Moondogs (39 page)

Monique heard gravel crunching and turned, thinking Reynato had returned from the makeshift lobby. He had, but he wasn’t alone. The man with the horribly scarred arms who’d sat across from them at
Junior’s Tapsihan
stood beside him. Actually, slightly behind him. So close that they were touching. It took Monique a moment to process what she was seeing. Reynato’s right arm was pinned behind his back. The scarred man held a stubby little penknife to his throat. He must have followed them. He must have caught Reynato as he exited the lobby.

“It’s all right,” Reynato cooed. “Don’t panic.”

Monique was panicking.

“I think he just wants the car,” Reynato said, sounding less than calm himself. The man with the scarred arms nodded, exposing his face under his ball-cap as he did so. It wasn’t just his arms—his whole face looked like hamburger. Monique edged back to the Honda, pulled the keys out of the ignition and threw them at Reynato’s feet. The scarred man snorted and kicked them away.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked in Tagalog. “What do you want?”

The scarred man didn’t answer. His penknife sank a quarter of an inch into Reynato’s neck. Blood bubbled about the blade, trickling down his throat and disappearing below the fabric of his polo shirt. Monique remembered the nightmares she’d been having. Shawn and Joseph and
Leila tied to palm trees in the jungle. Bandits hacking them to death with bolo knives, holding their heads in the air and posing for a digital camera. Her chest began to shake with sobs—she couldn’t help it. She felt pressure squeeze her lungs. Reynato’s eyes widened. “You’re almost there,” he whispered. “Do it. You can do it. Do it.”

“Wait,” she managed. “I’ve got something …” She edged back to the Honda and retrieved her purse from the backseat. She unzipped it and inched toward Reynato and the scarred man.

“Do it,” Reynato said. “Fucking
do it
. Bring the world down on him.”

Monique held out the open purse and the scarred man peered inside, a little hesitantly. She pulled out some bright cash and dropped it on the gravel between them. The scarred man looked down, and when he looked back up she had her pepper spray in hand. There was no way to get just him. She pressed the plunger home and doused them both in poison mist. They howled, Reynato dropping to the ground and the scarred man staggering backward. Monique gave him a running kick to the crotch, and when he fell she sprayed him again, almost emptying the can into his eyes and mouth. She took the penknife from his limp fingers and stabbed the puny, one-inch blade into his arm. She saw Shawn and Joseph, bloodied, in her head. Her rage was uncontainable.

The scarred man ran for it and Monique chased after, punching him in the back of the head, tripping him up at the heels. Blind, he crashed into a parked car and then toppled into the empty officers’ swimming pool. He scrambled out at the far end, disappearing into a bamboo thicket, howling as he went.

Monique rushed to the old administration building and told them to call the police. Then she helped Reynato into their room, locking the door, deadbolt and chain. He went into the tiny bathroom to wash out his eyes while she sat on the edge of the bed and tried to calm herself. For the longest time she was sure he was weeping. But when she went into the bathroom she realized he was laughing. Uncontrollably.

Chapter 25

After chasing Solita out and getting her barred from the hotel, Benicio spent some time tidying up his father’s ransacked suite. He began by collecting the papers she’d scattered across the floor and arranging them in vaguely relevant stacks on the table in the study. There were invoices, travel itineraries and printed e-mails—some achingly polite, others laced with profanity. There were also a few coffee-stained designers’ sketches for a some-day dive resort that Howard must have been planning to build down south. In one of the sketches the resort was called
Benny’s
. In another,
Paradise Rock
. He rolled the sketches together and placed them on the table as well.

