B009XDDVN8 EBOK (21 page)

M
R.
W
ILLING?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s Steph? Over at Jefferson Davis Mortgage?”

“Oh, Stephanie, hello. It’s nice to hear from you. What’s up? Are you guys hiring again?”

“Not yet, Mr. Willing. It’s still like a pirate ship here, everyone hunkered down waiting for the next victim to walk the plank. They let go of two more secretaries, Miss Thompson included.”

“No.”

“Yes. And she’s been here longer than anyone. They had a guard walk her out. A guard.”

“That’s not right. If you talk to her, please give her my sympathy.”

“I will. So how are you, Mr. Willing? Did you find anything?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I might have some good news. You know how you used to get all kinds of calls from headhunters before everything fell apart?”

“The good old days.”

“You just got another call, I think.”

“You think?”

“A Mr. Clevenger. He didn’t ask for you personally, but he said he was looking for a broker who had a background that seemed to fit you perfectly.”

“Fit me?” My ears pricked back like on a horse smelling snake. “How so?”

“He said he was looking for a broker who had been born in Pennsylvania and had gone to the University of Wisconsin. And I seemed to recall you matched up, so I checked your file, and sure enough.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him we had just the man he was looking for.”

“You didn’t give him my name or tell him where I lived, did you, Stephanie?”

“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Willing, not without getting in touch with you first. I don’t give any personal information over the phone. Especially now. Next thing you know, a client would be showing up at one of the brokers’ houses with a gun, and no one needs that.”

“No one indeed.”

“It’s just that he mentioned some Italian name and I told him that wasn’t you at all. But this Mr. Clevenger didn’t seem discouraged by that. In fact, he seemed pretty excited about getting in touch. He said he had a golden opportunity for you. Maybe it will lead to something, you never know. He left a number.” She gave it to me. “Good luck, Mr. Willing. I hope it works out.”

“I expect it won’t, but thanks,” I said before I pressed the
END
button.

I looked at the number I had scribbled as she talked. A 312 area code. Chicago. The land of the flat, Midwestern vowel. Stephanie was right about one thing: it was a headhunter for sure.

One winter’s day when I was in college, Augie and Ben drove up to Boston to visit me unannounced for some ribald fun. When they found out I wasn’t in the city, had never in fact registered at BC, there was a shitstorm, the whole
wounded-hearts-and-no-trust-between-old-friends thing. Men do it differently than women: we work it out with fistfights in seedy bars, arguing over our favorite albums. But at the end of the fight, I told them the truth about my college career in Madison, minus the name change. We assured one another we were past it, and that was the night we each got the identical
Still Here
tattoos to prove our undying bond, but the truth was we never truly got past it. We had all gone our separate ways and this was just another wedge.

But the point is that Augie had known I attended the University of Wisconsin. So I understood how this Clevenger, undoubtedly the bastard who had placed the call to Augie’s while I was inside, might have known about it, too—the marks on Augie’s body had indicated that Augie had received the whole Dick Cheney treatment. And Ben and Augie both had also known I was a mortgage broker. So none of this was totally unexpected, but somehow Clevenger had narrowed his search to somewhere near Richmond.

Except that was as far as it went. This Clevenger was clever, and thoroughly thorough, and scarily swift, but he was still looking for a Moretti, he didn’t yet know me as a Willing. I was pretty sure I had severed any link between my two names. I had even scrupulously kept my face out of my college yearbook—Jonathon Willing was listed as “Not Pictured” on the back page of the
Badger
. So he could know about the job, and know about the alma mater, but as long as he still didn’t know about the name I was okay.

Which is why Clevenger was sitting lost and lonely by his phone in Chicago, waiting for me to give him a call. Fat chance of that.

“Johnny? Is that you, Johnny?”

“Yeah, it’s me, Harry. What’s up?”

“Nothing. Probably nothing.”

“Well, is it nothing, or probably nothing?”

“Probably nothing.”

“Then it might be something.”

“It might be at that.”

