Eve's Men (34 page)

“Could you do it? Testify against your own brother?”

“I don’t see why not. After all, he spray paints his name at the scene of the crime. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems all this isn’t about
Miss Colorado
anymore, or his reputation. If he didn’t make his point in Colorado, then he sure as hell did in Bel Air. So I think blowing the
Nomad was
simply a matter of fun and fame. He’s already had his fifteen minutes, and now he wants a full hour at least.”

Eve sighed. “I hate to say it, but you’re probably right. About testifying, though, what about Terry? In L.A., she
was
a participant.”

“Yeah, but she’s only eighteen. And I gather her mother can afford Johnny Cochran. She’ll come out okay.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Me too.”

Just about the last thing Charley wanted to do that night was spend time with his brother, the mad bomber. But ever since Brian had come back from the
Nomad
, Charley had sensed in him a certain unraveling of the spirit.

“He’s out on the deck again,” Terry had said. “Sitting alone. He didn’t want anything to eat.”

So Charley eventually picked up the bottle of brandy Eve had gotten for him earlier and went back through the salon, where Beaver sat trying to watch television in spite of Chester, who was still camped about a foot away from the screen, flipping from one channel to another. Charley closed the glass door behind him and drew another deck chair over to where Brian was sitting, with his feet up on the railing. After taking a pull on the bottle, he held it out to him.

“Here, something to warm your tootsies.”

Brian declined the offer. “Who needs it? I can live with me, even if no one else can.”

“Well, good. Leaves more for me.” Charley took another pull. “Communing with nature, are we?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Too bad. There’s a bunch of it out there.”

The cove itself was about two hundred yards across at the mouth, a horseshoe of rock walls topped by a palisade of fir trees that looked hauntingly beautiful against the moonlit cloud cover. On the strand of beach below, a wood fire flickered at the base of a column of blue smoke, and the sound of voices came softly across the water, including the peal of a child’s laughter. Two cruisers, smaller than the
Seagal
, were anchored together—
rafted
, according to Beaver—and like the fire, their lights reflected off the cove’s dark surface, forming lanes of coruscating copper and silver that ran straight to Charley. An owl’s hoot only added to the peacefulness of the scene, putting it even further at odds with the reality aboard the
Seagal
.

“I guess you and Eve both think I’m crazy now,” Brian said.

“You really give a damn?”

“Well, I know I don’t feel so hot about what happened to you. Christ, I can barely remember the last time I swung on you. It must’ve been in grade school, in self-defense.”

Charley set the brandy down on the deck. “It’s been even longer since anyone pistol-whipped me.”

Brian laughed despairingly. “Goddamn Chester. I still don’t know how he got there so fast.”

“I guess he figured he owed me one.”

“Yeah, but he would’ve done it anyway—you know that. He probably would’ve whacked you ten more times if I’d let him.”

“I’m indebted to you.”

Brian wearily shook his head. “Look, you don’t have to bother, Charley, I know how you feel. I’m a total asshole and what I’ve done is ridiculous and pathetic. Right?”

“Not pathetic. I wouldn’t say that.”

“That’s decent of you.”

“Just one question, Brian. Why in God’s name did you have to drag me and Eve into this thing? You didn’t need us. In fact, we made it a lot more difficult for you. I keep thinking about it, but I never come up with an answer.”

For a time, Brian made no response. He just sat there with his arms folded and his feet propped up, his eyes focused off in the mist somewhere. “I can’t say for sure,” he said finally. “Could be, when I called Santa Barbara and found out you two were together, maybe I just wanted to get back at you. Involve you. Hurt you both. But I’m not sure. Maybe I knew this would be my last strike, and since you were the two people I cared most about, maybe I just wanted you to be there and see it. Maybe I just wanted to have you around these last hours before I take off again, for good.”

“That’s what you’re going to do?”

“Why not? I’m already a fugitive. If they nab me now or in five years, the punishment will probably be pretty much the same.”

