Thick as Thieves (23 page)

The traffic churns past on Brickell while Carr eats and watches and wonders. What was Valerie doing in the coffee bar, where she had no time to drink coffee, but time enough to delete her browsing history? Surfing? Sending? And if sending, then sending to whom? And why do it there, when she has Internet access back in Boca Raton?

Privacy and anonymity are the obvious answers, and both worry Carr. He and his crew are the only people in a position to eavesdrop on Valerie’s laptop. What might she be doing online that she’d want to hide from them? And who might she be doing it with?

After an hour, the lunch crowd has thinned on the street and in the wine bar, and the air-conditioning has dried him off, but Carr has seen no sign of Valerie. He worries that he’s missed her in the wash of people, or that she’s left another way, and he pays the check and steps outside. The humidity is like a wet hammer, and Carr is sweating before the light changes. There’s a shaded plaza beside the green tower, with white pergolas, razor-straight rows of palm trees, tables with umbrellas, and a view through the lobby glass of the elevator banks. Carr heads for one of the tables, and when he stops in his tracks he’s not sure at first what it is that’s stopped him.

Something in the corner of his eye. Something he knows. Broad shoulders held just so, a thrusting gut, an aggressive, pumping gait—a familiar bulk. In the lobby, in the shuffling clutch of people at the elevator doors. When Carr picks him out, there’s a rush of noise in his head—gears grinding on one another—and he’s frozen, flat-footed, in the plaza. He might as well be waving a flag. It’s sheer luck that Nando doesn’t look over.

“What the fuck?” Carr says to no one, and he steps behind one of the manicured palms.

Nando crosses the lobby and pushes through the doors. He’s wearing a tan suit and an open-collared French blue shirt, and he’s carrying a tan briefcase. He’s thicker and darker than when Carr last saw him, years ago in Costa Alegre, and more prosperous-looking than ever. He’s on his cell as he crosses Brickell and heads south. He’s still talking when he enters another office tower, this one clad in brushed metal and gray glass. He’s alone in the elevator when the doors slide shut, and Carr watches the numbers climb to eight.

Security in the gray building is lazy, and no guards brace Carr as he
scans the lobby directory. The assortment of firms is only slightly different here—more lawyers, fewer consultants—but there are still plenty of foreign banks. The eighth floor, in fact, is nothing but banks.

Nando is inside for about an hour, after which Carr follows him down Brickell to another building—gold glass this time. Carr can’t tell which floor he’s headed to—there are too many people on the elevator with him—but there is no shortage of banks here either. Nando reappears fifty minutes later. Carr is buying gum at a lobby kiosk and readying himself for another walk in the heat when Nando turns not to the Brickell Avenue doors, but toward the back of the lobby and the enclosed passage that leads to the building’s parking structure.

Carr comes down the passage in time to see Nando board an elevator. It stops on the third parking level and Carr jogs up the stairs. He comes out of the stairwell and hears footsteps echoing, a car door closing, and an engine turning over.

“Shit,” he whispers, and he waits at the stairs as Nando drives by in a white rental.

Back on the sidewalk, Carr looks up and down Brickell Avenue, but sees no sign of Nando’s car, or of Valerie. He walks up the street to the gray tower with the lax security. Around the corner he finds the tower’s four-level parking structure and, on its lowest level, the loading dock. There’s security there—two guys in rumpled uniform shirts and sneakers—but they seem only semiconscious. Carr checks the block and climbs a low wall into the parking structure. He bounces hard on the fenders of three parked cars—Lexus, BMW, Rover—and their lights flash and their horns blare. He steps behind a wide pillar, and when the security slackers wander over to investigate the alarms, Carr slips into the loading dock and into the service elevator and rides to eight.

Three banks—all foreign—have offices on the eighth floor, but only one has a reception desk. The blonde behind it looks barely out of middle school, and she has a fizzy voice and a manic smile.

“How can I help you today?” she says.

Carr puts on a beaten look. “I’m hoping you can help me out with my boss,” he says. “He’s was in here a while ago, and he thinks he left his BlackBerry. Now he is rip-roarin’ pissed—like it’s my fault he can’t keep track of his stuff.”

The girl nods in solidarity and sympathetic understanding of irrational bosses. “I haven’t seen anything lying around.”

“He was in about two hours ago. Black-haired guy, big, dark, in a tan suit and a blue shirt.”

