Dead and Gone (36 page)

“You never heard of this Darcadia thing before?”

“Sure. It’s no real secret, especially with the kind of money they’ve been raking in. But I didn’t know this freak was the big player.”

“Aren’t the
federales
interested?”

“Maybe IRS. Or the money-laundering guys. Might even be a candidate for RICO-fraud, I don’t know. But it’s not lighting up anybody’s screen, I can tell you that.”

“Good.”

“I don’t under—Oh. It’s like that, huh?”

“I’ve got no choice.”

“You had choices
once,”
Wolfe said. Then she turned and walked away.

T
he building directory was all in Chinese. I followed Max up the stairs. On the second floor, he made a gesture like pulling a tooth, telling me the office we wanted belonged to a dentist. The mute Mongol turned the handle of the office door and stepped inside. It was almost two in the morning, but a young Chinese woman in a white dental smock bowed to Max in greeting as if he were an expected patient. She didn’t acknowledge my presence. Max made a series of quick hand signals. The dentist led us into an operatory, then left the room. Max went over to what looked like a closet. It turned out to be an opening to a flight of stairs, leading down. I followed him again, and we ended up in an alley.

We walked for a couple of blocks, then Max rapped on a door the exact color—New York dirt—of the building it led into. The door opened. A Chinese man with a small meat-cleaver in his right hand stood there. He bowed to Max and stepped aside. I followed, still invisible.

This time, the exit was from the basement. But not into an alley, into a tunnel. It had obviously been there a long time, probably built by coolie labor for one of the Tongs, back when Chinatown was another country and tourists weren’t welcome.

When a branch of the tunnel finally took us into the cellar of Mama’s restaurant, I wasn’t surprised.

I
t took me a while to tell the story. When I was finished, the Prof spoke first. “Ain’t but one way for us to play, Schoolboy.”

The “us” came out of him so natural that I had to bite my lip to keep my face flat. Almost dying had really fucked up my internal controls.

“If we could find where he is …” the Mole offered.

“Not a prayer, Mayor,” the Prof chopped him off. “Motherfucker’s not putting himself on the spot. We want a date, we got to have the bait.”

“And he will have plenty of firepower behind him, Father,” Clarence added. “That team that tried to kill Burke …”

“Soldiers,” Mama said. “Very expensive.”

“What are you saying, Mama?” I asked her.

“All about money. This … place you talk about.”

“Sure, but …”

“Money is bait,” she finished for me. “Money bring him to you.”

“But he’s
got
all the—”

“No, he doesn’t, honey,” Michelle put in. “Mama’s right. If he did, why would he still be raising all this cash? You said the operation’s still going on, right? Still soliciting in the right places.”

“Sure!” the Prof backed her up. “Motherfucker had his whole rack stacked, he’d just jet off the set.”

“Okay, so he’s still collecting cash. How does that—?”

“Investor,” Mama said. “Big investor.”

I thought it through, taking my time. And kept coming up against the same flaw.

“No way this guy’s going to go face to face without knowing who he’s dealing with,” I told them. “I’d need an X-ray-proof ID, back-legend and all.”

“Didn’t your girl build you one of those before, youngblood?” the Prof asked.

“Wolfe won’t … won’t work with me anymore.”

“I can do it,” Michelle piped up.

Nobody said anything, waiting.

“I know just the man,” she said. “An old man. Lives in Key West. A real recluse. A
rich
recluse. Never goes out. I think he needs oxygen just to get around.”

“How’s that going to—?”

“Baby, let me
tell
it, all right? He’s an
old
man, if you understand what I’m telling you. He spends his money on anything that might give him back what he’s lost. Powdered rhino horn, tiger testicles—you know. Plus, he’s a real fascist. Anyone checks him out, they’ll see he’s been giving money to those save-the-race freakshows for years.”

“Yeah, fine. But this Darcadia—why bother? He’s already
got
his paradise right here, all that money.”

“No, sweetheart. There’s one thing he’s heard that’s
guaranteed
to give him back what he wants. Little girls. Fresh ones, understand? But he’s scared to death of trusting any kiddie pimp. Plus, he’s afraid to fly, so he only travels by boat. His
own
boat.”

“So maybe he’d want to buy a piece—”

“
—
a
big
piece.”

