Silken Prey

Taryn.
    He showed up at her house at midnight.
    He wanted more money.
    Like this:
    •   •   •
    D OUG D ANNON 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.
    •   •   •
    T ARYN 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