Side by Side (5 page)

Sean’s features were like stone. Then she leaned down and kissed her husband on the cheek. “Well, if that’s the case, you two guys better get moving.”

7

Ferny Ernest Smoot, who was supposed to keep tabs on the old judge’s comings and goings, hated his name, so he answered only to “Click.” Click had followed Judge Fondren from his big house in Meyers Park to the Westin Hotel in downtown Charlotte. There the judge met a light-skin black woman and the pair sat down at a table in the hotel restaurant. Click took a seat at a table across the room.

Click’s father, Peanut Smoot, would want to know if the lady was a cop, but since she wasn’t in uniform, that wouldn’t be easy to figure out unless Click was to ask her, which of course he couldn’t. She could have been a businesswoman, a lawyer, another judge, the judge’s secretary, or even a mistress. She was old, but not half as old as the judge was. She was pretty good looking, but she didn’t have breasts that amounted to much, and she was more short than tall.

Click knew the woman was staying at the hotel because she signed the bill that the waitress put on the table. What was odd was, after she signed the ticket, she leaned over close and said something to the judge, who turned to glance at a bearded man seated by himself across the restaurant. The woman leaned back and also looked over at the man. The bearded man they looked at didn’t notice them looking at him. So Click studied them all without acting like he was doing anything but eating—somebody who didn’t have any reason not to be minding his own business.

The bearded man was narrow-shouldered, pudgy, and looked to Click like a college professor whose mother still dressed him. He seemed to be reading a newspaper, but his eyes didn’t shift around on the page. He was either the world’s slowest reader, or he wasn’t reading at all. Then Click saw that the man was actually looking at the window beside him, using its reflection like a mirror to keep an eye on the woman and the judge.

Click wondered if the man had noticed him, too.

The judge got up all the sudden, said his good-bye to the pretty woman, and walked out of the restaurant. Click was only half done eating his nine-dollar hamburger—for which he didn’t even have a bill yet—couldn’t very well get up and take off after the old man without attracting attention. What he did was sit tight, eat the rest of his meal, and watch the woman, who waited a few minutes before she too walked out. That happened just as Click was forking up the last of his french fries.

As soon as she left, the bearded man set his newspaper aside and left the dining room. Click noticed that the man had signed a ticket too before he got up. So that meant they were both staying at the hotel.

Click set fifteen dollars on the table by the bill and walked out chewing. He would rather have used a stolen credit card, but that would take too long. As it was, by the time Click made the turns that put him in a position to see the end of the lobby, the woman and the bearded man were getting into separate elevators even though the man clearly had time to get in hers with her. They didn’t look at each other, but the woman did glance at Click. Click was sure they were together when the cabs both stopped at the fourth floor.

Even though his daddy would be pissed that Click lost track of the judge, the news about the meeting with the stranger should make up for it. His daddy couldn’t get too mad seeing how Click had warned him earlier that very morning that they needed more people to follow the judge right. Peanut had said, “No need to leash a bitch when you have her puppies in a box.”

Click went outside in the courtyard to use his cell phone. He was right about both things—Peanut was mad that the judge got away, but real interested in the woman and the bearded man.

“I shoulda known better than to send a child to do a man’s job,” Peanut told Click several times to let him know he meant it. And don’t think Click didn’t know better than to mention the fact that he had told his daddy following somebody wasn’t a one-man job.

Peanut agreed that, since the bearded man and the pretty woman were both staying at the same hotel on the same floor, but acting like they didn’t know each other, they were up to something. He said they needed watching more than the judge.

“It’s the damned FBI,” Peanut said.

“You sure?” Click said. “The man with the beard was goofy looking. He looked like he was supposed to be a college prof in some low-budget porn video.”

“Feds,” his father told him. “Sure as caged chimps sling balls of monkey dung. All the agents aren’t in slick suits. I need to think on it some.”

Click knew that the judge had screwed up by defying his father’s orders not to bring in the cops. Watching the judge was pointless now because the jurist was going to be punished exactly as he had been warned. Blood would have to flow or Peanut’s threats would be seen as less than certain.

Click was ready to leave the hotel. What more could he do? He wanted to go by Best Buy and pick out a few CDs, get some more memory for his Dell laptop because it hung up on his favorite interactive game, Urban Plague, and that lag had gotten him killed the night before. His heart sank when he found out that wasn’t going to happen today.

