Thick as Thieves (21 page)

“It’s none of your goddamn business why I want it. Maybe I want to light a cigar. Maybe I want to burn down the house. Why the hell do you care? I just want it.”

Carr drops into the chair and looks out at the empty night. He sighs again. “You’re not going to find it.”

“Because she took it. I told you, she takes things.”

“Mrs. Calvin didn’t take it.”

“Then where the hell is it?”

“It’s in the … It’s with her—with Mom. You buried it with her, Dad.”

“A full boat,” Howard Bessemer says to Bobby. “Jacks over eights.” He sweeps the chips from the center of the dining table into the large pile already in front of him. “It’s just not your night.”

It is nine a.m., and sunlight is streaming through the windows of Bessemer’s dining room, reflecting from the white plaster walls, refracting through the crystal ashtray, the highball glasses, the bottle of gin on the table, and the curtain of smoke above.

He turns to Carr and smiles. “Top of the mornin’, Gregory,” he says. Bessemer is a dissipated teddy bear today, in seersucker pajama bottoms, a New York Athletic Club T-shirt, and a three-day beard that is a dirty-blond shadow on his pudgy cheeks. His blond hair is bent at odd angles, his gumdrop eyes are red and shiny, and so is the new cut at the corner of his mouth. He picks a joint from the ashtray, lights it, and takes a long hit. “Deal you in?” he asks.

“Not just now, Howie,” Carr says, and he hands Bobby one of the grocery bags he’s carrying. “Let’s make coffee.”

Bobby follows Carr to the kitchen and empties the bag onto the counter. Egg sandwiches, bagels, fruit salad in a plastic tub. There’s a TV on the counter and Carr switches it on and turns up the volume. He tosses Bobby a pound of ground coffee. “Late night?” Carr asks, his voice low.

“Howie couldn’t sleep. He wanted to play cards, so we played.”

“You get high too?”

Bobby yawns and flips him the bird. “Yeah, baby, I’m trippin’ on Coca-Cola and potato chips.”

“You hit him?” Carr asks. Bobby spoons coffee into the machine. “Bobby?” Carr says again. Bobby fills the coffeemaker with water and presses the button. He looks at Carr but stays silent. “Bobby?”

“It was nothing. Mike was a little torqued up, and Howie was whining about something and Mike told him to shut up. Howie got mouthy and Mike got pissed.”

“And hit him.”

“Barely.”

“For chrissakes, Bobby, we need him in one piece.”

“Hey, I broke it up right away. And it’s not like we’re keeping the guy around long-term.”

Carr frowns. “While we’ve got him, we need him happy.”

“I’m down like two hundred bucks to the guy. That’s not happy enough?”

Carr shakes his head. “What’s got Mike twisted up?”

“Who the fuck knows?” Bobby says, unwrapping a sandwich. “It’s gettin’ so he’s almost as moody a bastard as you.”

Bessemer has finished his joint when Carr carries a sandwich and a cup of coffee into the dining room, and he’s stacking his chips into neat columns before him.

“I make it two hundred fifteen dollars I’ve taken off him,” he says.

“He’s good for it. Sorry about the bruise.”

Bessemer shrugs. “Your other friend is kind of an asshole, Greg. No fun to hang with at all.”

“He’ll take it easy as long as you do, Howie. Everybody’s a little stir-crazy, and the sooner we move things along, the better.”

“Amen to that,” Bessemer says, and takes a slug of gin. Carr takes the glass from him and slides the sandwich and coffee in front of him.

“Let’s do breakfast now, Howie. Then we’ll do the story.”

It takes Bessemer two sandwiches, three cups of coffee, and a long shower before he’s ready, and then he and Carr settle in Bessemer’s office. Sunlight seeps around the edges of the shades, but Carr leaves them drawn. He sits at the desk and turns on a brass lamp. Bessemer sprawls in a studded leather chair.

“Take it from the top, Howie,” Carr says.

And Bessemer does. He’s got the facts down cold: how he met Greg Frye in Otisville, where Frye was serving out the last months of a federal sentence for trafficking in stolen diamonds; how Frye had helped him learn the ropes there, and avoid the predations of the rougher trade; how they’ve kept in touch over the years; and how Frye has come down to Palm Beach in search of a banker, and—possibly—a business partner. And his delivery is solid: offhand, uncomplicated, adorned with enough detail to be convincing, but not enough to be dangerous. Bessemer is an apt pupil—at home with deception—but Carr knows that drills are one thing and live fire something else entirely.

