The Altar Of Bones Part 8

He fumbled with the picks, trying to feel for the slimmest one, and they slipped through his fingers. The picks. .h.i.t his knee, but by some miracle he caught them before they fell into the silt and reeds. Maybe it was Dom, the spirit of Dom, looking out for him, because he ought to have died ten times over by now.

One more time, though, Dom. Just a little more help down here, because I'm out of air.

White lights flashed in front of his eyes and his ears rang as he fought desperately to keep his mouth from opening to gulp at oxygen that wasn't there. One more time, Dom, one more ... One more time, Dom, one more ...

At last, at last he found the tire's air valve. He popped off the cap, poked the burglar's pick into the valve, pus.h.i.+ng in the seal. He closed his mouth over the valve and breathed in the sweet, wonderful air.

He closed his eyes for a moment in blessed relief, then covered the valve with his thumb so that bubbles wouldn't rise to the surface and looked up. They were still there, Hummer lights still s.h.i.+ning on the water, but they'd stopped wasting bullets. Soon, he prayed, she'd believe he was dead, but she wouldn't leave even then. She would wait a long while just to be sure, and she would have her two guys watch the sh.o.r.eline to make sure he didn't swim for it, and then she would wait some more, and he hated her for that.

Yeah, well, he would make her pay for all of it someday, but right now he needed her and the people she worked for to think he was dead. He needed time and the freedom from being hunted so he could find Katya Orlova and the film and get at the truth behind what his father had done. First, though, he needed to get over to Bolivar so he could read what Dom had left in Lafitte's treasure chest, and he hoped to G.o.d he was right about that, that Dom had managed to write it all down and hide it away before they'd killed him.

Ry took another breath of the oily, compressed air. He wondered how long he would be able to breathe the stuff before doing serious damage to his lungs.

He breathed again and looked up. The headlights were still there, d.a.m.n the b.i.t.c.h all to h.e.l.l.

He breathed and waited. Five minutes, ten. Breathed and waited, and waited some more, and still the headlights were there, s.h.i.+ning on the water. Suddenly his stomach cramped, so hard he almost opened his mouth and swallowed water. He hadn't, though. He'd kept it together, and the cramping was probably nothing to worry about, just nausea from the oil in the air he was breathing. Just nausea from the oil.

He looked up.

Still there.

11.

Martha's Vineyard, Ma.s.sachusetts Sixteen hours later SHE STOOD naked before him. naked before him.

The setting sun shone through the bedroom's enormous plate-gla.s.s window, burning his eyes and making her red hair look on fire. All he could hear was the surf breaking on the beach below them, and his own harsh breathing.

"Suck it off me," she said, and she cupped her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in her hands, lifting them. He saw that her nipples were smeared with something dark red and crusty, and he couldn't stop himself from shuddering.

"Oh, dear G.o.d ..."

"Dear G.o.d G.o.d?" she said, laughing. "G.o.d's never stopped you before. Is it because of whose blood it is this time? But you knew he was a priest when you told me to kill him, and I blew him away, lover boy. Blew him away right there in his church, and with the Lord Jesus and all his angels looking down."

He shook his head, but he couldn't stop himself from lifting those perfect, bloodied b.r.e.a.s.t.s in his two big hands. She was insane, truly mad, and so what did that make him? Because she excited him almost beyond bearing.

She sighed and leaned into him, seemed to melt right into him. "Do you want to hear how he begged for his life?"

"Later. Right now you're the one I want to see down on your knees."

He let go of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to grab roughly at his belt with one hand and her head with the other, snagging his fingers in all that luscious red hair, as he pushed her down onto the floor in front of him.

LATER, SHE SAID to him, "The other one, the priest's brother? He was a lot harder to kill. For a while there it was like we were playing Whac-A-Mole through the streets of Galveston, you know? He just wouldn't go down." to him, "The other one, the priest's brother? He was a lot harder to kill. For a while there it was like we were playing Whac-A-Mole through the streets of Galveston, you know? He just wouldn't go down."

Miles Taylor-billionaire, financial speculator, philanthropist, and political activist-was pouring one of the world's most expensive single malts, a sixty-year-old Macallan, into a pair of Waterford crystal tumblers. And it wasn't so much her choice of postcoital conversation as the way way she'd said it, with the same tone of voice she might use to order a pastrami sandwich, that made him stop what he was doing and turn to look at her. she'd said it, with the same tone of voice she might use to order a pastrami sandwich, that made him stop what he was doing and turn to look at her.

