“Not that I would ever give up my job with Dazzling Delicates. Besides, that isn’t truly a job; it’s more of a gift.”
“You’re going to write a book,” I said.
“A coffee-table book. Along the lines of Madonna’s
Sex
. It’ll showcase photos of women looking sexy in Dazzling Delicates lingerie.”
I put my fingers to my temples. “Taylor, that’s called a catalog.”
“No, these are women on the beach, or riding motorcycles down the freeway.”
“The freeway. Sexy women.”
She clapped her hands together. “That’s where you come in.”
I blinked. Despite myself, I felt flattered. “Really?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t do this book without my cousin.”
Me, model lingerie? A giggle formed at the back of my throat. A silly, thrilled giggle.
Taylor gesticulated, saying she had to schedule the photo shoots and write the commentary to go with the pictures. She wondered about scheduling—how long did it take to write a book, a couple months?
“Count on six months to a year,” I said.
No, this was stupid. Me, getting my photo taken in sexy underwear? Dazzling Delicates underwear? The idea was ludicrous.
Black, I’d wear something black. Tight and leather. And I’d throw on sunglasses like Trinity in
The Matrix
. And boots—Jesse would dig that. Thigh boots. Man, would he.
“A year? Honey, I can dictate a page in ten minutes, sending sales forecasts to Countess Zara headquarters. A book can’t take that long. You sure?”
“Positive.”
I’d better buy some fake tan. And hit the gym. Tonight. Wow, Taylor really did know how to make women feel exquisite.
She patted my shoulder. “But I know I can count on you. I mean, who else can do the proofreading?”
My helium head felt a pinprick. “Proofreading.”
“I need your expertise with adjectives. Fonts, too. And punctuation—I bet you’re a demon with exclamation points.”
I fizzled. “Don’t forget apostrophes. I’m lethal with those.”
“Aw. Hon, did you think I meant a photo spread? You live in hope, don’t you.”
I counted to three. Picking up Suzie Sizemore, I pulled the plug between her shoulder blades. She whistled and began deflating. Taylor squeaked and reached for her. I folded her in half and squeezed.
“Evan, she doesn’t like that.”
“Pack it up. I don’t care if your husband has Francis of Assisi visiting for the weekend. The bathroom guys will be back tomorrow and I want this stuff out of here.”
“But I need to talk to you about that. I was chatting with them and I found the things you’d emptied out of the medicine cabinet.”
“What? Taylor, don’t tell me you nosed through it.”
She pointed at the cardboard box by the television. When I left for the weekend, it had been in my closet. I felt queasy. She reached in, pulling out makeup, aspirin, and . . .
“Oh, my God,” I said.
... my birth-control pills.
She tapped her fingernails against them. “The thing I noticed? This pack is six months old and hasn’t even been opened.” She bit her lip and frowned at me. “Darlin’, you going natural?”
My light-headedness morphed into a floating sensation, as if I were rising toward the ceiling. I grabbed the pills from Taylor, dumped bathroom stuff out of the cardboard box, and began stuffing it with jockstraps and sex toys. Taylor told me to calm down. She understood if my biological clock was ticking like a nuclear bomb. I shoved Suzie Sizemore into the box with her crotch wrapped around her neck. Taylor said, “How rude,” and I shot back that Suzie looked more surprised than offended, what with her mouth open in that big round O. Taylor tapped her foot. “Well,” she said, “sounds like somebody’s feeling
frustrated
.” Did Jesse need to buy me some Weekend Fireworks? At which point I may have hissed at her, because she drew her arms up against her chest and jumped back from me. I think I was having an out-of-body experience.
I jammed the box into her hands, pushed her outside, slammed and locked the door. She stood on the path, calling through the glass. She understood that I had needs. She could help. That was what Dazzling Delicates was about—helping those in need. I closed the shutters. “Don’t suffer with unmet needs,” she shouted. “It’s unhealthy. You could develop a tic.”
I walked to my bedroom, shut the door, and flopped onto the bed.
This news would be all over the family within hours. That meant my aunts, cousins, Uncle Benny the priest, and my mother. I covered my face with a pillow.