Bessemer yawns and rubs his eyes. “I might crash right here, Greg,” he says.

“Not yet,” Carr says. “You think Prager’s going to be interested?”

Bessemer smiles. “You’re asking me now? I thought you knew it all.”

There’s a drinks tray on the credenza behind the desk, and Carr pours a gin and hands it to Bessemer. “You actually know the guy.”

Bessemer sits up, and curiosity sparks in his bloodshot eyes. He sips at the gin. “Curt will be interested enough to talk. Why wouldn’t he be? I’ve referred clients to Isla Privada before, and even if he doesn’t take them on, he always talks. Talking’s free, he says. Besides, he’ll like the synergy.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning a client who can broaden his business model is better than a plain old client to him. Curt will like the idea of taking your money—assuming there’s enough of it—but he’ll like the diamonds even more. Someone who can take cash in exchange for diamonds, and who can do it in quantity—that’s going to appeal to him. Diamonds are a lot easier to move than cash. And if you tell him you’ve got a network of people around the world who can do the transaction in reverse—take in diamonds and pay out cash—well, that’s a new model.” Bessemer takes another drink and smiles at Carr. “Assuming your story is solid.”

“It is.”

“Because if it isn’t—if it’s not granite—”

“It is, Howard.”

“You’re confident,” Bessemer says, finishing his drink. “That’s good.”

“You should be confident too. You should be thinking about what you want to do afterward, when you get your money back.”

Bessemer sighs and looks at his empty glass. “I have been thinking about it.”

“And?”

Bessemer furrows his broad brow. “I don’t know. I’m skittish about making plans. Seems whenever I do, things never work out. Sometimes I think the best way for me to make sure that I
don’t
do something is for me to make a plan to do it.”

Carr shakes his head. “Kind of self-defeating, isn’t it?”

“Self-defeat’s my best thing.”

“Maybe this is an opportunity to turn over a new leaf.”

“That kind of plan is always the most disappointing.”

“Then start small.”

Bessemer nods slowly. “I could get myself cleaned up—lose some weight, ease up on this.” He holds up his glass. “Maybe try to get fit.”

“All good ideas.”

“Then maybe I could spend some time with my kid. He’s twelve now, and I haven’t seen him in … a long time.”

“Baby steps, Howie. Baby steps.”

Bessemer stretches out on the office sofa and dozes. He shifts around occasionally and murmurs words that Carr can’t make out. Asleep he looks younger, Carr thinks, and much like his son. Carr empties ashtrays and fills the dishwasher and makes himself another cup of coffee. He looks out the window, at a jet crossing the sky, and thinks about Tina, flying down to Santiago, and Guerrero, who may have been Declan’s pilot. He thinks about Declan, and his hastily sketched exit plan from Mendoza, and he remembers Valerie’s words on the wharf in Portland.

You’re remembering a different guy
, she said, and Carr knows she’s right. Sometimes it seems that he’s remembering several different guys. It’s like a hall of mirrors, and everywhere there’s a version of Declan—short, tall, skinny, fat …

There’s the grinning red pirate who recruited him in Mexico; the wise mentor who taught him the ropes; and the tough, charismatic soldier who executed plans with precision and economy, improvised like Coltrane whenever things went sideways, and always led from the front.

Then there’s the melancholy, whiskey-voiced raconteur, sitting in a
darkened bar, spinning out tales of his days in the service—in Ireland, the Middle East, and at unnamed stops along the Silk Road—of the hell he raised with other crews, and the swag he hauled away. And there is the weary campaigner, aging, aching, and contemplating retirement with a mix of anticipation and dread. Those incarnations didn’t turn up often, and when they did it was always just before a job, or just after one.

And then there’s the Declan Valerie had in mind—the erratic, reckless Declan, the willful, capricious one. It’s hard—impossible, really—for Carr to reconcile her version with those others, but he can’t say he hasn’t seen them before. He has, in bits and pieces, several times over the years. And especially toward the end.

He hears Valerie’s voice again:
There was César, and before that the Russians
. They were the last jobs they worked, before Mendoza, and she was right about them—Declan hadn’t been at his best.

