Kora smiled when Leon came over to her followed by a couple of drunk girls all leggy and excited, dancing on the grass, shaking their booties, each with a colorful headband. Part of the girls-gone-wild-naked-in-the-fountain routine to cap off the party.
“I like this,” Leon said, his voice a little clearer now that he’d learned some ventriloquist tricks. “I like this a lot.
“It’s not hard to get used to, old sport,” Thorp said, putting a hand on Leon’s shoulder. “You’re gonna like being the man in my organization. This place will grow on you. I need to go see some people. You enjoy.” He patted Leon on the arm, then left the two of them to go meet some new arrivals.
Kora gestured at the movie playing silently behind the band, the circus lights, the red and white striped tents. Food, waiters everywhere.
“Money, power, and mystery,” she said. “It’s all there for the taking.” She handed him a drink with a straw, then kissed him on the side of his mask. “They fucking love you.”
“Our friends here yet?”
“They’ll be getting here soon. We need that smartphone of Rouse’s.”
“You … tell him … come.” Tell him it’s important. He doesn’t want me to come down to the poker room to get him.”
***
After Daisy left to get the lawyer, Leon stared out over the party to the lake. He hadn’t decided how he would do this. Kora had convinced him they were essential to making it all work. “They’ll be our shield,” she had said. If he wanted to kill them, he’d have to do it later.
He had agreed with her plan. Still, he wanted to hurt them. It would be hard to wait.
This is what it’s all about, he thought. You’re either royalty or you’re a peasant.
Leon went up into the house. He saw Daisy and the lawyer. They went up into the office, the lawyer moaning and groaning about something.
“What do you want?” he said to Leon.
“Your smartphone,” Leon whispered.
“You can’t have it. What the hell do you want my phone for? You pulled me out of the game—”
Leon grabbed him by the arms, slammed him up against the wall, and pulled a pocketknife out of his jacket. He flipped the blade open and pressed it near the lawyer’s eye. “You give me grief, you little piss ant, I’ll cut your eye out, put it in a martini glass, make you drink from it, and then I’ll make you eat that little olive. Give me the phone. Kora’s gonna show me all the cool stuff you have, and we don’t want you spying on us.”
“You don’t need the phone. I can open—”
Leon smiled and said, “I don’t want you looking because I might fuck her there. You know how it is.”
Rouse, shaking, carefully reached in his pocket and then handed the phone to Leon.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Leon said. “They might get jealous. You even tell Thorp, I’ll come for you. Cut both eyes out. Go back to your game. Win some money, counselor.”
“I need the keycard to the tunnel doors,” Kora said.
Rouse took a keycard from his pocket, then, with a glance at Leon, he backed away and left.
Kora smiled and said, “You’re so mean to that poor man.”
She came up and encircled him, a light, sexy laugh, pulling him back out of view. Gave him a kiss on his ear. “Who says some masked bandit is gonna fuck me?”
“That would be the masked man himself.” Leon made a little chuckling sound. Mia Farrow on her best day couldn’t come close to this girl.
She used the keycard to get into a back office. They passed a bank of monitors. He paused. One of the cameras showed a threesome, two girls and a fat ass.
“That dude is a congressman from Nevada. He’s one of the key players in getting some land rules changed. Can’t make up his mind if he likes girls or boys. Likes both at the same time. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit some of these guys are into.”
On another camera, they saw Rouse re-enter the poker room. “Like they say, the worst offenders of a society’s creeds are its rulers.”
Kora used the card to get through a door that led down a staircase into a stone corridor lit by faux torchlights. It was like something from the Middle Ages. She led him along the tunnel, their shadows sliding like ghosts along the walls lit with fake torches. Leon, wired up on OxyContin and a few drinks, but not too much, felt relaxed and fine. They went down the corridor, to a cage off to the left.
“That’s George,” she said, pointing to a huge lion sitting on a flat rock on the other side of a small pond.
“Damn prisoner,” Leon said. “I got a feeling the lion ain’t gonna sleep tonight.”
“Any more than we are,” Kora said.
He said, “I don’t like seeing lions in cages. I used to get locked up when I was a kid. Days at a time. I got a thing about that.”
