Riding the Rap (13 page)

But when the feeling kept growing on him he had to look at it again—sailing down 95 among semitrailers, tourists in rentals, retirees in white cars that all looked alike. What made him keep thinking Harry might be in that house?

A feeling. Yeah, but more than that. Something Falco had said that made him think of Bobby Deo.

The pruners.

A guy staying at the house who carried pruners, wore them with his good clothes and could've had his pruners with him when he robbed a grocery store. Bobby and Louis. In the store to get snacks and Jell-O. And the last time Raylan had Jell-O . . . It was at Wolfie's having lunch with Harry and Joyce and Harry said he always had Jell-O for dessert, strawberry with fruit in it. Harry said try it and Raylan did—and it was Jell-O all right, no better or worse than it ever was.

If Harry was being held, they'd have to feed him. But would they ask him what he wanted? Why not? Keep him happy. But what reason would they have to hold him?

Outside of money.

Harry had it and Ganz didn't and Falco said Ganz was dirty—into illegal deals, big-time gambling, bank fraud. . . .

Kidnapping?

If Harry was in there against his will, that's what it was, a federal offense; you could get life. Ganz had the right guy for it, Bobby Deo, who used to go out and snatch fugitives. Bobby picks the place to meet, the restaurant, because Dawn's there. Harry arrives and Dawn sets him up. For her old friend Warren Ganz.

But if it's a kidnapping, how do they score? Who pays? Harry doesn't have a wife. All he has is money.

Raylan looked at it for a minute or so; it didn't tell him anything.

The only thing he saw to do was go in the house and look around. Not with a consent to search, they'd never let him in. You could do it with Colombians because back home they couldn't refuse a search and thought it worked the same way here.

He could call it exigent circumstances, the imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm and break the door down. And if Harry wasn't there get sent to a new assignment like Minot, North Dakota.

The only other way, get a search warrant. Describe the premises in detail, what the house looked like, not just the address. Give the reason for requesting the warrant, also in detail, the probable cause why he wanted to gain entry, what he expected to find and why and show it to a U.S. attorney. Leave out the pruners and the Jell-O; no one would follow that kind of thinking, even though it was something he knew and could feel. If he was lucky and all the U.S. attorney did was put in a bunch of commas, he'd then take it to the U.S. magistrate and stand there while Her Honor read it, while she frowned and gave him a look, said something like, “Mr. Ganz owes Mr. Arno a sum of money, so you believe Mr. Arno is being held against his will in Mr. Ganz's home?” Her Honor would tell him his probable cause sounded like wishful thinking. He wouldn't in a million years get the magistrate's signature.

In the funeral home parking lot he'd told Falco about Harry being missing, the reason he'd met Warren Ganz's mother. Falco agreed with Torres: wait a few days and get Missing Persons on it.

“But what about Dawn?” Raylan said. “You think she really is psychic?”

“I think sometimes, anyway.”

“What if she can tell me where Harry is?”

“You mean using her clairvoyance?”

“It wouldn't be enough to get a warrant and take a look, would it? The word of a psychic?”

“You'd still have to show probable cause, get into all that. I'd talk to her though, why not.”

“You think, if Harry was kidnapped, Dawn could be involved in some way?”

Falco had stared at him over the roof of the car before saying, “You think she's stupid?”

Raylan wasn't sure that was an answer but let it go. He said, “You mentioned you put a wire on her, for the meeting with Ganz? I'd like to hear it.”

“Anytime you want.”

 

Dawn wasn't at the restaurant and the hostess hadn't seen her all day. She was there yesterday, and the day before; Dawn hadn't said anything about taking time off. Raylan picked up one of her
Certified Medium & Spiritualist
cards and rubbed it between his fingers walking back to his car. It didn't tell him anything.

He did have a feeling she wasn't going to be home, and when he reached the house on
Ramona saw he was right. No red car in the drive. He went up to knock on the door and looked at the sign as he waited, at
DREAM INTERPRETATIONS, PAST-LIFE REGRESSIONS
. Pay to get regressed back to a coal mine and breathe that dust again. Raylan walked around the house looking in windows cloudy with salt mist, careful not to get stuck by palmettos. He looked into dim, dismal rooms, at the old worn-out furniture, the sofa he'd sat in and felt the springs, at watermarks staining the wall where the picture of Jesus and the children hung, and wondered if it depressed her to walk in the house. She could be helping Ganz as a way to get out of there.

