Cool Heat (20 page)

She lit a cigarette and handed it to him. Then one for herself.

“Like I said,” as smoke drifted from her nostrils, “Whatever happens to me, just know I’m glad you killed that prick Shaun Corbin. I want to thank you for that.”

She wasn’t kidding about that one bit. This killer looked really bad, like he was drifting off. “I’d give you the best blow job of your life for doing it, but you don’t look like you could take anything too exciting right now.”

He tried to smile. Tried to talk, but he wasn’t looking like he was all there. Then the killer suddenly laid his head back against the corner of the couch.

What the hell’s this?

The killer was out cold. The gun on his lap, cigarette about to burn his stomach. She grabbed the cigarette and put it in one of the big shell ashtrays on the coffee table. Then she eased the gun from his hand.

Kora North had thought a thousand times what it would be like to put a bullet in some bastard’s head. And now she had the opportunity. It gave her a giddy feeling, but also one of uncertainty.

How to dispose of the body and how not to get blood all over her beautiful couch? She couldn’t decide what to do. And that seemed in her mind to sum up her miserable life.
Why?
It made no sense not to do it. Yet something held her back.

Then she nearly laughed out loud. The guy had fallen back and she realized he had this erection blooming in his pants. Her sense of dark humor gripped her. The utter absurdity of her existence and her effect on men stunned her at times. A guy comes to kill her but falls unconscious with a hard on. She’d tell the girls in the bar she did a goner with a boner, or something like that.

Whack-city is where I live, she thought.

Then it was decision time. She had to think this out. Consider all the ramifications of whatever she chose. And why it was even a question in her mind.

To kill or not to kill.

Do it!
she told herself.
Do it!

43

The Jacuzzi and massage never happened, and neither did any kind of sealing their bond doing something pleasurable. Instead, Sydney got a call from her police-reporter friend right after they returned to the Shaws’ telling her that Cillo’s body had been found.

Marco didn’t want to talk about it right away. He sat in the kitchen with a tiny headlamp and went over Dutch’s files, notebook, computer, and his security workup sheets—all of it on the kitchen table.

When he finally joined her on the deck, he decided to talk about it. They sat in the dark, nothing on the lake but the moon.

Sydney said, “According to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department…an accident. He fell getting into his rock pool. Hit his head. Knocked himself out and drowned. Apparently, he’d been lying in the pool for at least a day or two.”

Marco said, “Your police-reporter friend believes the accident theory?”

“I don’t think he’s got any contradictory information.”

“Who found him?”

“One of his friends couldn’t get ahold of him. Went up and found him.”

They were silent for a moment.

Marco said, “Damn, that’s really hard to get my mind around. Some people you grow up with, they seem indestructible. He was like that. One of my favorite stories as I a kid was how he survived the bombing of Harvey’s casino back in 1980. He was one of the guys who continued to play even as they were evacuating before the bomb went off. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you play one hand too many. He was a to-the-bitter-end kind of guy. A family trait.”

“Didn’t he win the Tervis Cup once?” Sydney asked. “I heard stories about that. And some controversy?”

Marco said, “He courted controversy, for sure. He was nothing if not provocative in everything he did. But the Tervis Cup was one of the highlights of his life. He talked endlessly about it. I was about twelve when he won it. He’d tell you every mile of the hundred-mile climb over the mountains, always prefacing it with the fight he had with some guy in Squaw Valley at the start of the race. Then the miserable climb in the heat and dust up twenty-three thousand feet and how cold it got at night, and then the drop down to Auburn over miserable switchback trails. I heard that story a hundred times. Got better with every telling. If he’d lived to ninety, I’m sure he would have added Indians he had to fight over the Sierras to the mix of things. It was the highlight of his existence, winning that race.”

“What was the controversy?”

“Somewhere between Devil’s Thumb and Murderer’s Bar, just as they were heading down toward the final victory lap at the Placer County Fairgrounds, they got into it again. The controversy was over whether some foul play was involved. The guy he beat out never finished the race, but he never talked about how he got a broken arm and cracked ribs. Never lodged a complaint.”

