Free Shadow Woman by Thomas Perry

first on her
breasts, and then her belly, and the hard corner of the marble
against her pelvis. She had no choice but to wriggle farther onto the
marble to keep the fillet knife flat under her belly so it wouldn’t
slice her open or clatter to the floor, only that brought her
buttocks up and parted her legs, and she had to hold herself
absolutely rigid to keep from moving against the blade. And he –
    The ring of the telephone beside
her bed was like something breaking. She snatched the receiver off
the hook and punched the button that was lit. She was too annoyed to
see which number it was, so she said, “Linda Thompson.”
    “Hello, Linda.” She
recognized the voice, and her anger began to turn into hope. “Can
you and Earl meet me someplace for lunch?”
    A job, she thought. Thank God.

5

    Linda
sat beside Earl in the front seat and watched each shopper pull into
the big parking lot, drive up and down a couple of aisles, coast
between two diagonal slashes of white paint, then go through the
ritual of checking the whole car: the mirrors to be sure the car’s
ass wasn’t hanging out far enough to get clipped, the passenger
seat to collect purses or glasses or hide a bag they bought in the
last mall from the smash-and-grab crowd, then the lock buttons. The
excruciating sameness of it was getting on her nerves. People were as
predictable as gophers. You knew the next three things they were
going to do before they did.
    The car smelled like dogs, that
nauseating dog-food smell they exuded from every pore. Earl had used
the car instead of the truck again. She decided not to say anything,
because it would spoil the next hour.
    Earl was brilliant in his own
way. Raising and training attack dogs was a great sideline for a
detective agency that didn’t do much business. In a city the
size of Los Angeles you could pick up any breed you wanted from the
pound for the price of the shots, which was up to sixty bucks now.
Some of them had papers. You trained the dog to sit, heel, shit
outdoors, and maul people, and you could sell it for fifteen
thousand.
    But Linda was ready to work now,
and that was Earl’s fault too. He had trained her practically
from childhood to his rhythms. He was only really alive when he was
hunting. Between times he only played at it and got more and more
irritable.
    Seaver was precisely on time, as
she had known he would be. He was one of those guys who seemed to see
himself as though he were still in the military. For the ones like
him, that wasn’t some kind of interruption in his existence but
his initiation into manhood. She saw him pull the rental car between
the diagonal lines, but he didn’t behave like the others. He
was out and walking as soon as the keys were out of the ignition. He
still carried himself straight, only now there was a little gray at
the sides of his short hair. The aviator sunglasses he used to wear
had been replaced with plain black frames, but the gray summer suit
with the bright white shirt still had that animal-in-clothes look
because it was cut too snugly and the collar was too tight, the way
the army had taught him to dress.
    He got into the back seat and
Earl drove off. “Hello, Cal,” said Linda. “You’re
looking good.”
    “You too,” said
Seaver. She knew that he had thought of a compliment, but he had
pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth because he had known
better than to say it in front of Earl.
    “Let’s go to Ivy at
the Shore,” said Seaver. “We can talk business while
we’re on the freeway, and then eat in peace.”
    “When’s your plane
out?” asked Earl.
    “Four o’clock,”
said Seaver. “If I’m back in my car by three, I’ll
make it. If not, I’ll take another flight.”
    As Earl accelerated down the
ramp onto the San Diego Freeway Seaver stared at the bottom of the
first overpass. Some time soon it was going to be a bad idea to
transact this kind of business on a freeway. Already the California
Department of