“—a big piece, okay, of this operation so he could have what he wanted … hell, be a
king
down there. Christ.”

“It sounds very perfect,” the Mole said.

“What are you saying?” Michelle challenged.

“That it is not true. It sounds as if you took Burke’s specifications and built a person to fit them.”

“Just
some
of it is built,” Michelle said, not resenting the Mole’s insight.

“How much?” I asked, already tired from the weight.

“The part about little girls. He’s not into that at all.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know what he
is
into, you idiot.”

I risked a glance at the Mole. He was calm as a snake on a hot rock. A venomous snake.

“What makes you think he’d go along with me taking over his identity?” I asked Michelle. Quickly, before she could go into details.

“Like I said, I know what he wants.”

“But we don’t have—”

“Sure. We have,” Mama said, radiating calm. “In special clinic, yes?”

She’d snapped to it way before I had. “What special—?”

“And it would take considerable time to complete all the testing necessary,” the Mole said, soberly.

“Mole,” I said, “we wouldn’t
really
be—”

Patches of red showed in the Mole’s subterranean complexion as his eyes flicked rapidly behind his Coke-bottle lenses. “I know,” he said. As close to sarcasm as he gets.

M
ama knew an outlaw doctor based just outside of Galveston.

The guy only did plastic surgery. And he didn’t keep records. All it took was cash for him to close down his clinic for a month.

Eight days later, Michelle called from Key West to say, smugly, that the old man was ready to travel. I asked her what kind of boat he had.

“I
t’s me,” I said, when I heard Gem’s voice on the phone.

“I knew you would call.”

“Are you as certain of the phone you’re speaking from?”

“Oh! No, perhaps not.”

“Can you find the corner of Ninth Avenue and Seventeenth Street?”

“Yes.”

“You have your red coat with you?”

“Yes. It is precious to me.”

“Be sure to wear it. A black man with a West Indian accent will meet you.”

“When shall I leave?”

“Now.”

I
watched from my back booth as Gem entered Mama’s restaurant with Clarence. Mama was at her register, but didn’t look up as Gem walked back toward me. Clarence went out the way he’d come in.

As soon as Gem was seated, Mama walked over, snapping her fingers for the mandatory tureen of hot-and-sour soup. One of the gunmen who pretend they’re waiters when some tourist mistakes Mama’s for a restaurant brought it over.

Mama took the lid off the tureen, looked a question at me.

I nodded a “Yes” at her, and she put a small bowl before Gem and filled it, making it clear I could serve my own damn self. She regarded Gem thoughtfully, doing an ethnic read. Then she tried a greeting in Tagalog, but Gem smiled and shook her head, replying in Cambodian. Now it was Mama’s turn to shake her head. She tried French, and Gem answered right back.

Mama bowed slightly and sat down next to me, bumping me over to the wall so she could sit directly across from Gem.

“You both speak English,” I said to her. “What’s with all this—?”

Mama cut me off with a look. Gem giggled.

And they went back to speaking French.

I was well into my third bowl of soup when they decided to let me in on the conversation.

“So? You Burke’s wife?” Mama asked in English.

“Yes,” Gem answered her.

“You understand, Burke my son. Not marry for … final unless I say.”

“I understand,” Gem said, solemnly.

“Your mother …?”

“The Khmer.”

“Ah. Sorry. So many …”

“Yes.”

“After this … thing all finish,” Mama promised Gem. At least, it sounded like some kind of promise. I couldn’t figure out what it meant, but I wasn’t dumb enough to ask.

A
fter Mama went back to whatever she had been doing, I read Gem the specs on the old man’s boat I’d written down from my conversation with Michelle.

“It’s a ninety-two-foot Cheoy Lee cockpit motor yacht,” I told her. “Whatever the hell
that
is.”

“I am sure they could handle it, but I will call to be certain.”

Then I told her the rest of it. Gem didn’t say a word, didn’t interrupt me once. When I was finished, she said, “There is another way I could help, I think.”

Mama came back over to my booth as if she’d been listening in on a wiretap and knew we were done talking.

“Eat now, yes?”

An hour later, Gem was still shoveling it away.

Mama passed by the booth, saw the carnage, and chuckled approvingly.

“T
he boat should have at least a four-person crew,” Gem told me the next day.

“At least?”

