Now, it was her turn to laugh. “You conceited son of a bitch! You think you can fuck me good enough to get it for free!”
Terry looked hurt. “Not free! I just think I can convince you to give me a discount. And I’m not conceited. I’m convinced.”
Traci looked at him wide eyed and broke into laughter. “You are out of your fucking mind!”
“Yes, but the money is real. Are you game or not?”
“Oh yeah,” she breathed between the laughing fits, “but what is it that makes you think you can win if I get to decide?”
Terry thought for a minute then shrugged, “Okay, maybe I am a little conceited.”
With the last of their negotiations done, Terry sat down on the bed and began removing his shoes and socks. He was still dressed in jeans and the jacket he’d worn in Lester. A sudden whiff and he realized it would be a good thing all around if he availed himself of the shower. Pulling his t-shirt off, he heard Traci draw in a quick breath. Never the shy type, Terry simply finished undressing and stood up naked in front of her. She returned the favor by wriggling out of the black dress seductively, letting it fall around her feet in a pile.
Terry’s eyes focused on the woman and smiled. She was truly lovely. There was only one thing that seemed out of place. She had on a pair of panties that looked bigger than most swimsuits these days.
Traci looked at him almost sheepishly, saying, “I know they look old fashioned, but a lot of the guys like them.” Then, as if she made herself angry by justifying them, she said, “And I like them! They save me a lot of chafing, and I’ve been wearing them most of my life. You don’t have to worry, they are coming off!”
She seemed far too defensive just over her choice of underwear. Terry told Charlie to try and get that out of her occupant when he did finally get to talk to him. In the meanwhile, he nodded and said, “They’re panties. And I like them, too.” Then, as a joke he added, “Course not as much as I like what’s in them.”
She grinned at him openly. Her teeth weren’t perfect, but they were passable. Terry asked, “Would you like to join me in the shower?”
For a second, she froze. Terry instantly realized his mistake. Whatever protection the room afforded her, being in the shower left her completely at his mercy. He withdrew the offer immediately.
She smiled again, embarrassed by her fear. She moved toward him to make up for it.
He knew what she was doing. It was a nice thing but unnecessary.
He grabbed her and pulled her to him, kissing her open mouthed and holding her for a second after he broke it.
Caught off guard, she recovered quickly. She was unused to a real display of emotion, but she responded to it nonetheless, pushing her naked body against his. She realized it felt good just to be held by him.
He broke the hold and moved into the shower, saying, “I’ll only be a minute.” At that, he stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. It took her a second to grasp the fact that he was leaving her out in the room with his wallet and everything else without even a thought. This guy was weird. She could grab it and run, and by the time he got out, she could be halfway home for all he knew.
She could but she wouldn’t, and somehow, she knew he knew it. For a moment, she considered doing just that simply to keep him from being right but that faded quickly as she realized he was right about her. She had become a hooker after she tried to be a wife and wanted to be a mother, but it wasn’t in the cards. Then, her husband had decided he wanted to try a different lifestyle, one that involved another man. It had taken her a long time to come to grips with the fact that it was his choice and not something she had done. In the end, simple economics had pushed her toward prostitution back in Chicago, but she always hoped for Prince Charming to show up and take her away. Until today, she thought it was just a pleasant fantasy. Now, all of a sudden, here was this man that looked like everything she wanted, and here she was displaying the kind of stupidity she had always hated in other women. She sold herself, yes, but she was not a whore. She actually liked her clients. And this one looked like he might be more than even that.
As she heard the shower start, she moved to the door and looked in through the crack. For a second, she just stood, enjoying the sight of his backside as he stepped into the tub. Then, she opened the door and walked in. Hell, if he was anywhere near as good as he thought, and that kiss indicated that he was, she wanted to find out just what was his deal.
She opened the door slowly. The hinges were oiled and made no sound, but she knew he heard her enter.
