Read At All Costs Online

Authors: John Gilstrap

At All Costs (20 page)

BOOK: At All Costs
7.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN
The Donovans needed a pay phone, but they may as well have been searching for the Holy Grail. In this part of southeastern West Virginia, it was hard enough to find buildings with foundations. The Gulf station up the road sported an international symbol for a telephone on the side of one of the service bays, but closer examination revealed that it had been out of service for quite a while—since, say, the Civil War.
They drove for fifteen miles, seeing nothing but shacks and endless forests, all situated on near-vertical slopes. “Why would anyone ever want to live here?” Jake wondered aloud.
Finally, they came to Homer and Jane’s Roadside Diner, whose status as the only restaurant in this part of the state was plainly illustrated by the number of old cars and pickup trucks in the parking lot. The building was classic backwoods construction. The red brick center section may have had some charm in its youth, but as time had worn on, wooden additions had been slapped onto both ends of the place, with an eye toward nothing but efficiency and economy. Overall, the place had a droopy, unappealing feel. Not that it mattered; every window in the place displayed the profile of a live diner. More important, according to the sign affixed to the brick, Homer and Jane’s had not only a telephone but rest rooms as well.
The van’s suspension moaned painfully as Jake piloted the vehicle into the crumbled and pockmarked driveway. “What do you think?”
“I think—” Carolyn stopped before she could complete the thought. “Oh, God . . . take a look at the newsstand.”
The gravity of her tone brought Travis forward. “What newsstand?”
Jake didn’t see it either at first, but when he followed her finger, his stomach flopped. In the windows of their coinoperated dispensers, three competing newspapers—two from West Virginia and one from Washington, D.C.—displayed pictures of the world’s most notorious environmental terrorists. Instead of the old Wanted-poster shots, however, the press was using current photos lifted from their driver’s licenses.
“Shit,” Jake said. “Looks just like us.” Something about seeing the story in the paper made the threat to them more palpable.
“Well, we certainly can’t go in
there,”
Carolyn said. “Those people are eating breakfast. Half of them are probably reading about us as we speak.”
It was a very good point. Wanted posters, as such, never posed much of a threat. People rarely made eye contact to begin with, and they certainly didn’t remember pictures of people they’d never met. In a tiny community such as this, though, where everyone undoubtedly knew everyone else, strangers couldn’t help but draw attention. When the focus of that attention was the very people whose pictures appeared before them in the paper, God only knew what might happen.
“I can go in,” Travis volunteered. “I don’t see any pictures of me.”
Instinctively, Jake and Carolyn started to say no, but then stopped.
Jake arched an eyebrow. “What do you think?”
“C’mon, Mom, I can do it.” Travis was anxious to prove himself. “Hell, it’s only a phone call.” Simultaneous glares silenced him, and he rolled his eyes. “I meant,
heck,
it’s only a phone call.”
“This isn’t a game, Travis,” Carolyn scolded.
“I know that, but Jesus—um, I mean
Jeeze—
why risk you guys getting recognized when the only thing I have to do is make a phone call?”
Another very good point, drawing another shrug from Jake. “I don’t see why not.”
“But Harry doesn’t know him from Adam,” Carolyn countered.
“He’ll know who I am after I tell him,” Travis offered. “C’mon, you guys, just tell me what to say, and I’ll say it. Then he’ll tell me, and I’ll tell you.”
Maybe it really was that simple. “Have you ever made a collect call?” Jake asked.
“Uh-huh. Remember that time in Amarillo when the Tawingos’ car broke down? I called you collect to tell you I was gonna be late.”
Jake and Carolyn looked to each other for some sound reason to say no but couldn’t find one.
“Okay,” Carolyn said with an uneasy sigh. “Here’s what we need you to say.”
As he watched his son climb out of the back of the van and stride purposefully toward Homer and Jane’s, Jake enjoyed a moment of intense pride. Here the kid’s world had been turned completely inside out, and yet he truly wanted to help. Much was left to be done, of course, and this adventure was far from over, but as ridiculous as it sounded, Jake felt that they were more of a family at this moment than they’d been in years.
