Thick as Thieves (37 page)

The fireplug nods, and the egg smooths his fatigue pants. “I want Pepsi,” he says.

There are footsteps, and the beams of light tremble and diminish, and the garage door scrapes down. The sound of rain is muted, the breeze vanishes, and the darkness is complete.

Bessemer sobs. “Is this part of it? Leaving us in the dark.”

“It’s a blackout, and let’s hope it lasts.”

“I don’t even know where we are.”

“There’s a shed next to the greenhouse, with garden equipment in it. I’m pretty sure this is it.”

Bessemer sobs again. “What the hell did you get me into?”

“Now’s not the time, Howie. Now we get the hell out of Dodge. Can you walk?”

“Walk? I don’t know if I can stand. My face hurts like a son of a bitch; I think they broke my nose. Besides, where am I supposed to walk?”

“I’m leaving, and you’d better come along.”

“Are you kidding? I’m not going anywhere—you think I want to get in deeper?”

“It doesn’t get deeper than this,” Carr says, and he stands and shuffles slowly forward, navigating from memory. Around the slant bench, the water jugs, the light stands, toward the tractor. His shin smacks into something smooth and metal.

“What are you doing?” Bessemer says.

Carr turns around and stretches his arms back. “I hope I’m turning on a light,” he says. He runs nearly numb fingers across a landscape of plastic textures—pebbled, cross-hatched, tacky, and smooth—until he finds the ridges of the tractor’s little steering wheel. Then he reaches down and scrabbles over knobs and switches until he touches a key. Carr turns it, and the tractor’s headlights come on—sickly beams that barely cross the room. To Carr, they are flares in a mineshaft.

Bessemer’s voice is a frightened hiss. “They’ll see!”

“The only windows are in back, Howie—those narrow slits near the ceiling. No one will see.”

Carr follows the light to a workbench on the wall. He peers at the tabletop, then turns around and strains his arms back until his fingers catch the garden shears. “Stand up,” he tells Bessemer.

“Why?”

“Because that way there’s less chance I’ll slash your wrists.”

“
What
?”

“And for chrissakes stand still.”

It takes two tries, back-to-back with the shears, and though Carr doesn’t slash Bessemer’s wrists, he does slice through his trousers and a chunk of his belt.

“Now cut mine,” Carr says.

Bessemer cuts the plastic in one clean pass, and Carr massages his wrists and cold hands. “Now what?” Bessemer says.

“Now sit down again, and put your hands behind your back.” Carr carries his own chair to the back of the room and places it beneath one of the narrow windows. He goes to the workbench, retrieves a pry bar from a hook on the wall, and stands on his chair.

“What are you doing?” Bessemer says. “We can’t get out that way.”

“No?”

“Maybe you can fit through, but I can’t. Are you going to leave me here?”

Carr reaches up and slips the pry bar between the cinder-block wall and the window’s aluminum frame. He grunts with effort and then there’s a sound of rending metal and breaking glass, and he looks down at Bessemer. “Better sound the alarm, Howie.”

And Bessemer does. Loudly. Loud enough to be heard over the lashing rain.

The metal door rolls up and two flashlight beams catch Bessemer in mid-yell. “The
bastard
, the
son of a bitch
—he left me here. That fucking prick went out the window and left me here!”

The lights dart and circle and find Carr’s chair, and the broken glass and mangled window frame on the floor. Rain is blowing through the rectangular gap.

“Shit,” the taller crew cut says. He draws his Glock and crosses to the window. His partner draws his gun too, but stays in the doorway, and Carr takes him first—the pry bar to the crotch, to the kidney, to the back of the head. There’s an explosive bellow and the taller crew cut turns, is frozen for an instant, and brings his gun up.

And Carr is on him at a run. He clamps both hands on the Glock, forces it down, and drives his shoulder into the crew cut’s chest. The crew cut goes back against the wall and the gun goes off and Carr snaps his head down hard on the bridge of the crew cut’s nose. There’s a crack and the crew cut’s grip loosens. Carr tears the Glock free as the crew cut hits him with the flashlight. It catches him on the shoulder and bounces hard against his ear, and Carr hammers the crew cut again and again on the side of his head until he goes over.

