Afterburn (33 page)

"I can't tell."

"You have time to see Dad?"

"I don't know."

"I can drive you out there."

"It's not the right time, this week. Maybe in a little while." Not a good start, Rick knew. "How's he doing, anyway?"

Paul lifted his hands off the steering wheel in a gesture of resignation. "The problem, at this stage, is bedsores. They keep moving him around in the bed. There are certain places—the heels, the buttocks. Places where the weight of the body rubs against the bed."

"Okay." He didn't want to hear it. It distracted him. Paul, eleven years older, had grown up in a different house, their father a happy man then—so Rick had been told. Paul's mother had been killed in a traffic accident, the middle of the day, a station wagon full of groceries. Another Staten Island housewife had been driving a car full of noisy kids. One of them had died. A tragedy, and nobody's fault, really—mothers just doing their jobs. Somehow Paul had been okay, but his father, later Rick's father, had been staved in by the death of his wife. In his grief, he quickly remarried. And maybe things had been all right for a few years. Rick remembered loving his mother like the sky itself, clung to her against his father's lack of interest. She'd taught him to catch and throw a baseball. Maybe things would have been different if she had not died. You could never say what would have happened. Paul was in his last year of high school when Rick's mother got sick. The breast cancer raced through her with no resistance. Also, she was late getting treatment, had hidden her condition from his father; why, Rick never did learn. Some problem in the marriage, something he would never understand, except that he blamed his father for not saving his mother. Perhaps she had feared he would withdraw further if he knew she was sick. That could be it. But there was no one to ask and never had been. After Rick's mother died, his father worked on the family business, never home much. Paul was away at college, in business school, in a big accounting firm in Manhattan. Everyone gone. By the time Rick was seventeen, he was running around pretty hard. By nineteen he was fucking four women on a regular basis, two of them local girls who didn't know which way the wind was blowing, the third the angry wife of a cop, and the last a woman who sold real estate in Manhattan. At thirty-three, she had already been divorced twice; her big trick was that she could touch the soles of her feet to the headboard while he was pounding her.

"Mary made a big dinner," Paul said. "I'll run you back afterward."

"Great. So let's talk now, you mean?"

"Once we get inside, the boys are going to be all over me."

He told Paul, this time in detail, about the visit from Peck out on Orient Point, Christina's release from prison. Paul nodded as he listened, a man accustomed to tortured narratives. The pinlights from the dash illuminated the surface of his glasses, the underside of his chin and nose. He seemed to recall the story even as Rick explained it—which was not so farfetched. People knew they were brothers. Tony Verducci was well acquainted with Paul. They knew the same people, they'd done business together.

"You have any idea why they want Christina?"

Paul gave him a long look, then shrugged. "They know she can do the job."

"But there are all kinds of smart—"

"You're forgetting something."

"What?"

"She didn't talk to the D.A.'s people."

"So she's getting a reward from Tony?" asked Rick.

"No, I don't think it's that."

"What?"

"If she gets caught again, he knows she'll be quiet. Or can be quiet."

"That's not a good enough reason to want her to do it."

"I know. I'm talking about factors. The other reason is that her system worked."

"Somebody else could think of another system.
You
could think of a system, for God's sake."

"I could, I suppose, but I wouldn't," Paul said. "It wouldn't be as good as hers, either. She has a gift for this kind of thing. I actually wish she had not had such a gift, because you exploited it, but it's true she has the ability. Anyway, you're forgetting about how Tony's mind works. He likes something, he stays with it. I heard he's got ten pairs of the same shoes, never wears anything else."

"Those slip-on things, loafers, with a heel. Sort of a Cuban look."

"Tony is
not
Cuban."

"So he wants to stick with Christina?" Rick continued. "That makes me think he's got some kind of thing coming up."

"Possible."

"You know what?"

"No."

"Bullshit."

