VC. I put my ear to the door panel but heard nothing within. Was the intruder still inside, or long gone? I turned the knob and pushed. The catch scraped against the plate. The hinges squealed. Shhh, goddamn it! I hunched, ready to charge. And then the doorknob was wrenched out of my hand.
“How long does it take you to ride an elevator to the second floor?” said Major Anna Masters, standing in front of me, hand on hip, wearing one of my shirts and a smile.
“I took the stairs,” I said. Anna was the last person I expected to see. She was in Germany, at Ramstein Air Base, wasn't she? “What are you—” Our bodies slammed together. Our lips found each other, tongues searching. I was instantly erect, like any good soldier should be.
“Get your clothes off, for Christ's sake. I'm hungry,” she said, breaking from the clinch.
I fumbled with my belt. “I usually dress for dinner.”
“Not tonight,” Anna replied, breathless, like she'd just run a race.
I kicked off my shoes and left a trail of socks, pants, and other items on the floor. I ripped my shirt off, the one Anna was wearing, and lifted her as I walked. Her back was hard and lean and her legs wrapped around me. I wasn't going to make it to the bedroom.
“There,” Anna commanded, gesturing at the table, which was set for dinner. I lowered her onto a place mat. She swept the cutlery away, sending it clattering among my clothes on the floor. Then she wound a hand around my neck, grabbed the edge of the table for leverage and ground her pubic bone into me. Neither of us wanted to bother with the entree. We went straight for the main course.
* * *
We had a second helping in the bedroom. Afterward, we lay in each other's arms in bed and watched the reflected neon from The 38th Parallel's sign below my window change color on the ceiling. It brought back Tokyo and, for the barest instant, the image of Dr. Tanaka rolling around in a stainless-steel tub. Professor Boyle's little inconsistency about seeing his partner leaving the party swam about in my mind. If Anna and I were working the case together, that would have been something we'd discuss. Perhaps later I could play back the recording I'd made of Boyle's statement to see if it also struck her as odd. And then the memory of Michelle Durban and our dinner in the sushi bar sprang up, along with a pang of guilt even though nothing had happened. But, if it had, I'd been outside the five-hundred-mile zone, which would have absolved me, wouldn't it?
Anna's weight shifted on me and her perfume flooded my brain. “I forgot I mailed you a key when I took this place,” I said. “When I saw the door open and the light on, I thought you were a burglar.”
Kim could have warned me. He knew Anna, and I'd have put money on him knowing she was upstairs, but he'd chosen to keep the secret. I might have to ask him for that five dollars back.
“So … haven't given a key to anyone else?” she asked.
“Handed out about a dozen. You're just lucky my harem's out of town.” I thought of Durban again.
“What?” Anna had caught the slightest twitch, or perhaps it was the slimmest surge of electricity beneath my skin. Whatever, she read it like a polygraph.
“Nothing,” I said, wondering how it was that women could do that—read a man's conscience.
“You're looking fit,” she said, tracing the definition of my stomach muscles with a fingernail.
“I've discovered Jane Fonda's home-workout video. How about you? Over the headaches?”
“Hope so. Haven't had one for a few weeks.” She sipped coffee, holding the mug between two hands like she was praying. Those headaches were bad ones, so maybe that's exactly what she was doing, praying they'd gone for the duration.
I'd been shot twice on my last case, once in the flesh under my upper right arm, the slug passing clean through the skin and missing the triceps muscle. Not such a big deal—a few stitches and purple, puckered scarring to remember it by. The other bullet, however, had shattered the humerus in my left arm—the big bone between shoulder and elbow—drilled a hole through the shoulder muscles, clipped a rib, executed a back flip with pike, and found its way into the subclavian vein, where it was then flushed through my heart. They located the slug