The Starshine Connection Page 4

  “Tell me, Mister B.S.,” she said, just a touch drunk. “How old do you think I am?”

  “I hate that question,” he admitted, removing his shoes. “You want my standard hoo-hah rationalization, or can you handle the truth?”

  “Only lie when it makes you more money, honey.”

  “Okay. I’ll have to warn you I’m lousy at this. You could be anywhere from a really road-weary middle twenties, to a particularly well-toned early thirties. Fair enough?”

  “Good boy,” she said. “Try thirty-two.”

  “Really?” Slayton was a little surprised. It was proving too easy to forget about the Starshine with that body pointed at him. He stood up and moved toward it. Anna practically flew across the room to intercept him.

  “Later,” she said, grabbing his arm and spinning him around. “We’ll use, umm… substances… later.”

  Hungrily, she levered his mouth open with her own lips and plumbed it with a butterfly tongue. She relieved him of his shirt; all he had to do was keep working on her mouth until they both needed air. Her hands could not get enough of him; they darted and dashed and grasped for more. Ben Slayton was being thoroughly groped.

  They writhed across the room in a passionate standing dance. Her body seemed to demand that he give it the same rough treatment to which she was subjecting him. When they cleared the table by the nineteenth-floor picture window with their squirming and mauling, she finally stepped back from him. He was unclothed except for his trousers.

  “Now,” she said. “Now we have us some fun!” She was breathing in gasps, pleased so far.

  She jacked back, swung, and smacked Slayton in the face as hard as she could. To Slayton it was a surprise; at least she had hit him harder than buddy-boy Rodney could have. Then he felt a thin edge of cold air across his cheek and realized that she had opened it up with her feral, blood-red nails. Her eyes glinted in the dark at the sight of blood.

  “Damn it!” he shouted. He should have realized!

  She leaped back, just out of reach of his grab for her in the dark and said, “Come on, come on now—rip it off! Come on, use the anger, godammit, use it!”

  Later, to himself, he had to admit that it was an effective arousal technique.

  But at the time, he sprang at her with a yell, reducing the space between them to nothing in a flash. His hands found the deep V of the thin material. Like an acolyte invoking Satan, he spread his arms wide and the gown sheared apart into two rough halves. Anna shrieked. The magnificent breasts bobbed free and the pair fell to the carpeted floor, wrestling wildly.

  She got off on violence. Literally, she lusted for blood, for hard, almost animal sex. She climaxed frequently, and Slayton used a variety of techniques to keep the experience from becoming mechanical. Her body was muscled usefully for marathon coupling, and, in a less turbulent part of his mind, Slayton began to suspect the exact nature of the problem Mrs. Anna Drake had with her slim, urbane husband.

  From the floor, where they began and remained for quite a few hours—at one point walking themselves across it in a horseback-style love embrace—they made it to the table by the window. There, she told him in fast, preorgasm breaths that there was a telescope freak a few skyscrapers away that was a big fan of hers. Slayton’s laughter played hell with their rhythm.

  From the window, inevitably, they managed to make it to the dance floor-sized bed. Their frenzied lovemaking stripped it a layer at a time—coverlet, comforter, blankets, sheets—until they were almost down to the mattress. Anna subsided before Slayton came face-to-face with the mattress tag, and she appeared at least momentarily satiated.

  Their sweat soaked the remaining sheets and pillows. Slayton speculated that this experience would have been termed—at least, by the fraternity boys at the University of Michigan, his alma mater—as a “bed-slammer.” There was really no poetic, euphemistic way to express it. It was at once crude and exciting—which was the way Anna Drake liked things.

  She propped herself up on one elbow, so she could face him in the dark. “Ben, darling,” she began.

  He was in the process of meditating up reserves of stamina. “I’ll be with you in just a second.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she said. “What I want to know is, what is so goddam important?”

  “Important?”

  “You know. You’re just spectacular, but there’s something that’s preoccupying you, just a little bit. It’s screwing up your performance, Ben.”