Carr is breathing hard as he strips the guards of flashlights, guns, radios, cash. He goes to the corner and runs a light over their wrecked bags. He picks through the pile and retrieves their wallets and passports.

Bessemer is still sitting, gripping the seat of his chair. “Jesus Christ,” he whispers. “Are … are they dead?”

Carr rubs the side of his head and stands in the open doorway. “Not yet,” he says, “though Rink might change that. We better get a move on; someone probably heard that shot.”

Outside they are drenched in an instant, and their flashlight beams are swallowed whole.

“Christ!” Bessemer says, struggling to keep up. “Is this even a path?”

“It’ll take us to the boathouse,” Carr says, “assuming we can stay on it.”

“What do we do there?”

“Get in a boat.”

“In this? Are you crazy?”

“I don’t like it, but I don’t like cutting across the property either, much less making it over the fence. I don’t know how many men Rink has here, but it won’t be long before they’re all out looking for us. They’re not going to look for us out there.”

The wind gusts and twists, shoving them sideways, shoving them forward, shoving them back. Palm fronds snap past them and sand scours their faces. The ocean is a flailing, howling thing, much too close in the dark.

“The money,” Bessemer shouts, though he is right at Carr’s back. “I thought nothing was going to happen until we were in Florida.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Carr says, and he pulls his mind away from a thousand questions about who did what, and when they did it, and where they are right now. There’s a squawk on the radio, and Carr stops and holds it to his ear.

“Dammit,” he says. “Someone’s calling the guys at the toolshed.”

“What do we do?”

“Go faster.”

But they’re not fast enough. They’re not halfway to the boathouse when a ribbon of light appears behind them. “They’ve got power in the guesthouse,” Carr says, and he looks up through the whipping trees. “And in the main house too.”

“And there,” Bessemer says, pointing. There are lights at the boathouse, and more lights moving down the path.

Carr looks back. “They’re coming from the greenhouse too,” he says. He grabs Bessemer’s collar and hauls him off the path, through bushes and branches, onto wet sand. The surf is white and frenzied before them, streaming across the beach and past the line of palm trees. The bay is boiling ink.

Carr drops the guns and radio to the sand. “Take off your shoes,” he shouts.

Somehow Bessemer’s face finds new terror. “What?”

“You a strong swimmer?”

“
What
?”

“It’s a simple choice: stay here and die, or take our chances out there.”

“There is no chance out there.”

“We’ll head west, around the jetty. There should be some protection in the bay, but we need to stay clear of the rocks.”

“We … we could hide.”

“They’re going to search every inch of this property until they find us, Howie, and when they do, they’re going to torture us and kill us. So now’s the time.”

Carr wades in and the cold is like a fist clenched around his lungs. He
loses his breath and nearly loses his footing, and in two steps he’s up to his neck. “Now, Howie.”

Bessemer looks around wildly and sees lights approaching. His chest heaves as he kicks off his shoes, and he’s fighting for breath when he calls to Carr. “Wait up!”

Carr is badly wrong about the bay: there is no protection—not from wind or wave or hungry currents, or from the constellation of debris that swirls and collides just below the angry surface. The lights from shore dim with the first swell, and disappear altogether with the second, and suddenly he’s fifty meters out. Or is it a hundred and fifty?

The sea heaves in every direction, and the wind makes shrapnel of the whitecaps. Carr’s feet tangle in what feels like plastic netting, and something hard—a fence post swept from somewhere—glances off his thigh and leaves his leg numb and useless. A sheet of drywall—peeling, dissolving—shatters across his back. There’s a roll of carpet, a shipping pallet, chicken wire, and a drowned chicken. It’s like swimming through a landfill, or in Dorothy’s twister, though actual swimming is all but impossible. Carr flails and twists and tumbles, coughing, spitting, wrestling for breath, and the only thing louder than the wind and rushing sea is his hammering heart.

Bessemer vanishes immediately, carried off without a cry, and Carr doesn’t see him for what seems a choking eternity—until he spots a white arm rushing past, struggling vainly against the riptide that he himself has just escaped. Carr sees him spin away—the white arm, the benign, round face, the sad, thin hair like sea grass—and then he calls Bessemer’s name, fills his lungs, and kicks out after him.

