The Informant (12 page)

“Another Stoli and tonic?” the waitress asked.

Victoria handed up her empty glass. “Please.”

She was seated at a table for two by a window overlooking the runway. People came and went from the tables around her with each arrival and departure announced over the loudspeaker. A snoring man with a backpack was stretched across five chairs at the table behind her, as if sleeping on his couch at home. A man dressed smartly in a business suit had taken the table beside her, burying his nose in some book, reading beneath the light from a neon beer sign. He looked about her age, with the kind of rugged good looks that usually snagged her attention. He had thick dark hair, and his large, athletic frame made the little plastic bar seats seem even more uncomfortable than usual. She’d been idly thinking about him ever since he’d sat down.

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“Here you are, sir,” the waitress said to him. “Dewar’s and water. I’m sorry, did you say bottled water or regular water?”

He lifted his nose from his book, finally showing Victoria something other than his chiseled profile. “Regular’s fine.”

“Good choice,” Victoria said to him as the waitress walked away.

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“That bottled-water thing’s a scam, you know.”

He smiled and raised his glass. “So I’ve heard. Cheers.”

They sipped their drinks and exchanged glances. “You mind sharing a table?” he asked. “I’m a little too close to the smoking section over here.”

She hesitated, then figured what the hell. If he turned out to be a creep, her plane was leaving in fifty-five minutes. “Sure,” she said.

They shared the usual small talk—where they were from, where they were headed—then ordered another round of drinks, though this time she opted for a ginger ale. He was a broker who dealt in Corvettes, Bentleys, and other classic automobiles, on his way to yet another wealthy estate auction in Chicago that would prove you can’t take it with you. As always, Victoria was appropriately vague about her “government job.” Quickly changing subjects, she noticed the title of the self-help book he’d laid on the seat between them.
“How to Put Power and
Passion into Your Relationship,”
she read aloud. “So, what woman is making you read
this?”

“Actually I’m not reading it. I just hold it up and 109

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stare at it in public places, like airports, until some attractive woman strikes up a conversation. Works every time.”

“And your wife doesn’t mind?” she said with a smile.

He smiled back, then turned a little more serious. “Actually I’m not married. Not anymore.”

“You say that like it’s recent.”

“The fat lady was singing long before it was legally over. We’re still friends. It wasn’t bitter. It was just…Ah, you don’t want to hear it.”

“No, go on—tell me.”

“Well, to be honest”—he gave a sheepish expression—“it was sex.”

Victoria gulped.

“Not that we didn’t have it. We just didn’t have it enough. No, it really wasn’t even that.” He looked down.

“We didn’t have it in enough different ways. You know what I mean?”

Her eyes widened as she sucked on an ice chip. “Well, yes, there
are
different ways.”

“Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“Me?” she scoffed nervously. “Nah.”

“Because I’ve really been looking for a woman’s honest assessment of this.”

“I don’t mind being honest.”

“Women usually don’t. But try to talk about sex with another guy, and about the only thing you’ll get out of the conversation is that
he
sure doesn’t have any problems. Not that
I
had a problem, of course.”

“Of course.”

He laughed lightly. “Okay, the
problem
, if that’s 110

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what you want to call it, was that I married a woman whose basic attitude toward sex was that she didn’t mind it. I knew this, of course, when I married her. Hell, I knew it the day I met her.”

“You had sex the day you met?”

“No. You don’t have to have sex with a woman to know whether she’s into it. Men can just tell these things.”

“Oh, yeah? How?”

“Her looks.”

“You can tell whether a woman’s into sex by what she looks like?”

“No. By how she looks—
at me.
Looks are very sexy.

Like you, for instance. The way you kept glancing over at my table from the minute I sat down, peeking out from behind that wisp of hair that kept falling in your face.

Very sexy.”

She smiled with embarrassment. “So what do you make from that?”

“I’m not sure. But see? You’re already thinking the way you should be thinking. All the little things translate to something else. That’s how we know.”

“So your wife didn’t translate.”

“She translated all right. I just defied the message. I kept hoping someday she’d hit that sexual peak everyone always talks about. But it never came. I tried everything.