“I wonder how Harry will react,” Jake mused aloud.
“I’m sure he’ll be relieved,” Carolyn said.
“Yeah, right.”
Carolyn’s maternal uncle, Harry Sinclair, owned more of Chicago’s Miracle Mile than any other single investor. Widely known for his intense loyalty to his friends, and his ruthless business practices, Harry was both feared and revered, all depending on which side of the negotiation table he was seated. Harry was a man accustomed to winning, regardless of the cost. Rumors abounded of competitors threatened into submission, but none of the accusations were true—at least not in the sense that people imagined.
Harry Sinclair knew only one subject—business—and he played the game with a passion matched by only a few. Jake had met the man only twice, yet he had the old bastard’s mantra down cold: “You can always tell a sucker,” he’d told Jake back when he and Carolyn were just dating. “He’s the guy who believes that the game is over when the other side gives up. Growing up on the South Side, I learned the
real
secret to winning. As long as the other guy can stand, the game’s still on.”
The lecture was the only form of speech that Harry Sinclair knew; and from that very first day, Jake couldn’t stand the man. He was the embodiment of everything that was wrong about business—the very attitude that allowed the Pennsylvania coal-mining barons to send Jake’s father into hell every day, knowing full well that the fetid atmosphere in those tunnels would corrode his lungs. For people like Harry, business was just a euphemism for crushing people who didn’t have the means to fight back. They were bullies, pure and simple, differentiated from the schoolyard variety only by their expensive suits and silk ties.
During that first meeting, convened out at Harry’s estate, and carefully orchestrated to intimidate the unsophisticated coal miner’s kid who was sniffing around his niece, Harry laid it all out on the table. Sitting in his $2,000 chair and sucking on a thirty-dollar cigar, he told the story of a Korean grocer named Kim Po, who refused to sell his store to make room for Sinclair Plaza, a sprawling, fifty-story granite and glass office/retail complex on Michigan Avenue.
A man who prided himself on always playing by the rules, Harry got zoning approval to build his vanity tower, anyway, bringing his building within six inches on three sides and the top of Po’s grocery. The Korean filed suit, of course, at which point Harry began his siege, filing a countersuit alleging emotional distress, and beginning an escalating war of legal fees which Po knew he could never win.
After six months of warfare, fought in the trenches of the courthouse, Po caved in and offered to sell his store. Harry refused. “I’d already spent that money on legal fees and architectural changes,” he relayed to Jake. “I offered him forty cents on the dollar, though, and he turned me down.”
With the value of his property dangling below the payoff price for the five college educations he’d leveraged against it, Po did the honorable thing. He dug in to make the best of things.
But, as Harry pointed out, he could still stand. When Sinclair Plaza finally opened, the old man made sure that the space just inches away from Po’s store was leased to a competing grocery, which coincidentally specialized in everything that the Korean sold, only more of it at a lesser price.
Harry ended up declaring victory on the day he finally bought the ruined grocer’s real estate as the only bidder at the trustee’s sale.
Predators like Harry Sinclair drove federal regulators nuts. For the last two decades, they’d worked tirelessly to keep the old man honest. They’d nabbed him only once, back in the late seventies when the IRS found enough indiscretions to justify a five-year prison sentence.
To Jake, Harry would forever be a jailbird, even as Carolyn worshiped every step the old man took. As the only girl among a sea of boy cousins, Carolyn had always been Harry’s “Sunshine,” and the real estate mogul played his role to the hilt, bringing her silver dollars and chocolate bars every time he saw her. There was an unbreakable bond there, part of the great mystery that was Carolyn’s childhood.
Distasteful business practices aside, Jake recognized loyalty when he saw it, and while he detested much of what Harry Sinclair stood for, there was no denying that the old man had come to Jake and Carolyn’s aid at a critical time. As the entire world bore down on the Donovans in 1983, Harry provided them with everything they needed to disappear, from identities to cash—all just months after Harry himself had been released from prison and stood to lose a great deal in the transaction.