“Stick around there and keep your eyes open,” Peanut told him. “Call me if anything happens.”

“What kind of anything?” Click asked.

“You’ll know when you see it. Like more cop-looking people coming from and going to her floor.”

“Daddy, I can’t very well park out on College Street and watch.”

“Stay inside then. Blend in and keep a sharp eye out.”

“What the hell do I do to blend in—get a job here?”

Click snapped the phone shut before his daddy could ream him out and frowned. He looked at the tree growing in a giant pot and at the plants that took up a whole corner of the hotel lobby and imagined himself squatting in the prissy foliage wearing camouflage overalls. Of all the members of the Smoot clan, only Click didn’t hunt. He didn’t like being in the woods, especially after he’d gotten chiggers so bad he’d gone to the emergency room about it. He’d known the nurse was trying hard not to laugh because his privates were swollen up and itched so bad he was crying. He also didn’t like sitting still all day with frozen toes, and once he killed a deer, he had to get really nasty field-dressing it. And his siblings always smeared his face with deer blood even though it was only done when you killed the first buck of your whole life. Peanut, Click’s brothers Buck, Curt, and Burt, and his sister Dixie could have the damned woods all to themselves, as far as Click was concerned.

Looking around at the ocean of open space punctuated with modern furniture, the polished marble and glass, he tried to figure out just how the hell he was going to manage an act of camouflage.

8

With his perfect white hair, bushy brows, his neatly trimmed mustache and perfect nails, attorney Ross Laughlin looked like an actor playing a distinguished senator. He wore a three-thousand-dollar Brioni suit, a three-hundred-dollar custom-made silk dress shirt, an Armani tie and thousand-dollar British shoes sewn especially for his feet. A massive gold signet ring bearing his family crest encircled his ring finger, and a platinum Rolex President wrapped his wrist. The attorney sat on the chilled steel chair and placed his briefcase to his right side on the tabletop, which was marred with graffiti. Popping open the briefcase, he removed the crocodile-skin notebook and opened it. Taking his Faber-Castell ink pen from his inside coat pocket, he uncapped it and started scribbling on the thick paper.

When Colonel Hunter Bryce was led into the room by two jail guards, Laughlin was busily making notes. Only when the guards exited the room did Laughlin look up at the middle-aged man built like a gladiator in his prime.

“Colonel,” he said.

“Ross,” Bryce said, running a hand over the gray stubble on his head.

Laughlin turned his eyes to look out through the security glass panel, and saw that the guards out in the hallway were not paying any particular attention to the prisoner and his attorney. The room had no audio or video surveillance because it was strictly for client-attorney conferences, which made it every bit as secure as the confessional.

“Sarnov is in town,” Laughlin told Bryce. “I am meeting with him this afternoon. Max is keeping him company.” Max Randall was Bryce’s right-hand man and his official representative until he was free. Max got Bryce’s orders through Laughlin.

“Sarnov should be in a good mood,” Bryce observed. “He’s two days away from taking delivery on his merchandise.”

“I doubt his mood could be described as good. His employers don’t like being held over a barrel, and after blaming you, I am sure they hold Serge somewhat responsible for the deal.”

Bryce shrugged. “If they weren’t over that barrel, I would be facing a life sentence, and they would not have a steady supply of the merchandise in the years to come.” As he spoke, Bryce cracked the knuckles on his powerful hands one by one.

Laughlin kept his expression flat as he scribbled gibberish on the lined paper with his ludicrously expensive pen. “Over a barrel” was a euphemism for the fact that Colonel Bryce had taken a three-million-dollar advance from a consortium of predominantly Russian criminal organizations on a nine-million-dollar total payment for a container of military weaponry. Bryce’s inconvenient arrest for stabbing an undercover agent to death had put the deal in limbo because Colonel Bryce had refused to divulge the location of the weapons to the Russians until he was free of the murder charge. It was a dangerous gambit, but Bryce had always juggled deadly situations like a clown kept tennis balls aloft. The man had nerves of tempered steel.

“It is a dangerous game you’ve been playing, Hunter,” Laughlin reminded him. “For me, if not for you.”

“Was
playing,” Bryce corrected. “After Monday all will be forgiven and we’ll be slamming back vodkas with them. You’ll forgive me, won’t you, Ross?”

