The Homecoming (24 page)

“What about Phil Holliman? He’s your muscle guy.”

“I’m not sure I can count on Phil. He’s sitting pretty right now, running Securicom. If they let Securicom keep the Quantum deal when the contract runs out this month—and they might—he’ll be in clover. I show up on his radar, the best way he clears himself with the Feds is to rat me out. There’s no percentage in this for Phil.”

“Can’t you use one of the guys? There are mean guys in the outfit. Ray Cioffi, for instance?”

“I don’t need a bunch of mean guys, Chu. I just need a driver, a guy to get me there and cover my back while I go in.”

He leaned down and fumbled in the valise at his feet, brought out another huge steel pistol, dropped the mag, racked the slide back, held it so Chu could watch as he shoved the mag back in, smacked it home, and released the slide. He thumbed the de-cocking lever and held it out to Chu.

“There you go. It’s ready to rock, so don’t blow your foot off. I got this from Shaniqua. It’s a Sig. Point and shoot. Fifteen rounds. Use both hands.”

Chu took it from Deitz. It was as heavy as a bowling ball and as far as Chu was concerned about as useful.

“Byron—”

“No. Fuck that. You’re going. I’ve given the thing a lotta thought. I’m not leaving you sitting around back here, going all pale and shaky on me. You’re in a spot here, Andy. You fucking did it to yourself. You put yourself right here in the fucking ten ring. For a while there, sitting in the slam, I thought about all the ways I’d like to fuck with you. But then I realized you weren’t the problem. The assholes who set me up, those guys are the problem. You
know
I didn’t steal that fucking money. Nick and Boonie and all the local guys know I didn’t steal that money. They’re just squeezing me with the Chink thing because they think I know who
did
steal that fucking money. And I do. I know
exactly
who did that fucking bank and I’m gonna go take the money away from them. Then I’m gonna kill them. Both of them. Then I’m gonna call Warren Smoles and he’s gonna set up a deal with the Feds and if I handle it right—recover the money—kill the cop killers—I’ll be a fucking hero and the Raytheon beef will disappear.”

“Who are they? The guys who really did it?”

“Haven’t figured that out, hah? I’ll give you a hint. Go find out who I paid five large to so I could get my Raytheon thing back.”

Chu knew that Deitz had ransomed back his module, and that the only people who could have had it to ransom
from
were the people who robbed the bank. But the payment went to a Mondex card, and although he had tried, he had never been able to track the card all the way to an end user. He had gotten as far as the Channel Islands and hit a wall. He wasn’t going to tell Deitz this anytime soon.

Anyway, Deitz had moved on.

“So I figure, bottom line, you and I are in the shit together. So man up, put the fucking gun in your pants—no, not down the front, you dumb-ass—on the side there—good—now put your coat on, get the fucking car keys, and saddle up.”

Chu made one last effort.

“Look, Byron, the guys who robbed that bank killed four cops and two civilians doing it. Whoever they are, they’re serious people and they’re not going to be easy to get to. And they have to know you’re out. Won’t they be expecting you to come after them? You’ll be walking into a trap. They’ll probably kill us both.”

Deitz said nothing for a moment, and Andy Chu’s heart began to beat again.

Not for long.

“Doesn’t matter. I can’t stay out that long. Every cop in the state is looking for me right now. Pretty soon the FBI will start thinking about who might be helping me. You’re not at work today. You just spent five thousand on clothes that are four times too big for you. Plus that fucking wig. Soon as they look at that, we’ll have the SWAT guys landing on your roof. I got a limited amount of time to take care of these pukes, and I’m not going to dick around with being fucking
tactical
. Okay?”

Chu sagged into himself, found a trace of courage in there somewhere. What the hell. He was hip-deep in self-inflicted shit. Maybe he was about to get what he deserved.

“Yeah,” he said. “What the fuck. Let’s go.”

Deitz grinned at him.

“Know what, kid? You got potential. Now let’s go kill something.”

Endicott watched the computer screen as Chu’s garage door slid up and Chu’s blue Lexus rolled down the cobbles. The brake lights lit up, and then the car headed off up Bougainville.

