An Absence of Light (30 page)

“You want to come over here early in the morning?”

“What time?”

“Seven-thirty.”

“I’ll be there.”

“It can’t be very much of an insurance company,” she said, throwing her fourth cigarette into the water. They were sitting on the dock of one of the marinas, their legs hanging over the side above the water, looking across the bay at one of the yacht basins, the strings of lights draped across the masts of the sailboats, the slightly different colored lights strung along the basin’s docks. “I called 800 information, and it wasn’t listed. Can’t be
much
of a company.”

She picked up the pack of cigarettes beside her and took out another one.

“Here, give me one of those damn things,” he said. He hated seeing her like this. It only meant more trouble for him, every time.

“I think they were
cops
,” she said, blowing smoke away into the soft breeze.

“Just because it was about Synar?”

“‘Just’ because?” She turned and looked at him. He was only wearing jeans, no shirt, no shoes. She had called the service they used, and he had called her right back. She figured she had gotten him out of bed. She would rather have gotten him
into
bed. She guessed he just threw on his jeans and came like that “I hardly remembered the goddamn name the first time she called. Then finally I did.”

He smoked. “These are nasty little things,” he said, holding the cigarette up and looking at it in the gloaming darkness. “This is one of those ladies’ brands isn’t it? Little thin things.”

“Jesus!” She was exasperated. Don was always calm. He was so macho. Some guys acted macho, wore it like they wore their cologne, put it on just before going out and then washed it off in the shower afterward. But Don never acted anything. He
was
macho and never even seemed to notice it, which was like catnip to women like her. He was one of those guys who always knew just what to do in every situation. It had something to do with survival instincts, or something primitive like that, that had gotten bred out of most modern men, the suburban Happy Hour kind of guys. Don C. was always going to take care of himself; he knew exactly how to do it without even thinking. And he could take care of other people, too, if he wanted to.

“You sure you didn’t tell them anything?” he asked.

“Not a damn thing.”

He smoked the cigarette, slumped on the edge of the pier, swinging his feet a little. He could hear the basso moan of one of the big ships standing off in the bay. Jesus, he liked hearing those ships.

“If they were cops, I guess I don’t understand what they were doing looking for Synar,” he said. The Probst case was closed down over a year ago. What was happening here?

“What if there
is
a real Colleen Synar?”

“Naw,” Don said. Faeber’s people were supposed to have taken care of that. Now he wondered if they had. That greasy Greek was going to have to hear about this.

Don scratched the hair on his stomach with a thumb. She looked at him. Here he was, his wavy hair kind of wild from being in bed—she guessed he had just run his fingers through it—and even slumped as he was, unconcerned about how he looked, she could see the rows of muscles in his stomach, the lumpy divisions of the different muscles in his arms and shoulders, swinging his feet like a kid. It made her wet just sitting by him.

“Well,” he said, “don’t get too worked up about it If they come back—and I don’t think they will—but if they do, just stick with your story. There’s nothing they can do about that, no way you can get in trouble, as long as you don’t go making up any more than you’ve already told them. Hell, you can’t be expected to know any more than that. Just stick to your story.”

That was kind of smoothing it over, but there was no need in getting her worked up about all the what-if’s in this situation.

Heath didn’t know anything about the arrangements with the police department or anything about that whole operation, or that it even existed. All he had told her back then was that if anybody ever called looking for a Colleen Synar that she was supposed to tell them exactly what she apparently told them. On the other hand, it was decided that they would use
his
real name. The Greek told him they had it one hundred percent covered but, if for some unforeseen eventuality they had to have a real person to prove there was flesh and blood behind the information, then they wanted him to cover. He was good at that and could handle it. Of course, he got a bonus for allowing them to use his name for this “remote risk.” A one-time chunk. Now it looked like that unforeseen eventuality had happened. He was going to have to think about this real hard. It was time to talk to that goddamn Greek. If he didn’t know what was going on here, he’d better get his greasy ass in gear and find out. If he did know what was going on, then old Don C. wanted to know why he hadn’t been warned.