“Not if you went in voluntarily.”

“Maybe not, Charley. But I ain’t going gentle into the slammer, or whatever they call it now.” He picked up the brandy bottle and took a short drink, then another, before giving it back to Charley. “Hey, brother, I almost forgot,” he said, getting to his feet.

Under the gunwale there was a row of built-in storage cabinets, one of which he opened now. He got out a package wrapped in plastic and gave it to Charley.

“The money, just like I promised,” he said. “And I wish it was all there. But I had to spend some of it, and C.J. took ten for his contribution and the use of the boat. Incidentally, he’s broke. Finally went through his entire inheritance, even the boat. Once we’re back, he’s got to turn it over to the bank and live like the rest of us, maybe even go to work.”

“Poor fellow.”

Sitting again, Brian shrugged. “Well, he’s been a friend a long time. And he helped a lot with this thing tonight.”

“So he told us.”

“I can imagine.”

Though Charley wondered just how much was in the package, he decided not to ask, figuring that whatever figure Brian gave him probably wouldn’t prove out anyway.

“The ten thousand you gave C.J.,” he said. “You realize I’m gonna have to go after it.”

“Good luck.”

“While we’re on the subject, just what the hell does the C.J. stand for?”

Brian smiled. “The J I forget. But the C stands for Christian. Christian Beaver.”

Charley laughed. “That’s great. Christian Beaver, huh? From now on, I call him Chris.”

For a time, the two brothers continued to sit there in silence. The people on shore had put out their fire, and Charley could hear them as they rowed toward their yachts. One voice, a man’s, came so clearly across the water he could have been sitting on the other side of Brian.

“I ain’t ever going back,” the voice said.

A woman laughed. “Not until tomorrow anyway.”

Charley got up then, about to go back into the cabin. But he paused long enough to lay his hand on Brian’s shoulder. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “you still got a big brudder.”

Though Brian said nothing, he reached up and covered Charley’s hand with his own.

As Charley stepped into the cabin, a television bulletin cut into a late-night movie review program. A clean-cut young newsman excitedly announced that there were two new developments in the yacht explosion story at the Romano Resort in the San Juan Islands. Knowing that Brian would want to hear the bulletin, Charley called out that he was on the tube again. Then, leaving the glass door open, Charley moved out of the draft and sat down. Eve and Terry evidently had heard too, for they came hurrying up from the bow cabin as the newsman’s voice read on, over stock footage of the resort by day and helicopter shots filmed soon after the blast, not much but darkness and electric lights and a few scattered fires on the hillsides.

“Earlier tonight the luxurious eighty-foot yacht of communications tycoon Rupert Stekko was blown up in the exclusive resort’s harbor. Authorities at first thought the explosion was accidental and involved no loss of life, but a few minutes ago San Juan County Sheriff Keith Butler reported recovering the body of the yacht’s cabin boy, a teenage Filipino. No name was given.”

By then Charley was barely breathing. Though he wanted to turn and see if Brian had heard the terrible news, he did not. He just sat there and watched as the newsman, on camera again, announced that there was increasing speculation that the notorious fugitive Brian Poole was in the area and might have been responsible for the firebombing.

“We go now to Harry Shaw on Orcas Island. Harry?”

The picture cut to two men standing in the floodlit darkness, with the channel’s white helicopter parked directly behind them. The reporter, a balding young man in a flight jacket, was holding a mike, moving it between himself and a tall, slim man in an elegant tux, with the jacket unbuttoned. The man had long iron-gray hair, dark, close-set eyes, a large nose, and wide mouth: the face of a wolf.

“John, I’m standing here with Rupert Stekko, owner of the firebombed yacht,” the reporter said. “Sir, I understand that you have reason to believe that this terrible act may have been the work of Brian Poole, who’s already committed a number of terrorist acts against your movie company, Wide World Studios.”

