Strip (6 page)

When Spence knocked lightly, she opened the door and pulled him inside. Her apartment was decorated with framed photographs of Kira and a changing group of men and women about her age in various places, always outdoors. They were on a mountain just at the tree line near some wind-tortured pines, in the stands at a baseball stadium, on a big sailboat ducking low to avoid the boom. She stood three feet from him while he glanced around him. She folded her arms and said, “Please don’t tell me that your boss wants to see me again.”

“No. He’s busy right now. He’s got his mind on other things.”

“Good, because I won’t.”

“Good.” He stood there, making no move to leave.

“Then what do you have on your mind?”

He took one step and gathered her into his arms. He kissed her with a certainty that overwhelmed her tentative first attempt at resistance. She was already off-balance, clinging to him to keep from falling backward. “I thought you weren’t interested in your boss’s leftovers.”

“You’re not a leftover.” His hands moved down her back to the bottom seam of her T-shirt and abruptly lifted it so the T-shirt came off and left her arms in the air above her head. “You mentioned he had trouble getting hard. He sure didn’t tell you about it. He couldn’t get it up last night, so all either of you got was a good night’s sleep. I’m here to make it up to you.” He hugged her to his chest.

“What if I don’t want to do this?” She caught herself enjoying the way the soft fabric of his shirt felt against her bare chest.

“I hope you do. You like me.”

“Oh?” She had tried to make it sound at least argumentative, but she had a chill at that moment and shivered, so it only sounded breathy.

He plucked the bow in the drawstring of her sweatpants. She grabbed for the waistband, but they were so loose that they fell to mid-thigh before she could, leaving her in only a pair of white panties. She had to step back and tug the sweatpants up with both hands, leaving her breasts exposed. “There are laws against this.”

“I’m an outlaw. A gangster. You said it before.”

She was holding her sweatpants with one hand and trying to ruin his view of her breasts with the other. “So you admit it.”

“Sure.” He gathered her in his arms again and began kissing her neck, her eyes, her lips.

“You’re making this very hard. But then I suppose I brought this on by what I left in the car, right?”

“What did you leave in the car?”

“I left my name and phone number on a piece of paper in the back seat. You could have called ahead and asked me to go out with you tonight. I would have said yes, and I could have worn something pretty, and we could have had a beautiful date.”

“I didn’t see your piece of paper. Will you go out with me now?”

“I just got out of the shower and my hair is stringy, and you’ve really gotten a bit ahead of yourself. I mean, really.”

“I apologize. I thought you liked bad guys.”

“Well, I do, but…” She kept trying to move, to turn away from him, to hold him off, but he held her as though he were unaware that she was struggling. Finally she said, “Oh, what the hell” put her arms around his neck, and kissed him.

Spence gave her a long, gentle kiss. When they backed apart, she kicked the sweatpants away from her ankles. He began to remove his own clothes and step away from them toward her. She backed into her bedroom as he advanced. The bed had not been slept in, so when they reached it they moved to opposite sides and tore the covers open together. Kira hurriedly yanked open the top drawer of the nightstand, tore a wrapped condom off a long strip, and put it in Spence’s hand. She had the air of a woman committing one last act before being swept away in a flood.

They met in the center of the bed, eager and uninhibited, always in motion. After a time they ended breathlessly and lay together for a few minutes, letting their hearts slow to a normal rhythm. Then he got up, stepped to her dresser, and tore the next condom off the strip before they came together again in the center of the bed, almost like opponents in a fierce contest.

After two hours they lay on their backs staring up at the ceiling, touching only slightly at the hip and the side of the foot. She said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“Do you do this kind of thing often?”

“Never. But suddenly this morning I felt like my life was changing—that big things were happening that I couldn’t control, so I had to go along. I took a guess that it was you.”

She snuggled close and put her arm across his chest. “That’s so…”

“True?”

“No, false. But this has been so, I don’t know, primal. When I think about it now I feel as if I’m going to faint.” She brought her leg across his thigh, straddled him, and stared down into his eyes.

“You don’t seem faint,” he said.

“The good kind of faint. It brings its own revival. I’m beginning to revive.”

“So am I.”

“How long can you stay?”