I
knew
her
body from head to toe, but she still acted like I didn’t have a body below my chin. I mean…you sure this isn’t making you uncomfortable?”

“It’s—no, I’m fine.”

“My wife and I must have made love thousands of times, but I bet that if you had four other men in this 111

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bar drop their pants and lined us up, she wouldn’t know my—my equipment from theirs.” He seemed to blush.

“I’d better stop there.”

Victoria struggled for a response. Finally, words came to her lips. “Hey, I don’t even know your
name.
”

“I’m Mike,” he said, extending his hand.

“Mike,” she said with a smirk, thinking of someone else.

“That’s a nice name.” She shook his hand, but it was more than a formality. They both held on a little longer than they might have. “I’m Victoria.”

She looked at him again from behind that wisp of hair, the look he’d thought was sexy. “You know, another guy named Mike once told me that the only people who can be completely open with each other are lovers or strangers.”

He nodded slowly. “There’s a lot of truth in that. Hell, I think I was just more direct with you than I ever was with my wife.”

There was a long but comfortable silence. Neither one looked away.

“You know,” he said, “I travel to the Washington area quite a bit. Would you like to get together sometime? I mean, for lunch or maybe dinner?”

Her smile flattened, but she kept looking into his eyes.

“Sure. Why don’t you give me your business card?”

“Well, that doesn’t make it very easy for me to call you when I come into town, does it.”

She hesitated. Her standing rule was never to give her number to a stranger. But maybe that was the reason the only men she ever met were obnoxious cops at happy hour who asked her to “roll their cigars.”

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“You’ve got a point there,” she said. She took a pen from her purse and put it to the cocktail napkin. “You realize, of course, that we’d no longer be strangers.”

“That’s okay. I promise I’ll still be completely open with you. Except, no more stories about my ex-wife.”

She chuckled to herself, still feeling a buzz from the vodka tonics. “That I can live with,” she said with a smile.

At 5:00 A.M. Saturday, Curt Rollins was dressed all in black—jeans, sweatshirt, ski mask, and gloves. A black vinyl pouch strapped tightly around his waist contained everything he needed. He was on one knee in a cluster of bushes at the edge of the woods, hiding and watching.

During five hours of surveillance the temperature had dropped twenty degrees, but it still wasn’t cold enough to freeze the ground. He’d smoked half a pack of Marlboros and was on his last cigarette.

The secluded house at the top of the hill was completely dark, save for the outside porch light. This one would be easy. One story. No alarm, no pets, no neighbors. He could have made his move long ago, but something held him back. The white clapboard house with blue slatted shutters looked like hundreds, even thousands of others he’d seen in his lifetime. But the smell of sulfur from the tide, the cool wind whistling through the screened-in porch and the lonely tinkle of a wind chime gave this one a haunting familiarity. It reminded him of the first crime he’d ever committed, at age ten back in 1973….

The sun was setting on another long and boring 113

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summer weekday as he and his best friend Frank trudged along the dirt road, toward the lake. Any minute now the long shadows of the forest would cover the shoreline, and the croaking chorus of bullfrogs would begin. Curt was wearing his favorite Chicago Bears jersey and baggy hand-me-down jeans that he wouldn’t grow into for another four years. He had a crew cut like his older brother in the Marines and a string of phony rub-on tattoos running up his arm.

“Let’s go creepy crawling,” said Frank.

Curt scrunched his face. “What’s that?”

“Don’t you know anything?”

“Nope,” he said, crossing his eyes. “I’m a retart.”

Frank gave him a swift kick in the rear. “It’s not re
tart
, you retard. I told you to stop doing that, or we’re not hanging out anymore.” Frank was the smart one, but he was small for his age. He was always getting in fights with kids who called him “Franny” or “Shorty.” Curt was the only kid he could hit without getting punched back.

“I read this book my mom bought,” said Frank. “About a guy named Manson. His gang used to go sneaking into houses and open drawers and stuff while people were sleeping.”

“I ain’t going in nobody’s house when they’re home.”

“You chicken?”

“No. It’s just stupid.”

Frank clucked like a hen. “You’re so chicken you wouldn’t even go in an empty house.”

