’t do something important while she was peeing in a gas-station restroom. The bulk of Dana’s cases came from (a) criminal defense attorneys who hoped she would find a miracle witness who could clear an obviously guilty client, (b) husbands or wives who thought their spouse was cheating, or (c), as in her present assignment, an insurance company that wanted to find out if a claimant was faking an injury. These were not scenarios that inspired the plots of high-octane action movies.

Lars Jorgenson was an athletic, broad-shouldered accountant with a serious addiction to gambling who had just gone through a brutal divorce. Jorgenson’s personal and financial lives had been sliding down a slippery slope until his car was totaled at an intersection. Jorgenson said he’d suffered permanent damage to his back that made it impossible to work, and he had a doctor who swore this was so. If the claim held up, Lars would receive a hefty sum, but the doctor was a well-known quack and the insurance company was certain that Jorgenson was faking. Dana had been following Jorgenson around for the past three days and had nothing to show for her efforts. Tonight, Lars had parked in the lot of a sports bar before hobbling inside in apparent discomfort.

Dana was an athletic five ten with short auburn hair and electric green eyes. Men always noticed her. To keep from being spotted by Jorgenson, Dana had donned several disguises. Tonight she was wearing a brown wig and makeup and clothes that made her look dowdy. Even so, several men at the bar watched her as she walked in.

One of the men watched longer than the others. He had a thick black beard, and his long, greasy hair was pulled back into a ponytail that fell down the back of a leather jacket that advertised Harley-Davidson. When the man made a quarter turn on his bar stool so he could eye Dana, his T-shirt rode up, revealing a gut that lapped over the top of stained jeans.

Dana’s stomach tightened, she grew light-headed, and her breathing increased. She slipped her hand into her jacket pocket and her fingers curled around the handle of a .38 Special, one of several weapons she was carrying. The man turned his attention back to his drink, but Dana couldn’t relax, and it took her several minutes before she let go of her gun.

Dana knew why she’d had the panic attack. Before she became a private detective, she had worked undercover for the D.C. police. On her last assignment, she was tasked to discover the location of a meth lab run by a biker gang. Dana infiltrated the gang but her cover was blown. The bikers had kept her prisoner in the basement of their lab, where they raped and beat her for days before making a fatal mistake.

One of the rapists had gotten drunk and staggered into the basement for some fun. He had tossed his beer bottle away before pulling down his pants. It had not registered in his drink-addled mind that the bottle had shattered until Dana shoved a jagged piece of glass into his eye.

When the police arrived at the farm they found Dana naked, covered with gore and staring glassy-eyed into space. A blood-soaked ax lay next to two .357 Magnums, and the ax and the handguns lay near the dismembered bodies of the other three bikers. The man at the bar bore a faint resemblance to one of her kidnappers.

Dana had spent a year in a mental hospital, recovering from physical and psychic wounds. When she left, she moved into a small apartment near the National Cathedral. For months she had stayed in her sanctuary unless necessity drove her out. When her savings reached rock bottom she was forced to face reality. There was no way she could return to the D.C. police, but police work was the only thing she knew. Working as a private investigator was an adequate solution, and she made certain that her cases were routine and did not involve danger. Then, by chance, Dana had been involved in a case that helped bring down Christopher Farrington, the president of the United States. The danger she’d encountered had made her feel alive and the notoriety she had achieved from this high-profile case had brought her plenty of work, but now it was the rare assignment that induced an adrenaline high.

When Dana entered the bar, she’d seen Lars Jorgenson limping to a table, leaning his cane against its side, and grimacing as he slumped into a chair. Dana found an empty booth that gave her a good view of her quarry. The second half of a basketball game was just starting on one of the large-screen TVs. A long hour later, the Wizards succumbed to the Knicks. Jorgenson, in apparent pain, levered himself out of his chair and limped to his car. Dana followed him home. When the lights in Jorgenson’s apartment went out at midnight Dana slumped down in the front seat of her car, took a sip of coffee from her thermos, and prayed that a direct hit by a flaming meteor would end her misery.