  He used the excuse to buy time. “You noticed it, then?”

  “Let me put your mind at ease,” she said. “You handle me right and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Later. But you’ve got to give out a hundred percent. It’s worth it. Deal?” Her eyebrows went up.

  Slayton took his eyes off the Starshine decanter, which seemed to rediate its own blue light at him from across the room. With a savage motion, he jackknifed across the bed and pinned her, spread-eagled, laughing.

  “Deal,” he said.

  5

  A five-minute inspection told Slayton that going through the front door to the townhouse was as good as breaking in anywhere else. The doors, the windows, the entire building was hot-wired for burglars; he would trip the same alarm going in the balcony’s sliding glass doors as bulling his way past the main entrance. Since the balcony—which would have been more secluded and obscured from the sight of casual passersby—was three floors up and would have entailed a drop down from roof level, Slayton opted for comfort. He kneeled before the heavy oak front door, working on the system of locks from the outside.

  The oak door was imposing, but it was a joke. It was close to a hundred pounds of solid wood held secure by a insignificant deadbolt less than an inch wide. Kicked properly, the sheer weight of the door would pop the lock right out of the frame.

  But then, the alarm would go screechingly off. The decal pasted unobtrusively on one of the first-floor front windows identified the Gendarme Security Systems trademark. This meant that an alarm would bring private watchdogs, not the police. The police were nothing to worry about; they took up to forty-five minutes to respond even to emergency calls. But the Gendarme men were highly paid and punctual, known and advertised widely as the Minute Men of security. Slayton had no desire to introduce himself to them—or their hardware.

  Other than the Gendarme sticker, the building itself bespoke the wealth inside. It was tall and imposing, seemingly hewn out of a massive block of characterless concrete, cold and soulless, like a castle keep. Its very outward appearance implied impregnability; it was meant to intimidate. Slayton wondered if the place belonged to a politician. He didn’t ask. All Anna Drake had given him was the address—which was all she knew.

  Slayton thought about the episode as he smoothly withdrew a set of professional lock picks in a vinyl wrap-up from his raincoat. Outside it had turned drizzling and miserable, a good general cover for his actions. Rain made noise to cover clandestine mistakes, and kept nosy people indoors.

  “There is nothing to lose after all, Ben,” she had said. “If they get pissed off and stop dealing with me, I can always get Starshine from you—you’re their competition, no? So place your fine, cute ass down right here and shut up and watch.”

  She had secreted him in the rear of the downstairs garage after making a few local phone calls. The numbers, she said, were changed each time, so they would do him no good. She set up a deal she did not really need—for his benefit. Slayton had earned the privilege in Anna’s bed, there was no getting around that. The muscles in his calves and buttocks still ached pleasantly.

  There was a flawlessly clean Porsche Targa parked in the garage, and Anna took her place behind the wheel. Everyone waited. When Slayton’s digital Seiko read 5:30 a.m., almost predawn, Anna radioed the mechanical garage doors grindingly up. She waited a beat after the doors were fully open, and then flashed her headlights five times into the night.

  Several moments later a silver Trans-Am with an ugly black eagle plastered acro
ss its entire hood pulled in, blocking egress from the garage. Slayton would later recall that eagle—it reminded him of a Nazi bird of prey—as a kind of perverted hint. It also looked like the eagle of La Raza, the icon of Chicano power and a symbol of Mexican-American pride. The Trans-Am sat and growled for a while, then shut down. Slayton was close enough to hear the engine clicking and cooling in the night.

  The passenger door popped open and a swarthy man in a silver racing jacket emblazoned with motorcross patches got out and approached the Targa. Anna rolled her window down.

  “Hi, baby.”

  “Hello, sweetheart. That’s a fancy cop car you got.”

  “I stole it from the cops.”

  “Don’t steal from the cops, sugar. Steal the cops.”

