The Starshine Connection (5 page)

“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.

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 across 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.