Thick as Thieves (36 page)

Carr glances at Bessemer, whose gaze is fixed on the roadway. “Almost. I’ll call you when I get in. How are things there?”

“I’m at her place now. She should be home in a couple of hours.”

“We’ll see you there tomorrow.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean? And then we’re done.”

“I’m talking about afterward. You made any decisions about that? ’Cause I know where I’m going; I just want to know if I’m going there alone.”

“I haven’t had much time to think about it lately.”

“How much time does it take? You either want to or you don’t.”

Carr glances at Bessemer again. “Can we talk about this later?”

“Not too much later—Amy will be back. Or were you asking for more time than that?” Carr is still searching for an answer when Valerie hangs up.

Bessemer packs quickly, humming to himself while he does it. Afterward, he goes behind the bar and mixes a gin and tonic. “For the road, Greg?” Carr shakes his head, and Bessemer raises his glass to the room. “I’ll miss the old place,” he says. “Such fond memories.”

Carr smiles and shakes his head. “Best to have none at all of these past few weeks, Howie. Best to get on with whatever it is you’re going to do.”

Bessemer looks at him for a long moment, and then he finishes his drink. “Do I have time for a shower before we leave?” Carr nods and Bessemer disappears into his bedroom.

Carr reaches into a duffel and pulls out the Glock. He drops the clip out, checks the load, and works the slide. Then he snaps the clip back in. He can hear the shower running in Bessemer’s bathroom, and Bessemer singing badly. He thinks about Bobby and Mike—
He’s everybody’s problem if you don’t
—and he thinks about Bessemer’s son—
I don’t really know him
—and he slides the clip out again.

“Fuck it,” he says aloud. He opens the balcony door, drops the clip into a stand of dense foliage below, and feels as if a piano has been lifted from his chest.

Carr looks up at the shrouded sky. He thinks about flight delays, and the connections from Miami to Palm Beach. He thinks about his mother and father, and the house in Stockbridge, and about Valerie. He goes inside and picks up his phone.

He tries her three times but gets no answer, and wonders if Amy Chun has come home already, or if Valerie is simply ignoring him.

Bessemer emerges with wet hair and fresh clothes. He drinks a final gin and tonic and watches with amusement as Carr wipes down the rooms. Top to bottom, back to front. Carr makes Bessemer close the door. On their way to the elevator, Carr wipes off the empty Glock and drops it behind the ice machine.

They pause beneath the portico when they come out of the lobby. Rain is falling, in fat, erratic drops, but the sky promises more. It’s dark now, and the trees are swaying. The lights in the parking lot are on and shaking on their poles. Bessemer curses softly, and they trot across the asphalt.

Their car is at the far end of the lot, in a space beside a light pole. As they approach, Carr notices that it’s the only light not lit. There’s a sedan parked in the next space that wasn’t there before. It’s dark—black or blue—and it’s familiar to Carr, though he’s not sure from where. A few steps closer and he sees that it’s a Nissan, and Carr stops in his tracks. Bessemer jogs ahead and Carr calls out, and there are footsteps behind him.

Carr drops his bag and whirls, and headlights come on, and catch him full in the face. A hand clamps on his wrist and tries to fold it into a come-along hold. Carr pivots and throws his elbow up and something crunches. A voice yells
motherfucker
and the hand falls away, and Carr pivots again, out of the light, as another voice yells
stand clear
. Carr hears a pop, feels a sting on his back, hears a hissing sound. And then the sky lights up, and so do his arms, and legs, and skin, and bones. And then it all goes dark.

There’s blood in his mouth when he comes to. He tries to feel it with his hand, but can’t because of the restraints. They’re the stiff plastic kind, and they’re tight behind his back. And then there’s the matter of the hood. Someone yanks it away and Carr is blinking into a hard white glare.

There are shapes behind the lights—charcoal figures pacing, pointing—and when the rush subsides in Carr’s ears, he can make out voices. Men’s voices, and a woman’s.

“What’s your name?” Kathy Rink says. “We know it isn’t Greg Frye.”

“I don’t give a shit about his name,” Prager says. “I want my fucking money back.”

Carr’s having trouble with the words—their meanings don’t keep up with the sounds. And he hasn’t taken any money—not yet. He tries to look at his watch, but again the restraints stop him. He hasn’t taken any money. The air is damp and smells of newly turned earth.