He turned toward the door and smiled, holding the shower curtain back so she could step in. He eyed her like a choice steak as she raised her leg over the tub. She was shaved neatly, and Terry could smell her scent as she walked into the room. He almost wished she wouldn’t shower so he could enjoy it while they had sex.
Instead, though, he pulled her into the shower and kissed her again. This time, there was more expectation than surprise. She put her arms around his neck and let her breasts lay on his chest. Without her heels, she was a little shorter, but Terry could not have cared less right then. He let himself melt into the beautiful woman in his arms. The shower did its work, rinsing off the grime of a bad day in Lester. She had no way of knowing about that though.
He reached over and turned off the shower. He was tired of dreaming. It was time for some reality.
On Clinton Street in Chicago, a small figure leaped out of a cab and headed down an alleyway, the only sound a tapping from shoes on the concrete. In seconds, the sound faded, and in its place, another could be heard if you could listen closely enough. A wet, gurgling sound that signaled the end of an existence.
Inside the cab, Veronica Moss, a fifty-two-year-old grandmother of six was dying. The gurgling came from the six-inch gash across her throat. Her eyes stared glassily at the roof of the cab. Tears ran down both sides of her face as life ebbed out of her quickly. Blood poured out of her neck and covered the front of her shirt, glistening in the streetlight. Her last thoughts were of those grandkids and what they would do without her.
The radio crackled as a voice on the other end asked for status reports. After a few minutes, all of the cabs had been accounted for save hers. Several more minutes went by as they found the GPS locator and requested the police check out their missing cab. Then, they waited.
They waited because they already knew what had happened. This would make six dead in the last six months. The police had kept the news off the air, but in the last week, there had been a pair of these killings. In the modern age of
You Tube
and
Facebook
, that had been a major accomplishment, but in the face of this, there would be no holding anyone back now. And once they started, it was sure to snowball.
FBI agents had been called in to help, but they got nowhere. There were simply no leads. Whoever this guy was, he was a ghost. They had no leads even though some of the cabs had had cameras inside. They had pictures, but they were poor quality and basically worthless. The face they showed gave them nothing but shadow and light. Their best techs had tried to enhance it with computer graphics but there were no similarities in the pictures they got other than general size and shape. The best conclusion they had was that the pictures were probably the same person, but there was no conclusive evidence either way that that was right.
Now, this latest murder would definitely put this thing out in the public eye. And then, it was open season. Cabbies had already stopped showing up. Only the bravest and most desperate had even bothered to drive the night shifts for weeks, and once this latest killing came out, it was a safe bet that there would be even less cabs on the streets at night.
Mayor Jack Simon was determined to keep the entire matter out of the papers. And up to now, a combination of threats, promises and outright bribes had done just that, but with this latest murder, all bets were off. Now, all he could do was brace for the worst and hope that out of the massive influx of theories from agencies all over the state, one of them proved to be more than the ink on the paper.
One of those theories was so preposterous that it had given one of the agents that had read it laughing fits. He thought that it had been a joke and said so to the mayor. It probably wouldn’t have gone any further except that one of the mayor’s top aides, Alvin Crane, was familiar with the man offering the theory, at least well enough to know that he had no sense of humor left.
Talbot Smyth was a British agent that had
transferred
to the FBI years ago. Before that, he had been an inspector at Scotland Yard. He’d transferred over when his wife, an American citizen, had developed a tumor and needed a specialist. The follow–up treatment required several months, and when it was done, his finances were tapped out. A last-minute plan allowed him to stay in the States as a consultant, which led him finally to a job that had enough clout to let him get his wife, Sonya, the help she needed. Now, he was rated pretty much indispensable by anyone he had worked with.
He’d come in on this case nearly at the beginning, at the second murder. He had run through a dozen different ideas on how this was being done before settling on the one he had presented to the mayor through his chief aide. The one that had caused such amusement when he sent it down through channels. To everyone, that is, other than Crane. There was little these days that gave him cause to laugh.
