The box wasn't heavy. Karen held it tucked under one arm while she closed and locked the door, then let the heavy bag slip off her shoulder onto a chair. She tilted the box toward the light to read the label. There was no return address, but her mother's name hit her. "JEANETTE WHITLAW" was printed on the box in plain block letters. Pain squeezed her chest. Jeanette had seldom ordered anything, but when she did, she had been like a child at Christmas, eagerly awaiting the mail or a delivery service, beaming when the expected package finally arrived.
Karen carried the box into the kitchen and used a knife to slit the sealing tape. She opened the flaps and looked inside. There were some papers and a small book bound together with rubber bands, and on top lay a folded sheet of paper. She took the letter out of the box and unfolded it, glancing automatically at the bottom to see who had sent it. The scrawled name, "Dex," made her drop the letter, unread, back into the box.
Dear old Dad. Jeanette hadn't heard from him in at least four years. Karen hadn't actually spoken to him since she was thirteen and he had called to wish her a happy birthday. He had been drunk, it hadn't even been close to her birthday, and Jeanette had cried softly all night long after talking to her husband. That was the day all Karen's resentment and confusion and bitterness had congealed into hatred, and if she was at home the few times he had called after that, she had refused to speak to him. Jeanette had been distressed, but Karen figured that on the scale of things holding a grudge weighed a lot less than abandoning your wife and daughter, so she hadn't relented.
Leaving the box on the table, she trudged into the bedroom and peeled off her clothes, dropping the crumpled green uniform on the floor. Her feet ached, her head ached, her heart ached. The overtime she was working, in at sixa.m. and off at sixp.m. , kept her mind occupied but added to her depression. She felt as if she hadn't seen sunlight in weeks.
She slipped her cold feet out of her wet shoes and hurriedly pulled on a pair of sweats, then some thick socks. She was cold and tired. She thought longingly of heat and sunshine. Once, when she was only two years old, they had been stationed at a base in Florida. Karen didn't really remember it, but when she closed her eyes, she still had the impression of wonderful heat, of long days under a brilliant sun. Jeanette had often talked of Florida, with longing in her voice, because those days had been relatively happy. Then Dexter had gone to Vietnam and never really came home. Jeanette had moved back to the mountains of West Virginia, where they were originally from, to be close to their families while she waited for her husband's tour of duty to be over and prayed for his safety. But one tour had turned into another, then another, and the man who finally showed up on their doorstep wasn't the same one who had left. Karen had clear memories of those days, of his sullenness, his long bouts of drinking, tiptoeing around him lest she set off his temper. He had turned mean, and not even Jeanette's unwavering love could hold him. He began disappearing, at first just for a day or two, then the days became weeks and the weeks turned into months, and then one day Jeanette realized he was gone for good. She cried into her pillow a lot of nights; Karen could remember that, too. They had moved from West Virginia to Ohio so Jeanette could get a better job. There had been those few phone calls, a couple of letters, and once Dexter had actually come to visit. Karen hadn't seen him; he was gone before she got home from her classes. But Jeanette had been glowing, softly excited, and at nineteen Karen was adult enough to realize her parents had spent the visit in Jeanette's bedroom. That was ten years ago, and Jeanette hadn't seen him since. She hadn't stopped loving him, though. Karen couldn't understand it, but she accepted her mother's constancy. Jeanette had been infinitely loving, even with the husband who had abandoned her.
After a lonely meal of cold cereal, Karen made herself pick up the letter again.
"Jeanie—Here are some old papers of mine. Put them in a safe deposit box and keep them for me. They may be worth some money someday—Dex."
That was it. No salutation, no "dear," not signed with love. He had just mailed his junk to her mother and expected her to keep it for him.
And she would have. Jeanette would have carefully followed his instructions and even kept that curt note, placing it with the pitifully small stack of letters she had saved from when he was in Vietnam. Karen's instinct was to toss the box into the trash. Out of respect for her mother, she didn't. Instead, she carried it into Jeanette's empty bedroom and placed it in one of the boxes that held her mother's things. She couldn't bring herself to get rid of anything yet; she had rented storage space and would keep it all there until that day came.
The packing was all but complete. There were only a few items left, sitting on top of the dresser. Karen added them to the box and sealed it with several strips of masking tape across the cardboard. With luck, the house would sell soon, and spring would come, and she would be able to see sunshine again.