The bedroom was a disaster, so he hit that next. He got the blazers and suit-jackets off the bed, turned their pockets back in and left them swaying quietly on wooden hangers in the closet. He picked socks up off the floor and folded them in pairs, turning one inside the other the way his mother used to. One of the socks had something hard inside the toe—a tightly folded wad of pesos that Solita must have missed. Benicio opened a dresser drawer to replace the socks, but after hovering over it for a full minute he found himself taking things out instead of putting them back in. He went through all the rolls of long black business socks that Solita hadn’t got to. Most were empty but many contained dollars, euros, and brightly colored pesos; bank-fresh and of high denominations. Benicio pulled the whole drawer out and emptied it onto the bed. He did this with all the dresser drawers, as well as his father’s nightstand and the storage cubbies in the closet. He went into the bathroom, where the sight of his father’s dive gear hanging from a sturdy towel rack momentarily startled him. It reflected darkly in the medicine cabinet door like the ghost of a frogman. He opened the cabinet, scooped the contents into a billowing undershirt, and added that to the mess atop the bed.

His fingers shook a little as he set about unfolding, unwrapping and
unscrewing Howard’s things. He anticipated—even hungered for—a discovery that would shock him. Maybe a coke-dusted pocket mirror, a threatening letter from a missing person, some precious stones in a nondescript satchel or a ball gag. But all he found was money and a few nude photographs of Solita. He folded one of the photos three times over and placed it between Bobby’s and Monique’s business cards in his wallet. Then he laid out the cash in neat piles of like currencies. He counted it, and after converting those he was familiar with got a sum that was a little over $500,000. Christ. They were well off, he knew that, but half a million dollars? With no more security than a rubber band and a not-so-creative hiding place? Benicio counted a second time to make sure and then a third time to make sure of that. He did it a fourth time, and then a fifth.

HE AND ALICE
spent the next two days at the embassy. On Thursday the Marine on duty granted them visitor’s badges, and they passed hours in a tiny media center in the annex. They were idle, mostly. Alice read yellowing stacks of back-issue
Inquirers
and
Bulletins
—her notes beside her always—while Benicio pretended to do research about the Abu Sayyaf online. But he was really just thinking about Solita. Solita and June. Solita and June, and all that cash he’d found in his father’s suite. The hours passed very slowly.

On Friday they met his father’s business partner for lunch at a carpeted Chinese restaurant across the boulevard. No one ate much. Hon was already there when they arrived, and he shot up from his table. His face shone with the memory of blubbering, and when they hugged—Benicio tried for the handshake but Hon was intent on the hug—Benicio felt the unpleasant slickness of cooled tears on his cheek. Hon hugged Alice as well, and Benicio was reminded of Howard when they’d picked him up at O’Hare, before the funeral. Howard had hugged her just like that. He hadn’t known who Alice was, but he knew she was with Benicio, and it was a sad time, so she got a hug, too.

Hon led them back to his table, where he’d been drinking ice water from a beer mug and eating a bowl of maraschino cherries. They sat.
Hon stared at Benicio for a long while. “You’re different,” he finally said. “In the last picture I saw, you looked very different. You looked so much younger.” He ate a cherry. It seemed he was going to start crying again. “I’m so fucking sorry,” he said, quavering. “I know I’m not, but I feel responsible.”

“You shouldn’t feel responsible,” Alice said. She briefly touched his arm.

“I know. I’m not. But still. I should have said something. I should have checked in with other people when Howie was a no-show. I just figured he was with Charlie. I guess he figured that Howie was with me. And it’s just like Howie, you know? When he wants something … he
wants
it. He needs a break—he goes. He takes it. He ignores your calls. How could I have known what happened?”

“You couldn’t,” Benicio said.

“I couldn’t,” Hon said. He smiled sadly, as though happy they three agreed on this. He ate another cherry. “I saw you today, late morning,” he said. “If your dad could see it, he’d be really proud.”