"All I know is, he's sending stuff into JFK, not taking it out," said Paul. "They're all messed up over there. They're putting in a new terminal. Trucks everywhere."

"He's not doing the air freight?"

"No."

"What?" Rick had been out of the game too long.

"He's shipping stuff out, like I said."

"So he's not setting up pickup points?"

"Nah."

"What's he need Christina for, then?"

"When you do a big deal like this, the money goes into a numbered account."

"So?"

Paul took a breath. "The money gets put in by one party and another party takes it out. Simple. But there's one problem with that. You need a password or a key code number to take the money out. Both parties have to have it."

"All right."

"Tony is careful. You know he needs to get the key code number without being told it. And vice versa. The other guy, too. They don't want to meet or see each other. Nothing on paper."

He understood now. Christina's old random number generator system could be applied to a new task. Originally the numbers corresponded to places and times. Now they were just numbers that became a sequence. "But the problem is that both parties still need a piece of paper that tells them where to go at what time. How are you going to know to show up?"

"That's true," Paul agreed. "But it's one link farther away. It's not the number of the account, it's some other number. Plus, it's also destroyable."

"I'm lost here."

Paul adjusted the air-conditioner vent. "Let's say we've got a system to make a long number, maybe a number with eight or nine digits. It's a system that can be used anytime. We have it ready. We don't need to make a new number yet. In fact, we don't
want
a new number yet. That's no good. You're sitting somewhere with the piece of paper and so am I. On that piece of paper are a bunch of numerals, each one corresponding to a time and a place. Next Tuesday at 6:00 p.m.—something like that. So I call and say, 'Five.' You start with number five and maybe you do the next five places on the list. Whatever, you can change it around."

"Then you start?" said Rick. "You start getting the digits for the new number from each place?"

"Yeah, but you pick situations that change pretty often. Like every fifteen seconds. So that eighteen months from now, if the feds are investigating, they can't say that at 10:00 a.m. on October 5 the elevator was on the sixth floor, or whatever. You pick something that changes almost constantly, that's the key,
almost
constantly, and leaves no record."

"Then you destroy the original piece of paper, since it was needed only once."

"Right," said Paul. "Maybe you even had the two people memorize it and destroy it beforehand."

"So that at this point, when the two people are done getting their number sequence, they each have the same number, but they have never met, never talked about the number, and do not have any piece of paper that came from the other party that tells them what the number was. In fact, if you went back to the same places again at the same time of day, you'd get a different number."

Paul nodded.

"Tony thinks he's going to get Christina to do this?"

"Maybe."

"She won't do it."

"He just got her out of prison."

"Somebody else could do this."

"I agree," Paul said. "It's just what I heard."

"She won't do it."

"Yes, she will."

"Why?"

"Because if she doesn't, then they will injure her friend."

"Who?" asked Rick.

"You."

"Me?" Rick laughed. "They don't have me."

"Of course they have you."

"They don't know where I am now."

"Are you sure?"

He thought about it. "No."

"They put you into play," said Paul. "Or Peck put you into play. Who does Peck work for?"

"Himself? Or at least not Tony."

"Is Peck your friend? Your old pal? You know him?"

"No."

"Fact, he never liked you."

"But Peck told me the D.A.'s Office did this against his will. He was all pissed off about it. He said his work was being ruined."

"You can forget that. Bunch of bird food."

"He's pretending?"

"Yes, because he wants you to jump in."

"Why?"

"I'll get to that," Paul said. "I got some stuff on that."

"So you're saying that if I get involved he doesn't mind."

"Peck comes to you, says she's getting out, so go do the right thing. Go be a hero. And you can't resist."

He nodded. "Okay, that's true."

"They fucking put you into play, Rick. It's a game with a lot of different balls—some move fast, some slow, some you can barely even see. They tell you enough so that you got to go find Christina. They don't shove you together, they make it appear natural, they make you work a little for it. That gets you involved with her. Then they grab you and tell her. Then she will do what they say."

