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“Apparently he’s fucking my wife.”
“Does she know his history?”
“He was out of the picture before I met her. I didn’t see any reason to dig it all back up. Now I do. I knew the cocksucker was a crook but I never dreamed he’d sink this low just to get back at me. If I’d told Anne, she wouldn’t have given him the time of day. She’d have picked someone else. She may be an adulteress, but she’s not cruel.”
“Do you want me to keep going?”
“Yes. I’m keeping all your hotel reservations except San Francisco. Mapes is living in LA, or was living there when he registered the Impala. I’ll book you in a hotel there and let you know which one. I’ll give you his address when you get there.”
“What if they go someplace else?”
“Then you’re off the hook. Job’s done. I’ll put a professional on it. I’m still hoping you’ll be able to catch them red-handed.”
Suddenly Plevin chuckled, a nasty sound. “I thought that last deal I swung with Mapes was the transaction of a lifetime. Wait’ll I offer the same to Anne: no settlement, no alimony, and I won’t have Lover Boy prosecuted for violation of the Mann Act. Let ’em try to pick up the pieces when he’s a registered sex offender and she’s Public Slut Number One.”
Cooke held his tongue, a near thing. He’d been about to call a multimillionaire who was capable of ruining his life a vindictive son of a bitch. Instead he said, “I don’t know what use I’ll be. I don’t have any experience with peeking through windows of private homes, and I don’t intend to gain any.”
“Nothing so sleazy. Just seeing them together, going into or out of the house, and I’ll tell them there’s a witness who can blast her out of divorce court.”
Cooke’s heart gave a lurch. “You want me totestify?”
“It’ll never get that far, promise you that. Okay, get back on the road.” Plevin rang off.
Putting the car in gear, Cooke wondered what the man would say if he told him what Anne had said, about not wanting any of her husband’s fortune if she could get away from the marriage clean. Falsehood that it was, it might wipe that smirk from his voice, if only for a minute.
PART 4
Crossover
CHAPTER 15
A GRIZZLED MOUNTAIN man in buckskins and a beard carrying a big-bore rifle loomed over the freeway on a billboard advertising the Kansas State Historical Society Museum in Topeka.HIS STORY IS OUR STORY, read the legend. Another sign left over from February advertised an annual Indian powwow. Marinas made liberal use of Lewis and Clark to rent canoes. Judging by the evidence, the trade in Native American souvenirs was brisk.
Cooke made a note to stop on the way back home and visit some of these attractions, sketchbook in hand. He was traveling through the kind of history that made the Chicago Fire look like a birthday candle.
Minutes later, traffic began to slow, then ground to a halt. An electric sign warned motorists of an accident up ahead.
An occasional horn made its desultory complaint. A couple in the sedan next to Cooke was having an argument, faces red, gesturing violently. After a while the conflict burned itself out in a gloom of tight-jawed silence.
Whenever there was a letup in the gridlock, it didn’t last more than a few seconds, and the pace seldom topped five miles an hour. It took Cooke thirty minutes to travel a mile. He tuned in to a traffic report. Police officers were directing drivers to leave the freeway at the next exit. That ramp, he could see from hundreds of yards back, was jammed bumper-to-bumper. At this rate, Anne and her lover would be across the Colorado state line before Cooke extricated himself from the tangle.
While looking for a break to enter the right lane, he called Plevin, who acknowledged his report without offering a solution. Cooke guessed he was better at navigating the information superhighway than the real thing.
An ambulance streaked past on the left shoulder, whooping and bleating, all its lights in play.
Blue and red lights flashed up ahead, where by craning his neck Cooke saw a tractor-trailer rig lying on its side on the left shoulder, undercarriage exposed like a derailed toy locomotive. The obligatory gawkers slowed the process of escape to lockstep.
The exit was a mixing bowl of intersecting freeways and six-lane highways, both surface and exiting traffic almost at a standstill. Fast-food joints, convenience stores, strip malls, and a mammoth Walmart turned the outskirts of some unidentified suburb into self-contained cities.
An earsplitting chain reaction of honking came his way from up the block, where a stoplight seemed to have taken up permanent residence. An SUV maneuvering to change lanes screeched its brakes, nearly standing on its radiator grille. A pedestrian was racing across three lanes from a combination service station and Subway on that corner, zigzagging between cars: a woman, her black hair flying behind her, placing her hands on fenders for balance as she spun right and left heading straight toward the Toyota, her gaze fixed on that goal.
She was too far away and moving too fast for Dennis Cooke to see the color of her eyes, but he knew instinctively they were brushed silver with gold flecks in them.
CHAPTER 16
SHE GOT TO the car just as the light changed. A hand clawed at the door handle on the passenger’s side. Her face bent to the window was drawn tight, the eyes white around the irises. She banged on the glass, working the handle at the same time with the other hand. The action prevented him from unlocking the door electronically from the master switches.
The cars ahead were beginning to move. He gestured frantically for her to stop tugging at the handle. Finally she understood. The lock released with a click. She yanked the door open and threw herself onto the seat.