The blonde nods. “New accounts,” she says, and she picks up the phone. “Britty, you find a BlackBerry over there? That new client, Mr. Reyes—he thinks he might’ve left his here.” She listens and nods and smiles at Carr. “She’s checking,” she tells him. Then she listens again and frowns. “Thanks anyway, babe,” she says into the phone, and she shakes her head.

He is barely aware of the walk back to the Four Seasons, and surprised to find himself there. More surprised to find that Valerie’s car is still in the lot. He gets into his own car and finds a spot with a view of the hotel entrance and waits.

The afternoon rush washes about him, and so do the questions. Mr. Reyes? New accounts? What is Nando doing in Miami? And what the
fuck
is he doing with Valerie? The questions spin around like water in a drain, and there’s orange in the sky when he realizes he hasn’t been watching the hotel, or anyway that he hasn’t been seeing it.

A dinner crowd is arriving, and the valets cast long shadows as they dart among the idling cars. Carr watches them run, and watches the pretty crowd disappear inside, through the revolving doors. And then he sees a couple step out. The woman is first, and Carr recognizes Valerie right away, though her blouse is untucked now, and her hair is damp, as if from a bath. It takes him a moment longer to recognize the man, who pauses in the doorway and then walks forward, slips a thick arm around Valerie’s waist, and rests a large hand on her hip. Mike.

“You’re not yourself this morning, Greg,” Bessemer says to Carr. “Need some more coffee?” He reaches across the kitchen counter and fills his mug.

Latin Mike looks at Carr with no expression, and Carr looks back. “I’m going now,” Mike says, and Carr nods.

Bessemer squints at him, curiosity plain on his round face. “Rough night?”

And it hasn’t ended yet, Carr thinks. The rum brought him no sleep, and even now there’s a blur around the borders of things, and a hollow echo to every sound. His thoughts want to wander, to drift sideways, to skid. They steer the wrong way and then hit the gas until the skid becomes a dizzying spin.

They left the hotel separately—Mike first, then Valerie. Carr followed Valerie back to Boca, back to her apartment, then out again to Amy Chun’s place. After an hour of watching dark windows, he left her there. Then he drove back to North Palm Beach and started to pace. Sometime past midnight the drinking began.

Drinking, pacing, replaying how many moments, again and again, in his head. Poolside at Chamela. Her apartment in Port of Spain. More workhouses and hotel rooms than he could count. And more questions. When did his suspicions begin? What set them off? When did she meet
Nando, and how? Why, along with the sensation of having missed a stair, does he feel something equally jarring—something a lot like relief?

Round and round he went, unable or unwilling to get to the middle of it, to get a purchase on the central problem: the dimensions of her betrayal. What has she done? What is she in the midst of doing? Who is she doing it with? Who can he trust, and what the hell should he do?

Howard Bessemer is still holding the coffeepot, still squinting at him. “Are we going to make that call today, Greg?”

Carr looks at him but says nothing.

Drinking, pacing, staring at the ocean.
What the hell should he do
? His options are limited to exactly two: finish the Prager job, or cut and run—and the second choice is more or less a nonstarter. Mr. Boyce has fronted a lot of cash on this job, and if Carr decides to fold, he’s going to want it back—and with a nice return. Yes, Boyce is currently holding the diamonds the crew picked up in Houston, and they’ll go some way to paying off the debt, but Carr has no intention of being stuck with the balance. Neither does he want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, waiting for Tina to appear.

Sometime before dawn, he decided he couldn’t stand his apartment any longer, and he walked across the road to the beach, leaving his shoes at the edge of the sand but bringing the rum. The sand was cold, and in the moonlight the breakers looked like white smoke rolling toward him.

He thought of Tina and looked over his shoulder and laughed out loud at the notion of telling Boyce what was going on. Or rather telling him that
something
was going on, but that Carr didn’t know exactly what it was. Not much of a thought, really—not much of an option. At best, Boyce would pull the plug on the job himself, and still want his money back. More likely, he’d decide the whole shit storm was an unacceptable breach of operational security—a terminal breach. And there, over Carr’s shoulder, would be Tina again.

Walking down the beach, he stepped on something slippery and colder than the sand. A jellyfish. He braced for the sting, but felt nothing and kept walking.

