Chapter 69
Jack lunged out of the chair. “Now wait a minute here. I am not going to…”
Dvora’s grin said it all. If he couldn’t picture himself as part of a gay couple, wouldn’t everybody else have the same problem? The tourists would look at them, not really seeing them as individuals. The cops would look the other way, forced to by the political might of the gay community in San Francisco. The couple might get some static from Queer Nation types, but probably not. As accepting as the City was of everything but the Tea Party, people who saw through the disguise would probably think they were a straight couple acting out a fantasy. Which now that he thought of it…
“Great idea,” he lied as he settled back into their ersatz barber chair.
Once his hair was butchered into a spiky thing, short on the sides and back, fuller on top, Dvora bleached most of the color out of it. Then she pulled out a tube of Preparation H.
“We don’t have to consummate our relationship.”
“Ha, bloody ha!”
“What’s the Preparation H for?” He asked.
“Preparation H shrinks tissue. Models use it to make their pores smaller so they look younger. I want you to look younger and thinner. I’m going to use Super Glue to tighten up your neck. If we had more time I would find Botox. You’ll wear this pair of narrow-wale black corduroy trousers and control-top pantyhose. We’ll put you into this jacket with very narrow shoulders. Make sure you hang your thumbs in your belt and walk with your shoulders back. Think of a big rooster, itching for a fight. We’ll make you taller with lifts inside cowboy boots and finish it off with a ten-gallon hat.”
An hour and a half later he stood in front of the lying mirror. Now he was six feet five, with the heels and lifts, taller still with the black hat. He looked five years younger, at least. And, he looked like a complete and total asshole. She looked up at him with what she said was the look of undisguised lust she was practicing. Then she walked to the end of the tiny room and back.
Gone was the feminine, muscular walk that still stirred him. In its place was a male homosexual aggressiveness that made him a little uncomfortable. He had been accused of being homophobic once or twice, but it wasn’t that. He was uncomfortable with anybody who tried to use their sexual preference to make other people uncomfortable.
“How am I supposed to act?” he asked.
“That’s what is so great. Just act rude, loud, aggressive, territorial, horny, and like an asshole. You know, your normal behavior.”
He growled deep in his throat, reached out and grabbed her by the neck with his right hand and forced her to her knees.
“No bitch of mine is going to talk to me like that.”
He didn’t know where it came from. And, what about the raging hard-on, threatening to break through the pantyhose and tight cords? When he took enough pressure off her neck for her to look up, her eyes filmed, and her head rolled on her neck.
She reached out and grabbed his butt cheeks, pulling his crotch to her and took him in her teeth through the double layer of fabric. He thrust his hips forward, pulling her head against his bulge.
He fought through the lust, pushed her away, grabbed her by her upper arms, and lifted her up until she was at eye level, feet nearly a foot off the ground.
“What in the hell are we doing?” he asked.
She reached around his back and grabbed him by the shoulder blades, wrapped her legs around his waist and bit into his left earlobe with her strong white teeth.
“Fuck me! Now!”
HE STROKED HER as she lay curled around him, his left arm under her, her head in the crook of his arm and shoulder. Her body looked amazing and felt better than it looked, with the layer of girl softness covering the years of dancer’s muscles. She had been a generous and uninhibited lover, taking as much pleasure from giving as receiving. He had been pleasantly surprised often and shocked just once, by the cesarean scar.
“You didn’t ask. It’s a cesarean scar.”
“I know,” he said.
“I was in college, my second try. Daddy bribed my way back in to Julliard. One of my fellow students was a model for a figure drawing class. He seemed nice. We were drinking wine in my apartment. I felt so strange. I thought at first it was the pot, and then realized he put something in the wine. I would have fucked him anyway.”
Her warm tears showered his chest. “My periods had always been irregular. I had been dancing hard all along, so my body fat was down to where I wasn’t menstruating regularly. All he gave me was Chlamydia, although I didn’t even know that until later. That was part of the problem. I blew off school a little later and headed to Paris to stay with friends. By the time I was sick enough to check I was four months pregnant.”
Dvora stopped and rolled on top of him. She rode him like a horse as she told the story.
