Pulse (22 page)

Authors: John Lutz

Tags: #Thrillers, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Espionage, #General

BOOK: Pulse

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T
he Happy Noodle was within easy walking distance from where Neeve had been working on the
Overbite
manuscript in the park. Still, she was slightly late when she walked into the restaurant for lunch with her friends and former colleagues.

Melanie, who arranged these occasional lunches, had made the reservation and was sitting at the head of the white-clothed table. Rhonda and Lavella were on either side of her. Each woman had before her a drink along with folded paper napkins, twisted red plastic swizzle sticks, and a few squeezed lime wedges.

“Train delay,” Neeve said, by way of explaining why she was fifteen minutes late. The truth was that her purse, and the heavy computer case containing the
Overbite
manuscript, had slowed her down, and she’d felt faint. She’d found a doorway to stand in, where the swarms of people on their lunch hour wouldn’t buffet her and she could catch her breath. She figured she might be experiencing a sugar crash, after only a doughnut for breakfast.

She’d felt around in her purse, found what was left of a wrapped Tootsie Roll, and popped the chocolate morsel into her mouth.

It did seem to help, as she proceeded more slowly to the restaurant, feeling her energy level gradually rise.

She sat down next to Lavella and placed her purse and computer case on the floor, propped against her chair leg.

Lavella was a beautiful black woman who worked as an associate editor at one of the big publishing houses. She glanced at the computer case.

“If the food server steps on that stuff, you’re gonna need a new computer,” she said.

“No computer in the case,” Neeve said. “Manuscript.”

“New thriller?”

“Vampire novel.”

“Surprise, surprise. Any good?”

“It sucks.”

The server, who looked a lot like a young Susan Sarandon, arrived. She didn’t step on the computer case, and jotted down Neeve’s order for white wine, and a fresh round of drinks for the others at the table.

The four women fell into easy conversation. They talked about the fact that Rhonda and Neeve had been forced into the ranks of the self-employed by the shrinking and consolidation of major publishers. About the encroachment of e-books. About a new book Lavella’s publisher was bringing out that claimed there was a secret government plan to cause the bond market to crash. About a launch party at a mystery bookstore. About Melanie’s new boyfriend, who used to play in the NBA and whom the other three had never heard of but pretended they had. All four women decided they liked a new bestselling thriller about a serial killer in New York. They were smart, strong women who enjoyed a good vicarious scare.

Though Neeve was a drink behind the others, she still felt slightly tipsy as they finished their lunches of soup and salads and left the restaurant. Beneath a large sign that indeed depicted a happy noodle, they wished each other luck, hugged each other, and went their separate ways.

Neeve was in a much better mood and was pleased to notice she was easily walking a straight line, so must not have drunk too much. What? Three glasses of wine? Four? Well, she’d had pasta with her drinks. Rather, drinks with her pasta—an important distinction, in Neeve’s mind.

The afterglow of drink and food was making her sleepy. By the time she’d reached her building and stood before her apartment door, she knew her plans to work some more on
Overbite
were going to be put on hold. A short nap was in order.

Self-employment. It has its advantages.

Q
uinn sat at his cherrywood desk in his den, reading Sal and Harold’s respective reports, wishing he could smoke a cigar. His Cubans remained unlit in a small humidor in the desk’s bottom drawer. If he actually lit one anywhere in the brownstone, even
near
the brownstone, Pearl would smell the tobacco smoke and bitch at him. And now a second nose was in the picture. Jody wouldn’t actually say anything to him about the scent of tobacco smoke, but she would regard him with a sad and disdainful expression that was very much like Pearl’s.

Quinn absently touched his shirt pocket where a cigar wasn’t and reflected that it would be nice if eyewitness accounts were actually as accurate and useful as they were in TV police shows and the movies.

If ifs were skiffs we all would sailors be.

Something his daughter, Lauri, used to say. She lived in California, where she was doing okay, according to her occasional letters or cards. A few times she’d sent some e-mails, with photographs of her and some guy she was dating. Gary, Quinn thought his name was. There were palm trees in the backgrounds of all the photos, as if she was trying to make a point. She’d never return to New York.

Quinn wondered if Lauri and Jody would get along.

Separated by a continent, it was possible that they would never meet.

Made melancholy by such thoughts, Quinn considered phoning Renz and seeing if the NYPD had any new information that might help in the investigation. It could be a good idea to remind Renz that information flowed both ways.