The massive, yellow-eyed king of beasts trapped in his dungeon. Leon hated human beings who did that.
“Solitary confinement. I don’t believe in cages for predators. It’s a contradiction of their nature. Cruel and unusual punishment. They need to be free to hunt. They need the kill. The taste of fresh, warm blood.”
Kora said, “I agree. The closest George has been to hunting anything was when Thorp put this drunk in there once. He was doing it because that’s what his idol, the guy he named the lion after, used to do.”
“What happened?”
“The guy was lucky. George had been fed and didn’t do anything. He’s an old circus lion, so they don’t have the same aggression. But it scared hell out of the guy. He sold his company to Thorp, left town, and has never been back. But here’s the thing: George Whittell—that’s Thorp’s hero—he’d take his lion out all the time. Drove him around. Let him see the world. Thorp never even does that. It’s illegal, and these days, people would shit seeing a lion in the front seat.”
The made their way up to the door leading to Rouse’s.
“Why is Thorp so obsessed with this Whittell guy?” Leon asked. “That’s pretty weird.”
“Their families go way back. They both lived in San Francisco. Summered here. I guess Oggie grew up hearing all the great stories about card games with Howard Hughes, Pretty Boy Floyd. The guy supposedly sparred with Jack Dempsey. His parties were legend. Big game hunter. Ogden thinks he’s the incarnation of George Whittell. He couldn’t clean Whittell’s piss bucket.”
“Maybe one day he’ll wake up in the lion’s cage. See what it’s like. Maybe tonight. Maybe we’ll invite the bastard to his own party.”
Kora smiled. “You’re something else, dude.”
52
“Here we go,” Sydney said as she drove in close to the Incline Village beaches. Past Ski Beach with the boat-launch facility, Incline Beach, and then Burnt Cedar. Marco worked the binoculars. She angled toward the estates to the west, getting that familiar mix of excitement and apprehension.
It’s time. This is for Karen.
You wait, plot, investigate, fantasize, despise, and then, one day, that hour you’ve been longing for finally arrives, she thought. The hour of retribution.
She eased the boat slowly past the beaches, then an outcrop of rock, keeping out of the orb of light from the party as she steered into an empty slip beside a small dock. The only lights at the Rouse estate were some Malibu lights on the walkways.
“We have company,” Marco said.
Where they pulled in between two other boats, it was obvious one had occupants in the boat’s cabin. In spite of the noise from the party, they heard a sharp giggle. A laugh. Somebody getting some action.
Marco texted Kora North again and this time got what they wanted.
GTG:
good to go. She was at the party playing her Daisy role.
“Good girl,” Marco said quietly. He turned to Sydney. “You ready?”
“Let’s move back away from these guys, just in case. Wouldn’t want company right now.”
She backed out and moved further away, putting the boathouse between them and the lovers. She edged into shore, to the copse of trees that separated Rouse’s place from the neighbor’s.
Marco glanced up at the faint moon. “That a good moon, or a bad moon?”
“We’re gonna find out,” Sydney said.
He grabbed the dock with one hand, then, using the heavy-duty climber clasps the Shaws kept onboard, he secured the boat to the dock cleat, then grabbed his bags and dropped them on the dock as Sydney climbed out. They slipped ashore stealthy as a couple of big cats and headed into the trees, toward the lights and noise of the party on the other side of the lawyer’s estate.
The night filled with the high-pitched laughter of female flappers kicking up a storm to the Lindy Hop while somebody on a mic amped up the crowd. Sydney couldn’t help fearing that security guys could jump out of the bushes at any moment and gun them down.
When they were close to the lawyer’s property line, Marco stopped. He worked the grounds with the night glasses—the perimeter, the gardens, the fishpond, and the house. “Clear as far as I can make out.”
Marco looked back at the boat with the couple. “It’s a good moon for somebody.”
They moved closer to the property line.
“Looks quiet,” Marco said as he handed her the night glasses.
He put the heavy bag with the equipment down. She did the same.
Sydney said, “The perimeter should be just this side of those lights if Dutch’s map is good.”
After scanning the area, she squatted down next to Marco to help him.
He said quietly, “At what point did you know you had me?”
