Silken Prey

belly below his navel. He said, “Jesus, cold,” and picked it up, and she laughed, almost girlishly, rolled onto the bed next to him, careful with the drink, and said, “Carver.”
    “What’d he say to you?” Dannon asked.
    Taryn rolled toward him, one of her breasts pressing against his biceps; she wetted a finger and circled one of his nipples in a distracted way, and said, “This afternoon, before we went over to that school, he said that he hadn’t signed up for all this. That’s what he said, ‘signed up.’ I asked what that meant, and he said that he hoped I’d be more grateful than I had been so far. I said that I would be, that if he’d hold on until I was in the Senate, I could take care of him in a lot of ways: money, another army job, get his record wiped out, whatever he needed. He said, ‘Money’s good,’ and said we could talk about the other stuff, then he asked when he’d get a down payment.”
    “What’d you say to that?”
    “I said too much stuff was coming down right now: that I assumed he’d want a big brick of cash that he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on, but even for me, it takes a while to get cash together. Almost nobody uses it anymore, except dope dealers, I guess.”
    Dannon said, “Got that right. I can’t remember the last time I saw somebody buying groceries for cash, except me.”
    “He said, ‘Well, better get on that. I’m gonna need a big chunk pretty soon. I got a feeling that when everything settles down . . . my services might not be needed.’ I said, ‘You’ve got a job as long as you want it, and you’ll get paid as much as you need.’ He laughed and said, ‘I kinda don’t think you know how much I need.’”
    Dannon said, “That’s the problem with Ron. He’s hungry all the time—more pussy, more dope, more money. There won’t be an end to it.”
    “I know, but I don’t know what to do about it.”
    Dannon said, “Ron and I . . . he was enlisted, I was an officer. We’re not natural friends. I’m not being arrogant here, lots of the enlisted guys are sharp as razors: but that’s the way it is. He doesn’t think, except tactically. How exactly to do one thing or another. He thinks three days down the road, but not three months or three years. He’ll get us in trouble, sooner or later.”
    Taryn said nothing, waiting, watching Dannon think.
    He said, finally, “There’s something else.”
    “What?”
    “I’m kinda worried that from Ron’s perspective,
I’m
the problem,” Dannon said. “He’ll figure he can handle you. But you and me together . . .”
    “You actually think . . . he might come after you?”
    “I think it’s inevitable,” Dannon said. “It’ll occur to him pretty soon. After it does, he won’t wait. That’s the three-days-thinking problem again. He’ll think about it, then he’ll move.”
    “Oh, dear.”
    “I think he has to go away,” Dannon said.
    “You mean . . . someday?”
    “No. I mean right away. I know it’ll be a political problem, but . . . I know this guy down in Houston. For ten thousand dollars, he’ll fly Carver’s passport to Kuwait. He’s got a deal with one of the border people there.”
    “I don’t understand,” Taryn said, though she had an idea about it.
    “Simple enough. Ron goes away. I FedEx his passport and ten grand—I’ve actually got the cash in my safe-deposit box—”
    “I’ll pay you back.”
    “I got this. My guy in Houston flies the passport to Kuwait and walks it across the border into Iraq. We call up this Davenport guy, say that we’re worried because Ron didn’t show up for work on Wednesday and he doesn’t answer his phone. We don’t know where he’s gone.”
    “And Davenport thinks it’s possible that he’s run for it.”
    “Yeah, because they send out a stop order on him, and because of his background, and what they think—that he killed Tubbs and Roman—they include the border people and the airport security, and
they
report back that his passport left the country, and then crossed the border into Kuwait and then out of Kuwait and into Iraq.”
    “Don’t they take pictures, you know, video cameras of everybody going through the airport?”
    “Sure. But IDs aren’t synced with pictures. They ask for your passport when you check in, but going through security, they only ask for a government ID. This Houston guy shows Ron’s passport to the airlines and the security people, who check him through. The cops look