Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

"Hey," said Samara, "you paid good money for that thing. I could've carried it."

"No point," Jaywalker explained. "Once they get wet, they're no good anymore. That's the whole idea. That woman back there on Canal Street? She's their vice presi dent in charge of market research. In two years she'll have enough money to buy Manhattan, dismantle it and ship it back home."

Samara laughed at the thought, a hearty laugh, totally free of self-consciousness. Like her tears on the witness stand, her frequent lapses into locker-room language and just about everything else about her, there was nothing re strained about her laughter, nothing contrived or con trolled. The tabloid writers who'd been so quick to tag her as a gold digger had gotten it all wrong. The truth was, she operated without a plan, Samara did. If something struck her as funny, she laughed at it like a child. If it struck her as sad, she bawled. And if it struck her as absurd, she came right out and said so, without measuring her words or both ering to pretty them up.

Her laughter now was infectious, downright contag ious. In spite of himself, or perhaps because of what the two of them had been through over the last couple of hours, Jaywalker found himself letting go and laughing right along with her. They laughed at his dumb remark, at the fact that they were laughing at it, at their dripping hair and their soaking clothes. They laughed because they were together. This time tomorrow she would be in jail and he'd no longer be a lawyer, but right now they were together, heading to her place for the night, and that was enough.

Or, as Samara would have so eloquently stated, fuck tomorrow.

When they reached her town house, Jaywalker noticed a gray Ford Crown Victoria idling across the street. There were two overfed white guys sitting in it, and the wind shield was fogged up where coffee containers sat on the dashboard. Tom Burke had evidently taken to heart Judge Sobel's suggestion of stationing detectives outside Samara's building. If Samara noticed them, she said noth ing. It took a cop to spot a cop, Jaywalker knew from his DEA days. Then again, Samara had done her share of flirting with the law, and not much got past her. Maybe she'd noticed them and just didn't care.

He let go of her just long enough for her to open the door to her town house. Once inside, they looked at each other in the light and began laughing all over again. They were completely covered with snow, both of them. Their cloth ing, their hair, their eyebrows, their eyelashes.

"You're going to look great when you're old and gray," said Jaywalker. He'd meant it as a compliment; he'd always loved the contrast of a young face, whether male or female, against a shock of gray hair. But all it earned from Samara was a sharp jab to the ribs. He caught her by the wrist, and found the other one, as well. They were tiny, so tiny he could completely circle his fingers around them. Drawing them against his chest, he wrapped his arms around her. All he'd meant to do was to immobilize her, to tie her hands up and prevent them from inflicting further damage. Or maybe not. But if he'd expected her to struggle, she surprised him once again. He felt her body go soft in his arms, and his reaction was to look down at her, at the precise moment she'd chosen to look up at him. Their eyes locked, and Jay walker found himself experiencing the same sensation he'd felt the very first time he'd seen her, and then the first time he'd seen her all over again, six years later. Only this time they weren't sitting across a desk in his office or squinting through wire-reinforced glass in a visiting room on Rikers Island. This time she was in his arms.

They peeled off each other's snow-caked clothes, drop ping them in a heap on the hallway floor. Almost as if there'd been preset ground rules, Samara stopped when she got to his boxer shorts, Jaywalker at her bra, her dentalfloss thong, and her electronic ankle bracelet. He didn't actually know it was a thong until she turned away from him and motioned him to follow as she began climbing the stairs. God, he thought, looking upward at her, whoever invented those things deserves a Nobel prize. And for the first time in his life, he was prepared to forgive Bill for having been rendered totally helpless in front of Monica. Well, perhaps not exactly in front of her.

They ended up in the den, or perhaps it was the study; Jaywalker couldn't remember. It was a modest-sized room, dominated by a huge fireplace, which in turn was sur rounded by an equally oversize U-shaped sectional sofa. There were logs laid in the fireplace, and he looked around for a book of matches. But she picked up what looked like a TV remote, pointed and clicked, and just like that, fire happened. It might not have been Jaywalker's weapon of choice, but it did the trick.

"So," she said, standing there in the firelight. "Is it after yet?"

"It's close enough," said Jaywalker.

Even as extended foreplay goes, seven and a half years is an awfully long time. With a buildup of that length, it would have been entirely understandable, indeed all but inevitable, that the reality would fall far short of the anticipation.

It didn't.

Finally going to bed with Samara turned out to exceed everything Jaywalker had imagined, hoped for and dreamed about in his wildest and most X-rated fantasies. If her bethonged backside had driven him crazy, so now did the rest of her. But there was more. Not only was she physi cally exquisite, she was, well, talented. So much so, in fact, that once or twice Jaywalker caught himself remembering the details of her past. But each time his hesitation proved to be only fleeting and soon evaporated. And if Samara didn't try to make him feel as though he were her first ever (a tall order if ever there'd been one), she somehow man aged to succeed in making him feel that he was her best ever, smothering any self-doubts he might have had with an unending barrage of kisses, touches, caresses, moans and all sorts of other stuff that in the end would leave him breathlessly begging for less. Totally forgotten were any concerns over the freshness of his breath, the size of his personal endowment or the satisfaction of Samara's needs; all three of those areas seemed to work out just fine, thank you. Suffice it to say that in spite of however great the an ticipation might have been, the experience itself proved to be anything but anticlimactic, both figuratively and literally. In fact, at one such moment, Samara was heard to remark, "That's three months off your life expectancy so far."

"Me?" Jaywalker gasped. "Then you've lost years. "

"It's not the same, silly. Don't you know anything? "

This from a woman twenty years his junior, sitting astride him totally naked, her small breasts framing a pair of out rageously pointed nipples. And already she was busy at work trying to deprive him of yet another month of his life.

At some point, when they'd been forced to come up for air, Samara caught Jaywalker pinching the bridge of his nose. "Headache?" she asked.

He nodded.

"I'm sure Barry left some aspirin here," she said. "Or some ibuprofen. He was a regular walking pharmacy."

"I can't take any of that stuff," said Jaywalker, who'd developed an allergy late in life. "My head blows up, and I look like a manatee."

"So what can we do for you?" she asked.

"You've done more than you can imagine."

"Seriously."

"Seriously? I guess I should eat something," he said. "It's been about a day and a half."

"And by something, you probably don't mean ice cream."

The thought of brain-freeze caused him to reach for the bridge of his nose again. "Probably not."

"Pizza?"

"You've got pizza?"

"No," said Samara. "But I've got a phone. This is New York, remember?"

At his insistence, they ordered not one but two medium pies. When the pizzas arrived thirty minutes later, they kept the plain one for themselves. The pepperoni, meatball and extra cheese, Jaywalker had redelivered to the gray Crown Victoria across the street.