On the other hand, it was always annoying to talk with Renz. If Renz wanted to pass on information to Quinn, he’d call, so why should Quinn subject himself to having to listen to the conniving and ambitious commissioner?

Why would anyone willingly subject themselves to Renz? Such encounters left an odor of corruption and had a lasting effect, like radioactive garbage.

Quinn decided it would be better to feel melancholy.

Renz lay on his back in the hotel room bed, still panting. He knew if he didn’t start losing weight, sex with Olivia would kill him. He grinned. On the other hand, if he kept having sex with Olivia he was bound to lose weight. Hell, Olivia might kill a healthy man.

He could hear Olivia tinkering around in the bathroom, then the faint hiss of the shower. Renz wondered if she had another appointment booked. He knew Olivia was one of the highest-paid call girls in the city, though he never found out exactly how much she charged. That was because she was free for Renz, as long as he kept the vice squad away from the supposedly honest escort service where she was employed. It was odd, Renz sometimes thought, how the fact that no money changed hands made things different. A real relationship had developed. For Renz, anyway. He wasn’t sure about Olivia Dupree, which wasn’t her real name.

He knew her real name, and more than that about her.

Olive Krantz had been raised by strict Baptist parents in St. Louis, where she started getting into trouble with the police when she was fourteen. By the time she was eighteen, marijuana possession and peace disturbance had become breaking and entering and prostitution. Even at fourteen she’d looked more like a beautiful woman than a teenager. By eighteen she’d been devastating. And she’d devastated the lives of two mall security guards who were caught on video exchanging merchandise for sex. The woman in the grainy security camera video hadn’t been identifiable, and Olive Krantz had walked away without being charged.

She apparently liked prostitution, and before she was twenty she was in New York, working for one of the big escort agencies. She was twenty-nine now, and probably rich in her own right, because she’d never been a fool.

Renz knew she was simply doing her job, keeping the police commissioner—a very important client indeed—off her employer’s back.

She and Renz had become something like friends one night, not while they were screwing, but while they lay in bed together afterward, talking.

Renz knew it was all bullshit, pumping him for information. This woman was smart and knew information was power and protection, so she wanted some about him. He didn’t care. He knew what not to tell her while telling her plenty. He realized he would never really possess a woman like Olivia. Not all of her, anyway. No one could.

They talked more and more often, sharing each other’s secrets. Or so it seemed. Most of what Renz told her were lies, and he wondered if she ever checked to see if any of it was true. She seemed so trusting, but he knew she wasn’t.

She emerged from the bathroom nude, still rubbing her short blond hair dry with one of the hotel’s huge white towels. The brisk action with the towel made her breasts jiggle.

“Wanna come back to bed?” Renz asked, wondering if he’d be able to get it up again so soon after the last time.

“You’re insatiable.”

“For that I need inspiration,” Renz said, “and that would be you.”

Olivia smiled.

Still holding the towel, she walked over to the bed and kissed his forehead. He felt her bare nipple brush his arm.

“Really,” he said, “why don’t you hang around for a while? We can talk.”

“I would if I could, baby, but I promised a girlfriend I’d babysit her two kids for her.” She glanced over at the clock on the dresser. “And I’m running late already.”

Renz nodded and smiled.
Oh, you beautiful liar.

He watched her finish getting dressed, and they kissed good-bye before she left.

Renz had over an hour before checkout time, so he lay back on the linens that still smelled of sex and rested peacefully, forgetting about the pressure on him from the pols and higher-ups, the sicko Daniel Danielle (Quinn’s problem), the blizzard of paperwork that was his constant annoyance, his plush but lonely penthouse apartment in the Financial District.

He thought only about Olivia and their relationship. About how they gave each other exactly what they both needed and didn’t ask too many questions, knowing the answers would be lies anyway.

What could be better than that?

Renz’s cell phone played a trumpet cavalry charge in his pants pocket. The trouble was, his pants were folded over the back of a chair across the room. He hesitated, then decided the call might be important and reached the phone in three large steps away from the bed, reaching it just before the charge was over. His pants dropped to the floor as he dragged the phone from their left-side pocket. They’d be wrinkled now, which irritated Renz.

He glanced down and saw that the call was from Q&A. Quinn.

When the connection was made, Renz said, “We need to make this fast, Quinn. I’m at a meeting.”

“Sure. Sal and Harold widened their canvass in Vess’s neighborhood and came up with a witness that saw a woman who came around the victim’s apartment.”

