Authors: John Gilstrap

At All Costs (38 page)

BOOK: At All Costs

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C
HAPTER
F
ORTY

“All you have to do is
drive,”
Nick mocked under his breath as he crossed the once-grand lobby of the Radford Hotel. He carried the pizza box on his shoulder, bearing the logo of Papa Lorenzo’s Perfect Pizza Parlor. The box was empty, of course. Nick and his coconspirator had consumed the whole thing while sitting down the block in Thorne’s rental car, working out the fine points of the plan. Tasted pretty good, actually, considering the fact that Papa Lorenzo and his staff all wore turbans.

Even though Little Rock was a small city by most standards, the task of locating a single needle named Irene Rivers in a haystack of several dozen hotels seemed hopeless at first. Then Jake got an idea. In fact, he seemed flooded with ideas. Good ones, even. An amazing turnaround, Nick thought, given the quivering mess he’d been just scant hours before.

Their approach was simple: divide the Yellow Pages in half and burn up a ton of quarters in pay phones calling front desk after front desk and asking for Irene Rivers’s room. They were just shy of four dollars into their strategy when Jake got a hit on the Radford. After the phone in her room rang ten times without anyone answering, he just hung up, confident she was still out saving the world from the likes of himself.

Finding the hotel was only the first step, though. They still needed a room number, and for that, Nick needed to do some legwork. Between the two of them, his was the face that hadn’t dominated the news.

The Radford was a big old place, which once had been the destination of choice for visiting presidents and celebrities. On the heels of more than a few slow years, though, the Radford had been unable to keep up with the Grand Marquis and the Crown Plaza, and its once-dependable clientele had shifted its loyalties elsewhere. The place was still several giant steps away from homeless-shelter status, but there was precious little charm left in the threadbare Oriental carpets and scratched cherry walls.

To be put up in a place like this was clear evidence that Irene Rivers had seriously pissed off her travel agent.

As Nick approached the two teenagers manning the front desk, they looked up simultaneously and smiled. “Hi. Can I help you?” one of them said.

Nick noted the similarity of the girls’ features—even down to the matching zits on their chins—and he wondered silently if maybe they were sisters. He smiled back, trying his best to look a little sheepish while praying that his hands wouldn’t shake.

“Hi,” he said back. “You sure can.” With hopes of making himself look more like a local, he spoke around a toothpick he’d picked up at Papa Lorenzo’s. “One of your guests called and ordered a pizza. Unfortunately, I lost the note with her room number on it. Got a name, though. Rivers. Irene Rivers. Can you give me her room?”

The Bobbsey Twins exchanged glances, then shook their heads in unison. “No, I’m afraid not,” said the one on the right. “We can’t give out people’s room numbers to anyone.”

“I can call her, though, and have her come down and pick it up,” offered the twin on the left.

Nick’s stomach knotted. He felt a burst of panic, then forced a smile. “No,” he said quickly. “Please don’t do that. Listen, truth of it is, I’m already running fifteen minutes late with this thing, and this is the second time I’ve lost an address tonight. Boss told me this Rivers lady is a pain as it is. If she gets ticked and calls, I’m sunk, know what I mean?”

The girls shared a
significant
look this time and nodded again. Obviously, they’d known some difficult customers in their time and maybe even worked for an asshole or two along the way.

“We really shouldn’t . . .” hedged Bobbsey Left.

“Please,” Nick begged winningly. “It’s humiliating enough for a man my age to be delivering pizzas. I could really do without a lecture to go with it, you know?”

Another look. And a joint sigh. “Okay,” said Bobbsey Right as she tapped the keys on her computer. “Just don’t get us in trouble, okay? Room 405.” She looked up and pointed across the lobby. “You can take those elevators over there.”

Nick smiled and thanked them. He wandered over and pushed the call button, but it seemed forever before anything happened. Even the elevators in this old barn were tired. Fortunately, he was the only passenger. After the big doors rumbled shut, Nick pushed the buttons for both the second floor and the fourth, so that the floor indicator in the lobby would go all the way to Agent Rivers’s floor, even after he exited on the first stop.

The hallway was bright enough, if somewhat narrow, in the style of old downtown hotels, and he encountered his first dilemma in trying to figure out what to do with the damn pizza box. Finally, he gave up looking for a trash can and just slid it under a Coke machine.

That done, he took the stairs down to a preselected side entrance on the first floor. Checking one more time to make sure that the stairwell was empty, he opened the door and nearly screamed. Jake was standing right there, not two feet away on the other side. “Jesus! You scared the shit out of me!”

Jake looked at him like he was crazy. “I told you I’d be waiting here.”

“Yeah, but . . .”
Oh, the hell with it.
“She’s in room 405. How’re you gonna get in?”

Jake shrugged and craned his neck to peer up the stairwell. “I don’t know yet. But I’ll make it.”

They climbed the first two floors together before Nick broke off to retrieve his elevator. “I’ll wait for you in the car,” he said. But his face said something else entirely.

Jake smiled. “I’ll be there.” He sounded none too convinced himself.

It was nearly two by the time Irene returned to her hotel room, exhausted. Her body was whipped, but her mind whirled way too fast to permit sleep. She’d hoped that the martini before dinner and the two glasses of wine with the entree would take the edge off, but it was no use. Slice by slice, her career had been whittled away to virtually nothing these past few days, and all the alcohol had accomplished was to give her a world-class case of heartburn.

A hot bath was her last hope. She preferred them just this side of scalding, where the skin of her fingers and toes would prune up in minutes and the heat would suck away her ability to concentrate on anything but sleep. None of the worry mattered, anyway. Even with his wife and son in jeopardy, Jake Donovan still remained out of reach. That part surprised her. She’d thought for sure he was more of a family man than that.

