Read Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) for Free Online

and a selfish, no-nonsense kind of determination. Wherever
you decide to go, MOMA, the Village Vanguard, some tiny Ethiopian restaurant
that only the very most knowledgeable food nut would know about... Whatever you
do, you have to go there with a sort of irrepressible eagerness, a willingness
to ignore everything other than your own goals. Damn the traffic, the lines, the
prices; take no heed of other people, crowding you out, everyone noisy and
unapologetic. New York requires more than simply your presence. It demands your
acquiescence, your willing surrender.
    The East Coast would have to wait. She thought about Brad, left in
the desert, squealing at his own sex video. That image of him was playing on
her mind. She knew he deserved it. She also knew that he wouldn’t die. With the
Cardinal, the punishment was always exactly proportionate to the crime. In a
day or two a call would be made to the local sheriff’s office, and sometime
later a very tired, frightened Bad Daddy would be led out into the
sunlight, wondering what the hell had just happened to him, and with no idea
how he was going to explain it to the smirking sheriff.
    She let the idea go, sensing in herself a sudden physical lethargy. Was
it a dip in her blood sugar? Perhaps, or just the inevitable drop in spirits
following a job which, if she were to be honest, had been pure pleasure.
    One way or the other, then, she didn’t feel like having fun. So she
turned and looked for the cabs, deciding to do what she always did when she
felt a little down and deflated: hole-up somewhere expensive and blow a couple
of grand on room service.
     
    “Oh, yeah, that’s right,” she said, twenty minutes later, having
asked for a smoking room and remembering that most five-star hotels are smoke-free
these days.
    “Luggage?” the young girl on the desk asked.
    “Just this,” Carol said, indicating a small titanium case beside her
on the floor. “And can you send up some cranberry juice and some chilled Vodka—
Stolichnaya
 blue if possible—plus seafood, crayfish, lobster, whatever you’ve got.”
    The girl said nothing, tapping away dutifully at
her keyboard. Ms. Carol Schmidt had just booked the most expensive suite in the
place, never asked the price, and said she didn’t know how many days she’d be.
With this kind of customer, you don’t ask too many questions.
    “OK, can you have that taken up,” she said. “I’m
going out front for a cigarette.”
    “There’s a smoking area around the side of the main building,” the
receptionist added helpfully.
    “Out of harm’s way!” Carol said to herself as she rummaged in her
purse for the pack of Camels that she always kept, but hardly ever
smoked.
    Today was different, though. Today she needed one. Something was on
her mind, but she didn’t know what.
     
    Back up in her room, the disgusting taste of the cigarette still in
her mouth, she fixed herself a vodka and cranberry juice and grabbed her iPad
Mini from her purse. She fiddled with the Wi-Fi, taking two or three goes to
type in the password correctly. It always annoyed her that you paid so much for
a room and they still charged you for Internet access.
    Five-star hotels invariably gave you free Wi-Fi if you asked for it.
Problem was, she always forgot to ask. Not that it mattered. Money didn’t mean
very much to Carol. Although she knew that the minute she decided to stop
working for the Cardinal, access to this lifestyle and the infinite line of
credit that went with it would immediately disappear.
    Slumping back on the bed she flicked through CNN and a couple
of other news sites. Several times she thought about logging onto Bad Daddy’s
site, watching him lying there suffering. But it didn’t appeal. For her the job
was over, and even now she was beginning to put him completely out of her mind,
just as she did with every other job that she and the Cardinal had done over
the past nine years.
    “Nine?” she said to herself, realizing that in