Femme Fatale and other stories

a guy, who’s making trouble for me. Trying to extort me. We ran into each other in real life and now he says he’ll expose me if I don’t start doing him for free.”
    “It’s a bluff. It’s fuckin’ Cold War shit.”
    “What?”
    “The guy has as much to lose as you do. He’s all talk. It’s like he’s the USSR and you’re the USA back in the 1980s. No matter who strikes first, you both go sky-high.”
    “He’s divorced. And he’s a personal injury lawyer, so I don’t know how much he cares about his reputation. He might even welcome the publicity.”
    “Naw. Trust me on this. He’s just fucking with you.”
    Val didn’t know about Scott, of course, and never would if she could help it. The problem was, it was harder to make the case for how panicky she was if she couldn’t mention Scott.
    “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she insisted. “He’s a loose cannon. I always assumed that guys who came to me had to have a certain measure of built-in shame about what they did. He doesn’t.”
    “Then give me his name and I’ll arrange for things to happen.”
    “You can do that from in here?”
    He shrugged. “I’m on death row. What have I got to lose?”
    It was what she wanted, what she had come for. She would never ask for such a favor, but if Val volunteered—well, would that be so wrong? Yet the moment she heard him make the offer, she couldn’t take it. She had tested herself, walked right up to the edge of the abyss that was Val, allowed him to tempt her with the worst part of himself.
    Besides, if Val could have some nameless, faceless client killed from here, then he could—she didn’t want to think about it.
    “No. No. I’ll think of something.”
    Not my son’s face,
she told herself as she bent to kiss his cheek.
Not my son’s freckles. Not my son’s father.
But he was, she could never change that fact. And while she visited Val, in part, to convince him that she had nothing to do with the successful prosecution that had been brought against him when undercover narc Brad Stone somehow found the gun used to kill a young man, she also came because she was grateful to him for the gift of Scott. She hated him with every fiber of her being, but she wouldn’t have Scotty if it weren’t for him. She wouldn’t have Scott if it weren’t for Val.
    Maybe she did know something about divorce, after all.
    F IVE DAYS WENT BY , days full of work. Congress was back in session, which always meant an uptick in business. She was beginning to resign herself to the idea of doing things Bill Carroll’s way. He was not the USSR and she was not the USA. The time for Cold Wars was long past. He was a terrorist in a breakaway republic, determined to have the status he sought at any cost. He was a man of his word and his words were ugly, inflammatory, dangerous. She met with him at a D.C. hotel as he insisted, picking up the cost of the room, which was usually covered by her clients. He left two dollars on the dresser, then said: “For housekeeping, not for you,” with a cruel laugh. Oh, he cracked himself up.
    She treated herself to room service, then drove home in a funk, flipping on WTOP to check traffic, not that it was usually a problem this late. A body had just been discovered in Rock Creek Park, a young woman. Heloise could tell from the flatness of the report that it was a person who didn’t matter, a homeless woman or a prostitute. She grieved for the young woman, for she sensed automatically that the death would never be solved. It could have been one of hers. It could have been her. You tried to be careful, but nothing was foolproof. Look at the situation she was in with Bill Carroll. You couldn’t prepare for every contingency. That was her mistake, thinking she could control everything.
    Bill Carroll.
    Once at home, she called her smartest girl, Trini, a George Washington University coed who took her money under the table and didn’t ask a lot of questions. Trini learned her part quickly and well, and within an hour she was persuading police that she had seen a blue Mercedes stop in the park and roll the body out of the car. Yes, it was dark, but she had seen the man’s face lighted by the car’s interior dome and it wasn’t a face one would forget, given the circumstances. Trini gave a partial plate—a full one wouldn’t have worked, not in the long run—and it took police only a day to track down Bill Carroll and bring him in for questioning. By then, Heloise