Not in a million years did I want relatives yakking about my sex life. What went on between Jesse and me was off-limits to anybody else. Yes, things were sometimes complicated. Not sex—sex was fine. Sex was a moon shot for me. It just took patience and imagination by the truckload. But when a man had a spinal cord injury, conceiving without fertility treatment was tough. The truth, which worried me more than I liked to admit, was that his SCI meant we didn’t need contraception. I rolled over. If I strangled Taylor with a push-up bra, nobody would convict me. I could blame the tic.
I stood up, headed to the bathroom, flipped on the light, and stopped short. Mr. Martinez and his sons had been going to town. I had no shower, toilet, or sink.
Jesse laughed when I called, and said he’d love a guest as long as I left Toby Keith and Patsy Cline at home. I packed up and was halfway out the door when the phone rang. I waited, hand on the knob, letting the machine pick it up. Jax’s cool voice came on.
“Webcam.” She hung up.
Exhaling, I pulled the small camera from my desk drawer and wired it up to my laptop. Almost immediately the video program beeped and a window opened. On-screen I saw Jax, her face warm under a desk lamp, her diamonds afire.
“Good job. The chatter has escalated. People are paying attention,” she said.
“Is that how they taught you to talk back at Langley?”
In the background were a bed, hotel-quality artwork, drapes, a balcony. Outside, a man leaned against the railing, gazing at the dusk. A cigarette glowed red as he inhaled.
“Hello, Tim,” I said. “How’s the view there in Lone Pine? Or is it Palmdale?”
“Dubai, pet.” He blew smoke toward the sky.
“Jax, the China Lake police are calling in the FBI. They’re annoyed at me but going all-out.”
“Good. Because I have more information for you.” She adjusted the focus on her camera. Her image blurred and sharpened. “Coyote was once attached to a project called South Star. It was black. Run out of China Lake.”
My pulse jumped. “He’s navy?”
“No. And neither was South Star. It was DARPA funded originally, but went dark. The research developed fast and weird. Big stuff.”
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, funded open research at universities and corporations. But sometimes projects turned hot and went classified.
“Coyote was a test subject for the project,” she said.
My thoughts adjusted. “You’re saying South Star wasn’t a weapons system?”
“On the contrary. That’s precisely what it was.”
China Lake is all about weaponry: missiles, bombs, antimissile space defense. At the gate to the base a sign politely reminds drivers to phone for a police escort if they’re delivering high explosives. But Jax was implying something quite different.
“Human weaponry,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“But you’re saying this wasn’t navy research. Was it the agency?”
“Could have been DIA or NSA, or any one of a dozen off-the-books pet projects of somebody with the ear of the brass.”
My mind was buzzing. “If the killer was attached to this project, then there must be records. They’ll have his name and can begin tracking him down.”
“Did you hear me? This project was black. It won’t be like looking up names in the phone book. The Bureau will have to pry that information loose with a crowbar. If records even exist.”
“So? Ask around Langley.”
She smiled, showing ice-white teeth. “For the longest time you refused to believe that I was with the Company. Now you refuse to believe that I’m not.”
Exactly. I didn’t know what her real story was, who she worked for, whether she was freelance or still collecting a federal paycheck. And her smile told me she liked it that way.
She folded her arms. “You have sources; I have sources. All mine know is that Coyote was once attached to South Star. You’ll have to dig for the rest.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Her voice went quiet. “Walk back the cat, Evan.”
Static rose on the line and the video pixilated. When it cleared, her feline eyes were dark and assessing.
“Explain,” I said.
“It’s a metaphor for troubleshooting. When something goes wrong, you analyze the situation to figure out why. Think of a cat unraveling a ball of string. You have to rewind the twisted yarn to find the flaw.”
Her voice lowered to a register that put me in mind of a Ferrari. Racing, smoothly and effortlessly, even though the engine was running at high revs.
“When you walk back the cat, your goal is to correct mistakes so they don’t happen again. You reassess evidence and assumptions until you find the double agent, the false source, or the analytic error. That’s how you identify the real problem.”