“I had been using and drinking. While I was trying to dry out, I lost track of time. By the time I’d decided that I would make the world’s shittiest mother it was too late to get an abortion. A while later Daddy had me flown home. On the plane on the way back, something happened. They said later, my weakened state combined with Chlamydia and lack of prenatal care all added to it. By the time I got off the plane I was hemorrhaging and they took me from the airport in an ambulance. I was in the hospital for six weeks. They did everything they could. He died during the cesarean.”
She sat up enough to slip him inside her. “He wouldn’t have lived even if he made it to term. His lungs weren’t formed properly and he only had little flipper things where his arms should have been. When it was all done and they thought I might want to live, they told me I’d never make more babies.”
That night they used sex as a drug.
IN THE MORNING the promise of the storm was gone. In its place was a redolent, lazy feel to the air, as if this part of the planet was tired of bracing for the storm that never happened and decided to rest. Dvora woke up with a case of the Shut up and stay-away-from-me’s.
A glimpse of a mean-looking guy in the mirror made him lunge to his strong side with his hand on the pistol.
Damn good disguise, he thought. He wanted to go back in and tell her about it,make her smile and laugh. She had a right to be unhappy if she wanted. He brushed his teeth and flossed, thinking he kind of liked himself blond. He’d always laughed at men who dyed their hair. He wondered if looking younger could make you feel younger. If smiling could make you happy, then maybe a face-lift could make you young.
They watched the local station that interrupted talk shows for anything resembling news. He reached to switch channels when:
“This reporter has just learned that a couple matching the description of Jack McDonald and Dvora Schacter boarded an Aeroméxico flight to Mexico City within minutes of the brutal gangland-style slaying of Donald O’Hare. Witnesses say the man was visibly tense and the woman very uncomfortable, crying quietly for much of the short flight. Local authorities contacted the FBI with information, which was then delivered, through channels, to the authorities in Mexico City. The couple managed to get off the flight before the Mexican Federal Police were in place. More developments are expected soon.”
“Bless you, Bob,” he said.
“You think it was Bob’s doing?”
“Sounds like Bob, and our luck is starting to turn.”
JACK RETHOUGHT the operating plan, trying to debug it. The plan had more holes in it than Dvora’s pants. The next part of the plan was to stop by two different shops to get passport pictures, then buy phony IDs, get out of the City and buy a car, or buy a car and then get out of the City. He sort of forgot to tell her that once they did, he was going to ditch her. The plan could fall apart at any step. Dvora could have already been arrested. The Feds could be sitting on top of all of Bob’s communications. Someone could rat them out when they were trying to buy phony IDs, or when they bought the car.
He heard the creak of the stairs this time and was standing by the door waiting as Dvora knocked to come in. She brought her new passport picture and newspapers. They weren’t top of the fold in the Chronicle. They were the top story below the fold.
ENTREPRENEUR ASSASSIN
San Francisco,
Eyewitnesses report that at 5:16 PM yesterday, Donald O’Hare, president and CEO of ReWire, Inc., one of the leading-edge genetic engineering firms in the Bay Area, was brutally executed in gangland fashion by Jack McDonald, senior partner of DealMaker, a private Bay Area investment banking company. Witnesses also state that Mr. McDonald’s sister’s lover and roommate, Dvora Schacter, was at the scene of the crime and seemed to be Mr. McDonald’s prisoner.
He read the end of the story later. At the end of the first paragraph there was a sidebar saying to look at the related story in the Street Walker section of the Business Pages.
“Fuck! Those sons-of-bitches,” Dvora shouted. She had read the headline story on the way in and had finished Street Walker.
…DealMaker’s senior partner, Jack McDonald, chief suspect in the murder of Donald O’Hare, president and CEO of ReWire, Inc., is also rumored to be the subject of an insider trading investigation. It is rumored by sources close to the SEC regional office and the Treasury Department that warrants and subpoenas are forthcoming. …
“What do we do now?” Dvora asked.
“We keep to the plan. There is no way any of the trades can be traced to us and no one will rat us out. At most, when this is over, we’ll have to litigate to recover assets.”
He needed to talk to Bob. He was certain that Bob’s phones would be tapped. Osama Bin Laden was almost killed because he used a satellite phone. A politician stroking his ego bragged to the press about how the CIA was tracking Osama’s satellite phone. Osama had continued using it, but only to confuse his enemies. After that he used couriers who didn’t even know they were delivering messages.