“Maybe he got a little drunk and slipped,” she said.

“Maybe. He definitely gave me some good moments in my life. But he had a real dark side, for sure. I can’t help wondering if maybe because he didn’t bring me in, he had to be punished.” After a long pause, he added, “I’ll think about him and that part of my life later. Right now, we have work to do.”

Marco took out his cell and called Kora North. No answer. Called her again. “C’mon, Kora, answer the goddamn phone.”

“She’s probably drunk and asleep. Or she decided to run,” Sydney said.

“We have too much on her. And she wants that money. I’ll go with sleeping. But when their
Sicario
doesn’t return, there’ll be more guys out there looking for him. And us. We travel by boat at night from now on.”

They stayed up until morning. Marco tried Kora twice more and got nothing. Sydney sent her a text. If they were going over there, it meant waiting until dark. They needed some confirmation from her.

***

Kora stared at her phone, then at the comatose killer. He’d been out a hell of a long time. It was already daylight. She knew she couldn’t continue to ignore the texts she was getting from Jesup and the calls from her boyfriend. She tried to decide what the hell to do. Maybe she should just tell this Marco guy that the killer was lying there on her couch unconscious. Let him handle it.

The humming of her phone, mingled with the killer’s snoring, had her getting crazy. Leon was in a sleep so deep that when she nudged him, he didn’t show any signs of waking up. Maybe he was dying. She realized if he died, that was a problem. If he lived, maybe a worse one. If she killed him, Thorp would get her one way or another for it.

She now had Leon’s gun and her own. She had all the power. Just didn’t know what to do with it.

Make a goddamn decision,
she admonished herself.

She fought off a sense of panic. If she shot him, she had to do it in a way that wouldn’t mess up her expensive couch. She loved the couch. She had expensive tastes.

She wondered if he was brain-dead or something. Then it occurred to her that if she didn’t answer the texts or phone calls, Marco and Jesup might just show up.

I can’t kill a man while he’s sleeping, she thought. That’s not fair. He’s got to see me, look into my eyes and know he’s about to die.

Then she wondered why she thought that. What the hell did it matter?
I’m nuts,
she thought.
Can’t make up my goddamn mind about anything
.

She stared at her fish tank. The fish swimming lazily. All damn day, every day. Trapped. No exit.

That’s when she looked at the buzzing phone and knew she had to answer this time or the guy might just come over to find out what was wrong. She picked up the phone.

It was the boyfriend, Marco. He said, “If you’re not okay, say you have the wrong number and hang up.”

“I’m okay. I was sleeping.”

“Okay. Look, I need the drawings so we can begin…construction.”

“I’m working on them.”

“Do the best you can,” he told her. “Inside and outside, down to the water. The inside is the most important. Where the office will be located. On the outside, where the fishpond, gazebo, boat dock, and that kind of thing should be.”

“When do you want them?” She spoke to this stud, wondering where he was. Maybe right outside close. She stared at the killer. He was now snoring fitfully.

“Tonight. Make them detailed as you can. Contractors will be coming in a couple days.”

She wondered if he really needed them, or if he was just testing her. All this code language like the fucking FBI was listening in or something. And again she wondered if she should just tell this Marco guy and have him come over and kill the guy.
Go ahead, tell him,
she pleaded with herself. But she didn’t.

Be real easy to kill the killer and then let Marco get rid of the body, wouldn’t it?

She couldn’t think clearly about what it would mean. She was in a state, caught between the killer, the guy on the phone, and Thorp. It always amazed her how she got into this kind of shit.

Meanwhile, Marco was telling her he’d let her know when he was there. Asked her again if everything was good.

Good?
No,
she thought,
not exactly.

“Yes. Everything’s good. At least as good at it can be under the circumstances,” she said, walking to the window, back to the couch, then to the bar as she talked.

“Sorry ‘bout that. It’s how things go. Contractors are undependable. Let me deal with them.”

