Indigo Slam: An Elvis Cole Novel (18 page)

I let myself back into the safe house a few minutes after one that morning to find Mon hiding behind the door with his pistol. Mon shrugged when I looked at him, and said, “Can’t be too careful.”

Walter Junior was stretched out on the floor, sleeping. Dak and Walter Senior were at the dining room table, playing cards. Clark was sitting with them. “Money come yet?”

Dak was concentrating on his cards. “Soon.”

“Where’s Pike?”

Mon said, “He left, but he did not say anything.” His eyes narrowed.”I no like that.”

“He never says anything. Forget it.”

Clark’s skin seemed greasy, and if you looked close enough, you could see that his hands were trembling. “Clark?”

Clark shook his head.

“How’re the kids?”

“Sleeping.”

I joined them at the table and waited. No one spoke. The waiting is often the worst.

At twenty minutes after two that morning, someone knocked softly at the door and handed Dak an overnight bag containing twenty thousand dollars in nice neat hundreds. Real hundreds, printed by the U.S. Treasury on paper milled at the Crane Paper Mill in Dalton, Massachusetts. Dak probably kept them under his mattress.

Clark pronounced them too clean, put the bills in a large Ziploc plastic bag with a half pound of ground coffee and one pound of dried kidney beans, and put the bag into the dryer. It wouldn’t hurt the money, Clark said, but it would uniformly color the money as if it had been falsely aged.

Joe Pike returned at just after four. He gave Clark a small brown vial of prescription pills, and murmured something to Clark before moving to a dark corner of the living room. Clark looked at the vial, then stared at Pike for a long time before he went into the bathroom. A little while later he appeared to be feeling much better.

None of us formally went to bed; instead, we perched on the couch or in the big chair or on the floor, and drifted in and out of nervous uncertain catnaps, waiting for the dawn.

Sometime very early that morning, Teri came downstairs and moved between the napping men and cuddled against her father.

I phoned Dobcek at nine the next morning, exactly as I said I would. He said, “We meet you on the Venice boardwalk in exactly one hour.”

“Let me speak with the boy.”

He put Charles on the line, and I told him that everything would be fine. I told him to stay calm, and to trust that Joe and I would bring him home. Dobcek came back on the line before I was finished. “You know the bookstore they have there?”

“Yeah.” Small World Books.

“Wait on the grass across from that. We come to you.” Then he hung up.

I looked at Clark. “You up to this?”

“Of course. Charles is my son.”

“Then let’s go.”

Dak agreed to stay with Teri and Winona while Joe and Clark and I went to the meet. We used Joe’s Jeep, with Joe driving. Two long cases were on the rear floor that hadn’t been there yesterday. Guess he’d gotten them last night.

We used the freeways to get to Santa Monica, then turned south along Ocean Boulevard, riding in silence until we came to Venice. Pike turned onto a side street and stopped. He said, “What’s the deal?”

“They want Clark and me across from the bookstore on the grass. They’ll come to us. They’re supposed to have the boy, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Clark leaned forward. He was holding the overnight bag on his lap like a school lunch. “Why won’t they have Charles?”

“They’ll say that the boy is in a car nearby, and maybe he will be, but probably he won’t. They’re not coming here to trade, Clark. They’re coming here to kill us. Keep that in mind.”

“Oh.”

“They’ll say the boy is somewhere else to get us to go with them to a place they’ve picked out. It will be a private place, and that’s where they’ll do the murder. We in the trade call that the kill zone.”

Clark said, “You say that so easily.”

Pike shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“But how will we get Charles?”

“We’ll show them the money. Your job is to stay calm and convince them that you printed this money and that you can print more. That’s very important, Clark. Can you do that?”

Clark nodded. “Oh, sure.” Oh, sure.

“Markov wants you dead, but if he thinks he can get something from you before he kills you, he might go for it.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

Pike said, “Then we’ll kill him.”

When we were two blocks north of the bookstore. Pike turned into an alley, got out, and slipped away without saying a word. He took one of the cases. Clark said, “Where’s he going?”

“He’s going to make sure they don’t kill us while we’re waiting for them.”

“You think they’d do that?”

“Yes, Clark. They would do that.”

I climbed behind the wheel, and at nine forty-two, I left Pike’s Jeep illegally parked in a red zone behind the Venice boardwalk. “Let’s go.”