Yasmine Poole sat in one of the room's floral, white wicker chairs-a hideous thing his second wife, Laurette, had picked out back in the day and which he'd always hated. Too froufrou he'd told her at the time, but she hadn't really given a s.h.i.+t about his opinion on bedroom chairs or anything else for that matter, which was why he'd eventually divorced her a.s.s.

Yasmine, though, was a whole different kind of woman. He couldn't figure her out. Couldn't figure them them out, their relations.h.i.+p, or whatever people called long-term and exclusively mutual s.e.x these days. An undercurrent was between them, an intimacy that was nearly unbearable at times, raw and dark. She'd told him once that he indulged in her the need to kill. "You are my pusher," she'd said, "for the dark drug I need to feed my soul." out, their relations.h.i.+p, or whatever people called long-term and exclusively mutual s.e.x these days. An undercurrent was between them, an intimacy that was nearly unbearable at times, raw and dark. She'd told him once that he indulged in her the need to kill. "You are my pusher," she'd said, "for the dark drug I need to feed my soul."

Lately, though, he was beginning to wonder which of them was really the junkie. Because every time he looked at her, the way he was looking at her now, he was lost in her.

He saw that she'd pulled her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck and was dressed again in the ivory silk Armani suit she'd had on when she'd flown over from the mainland an hour ago. She was reading something off a laptop she had balanced on one knee, and that little crease was between her eyes that she got when she was concentrating. But her mouth was the mouth of a wh.o.r.e, red and wet and swollen.

"You're wearing that moony, doofus look again, Miles," she said, without looking up. "If you're not careful, people are gonna say you're in love."

Miles Taylor could actually feel himself blus.h.i.+ng, and it annoyed the h.e.l.l out of him because he was sure no one had ever succeeded in making him blush before in his life. "I was just thinking how not more than a half an hour ago I was sucking blood off your naked t.i.ts, and now you're sitting over there looking so proper and professional. Like a model for a Brooks Brothers catalog."

"I'm a personal a.s.sistant to the president of a multibillion-dollar corporation. This is how I always look when I'm not killing for you, or f.u.c.king you. And you were so smiling at me, Miles. Lovingly. I could feel it like a warm breath on my skin. I keep telling you we're soul mates. You need to accept that and deal."

"Bullc.r.a.p."

Even if he did believe there was such a thing as soul mates, he would never give her that power over him by admitting to it, and the last thing he wanted to do was "deal."

What in h.e.l.l did that expression even mean, anyway?

Miles Taylor ruled a financial empire worth over $15 billion, more than the gross national product of some third-world countries, and with all the mesmerizing power such an obscene amount of money entailed. He had one child still living, a daughter; five grandchildren, all girls; two ex-wives, both b.i.t.c.hes; and he couldn't so much as sneeze without a half dozen a.s.s-kissing toadies springing up to hand him a hankie.

And not a single one of those people mattered to him.

All his life he'd had this aching hole in him that he just couldn't seem to fill. It was like that disease where you're hungry all the time, and you eat and eat, but all the calories and nutrition just go right through you. He could've paid some psychiatrist four hundred bucks an hour to tell him it was all Mommy and Daddy's fault, and the guy would probably be right. But who gave a s.h.i.+t?

All he knew was that ever since Yasmine Poole had come into his life, he didn't feel so empty anymore. And that scared the living h.e.l.l out of him sometimes, because she was, to put it crudely, crazier than a s.h.i.+thouse rat.

"I'll tell you what it is, Yaz," he said. "You're in love with my money and I'm just a h.o.r.n.y old goat, and that's either ridiculous or obscene, because when a man's c.o.c.k's got some eighty years on it, even a tight p.u.s.s.y and a little blue miracle pill can only compensate for so much reality."

She raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow, although she still didn't look up from whatever she was reading on her laptop. "Notice how all I have to do is drop the word love love into the conversation, and your mind leaps right to my p.u.s.s.y without even pa.s.sing go. Yet people call me the gold digger." into the conversation, and your mind leaps right to my p.u.s.s.y without even pa.s.sing go. Yet people call me the gold digger."

He laughed as he went to her, carrying a gla.s.s in each hand and trying to hide from her the little hitch in his stride, because if she noticed it, she'd be back on his case again about seeing a doctor and getting it replaced. He'd blown the knee out twice, once years ago on a track field in college, then later on a ski slope in Aspen, and it throbbed nearly all the time now. A low, dull ache. He'd taken two heavy-duty pain pills earlier, but they were wearing off, and he didn't want to take more because he hated what the drugs did to his brain, how they made his thoughts wander.