Raylan didn't feel like hanging around. He got in the Jaguar and drove up to Manalapan with the idea of staking out Ganz's house for a while, see if anyone came or left . . .

And saw it happening before he even got there, as he came past groomed oleander toward the wall of trash vegetation marking Ganz's property, saw Bobby Deo's Cadillac pop out of the drive and turn north. Two guys in the car.

Now Raylan had to make a decision quick: follow or, with them gone, see about getting in the house.

C
hip watched Bobby's Cadillac on the television screen until the car was through the shrubs along the drive and out of view. Finally. He'd been waiting all morning for them to leave so he could talk to Harry.

Trying to hurry them along didn't work. “You want to get the show on the road—isn't that what you told me?”

Louis said they'd leave when it was time to leave. Louis dragging his feet, Bobby taking half the morning to get dressed, Ganz smoking weed. This was before the guy in the hat showed up on
the patio and spoke to Louis and Bobby. Ganz lit another joint, sucked it down listening to Louis say the man was a United States marshal, with the star, with the gun on his hip under his coat. Could see it when he took out his I.D. But mostly the man was a friend of Harry's, the reason he came. Chip toking, Louis saying the man's seen how it is now, who's who, and won't have a reason to come back. By the time Louis finished Chip was worry-free, zonked on the weed, able to ask deadpan, “A U.S. marshal? He ride in on a horse?” Louis grinned while Bobby sat there with a bug up his ass as usual. Chip thinking, even if it was the same guy who spoke to Dawn, so what?

Wait some more, finally one o'clock before Louis said it was time and they left, the program now back on track in spite of interruptions, shit happening, revising the timetable, his two helpers thinking they knew more than he did. Why argue? If they wanted to speed up the program, get it done, fine. Chip thinking, telling himself, Go with the flow, man. Saying, You cool? Yeah, you're cool. He felt it, full of his old confidence, in control. . . .

Pushed a button on the remote, to switch the picture from the front drive to the hostage room upstairs, and stared at the picture for several moments—at the cots, the chains on the floor, trash, boxes of snacks—before he realized, Christ, Harry wasn't there.

Ganz came up out of the sofa.

 

The black guy had stood behind him the whole time while he cut the blindfold off with scissors, so Harry didn't get a look at him. All he knew for sure, it was the same guy who'd said the other night, “We do some business. Just me and you.” Harry had thought at the time the guy was putting on a Bahamian accent so his voice wouldn't be recognized. This time the guy said, “Go on in the bathroom and clean yourself up. Man, you smell ripe.” And Harry realized what the guy had was the trace of a Bahamian accent, maybe left over from when he was a kid. The guy stood close breathing on him, Saying, “There's a toothbrush in there, a razor, I believe anything you need.” The guy who wanted to do some business being nice to him. Making a play, it sounded like, to cut out the other guys—Harry pretty sure now there were three of them. He said, “I can't take a shower with these chains on.”

“Do the best you can,” the black guy said. “Take a whore bath. You know what that is?”

“Before you ever heard of it,” Harry said.

The guy handed him a bathing cap to use as a blindfold, with instructions when to put it on, didn't say anything about doing business, and left. Harry washed up and shaved; next thing would be to talk the guy into a shower and promote some clean clothes. He looked around his cell for the first time, the room bigger than he'd thought; looked at the windows covered with plywood and shuffled over to see if he could work the sheet free, but it was nailed onto the window frame.

Later on, Harry was coming out of the bathroom when he heard the key turn in the lock. The door swung open. Harry saw the look on the guy's face, a different guy . . .

 

What Chip saw was the blindfold gone, something else covering his hair that Harry reached up and stretched down over his eyes: a rubber bathing cap, white with a yellow flower design that Chip's mother used to put on when she swam in the ocean, years and years ago. He could see her wearing it.

Harry raised his arms as though to protect himself, saying, “I didn't see you, okay? Honest to God, I didn't. The other guy said it was okay to take it off when I went to the bathroom or if I was alone, but cover my eyes if anybody came in. I swear I didn't see you.”