There’s a noise to Carr’s right, something between a groan and a sob. He turns and sees the hood torn from Bessemer. His head lolls to one side. His face is white and wet with tears, and there’s a triangle of blood spreading from his nose down across his mouth and chin.

“And you, you fat lying fuck!” Prager shouts. “I trusted you.”

There are shuffling feet and urgent whispers behind the lights, and Carr tries to look around. He sees a concrete floor beneath him, and open
space above. To his left, half in shadow, there is a workbench covered with empty terra-cotta flowerpots, coils of garden hose, and sacks of potting soil. To his right, in a sodden heap in the corner, he sees what’s left of his and Bessemer’s luggage. Everywhere there is the clatter of rain on a tin roof. Bessemer groans again.

“Not me,” he mutters.

“Anything broken, Howie?” Carr says softly.

Prager steps from behind the wall of light. He’s in shirtsleeves, and his hair is wet and wiry. Cords pop in his neck, and veins pulse. Carr is fascinated by them. Prager grabs him by the collar, and Carr can smell his sweat and his fear. “What the fuck did you say? Come on, say it again.”

“Curt, please,” Kathy Rink says sharply. “Let me do my job.” She emerges from the glare and puts a hand on Prager’s arm.

He flicks her away like a bug. “I keep waiting for you to start,” he says disgustedly. “Find my money. Find out what the hell he did to my system.”

Carr blinks his eyes, trying to clear them. Maybe it’s the lingering effects of the Taser, or his collision with the pavement afterward, but his mind is split into several pieces. One piece is trying to establish a basic fact set, and to make it sit still. Someone has hit Isla Privada, ahead of schedule. Prager has found out about the theft. Prager has found out about him. Prager is going to kill him.

Another piece is a storm of questions. How did Prager find out? Was there a camera he hadn’t seen, a switch he’d tripped? Was he spotted in the house? He doesn’t think so, but anything’s possible. The biggest question—who has stolen Prager’s money—Carr scarcely needs to ask, even in his fractured state. It’s someone in his crew. Maybe everyone in his crew.

Yet another part of him tries to figure the timing. How many hours passed between Dennis reporting that his spyware had scooped up Prager’s passwords, and Carr being tasered in the hotel lot? Enough time, certainly, for Dennis to call Valerie. Enough time for Valerie to sit down behind Amy Chun’s desk. Enough time to do any number of things, if the people doing them had discipline and a plan. Carr tries to look at his watch again and strains against his plastic cuffs.

The last scrap of his mind is the busiest—a panting, scrambling thing, searching every inch of this arena of light, probing the shadows at its boundaries, looking for a way out. Flowerpots, garden hoses, potting soil,
an upside-down wheelbarrow, what might be a spade, what might be a rake, a garden tractor that is missing a wheel—he’s struggling to turn any of it into a key. Kathy Rink isn’t letting him think.

She’s sitting on a stool now, her face close to Carr’s. “I said, ‘What do I call you?’ ” Her skin is grainy, and there are deep lines around her mouth. Her breath smells of old coffee.

“My name’s Greg Frye, but call me what you want.”

“But that’s not your name, is it?” Carr tries a smile, but the cut in his mouth hurts. “Though your diamonds are for real, and your prints came back as Greg Frye, which—I gotta admit—gives me a scare. You some flavor of cop, Greg?”

Carr shakes his head. “You seem to have your mind made up about things.”

“Your prints come back as Greg Frye, and there’s a file for Greg Frye with the Bureau of Prisons, but after that …” Rink shrugs. “How’d you manage that?”

“If you think I’m a cop, shouldn’t you be a little more careful with the merchandise?”

Rink holds his Greg Frye passport up. “Not so much, Greg. You and Bessemer checked out of your hotel, and the last anyone heard you were headed for the airport. I want to, I can have a couple of guys with your names on a plane to the ass end of nowhere, just as soon as the airport opens up again. Your handler’ll think you two ran off together.

“Now, how ’bout you tell me where your buddies are—the ones who put on the little show this afternoon?”

Carr smiles again. “It seems like something’s happened here, and you think I’m involved.”

“
Something’s happened here
?” Prager calls from the shadows. “My whole system is locked up. I might as well be fucking
blind.
” Kathy Rink looks sharply at him, and then turns back to Carr.

“I know a lot of people,” Carr continues. “Let me make some calls. Maybe between the two of us we can figure out what’s going on.”