Sitting there in the van outside the diner, Jake shook his head in disbelief.
This
was the man from whom Travis was soliciting assistance? The punch line of an old joke popped into his mind, making him squirm in his seat:
We’ve already established what you are, madam, now we’re just haggling over price.
As he waited for Travis to return, Jake let his thoughts drift back to his
second
meeting with Harry Sinclair—Jake’s first in the role of fugitive. The old man had sent a car to pick up Jake and Carolyn at a prearranged spot downstream from Buford. He remembered the driver’s name to this day. Thorne: a sinewy, large-torsoed military type who rarely said a word but whose dark eyes continually cast a threat. The pickup had been late at night, as Jake recalled, and they drove straight through till morning to a house somewhere in southern Illinois.
Jake had slept most of the way, finally awakened by the heat of the rising sun. Carolyn was already awake, sitting upright and talking in hushed tones to Thorne. Jake stretched noisily, and slowly worked his way up to a sitting position.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” Carolyn said happily. “About time you woke up.”
“What time is it?” He was too sleep-dumb to think of checking his watch.
“About nine. We’re almost there.”
“Correction,” Thorne interrupted. “We
are
there.”
The only building in sight was a largish farmhouse planted in the middle of a huge expanse of green farmland. Thorne slowed the Cadillac nearly to a halt to catch a rutted dirt path. The house was gorgeous, in a uniquely midwestern way. Probably dating back to the 1920s, it vaguely resembled a squatty Aztec pyramid, anchored at its base by a huge, wraparound porch, and rising two more stories in classic Victorian style to a slate roof and an intricate collage of gables.
Harry was waiting for them at the front door, and Carolyn started to cry the instant she saw him. The years in prison had been hard. Heavy creases had invaded his boyish face. Last time they’d seen each other—could it possibly be eight years?—his hair, which now resembled a disheveled cotton ball, had been a lush auburn mane, carefully coiffed and proudly displayed. Despite his ever-present paunch, he’d always been obsessive about his wardrobe, sporting the very latest in men’s fashions. Now his clothes just looked rumpled and old; not unlike the man wearing them.
Carolyn was out of the car as soon as it pulled to a stop, and she became a young girl again as she glided up the manicured path and into Harry’s outstretched arms. “Little Sunshine,” he whispered gently, “I’ve missed you so much.” As she buried her face in his shoulder, he stroked the back of her head.
“Shh, Sunshine,” Harry cooed. “Shh. Settle down now. Everything’s going to be just fine . . .”
Jake watched it all from the driveway, trying to ignore Thorne, who seemed to regard Sunshine’s husband as a threat. As Jake felt the driver’s eyes burning through him, he found himself oddly aware of his hands, feeling fidgety as he fumbled for an appropriate, nonthreatening place to put them.
A minute passed before Carolyn pulled away from her uncle, and even as she did, he continued to hold her at arm’s length, examining the face he hadn’t seen in so long. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “You look like a Sinclair. You have your mother’s eyes. And her mouth, too.”
“So, her mom cussed, did she?” Jake quipped, trying to be recognized as something more than a lawn ornament. He smiled, but no one else did.
Harry’s scowl spoke his mind:
Haven ’t you left yet?
Jake extended his hand and stepped forward, bringing Thorne in close behind. “Hello, sir. Nice to see you again. You look well.” Again, he smiled alone.
Carolyn half turned, keeping one arm wrapped around Harry and beckoning her husband with the other, as if to include him in a group hug. “You remember Jake, don’t you, Uncle Harry? We dated back in high school? You had him to dinner once . . .”
BOOK: At All Costs
7.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Dropped Dead Stitch by Maggie Sefton
Pox by Michael Willrich
Convincing Leopold by Ava March
Wyoming by Barry Gifford
Crimson Echo by Dusty Burns
Facade by Ashley Suzanne
Lords of the Were by Bianca D'arc
The Pick Up Wife by W. Lynn Chantale