Stekko smiled thinly. “Well, I make it a point not to deal in reckless speculation. All I can tell you is that Kevin Greenwalt—”

“The man whose great art collection was destroyed by Poole last week,” the reporter interrupted.

Stekko nodded. “Yes, the man who runs Wide World—”

“Which is just one part of your empire.”

The tycoon looked at the reporter as if he’d just belched loudly, then casually reached over and took the mike from him. “Which I own a controlling interest in, yes. Anyway, Mr. Greenwalt phoned me two days ago with the news that the car Poole used in his escape from Bel Air—an old nine-eleven Porsche with California plates—had been briefly spotted by the Seattle police. That’s all I know. I will add this, though, that if Mr. Poole is responsible for destroying the
Nomad
and killing this very fine young man, he will have to pay for his crimes. And I’ll do everything in my power to see that he does.”

Finished, Stekko handed the mike back to the reporter, who was stammering. “Well, I g-g-guess that’s it from here, John. As yet, no real proof yet, who’s responsible for the bonfiring …” Catching himself, the reporter whinnied and shook his head. “The firebombing, that is. Back to you, John.”

Having come all the way into the cabin, Brian now reached down and turned off the TV. Then, without saying a word, he went out onto the deck again. Chester was the only one who followed him.

“Hey, Brian, come on!” he said. “It wasn’t none of our fault, man! No way! You went inside and checked, din’tcha? And nobody answered, did they? So it’s this gook’s own goddamn fault—not ours.”

Brian had climbed up onto the bridge by then, and when Chester tried to follow him there too, Brian shoved him off the ladder. And Charley heard him speak then, his voice sounding oddly weak and strangled.

“Keep the hell away from me,” he said. “All of you.”

Chapter Fifteen

Charley was finding it almost too much to deal with, not just thinking about the youth who had died and wondering what effect his death would have on their own lives, but also knowing that Brian was alone up on the bridge, lying out in the cold and the damp right above their heads, trying somehow to deal with the knowledge that he had killed.

Crying openly, Terry had gone back to the bow cabin and crawled into her bunk as if she might never leave it. Eve was sitting next to Charley on the built-in couch, snuggled tightly against him, her tears wetting his neck and shirt.

“We’ve got to go to him,” she kept saying. “We can’t leave him alone up there. He can’t deal with it, Charley, I know him. He’s going to dive off the boat and not bother to come up.”

But Chester would not allow anyone else to go up. Producing the gun Brian had given him before rowing to the Nomad, he had taken charge, telling them all what to do, which essentially was nothing.

“If anyone’s goin’ up top and talkin’ to the man, it’s gonna be me. We the ones who blew the goddamn boat, and I’m the one with this li’l goddamn peashooter,” as he called the .25 automatic, which appeared perfect for his tiny hand.

Beaver meanwhile was going at the champagne as if it were water, this on top of another lung-rattling snort of cocaine. Bitterly, he lamented that he had ever been fool enough to get involved with “a fanatic and a psycho,” a word choice that brought Chester to his feet, in fact up onto his toes, with his chest puffed out and his mouth in a snarl as he yanked Beaver off his stool and began to shove him about the salon, berating him every step of the way.

“Jest who you callin’ psycho, you candy-ass motherfucker? If you done yer job right, we’d of knowed who was in that goddamn boat, and nobody’d be dead now. And Brian wouldn’t be layin’ up there stewin’ like he is—you hear me?”

He finished by shoving Beaver down into the pilot’s seat and telling him to watch his mouth from then on if he knew what was good for him. With that settled, Chester began to pick at another sore.

“And jest who the fuck Brian Poole think he is anyway? Too big and important to even talk with a guy? I put my ass on the line fer him today, and this is how he pays me back, huh, like I’m some dumb shitkicker or somethin’, not worth his precious time? Well, lemme tell ya, this shitkicker has jest about had it. And that’s a fack.”