Storm Surge (32 page)

Dawkes
nodded. “And even better, the
ledger’s in Currant’s own handwriting.”

Mercer laughed
sharply. “You’re shitting me. He kept records?”

“Currant’s not
the sharpest knife in the drawer. He needed notes to remember who’d bought
him.”

Mercer shook
his head. “Definitely not cut out for a life of crime.” He snorted.
“Amateurs.
So, when Buchan got the ledger, Buchan owned
Currant.”

Dawkes
nodded again.

“And, instead
of turning him in,” Mercer said, “your boss decided to use the book as
leverage. Nice.” He leaned forward. “Well, looks like neither of you ended up
with the little black book,
Dawkes
. Looks like I’ve
got the juice. I got the goods on both Currant and your boss, seems to me.”

Dawkes
looked up at him miserably. “What do
you want?” he said. “We can pay you…”

“I’m fixed for
money,” Mercer said. “I put some away for retirement.”

“So….”

“I’m going to
give you a list of my own,
Dawkes
.
Three
names.
Are you listening?”

Dawkes
nodded again, his eyes fixed on
Mercer’s cold blue ones.

“Sharon
Brennan.
Her daughter, Glory.
And a deputy sheriff
named
Bohler
. You have those names?”

“Yes,”
Dawkes
whispered.

“Tell the
names to me.”

“Sharon
Brennan.
Glory Brennan.
And Deputy
Bohler
.”

Mercer smiled.
“Very good.
You’re a fast learner,
Dawkes
.
You’re brighter than this guy Currant, for sure. How come you’re not the
Senator?”

Dawkes
opened his mouth, but Mercer cut him
off. “Skip it. I really don’t care. Now, I want you to tell your boss something.
And get the word to your friend Currant. These people are to be left alone.
Anything happens to them, and I mean anything, I drop this bomb.
On both of them.”

“I’ll tell
them,”
Dawkes
said.

“I’m not
finished,” Mercer said. “I’ll drop this bomb. But that’ll be just the
beginning. It’ll be war,
Dawkes
.
War
to the knife.
The knife to the hilt.
Do you
understand?”

“You’re
crazy,”
Dawkes
said. “These are powerful people. You
can’t go up against them.”

“You may be
right,” Mercer said, “But it seems to me I’ve done all right so far.” He walked
to the door. “Don’t get up,” he said. “I’ll let myself out.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY

The man sat
alone in a booth at the rear of the restaurant. It was after 3:00
P.M
, the lunch crowd already gone, the early birds not yet
drifting in. The pretty Hispanic waitress kept coming by, refilling his Diet
Coke, pointedly asking for the third time if he wanted to see a menu. “No,” the
man said. “I’m meeting someone.
Maybe then.”
The
waitress scowled and walked away. The man at the table sipped his drink and
looked nervously at the front door. The harsh light of the lowering sun sent
spears of light across the floor of the entranceway. Even in the cool dimness
of the deserted restaurant, the sunbeams reminded everyone that outside was a
fierce unrelenting desert heat.

The door
opened, a string of crude metal cowbells hung on the knob jingling to announce
the new arrival.

It was a tall
man in a baseball cap and sunglasses, dressed in jeans and a faded blue
T-shirt. He was carrying a leather briefcase that looked incongruous with the
rest of his ensemble. The waitress walked up to him and they exchanged a few
words, until the waitress pointed back at the table where the man sat. The man
in the baseball cap walked over. “Mr. Donovan?” the man in the ball cap said.

“Yes,” Donovan
answered. “And you are…?”

“I’m the guy
that called.”

“Well, yes, I
figured that,” Donovan said. “Do you have a name?”

“Not really,”
the man said. He smiled in a way that made Donovan feel uneasy. “It’s kind of a
long story.”

“Look,”
Donovan said. “I know you said on the phone you had a story for me.
Something big.
But the Phoenix
Sun
is a reputable
paper. And, I’m
sorry,
we have rules about totally
anonymous sources.”

The man took
off his sunglasses and looked at Donovan without speaking. “No offense,”
Donovan said quickly.

“None taken,”
the man said. “A man’s got to have rules to live by. Else we’re nothing better
than animals.”

“Right,”
Donovan said.
Oh, god
, he thought,
another
nutjob
.
They were an occupational hazard. He only hoped this one wouldn’t start yelling
about 9/11 or Area 51. “You can call me Mercer,” the man said.

The waitress
came. The man in the ball cap ordered coffee. Donovan declined another soda. At
the rate he was downing caffeine, he’d be after midnight getting to sleep. He
wanted to humor the
nutball
just long enough to avoid
setting him off,
then
make his getaway.

“So, Mr.
Mercer,” Donovan said, “What do you have for me?”

Mercer reached
into his briefcase and pulled out a black notebook. He slid it across the table
to Donovan without speaking. Donovan turned it around, flipped it open. He
studied the pictures for a moment.

“Hey,” he
said, “that’s…”

“Currant,
yes.”

Donvan
flipped through the book some more.
“Do these mean what I think they mean?”

Mercer nodded.

“So tell me,
Mercer, where’d you get this?”

“Took
it off a guy who was trying to steal it back.”

“What?”

“This was in
the safe of Senator John Buchan.”

“And you
caught somebody trying to steal it.”

“Right.
Just call me a concerned citizen.”

The coffee
came. Mercer smiled at the waitress. “Thanks,” he said.

“You’re
welcome,” she smiled back.

“Holy shit,”
Donovan said as she walked away. “This could be huge.”