He set her drink down on the gla.s.s-topped wicker table beside her and took a healthy swig of his own. At $38,000 a bottle you wouldn't think it would burn his gullet going down, but it wasn't the Macallan's fault, he knew. It was the d.a.m.n acid reflux. Christ, he hated getting old.

"The other O'Malley boy," he said. "The one you said was so hard to kill. Are you sure he really is is dead? Because, baby, if that film ever sees the light of day ..." dead? Because, baby, if that film ever sees the light of day ..."

He waved a hand to encompa.s.s the whole nightmare scenario. His reputation destroyed, his power shattered, not to mention the possibility of spending the last of his golden years sharing a cell with a sodomizing, drug-crazed biker called Bubba. All these years, all the millions he'd spent on influencing both the marketplace and the ballot box, positioning himself so that he was for all intents and purposes running the party from the inside, and they were finally back to winning elections again, controlling Congress, and starting to change the country for the better.... All of that would be down the toilet if the film got out.

"Tell me we've got this under control, Yaz. Tell me you know for sure that he's dead, because first he gets away from a whole frigging commando squad down there in D.C., and then he pops up in Galveston-"

"He drowned, Miles." She made a glug, glug, glug glug, glug, glug sound, bugged out her eyes, and let her tongue flop out the side of her mouth. "We hung around on that dock for almost an hour after his car drove into the water, and there was no way he could've climbed back out without us seeing him, so unless he grew gills, he's dead. Along with his brother and his old man." sound, bugged out her eyes, and let her tongue flop out the side of her mouth. "We hung around on that dock for almost an hour after his car drove into the water, and there was no way he could've climbed back out without us seeing him, so unless he grew gills, he's dead. Along with his brother and his old man."

"Yeah. Dead like his old man." Miles shook his head. "That f.u.c.king Mike O'Malley. He's been like a knife pointed at my throat all these years, and I didn't dare get rid of him because of that d.a.m.n film. Now he finally goes and dies of a nice, natural heart attack, and it looks like I'm home free. That with him dead and gone, all I got to do is clean up any possible loose ends by whacking his boys, just in case he told them something, you know? And if I can't turn up the film, then it can just go on rotting wherever the h.e.l.l it's been all this time, some safety-deposit box or lawyer's safe, whatever."

He stopped to draw breath, glancing over at her, and he saw that she was looking up at him, her hands folded in her lap, as if waiting patiently for his rant to wind down. "Only now," he said, "you tell me the p.r.i.c.k never had the film in the first place. Or rather that he had it a week at the most, before his woman took off with it. This Katya Orlova person. h.e.l.l, up until this deathbed confession of his, I didn't know such a woman even existed existed. f.u.c.king O'Malley. All these years, I could've had him killed at any time and it wouldn't have mattered."

Yasmine breathed out a soft sigh and stood up, closing her laptop. "Well, he's dead now. And his kiddies are dead. And I've already got people out looking for Katya Orlova. If she's anywhere alive on this earth, we'll find her and make her dead, too. After she gives us the film, of course."

"Yeah, okay, okay. Good."

The woman, Katya Orlova-she could be long dead by now, too, Miles thought. And even if she was still alive, she would have to be a withered old crone, all bent over and helpless, maybe even on her merry way to dementia. They were all of them so d.a.m.n old now.

Miles belched, then tried to rub away the pain in his chest with his fist. He downed another swig of whiskey. It didn't help either.

Yasmine came to him. The material of her suit was soft and clingy, and it moved over her hips like a man's hands. Her eyes were dark and deep and luminous.

"You've still got some of his blood on you," he said, his voice rough.

"What? Where?"

"Here." He cupped his hand around her neck, pulling her to him. "Behind your ear. Jesus, Yaz, what did you do? Dab it on after you killed him like it was some kind of f.u.c.king perfume?"

She was bats.h.i.+t crazy all right, but then he'd known that about her, lived with it and relished it, for seven years now. From the first day he'd hired her.