I led Clark along the alley to the boardwalk, and then to the bookstore. It was a bright, hazy day, just on the right side of cool. Street people were already up and walking their endless laps of the boardwalk, and shop merchants were hawking tattoos and sunglasses to tourists come to see what all the excitement was about. Tall palms swayed in the breeze. Joggers and Rollerbladers and male and female bodybuilders with great tans moved through the streams of people with practiced indifference. Clark said, “Where’s Joe?”

“You won’t see him, so don’t look for him. The Russians will wonder what you’re looking for.”

He locked his eyes forward, afraid now to look anyplace other than directly ahead. “Do you see them?”

“No, but they’re probably watching us.”

“Oh.”

The bookstore had just unlocked its doors, and a dark-haired woman with glasses was pulling a wire magazine rack onto the walk. I walked Clark into the store and told him to wait inside with the bag and watch me through the window. I told him not to come out until I waved for him. The dark-haired woman eyed us suspiciously. Probably thought we were shoplifters.

I walked back across to the grass and waited. Three homeless men were lying on the grass there, one of them holding a fat dog. The man with the dog looked at me, and said, “Spare any change?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be cheap. It’s for the dog.”

I shook my head. “No change.”

The man smirked at his friend. “Cheap.”

I looked along the boardwalk first one way, then the other, then along the beach behind me, and into the parking lots and alleys, just another guy hanging around on the boardwalk wondering if he could get his gun out in time to save Clark Hewitt’s life, not to mention his own. I eyed the fat dog. “Looks like he could use a little exercise.”

The homeless man was affronted. “Mind your own goddamned business.” So much for small talk.

Six minutes after ten o’clock, Alexei Dobcek walked out of the bookstore’s parking lot and came directly toward me as if we were the only two guys on the beach. I said, “Where’s the boy?”

“Near. Let’s get Clark and go see him.”

I lifted the bag. “We had a different idea.”

Dobcek glanced at the bag, then past me and to both sides, like maybe someone might be coming up on him fast. He smiled like I should know better than to try anything like this. “We know Clark is in the bookstore. Why you want to get stupid like this?”

I dropped the bag at his feet. “Look in the bag.”

He glanced at the bag, but didn’t pick it up. The homeless man was eyeing the bag, too. Dobcek said, “Markov is near with the boy. We had an agreement, did we not?”

“Look in the bag. It won’t bite you.”

The homeless man said, “Can I look?”

Dobcek pasted the homeless man with dead eyes. “Leave here before I crush your dog.”

The homeless man gathered up the dog and scurried away.

Dobcek said, “Fucking trash.” All heart, these guys.

“Look in the bag, Dobcek.”

He glanced at me again, then squatted and opened the bag. He reached in, felt the paper, then closed the bag and stood. “So?”

“It’s Clark’s new project. Bring it to Markov, have him look at it, and tell him we’d like to work out a different arrangement.”

Dobcek stared at me, then shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“Bring it to Markov and have him look at it. I’ll wait here.”

Dobcek leaned close to me. “We’ll kill the boy.”

“Have him look at the money, Dobcek. I’ll wait and so will Clark. We’re not going anywhere, and Markov will want to talk about it. Tell him this is a sample.”

Alexei Dobcek looked one hard long time at the bookstore, then walked away with the bag.

I watched couples share coffee and breakfast at the little restaurant next to the bookstore, and I thought I might bring Lucy down here. She’d like the bookstore, and we could sit at one of the little outdoor tables and watch the street performers and enjoy ourselves. Read a little, eat a little. Be nice to do if I survived the next ten minutes or so.

Dobcek reappeared between the street vendor tents, and this time Sautin and Andrei Markov and a fourth man were with him. The fourth man was wearing jeans and a green polo shirt, and he was carrying the bag. Markov was wearing a sharkskin jacket and gold chains, and looked like a second-rate Vegas lounge act. A young woman in a green bikini looked at him as she Bladed past and laughed. Probably wasn’t the fashion reaction he was hoping for.

When they reached me, Markov made a little wave at the bag. “I always worry when someone change the plan on me.”

“So why didn’t you just kill the boy and drive away?”

“Maybe I still gonna do that. Maybe the boy and you and Clark, too.” Markov smiled toward the bookstore, then waved toward the bag again. “Why you wanna show me this?”