Mercer took a
sip of his coffee. “It gets better.” He told Donovan the rest of the story.

“Holy shit,”
Donovan shook his head when he was finished. “But I can’t use this. Not yet. I
don’t have enough…”

“I know. You
have rules. I like that. But it’s a string. Pull on it and see what happens.”

“Okay,”
Donovan said. He narrowed his eyes. “So how much do you want for this?”

“Nothing,”
Mercer said.

“So what’s the
catch?”

“No catch,”
Mercer said.

“Sorry,
friend,” Donovan said. “I’m not buying it. Everybody wants something.”

“Oh, I want
something,” Mercer said. “I want you to print that story.”

“Because
you’re a concerned citizen.”

“Yeah,” Mercer
said. “And because someone broke his word to me.” He stood up. “Pull on the
string, Donovan,” he said. “See what unravels.”

“Tell me one
last thing, Mercer,” Donovan said. “Why this paper? I mean, this is the sort of
thing the New York
Times
or the
Washington
Post
would love to have.
Why come all the way out here to Phoenix?”

“I’m not going
near an ocean for a while,” Mercer said. He walked toward the door. The
waitress was on her way over to the table. Mercer stopped her, spoke to her,
handed her something. She looked down at the object in her hand,
then
looked back up with an expression of total shock. She
started to say something, but Mercer was already out the door.

Donovan looked
down at the notebook. This was the kind of story that, if it panned out, could
make careers. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. But he was going to pull on
the string and see where it led. He looked up. The waitress was standing beside
the table, a look of amazement on her face.

“Can I get the
check, please?”

She looked
back at him and smiled. “Your friend there got it,” she said. “He gave me a
hundred dollar bill and said ‘keep the change.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

He hadn’t been
inside long, but the interior of the Ford Taurus was already so hot that Mercer
had to step back after opening the door to let the wave of heat go past him. He
got in and drove away. “It’s a dry heat,” people kept reassuring him. “Yeah,”
he always thought, “so is a pizza oven.” The air conditioner was just beginning
to make headway against the heat inside the car when he pulled into the parking
lot of the strip club. He parked the car and got
out,
leaving a couple of hundred dollars on the seat to pay for the damage he’d done
to the ignition when he’d hot-wired the vehicle. As he reached the edge of the
parking lot, a Saturn Aura pulled up to the curb. He opened the door. “Need a
lift, cowboy?” Sharon said.

The interior
was blessedly cool. Mercer leaned back against the headrest and closed his
eyes.

“Back
to the motel?”
Sharon said. Mercer just nodded.

They drove
through the sun-blasted streets until they pulled into the parking lot of a
shabby motel. The asphalt was cracked and the paint faded by the sun. It wasn’t
an impressive place, but it was sufficient for their purposes.

“Wait here,”
Mercer said. He got out of the car, briefcase in hand. He mounted the metal
stairs to the second floor and let himself into the room.

The man was
still there, shackled to the bed by a chain around one ankle. His hands were
cuffed behind him, and a black hood covered his head. Mercer took a small
automatic pistol out of the briefcase, walked over and yanked the hood off.

Mercer had
never seen the man before yesterday. He was short, nondescript like most in his
profession, dressed in khaki pants and a golf shirt like any tourist. Only the
hard look in his eyes betrayed him as something more. He had a cut across his
left cheek where a blunt object had laid it open.

The man looked
up at him defiantly, his mouth bound tightly with duct tape. His eyes narrowed
as he saw the gun.

“None of this
had to happen,” Mercer said. He was screwing a silencer onto the barrel of the
weapon.

The man didn’t
answer, nor did he try to get away. Mercer admired that.

“I told
Dawkes
I didn’t have any interest in whatever game he and
his pals were playing. I just told him to leave us out of it.”

He stopped and
considered that word.
Us.
It wasn’t something that he
was used to saying. He shook his head and went on.

“But I guess
he thought maybe I’d go back on my word. That’s why he sent you after us. He
should have known better.” He raised the gun. “I was going to leave you alive,
to send a message back. But I think this will get the message across.” He
hesitated,
then
he smiled.

“Don’t worry,”
Mercer said. “I won’t tell anyone the person who knocked you out and took your
gun was a teenage girl.”

That got a
reaction. Mercer couldn’t hear it, but he figured he had the gist of what the
man was trying to say.

“Guess you
didn’t see that one coming, huh?” Mercer said. “I figured something like this
might happen, so I’ve been working with her and her mom. Little girl’s a fast
learner.”

The man was
still swearing. Sweat beaded on his brow.

“You should be
thankful I didn’t give you to her mom. She’d have made this last a lot longer.”
Mercer said, and fired.

“War to the
knife,” he said.
“And the knife to the hilt.”

Afterwards,
Mercer undid the chains and the cuffs, stuffing them in the briefcase. The gun
he laid on the floor next to its owner. He carefully wiped down all the
surfaces he could remember touching. He closed the door quietly behind him as
he left.

“Where
to now?”
Sharon
said as he climbed back in the car.

“I don’t know.
Someplace dry.”

“This place is
pretty dry,” Sharon observed.

“Yeah, but I
hear there’s a monsoon season.”

“Huh,” Sharon
said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Besides, we
need to move.”

Glory spoke up
from the backseat.
“How about Vegas?”

Mercer smiled.
“Works for me.”
He leaned back against the headrest
and closed his eyes again.

He needed to
rest. It was going to be a long war.
And a lot of people who
needed killing.