At last, astonished by her vehemency, Sam began to assimilate the observations he’d made on entering. No washers or dryers in operation. No clothes basket. No box of detergent or bottle of fabric softener.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, suddenly suspicious.
“Nothing, if you keep your distance.”
He wondered if she knew somehow that the local cops were eager to get hold of him. But that seemed nuts. How could she know?
“What’re you doing here if you don’t have clothes to wash?”
“What’s it your business? You own this dump?” she demanded.
“No. And don’t tell me you own it, either.”
She glared at him.
He studied her, gradually absorbing how attractive she was.
She had eyes as piercingly blue as a June sky and skin as clear as summer air, and she seemed radically out of place along this dark, October coast, let alone in a grungy Laundromat at one-thirty in the morning. When her beauty finally, fully registered with him, so did other things about her, including the intensity of her fear, which was revealed in her eyes and in the lines around them and in the set of her mouth. it was fear far out of proportion to any threat he could pose. If he had been a six-foot-six, three-hundred-pound, tattooed biker with a revolver in one hand and a ten-inch knife in the other, and if he had burst into the laundry chanting paeans to Satan, the utterly bloodless paleness of her face and the hard edge of terror in her eyes would have been understandable. But he was only Sam Booker, whose greatest attribute as an agent was his guy-next-door ordinariness and an aura of harmlessness.
Unsettled by her unsettledness, he said, “The phone.”
“What?”
He pointed at the pay phone.
“Yes,” she said, as if confirming it was indeed a phone.
“Just came in to make a call.”
“Oh.”
Keeping one eye on her, he went to the phone, fed it his quarter, but got no dial tone. He retrieved his coin, tried again. No luck.
“Damn!” he said.
The blonde had edged toward the door. She halted, as though she thought he might rush at her and drag her down if she attempted to leave the Laundromat.
The Cove engendered in Sam a powerful paranoia. Increasingly over the past few hours he had come to think of everyone in town as a potential enemy. And suddenly he perceived that this woman’s peculiar behavior resulted from a state of mind precisely like his. “Yes, of course—you’re not from here, are you, from Moonlight Cove?”
“So?”
“Neither am I.”
“So?”
“And you’ve seen something.”
She stared at him.
He said, “Something’s happened, you’ve seen something, and you’re scared, and I’ll bet you’ve got damned good reason to be.”
She looked as if she’d sprint for the door.
“Wait,” he said quickly. “I’m with the FBI.” His voice cracked slightly. “I really am.”
44
Because he was a night person who had always preferred to sleep during the day, Thomas Shaddack was in his teak-paneled study, dressed in a gray sweat suit, working on an aspect of Moonhawk at a computer terminal, when Evan, his night servant, rang through to tell him that Loman Watkins was at the front door.
“Send him to the tower,” Shaddack said.
“I’ll join him shortly. ” He seldom wore anything but sweat suits these days. He had more than twenty in the closet—ten black, ten gray, and a couple navy blue. They were more comfortable than other clothes, and by limiting his choices, he saved time that otherwise would be wasted coordinating each day’s wardrobe, a task at which he was not skilled. Fashion was of no interest to him. Besides, he was gawky—big feet, lanky legs, knobby knees, long arms, bony shoulders—and too thin to look good even in finely tailored suits. Clothes either hung strangely on him or emphasized his thinness to such a degree that he appeared to be Death personified, an unfortunate image reinforced by his flour-white skin, nearly black hair, sharp features, and yellowish eyes.
He even wore sweat suits to New Wave board meetings. If you were a genius in your field, people expected you to be eccentric. And if your personal fortune was in the hundreds of millions, they accepted all eccentricities without comment.