BEFORE Y YASMINE P POOLE'S resume came across his desk, Miles Taylor was going through personal a.s.sistants at the rate of one a year. He was an exacting-okay, you might even go so far as to say a tyrannical-boss, and it seemed as if no matter how impressive the PAs all looked to him on paper, they turned out to be idiots whose delicate self-esteems got bruised if he so much as looked at them crossways. And he really didn't have the time or patience for that kind of s.h.i.+t. resume came across his desk, Miles Taylor was going through personal a.s.sistants at the rate of one a year. He was an exacting-okay, you might even go so far as to say a tyrannical-boss, and it seemed as if no matter how impressive the PAs all looked to him on paper, they turned out to be idiots whose delicate self-esteems got bruised if he so much as looked at them crossways. And he really didn't have the time or patience for that kind of s.h.i.+t.

Yasmine Poole's resume was also impressive at first glance. A degree from the London School of Economics, followed by a year as an arbitrage trader with F. M. Mayer, then another year as an a.n.a.lyst with Wertheim and Company, and all of this by the age of twenty-eight. Which was young, but that didn't especially bother Miles. It meant she would still be both hungry and malleable-two qualities that seemed to fall by the wayside as you got into your thirties.

His company, Taylor Financials, had never hired so much as a janitor, though, without doing an extradeep background check on the applicant, and it was what came out of the investigator's report on Yasmine Poole that most intrigued Miles.

For one thing, her name wasn't Yasmine Poole, at least not originally. She'd been born Yasmin Yakir, the child of a couple of New York right-wing activist Jews. When she was ten, her parents emigrated to Israel and settled in an illegal West Bank wildcat outpost. Two years later, when she was twelve, a Palestinian rocket destroyed their home while she was at school, making her an orphan. After that she was in a group home in Jerusalem until she turned eighteen, when like the rest of her countrymen she was required to join the army.

But whereas most Israeli women were a.s.signed to support or staff billets, she was selected by Aman, their special ops branch, to be trained as an a.s.sa.s.sin. She'd served three years, but doing what exactly only G.o.d and the Israeli army knew for sure, because as good as Miles's investigator was, he wasn't good enough to penetrate their intelligence files.

"Actually," the investigator told Miles, after he'd been summoned to fill out his report with a verbal and more personal evaluation, "I got the sense she was eased out of the army quietly, you know? After her three years were up. Like maybe she got to liking it just a little too much. The killing, if you know what I mean."

Miles said nothing, and after a long silence the investigator went on, "Her commanding officer couldn't decide whether she was crazy, or she just liked to play at being crazy. But whichever it was, I think she scared the holy bejesus out of him."

The investigator paused again, and Miles still said nothing. Finally, figuring he was dismissed, the guy got up to leave. But at the door he stopped and said, "If you want my recommendation, boss, I say stay away from her."

Instead, Miles had her in for an interview the very next day.

Her beauty literally stole his breath away. He'd long ago lost count of the number of actresses and models he'd f.u.c.ked, and still he'd never had that happen to him before. Where the very sight of a woman closed up his throat so that he couldn't inhale or exhale, just gape at her like a beached fish.

"So tell me," he finally said, when he got his breath back, "what are you running from, Ms. Yasmin Yakir?"

He expected a gasp or at least a blush, but all he got was a little shrug that drew his eyes down to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "So, you did your due diligence on me and found a skeleton. Big whoop. We all got them." She crossed her long legs, made sure he was looking, then added, "What are you running from, Mr. Marcario Tavoularis?"

It was so funny, he almost laughed out loud. He'd set out to shock her, and he ended up shocked. Not so much that she knew he'd changed his name from the Greek Marcario Tavoularis to the Waspish Miles Taylor, but that she'd gone to the trouble to find this out about him. He hadn't tried all that hard to bury his working-cla.s.s origins, but it would still have taken some digging.

But then she'd been in the Israeli intelligence, after all, or a form of it anyway. He was confident, though, that his real secrets, his bodies, were too deeply buried for her to have gotten even a whiff of their stink.

So he leaned forward and put a lot of mean into the smile he gave her. "What's your point, Ms. Yakir or Poole, or whatever? That you're smart and you got a set of b.a.l.l.s? You think that makes us even?"

The smile she gave back to him made him hard. "No, Mr. Tavoularis, or Taylor, or whatever. When you kill your first man," she said, "then we'll be even."

He wanted to wipe that smart-a.s.s smile off her face by telling her about the big kill, but he didn't. He told her about it eventually, though. Eventually he'd told her pretty much everything.

"DON'T FROWN AT me like that," she said to him now. me like that," she said to him now.

