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He turned to me when I was a good fifteen yards away. He smiled.
“Tempting, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“The thought of throwing me off the roof.”
“A bit.”
“But the police would quickly ascertain that the last call I made from my cell phone was to your cell phone, and they’d triangulate the source of the signals and place you at City Hall, six or seven minutes before I died.”
“That’d be a bummer,” I said. “Sure.” I pulled my gun from my waistband. “On your knees, Wes.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Hands behind your head and lace the fingers.”
He laughed. “Or what? You’ll shoot me?”
I was ten feet away now. “No. But I’ll pistol-whip your nose beyond recognition. Would you like that?”
He grimaced, looked at his linen trousers and the dirty ground at his feet.
“How about I just hold up my hands, you frisk me, and I remain standing?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” I kicked him in the back of the left knee and he dropped to the ground.
“This is not what you want to do!” He looked back at me, his face scarlet.
“Oooh,” I said. “Wesley gets angry.”
“You have no idea.”
“Hey, psycho, put your fucking hands behind your head. Okay?”
He did.
“Lace the fingers.”
He did.
I ran my hands along his chest, under the flaps of his untucked black silk shirt, along his waistband, crotch, and ankles. He wore black golf gloves in the dead of summer, but they were too tight and too small to conceal even a razor, so I let them be.
“The irony is,” he said as I searched him, “that even as your hand is running all over my body, you can’t touch me, Pat.”
“Miles Lovell,” I said. “David Wetterau.”
“You can place me at the sites of either of their accidents?”
Nope. Son of a bitch.
I said, “Your stepsister, Wesley.”
“Committed suicide, last I heard.”
“I can place you at the Holly Martens Inn.”
“Where I provided aid and sustenance to my clinically depressed sister? Is that what you’re talking about?”
I finished frisking him and stepped back. He was right. I had nothing on him.
He looked back over his shoulder at me. “Oh,” he said, “you’re done?”
He unlaced his fingers and stood, brushed at the dark ovals on each knee, the oily, sunbaked tar permanently imprinted in the linen.
“I’ll send you the bill,” he said.
“Do that.”
He leaned back against the wall, studied me, and I again felt the irrational urge to push him over. Just to hear his scream.
Up close for the first time, I could feel the casual combination of power and cruelty that he wore like a cloak draped over his shoulders. His face was a strange mix of hard angles and ripeness-hard jawline under fleshy red lips, a doughy, pudding softness to his ivory skin interrupted by jutting cheekbones and eyebrows. His hair was blond again, and combined with those fleshy lips and eyes so blue and vibrant and mean, the total effect of his face was defiantly Aryan.
As I studied him, he studied me, cocking his head ever so slightly to the right, his blue eyes narrowing, the hint of a knowing grin curling the corners of his ample mouth.
“That partner of yours,” he said, “is a real babe. You fuck her, too?”
It was as if he wanted me to throw him off the roof.
“I bet you have,” he said, and glanced over his shoulder at the city below. “You bang Vanessa Moore-who by the way I caught in court the other day, quite good-and you’re banging your hot little partner and God knows who else. You’re quite the swordsman, Pat.”
He turned his head back to me and I placed my gun in its holster at the small of my back for fear I’d use it.
“Wes.”
“Yeah, Pat?”
“Don’t call me Pat.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “Found a sore spot. Always interesting. People, you know, you can never be sure where their weaknesses lie until you prod a bit.”
“It’s not a weakness, it’s a preference.”
“Sure.” His eyes glittered. “You keep telling yourself that, Pat, er, rick.”
I chuckled in spite of myself. The guy didn’t quit.
A traffic helicopter from one of the news stations flew over us and then made an arc over the expressway as the crush of rush hour began to swell on the elevated girders to my left.
“I really hate women,” Wesley said evenly, his eyes following the path of the helicopter. “As a species, intellectually, I find them…” He shrugged “…silly. But physically”-he smiled, rolled his eyes-“Christ, it’s all I can do to keep from genuflecting when a really gorgeous one walks by. Interesting paradox, don’t you think?”
“No,” I said. “You’re a misogynist, Wesley.”
He chuckled. “You mean like Cody Falk?” He clucked his tongue. “You couldn’t get me out of bed for rape. It’s pedestrian.”
“You’d prefer to reduce people to shells, that it?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Like your stepsister. Reduce her to nothing, so that the only way she can express her horror is sexually.”
He raised the eyebrow another notch. “She loved it. Are you kidding? Christ, Pat-whatever the fuck your name is-isn’t that what sex is all about? Oblivion. And don’t give me this PC rhetoric about spiritual commingling and making love. Sex is about fucking. Sex is about regressing to our most animalistic state. Caveman. Private. Pre-Ur. We slurp and scratch and bite and groan like animals. All the drugs and marital aids and whips and chains and variances we add to the stew are all just extras meant to heighten-no, accomplish-the same thing. Oblivion. A regressive state that transports us back centuries and de-evolves us. It’s fucking, Pat. It’s oblivion.”
I clapped. “Terrific speech.”
He took a bow. “You like that?”
“You’ve practiced it.”
“It’s been tweaked over the years, sure.”
“Thing is, Wes-”
“What’s ‘the thing,’ Pat? Tell me.”
“You can’t explain poetry to a computer. You can teach it rhyme or meter, but it doesn’t understand beauty. Nuance. Essence. You don’t understand making love. That doesn’t mean a higher state-beyond fucking-doesn’t exist.”
