It was a hassle for Oliver Lincoln to contact the client, but to contact the Cuban all he had to do was go to a restaurant in Miami and have a nice dinner. The restaurant was very popular and very expensive, and the Cuban owned it.
She sat down with him after he had finished his dinner. He knew, in spite of all the business he’d given her over the years, that she’d charge him for the meal. She was, he was convinced, the most miserly person he’d ever known. She made a good income off the restaurant and an even better income from her other job, but she lived in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot home in a middle-class neighborhood in Miami; she wore off-the-rack clothes; and she drove one of those homely hybrids that got about fifty miles to the gallon. Lincoln suspected that the woman had millions stashed away in a bank in the Cayman Islands—or buried in a can in her backyard—but he had no idea what she was saving the money for. Lincoln couldn’t retire because he had such expensive tastes. The Cuban, on the other hand, could have retired years ago had she wanted to, but she didn’t. She loved money—not the things money could buy. Oliver Lincoln simply couldn’t relate to people like her.
The other odd thing about the Cuban was that she was a beautiful woman who seemingly had no interest in sex. He suspected she was near forty. She had a lush figure, a flawless light-brown complexion, and long lustrous black hair. Lincoln had certainly made the effort to bed her, but she refused to have anything to do with him in anything other than a business capacity. And because he needed to know about her for professional rather than personal reasons, he’d had her followed on a number of occasions. She may have had lovers when she was a teenager, but Lincoln had known her since she was twenty-five, and in all that time she had never dated or lived with anyone that he had been able to discover.
“I want a man either incapacitated or dead,” Lincoln said. “If he had some sort of accident that put him in the hospital for a couple of months, that would be all right, provided there was no doubt that what happened was an accident. You can kill him if that’s easiest, but you have to make certain that it doesn’t appear that he was the target; he must be collateral damage. For example,” Lincoln said, “if a bus were to plow into a crowd standing on a corner and he was part of the crowd, that would be acceptable.” Lincoln smiled when he said this; he didn’t really expect her to run the man down with a bus, but she didn’t smile back. She didn’t have a sense of humor either. He would really find her quite tiresome if she wasn’t so good at what she did.
“How much?” she said
That was always the first question she asked. No who or where or why or when, but always how much?
“Seventy-five thousand,” Lincoln said. Lincoln thought it appropriate to keep half of what the client was paying, and after she tacked on her expenses—and padded them—her bill would be close to a hundred thousand.
As if they were both reading from a script that they’d read from many times before, she said, “Plus my expenses.”
“Don’t I always pay your expenses?” Lincoln said.
“Last time, when I asked you to pay for my shoes, you argued with me.”
“Well, I thought that was rather petty of you, billing me for that item. It wasn’t my fault that you got Mr. Potter’s blood on your shoes and had to burn them.” Actually, Lincoln had given her a hard time about the shoes because it amused him to do so. She always presented him with a written expense report detailing every dime she spent on a job, and he always pretended to study it carefully before he paid her. Afterward she would destroy the report while he watched.
“It was a job-related expense,” she said.
“If you say so,” he said, just to tweak her.
She glared at him for a minute, then said, “When do you want this done?”
“Immediately, of course. Why do you think you’re being paid so much?”