“You mean when the victim wasn’t home?”

“Could be,” Quinn said. “And her actions were furtive. What I want from you are some uniforms to really cover that neighborhood and see if anyone else has something to add. I’d like to put this woman with Vess, and maybe get a better description.”

“Whaddya need, six officers?”

“That would do it,” Quinn said, surprised by Renz’s generosity.

“Anything else?”

“No, I’ll let you get back to your meeting.”

“It’s over now,” Renz said, glancing down at his flaccid self. “But there’ll be another one pretty soon.”

Hanging up the phone, Quinn thought that was an odd thing for Renz to say. He supposed that as police commissioner, Renz’s life had become one meeting after another.

Renz had stepped out of the shower and was toweling himself dry when he heard his cell phone again. He’d brought the phone into the bathroom with him and rested it on the edge of the washbasin. The trumpet charge was deafening bouncing off all that tile.

He reached the phone with a wet hand and squinted at it to see who was calling. Quinn, maybe. Wanting something more.

But he saw that the caller wasn’t Quinn. It was an aide to the mayor, no doubt calling for a progress report on the Daniel Danielle investigation. Pressure, pressure.

Renz’s puffy cheeks rounded with his slight smile. He knew how to deflect pressure. And where to deflect it.

And who would feel it next.

T
he knocking on Neeve’s apartment door turned out to be a middle-aged man with the looks and bearing of someone thoroughly beaten down by life. He asked for Herb Moranis.

Neeve informed him that Moranis had lived on the first floor but moved away last month. He looked crestfallen, thanked her for the information, and walked meekly toward the stairs.

Neeve stood with her hand still on the knob of the closed door.
See, what you were so afraid of? Nervous Neeve.

Someone had chided her with that long ago in her childhood. She couldn’t remember who.

Nervous Neeve.

“I’ve read about your organization in the papers,” Penny said.

Genna Sinclair, a stern-looking woman of forty-five who looked as if she should be carrying a yardstick and terrorizing students, smiled in a way that caused her chin to jut out and convey a definite menace. “Shadow Guardians is having an effect,” she said. “We make it safer for the individual police officer by phoning in crime as we see it develop. Our central office has direct lines to every precinct house in the city.”

Keeping her voice low, since they were in the library, Penny said, “But I don’t know exactly what you mean by crime developing.”

“Say someone is getting bullied on the subway and it looks as if it’s going to develop into a fight or beating. Or a car alarm goes off and you see someone walking away, and the owner of the car hurrying to catch up. Or someone has shoplifted something in a jewelry store and you know the store’s security is going to confront him on the sidewalk, and the security is an old man unarmed. Those kinds of things. You realize they happen more often than you think, once you learn to look for them. And if the police know soon enough about crimes developing—or just committed—they’ll be able to close on the spot sooner and in greater numbers, and be safer.” Genna tapped a button on the dark lapel of her business suit, lettered S
OONER
IS
S
AFER.

“It makes sense,” Penny said.

“Too many cops get hurt or killed because they arrive on the scene without proper backup following in time. And when they get there one at a time, it emboldens the bad guys. A cop might be the only one who knows what’s going down, find himself alone and outnumbered, and bang.”

“That’s my recurring nightmare,” Penny said.

“You contacted us, so you must think our kind of organization is needed.”

“I saw you interviewed on TV and decided to look at your website.”

“And?”

“It seems to make sense.”

Genna flashed her indomitable chin-out smile. “You should come to one of our meetings, then make up your mind. If you think our police should be safer—”

“I do,” Penny interrupted. “My husband is a sort of cop.”

“Sort of?”

“He’s an ex-homicide detective. Now he’s private, with Quinn and Associates Investigations.”

Genna nodded. “Q and A.” She seeming impressed.

“In a way,” Penny said, “it’s more dangerous than regular police work.”

“Then you should definitely attend one of our meetings. We tend to snuff out violence before it has a chance to begin.
Preventing
violence is the key.”

“Where do you meet?”

“Different places. Sometimes libraries.” She glanced around. Hit Penny with the smile again.

“We don’t have much space,” Penny said, “but maybe after closing time.”

“That would work. I’ll let you know when the next meeting’s scheduled.”

“Fine. Anything I’ll need? I mean, to join?”

“I know it’s hard to get a license,” Genna said, “but it might be a good idea if you owned a gun.”