Chip said, “But you saw the other guy.”

“No, I didn't, he was behind me. He told me to put the bathing cap on—it's tighter'n hell and hot. Pull it down over my eyes I can't see a goddamn thing.”

Chip said, “He tell you what you have to do?” and watched Harry lower his arms before he spoke.

“What do you mean?”

“Didn't say anything about getting out of here?”

Harry hesitated again. “No. Was he suppose to?”

“Sit down.”

He watched Harry stoop to pick up the chain and shuffle to the cot, used to moving this way.
When he was seated, Ganz walked over and sat down next to him.

“Have you decided?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“What it's worth to you to get out.”

“Name it,” Harry said. “Whatever you want, if I've got it.”

“How about three mil?”

“You kidding? I don't have that kind of money.”

Chip said, “You sure?”

“I know how much I've got put away, about two and a half, two hundred fifty thousand plus some interest.”

“Where is it?”

“In the bank. Barnett branch on Collins.”

“What about in the Bahamas, in the Swiss bank?”

“The Bahamas?”

“Freeport. You forgot about that one. What I'm gonna do,” Chip said, “is give you one day, twenty-four hours, to come up with a way of drawing all the funds out of the Bahamas account and giving it to us, in cash. I mean, of course, without anyone else knowing about it. If I don't like the idea, Harry, you're dead. You pay up, you go home. So it better be the best fucking idea you ever had in your life.”

Harry said, “Do I get my car back? It's brand-new.”

 

He heard the guy say, “That's what you're worried about?” And felt the guy's hand on his
shoulder, pushing on it as he got up from the cot, the guy saying, “Twenty-four hours, Harry,” and a few seconds later heard the door open and close and the key turn.

Harry waited. He said, “You still there?” He waited again, a little longer, and said, “You still there, asshole?” and peeled up the edge of the bathing cap.

He tried now to picture the guy from the glimpse he got of him, no one he'd ever seen before, but a type: Miami Beach, there were hundreds of those skinny middle-aged guys around with tans, retired, nothing to do; they sat on benches in Lummus Park watching the models getting their pictures taken. But this one—in a place right on the ocean, carpeting that had to run seventy, eighty bucks a square yard easy, expensive fixtures in the bathroom, a marble floor . . . Did the guy live here? He didn't sound like a wiseguy, he sounded like a guy trying to act cool. Giving him twenty-four hours to come up with an idea—that was bullshit. If they knew he had an account in the Bahamas, all they had to do was get him to transfer the money from his account to their account. Open one—what was hard about that?

Harry ate an Oreo cream cookie thinking: They start out with this great idea, how to score a bundle. Propose a deal, dress it up. If it works and they get the money they let you go. He believed they would, otherwise why bother with a blindfold? But the black guy had his own proposition, cut the other guys out, and if he did
he'd have to kill them. So that's the kind of people you're dealing with, Harry thought. Some guys with an idea who most likely never tried it before, felt their way along without knowing shit about what they were doing. So you don't know either, Harry thought. It could come apart for any number of reasons: not trusting each other, or one of them tells somebody else, the wrong person, the cops enter the picture and these guys panic . . . Harry thinking, The cops should be on it by now anyway, for Christ sake. What were they doing? Buck Torres, he'd know you're missing. Joyce would call him first thing. It got Harry excited. But then he thought,
No, she wouldn't call Buck, she'd call Raylan . . . Well, that was okay, get the cowboy on his trail. But would he have his heart in it? That fucking cowboy might just as soon you stayed missing.

No, he'd get on it. Wouldn't he?

 

What Raylan did was drive along Ocean Boulevard looking for vacant property, someplace he could park and cut through to the beach. As a last resort he could go up to the shopping center by the Lantana bridge and park there; he didn't think it was too far, maybe a mile. He watched his odometer. At six-tenths of a mile he came up on a bunch of Australian pines, big and scraggly, bent from years of wind off the ocean, the trees lining an empty lot of scrub growth. It looked good. He'd leave the Jag here and approach Ganz's place from the ocean side. Take his boots off to walk along the beach.