She smoothed the deep crow's-feet around his left eye with the tips of her fingers. "You think too much about things sometimes. a.n.a.lyze and poke at them. a.n.a.lyze and poke at me me. Some people are simply born in love with the taste of blood."

A door slammed down below and someone laughed, too loudly. Miles turned away from her and limped to the window to see what the noise was about.

The sun was long gone now, but enough light was still left in the summer sky to see that it was nothing, just three of the catering crew who'd come out onto the deck from the billiard room for a smoke. Tomorrow night he was throwing a party here at his beach cottage, an intimate gathering of fifty or so of the world's superrich and famous.

My beach cottage. Hunh. Twenty rooms, stone fireplaces, wraparound verandas, ocean views, and a $12 million price tag-and here at the Vineyard they called it a "cottage."

"Did I ever tell you, Yaz, that I was born and raised right here on the island?" Of course he'd told her, and probably more than once, but he went on anyway. "In a little town called Oak Bluffs. Five of us squeezed into a real honest-to-G.o.d New England cottage. Four tiny rooms built by some whaler a couple of centuries ago. It had a lot of gingerbread on the outside so the tourists all thought it was 'cute,' but inside, the linoleum floors were peeling and the old pipes froze and broke every winter. And there was never enough money for anything. My daddy-before he took off on us when I was thirteen-he ran the local gas station. He took care of the fancy cars of the rich summer families who thought of us as townies, when they bothered to think of us at all."

She had followed him to the window and now she slipped her arm through his, leaned into him.

"And yet now those very same people," she said, "are coming to your parties in this big ol' house, their lips in a permanent pucker the better to kiss your a.s.s, and you like it, Miles, and your a.s.s likes it because it feels just so d.a.m.n good good."

Miles laughed at the image she'd put into his head, but it was a bitter laugh. Even after all these years, after that dump of a house and his brute of a father, and the rich sn.o.bs who came to rub his face in it with their very existence-it all still festered.

They were quiet together a minute, then he said, "I've had this dream the last couple of nights. I'm a kid again, out in the backyard of the Oak Bluffs house, only instead of playing I'm trying to bury a dead body, and it's raining so hard that, no matter how much dirt I shovel in the grave, the water keeps was.h.i.+ng it away, exposing the bones."

He turned to look at her. "And, yeah, I know what you're going to say. Sometimes a dream is just a dream."

"No," she said, and something was in her eyes, something hard and cold. "What I'm going to say is that you lied to me."

"About what? And, anyway, are you going to tell me you've never lied to me? Everybody lies. It's in our natures. h.e.l.l, the whole world spins merrily along in a circle f.u.c.k of lies."

"Your big kill. You lied to me about the reason for it."

"Funny, but that is one thing I haven't lied to you about."

"Call it a sin of omission then."

He shook his head, feeling a little p.i.s.sed now. "Still not following you."

"The altar of bones."

"The what what? Yaz, I swear to you I don't know what you're talking about."

Instead of answering, she lifted her left hand and he saw that she was holding one of those miniature tape players. At some point she'd put down her drink and picked up the player and he hadn't noticed her doing it, and that bothered him. Was it those d.a.m.n pain pills he'd taken for his knee, fuzzing up his head, or was he really losing it?

He knew about the recording she'd made in the hospital, of course. She'd given him the gist of it when she used a burner phone to call him from Galveston on his secure line. How she'd taped the old man right before he croaked, spilling his guts to his priestly son, telling the boy all about the big kill and the home movie he'd had made of it. Only O'Malley didn't have the movie anymore, had never really had the movie, because some woman called Katya Orlova had run off with it and disappeared.

Miles thought Yasmine had told him everything about O'Malley's confession and what had gone down in Galveston, but now she pushed a b.u.t.ton on the tape player. He hadn't heard that voice in forty-eight years. Mike O'Malley's voice.

And Yasmine hadn't told him quite everything, after all, because he heard Mike O'Malley say, "It all started with Katya Orlova and the altar of bones, but it ended with the kill."

MILES LISTENED THROUGH it to the end, until that familiar voice, an old man's voice now, faded so it was barely intelligible, saying something that sounded like "I thought she'd died in the cave." Then after a long pause, another voice said, half plea, half prayer, it to the end, until that familiar voice, an old man's voice now, faded so it was barely intelligible, saying something that sounded like "I thought she'd died in the cave." Then after a long pause, another voice said, half plea, half prayer, "Dad? Oh, G.o.d- "Dad? Oh, G.o.d-"