All Through the Night (17 page)
Wayne said, “I need to ask you something.”
The guy actually laughed. “Not a hope.”
One minute Jerry was standing on Tatyana’s other side. The next he was directly in front of Berkind. “That old guy who’s gone missing is my friend. You, I don’t even
want
to know.”
Berkind tried to step around Jerry and failed. He pushed uselessly at Jerry’s solid bulk. “Get out of my way.”
Travelers split and spread like a school of disturbed fish. Jerry held his ground. “The badge in my back pocket says I served with Orlando’s finest for thirty years. We yell for security, who do you think they’re gonna believe?”
Tatyana said, “Jerry, please.”
Jerry held his ground. “I’m giving you one more chance to answer the man’s question.”
Wayne said, “I need to know who sent you to harass me in the conference room.”
Berkind rubbed his neck. “You’re all insane.”
Jerry stepped in closer still. “Else you want to see what rough really means, you
answer
the man.”
“Who sent you?” Wayne repeated.
“I’m not telling you a thing.” His eyes were red-rimmed and almost teary with rage. “What is
with
you, Kuchik?”
“Easton told you to help us, Jim.”
“Easton Grey is hunkered down in his house like it was a cave.” The guy huffed his breath now, like a bull ready to charge. “I checked up on you. Mister Special Forces, the man who won’t be stopped, the big warrior hero who’s going to make everything safe for our fearless leader to come crawling out of his hole.”
“Jim.”
“No, Kuchik. You’re on
their
side. I’m the one who’s trying to keep this deal together. And I know an enemy when I see one.”
“Who is trying to kill the deal, Jim?”
Berkind swiveled around the former cop and stalked away. This time Jerry did not try to stop him.
Tatyana said, “He’s been like this all day.”
Jerry asked, “Easton told you to travel with him?”
“It was supposed to be somebody else. But when I got to the airport, he was here waiting for me.”
Wayne said, “The data I found online says Teledyne is made up of three different groups. Hotels, private clinics, and condominiums. Is he working on the whole deal, or just one part?”
“Jim Berkind has been working with Teledyne’s hotel group for almost three years. We partner with them on hotels in Colorado resorts. That’s how we came to know they were interested in being acquired.”
Jerry said, “I don’t see the connection.”
Tatyana gave her face a weary swipe. “Can we leave, please? It’s been a very long day.”
Wayne took the briefcase from her limp fingers, then slipped the overnight bag off her shoulder. “Who was supposed to be coming with you?”
“Another of our legal team. He is genuinely sick. I checked.”
“I need to get back inside your company, Tatyana.”
“I thought the books wouldn’t tell you anything.”
“Not Grey’s. Teledyne’s. I need to go deeper.”
She nodded slowly. “Our company keeps a suite at the Peabody. I’ll make a call. If it’s free, you can stay there tonight.”
“I’m not talking about tomorrow,” Wayne replied. “I need to do this now.”
Jerry checked his watch and said, “We need to make one stop on the way.”
Tatyana looked from one face to the other, then decided. “Do you remember where I live?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll take a taxi home. Make your stop and come meet me at my condominium. I have a dedicated line to Grey’s mainframe with unlimited access to Teledyne data. You can check it out and nobody needs to know.”
T
he area around the projects where Julio and his grandmother lived looked a lot worse at sunset than it had in the middle of the day. The sky was not completely dark yet, but already the shadows held big-city nightmares. A cluster of kids passed by. All of them slowed to inspect the faces inside Wayne’s truck.
“Five gets you twenty, every one of them is packing.” Jerry checked his watch. “Try your sister’s number.”
Wayne drew Tatyana’s cell phone from his pocket. He punched up Eilene’s number. Julio answered on the first ring with, “What.”
“Where are you?”
Jerry said, “Give me that.” He took the phone from Wayne and said, “You’re late. Which means we’re sitting here in a free-fire zone and you’re out shooting hoops or whatever—”
Jerry stopped talking. He listened intently, shot a glance at Wayne, then said, “You shoulda called this in.”
“What is it?” Wayne asked.
Jerry raised one finger. Wait. “That’s good thinking, kid. But you shoulda let us know what you were doing. Yeah. Okay. You stay safe, you hear?”
Jerry slapped the phone shut. “Let’s roll.”
“He scored?”