 

Chip was back in the study keeping watch, the hostage room still showing on the TV screen: Harry Arno, without the bathing cap, sitting on his cot eating a cookie . . . eating another one, digging into the package of Oreos again, Jesus, biting into another one. It made Chip hungry to watch. Not for cookies, though, popcorn. Nothing hit the spot after smoking weed like hot buttered popcorn laced with garlic salt. Thinking about it he had to swallow. Sit here and shove handfuls of popcorn into his mouth while he kept watch. He remembered there was a big jar of Newman's Own popcorn, unopened, in the kitchen and it gave him a good feeling. He preferred Paul Newman's to Orville Redenbacher's, though Orville's wasn't bad. It was nice to be a little stoned and know the situation was in hand. Watching Harry the bookmaker eating Oreo creams. Chip grinning now—hey, shit, look at him, still eating. An Oreo wouldn't be bad . . . Or peanut brittle—there
was a box of it in Harry's room, right there, on the floor. Jesus, peanut brittle, he could taste it. That's what he needed, something sweet. First scan the grounds, then go upstairs and get the peanut brittle. Fuck Harry, he had his cookies. Chip pushed a button on the remote. Nothing going on out front. Now the back of the property . . .

And Chip felt himself jump, the same way he'd jumped ten minutes ago when he looked at the room upstairs and didn't see Harry. What he saw this time, out beyond the patio, was the guy
in the hat again, the U.S. marshal, by the trees at the edge of the yard, the guy pulling on his boots, looking toward the house and now coming this way past the pool, coming across the patio, the guy in the hat and dark suit in full view now, close, filling the screen, looking up as he approached and now he was out of the picture, beneath the video camera mounted above the French doors.

The phone rang and Chip reached for it.

It was in his mind he didn't want the guy to hear any sounds from inside the house and had the phone in his hand before he realized his mistake. What he should've done, let the guy hear the phone ring and no one answer. . . . It wasn't too late to hang up. He started to when he heard, “Chip?” and thought he recognized the voice but wasn't sure.

“Who is this?”

“Who do you think?” Dawn said.

“Listen, I can't talk to you right now.”

“Someone's there?”

Chip watched the TV screen, the empty patio, wanting the guy to appear again, see him walk away. All the doors were locked; he'd made sure of that after Louis and Bobby left. The guy wouldn't break in—he couldn't, he was a federal officer, for Christ sake.

“Chip? I'm at Chuck and Harold's. . . .”

“I know—something came up, I couldn't make it.”

“You don't have my money, do you?”

“Tomorrow, how's that?”

“You're stringing me along. . . .”

“No, I called, you'd already left,” Ganz said.

“I'll check my machine.”

“I didn't leave a message. Listen, I wondered, has that guy been back?”

“What guy?”

“With the hat.”

“No.”

“You said he was a fed, some kind of federal cop.”

“Yeah?”

“How'd you know?”

“I guess the same way I know he's looking for you now. He hasn't found you yet, but he's getting close.” Dawn paused and Chip waited. She said, “He isn't by any chance there right now, is he? Outside, looking around . . . ?”

“I haven't seen him.”

“You mean you haven't spoken to him,” Dawn said.

The front door chimes rang in the hall.

Chip switched the picture on the screen from the patio to the front entrance and there he was, waiting, touching his hat as he looked up at the video camera, Dawn's voice saying, “But you
have
seen him. Chip? Tell me the truth, aren't you looking at him right now?”

He didn't answer.

“Chip?”

He was watching the guy, watching him turn finally and walk off the front stoop, gone, out of camera range, and Chip switched the picture to the driveway. Nothing. No sign of him. Chip
thinking, He's gone around back. And Dawn's voice came on again.

“Chip? He knows we know each other.”

“How could he?”

“It's what he does. He finds out things.”

“All right, let's say he's on it. But you haven't seen me. Listen, I'm not even here. Louis told him I'm down in the Keys, doesn't know when I'll be back.”

“He's talked to Louis,” Dawn said, “but not to you. Is he still there?”

“He left.”

“But you saw him.”

“For a minute,” Chip said. “Not even that.” He felt alert but was thinking in slow motion, trying to hold a conversation and make sense, sound convincing without saying too much, Christ, with a federal U.S. marshal creeping around outside. It was hard, it required nerves of fucking steel. He put the patio on the screen—empty in a glare of sunlight—and said, “Look, you don't know anything, so there's nothing you can tell him, is there?”