Still, even he had to admit it was a bit much. But then, how else would one explain something like this, killing cabbies in the middle of the night for no reason other than to kill them. No robbery, money still in pouches, wallets untouched. Why else would someone be doing this?
He hated the thought, but it was a plausible answer if nothing else. And it did fit the facts they had, scant though they were.
He had to make sure that his idea didn’t get out into the public. The idea that a Jack-the-Ripper type had invaded Chicago these days was not as farfetched as it once may have been, but it was no less terrifying than it could have ever been. And if the papers got wind of it even being on the table, assuming, of course, it never panned out, the mayor would be a laughing stock for entertaining the idea in the first place.
Of course, that would only be the tip of the iceberg if it turned out to be true and he had done nothing. And in either case, there were more murders coming in his opinion. Despite the possible delusion of Smyth’s ideas on the culprit, his solution of enlisting the aid of a former San Francisco private eye by the name of Terry Bridger was intriguing.
Smyth had met, and been suitably impressed by, the man in a case in Sykesville, Iowa. A man butchered a family there and went on a rampage, hiding during the day and coming out at night to find new victims all over the Midwest. That maniac slaughtered half a dozen families. He was the worst kind of serial killer. He was on a spree he knew would end with him either dead or captured, but he either didn’t care or was so arrogant, he thought he could elude the police forever.
If it hadn’t been for Bridger, according to Smyth, there was at least a chance that he would have done just that. Somehow, Smyth said, Bridger had managed to figure out where the man was going and been there, waiting. As a consultant, he was, of course, not supposed to engage the perpetrator, but he had had no choice as the man had already chosen his entertainment for the evening. In the ensuing fight, Bridger had taken a bullet through the leg and still managed to subdue him. When the police had finally arrived at the call of one of the proposed victims, the man, not knowing Bridger was working for the police, had even tried to say he was stopping him from attacking the family.
Crane laughed at that. Until he realized that until Smyth and his partner had showed up, it was as likely a scenario as any. In the end, Bridger had collected the reward offered by families of the victims as well as a local philanthropist. The mayor had no such benefactor, but he did have a slush fund. And given that the rates this Bridger charged were ridiculously low, it seemed it could be an idea worth considering. The mayor, however, was not so much inclined.
“You think we should try to use this consultant to catch a gang of lunatics? Shit, Al, for all we know, this could be the whole plan! They could be in cahoots figuring out some way to extort money from cities!”
Crane was used to Mayor Simon’s paranoia. To tell the truth, it was one of his most endearing quirks. Especially considering the others were racism, elitism and plain old ignorance. He had helped make him mayor under the strict rule that he would also be one of the ones that kept him controlled. In public, he was the politician’s politician, promising little and delivering less, but he was always so much in control that no one noticed they got screwed until it was far too late. He was great for business and keeping a good face on City Hall, but he was a puppet in most cases, of the city’s corporate bosses.
These days, it wasn’t so bad. And as behind-the-scene bosses went, Chicago’s were some of the more genteel. In matters such as this, though, they left the handling to the mayor and his staff. In other words, him and Martin Finch, the mayor’s chief aide. Or as he liked to call him, Simon lite.
“Sir, it would be highly doubtful that this man Bridger would be in any way, shape or form connected to this person we are looking for. According to FBI files, he was a cop and an army ranger in Iraq. He’s had several cases with the bureau and each one has ended well.”
The mayor cut him off disdainfully. He knew what kind of man this Bridger was despite the fact that he had never met him. The opportunistic sycophant that wormed his way in like a huckster then made off with the silver when no one was watching. “Yes, and he no doubt took all the credit for it, leaving the ones that did the actual work to look like fools.”
Crane counted slowly to ten before he answered. There were times he wanted to push Simon out a window at the top floor and blame it on the spirits of fair play and common sense. Anyone who knew the idiot would have backed up the possibility.