At The Edge

  At The Edge

  David Dun

  David Dun

  At The Edge

  Prologue

  Kenji Yamada had never seen anything so magnificent as Catherine Swanson's thighs. He sat beside her in the back of his Rolls-Royce Seraph with the twelve-cylinder motor at idle and the CD player whispering Sinatra love songs.

  Her scent filled his nostrils with a heavy-sweet floral fragrance that included a hint of musk. A black linen sheath dress with a high collar left her shoulders bare, the flawless perfection of her skin like emperor's silk.

  Her eyes made him feel wanted and close, while her fingers caressed the back of his head, stirring long-forgotten memories. Years ago at prep school, the most beautiful girl in his class lived in an ivy-covered brick house and wore designer tennis shoes from a store in New York. He had taken her in the rain under a maple tree. Shoulders like that.

  Over Catherine's left breast she wore a diamond pin emblazoned with the letter C. Her fine chestnut hair was damp velvet in the moonlight.

  For the joy of knowing her, of touching her, Kenji was risking both his marriage and his professional perch atop the Amada Corporation. This was not the worst of his sins- it was just the most personal. Still he felt no hesitation, not the slightest pause, as he contemplated his headlong fall into the unknown.

  He nuzzled her neck while his attention focused on the thigh and black garter that seemed to be sliding free of the dark linen fabric. He ran his fingers over Catherine's arms, the muscle, and shape, how they flowed down to slender long fingers.

  Tentatively he kissed Catherine's mouth. When he felt her tongue in reply, she turned in the seat and he kissed more confidently. Just visible on her inner thigh, at the edge of her panties, was a tattoo-a tiny rose with the initials TS on either side of the stem. Above the old-fashioned silk stockings, her legs were baby smooth.

  His experienced fingers felt for the zipper on the back of her dress and, for the first time, he hesitated.

  The wife of Senator Tom Swanson, the most coveted but untouchable wife he had ever met, an established, conservative woman with an impeccable reputation, would not be committing adultery in the backseat of Kenji Yamada's car. Notwithstanding that he was a successful businessman, polished, sophisticated, a powerful-looking fellow with exotically handsome eyes. He was also notoriously married.

  She looked at him, the moonlight spreading across lips that now formed a challenging smile. Stifling his doubts, goaded by the smile, he pulled the zipper down to her waist.

  ''Kiss me'' was all Catherine said as he lowered the gown.

  He had never hungered for a woman as he did for Catherine Swanson. It was love, but love of power; it was the dream, nurtured since boyhood, of forbidden fruit; it was raw animal attraction; it was his circumstantial celibacy, now five days old; it was his age; and it was that life might be escaping him without him having grabbed enough of it.

  He thought he detected something in her glancing eyes- he knew it wasn't desire.

  And then his world changed forever. The door flew open, a blinding strobe lit the night air.

  ''You son of a bitch," Catherine shouted at the photographer.

  Kenji said nothing, grabbing for his loafers, trying to figure out how he could climb across Catherine to the man popping the pictures. Realizing such a move was impossible, he reached instead for the door handle on his side of the car. Catherine tried to cover her brassiere, then get the dress down somewhere near her knees, but it was too late. More efficient-sounding clicks and whirs and flashes. The camera was getting it all.

  As Kenji ran around the car, his fear, the humiliation, the shattering of his sense of personal control, vanished, and he became the pragmatic old Kenji who had climbed the corporate ladder with a measure of ruthless ambition equaled by few.

  The photographer was disappearing into the night. Kenji circled to the front passenger's side and in the glove box found his 9mm Smith amp; Wesson semiautomatic pistol, which his security chief had given him and until tonight he had shot only at an indoor range.

  The disaster of being caught and not in control had brought about a deadly calm. He got in, slid behind the wheel, and shot the Rolls down the road, its lights illuminating the photographer who ran toward a van still a hundred yards distant. Kenji was a few car-lengths behind and bearing down fast when the man left the road for the forest.

  Kenji stopped the car and got out. Even in the shadows of the full moon, he could see the layer of dust that covered the huckleberry, the salal, and higher up the redwood boughs. He could hear only the sound of the man moving through the brush and the purr of the car's motor. As a precaution against something he hadn't yet defined, he shut off the engine and took the key.

  "Stay here," he told Catherine. Then he shouted at the forest: "All I want is the film. Then you can go."

  Silence.

  "I'll give you money," he yelled. "We can talk."

  Nothing.

  Picking a redwood tree by the side of the road, he aimed to its center and peeled off three shots in rapid succession.

  He heard crashing and plunged into the forest after the retreating sounds. It felt like he was wading through heavy water. Vines tore at his silk Armani socks. The thin soles of his handmade calfskin shoes were slick and his feet moved crazily. Densely packed boughs obscured his surroundings. Even the full moon couldn't find its way through the green mass that was a redwood forest. Oddly, he thought of ticks and Lyme disease, of poison oak, of falling in a hole. Still, he moved forward, following the sound, until the quiet compelled him to stop.

  His breaths came heavy, pushed by the nagging realization that he could not lose this race.

  "You don't want to stumble around in the dark woods with a wild man shooting at you," Kenji yelled.