“I don’t have to be at work until midnight”

“Oh,” she said, then closed her eyes. “Oh.”

J
OE CARVER STOOD
in the Citibank branch in Studio City and watched the pretty teller count out the hundred-dollar bills. They were the cash advance on the business credit card he had stolen from Manco Kapak’s wallet while he was waiting for Kapak to return from the shower.

It was taking a long time for the teller to count out four hundred bills, and the wig, mustache, false eyebrows, and dark makeup were all hot and itchy. Carver didn’t worry that the long wait might be dangerous, because the unseen people who had verified the card and approved the transaction wouldn’t blink at a charge of forty thousand dollars from Kapak’s company. That was probably about the size of his company’s weekly liquor bill. And Carver wasn’t trying to hide the charge forever, just until he got outside. After that he wanted Kapak to see it and howl.

He was confident that Kapak would be occupied with the fate of his Hummers until at least lunchtime. After that he would be trying to make decisions about how to do Carver permanent harm. He wasn’t going to walk into a random branch of a random bank and see Carver using his business credit card.

Carver was taking the money only out of annoyance anyway. When he was making his way into the bamboo forest behind Kapak’s house, he had heard a shot, looked back, and seen Kapak standing by one of the tall, narrow bedroom windows, still naked, with a gun in his hand. His eyes were not on Carver, they were turned up to watch big sheets of glass falling.

Carver had gone through the grove of tall bamboo, over the back wall, and out to the next street. But he had been brooding over the sight since he had seen it. Stealing the business credit card from Kapak’s wallet had been a small precaution. He had not formed a genuine intention to actually use it, only had a vague idea that if he had to pay Kapak off, he might use the card and pay him with his own money. But as soon as he’d heard the shot, he had changed his mind. The card was going to help him send Kapak the message that attacking Joe Carver was a bad idea.

The little teller behind the bulletproof glass counted out the last ten bills and looked pleased with herself. She put the first two stacks in the tray under her window and waited while he picked them up and put them into his canvas bag. Then she put the last two stacks into the tray. As he put away the rest of his money, he said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Kapak.” That was what he liked the best.

Carver knew he had very little time, and that he needed to be moving. He walked out of the bank into the warm sunshine along Ventura Boulevard. At the first corner, he crossed to the south side, and then went over to Cantura Street. It was much quieter as he walked along in the shade of the overarching branches of the sycamore trees. Carver made his way east to the end of Cantura, then turned onto Ventura again, and walked the last three long blocks to the zone where the used-car lots began. He stepped inside the gate of the first one, because he saw just the car.

After a test drive, he made an offer for a year-old Toyota Camry. He liked the car because it was black and nondescript. It was the kind of car that could get left in a parking lot and found only after every other car in the lot was driven off. He paid some of Kapak’s cash for it.

All Joe Carver had wanted was to stay safe so he could start a new life here in Los Angeles. He had owned a restaurant and bar in Chicago for years, and now he wanted to start a similar business here. He could hardly expect to do that if a powerful man kept sending thugs out to find him. He had done his best to make the problem go away. He had simply evaded them, stayed out of sight, and waited for the threat to pass. He had thought that maybe Kapak would run into the real thief, or the source that had made Joe Carver the suspect would lose its credibility. Kapak himself could get into trouble of some other kind and get arrested or killed. Not only could anything happen, but if a man waited long enough, it usually did. Carver had waited a month, but nothing had happened.

He had done his best. He had taken a big risk to go to Kapak unarmed and show him his face, so Kapak would know that Carver wasn’t the man who had robbed him. He had politely asked Kapak to start leaving him alone.

Within minutes Kapak had shot at him from behind. There was no way to make a simple truce with Manco Kapak. The man didn’t care that Carver had done him no harm. Now he was going to have to learn how expensive it was to persist in a wrong decision.

Carver drove to a Big Five sporting goods store and picked out a Remington Model 870 twelve-gauge shotgun with a short barrel and a magazine tube that held eight shells. He couldn’t imagine Kapak sending fewer than eight people next time if he sent any. Carver drove to Griffith Park to find a lonely parking lot beside a small picnic grove so he could take it out of its box and load it with double-ought buckshot. He laid it in the trunk under a mat and put the rest of the box of twenty-five shells in the plastic bag, then flattened the boxes and burned them in one of the picnic grills.