The bottom line is, he needs Prager’s money, needs what it can buy. A few months back he’d calculated that he had enough put away to do what he wanted for as long as he wanted, but that calculation is out of date. His father’s situation and Mrs. Calvin’s impending departure have thrown his cash flow assumptions to the wind. He needs the money.

Bessemer clears his throat once … twice. “I’m thinking that maybe you’re not into this today, Greg—that your mind is elsewhere. Greg?”

So, finish the job. Easy enough to say, but it begs the question of who he can trust while he’s doing it. He’s been asking himself that since Declan’s death, or maybe even before, but now it’s acquired a particular urgency.

Working the paranoid calculus—that’s what his instructor at the Farm had called it, an atypically neat turn of phrase from an otherwise lumpish fellow. Tracing the lattice of connections, mapping the shifting landscape of who-owes-who and who-owns-who, of loyalty, grudge, and pressure. Who’s in bed with whom? Who’s working what angle? Who benefits? Nando and Valerie. Valerie and Mike. If Mike, then Bobby as well? They were both in Mendoza, after all. And what about Dennis?

The answer—the short answer—is to trust none of them, not for a second, not as far as he can throw them, not even half that far. But nothing is ever so straightforward. The practical truth is, if he’s going to finish the Prager job, then he needs them—all of them. And they need him. They have to trust one another to carry out their assigned work—to watch one another’s backs. Like birds of a feather and bugs in a rug, arms linked in a chorus of “Kumbaya.” Thick as fucking thieves—right up until the moment they transfer the money out of Isla Privada’s accounts. Then the question becomes how to survive their success.

Dawn found him standing frozen at the shoreline, surrounded—as if in a minefield—by acres of clumped seaweed and the glistening bodies of jellyfish. His ankles ached with cold, and his head was filled with shuffling images of burned and broken metal, Declan’s skewed grin and blackened limbs, and Valerie in the dark. He could almost summon her smell and the feel of her skin, but the rising light and the ocean breeze swept his conjuring away. Surprise? Sadness? Anger? Relief? Like the seaweed, they’re tangled too thoroughly for Carr to pick apart.

Bessemer is standing now, a look of alarm replacing the curiosity on his face. “Are we calling or not?”

Carr looks at him. “Pour me another cup of coffee,” he says, “and get the telephone.”

They’re followed from the airport on Grand Cayman—two men in a muddy blue Nissan, as inconspicuous as it’s possible for a single-car tail to be. Carr spots them as he turns the Toyota onto Dorcy Drive.

“They were at the rental counter,” he says, “but that’s not a rental car.” Bessemer starts to turn in his seat, but Carr puts a hand on his arm. “Use the mirrors,” he says. Bessemer does, and his brows crease in confusion.

“The driver was outside passport control,” Carr says, “but he wasn’t on our flight.”

“You think they’re following us?”

“I know they are. You ever see them before?”

“I don’t think so,” Bessemer says, and there’s worry in his voice.

“This a usual thing for Prager?”

Bessemer shakes his head. “If it is, I never noticed.”

They’re quiet after that. Bessemer watches the Nissan in the rearview. Carr watches traffic and looks at the landscape of the northern edge of George Town, which is flat, cluttered, and homely under a pale sky. Carr lowers his window and the smell of ocean rushes in, mixed with odors of asphalt and exhaust and brackish salt marsh. He glances at Bessemer, who is still looking in the mirrors, and whose face has tightened with fear.

“Strip malls and SUVs,” Carr says. “Just like Florida.”

Bessemer nods stiffly. “The north side’s nicer. This your first time
down here?” Carr smiles but doesn’t answer, and Bessemer’s eyes dart back to the mirror.

“They’re just watching, Howie. They’re not going to do anything.”

Bessemer’s nerves have been fraying since the call to Curtis Prager, which, when it finally happened three days before, had gone as well as Carr could’ve hoped. Bessemer had stayed on script and had managed to sound convincing about it. And, because Prager doesn’t like phones, he hadn’t had to talk for long. Bessemer told Prager that a good friend, Greg Frye, was in town, looking for a money manager.
And when I heard about the business opportunity Greg’s got, I thought of you right away, Curt
.

Prager asked how good a friend this was and how Bessemer knew him. When Bessemer explained that he was an Otisville friend, Prager went silent for a long while—so long that Carr wondered if they’d been cut off. When Prager finally responded, he was brief.