“All right, let’s have it.”

“I was at Schooners last night, with the Koreans. Nothing out of the ordinary there. And who comes in but a fellow named Prolly, got a commercial fishing boat, docks down in Shipps Bay now. Old Prolly and me, we got into some piles in our day. There was this one time, we was busting on this waitress up there in Ocean City—Maryland, not Jersey, I’m talking. We had gone there on a charter for these business types from Ohio, and the—”

“Harry?”

“Prolly, right? Remember how you asked me to keep my eyes open for anything that might not be on the square.”

“I remember.”

“Well, when Prolly and me was having drinks, I asked him if he seen anything out of whack and he says it just so happens a fellow came into Prolly’s usual joint, a sailors’ bar not far up the road toward Virginia Beach, and the guy was buying beers and flashing a picture, offering a hundred if anyone recognized the face.”

“A picture?”

“Yeah, a picture. Said it was a guy who owed him on a boat somewhere out of Richmond. Prolly said the picture was black and white and fuzzy. Of a guy walking through a metal detector at an airport.”

“What did the guy in the picture look like?”

“It was hard to say. But he was white, tallish, in his forties.”

“What about the guy showing around the picture?”

“Well, all Prolly said about that was there didn’t seem to be much to him but his smile, but there was something in the guy’s
smile that made Prolly damn glad it wasn’t him he was looking for. And Prolly was a fighter, too, in his day, an amateur and a lightweight, but even so. Still it could have been anyone in that picture, right?”

“Right.”

“Like I said, probably nothing.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Though Prolly, he said the guy did mention something about a scar.”

Clevenger, that devious son of a bitch.

How the hell did he know about the boat? The scar I understood, and the picture, too. The bastards had combed through the photographs automatically taken at the Phoenix and Philadelphia security gates and somehow found a picture they assumed was me. Whether it was or not, who could tell, maybe they had the complete wrong guy, though I suspected they didn’t. But how had they learned about the boat? Whatever they did to Augie, however medieval they got, he couldn’t have told them about it because I made it a policy to keep anything about my escape hatch from Augie and Ben. Even though I trusted them both, the less they knew about any of it, the better. But somehow Clevenger had divined the possibility that I had a boat, and was now combing the seaside haunts up and down the coast, looking for me.

Well, let him. His thugs could stake out the docks all they wanted; I sure as hell now wasn’t going anywhere near my daysailer until all this had passed. As long as they were sticking to the water, they weren’t getting close enough to bite. As long as they didn’t have my name, they had nothing.

Nothing.

“Hey, it’s Charles. You coming down?”

“Coming down where?” I said.

“To the club. You had a game scheduled this morning, right?”

“What kind of game?”

“Jon, what’s going on? We don’t play badminton.”

“But we didn’t plan to play today, did we?”

“Not us. You and your friend.”

“My friend?” I said.

“I was in the pro shop when he called and asked if you were a member there. When Don asked why he was asking, the guy on the phone said that you two had made plans for this morning but that he couldn’t make it. And you know, I wasn’t doing anything today.”

“That’s a change.”

“So I thought if you were planning to play anyway and he wasn’t showing up, maybe I could jump in.”

“I wasn’t planning to play.”

“That’s a little weird.”

“Must be a mix-up,” I said. “Did he give his name, my friend?”

“Cleckinger or something, I think it was.”

“Clevenger?”

“That’s it. Is he any good?”

“The son of a bitch is a plus,” I said.

Even before I hung up on Charles, something cold and familiar raised the hackles on my neck. I leaned forward and looked out the window to the street in front of the house. Empty. But it wouldn’t be for long.

He had found me. It had found me. I was fearfully peeking out the windows of my house, just days after I had fearfully peeked out the windows of Augie’s house, and the terror was the same. My precautions had been for naught; my lines of obfuscation had
been obliterated with an alacrity that stunned. A dagger through tissue paper, a baseball bat to the ribs.

Clevenger, that wily bastard, had gotten my name.