“The obvious problem is that this person Coyote has killed two of my classmates. But you’re suggesting that the real problem lies elsewhere.”
“Rumor has it that Project South Star was shut down because results ran ahead of the researchers’ ability to control them. The question is, what happened to Coyote on that project?”
“If you want me to dig, give me a shovel. Tell me more about Coyote.”
Tim strolled in from the balcony. “Very well.”
He had a mutt’s face and the self-possession of a Buddha. His weathered eyes and haphazard English smile went with the workingman’s voice, though for all I knew he was the son of an earl.
“Coyote is adept as a trickster because he loves to play dress-up. He’s airy-fairy. A little man overbutching it during the day and strapping himself into heels and spandex at night.”
“He’s a transvestite?” I said.
“She-male, mister sister, whatever you want to call it. His sexual identity has a certain fluidity that helps him blend into scenes, playing either gender.”
A wormy feeling passed through me. “That’s information I can give to the police. The rest of it, digging into this Project South Star, how am I supposed to do that? Give me some guidance.”
“Look at your connections.”
Connections meant China Lake. Static increased, brushing over the audio connection like sand.
“Be straight with me. Why are you telling me all this?”
“I’ll tell you why,” Jax said. “Because I have the training and the experience to know that I can turn anybody’s lights out, and I’m damned good at it. But Coyote is flat-out petrifying.”
6
“She’s playing with me. She’s running a game,” I said.
Jesse didn’t disagree. He watched me pacing back and forth along the edge of his deck. His blue eyes were dark in the night.
“If it’s a game, that implies she wants to win,” he said. “The question is, how does she do that?”
The night was cooling, a chill rolling off the ocean. Breakers shrugged up the beach. Behind Jesse the plate-glass windows shone with amber light from the house.
I turned and paced. “Jax is trained to use disinformation as a tool. How do I sort truth from lie?”
“You took the first step by phoning this new information to Tommy. He’ll investigate.”
I nodded. “That still leaves me wondering what Jax wants from me.”
“Do you believe that Coyote frightens her?”
I slowed. “Yes.” And that frightened me. Tremendously.
“In that case, presume she isn’t sending you on a wild-goose chase. Look at your connections. You know what she was getting at as well as I do.”
“China Lake.” I crossed my arms against my chest. “But my connections are navy. This defunct project was supposedly something else.”
The navy doesn’t have sole control over the base. In its labyrinth of labs and million acres of test ranges, other entities run their own projects. Perhaps including South Star.
He looked thoughtful. “At the reunion I was joking about cover stories and secret pasts. But—”
“Could it be real? No.” I put my hands up. “Okay, I know China Lake’s reputation. The military performs biowar experiments on convicts. Psy-ops types keep children in cages. Space aliens play pass the anal probe. It’s all tinfoilhat stuff.”
“I’m not talking about UFOs.”
I reached the end of the deck and turned. He spun around and curved into my path, stopping me.
“You know what Jax has been hinting at. You’re simply avoiding it.”
I looked at him, and the ocean, and up at the night sky. He touched my arm.
“Evan, call your father.”
It was late in Key West, but my dad was a nighthawk. He’d be watching the History Channel or reading a Patrick O’Brian novel if he wasn’t working at the computer. I dialed on my cell phone and headed inside. As his phone rang I took up my pacing again, back and forth across the hardwood floor in the main room. Jesse came in and turned on the stereo. My dad’s phone continued ringing.
The music spilled across the room, unfurling like a silk banner up to the cathedral ceiling. It was jazz and it was old. I looked at Jesse, surprised. Normally he preferred bands that had torched their guitars onstage circa 1969.
“Stress management,” he said. “New tunes for a happier head.”
Walking past him, I rubbed his shoulder. Whatever worked. Anything to pull him out from under the grief and survivor’s guilt that had crushed his spirit to dust. Anything to stop the nightmares. To keep the sound of a siren or a gunning engine from igniting a flashback, putting him in Mission Canyon again, lying broken in the ravine, watching his best friend die. My hand lingered on his shoulder.