Yeah, right,
she thought sarcastically, looking at this killer of men, and maybe of women. She was so tempted to tell Marco she had the killer right there in front of her. But what would that accomplish? How many more were out there?

Don’t tell him. No way, Kora thought. Not yet.

“Okay, I’ll be in touch.”

She closed the phone. Men and their bullshit.

She again looked at the fish tank. She saw herself in there as a tiny fish swimming against glass walls in a permanent trap.

To hell with that.

She picked up the guns and tried to decide which one would be best to finish this with.

Shoot the bastard in the head and be done with it.

Then call the police and say some madman broke in and tried to rape her. He sure as hell fit the description of a madman.

She pointed one gun, then the other, at his face. All her life she’d wondered, since the first time she was raped, what it would be like to kill some sonofabitch. Now she was about to find out.

Bang-bang, motherfucker.

Still, she hesitated.

She hadn’t made up her mind, and that really bothered her.
I’ve fucking got to decide,
she thought.
If he doesn’t die, if he wakes up, then what?

He kills me.

That’s what.

What is wrong with you, damnit? Either kill this bastard or…or what?

44

Marco said, “Kora’s good to go. She’s looking at the end of the rainbow.”

Marco went back into the files and tapes Corbin had on her. It was heavy stuff.

Sydney pulled her chair next to him and said, “These guys she and the other girls are partying with, they’re some of the most important people around the lake.”

A couple tapes later, they found a senator, two congressmen, and other politicos. “This outfit was busy,” Marco said. “No wonder they got control of things. How far is it to Rouse’s place?”

Sydney said, “From here, in that speedboat, about half an hour. You know what’s so scary? I’m now my opposite, my dark alter ego. I was this straight-laced law chick, but now I’m a full-fledged criminal. It was so easy and doesn’t really seem to bother me. That’s scary. You went through some of those radical changes, didn’t you?”

“Here’s the thing. The way I look at it, there are two kinds of law breakers—those who have no moral justification and those who do. It’s all a matter of context. If the law can’t bring justice, well, maybe somebody has to do whatever it requires.”

“The end justifies the means?”

Marco said, “Sometimes the means force the issue, determine the end.”

They went over all the negative scenarios. They worried Kora had gone to Thorp and there would be people waiting for them. But given they had so much on her, so much of what she wanted, in the end, they agreed that was unlikely…but they still needed to plan for the worst.

***

Sydney dug out Bernie Shaw’s many maps, and they looked at the keys. The condos and house were on fingers of land that had been created out of the wetlands. It looked on the map like a cluster of germs.

“I nearly bought a condo here when prices dropped,” Sydney said.

“It looks like a nice place. What stopped you?”

She told him how unaware she’d been of some of the history of the place. That it was carved out of Truckee wetlands, much of the building material supplied by none other than Thorp’s grandfather and father. It triggered one of the great battles over the destruction of the environment in the fifties and sixties.

“You and the Thorps go way back.”

“I guess so. They stuck thousands of condos and houses right on top of one of nature’s necessary places. This is where she lives, on Capri Drive.”

“It seems like a big place,” he said, looking more closely at the map.

“They dredged the wetlands so they had all these fingers of land, so everybody gets a little waterway out front. Seven miles of interlocking waterways.

“It
is
big.”

“Would have been even biggerhad they not been stopped. They altered the natural channels that filtered the water before it reached the lake. The paving and building on the Keys eliminated that filtering process, and that had a lot to do with the lake turning gray-green. From high in the air, the place looks like a big pond with amoeba-like creatures frozen in place. If Thorp and his investors get their way on the North Shore, who knows if they won’t come back and finish this? It was Thorp’s father and grandfather who supplied much of the building material for some of the first homes. And across the lake, if they find a way to open up any part of the Whittell legacy, Tahoe will just be a really bad copy of Vegas.”

“Funny how my uncle changed,” Marco said. “He was a big fan of keeping the lake in its natural state. You would have connected with him back then.”