  Slayton recognized an exchange of code phrases—it figured with an operation like this one. Security, painstaking care was necessary, but criminals always got hung up on the secret agent aspect, carrying the games too far. It was more thoughtful than most introductory exchanges, though—the cop references were the only recurring theme. The sentences were so nonsensical that they could not be faked.

  “Cops steal too, darlin’.”

  “No, cops don’t steal,” Anna said. Slayton could hear the mocking tone in her voice and realized she thought this whole game was stupid. “Cops cop.” He suddenly wondered if he wasn’t being set up. It would not be beyond someone as mercurial as Anna.

  As she spoke, she extended a white envelope, which the man accepted. Slayton had watched her pack the envelope with hundred-dollar bills less than an hour earlier. She had been naked when she did it, sitting primly in a desk chair back in the suite. Wordlessly, the dude in the racing jacket returned to the Trans-Am.

  Slayton noticed that the windows of the Trans-Am were heavily mirrored all around, but he could still make out a green glow of dashboard lights inside. Total silence. Nothing happened as the men inside counted and reassured themselves. More time clicked off. Slayton was used to this sort of stake-out, and conditioned himself to such waits to insure he would not fall victim to unexpected problems like leg cramps, from freezing in a single position for long periods of time. He could wait as long as the guy in the racing jacket needed.

  The door opened again, and the man returned to Anna’s car wordlessly. She rolled the window down a second time. The man nodded, and she acknowledged him.

  Another stage completed.

  He moved to the trunk of the Trans-Am as it yawned silently open, unlatched, apparently, by the driver of the car. The man approached and the trunk opened like the door on a haunted house—by itself.

  From inside the man hefted a box, and at that moment everyone present had one thing in common: they all knew what was inside.

  The only people who did not know what was going on were the two Treasury agents parked in a black Mustang a block and a half away. They had been special-requested by Slayton, and their job was to follow the Trans-Am, to report on its destination.

  “And this is important,” Slayton had added over the phone. “No arrests, no problems. Stay with them and don’t give yourselves away. You don’t even exist. When they stop, find out where. From there, I’ll handle it.”

  So far everything was touchy but satisfactory. The man lugged the box to the garage and placed it on the floor next to the Targa, where Anna could see it. Slayton noted that the box was sealed, as if for shipping. It looked innocuous as hell.

  The man turned on his heel and the Trans-Am burst into powerful life as he returned to it. The bars of brake lights flashed once before the auto screeched away a little too enthusiastically, leaving brief black tire-marks on the pavement in front of the garage. When it had vanished—though the sounds of the pilot’s power-shifting could still be heard in the distance—the garage door glided automatically down and everything faded to black inside.

  The interior lights of the Targa did little to dispel the darkness as Anna got out.

  “There’s the spoils, honeybunch,” she said. “Happy now?”

  “I’ll let you know in a couple of days,” Slayton said, emerging from his hiding place.

  “I don’t really know what I’ll do with that much,” she said, eyeing the box. “I mean, after what you were telling me about it. But I’ve had loads—I’ve never done anything like that halfway, and if you don’t know that, you should have guessed by now.”

  “Some people are sensitive to its negative effects. That doesn’t mean all people. You lucked out.”

  “True, babe. Let’s go back upstairs?”

  Slayton snorted a little laugh. “It’s almost sunup.”

  Her eyes went hard and black. “I didn’t ask you for the time.”

  “Just can’t get enough of this tired old body?”

  “Something like that,” she grinned, her arm snaking its way around his waist, leading him away from the Targa.

  “What about that?” Slayton said, angling his head back toward the box on the floor, which must have contained twelve decanters of the illegal, narcotic moonshine.

  “What about it?” she said, not stopping.

  “Seems like an awfully expensive thing to leave sitting around.”

  “So’s the Porsche,” she said, dismissively. “Both of them are drops in the proverbial bucket. Petty cash time. You’re not really concerned about that, now are you?”