Chapter 3
«^»
August 5, New Orleans, Louisiana
Almost midnight. Someone was following him. Again. Dexter Whitlaw turned his head just enough to see the flash of movement with his peripheral vision. Excitement pumped through his veins, and he almost grinned. There was nothing like the hunt, even when he was the prey. They had been after him for almost six months, and he delighted in using his old skills to evade them. He had led them on quite a chase, zigzagging back and forth across the country, surfacing in the larger cities to place another call. He hadn't expected it to be easy, and he hadn't been disappointed, but he knew his man. After the initial "Go to hell" had sounded in his ear, Dexter had begun his game of cat and mouse. Blackmail could be as brutal as an amputation or as delicate as reeling in a world-record trout on gossamer line. First, he had established his evidence—just a little of it, just a taste of what could be released if certain conditions weren't met.
As he had expected, the pigeon had reacted with fury. Far from being intimidated, he had called all his dogs and sicced them on Dexter. Most men would have been dead by now, but Dexter had spent a three-year lifetime crawling on his belly in Nam, learning patience and strategy and the ability to conceal himself so well that the unsuspecting dogs had several times walked right past him, just as Charlie and the North Vietnamese had done in Nam.
Dexter was having a hell of a time. He hadn't felt so blazingly alive since he had looked down his scope into that Russian's scope and known one of them had only a split second to live. The dog following him now was better than the others. Not as good as ol' Dex, he thought exuberantly, but good enough to give him a thrill. Hell, he even knew this one; unless he missed his guess, he was being dogged this time by no less than Rick Medina, one of the CIA's best wet men back in their old green hunting grounds, twenty-five years ago. Another time, another world, but here they were, the same old players playing the same old game of hide and seek.
Dexter blended into the shadows, hunkering down for a minute while he waited for his follower to make another move. A less cautious man would have shot first and checked his identity afterward, but this guy was smart. Assume Dexter didn't know he was being followed; a hasty killing of the wrong guy would send the real prey so far underground it might be weeks before they could pick him up again. And don't forget to factor in the unwanted attention of the cops. True, for the most part, the cops didn't worry much about the unexpected demise of a street bum, even when said demise was caused by a bullet in the brain.
But you could never tell; they might be having a slow day and want some excitement, or a TV news crew might happen on the scene, and the bright lights would prod the cops to reluctant activity—the random occurrence of feces, as one erudite patron of a soup kitchen in Chicago had put it. Dexter waited. Slowly, his movements ghostly, he smeared dirt on his face and hands to disguise their relative paleness. Then he ducked his head down and remained motionless, comfortable in the knowledge that he was virtually invisible to anyone peering into the deeply shadowed alley. After several minutes, he listened to the shuffle of footsteps as they moved closer. Maybe it was the hunter; maybe it was just another bum. Dexter didn't move.
The footsteps paused. Dexter pictured what anyone looking down this alley would see: scattered trash, broken bottles, a pile of malodorous refuse too small to conceal a man, except that it did. It had rained earlier; the street lights shimmered on puddles of water. Any empty cardboard boxes that had littered the alley a few hours ago had been taken to provide shelter from the rain. To the average hunting dog, the alley would look empty and unproductive, but Medina wasn't the average dog; he, too, had trained in Vietnam, so he knew how to be patient and wait for the prey to make a mistake. Well, in this case, Dexter thought happily, he would have a long wait. Dexter Whitlaw didn't make mistakes, not in this. He might have screwed up everything else in his life, but he'd been a first-class hunter. So he waited, long after the shuffling footsteps moved away, long after other sounds of other footsteps took their place. A rat sniffed around his shoes, and he waited, motionless. After a while, he was rewarded when those same shuffling footsteps made a return visit, once again pausing at the alley. The hunter was comparing the way the alley looked now to the way it had looked earlier. Nothing had changed. Satisfied now that his prey wasn't there, the hunter moved on, still using the shuffle because a good hunter never broke his disguise.