“I’m not responsible for her not being a real person,” Heath said.

“No, hell no,” Don sympathized. “Just tell them to piss off.” He dropped what was left of the shitty little cigarette between his bare feet into the water.

“Yeah, I don’t even have to talk to them.”

“Shit, no.”

She was quiet for a while, and the water sloshed lazily against the pilings underneath them.

“I tell you what,” she said, dropping her own cigarette into the water now, “for a long time I just took the money and didn’t think about it. I mean, it’s not like it’s drugs we’re dealing with here. I wasn’t going to get busted. And the money’s been so damn good, you know, unbelievable. But, I don’t know, this now…”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

He didn’t like the sound of this too much. They had worked together a little over two years and everything had been fine. He had never allowed her to learn any more about him than his obviously bogus contact name. She didn’t know where he lived or even what he drove. She had always been able to get everything he had requested. She was smart enough to follow the security procedures he had taught her and even smart enough to expand her own little network—the pyramid idea of acquisitions was something she snapped to pretty quick—but she wasn’t that little bit smarter that she needed to be to give him any trouble, to be too curious. Or maybe it was just that she was too passive. She had told him one time that her former husband, the guy she had run away from just before he had met her, had knocked her around a lot, sent her to the hospital three times. Don guessed the guy must have beat all the spunk out of her. She was pretty easy to spook.

“Looking back,” she said, “if I had it to do over and you asked me to cover for you on this Synar thing, I wouldn’t do it.”

Sometimes she sounded like a high school kid, he thought.

“I don’t guess I can blame you,” he said.

“Really?”

She seemed surprised by that, that he would understand. He was looking down at the water, at his white feet in the half light, the water moving under them, back and forth, back and forth around the pilings. He liked the smell of piers, of the way they smelled after years and years of standing in salt water, and people plopping fish up on them and cutting bait on them and spilling beer on them and the sun baking it all and drying it up and always the salt water. You didn’t smell that kind of smell, that exact smell, anywhere else in the world except on piers. He had noticed that all the piers in all the countries he had been in smelled the same.

“I can’t help but wonder what they do with it,” she said.

“What?”

“That stuff we get for them.”

He had meant, What did you say, because he had been daydreaming, but he figured it out.

“Oh.” He straightened from his slump and took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t ask myself that question if I was you.”

She waited a second. “But I would like to know.”

“Well, I don’t want to know,” he lied. “I just pass it on, take the money, and keep my mouth shut. I’ll give you a little insight. The people I pass it on to, you don’t want them to know you’re asking yourself that question.”

“I can guess there’s big bucks in it,” she said. “They’re not going to give the ‘little people’ like us any percentage in an operation like this, so if I’m making what I’m making… and when you figure there’s more like us…” She shook her head. “I mean… God.”

He let her dwell on that a moment.

“What you’ve got to think about, Val, is where you’d be if this hadn’t come along for you.”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“I mean, that you’ve got to think about what the hell you’d do if this dried up on you.”

“Why have I got to think about that?”

“Because you keep asking yourself questions about what they’re doing with the information you give them,” he said, his hands flat on the pier on either side of him as he looked down into the water, “and you could find yourself out of this deal quicker’n shit.”

This was sobering for her, not only because of the prospect to which he alluded, which she had to admit, was indeed grim, but also because it was a none too thinly disguised threat If she had learned anything over the two years she had been doing this, it was that someone had done a hell of a job in planning the structure of the “organization.” She always paid her people in cash, and she was always paid in cash, even though the money was big. One of the first things Don taught her was how to deposit the stuff in banks without drawing attention, spread it out She didn’t know the real identity of anybody in the whole operation except the people below her whom she had recruited herself. But she had gathered from little snippets here and there in her conversations with Don over the two years that there were maybe half a dozen people like her that Don dealt with, and that maybe there were half a dozen people like Don that the guy above him dealt with. She couldn’t even imagine how far it went.