“Hard to say. Julio hit the evening service at Eilene’s church. Then he’s going over to the late mass at the Catholics. He’s asking all the maids to keep an eye out. He’ll bunk at Eilene’s. Let’s go, okay? I seen back streets of Da Nang that felt safer than this place.”
Tatyana’s home held the same muted elegance as the woman herself. Twelve-foot ceilings, recessed lighting, marble tiled floors, a couple of nice oil paintings. She ushered Wayne and Jerry into her home office. Twin twenty-one inch screens flanked a wireless keyboard and Bluetooth mouse.
As she switched on the computer and tagged in her ID, Jerry said, “Mind if I make a few more calls on your cell? I’d like to check in with the cops here and down around Vero.”
Tatyana did not look up from the screens. “Keep the cell phone, it’s my personal line. I can use the company’s. Okay, here is the accountant’s summary on Teledyne. You scroll down and touch the blue script and it will flash you over to the raw data.”
“I can handle this.”
“Good, because I’m exhausted.” She patted his shoulder—nothing intimate, just two colleagues pushing hard on a deadline. “Help yourself to anything you need in the kitchen. Call me if there’s an emergency.”
Wayne soon lost himself in the books. The story was a far more complicated one than Grey’s, and it held him. He heard things in his periphery. Wayne registered on some vague level that Jerry spoke to his buddies on the Orlando force. Then Jerry called Coltrane and the Vero Beach Police. He called his Orlando buddies again. Jerry then set a cup of coffee by Wayne’s hand and repeated what he had said earlier, how there were basically four clearinghouses for Florida crime. Jacksonville was focused mainly north, handling things south of Atlanta. Miami’s gangs covered the glades, Lauderdale, and the Keys. Tampa controlled the panhandle to where the reach of New Orleans began. And Orlando handled the rest—most of central Florida, most of the East Coast. Jerry’s pals on the force might hear if a local syndicate or gang was involved. If. Wayne heard all these things. He even glanced up several times while drinking from his mug. But nothing registered below the surface, down where the numbers churned and the Teledyne tale spun itself out.
The phone rang sometime after midnight. First the home phone, then the cell. Wayne heard it chirruping from the living room. Jerry did not pick up. Ten minutes later the home phone started again. Wayne picked up the receiver on the desk. “Kuchik residence.”
“Mr. Grusza? Easton Grey.”
“Tatyana’s asleep.”
“Good. I was hoping to speak with you. How are things?”
“Still no word about Foster.”
“I’m so sorry about your friend.” The company chief did not need volume to express his genuine regret. “I just spoke with Officer Coltrane. He’s set a surveillance team on our home.”
“Mind if I ask you some questions?”
“Of course not.”
“I’ve been going through the Teledyne books.”
“And?”
“I haven’t found a thing. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but it isn’t here.”
Easton Grey waited a moment. “But something causes you to want to know more.”
“I’m probably chasing smoke here.” Wayne rose from his chair. “But my friend is missing and it’s hard to see much else.”
“Sometimes any movement at all can be seen as progress. Any action is better than standing still.”
The words connected at some visceral level, down below conscious thought. Two men struggling against the night and forces they could neither identify nor attack. “Teledyne lists three official lines of profit. Hotels, clinics, condos.” He grabbed his mug and opened the office door. He didn’t want more coffee. But the office felt claustrophobic and going for a refill gave him an excuse to move. “Everything is pretty clear, not totally, but nothing that’d throw up a serious red flag. At least, nothing I found.”
“Nothing anyone has found. And my staffer looked carefully. Let’s go back to that earlier word of yours. Official.”
“A lot of their profit comes from partnerships. They’re listed, but I don’t have access to the books.”
“How long have you been studying these accounts?”
“All night.”
“I am impressed. Well, the answer is, they concern me too. We are interested in acquiring Teledyne because one of their divisions meshes well with us, while the others cover markets we currently do not. But Teledyne holds minority shares in nine partnerships. All but one are with the same group. A privately held company.”
“And because it’s a minority share, you can’t demand an inspection of the private company’s books.” Wayne passed through the living room. Jerry was conked out on the sofa, snoring softly. He waited until he entered the kitchen to ask, “Who’s the majority partner?”
“A group called Triton.”
“Never heard of them.”
“That is no surprise. Triton is very closely held.”
“I’d like to have a look at whatever you have.”
“It’s very little, but I will instruct the team to make that available. Anything else?”