He drove to Sherman Oaks, parked in the lot of a grocery store, and walked to a Wells Fargo Bank branch. He opened a checking account for an entity called the Fortuna Company, deposited five thousand dollars, and received a sheaf of temporary checks.

His next stop was the Westfield Mall. He used Kapak’s card to pay for a hundred American Express gift cards at two hundred dollars each, then bought a new wardrobe of suits, shoes, and informal clothes, the most expensive he could find.

The next series of purchases were simply an effort to drain as much money out of the card as possible before the account was shut down. He bought diamond jewelry and high-end wristwatches for men and women from two different stores. He was aware that there was a federal law that would prevent Kapak from losing much money through a stolen credit card, but he also knew that the charges would horrify and enrage Kapak. Carver took everything he had bought out of the bags, hid the large items in the car trunk, and stashed the rest under the front seats.

Carver had bought enough so he felt he had to move to another shopping center. He had estimated that he could keep charging until late afternoon, so when he got to the Glendale Galleria, he decided it was time to run a check. He went to the food court and ordered a dozen cookies, and handed Kapak’s card to the teenager at the counter. The boy ran the card, waited for the approval, and then handed it back to Carver with an apologetic expression. “Sorry, man. This isn’t any good. Would you like to cancel the order?”

“That’s okay” Carver said, and handed him the cash for the cookies and a tip. He decided the boy looked too embarrassed for a simple declining of credit. Some other message must have come up on his machine like “Confiscate card” or “Call the police.” Carver hurried away and slipped out of the Galleria through the big Nordstrom store that opened into the parking garage. He looked at his watch. It was just 4:00. He’d had a pretty good day. He had a gently used car for free, still had thirty thousand cash and twenty thousand in American Express cards, some very nice clothes, about sixty thousand dollars in jewelry, and a loaded shotgun.

As soon as he was two miles from the Galleria, he took off the uncomfortable fake hair, eyebrows, and mustache, and then used hand wipes to rub off the dark makeup from his face, neck, and hands as he drove. He stopped at a grocery store and used cash to pay for a roll of duct tape, a box of kitchen matches, two hundred feet of clothesline, and a can of charcoal starter.

When he reached the neighborhood where Kapak lived, he began to drive up and down the streets. The next step was going to take some thought and study. If only he knew who had really robbed Kapak, none of this would be necessary.

J
EFFERSON DAVIS FALKINS
lay on the spine-snapped couch under the big window in Lila’s apartment, feeling the faint motion of air across his bare chest and bare feet and bare legs up to the place where his baggy khaki shorts began.

The couch smelled like dog, and because he had been sleeping on it, he supposed he did too. He sat up. The sun must be very low now, because to the east he could see the hint of the deep indigo rising from somewhere beyond the curve of the earth.

Eldon the dog raised his head and turned to Jeff, knowing that in a minute Jeff would probably insist on getting up and spoiling the community and comfort of the couch. Eldon sniffed the air, learning things from it that he kept to himself. All Jeff could tell was that he had not sniffed anything that worried him, like the approach of hostile strangers. Jeff shifted his leg and the heavy dog stood up on all fours, stepped down from the couch to the filthy yellow shag rug, and trotted off. A few seconds later the
scrit-scrat
sound of his toenails announced he had arrived in the kitchen. Falkins could hear Eldon’s long tongue lapping the water in his dish.

Jeff didn’t hear Lila say anything to Eldon, so he called out. “Lila?” There was no response, so he said it louder. “Lila!” He stood up, rubbed his stubbly chin, and joined Eldon in the kitchen. The note was on the kitchen table.
To Mr. Jefferson Davis Falkins. Went to Work. You should try it sometime.
That was perfect Lila. She had such a superstitious reverence for work that she capitalized it. Her respect for it transcended even her attachment to arithmetic. She worked the evening shift at the Siren Club from 4:00 until midnight five nights a week and made so little that she couldn’t have afforded to eat at that club without tips. She was slim and pretty and naturally blond, so she at least got good tips, but that was beside the point.