“I was never really comfortable with that until the guy came into the back hall and tried to kill you.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything as he went to work.
***
I got me a real sweet girl,
Leon thought as they moved through Rouse’s house, down a long hallway. It was pitch-black until they moved to a front room, and the lights from the party spilled through the windows.
He felt all aglow just looking at Kora, in her Daisy outfit, all excited over what they were doing. It made her all the more sexy to Leon.
Fantasies ran through his mind about how all this was going to play. The future. All the places they’d go and hang out. The world’s best beaches. Hotels. He’d never really had fun. It was always the hunt, and then the next one. They weren’t fun in the same way he now envisioned. Kora had changed all that.
“How many people have you killed?” Kora asked, touching his arm as they stared out across the veranda to the lake.
“In my career, counting the two here, eighteen. That doesn’t sound like much, but I’m not all that old. And I don’t take crap jobs.”
Kora, smiling, said, “You want to up the numbers, I can think of some really good candidates.”
He emitted a gruff chuckle. That this girl liked what he did for a living was crazy-great. No woman had ever reacted to him this way before.
How outstanding,
Leon thought. He was seeing himself as a James Bond of the dark world, and now he had his Bond girl.
They came up in a small, empty room, then continued on into the lawyer’s house. The place was open and polished—everything looked like top dollar. Rouse had taste. Style-wise, it was the opposite of Thorp’s.
“Tricky Dick is into chrome and glass. He’s a clean freak.”
Kora showed him where the panic-office-vault-room was down a hall from the great room. The walls were lined with pictures of celebrities and stupid Roman statues.
Leon studied the vault and knew quickly this wasn’t something he—or anybody but a serious B&E guy with the right tools—could get into easy. He hoped their boy came prepared.
“What the hell is this?” Leon said.
On a shelf above a bar were two stuffed birds, a lion’s head was mounted over the doorway, and in the corner, huge elk posed, their antlers reaching halfway across the room.
Kora said, “He brings girls in here. Likes to have sex with all this hunting stuff around. Maybe needs that to get it up. It’s his Hemingway complex.”
“How weird are these guys?” he asked.
“Tricky Dick fucks girls while he’s telling them about these animals. I hear it all from them later. They pretty much hate the guy.”
“Those birds,” Leon said, pointing to a couple of falcons on a platform above the door into the great room. “They’re peregrine falcons. Great hunters. They can hit dive speeds well over two hundred miles an hour.”
“You serious?” Kora said. “That is fast. I didn’t know any animal had that kind of speed.”
“They’re like missiles. They create the coolest flight. Graceful and fast. Nothing maneuvers like they do with those deep wing beats. They can see a mouse on the ground a mile away. The Air Force Academy in Colorado is big on falcons. They call peregrines Mach ones because of their speed. Having them stuffed is a crime.”
Kora got a text message. “They’re here.” She gave Leon a kiss on the side of his face mask. “Time to party hearty, mate.”
Leon, looking at the excitement on Kora’s face, felt a rush of blood to his loins.
God, I love this girl,
he thought.
53
As this most successful of his Gatsby Galas rolled on toward dawn, high on coke and alcohol, Ogden Thorp, felt great. “Superb, old sport,” he said to one of the guests as they clinked glasses in passing.
There was a gathering by the fountain he’d had built. They knew the scene was coming where Daisy and some other girls were going to rip off their clothes and jump in.
Where the hell are you, Daisy? Getting time.
It was a magnificent party. His coming out party, joining the top dogs. He’d stop people here and there to raise a toast to success, to the “death of the witch.” They didn’t know what he was referring to and didn’t care. A toast was a toast. And they’d throw more mystery-man guesses at him.
Thorp moved over, out by the fountain, where some guests—one a banker’s wife he’d like to bed down—were drinking and talking.
There were moments, and this was one, when Thorp believed wholeheartedly in a semi-feudalistic world where you did good by your peasants but kept the peasants in line, and where you had parties like this and the smart people controlled the world because that was what nature demanded. And with the end of the middle class, it was back to normal. A world he was creating in Tahoe. One he understood. And one he believed was his birthright.
He’d even gotten into a “green” discussion. He went on about how the forest service was the real culprit behind the pollution of the lake.