  No response.

  "I would pay you ten thousand dollars."

  He heard a single sharp crack as though the man had shifted his weight. He listened intently to brushy sounds overlaid with a noise like falling Venetian blinds. He staggered foward at a near run.

  When the photographer moved, Kenji moved, but his gut told him that he was lagging farther behind.

  "All right, twenty thousand cash."

  There was an urgency about this situation unlike any other in his forty-one years. The equation was simple. His Harvard-educated Japanese wife would not stand for philandering of any kind. If she left him for adultery, then his position as head of Amada, a subsidiary of her father's sprawling financial empire, would go with her. And under anybody's laws he could be disinherited. Kenji Yamada would become the paper tiger, sentenced to a living death.

  Of late, his wife had become wily. She had caught him once. A hot day, a cool drink, a soft leather couch, the brown of it matching the skin of his personal secretary, a woman impressed with his power, his position, and his good looks.

  Without artifice his wife would never have discovered his secret, but she had resources and she used them. It was a simple matter to plant a bug in his office. She had heard every groan, each exclamation of success, Kenji's bragging about doing two women in the same day-everything. He had been given both warning and ultimatum: one last chance. That chance was about to be spent by a two-bit photographer running through a darkened forest. He had to find this man hiding in the woods; he had to get the film.

  Kenji made his desk-softened body go faster, risking injury. The photographer was getting tired, the pauses longer, the scurrying less frenzied. The chase would not go on much longer; at some point the man would disappear.

  The forest seemed sparser. Looking up at an angle through the trees, Kenji saw stars. It signaled a large opening. Maybe a clear-cut, maybe a power line, or perhaps a log-haul road. A place this fellow might run. Without waiting for more brush
y footfalls, Kenji estimated the direction and crashed wildly, not caring if he punished his body. Head down, arms out in front of him, he managed to miss the tree trunks.

  There were no more sounds of the man running, but he guessed the reason. He burst out of the brush into the clearing. Stars were bright in the watching sky, the moon a fountain of light silhouetting a figure sprinting in its glow. A power line and a maintenance road stretched to the crest of a small hill, where the man's feet flew over the smooth surface of the dirt road. It took only a few strides before Kenji knew he couldn't keep up. This man was a lithe, long-muscled runner.

  Fear swept through him. He saw his wife's disgusted, hurt face. He raised the gun. You couldn't shoot a man for taking a picture. But your whole life, everything you value- your honor, your vanishing fortune… The finger squeezed in the middle of the debate. Eight times it squeezed. It was an unlucky shot, almost an accident, he would later conclude. Hitting a running man with a pistol at fifty yards is really not possible with precision. He knew the instant he pulled the trigger that he had a hit. His knowledge of the hit, he decided, came from a spiritual union with the hunted, rather than the sickening thud that was the bullet hitting flesh. Startling to think that you would actually hear the strike, hear the thump of expanding lead boring through bone and meat.

  For a moment Kenji considered the odds that the body could be hidden, the evidence destroyed. He and his security man, Hans Groiter, would be back first thing in the morning to dispose of the body. For money Hans could do something like this. Already he and Hans were so deep into the dirty deeds of life that he didn't fear Hans or his reaction, although this accidental shooting was rather more dramatic than anything they had done previously.

  It was a sick moon with stars strewn across the sky like diamond teardrops. There were already crickets and frogs, the scurrying of the newborn in the brush, and other sounds of dawn in springtime. Kenji wondered why a night like this could not be left to love.

  He covered the fifty yards to the body, taking in the moon, the stars, his life, the law, the jail cell, the publicity, the whole panoply of what-ifs that encompassed both capture and escape. He played it through his mind first one way, then the other, careful to give equal time to the possibility of failure. It was bad luck to assume a win.

  The photographer lay flat on his back in the middle of the road, his sport coat looking tattered. To Kenji's horror, the body still moved; there were strange breathy sounds gurgling through frothy blood that looked black in the moonlight. Oddly, or maybe it wasn't odd for bohemian photographers, the man wore denim jeans and a white T-shirt sporting a heavy bloodstain that in a well-lit photo would have made a dramatic statement.

  The clip of his pistol was empty. Kenji waited a moment and realized the wheezing and choking could go on quite some time. Obviously, it was a lung shot that missed the heart. He had made a mistake, and he knew that to escape his mistake he needed to control his mind. Justice lay in his own consciousness, not in the sovereign state. Kenji would make his own justice. He walked away until the choking was a whisper.

  This man's death dragged on. Walking back, Kenji decided that he was strong enough to partake in this man's death.

  "Help." The man was trying to talk. Looking down to find the camera, Kenji couldn't escape the sight of the seizing body, head thrown back, mouth gaping. "Help me."

  For whatever reason, he felt nothing. He yanked the camera over the man's head, cursing as the photographer tried to push out the word ''help'' through cups of blood.

  ''You die hard.'' Kenji opened the camera and pulled out the film, then grabbed the man by his feet and pulled him out of the road and into a thicket of stickers that tore at his clothing and his flesh. He noted the distance between the giant electrical towers, about halfway between. The blood would make the body easy to find.

