Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

“Unless they knew somehow that …” Doc said and then trailed off.

“That’s right. And Trey and I were alone in her living room when she authorized me to put Jimmy out there. And, of course, there’s every chance in the world that Eduardo heard it, since he’s attached to her by an invisible rope.”

“And if he heard it, then what?”

“Then one of two things. Either he sold Trey out and told the people who killed Jimmy and then went to ransack the apartment on their behalf. Or, and this is the one that worries me, he did it all on Trey’s orders.”

“Slow it down,” Doc said. “Are you suggesting that Trey is sabotaging her own movie?”

“I’m suggesting that it’s one possible explanation for everything that’s happened.”

Doc hooked his thumbs in his suspenders and gave them a snap. “But why? She needs the money. It’s part of her plan.”

“Money would be the answer,” I said. “Something that would make more money than actually finishing the movies. But the only thing I can think of that would pay her anything substantial is a huge insurance loss.”

Doc nodded. “I hadn’t considered that.”

“Well, forget it. Tatiana made it very clear to me. Thistle is completely uninsurable.”

He turned his head and looked down at the sidewalk. I didn’t think he was going to reply, but then he said, “And you believe Tatiana.”

The question stopped me. I had believed her, certainly. There was something plausible and solid about her. As there was, I thought, about so many crooks. “I’ll find a way to check it,” I said. “But I don’t know. The way Trey held Thistle’s feet to the fire yesterday, threatening her with her contract and everything. Seems like she could have had her default right then.”

“This is your area,” Doc said. “I’m a simple pediatrician.”

“Okay, one more question, purely about Trey. How do you think she really feels about her ex-husband?”

“That one’s easy,” he said. “She hates the ground his shadow falls on. She’d pay scalper’s rates for a front-row seat at his execution.”

“Not likely, then, that they’d be working together.”

“Here’s how unlikely it is,” he said. “I’ll bet you five thousand dollars right now that he’s dead within eighteen months.”

I shook my head. “A lot earlier than that.”

“Omaha,” I said to the guard.

“Long way,” the guard said, although it sounded like a guess.

“That’s why they need me. Hard to run an office that far away without having a man right there.”

“Johnny on the spot,” the guard suggested. He was a liberally weathered fifty-five or so, with a richly veined nose and enough alcohol on his breath to float an olive. His name tag said CARL.

“Johnny on the spot,” I said admiringly. “Exactly. Boots on the ground. Local talent. ZIP code savvy. You gotta know the territory.” I was, just conceivably, over-extending.

“You the man,” Carl contributed, offering proof, if further proof were needed, that here was one more expression that needed permanent retirement.

I resisted offering Carl a knuckle-bump and said instead, “So anyway, Jack said to me, ‘Just show all this stuff to Carl, and he’ll let you go on up.’ ” I paired the homemade business card with the bogus driver’s license and held them nice and steady in front of Carl’s eyes. It took him a second to home in on them. “I just need to drop something off,” I said.

“Kind of late,” Carl said.

“Damn airplanes,” I said. “You know how it is.”

“Do I ever.” Carl snorted. “Damn airplanes,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, heading for the elevators. I half expected him to call me back, but all he said was, “Damn airplanes,” and then he snorted again. Apparently, he flew a lot more than I’d guessed.

The company on the card I’d made was called Earl Distribution and it was run by someone named Jack Earl. That, and the fact that it was on the same floor as Wattles, Inc., was one hundred percent of what I knew about it, since that was all that the office directory in the lobby had on offer when I’d read it on my way out with Hacker. I’d been worried that old Carl might have asked me something about what we were distributing, but I’d underestimated the vehemence of the universal frustration with the airline industry.

I turned my back to the camera on the elevator and waited until the doors opened before I put on the ski mask. If there was a camera in the hallway, I couldn’t see it, but I kept my head down anyway. And I was wearing the stupid wig to match the driver’s license, so any camera above me would be getting a nice clear shot of someone who looked like he’d kept his head in a jar since 1968.

I took one look at Wattles’s door and felt like he was letting down the team. He was a crook, and he should have been ashamed of himself for relying on those locks. If I’d had a few more minutes, I probably could have sweet-talked them open, just a little judicious lock flattery. As it was, it took less than forty-five seconds before the door swung wide.

I slipped in, closed the door behind me, turned on the lights, and jumped half a foot straight up into the air.

I’d forgotten all about Dora, the inflatable receptionist, who sat behind the desk, looking at me expectantly. I was leaning against the door, trying to get my knees to stop wobbling, when I looked at her more closely. I blinked a couple of times, but it didn’t go away. A cherry bomb went off in my head.

I knew who she looked like. How could I have been so stupid?

Laughter was an appropriate response, and I gave her quite a lot of it. If she’d been sentient, she probably would have approved of it, if only as a change from the steady diet of necessarily humorless lust she’d been created to endure. One thing about guys who buy blow-up dolls: there’s probably a pretty good chance they aren’t hypersensitive to the funny side of things.

But Dora wasn’t just funny. I had to look at her three times to be sure, but there was no question about it. Wattles had screwed up on a planetary scale. Dora was a chance at deliverance.

I went through the closet in the reception room and found half a dozen of her, neatly packed into their garish cardboard boxes, made in China, of course. It was easy to picture the assembly line of Chinese peasants, yanked from the mud of their little Puritan villages so fast their shoes were probably still stuck there, trying to figure out exactly what it was they were making. The company name Wattles had come up with was My Sweet Inflatable You , and the box copy waxed sub-poetic to describe Dora’s infinite willingness to be penetrated in a variety of ways and her deluxe feature, a voicebox that said, “Oh, baby,” and/or “Don’t stop now” when the eager lover pressed her left ear. I guessed the phrases came at random, although “Don’t stop now” seemed a little risky, especially if lover boy had just wrapped it up, so to speak. These guys are probably fragile enough without being urged to exceed their sexual capacity by a blow-up doll.

Anyway, I had a vitally important use for Dora. It wasn’t the one Wattles had planned on, but it met my needs so perfectly that I guessed things averaged out.

I put two Doras, all boxed up, just beside the door, and went to the files. In the locked drawer for My Sweet Inflatable You, I found that Wattles kept two sets of books, one for himself and one for the government, with remarkably little in common. The one for himself contained a tidy little spread sheet that told me that Dora had been purchased by more than 24,000 presumably blissful consumers, who had paid $79.95 each for her latex companionship and conversational skills, which meant that Wattles had grossed about a million nine on her. Suddenly his choice of models didn’t look quite so dumb, at least not from a commercial perspective. I wrote down the precise number of sales for that persuasive touch of verisimilitude. Sometimes, when you want to make a point, a detail really nails it, and I thought this number would make a truly lethal difference.