The deceptive gait might have worked, if Dexter hadn't once seen Medina use the same drunken shuffle to bait two bully boys in a Saigon dive, drawing them in with the false assurance that the Yankee was too shit-faced to put up much of a fight. The two specialized in drunk American soldiers and had fun beating the helpless boys to bloody pulps after stealing their money. The week before, one of the boys had died of internal injuries, and a certain American faction had begun a ruthless search for the two Vietnamese. As the man who had found and identified them, Rick Medina had the honor of taking them out. Two clean shots to the head would have done it, but Medina had wanted to play with them first. Medina was a neat, all-American type guy, good-looking and slim, with his brown hair cut in a short crew and his clothes pressed and creased even in the oppressive heat. He was intelligent and affable—for the most part. When he was pissed, or when he was working, the affability disappeared as if it had never existed, and in his blue eyes was the cold light of a killer. Medina had lured the two Vietnamese out into a dark alley; they hadn't even tried to conceal the fact that they were following him, so certain were they of his helplessness. They closed on him like hounds on a rabbit, but at the last second, the rabbit had whirled, all signs of drunkenness gone. The knife in his hand had a dull black blade, so it wouldn't reflect light. The two Vietnamese likely never even saw it. All they knew was that suddenly their bodies were licked with fire, Medina's hands darting and leaving behind slashes that never went quite deep enough to kill—not yet, at least. Medina had shredded the two, all the while whispering to them in their own language, so that they would have no doubts about what was happening and why.
They tried to get away but found the alley blocked by several blank-faced Americans, all holding pistols.
Trapped, hysterical, they reckoned Medina the least threat and turned to fight him. Big mistake. Rick Medina was a regular Veg-o-Matic that night. He sliced and diced with mechanical precision. He weaved and darted, and each flick of the knife relieved someone of a body part—an ear, a finger, a nose. The two were hoarsely screaming before he finished them, neatly slicing their throats and letting them drop. Stepping over the bodies, he rejoined the silent group at the head of the alley, his face set and expressionless.
Medina had gone off by himself, shrugging away the offers of company, and when he surfaced the next day, he was his old affable self again, the killings handled and put behind him. That was it about Medina, Dexter thought. He was a stone killer when the occasion called for it, but not a murderer. As brutal as the executions had been, they were just that: executions. A lesson taught. After that, the young American soldiers had enjoyed a bit more safety when carousing in the Saigon bars and whorehouses. Medina had known he would pay a personal price for doing the two kills and accepted the cost.
Whatever line was drawn in Medina's soul, he had never crossed it. All of his kills had been righteous. When Dexter considered it, he realized he probably respected Rick Medina more than any other person in the world. Medina had held to his code; Dexter himself had not, and he had spent all these years paying for his lapse.
If anyone could catch him, Medina could.
Knowing that gave extra life to the game.
Dexter finally rose silently to his feet. A glance at the stars told him roughly two hours had passed. It was time to lose the street bum disguise. It had worked for a long time, but Medina was on the scent now. The alleys and soup kitchens would be the first place he looked, so Dexter would have to make it a point not to be there. Too bad; street bums had an anonymity that almost no other group possessed, because people actively avoided looking at them. The cops didn't waste any time on them, and they in turn weren't likely to talk to cops about anything they saw. But there were other disguises that would serve him almost as well; the trick was to blend in with his background, whatever that background might be.
New Orleans offered a rich variety of possibilities, and Dexter considered several of them as he took a circuitous route to the Quarter, which was always awake no matter the hour or the day. After crisscrossing St. Charles a couple of times, doubling back, always checking, he finally reached Carondelet. All the time, he watched his flank, alert to any sign of a tail, but saw nothing suspicious. He now went straight down Carondelet and crossed Canal, where Carondelet became Bourbon Street. Tourists still strolled the uneven pavements, newly emerged from the restaurants and bars and strip joints. Some were obviously drunk, holding plastic cups sloshing with beer or Hurricanes. More than a few wore cheap plastic necklaces in a variety of colors, and sequined masks were evident as well, though Mardi Gras was months past.
The bar lights glittered on the wet pavement, and jazz wailed out of the open doors of the bars, colliding with the more discordant, driving beats coming from the strip joints, where bored-looking dancers, both male and female, gyrated their hips and humped poles and pretended to be sexy.
Laughter rippled from one group of tourists, three prosperous-looking young men whose arms were clutched by glittering young women in cocktail dresses. As Dexter watched, a briskly walking man brushed past the group and went on his way, turning at the next street and disappearing from view, with at least one of the young men's wallets inside his shirt. Not one of the tourists realized anything had happened.