Endicott started the Cadillac, put it in gear, and glided silently down the road, now and then glancing at the Toshiba screen. He had attached a GPS transponder to the Lexus during the night—Chu’s alarm system wasn’t much better than a bunch of tin cans tied to a string—and now he could follow that Lexus wherever it went.

Where it seemed to be going was north on River Road. Endicott sat back into the satiny leather seats—Cadillac. No better car in the world—you can keep your BMWs and Audis—and thought about what he had just heard:

You
know
I didn’t steal that fucking money. Nick and Boonie and all the local guys know I didn’t steal that money. They’re just squeezing me with the Chink thing because they think I know who
did
steal that fucking money. And I do. I know exactly who did that fucking bank and I’m gonna go take the money away from them. Then I’m gonna kill them. Both of them. Then I’m gonna call Warren Smoles and he’s gonna set up a deal with the Feds and if I handle it right—recover the money—kill the cop killers—I’ll be a fucking hero and the Raytheon beef will disappear
.

It had never occurred to La Motta or Munoz or Spahn—or for that matter to Endicott—that Deitz hadn’t stolen that money. In the world they all inhabited,
innocence
was not a word that tripped lightly off the tongue.

Endicott looked at his cell phone, considered asking for advice from
his source down here—Deitz’s own lawyer, Warren Smoles, as crooked a man as ever choked down a scruple with a double shot of Tanqueray. Another thought?

Was it possible that Deitz
knew
he was being listened to? That this was all showbiz?

No.

It wasn’t.

He’d only been on Deitz for two days and he had already decided that Deitz had the situational awareness of a mollusk.

Shortly thereafter, Endicott reached a conclusion. No calling Warren Smoles, or Mario La Motta, or anyone else.

All of this was just too damn interesting for that. He watched the red dot as it accelerated north on River Road, now just crossing Peachtree.

He reached for a Camel, lit it up, rolled down the windows, and opened up the moon roof. If you smoked in a rental car, they charged you five hundred dollars to clean it. Endicott could afford it, but five hundred was outrageous.

“
You know I didn’t steal that fucking money
.”

The Chinese guy was probably right—and for a pencil-neck geek he had serious stones—but he and Byron Deitz were probably going to die this afternoon. It would be interesting to see who was going to do the killing.

He pulled on his cigarette, blew smoke out through the moon roof, smiling.

Excellent
.

Lemon Featherlight got to the Lady Grace morgue about fifteen minutes after Nick called him. Nick didn’t send a cruiser because Lemon would have told the cop where and how to insert his cruiser and that wouldn’t have gone well.

They watched him coming down the long, dark hallway, a tall, lean silhouette in a black tee and jeans, passing into and out of the pools of light from the overheads, his boots hitting solid on the terrazzo.

He walked up to the steel doors where Boonie and Nick were waiting and stood there under the light, a handsome but angular, even cruel, face, his deep-set eyes in shadow, long black hair pulled behind his ears, his mouth a thin line and his hands at his sides.

“Nick. How are you?”

Nick smiled.

“Banged around a bit. My own damn fault.”

“I heard the van hit a deer.”

“A buck.”

“Big one?”

“Full-grown. Killed the driver and the shotgun guard. The van went down and I woke up with Boonie here crying salt tears over me.”

Boonie snorted but said nothing.

“I saw Reed in the hall. How’s he doing?”

“Not well. Marty Coors grounded him until a hearing.”

“I saw the video. He’s lucky he walked away.”

“Lot of people didn’t,” said Boonie. “You ready to do this?”

“I’m here,” he said, still looking at Nick, ignoring Boonie, whose expression was equally stony.

“Where is this guy?”

“In here,” said Nick, hitting the steel button. The doors hissed open and Nick led them back into the storage sector, Boonie following as if Lemon were already in custody. They gathered in front of Drawer 19.

Nick looked at Boonie, who opened the door and tugged the tray out. He pulled the sheet off the way a matador swirls his cape. If he was expecting Lemon to pass out from the shock, he was disappointed.

Lemon stood there, hands folded at his buckle, his face impassive, as Nick, with Boonie’s occasional assistance, laid out the details of the autopsy report and the related forensics.

When he was finished, Lemon looked across the tray at Nick.

“It’s him. That’s the guy.”