“Your holding out on Intermat has put me in a very precarious position with good and valued clients,” Laughlin said. “You put me between them and the potential loss of their money, and that is a very dangerous place.”

“Your past business with them is nothing compared to the deals we will do in the future,” Colonel Bryce said smugly. His eyes radiated total confidence.

Laughlin had done ten million the past year with Intermat in hijacked cigarettes, more than that in pure grain alcohol furnished by a distillery, and they were expanding into new avenues of revenue. Eventually the Russians would take the whole operation, but by then Laughlin would be ready to retire.

“I’m just a middleman in your dealing with the Russians,” Laughlin reminded the colonel. “I am getting too small a cut for the degree of danger.”

“Being a middleman has its rewards. And its risks,” Bryce said, smiling. “They may not like being over this barrel, but they see into the future and the barrels of gold that await.”

“They are like Colombian drug lords without the reputation for the drug lords’ compassion.”

“So, what about the pair?” Bryce asked.

“Locked away,” the lawyer answered.

“You trust them to
properly
handle the disposal?” Bryce asked. “Them” referred to the Smoots. “Randall should be doing it.”

“They are highly proficient at making things disappear,” Laughlin said. “I suspect they enjoy it. And Randall can be connected to you. The Smoots, with one exception, are expendable and totally ignorant of my involvement.”

An image of Peanut Smoot’s children formed in Ross Laughlin’s mind. It was a chilling portrait. The attorney couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be at their mercy.

If it weren’t for the enormous stakes, Ross Laughlin would certainly have felt very sorry for Lucy Dockery and her child.

9

Winter Massey let the hot water drum on the top of his head. He heard the bathroom door opening and, seconds later, a naked Sean pulled the curtain back and stepped into the tub, closing the curtain behind her.

“You need your back scrubbed?” she asked, putting her hands on his shoulders and squeezing.

Winter wiped the water out of his eyes, and when he turned to her, she pressed herself against him and touched her lips gently to his.

“You know,” he said, smiling, “I don’t have time for this.”

She said, “It’s been my experience that you don’t take all that long.”

Winter hugged her to him and laughed.

Afterwards they dried off and dressed. Sean had already packed his clothes in an overnighter that waited by the door. She sat on the edge of the bed, legs crossed at the knees, and he felt her golden-brown eyes on his back as he stood at the open gun safe peering into the drawers at his handguns.

Winter took out his SIG Sauer 226 and hefted it. The 9mm had been his first service piece, but he had set it aside for one in .40 caliber—a trade-off of fewer rounds per magazine and a bit less penetration, for the extra knockdown it offered. He had a third SIG chambered in .45 automatic, which he considered because of its superior stopping power. The forty was a compromise.

Sean seemed to be reading his mind. “Massey, just take the forty.”

He lifted the .40 caliber from the felt-lined drawer along with a pair of extra magazines and set them on the top of the safe. He took his shoulder holster from another drawer, and a couple of boxes of ammunition from another.

“All you can do is the best you can do, Massey.”

Winter opened another drawer in the safe and took out an envelope that contained two thousand dollars in hundreds, fifties, and a few twenties. Having cash on your person and using it for your expenses was important. Most people with information to sell didn’t take promises or plastic. And he wouldn’t be turning in an expense report.

Winter clipped his cell phone onto his belt, put an extra charged battery into his pocket, and ran through his mental checklist. He decided he had everything he needed, and picked up his lightweight leather jacket by the collar.

“Call me when you can,” Sean said, standing. They embraced and kissed tenderly. Reaching behind him, she gave his buttocks a squeeze.

“Call you what?” he said, kissing her forehead.

“Call me in love, Winter James Massey,” she whispered into his ear.

“Some guys have it all,” he said.

“So do some gals.”

She accompanied him to the front porch. Rush and Faith Ann were seated in the porch swing. Between them, Olivia slept in her car seat. Winter kissed each of them and promised he’d see them on Monday.

“Keep on the sunny side, Win,” Hank said, from the rocker.

“Always,” Winter said. “Keep everybody in line, Hank.” He patted his friend on his shoulder before taking Sean’s hand and walking with her to his truck.

Sean held the door open and, after Winter climbed in, she kissed him again and squeezed his forearm.

“Hey, Massey,” she said. “Promise me one thing?”

“Anything.”

“Just this once, try not to get all busted up.”