82 Desire

their clientele.”
    Skip gave her a grin. “You never know till you ask.”
    Rudolfo was tapping on her desk. “Let me make a phone call.”
    She called someone and spoke in Spanish. Skip was encouraged by much nodding and repetition of “si.”
    Rudolfo wrote something down before she hung up. “I called a guy I know in Miami. One of these clowns isn’t too active right now. My friend thinks he left the country for some reason.” She passed the paper over. “This one’s your best bet. Real popular with high rollers. And there’s something else—my friend in Miami says she’s got a kid.”
    “She?”
    Rudolfo nodded. “Eleanor’s a pioneer in her field—real poster girl for equal opportunity crime. But Stefan, the kid, has been in a lot of trouble a lot of times.”
    “Drugs?”
    “Yeah. And here’s the good news—they’ve got him in custody right now. His mom may not know about it yet. Maybe you can use that for some kind of leverage.” She shrugged. “It’s about an hour’s drive down there. Plenty of time to dream something up.”
    Skip frowned. “How do I find her?”
    Rudolfo gave her directions and wished her luck.
    It wasn’t far to Miami but Skip had a panicky sense of time racing by too fast. The note must have meant an appointment with the forger—today, probably. But suppose Eleanor Holser wasn’t the right forger? I wonder, she thought, if I should call in sick tomorrow?
    She phoned Steve but got no answer—he must have been at the beach. She left a message and started driving. It was that difficult time of day when the sun is sinking and manages to shine in your eyes no matter what you do with your visor. It occurred to Skip that it was going to be dark soon. But traffic was light and she made good time.
    Holser lived in what seemed to Skip a fairly upscale, if, to her mind, decidedly tacky, part of town. Her house was some sort of split-level A-frame that managed to look like a cross between a barn and a beach house. It appeared to be built of driftwood, and if Skip had to guess, she’d have put it at late-seventies’ vintage. By now, the evening was only a hair from pitch-dark, and the forger apparently hadn’t turned on her porch lights.
    There were also no lights in the front of the house, but the curtains hadn’t been drawn and from somewhere, maybe a den in back, came an orangy glow. Probably someone was watching television. Skip approached gingerly, listening a moment before planning to ring the bell.
    Instead of the expected drone of television news, she heard a thump followed quickly by a kind of truncated scream—a short, staccato sound that meant sudden pain, a woman’s pain. She thought later that it was a yelp.
    Quickly, she dropped to a crouch and listened more closely. It could, after all, have been the television.
    The woman yelled, “Goddamn you!” and there was another thump, far too close, too immediate to be electronic. Grateful there wasn’t much light, Skip dug her gun from her handbag and crab-walked to the corner of the building. Here she straightened and ran to the back, which was glass nearly all the way across, the room, thus enclosed, perfectly illuminated by a single table lamp.
    It was quite astonishing. The place was like a ruin lit for a son et lumière—so magnificently displayed a mouse couldn’t have hidden in it. As she had surmised, it was a den, low-ceilinged and lined with bookshelves that held as many tchotchkes as books. The furniture was Naugahyde, all placed for optimum viewing of a television screen so large it destroyed any pretense of proportion. On the sofa sat—or rather huddled—a woman with her hands behind her, as if tied, and in front of the woman, obscuring her partially, was a man in jeans and a black T-shirt. He held a gun loosely, by its barrel.
    He’s pistol-whipping her , Skip thought, and the woman gasped, coming to attention. She had seen Skip. The man couldn’t miss the fact that there was something outside. Skip dropped to the ground as he whirled, shooting through the glass, wildly. The glass made a horrible noise, but the shot didn’t. Silencer , she realized—and it had already been on the gun.
    She couldn’t return fire for fear of hitting the woman, but the gunman evidently saw she had a gun. He disappeared into the other room.
    Skip struggled to her feet, looking wildly around her in a moment of indecision, and then ran back around the side of the house. Gaining the front, she saw a car