Kathy Rink produces Carr’s cell phone from somewhere. “Who do you want to call, Greg? Give me your password, and I’ll ring ’em up for you. And speaking of phone calls—who do you think would call Curt, out of the blue, with a heads-up about wire transfers? What reason would they have, and why would they throw your name around?”

“There are people up in Boston who don’t like me much.”

“They’re not alone,” Rink says, smiling, and she pats the side of his face.

There’s a noise behind Rink—a metallic complaint, like a rusty garage door—and the sound of rain grows louder and a breeze blows in. There’s movement beyond the lights, and a man steps into the arena. It’s one of Rink’s crew cuts, carrying several rolls of duct tape. His nose is packed and bandaged, and there’s dried blood on his polo shirt. He glares at Carr through blackened eyes.

There are two other men with him, and they don’t have crew cuts. One is a suntanned fireplug, with a peroxide ponytail, a camo wife-beater, and tattoos from his collarbones to wrists. He’s got towels over his shoulder and a slant bench under his arm, and he smiles at Rink with crooked teeth. His colleague is small and slim and shaved egg-bald. His skin is the color of oatmeal, and he’s wearing dark glasses and pressed fatigues. He’s got a plastic water jug in each hand—the five-gallon kind that go on water coolers—and he sets them down in front of Carr.

“I tol’ him we didn’t need so much,” the fireplug says to Rink. His accent is deeply Southern. “When does it take even a gallon? But he don’t listen.”

“I like to be prepared,” the egg says. His voice is soft, his accent from nowhere.

Kathy Rink tosses Carr’s phone and passport into the corner, onto the remains of his luggage. “We won’t waste a lot of time going round with threats, or any of that
we can do this hard or we can do this easy
crap, okay? We both know you’re not gonna say shit unless you have to—and even if you did, I wouldn’t believe it. Besides, after what you did to me today, there’s no way I’m gonna miss this opportunity.”

The fireplug laughs and puts the slant bench down. He kneels and begins to adjust the angle. Howard Bessemer moans. “Jesus Christ,” he says, his voice a choked whisper. “This wasn’t me. None of this was me.”

Rink turns to him and frowns. “My problem with you, Howie, is I’m not sure what you’re good for. I mean, I don’t need to put you on the board here—I could just smack you in the head and you’ll tell me whatever it is you think I want to hear. So what exactly do I need you for?”

Bessemer cranes his neck, trying to see beyond the glare. “Curt! Come on, Curt!”

And then the lights go out.

Prager’s is the first voice Carr hears. “Son of a bitch!” he shouts. “Son of a
fucking
bitch!”

“Flashlights!” Kathy Rink calls. “Somebody get some lights here.”

There’s scraping, stumbling, cursing, and then two thin, shaky beams cut the black. A pool of light spreads at Kathy Rink’s feet, and another at Prager’s, and then there are radio voices in the air. Someone calls from the darkness: “Power’s out at the main house too.” To which Prager responds: “You’re
fucking
kidding me.”

Two more flashlight beams emerge from the dark. Two crew cuts, wet with rain, emerge behind them. “It’s a blackout, sir,” one reports. “The whole north end of the island’s dark.”

Prager’s voice quivers with anger. “Which is why I have emergency generators and two big tanks of diesel. So where the hell are my lights?”

“They’re trying, sir. There’s a problem—with a fuel line, they think. They’re working on it, but it’s slow going in the dark.” Prager curses fluently, and Carr stifles a laugh.

There’s throat clearing, and then the fireplug’s voice. “This isn’t the kind of thing you want to do by flashlight, Kath. I’m up for it if you are, but truth is, we might drown the fucker without meaning it.”

Rink curses under her breath. “How long till we get the lights back?” she yells.

There’s whispering and radio static, and then an answer. “An hour, maybe two.”

“Fuck!” Prager shouts in the dark.

For a moment there is just the rain, hammering at the roof, sweeping through the foliage, and then Rink speaks. “I’m thinking we should take a break, Curt—wait till we have light to work by.” There’s no response from the darkness, and she tries again. “Curt?”

There’s an embarrassed cough, and one of the crew cuts answers nervously. “He left, ma’am. I think he went up to the house.”

“Shit,” Rink whispers, and then, in a louder voice: “Let’s button it up for an hour, boys.” She points at two of her crew cuts. “Colley, Marco—you two are outside.” And she looks at the fireplug. “C’mon, Vic, I’ll buy you and Amory a beer.”