  “It looks like I’m not,” he said, allowing himself to be led away. Ben Slayton himself represented a great deal of money. Independently wealthy, a collector of antique autos, a property baron with an excellent stock portfolio, he considered self-sufficiency the mainstay of life. Such an attitude had led men of his stature and ethics all the way to the top of the hill. And still it pained him to see frivolous waste. Anna Drake wasted lavish sums of money just to stave off the pressures of madness that came from being wealthy in the first place. It seemed quite silly.

  But Slayton remembered something his late father had once told him regarding such immense wealth and the freedom it brought to its holders: “The titled are entitled.”

  Entitled, Slayton thought now, to kill themselves in pursuit of expressing the freedom money brings. The old, hoary patriot’s rationalization. In that moment he found himself wondering if Roxanne Drake was doomed to the same sort of wealthy despair as her stepmother.

  He watched Anna precede him and hoped not.

  The lock was as intimidating as the townhouse door—outwardly. It yielded easily to Slayton’s combination of picks after about a minute of preliminary poking and teasing. The alarm system was based on interfacing electronic contacts. It would not go off until the connection between the deadbolt and metal socket of the door jamb was broken.

  Slayton drew a jumper out of his pocket. He could not have anticipated a specific type of electrical system, so he had brought along the most practical jumper lead, one with a ball of conductant gum on each terminal. Unlike the fancier jumpers with their clips and attachments specific to defeating certain kinds of lock and alarm systems, the gum allowed leeway because it adhered to almost any surface.

  He edged the door open about half an inch and poked the first terminal, a black wire with the wad of gum, inside. The difficult part would be attaching it to the counterpart section of the door jamb.

  Spearing the gum on one of his lengthier “tickles,” or lock picks, he extended the assemblage through the space too narrow for his own fingers. The pick clicked onto the interface of the jamb, and Slayton pushed it with his thumb. The gum hit home solidly and stuck.

  Slayton stood up and carefully eased the door open. The slack wire played out. As far as the electrical systems were concerned, the door was still in contact with the jamb, which was now several feet away. There was a dimly lit stairway leading up to the front door proper.

  He stepped over the nearly taut wire and closed the door behind him, withdrawing the jumper after it was closed. He could figure out how to test-delay the system from the inside when he needed to get back out, later.

&nb
sp; This was the address the two Treasury agents had delivered to Info Central, and which Slayton had gotten over the coded scramble line minutes after they had checked in. The silver Trans-Am’s first stop was made here. There were two other locations on the list. Slayton did not need to make an equipment stop; he had anticipated what he would need, and made sure that it was all in his own car when he finally left the company of Anna Drake, promising her that she would see him again.

  That had turned out to be another condition of her bargain. She was nothing if not a tough negotiator.

  The door at the top of the stairs was nothing to defeat. Slayton was inside.

  The first impression was much like the one he had gotten of Anna Drake: money, and lots of it, was tied up in this place. Everything from the location and layout to the furnishings and rickrack on the display shelves bragged. It was the sort of conspicuous, show-off consumerism Slayton expected of a nouveau riche, someone who has gone from the gutter to the top of the mountain with no humbling stops between the two. One of the giveaways of a wealthy individual possessing no taste whatsoever was also glaringly obvious: the apartments were outfitted to please visitors, not the occupant himself.

  Slayton rolled his eyes, guessing that there would be a safe hidden in a fairly obvious location. In this sort of place, there always was.

  He discovered it behind a sprawling abstract rendered by some latter-day Picasso clone, a noisy clash of art-school technique with commercial sleaze. It was painted on cheap canvas and mounted in a DeLarge frame that probably cost more than the painting itself. It swung laterally out on interior hinges to reveal a formidable-looking safe built into a wall torn down and reinforced specifically for the purpose.

  Priorities would follow the safe. The desks would be next, then a general class-two search of the premises. Search priorities were arranged according to how much time was available; Slayton figured he had at least half an hour, counting lead time—that is, the time he needed to get in and out of the building.