Still fully clothed, Irene plugged the tub and cranked the faucet all the way to hot. After a few seconds, she eased it back a bit, then closed the door behind her as she strolled back to the bedroom to change out of her suit.

They knew for certain now that Donovan was getting help from someone. The local cop in Newark reported a third party, as did the paramedics at the Rescue Squad building. Crime scene technicians had confirmed glove smudges in the Faylons’ Toyota, but no extra prints yet. The Caddy was a rental—under a fictitious name—and as such had hundreds of fingerprints all over it. They’d run them all through the computer, of course, but it was a giant step between having rented a vehicle and being a suspect in a crime.

Agents from the Chicago field office had been following through on Irene’s pet theory involving Harry Sinclair, but after a day of turning his house inside out, no one had found a single piece of evidence to implicate the old man. Old Harry had even shown up at the house again, after a day of what he called “alone time.” Apparently, occasional stretches of unaccountability helped him cope during his periods of heavy thinking.

Ted Greenberg in Chicago had sent a tape of Sinclair’s interview via courier to George Sparks’s office in Little Rock. Irene had listened to a copy in the car on the way to dinner. It was funny, really, hearing Ted work to trip up the old man.

“So, how do you explain the phone call from Travis Donovan?”

“I suppose he wanted to talk to me.”

“Did he?”

“Why don’t you tell me.”

“Look, Mr. Sinclair, it’s in your best interest to cooperate here.”

“Consider me the poster child of cooperation.”

“Fine. Did you speak to Travis Donovan?”

“I’m afraid our connection was broken.”

“So you didn’t speak to him?”

“If the connection was broken, how could I?”

“Please answer the question, sir. Yes or no.” The frustration in Greenberg’s voice jumped right out of the cassette. “Did you or did you not speak over the telephone with Travis Donovan?”

“That would be very difficult without a connection, don’t you think?” Equally obvious was the amusement in Sinclair’s voice.

And so it went, for forty-five minutes, with Harry Sinclair neither incriminating nor perjuring himself. It occurred to Irene that the old man would make a great politician. In all likelihood, the interview would have continued ad infinitum had Sinclair’s attorney not shown up and put a stop to it. He’d already talked an appellate judge into nullifying their warrant and slapping a stay on their wiretap, due to a lack of evidence.

What the hell?
she told herself. It was a dead end, anyway.

She undressed quickly and clumsily, kicking off her shoes and wriggling out of her suit. She paused a minute to check a spaghetti spatter on the front of the blouse and made a mental note to send it out to the cleaners first thing tomorrow, before it had a chance to set. Next came her weapon, a black S&W .40-caliber semiautomatic, which she unclipped from the waistband of her skirt and dropped with a thunk onto the dresser. In less than a minute, she was naked, ready to soak. On her way back toward the bathroom, she paused for a moment to view herself in the mirrored closet doors, first full-face, then profile.

“Not bad for forty-two,” she told herself. Then, to remember what she looked like at twenty-two, she sucked in her stomach until she couldn’t breathe. “It sucks to grow old,” she grumbled. Hearing the vernacular, she reminded herself how much she was beginning to sound like her kids.

I’ve got to call them,
she thought.
First thing tomorrow. It’s been two days.
And two days alone with their father was more than anyone should be asked to endure.

By the time she finished brushing her teeth, the water level had reached the danger line, and she had to take care as she lowered herself into the steaming bath not to slosh anything over the sides. It was wonderful; better, even, than she’d hoped. In the oversize tub, the water came past her breasts, just high enough to tickle the underside of her chin. The tension and the worry drained away as she leaned her head back against the tile and closed her eyes. This was heaven. If only she’d thought to turn out the lights, she could’ve fallen asleep right there.

In fact, she’d nearly nodded off when she heard the bathroom door open.

“Don’t scream,” Jake warned as he took aim at Irene’s left eye. “In fact, don’t say anything. If you try to call for help, I’ll kill you.”

Irene didn’t move, other than to begin trembling in the scalding water.

“Do you believe I’ll kill you?” Jake asked.

The fugitive’s face was blank, yet his eyes remained warm. The contrast petrified her. She nodded. Yes, she believed him.

He nodded along with her. “Good.” He pulled a towel off the metal rack next to the sink and handed it to her. “Here,” he said. “Cover yourself up.”

She reached for the towel too quickly and caused a wave of water to arch over the porcelain edge and slap down onto the black and white tile floor. As she tucked the towel around her body, she realized with a shudder that she was staring down the barrel of her own gun. A humiliating end to a humiliating day.

“What do you want?” she demanded. The strength she heard in her voice surprised her.

“How’s my son?”

She glared at him, her fear dissolving quickly into anger. “Who do you think you are, charging into my hotel room—”

“You know who I am,” Jake interrupted. “And if you truly believe all the bullshit they say I’ve done, then you should be scared shitless right now. If you don’t believe it, then you should know just how angry and unstable I have a right to be.” He helped himself to a spot on the vanity and drew one knee up to help support the weight of the pistol. “Either way, it seems that you should think twice before pissing me off.”

She continued to glare. There was fear in his eyes now, and combined with the complex assortment of other emotions he projected, she didn’t know what to make of his stability. Perhaps it was, indeed, time to be careful.

He took a deep, shaky breath and tried again. “I’m not asking you for state secrets, Rivers. I’m a father whose son is sick. Now, please answer my question. How is he?”

The way she broke eye contact said more than her words ever could. His shoulders sagged.

“They say he’ll live,” she said softly. “But it’s too early to tell the full extent of the damage to his lungs.”

Jake felt the sadness return and closed his eyes.
At least he’s alive,
he told himself. This was a time to focus on the positive.

BOOK: At All Costs

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