“Clark printed it. He’s going to print more, and we were thinking you might like some of it instead of killing Clark and his boy. We were thinking that you might like so much of it that you’ll forgive Clark for the little problem in Seattle and let bygones be bygones.” They would either go for it or they wouldn’t. We could either convince them it was counterfeit, or we couldn’t.

The fourth guy put the bag on the ground, and took out one of the hundreds. He snapped the bill and sneered at me. “You sayin’ this is funny?” He snapped the bill again. “My goddamned ass it is.”

The fourth guy wasn’t Russian. He sounded like he was from Georgia or Florida, and I didn’t like it that he was here. He sounded like he knew about printing, and he might be able to call Clark a liar and get away with it. Maybe he was Markov’s current funny money specialist. I said, “Who the hell are you?”

“The guy sayin’ you’re bullshit.”

I smiled at Markov. “You’re not interested, that’s fine.” The homeless guy with the dog had set up shop ten yards down the boardwalk in front of a stand selling African robes. I called, “Hey, dog man.” When he looked over, I closed the bag and tossed it to him. “Have a party.” I turned back at Markov and spread my hands. “Your loss, Andrei. We’re sitting on a couple million more of this stuff.”

Ten yards away, the homeless guy looked in the bag and shouted, “Yeow! Jesus has returned!”

Markov sighed and tilted his head. “Dobcek.”

Dobcek trotted over and pulled the bag away from the old man. The old man didn’t want to let go, so Dobcek punched him once in the forehead. Hard. I kept the smile on my face like it didn’t matter to me. I kept the smile like I didn’t want to take out my gun and shoot Dobcek to death. Like I didn’t feel like a dog because I had brought it on the old man.

The fourth guy said, “Hey, Mr. Markov, if those bills are righteous I’d like to know how.” Wounded and whiny, as if his feelings were hurt that Markov doubted him.

I said, “Clark’s in the bookstore. You give him a pass to come out here and talk about it?”

“Da.”

I waved Clark out. When Clark reached us he stood a little behind me, and kept his hands in his pockets. The sun made him squint so much that his eyes were little slits. Markov said, “You look like shit.”

Clark said, “Hi, Mr. Markov.”

The fourth guy toed the bag. “This is intaglio, not offset. This is Crane paper.” He shook his head. “My ass you printed this.”

Clark blinked at me, and I gave him an encouraging smile. “Guy thinks you’re bullshit. Guy wants to know how you did it.” I crossed my arms so that my hand was near the Dan Wesson and hoped that Pike was zeroed on Dobcek because I was planning on shooting Sautin. I would shoot Sautin first, then Markov, and then the fourth man, and hope that I could do all that before someone shot me. We were maybe twenty seconds from all the shooting, and if we survived the boy would still be lost, all because some cracker who knew a little printing just happened to be with Markov.

Clark blinked at me again, and I said, “Tell the man, Clark.”

Clark blinked once more, then took a bill from the bag, snapped it just as the cracker had, and smiled at Andrei Markov. “Of course it’s Crane paper. You can’t fake that wonderful sound.” He snapped it again, then held up the bill. “They used to be one-dollar bills.”

The cracker frowned.

Clark said, “Real U.S. money printed on real Crane paper.” He held the bill to Markov. Markov took it. “But they were ones. I washed them, Andrei. Bleached the original ink, then washed them and pressed them and reprinted them as hundreds.” Clark’s smile widened. “You wouldn’t believe the wonderful technology we have now, Andrei.”

The cracker took a bill from the bag and frowned harder at it.

Clark said, “I bleached eight hundred pounds of paper, and I’ve got an intaglio press. It’s older, but it’s one of the Swiss originals that a printing firm in France had until they went out of business last year.” Clark let the smile turn shy. “Well, it’s not mine, really, but these people I know have it. I’m printing for them just the way I was printing for you.” I was staring at Clark. Staring, and impressed as hell.

Markov said, “You gonna steal from them, too?”

“If I have to.” He said it directly to Markov and he said it well.

The cracker said, “Where’d you get the plates?”

“Scanned them off a series of mint collector notes, all perfect hundreds printed between 1980 and 1985. I used a high-density digitizer to get a pretty clean line, then created a photoneg off the digital image and used the photoneg to acid-etch the plates.” Clark pointed at the hundred the cracker was holding. “You can see the inks are a little off, but I think I got pretty close.”