Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [99]
37
FLOOD AND I woke up together in the morning. My left hand was buried somewhere beneath her so I couldn’t see my watch, but the light outside told me it was well past sunup. Flood stirred against my shoulder, mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I bounced her gently with my shoulder until she came around. She opened her eyes and blinked at me. “You okay, Burke?”
“Yeah, and I’m ready to go to work. Let me just get cleaned up a bit, and I want to start on Goldor’s file.”
She rolled over onto her side so I could get off the mat, then lay back and closed her eyes. I watched her practice her breathing for a minute before I walked into her tiny shower. My face in the mirror startled me—it was healing but the lower jaw was all bluish-yellow—it would probably stay discolored for another few days. I used some of Flood’s mouthwash and then examined my teeth in the mirror—the stitches were holding.
When I went back inside, Flood was lying on her back, her legs in the air, toes pointed up. She was doing some kind of exercise where she split them until they were nearly parallel to the ground, then brought them together again, lowered them almost to the floor but didn’t touch it—she held them for a few seconds like that, then broke them again and started over. Her movements were so smooth they looked effortless, but they couldn’t have been. I waited until her legs were straight up again and grabbed an ankle in each hand. “You have thick ankles, Flood,” and moved my hands away from center to spread her legs again. They didn’t budge—I increased the pressure and watched the long muscles flex on the inside of her thighs. I could feel the strain in my forearms, and finally her legs started to yield. I pushed harder and suddenly her legs shot open and I fell forward right on top of her. But before I could land she whipped her legs back, doubled up her knees, and caught me on the pads of her feet. And then she tossed my entire bulk into the air like a seal playing with a ball. She caught me on the way down, giggling like a little kid. The second time I was headed down I flipped my shoulders back, landed on my feet, grabbed her ankles again and pulled her upside down and erect, facing away from me. But before I could do some giggling of my own she slammed into my ankles with the heels of her hands and I toppled over with her underneath. This time her damn laughing fit made it feel like I was lying on top of some rocky Jello. I rolled off, reached for a cigarette—she was still chuckling.
“Flood, you’re a clown, you know that?”
“What did I do?”
“Never fucking mind,” I told her, and tried to keep from laughing myself. She got up without using her hands and floated off to the shower. I got dressed, lit up another smoke, and took out the Goldor file. It was everything Pablo had promised: full name (Jonas James Goldor), date of birth (February 4, 1937, in Cape May, New Jersey), height (5’ 11”), weight (175), rap sheet (two arrests for assault, the last one in 1961, no convictions), military service (none), marital status (never married), mother’s maiden name, father’s occupation at time of Goldor’s birth (note that both parents were deceased. Too bad—I hated to have anything in common with him). A long list of corporations and partnerships in which he held an interest. Location of two known safe-deposit boxes in commercial banks. Copies of driver’s license, ownership registration certificates for four cars (a Rolls, a Porsche 928, a Land Rover, and a 500-series Benz sedan), copies of some cancelled checks written on two of his corporations, a copy of his 1979 IRS return (showing a gross income of $440,775 with a net of $228,000, all from a series of subChapter -S corporations, a pass-through tax trick so that he could be the sole stockholder and not be taxed corporately and individually). Also a floor plan of his house in Scarsdale, complete with all the switch-box locations for the electronic protection system.