“Yes, I would.”

“Prove it. Let’s go inside the Dawson’s summerhouse down by the lake.”

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The white clapboard summerhouse was at the top of the hill looking down on Loon Lake. It was still boarded up from the winter. With a stick Frank pried away one of the blue slatted shutters at the back of the house. Curt lifted him up so he could look inside. He broke one of the windowpanes, slid open the window and crawled inside. “Come on,” he called from inside the house.

Curt pulled himself up by the windowsill. He tried going in headfirst but didn’t have the arm strength. He threw one leg over the ledge and tried going in backward. He was inside from the waist down, blindly searching for the floor with his tiptoes when he lost his grip and tumbled inside. A table went over, and a lamp crashed to the floor.

Curt looked around. It was dark and stuffy inside, but from the light through the window he could see the por-celain lamp scattered on the floor in a hundred pieces.

“Oh, no,” he groaned.

On impulse, Frank dashed across the room to the matching lamp and knocked it off the table. He laughed, like he enjoyed it.

“What are you
doing
?”

He just laughed louder. A wild excitement filled his eyes as he stood there, surveying the room. He grabbed a poker from the fireplace and started knocking books from the shelves and pictures from the walls. Dishes, the television, knickknacks—everything, smashed. Curt screamed at him to stop, but the noise drowned him out.

He stopped suddenly, panting and completely out of breath. “Break something,” he shouted.

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Curt stood there, shaking.

“We’re in this together. Break something!”

“I—I don’t want to.”

Frank held the poker in both hands and ran at him at full speed, knocking him to the ground. Curt was on his back, and his friend was on top, pressing the poker down on his throat. “Break something! Or I’ll kill you!”

Curt looked up in fear, gasping for breath. “Okay,” he grunted. Frank let him up, but he walked right behind him and held the poker like a baseball bat, threatening him. “The mirror,” he said, pointing above the fireplace.

“Knock it down.”

Curt took a deep breath. Reluctantly, he climbed up on the stack of logs by the fireplace and tugged at the big oak-framed mirror, keeping one hand on the mantel for balance. It wouldn’t budge.

“Harder!”

With two hands he gave a hard shove. The mirror shifted and Curt lost his balance. The stack of logs col-lapsed beneath him and he fell to the hardwood floor.

The mirror landed on his foot with a thundering crash, shattering into tiny pieces. Curt cried out in pain.

“My leg!” Tears streamed down his face. A triangular piece of glass as big as a slice of pizza was protruding from his bloody calf.

“Don’t be a sissy!”

“Let’s get out of here!”

“You’re getting blood all over the place. You’re gonna get us caught!” Frank ran to the bedroom and came back with a bedsheet. He wrapped his hand in the sheet and pulled out the broken glass. Curt screamed.

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“Stop being such a girl!”

Curt’s voice was shaking, and he couldn’t catch his breath. “I have to call my mom. I have to go to the doctor.”

Frank tied the sheet around the leg, but the red soaked right through. “Creepy crawlers don’t go to the doctor.”

“I need stitches.”

“I can do it. I watch my mom do it at the animal hospital all the time. It’s easy. All I need is a needle and thread.”

“No way! I’m going to the doctor.”

“You
can’t.
You can’t tell anyone how it happened.

This is like when we play army. Same rules.”

“I don’t want to play.”

“This isn’t
play,
” he shouted. “You know the rule. What do you say if you’re captured? Answer me! Or I’ll kick you in the leg!”

“Don’t kick me!” he cried. “Just name, rank and serial number, that’s all.”

“If you go to the doctor, you’re a snitch. Snitches are the lowest form of life on earth. Take the pain. Just take it!…”

Rollins bit his lip, feeling it all over again. He blinked hard and shook off the memory. He looked to the east, where a faint orange glow was brightening the horizon.

It would be light soon if he didn’t move fast. He crushed out his cigarette, gathered up the handful of butts from the ground around him and stuffed them in his pouch so the police wouldn’t find them. After three deep breaths, he sprung from the bushes and skulked across the yard, up toward the dark and deathly quiet home of the next scheduled victim.