John Sandford: Silken Prey

She liked that. A lot. As anyone with narcissistic personality disorder would.

There was one large, juicy fly in the ointment. Three weeks before the election, she was losing. The thing about Smalls was, he was likable . Okay, he’d screw anything that moved, and in one case, allegedly, a woman who said she’d been too drunk to move. But then, what did that mean, anymore?

• • •

SO TARYN, WORKING ANONYMOUSLY through the shadow campaign, had hired Bob Tubbs to do his thing, to win the election for her. Tubbs didn’t know the man who passed him the 100K in twenties and fifties.

But Tubbs was a political, and had been around a long time, and knew how to follow a trail. It took a while, but he eventually followed it back to Dannon and thus to Taryn.

He showed up at her house at midnight.

He wanted more money.

Like this:

• • •

DOUG DANNON WAS A sandy-haired man of medium height with a trim, sandy mustache and a wedge-shaped body, marked with a few shrapnel scars from nearby explosions. On the particular night that Tubbs showed up at the door, he was sitting on a twenty-thousand-dollar German woven-leather couch that was soft as merino wool, his feet on a seventy-five-thousand-dollar Persian carpet as delicately brilliant as a French cathedral’s stained-glass window. He looked out through the faintly green, curved-glass porch windows at the billion-dollar woman, who looked like a million bucks.

She was topless, and the bottom of her bathing suit was not larger than a child’s hand. She’d just pulled herself out of the deep end of the heated pool, after forty laps, and stood shaking off the water. Tall and blond and tanned, she had muscular thighs and small breasts tipped with erect pinkish-brown nipples.

Hansel and Gretel sat on the pool’s flagstone deck, watching everything. The dogs made people a little nervous. Agitated, they could tear a rhinoceros apart, and they loved Taryn more than life itself.

Taryn knew Dannon was there behind the glass, watching, and that Ron Carver was someplace in the house, but paid no attention to that set of facts. Carver, who worked security with Dannon, was also part of the shadow campaign. Carver had suggested to Dannon that she could do this—swim topless, and occasionally nude, while they were in the house—because she was an exhibitionist.

Dannon thought that was probably true.

He was wrong.

She did it because, in the larger scheme of things, Dannon and Carver were irrelevant. The fact that they’d seen her nude meant nothing, because they meant nothing. They were tools; it was like being seen by a hammer and chisel.

• • •

TARYN HAD BEGUN TOWELING off when Carver came into the living room carrying a glass of bourbon; in fact, a glass of A.H. Hirsch Reserve, Dannon knew, which Carver had been regularly pouring from Taryn Grant’s liquor closet. Carver had a deal going with the housekeeper, who would order additional bottles as necessary. Taryn need not know.

Dannon disapproved: but Carver had told him that he needed a bit of booze on a daily basis to keep his head straight and the Reserve was what he’d chosen.

“If she smells that on your breath, when you’re working, she could fire you,” Dannon said.

“Ah, she’s so loaded she couldn’t tell that she wasn’t smelling her own breath,” Carver said. He was a large man, thick through the chest and hips. A small head, with closely cropped brown hair, made his shoulders look especially wide. He had a 9mm Glock tucked into a belt holster in the small of his back, and, because he was slightly psycho, a little .380 auto in an ankle holster.

Dannon was less psycho, and carried only a single gun, a .40-caliber Heckler & Koch, butt-backwards in a cross-draw holster on his left hip. Of course, he also carried a Bratton fighting knife with a seven-inch serrated blade guaranteed to cut through bone, tendon, and ligament, on the theory that you should never bring a fist to a knife fight.

“Look at the ass on that bitch,” Carver said, sipping at the Reserve.

“I don’t want to hear that,” Dannon said.

“’Cause you’re totally pussy-whipped,” Carver said, watching the billion-dollar woman arching her back, thrusting her breasts toward them, as she pulled the blue-striped pool towel across her back. “Though it is a pretty sweet billet. Kinda boring, though. Other than the fact we get to watch her rubbing her tits.”

“Plenty of jobs outta Lagos,” Dannon said, watching Taryn through the glass.

“Fuck Lagos. The goddamn Africans got gun guys coming out of their ass. They don’t need me around.”

“I knew this guy from Angola, black as a lump of coal,” Dannon said. “Smart guy. Hired into the Bubble as a security guard. The first day he’s there, some asshole raghead points his taxi at the Haleb gate . . .”

More been-there-done-that Baghdad bullshit, but Carver listened closely, because he liked war stories. In this job, so far, there hadn’t been much to do but remember the Glory Days and collect the paycheck. Before he’d gotten kicked out of the army, he got to carry the SAW, the squad automatic weapon. It was twenty-two pounds of black death, loaded, and took a horse to carry. He was the horse, and happy about it.

• • •

OUT IN THE ENCLOSED pool, Taryn Grant finished drying herself and pulled on a robe. Carver was right: she was drunk, Dannon thought. She’d always taken a drink, and this night, at a campaign stop in a Minneapolis penthouse, she’d taken at least three, and maybe more, and two more back at the house, before she went for her swim; and she’d taken a drink with her, to the pool.

He’d talked to her about it, and she’d told him to shut up. She could handle it, she said. Maybe she could. In Dannon’s experience, alcoholism was the easiest of the addictions to control. Look at Carver, for example.

• • •

TARYN WAS PICKING UP a pack of magazines when the front gate dinged at them, then a quick, more urgent buzzzzz . Somebody had hopped the gate.

Dannon snapped at Carver, “Get the camera. I’m on the door.”

He started toward the front door, and as he went, pushed the walkie-talkie function on his phone. Taryn’s phone buzzed at her and didn’t stop, a deliberately annoying noise, impossible to ignore. She picked it up and asked, “What?”

“Somebody’s inside, on the lawn, hopped the gate,” Dannon said. He pulled his gun. “Get in here with the dogs and stay on the phone.”

“I’m coming,” she said. This is why she had security.

Carver was on the same walkie-talkie system, and said, looking at the video displays in the monitoring room, “Okay, one guy, big guy, coming up the walk. He’s not lost, he’s walking fast. Wearing a suit and tie. Hands are empty.”

“I’m inside, locking the doors,” Taryn said.

“Guy’s at the door,” Carver said. “I don’t know him.”

The doorbell rang and Dannon popped the door, gun in his hand; looked at the man’s face and said, “Ah, shit.”

“Hello, mystery man.”

• • •

TARYN HAD BEGUN DOING research for her Senate run two years earlier. She did the research herself—narcissistic personality disorder aside, she was a brilliant researcher, both by training and inclination. Much of the research involved selection of campaign staff, from campaign manager on down. She shared the research with Dannon, whose personal loyalty she trusted, because Dannon was in love with her.

Because of that loyalty, and because of his history as an intelligence officer, she’d had him set up the shadow campaign staff—spies—to keep an eye on her opponent, Smalls. He’d also identified other possible assets: among them, Bob Tubbs.

Tubbs was a longtime Democratic political operative, and had been considered for a staff job with the regular campaign, to be eventually rejected. “He’s been involved in some unsavory election stuff, so I want to keep our distance,” Taryn told Dannon. “But also, it’s good to keep him on the outside, in case we need somebody on the outside . . . somebody who could handle something unsavory.”