Wayne pulled the coffee pot from the burner, held it poised over his mug, then put it back in place and turned the machine off. “Probably. But I can’t think of it right now.”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am about Foster Oates. I feel as though this is all my fault.”
“Get in line.”
“All because of a warning from an extremely black gentleman who might have been …”
“You might as well say it, since we’re both thinking the very same thing.”
Easton Grey might have huffed a laugh. “I’ve spent my life trying hard to follow God’s edicts. And it has led me to a place where I’m trapped inside my own home, my wife is upstairs lying awake alone in our bed, my daughter has cried herself to sleep, and a helpless old man has vanished.”
“I can go one better.” Wayne leaned on the polished granite countertop. The stone was rose colored and cold to the touch. He faced a central island with a stove framed by more granite. Above it hung a variety of copper utensils and pots. Everything perfectly in order. Mocking the haphazard disarray of his life. “By the time I hit sixteen, I figured if God was in the market for people like my dad, I didn’t want to have anything to do with either of them. I used a fake ID to lie my way into the army. I discovered a vocation. If you can call small arms, high explosives, and hand-to-hand a trade.”
“But you liked it.”
“I thought I did. Until I let my mind wander on patrol one day and got two of my best buddies killed.”
There it was. The deed never mentioned, hanging there like greasy smoke in the polished kitchen. Wayne breathed a couple of times, feeling his way through the shock of having let it out. He was tempted to blame it on the hour and the strain. But he refused to mock the moment with a lie.
Easton Grey’s voice was as lean and dry as the man himself. “Is that what the visitor referred to when he said the deaths were not your fault?”
Wayne liked that term. The visitor. “He didn’t say. But that was what I thought.”
“He could have obtained that information from any number of sources, I suppose.”
“Sure. The patrol is in the division records. We went out. We took incoming fire. They carried me and my buddies out. Several of us got awarded bronze stars.” Wayne rubbed his hand along the counter, streaking the granite with sweat. He started over at the beginning. “I was on point. We were following a goat trail along a ridgeline. Maybe we were inside Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan—up there it’s impossible to tell. We were so high, man, the clouds were a couple of miles
below
us. Then I heard an eagle. Just amazing, the sound. I dream about it. If the mountains had a voice, it would sound like that bird.”
The refrigerator clicked on. Wayne listened to the hum. He heard the man’s breathing on the other end of the phone line. He knew he should stop talking. There was no reason to go on and four years of reasons to stop.
“The bird hovered about twenty yards off to my right, out where the world just dropped away to nothing. I watched the bird instead of the trail. Then I caught something, maybe out of the corner of my eye, maybe a sound, just enough to shout, ‘Incoming!’ I yelled it before I really saw them clearly. The RPGs flew at us like oversized bullets. Two of them. Coming slow and fast at the same time.”
“Your shout saved the lives of the other men.”
“No. That was the official line. But it’s not right. Watching that bird got my two buddies smoked.”
“The visitor says you’re wrong to think so.”
“Yeah, well, the visitor wasn’t …”
Easton Grey let the unfinished thought hang for a moment, then said, “I find great comfort in speaking with you, Wayne.”
The usage of his first name came and went naturally. “Lessons from a life gone all wrong.”
“No. Not that at all. I’m glad you’re on our side.” He could hear Easton shifting the phone. “Wait one second.”
Wayne felt the silence settle in around him. Like a blanket scented with some kitchen cleanser and the vague presence of something beyond his vision. Not the people sleeping in other rooms. Something unnamed, yet comforting.
Easton Grey returned. “I thought I heard my daughter. She’s been in such a state, I can’t tell you how hard it is to live with a teenager sometimes, even one you love more than your own life. She’s started going on about moving to Africa. She’s downloaded maps of every country on the continent and pinned them to her walls, along with drawings of native dress. I tell my wife at least it’s not some punk band with body piercings and misspelled tattoos.”
“I have a friend who lived there for, I don’t know how long. Years. She’s …” Wayne tried to decide how to describe Victoria. “There’s something special about this woman. If anybody can help your daughter, it’s her. And with Foster missing, this might help my friend a lot.”
“Will you speak with her?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.” A pause, then, “If you will go lay down and try to rest, so will I.”
“Deal.”
“Could we have a moment of prayer before we close shop?”
Three times in one day.
Definitely
a record. “Say the words.”