Firing up the lap top and emailing Bob would have had the same effect as putting the message on one of those huge billboards the dot.com companies bought before the bubble burst. People like and want privacy. Some people just liked it and other people needed it. Suppose you were an elder in the LDS, but you wanted to look at pictures of naked young men?
The Internet, with cookies and all the databases, was normally like an open book, but there were ways. Jack needed secure communications wherever he went so he took a roundabout route. First he encrypted everything he sent. Then he used two different web-based emails, one to sign on to the other. The most important part of the puzzle was his account with aka.com. He paid for the service for a year at a time with a money order bought for cash out of state. This meant, in theory anyway, that he could sign on to the net anonymously. He didn’t trust the people at aka.com so he used the added arm’s-length of the web-based email accounts and still used a web proxy.
Next time they went out somewhere with free wireless access he would download SPY software. The guy who’d written the program had been imprisoned for writing it, but it was still available on the web. It should give them secure communications, except for Carnivore.
He was absolutely sure the FBI would be using Carnivore. The Feds had boners for the net. No matter how many lawsuits they had to respond to over the years, they kept sneaking ways to monitor the net. In the past it had been the excuse of child pornography. Now it was terrorism.
After thinking it through, he left the laptop where it was. You defeat high tech with no tech. When he left with the gun in his pocket, Dvora didn’t look happy.
AS JACK sat for his passport photo at the mailbox and copy store he thought about Proposition 187. The law had supposedly been designed to make it harder for illegal aliens to take a free ride on the California welfare train. It should have been called the profit multiplier act for forgers and smugglers. Or, it could have been called the full employment act for bureaucrats and the border patrol.
All 187 had done was to put more profit into phony IDs and run off a few of the weak sisters. And, there were a lot more illegal aliens prostituting themselves or selling dope or their kids to pay for phony IDs. The act created another layer of government bureaucracy hired for life, pretending it was a terrible thing to try to sneak into this country. The government types would catch a few of the low-level people so they could justify bigger budgets each year. The proposition was found unconstitutional, but Jack was sure all the bureaucrats hired were still on the payroll.
Jack paid cash to print the pictures. He already had Dvora’s picture from her earlier shopping trip. On the way to the restaurant he looked at his picture and wondered if he’d always look like an asshole and not noticed it.
Mama Ling’s was already busy, despite the early hour. Busy was good. The more crowded, the better. He stood just outside the door, scanning the crowd, not eager to test his disguise on anyone he knew. There was the usual crowd of people three deep at the Dim Sum bar, a group of a dozen or so German tourists in the corner to the right, tables of natives in the middle and two different groups of bikers to the left. One of the groups was RUBs, and the other the real thing.
The pretend bikers were trying to avoid doing anything to piss off the old outlaws. The outlaws were acting hard, which meant they weren’t, and talking loudly about gooks. The leader of the pack had been on local TV some years back, vulgar and vocal about helmet laws.
Jack could hear the asshole all the way across the restaurant as he said, “We should have whipped the gooks ass in Nam, and would have too, if the politicians hadn’t stopped us.”
Jack knew one of the waiters would spit in their food or, hopefully, piss in it. A spot opened up at the Dim Sum bar and he slid into it, ahead of a Chinese gangbanger who cursed him in Cantonese. He ignored the snickers from the sailors at the end of the bar. The pants were too damn tight. That and the pantyhose had him peeing every ten minutes.
Jack turned back toward the bar, thinking the server would be the one to ask about papers, when he heard the gang banger to his left whisper “Cops!” in Cantonese and slide out. He turned on the stool as naturally as he could.
The smaller cop was staring at him with a strange expression on his face. About five-nine, one-fifty or so, mid-thirties, extremely short dark hair, very pale, and impeccably dressed in a dark blue suit. The cop turned and said something to his partner who laughed and shook his head.
Jack stood and walked toward the back as casually as he could. He hoped there was a back way out he didn’t remember from before. There was one of those curved round mirrors high on the wall right at the turn so waiters could avoid collisions. He glanced at it, catching the heel of his boot on nothing. The little cop was following. There was no back way out.