César was a transporter, and he’d ship pretty much anything to anyplace, according to Mr. Boyce and Tina. He’d started out, like so many in the region, with drug shipments, and found natural synergies in the movement of small arms and cash. Then, in the early years of the new century, he diversified into transporting heavier weapons, hijacked electronics, pirated software and DVDs, and human traffic headed north. Despite his success, or perhaps because he kept so busy spending its fruits on hookers, Ferraris, and thoroughbred horses, César had, over the years, underinvested badly in his own security infrastructure.

“I’ve seen 7-Elevens with tighter perimeters,” Tina had said.

The perimeter she was talking about was in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, around a waterfront compound where César kept an office, some odds and ends of his shipments—a pallet or two of flat-screen TVs, a crate of RPGs—a climate-controlled garage for some of his Testarossas, and $6.8 million in shrink-wrapped packs of hundred-dollar bills. The money was in a cinder-block annex to the Ferrari garage, and it should’ve been a simple job—three sleepy guards, a fence to scale, a video feed to interrupt, an alarm system barely worth the name, and a safe room that wasn’t. In and out, unseen and unheard, in seventeen minutes flat. It should’ve been simple, but it wasn’t, because Declan developed something of a mania for César.

Not that that was difficult to do. César was unlikable in the extreme—a thug, a beater of women and children, a liar, a casual killer, and an all-around
swine. Though he was, in truth, no worse than any of the other people they stole from, Declan had for some reason decided that he was.

“I think it’s his girth, boys,” he confessed over beer one night in a Puerto Barrios bar. “He’s such a fat fuck, and he dresses like … What’s he dress like, Bobby?”

“Like an L.A. pimp, Deke, circa 1977.”

“Not even that well, lad. And he’s an insult to those cars of his. I just don’t know how he jams his guts behind the wheel.” It was a running joke through all their planning, and then, on the night of the job, in an instant it wasn’t.

Carr was on the fence, and Declan, Bobby, and Ray-Ray had the safe room. Carr watched through the nightscope as Bobby and Ray-Ray came out, bags over shoulders, and headed toward him.

“Where’s Deke?” Carr said into his headset.

There was a pause, a whispered chuckle, and then Declan’s raspy voice. “Leavin’ a little something for that feckin’ sack,” he said, and Carr saw him in the doorway of the Ferrari garage—saw him pitch something in underhanded, and then come running.

“Might want to add some quick, lads,” he said, and then the night lit up with an orange flash, a muffled blast, a symphony of breaking glass, and a shock wave that Carr felt even fifty yards away. He tore the nightscope from his head.

“What the fuck?” Bobby and Ray-Ray shouted, nearly in unison.

Declan was laughing when he reached them, and laughing later that night, when they passed a bottle around in the cabin of a sport fisher, halfway to Belize.

“He didn’t deserve those cars, the fat shite. All I did was restore order to the universe. And what the fuck was he gonna do with that box of pineapples anyway? Nothing so productive, I’ll guarantee you.” He looked at Carr. “Why’re you being a feckin’ old woman about it, anyway? It’s fireworks is all—nothing to fret over. It’s like a tonic.”

Bobby and Mike and Dennis and Ray-Ray had laughed with him; Carr and Valerie had not.

Nobody was laughing after Nicaragua, though. The Russians were called Dudek, and they were actually from Ukraine—two cousins who cashed out of the army and headed west when the Evil Empire dissolved. And weapons were their specialty. They bought them, sold them, shipped
them, serviced them, and trained clients in their use. And unlike César, they did not leave piles of money about in cinder-block sheds. They did, however, keep some petty cash on hand—$5.1 million, more or less—in a safe in the back office of Dudek Air Charter, not far from the Managua airport. The safe was a serious one, as was the security around it, which relied less on technology than it did on the presence of many guys with guns.

Carr hadn’t liked the job at first, hadn’t seen a way of doing it that didn’t devolve into a full-on firefight, but Declan had pushed, and eventually he’d come up with a plan. It relied on distraction, misdirection, and some painfully tight timings, but if it played as written, it would get them in and out without a shot fired. Carr was pleased with it; Declan less so. It was late, and they were sitting in the shitty kitchen of a shitty house, in a city—Managua—full of shitty houses.

“The way in is okay, I guess, but the exit is too clever by half. We’ll have the swag in hand, fer chrissakes, we don’t need yer feckin’ floor show. We just head for the door.”

“And do what,” Carr had said, “shoot your way out? Those aren’t rent-a-cops at Dudek, those are mercs—mostly kid mercs. They’re not big on judgment or hesitation or worries about mortality—theirs or anyone else’s. You light it up with them, it’s not a halfway thing.”