"Only if she cares what they do to me."

"She cares."

"You can't be sure. I
hope
she cares, but you never know."

"She cares. They'll find a way to be sure she cares."

"There's a problem with this plan. They don't know where she is."

"Are you sure?" asked Paul.

"I don't know where she is and I'm looking for her."

"That part I don't know about. Maybe they expect you to be the hound dog, to find her. Maybe they have been following her and nobody knows. Maybe they
were
following her when she got out of prison but lost her. I'm just trying out possibilities here. Maybe they expect Peck to find her."

"If I walked out right now, then she wouldn't have to cooperate," Rick suggested.

"Who is she going to go to, the police?"

"No."

"There's another problem. You walk out of the game, they'll come and find you."

"I could go to South America, I could go—"

"You have a current passport?"

"No."

"You think you could really abandon her at this point?"

"No," Rick said. "I can't do that."

"Right." Paul tapped his head. "These guys are smart, you got to understand that."

"If I can tell Christina, and we both disappear, then I've made it."

Paul nodded. "That might be true. If the two of you leave at the same time, and then Tony's deal still goes through, gets done some other way, maybe it's better after. The problem, of course, is that she may not want to see you. Be with you."

"She needs me."

"She doesn't know that. She might not agree with that. You need her, actually." Paul raised his eyebrows. "The only way you get out of this thing is if you take her with you or if she just gives them what they want."

Paul pulled the car into the driveway, past high spruce trees that hid the house completely. Five fat men in Santa Claus suits could get out of a fire engine and walk into the house and someone watching from the street would never know. Paul had these things worked out in advance.

"You got the drive refinished?"

"The oil stains bugged Mary."

"What do you think?" Rick asked.

"About how it will go? Not good."

"Bad?"

"Probably."

"Why?"

"You were an asshole, Rick. A complete asshole. You walked and she went to prison. I don't think it was much fun. I heard there was some incident with a guard up there, some kind of forced-sex thing."

Anger kicked at his chest. "With Christina?"

Paul nodded. They sat in the car outside the garage.

"You're doing everything they expect of you. Everything is a pattern."

"What do you mean?"

"The money in Aunt Eva's place."

He hadn't mentioned this to Paul. "That was only—"

"The bar situation the other night."

"You knew before I called you?" Rick asked.

Paul nodded. "I hear things. People tell me, you know, and I can see a pattern. I got a brother living in a shack out near the fishing boats, goes to the city, gets his old money back, starts drinking and fucking around in Tony Verducci's bar, that's easy. That's a pattern. The pattern is, he's going to keep thrashing around. He's looking for action."

Rick felt a sick sense of truth in these words.

"All right," Paul said.

"That's it?"

"Yes, for now."

"You got any more?"

"Not now, the meal is going to be ready. I'll tell you Mary's point, though. Just a little common sense. I was talking with her about your situation and she pointed some things out."

"Like what?"

"Christina is a pretty girl."

"Sexy. Not pretty exactly. Not a cheerleader."

"Hey," argued Paul, "I don't remember you complaining about how she looked. We still have those shots of you guys on our boat that first time."

"I was catching tuna, right." But what he remembered best was the way Christina showed Paul how she could play with numbers in her head. Perched on one of the boat's fishing chairs in a tiny black bikini, and oblivious to the Long Island shoreline whipping past, Christina had asked Paul about the speed, size, and shape of the school of tuna the boat was intersecting. Hard to say, he'd answered. Give me estimates, she'd said, and after he did, she told him that if he shifted the angle at which he cut across the school's path by twenty degrees, the bait would be in front of the fish "about one third longer in time." Paul, trained as an accountant, stared at Christina for a moment, then told Rick to take the wheel. After sitting with a paper and pencil for a few minutes below the deck, he'd come up with a grin on his face. I was off a little, Christina said. Not by much, Paul had answered, eyes thoughtful, not by much.