“Thanks,” Benicio said, but he was pretty sure his father wouldn’t be proud. That morning he’d given a brief statement; hemmed-in under a scrim of cameras and boom microphones, just a rickety composite podium between him and the pressing press. Monique had been confident it would get carried wide but even she seemed surprised as they watched Benicio on CNN International not ten minutes later on a television in her office. The shot changed to stock footage of a jungle clearing where Abu Sayyaf terrorists rested rifle butts on their hips and pumped rocket-propelled grenade launchers above their heads like little barbells, the audio from Benicio’s statement still running as their mouths moved soundlessly. Then the picture of his father filled the screen—the one recovered from the kidnappers’ cell phone. It was the first time Benicio had seen it, and it was terrible. The shot switched back to him as he concluded the statement and took questions. He looked much more composed on TV than he remembered feeling. Too composed, he thought.

Benicio got up from his chair across from Hon and moved to sit in the one beside him. “I have something I need to ask you,” he said. The
gesture, and the question, seemed to put Hon on guard. He straightened and rubbed his cheeks with his shirtsleeve. He reached for another cherry and, finding that they were all gone, just left his fingers in the syrup at the bottom of the bowl.

“You found out about her,” Hon said. “I already know. Bobby told me how you cornered him last weekend. He shouldn’t have said anything. She’s none of his business.”

Alice perked up and shifted in her chair. Benicio hoped she’d excuse herself, but she didn’t. “That’s not what I want to talk about,” he said.

“Good,” Hon said, “because she’s none of my business, either.”

“I know she’s not. She’s nobody’s business but Howard’s.”

Hon nodded. His eyes had dried, but his cheeks were still wet, and fluorescent light shimmered off of them. “Well, what else can I tell you?” he asked.

Benicio leaned forward. “I want to know where Howard stands—money-wise. Why is there cash hidden all over his suite?”

Hon went from looking sad to just plain uncomfortable. He pulled his fingers from the cherry bowl and wiped them clean on a cocktail napkin. “Is this really the best time to be thinking bad thoughts about Howie?”

“I’m not thinking bad thoughts. But I want to know why he has eight thousand euros in his tissue box.”

Again, Alice straightened. Her leg touched Benicio’s under the table, but if it was a signal, he ignored it.

“You think Howie’s not straight with you?” Hon asked.

“I know he’s not straight with me. I’d like you to be.” Benicio tried to scooch his chair a little closer to Hon, but because of the deep carpet all he did was rock forward and back. “Was my father … is he into something illegal?”

“Illegal?” Hon grimaced and snorted. “You need laws for illegal. That’s
cash-on-hand
.” He said it as a single word. “That’s workable business work.”

“It’s a lot of cash on hand.”

“We have a lot of business.”

“How much? How much money has he hidden away?”

Hon’s expression completely hardened. He finished his ice water and set the glass down roughly. “Your father, my friend, is in some big-time trouble. We don’t know where he is. And all you want to know is how much money he has?”

“That’s not all I want to know,” Benicio said. “That’s all that you can tell me.”

Hon moved his tongue over his teeth. He pulled a little pencil out of his suit pocket—it looked like something a bookie would use, or a mini-golfer—and carefully etched a number on the syrup-smeared cocktail napkin. He slid the napkin across the table and snapped his hands back, like it was a dirty note passed in class. Alice made a show of not looking at it.

Benicio picked up the napkin and counted zeroes—five, six, seven of them—enough to render the preceding digit almost meaningless. Enough to make this situation with Solita and June a lot more complicated than it had been. Hon patted down his lapels and pants pockets in preparation to leave. “That’s only more or less,” he said. “Not counting his private investments or bonds, which I don’t know about. Not our establishments either, which are all half-half, anyway. Howie’s very liquid.” He stood and looked down at them, quietly. It was plain that he wanted to say something else before leaving and was working out the wording. Finally he mumbled: “Maybe Howie doesn’t deserve better than you. But I wish he had it.”

“Hey,” Alice said. “Hey. You’re upset. But that’s enough.”

“That’s right,” Hon said, turning to her as though he could persuade her to switch sides. As though there were sides. “Yes. I’m upset. I shouldn’t be the only one.”