  Kenji remembered this power line, knew it eventually intersected the logging road about a half mile from where his Rolls sat with Catherine, who by this time would be shivering. He elected to walk back through the woods, letting the trees thrash him, recalling that white people had whipped themselves to receive some strange absolution from then-wrongdoing. Already he wondered whether tomorrow or the next day he might feel something. Perhaps when he lifted his little boy over his head or touched his wife in the night, he would feel the weight of his guilt.

  He reached the car and walked to the back door on Catherine's side, took off his coat and brushed himself off. For a few moments he had allowed himself the luxury of infatuation. It would never happen again. But this time there was no question that he would yet have Catherine physically.

  "What was all the shooting? Thank God you're all right. I mean, my God, no one should get shot over pictures." She was terrified, rambling. "The photographer is all right. Please, dear God, tell me he's all right."

  Kenji paused. And then he lied. "He's fine. I was so pissed that I made him dance. He danced and I shot. I stripped out the film. It's OK."

  Kenji walked around the burgundy car, noticing the gleam of the moon in the satin finish. He got in the back on the other side and motioned Catherine to him. The strain showed on Catherine's face.

  "Guess you took care of him," she said a little too brightly.

  "Shall we resume?"

  "You've got to be kidding-after that?"

  "But you were so…," he started, casually reaching for her purse.

  "What are you doing?"

  It took only a second to find the small transmitter.

  "How crude."

  She looked pale, the skin on her face even tighter. He dropped the 9mm in her lap. She shook, but at first he said nothing.

  "Talk."

  "Please don't hurt me." Her lip was quivering.

  "You've got the gun, not me."

  She held her hands up as if the gun were a loathsome creature.

  "My husband has very little, just his government pension from the Senate. We have huge debts, legal fees. Your assistant wanted to test you. He wanted evidence if you failed the test. He promised we'd get a little part of Amada. He said there might be some discovery that would make Amada very valuable. The details… I'm unclear."

  "All you had to do for the money was seduce me?"

  "There were other things… Political favors."

  "Ah, that would be after he took over for me." Kenji chuckled but felt only hatred. "What do you know of this… discovery?"

  "All Satoru would tell us is it could involve a lot of money. There was a guaranteed minimum of fifty thousand cash no matter what happened. Otherwise, I never would have done it."

  "I assume the pictures were to be given to my wife and father-in-law as an excuse to throw me out."

  "Only if you took me up on my offer."

  For a fleeting moment he wondered whether this was all Satoru's idea or if his father-in-law had a hand in it- probably the former. Satora was ambitious.

  Putting his arm around her, he put his face an inch from hers, holding her tight. Chanel again filled his nostrils. He didn't worry about his sweaty smell or unkempt hair.

  "Here's what you'll do. You will tell Satoru that I wouldn't touch you. We were never here. After the restaurant I took you home. I will give you and your husband the stock you were promised in a revocable trust. It will be revoked automatically upon my death. Only I can take the stock back during my life. You will get your millions if I decide so. So save some of your income from the trust and wish me a long life. But you will never deny me your body-ever. Agreed?"

  A pause.

  "OK," she said, looking out the window at nothing but the darkness.

  "OK," he repeated. "Our deal starts now."

  1

  It was spring, and Dan Young's front-yard dogwood was showing the tips of its taupe blossoms. Normally, Dan didn't give domestic shrubs or trees or gardens a second thought, but Tess's favorite tree had been their dogwood, planted on their first anniversary, and that made every dogwood important.

  Here, not two
feet from his nose, someone else's early-blooming dogwood grew outside the window of the small antique shop. This downtown store had a timeless feel to it-reminding him that there were those certain moments that could make a person's destiny. Dan wondered if this might be one of those moments, for he carried $500,000 in cash in his leather briefcase. It was an extraordinary sum and he was delivering it to a rather unusual person.

  Amid the store's velvety brown hues of old wood, the smells of scented polish and beeswax, shoppers talked in lower tones and seldom let their cigarette ash hit the floor.

  The place exuded personality. When he had stepped inside to kill some time, Dan instantly knew that the proprietor's hand was connected to his heart instead of his wallet. In this small town by the sea, where the locals made lumber, caught fish, worked for the government, or catered to the tourists, and consequently had modest budgets, such a store could have been more profitably filled with cheap furniture sold on easy terms.

  A freestanding armoire from Gascony, France, shone with quiet grandeur. According to the placard, it had been hand made in the mid-1800s. Beside the armoire hung the object of his attention-a photograph seemingly yellowed with age. It intrigued him. He'd been around the perimeter of the place twice-the consequence of being early-and this was his third time back to the narrow space in front of the photo.

  The photo had been taken in black and white, probably with a large-lensed box camera manufactured around the turn of the last century. He had a passing interest in photography and knew the look created by large, slow cameras using photo plates. Or maybe it was the clothing of the subjects that made him think the camera was from another era. A giant redwood tree served as the backdrop for the composition. In front of the tree stood a woman, a man, a dog, and a young woman. Dan somehow knew the dog belonged to the man. It was doubtful that the woman even liked the dog, although he could surmise from the look of things that she liked the man.