Boonie sighed, put his hands on his hips.

“You can see this guy is dead, right?”

Lemon looked at him without expression.

“Yes. I can.”

“And you believe us when we tell you that this guy right here died maybe twenty hours before you say you saw him in the hallway outside Rainey’s hospital room.”

Lemon nodded, waiting for the rest.

“So. Did anybody else see him?”

“Maybe,” said Lemon. “Have you asked?”

Boonie’s face got darker.

“It was six months ago. I only just heard about this.”

“Now you have. You’re right here in the hospital. Go ask the people on that floor. And in the lobby. I’ll wait.”

“On your say-so?”

Lemon shrugged.

“Agent Hackendorff, I really don’t care.”

Boonie bristled.

“Look, Featherlight, I can make your—”

Nick broke in.

“Boonie, stop being such a hard-ass. Lemon’s a stand-up. I know you don’t like what he is telling you. I didn’t like telling you my part either—”

Lemon looked at Nick.

“What part did you tell him?”

Nick went through it, Rainey using Merle’s name when he woke up, talking about Glynis Ruelle. The writing on the back of the mirror. When he was finished, Lemon kept on looking, the question clear in his pale green eyes.

Nick shook his head.

“No. Not the rest of it.”

Boonie groaned, stepped back, and looked at them both.

“The
rest
of it? There’s more?”

Nick and Lemon exchanged a glance, and then they both turned to Boonie.

“Yes,” said Nick. “There’s more. You want to hear about it?”

Boonie said nothing for a time, glaring down at the corpse on the steel tray.

“Sure,” he said, with a sudden smile. “I mean, after all this crazy shit, how weird can it be?”

Nick signed himself out in spite of the howls from the docs and the nurses—possible concussion—danger of a clot—internal bleeding—and they took Boonie’s black Crown Vic across the river to the Pavilion, a riverside restaurant and shopping complex built out on a cedar plank boardwalk that ran in a broad curve along the river.

The day was warm and clear, with just a bite of fall in the wind. The
Tulip was racing past the railings, a deep, rumbling vibration as it swept around the pylons. Beyond the railings the sunlight glimmered on the water as it roiled and churned. Along the riverbanks bougainvillea vines grew thick, and dense colonies of pampas grass nodded in the breeze. Upriver, the old willows on Patton’s Hard glowed with an inner light.

They got a round table under the awning at the Bar Belle and a pretty waitress with a retro forties look and a figure to match took their orders—beer, beer, nachos, and a carafe of Chianti—smiling over her shoulder at Lemon as she left them. Boonie held up his hand, palm out.

“Nope. No more weird shit until I get myself outside a Beck’s.”

So they sat there, waiting, in an uneasy silence, broken a minute later by a cell phone ringing. There was the usual reflexive scramble through pockets until Nick came up with his.

“Well, I’m a dead man,” said Nick.

The phone rang on, shrill and insistent. He had a brutal headache and the crack in his … his what? His supraorbital process? Well, that hurt too. Maybe signing himself out without calling Kate wasn’t such a good idea. And what Kate would have to say about it when she heard would probably render him sterile. He was about to find out.

“Hey, Kate—”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the Bar Belle, with—”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Okay, babe, listen, I was just going to call—”

The line was dead.

He put the phone down on the table. The other two men looked at each other and then at Nick.

“Kate?” asked Lemon.

Nick nodded. A commiserative silence followed. Their drinks arrived and he picked up his wine, took a long drink.

“We should have given her a heads-up,” said Boonie.

“She’s on her way over.”

Boonie winced.

“Shit. Right now?”

“Twenty minutes away.”

“She’ll kill me. She told me not to take you anywhere. I’m a dead man.”

Lemon smiled at him, a sardonic grin.

“Still time to make a run for it. You might even make it to the Canadian border.”

Ignoring him, Boonie lifted his Beck’s, took a long swig, set it down with a dismal sigh.

“Hey. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“It could be me instead of you,” said Lemon.

Boonie took another drink, leaned back.

“Okay. We got twenty minutes. Can you tell me what you gotta tell me in twenty minutes?”

They managed it. In the end they had to ask Boonie to stop interrupting. He finally did, and they got to the end of it, at least the end so far.