“It is an oceangoing vessel,” she said, as if reciting a lesson. “So it must be manned around the clock. It is a
very
big boat, probably cost in excess of three million dollars. You have never been at sea?”

“Me? The only boat ride I’ve ever been on in my life was the Staten Island Ferry.”

“Ah, well. It does not matter. You will not be posing as a sailor. And if you appear … ill at the time of your meeting, it will be in character. But we
will
need one more person.”

“One more? You said four, right?”

“Oh, I will be going, too,” she said.

“I
need a driver, Sonny,” I told the kid. Only he wasn’t a kid anymore.

“I heard you were—”

“Now you know better.”

“Oh man, this is great! I—”

“In or out, kid?”

“Can I use my own ride?”

“Which is?”

“A Viper GTS. But it’s got—”

“No. We need something with plenty of room. Got to carry some people, long distance.”

“Can we use your—?”

“No. That’s gone.”

“Damn! That was one sweet—”

“The job is a delivery. You bring some people somewhere, you pick someone up when you get there, you drive them all someplace else. Then you come back on your own.”

“Why would you need me for that?”

“You thought I was … what? Remember?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Okay. You need fast or smooth?”

“Smooth. And roomy.
Lots
of room.”

“My buddy has a Ford Excursion. We use it to tow mine to the races. Big enough?”

“Plenty. With clean papers all the way through, son. You’re going to be crossing a lot of state lines.”

“Just tell me where to meet you.”

“S
onnyboy!” the Prof greeted him with a hug, then stepped back to look him over. “The wheelman’s a real man now!”

The kid whose mother had named him Randy blushed.

We loaded the truck in the back alley behind Mama’s. The guy she brought over to do the heavy lifting was so big he should have given off a beeping sound when he backed up.

“It’s about fifteen hundred miles,” I told Sonny.

“This one’s got the V-10 in it. I can make fifteen hundred miles in—”

“You can make it in about thirty hours, kid.
No tickets
, understand? Max might be able to stop a rhino, but he drives like one, too. So you’ll have to break up the run. Just grab a motel anywhere along the—”

“I am an excellent driver,” Gem announced.

“You ever drive anything this big?” I asked her, pointing at the red Excursion’s huge bulk.

“Bigger,” she said. “And over much worse roads than we will be traveling.”

Sonny and I exchanged shrugs. When I didn’t argue with her, he decided he wouldn’t, either.

W
hen the Excursion pulled out, it carried a silent Mongolian who could take a life with either hand; a pasty-faced, pudgy guy with thick glasses and a satchel full of stuff they don’t allow on airplanes; and a cargo hold full of equipment. And Gem.

Right behind them was a dark-blue BMW 7 riding caravan, Clarence and the Prof inside. And me.

I
jumped off in D.C., grabbed a flight to Tampa. Met Michelle at the airport. She had a man-and-wife rental at the Hyatt Regency, where we spent the night going over it, again. The next morning, we took off for Key West.

W
hen the rest of the crew arrived—a couple of hours ahead of schedule—we went over it one more time. I finally thought we were all finished, but Michelle had one more thing.

“That nurse’s outfit does look cute on you, but are you sure you can handle the needle?” she asked Gem. “The Mole will get the dosages perfect, but you’ve got to slip it in like you’ve been doing it for years.”

“Shall I show you?” Gem asked, reaching for the syringe.

I
t took hours to get the old man into the back of the Excursion.

Not to load him, to convince him. Michelle had greased the skids, all right, but the man was old … not dumb.

I was the businessman, in my alpaca suit. Michelle was the working girl who was going to get a cut of the profits—that part actually calmed the old man down, as we expected. Max was the bodyguard, Gem the nurse.

The Mole’s role was mad scientist. Fortunately, that wasn’t much of a stretch. By the time he got done explaining how individual cells could be extracted from first-trimester aborted fetuses, tested for a unique DNA combo-string with a producer-multiplier effect on testosterone, and, once isolated, IV-dripped into a man kept in a quasi-comatose state—“The body must be regulated in all respects during the transfer. Any sudden acceleration of heartbeat, for example, would negate the bonding process. We are not
adding
to blood. We are making
new
blood, which will then self-replenish. The goal is a compound, not a mixture”—he had me wanting to try it myself.