“The thing is,” Don said, interrupting her thoughts, “nobody’s indispensable. They’ll just get somebody else. We just do our business, make our deliveries, take the money, then we get to keep on taking the money. If we cause any trouble, hell, they just don’t need trouble, everything dries up. No more Don C. That number you call? It disappears, and I won’t exist anymore.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw her looking at him again. “All they gotta do is say it, and it happens.”

“Hey, Don, I was just wondering,” she said defensively. “Hey, I don’t care about anything but doing what I do. I don’t care at all… about anything but just doing that Just doing my job, that’s all I want to do.”

“Good,” he said. “It’s the best money you’ve ever made, and if this dries up you’ll never make this good again, not even selling dope.” He swung his legs bigger, sort of indicating a change of pace or subject matter. Not too far out in the bay some kind of craft, a big cabin cruiser, with red and green lights, plowed by and you could hear the frothy sound of the salt water spraying up from the bow and splashing back into itself. “How you like that new ‘Vette?”

“How did you know I got a new car?”

“I saw you drive up in it, honey,” he said, grinning.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, somehow not entirely convinced. “It’s great.” She tried to brighten up, really wanted him to know she wasn’t thinking about the other anymore. “It smells so damn new. I’d like to get a new car every time that smell wears off.”

“Hell, you can buy that smell in a little spray can at the car wash,” he said.

“Yeah, well I’ve tried that It’s nothing like the real thing.”

“How’s it handle?”

“You never driven a Corvette?”

“Nope.” He was looking at her, grinning.

“Well, you’ve been missing something, Donny. It’s better’n sex.” Pause. “Well, as good as, anyway.” Pause. “Nearly.”

He laughed and ran his hand through his hair, and the muscles in his bare arm rippled when he did it, and she laughed too. She wished he would lean over and just pull down her top, just pull it down and put his mouth on her, and then she would lie back and he could have her right there on the damn dock. She didn’t think there was a sexier man alive than Don C.

That’s what she was thinking when he said:

“Okay, we’d better get out of here.”

It took her a second to come down out of that imaginary thing that she would let him do.

“Yeah, I guess so,” she said.

“You’re supposed to have something for me in a couple of days, anyway, right?”

“That’s right,” she said, putting down one hand to steady herself as she got up. He got up too, and jammed his hands into the pockets of his tight jeans while she fished in her purse for the keys to the Corvette. She always left first. “I’ll call you.”

“Don’t worry about anything,” he reassured her. “I don’t think they’ll be back to see you. I’d even lay a little bet on it.”

“You’d better keep your money,” she said, finding the keys. She was pretty sobered by his abrupt interruption of her fantasy. “See you later.”

She turned and started walking back along the long pier. There were a few people as she got nearer the land, a guy crabbing, a couple sitting on the pier looking out to the bay. When she got to the light where the pier connected to the land, she turned around to look back. He was still there, and though he was a little more obscured by the night she could tell he wasn’t looking at her anymore. As a matter of fact, she thought she could see him pissing off the end of the pier.

By the time Paula and Neuman had called in—their call was closely followed by Arnette’s—Graver had read several times through the intelligence reports on Victor Last as well as the crime analysis reports that detailed occurrences of MO’s fitting the description of Last’s known operations. The exercise was educational. He put a few things in his briefcase, grabbed his coat, reset the security system, turned out the lights, and pulled the door closed behind him.

Riding down in the moaning elevator, he thought of how Besom’s death suddenly had galvanized the investigation. None of them, Neuman or Paula or himself, could imagine anything but the worst now. It still felt like he was living a bad dream when he thought of Burtell’s role. Even when he spoke to Ginette on the telephone earlier, he felt as if the expression on his face was unnatural. He simply found the whole distorted situation too bizarre to know how to behave. The hardest part now was trying to decide whether Dean was in danger, or whether he
was
the danger. The thought of it ate at Graver like an ulcer.