The rip takes hold of Carr again—shoving, pulling, twisting him around—and he loses Bessemer behind a wall of water. He manages a sloppy breaststroke, but can’t keep the ocean out of his mouth. He calls out, but the wind tears the words from his throat. He sees a shape that may be an arm, or a leg, or a tumbling body, and he lunges forward, through a breaking wave.

His fingers hook on something and he takes hold of an ankle. Bessemer is floating facedown. He finds his belt and flips him over. Carr slides an arm under Bessemer’s arm and across his chest, and Bessemer’s head rolls back against Carr’s shoulder. Even in the dark, through the spray, Carr can see the ashen face, the blood flowing down his cheek, and the deep, depressed gash at Bessemer’s left temple. He puts his ear to Bessemer’s mouth and hears faint, uneven breathing.

“Howard,” he yells, again and again over the wind, and Bessemer mutters weakly. The rip is pulling them out and under, and pulling Bessemer from him. Carr strikes out perpendicular to the current—to what he thinks is the east.

The current is twisting them, and he fights to keep Bessemer’s face out of the water. His legs and shoulders are cramping, and his fingers, wound in Bessemer’s shirt, are numb. He closes his eyes and concentrates on his breathing, on coordinating it with his kicks and his sculling arm, on ignoring the lead in his thighs and the weight clutched against his chest. And finally he finds it—the metronome he’s been straining to hear, the rhythmic four count that silences the wind and the flailing sea: his heart, his lungs, in, out.

Carr loses himself in the cadence and loses track of time, and then, suddenly, the outbound surge is gone. They’re free of the rip. Carr keeps kicking and realizes that another current, a lateral one, is pulling them slowly eastward. He lets it carry them, lifting his head to look for lights or land or anything at all, but he sees only darkness. They’re well out of the bay now, he’s sure—well beyond the reefs—and the waves are larger here and even more chaotic. One lifts them up high, and for an instant Carr sees a light, or thinks he does, and then another wave breaks across them, nearly tearing Bessemer from his grasp. Carr catches his arm, pulls him close again, and gets a better grip across his chest, and it is only then he realizes that Howard Bessemer has died.

From this height there’s no trace of the storm—just pale sky, turquoise sea, and the edge of Cuba—brown and green and wrinkled as a fallen leaf. No trace, but he can still feel it moving in his arms and legs, and in his gut: a surge, a lift, a queasy drop. He can still hear the roar. Or is that the jet’s engines? Carr signals the flight attendant and asks for another coffee and a blanket. Half a day since he came out of the water, and still he can’t get warm.

He doesn’t know how long he was in. Hours, certainly. Long enough for the lateral current to carry him miles to the east. Too long for him to hang on to Howard Bessemer’s drowned and battered body. A wave finally tore it from his grasp, and some time afterward—he didn’t know how long—Carr’s foot found a sandbar, and eventually the shore.

It was a spur of rock off Old Robin Road, and there was a house under construction nearby, and a trailer to shelter in, once Carr had kicked in the door. He collapsed on a sofa, slept, and dreamed of nothing. In the drizzly morning, he’d hitched a ride with some housepainters to George Town.

A barefoot man in damp, salt-stained clothes hadn’t raised as many eyebrows as Carr had expected. Maybe the locals wrote it off to the exigencies of the storm, or the eccentricities of tourists. Maybe it was Carr’s still-wet cash that preempted their questions. In any event, it got him a
ride to the strip mall, where he bought clothes and a toothbrush and a prepaid cell in a discount store. He washed up and changed in the store’s bathroom, then sat on a curb and made phone calls.

The first one was to his father, and the relief he felt when he heard Arthur Carr’s voice—
Why the devil are you calling? You never call
—took him by surprise. The next ones were to Valerie, and Bobby, and Dennis, and Mike, and Tina, and they all went unanswered.

Two tries, three tries, and then he’d taken a taxi to a cruise ship pier. He’d invested in sunglasses and a ball cap there, with a smiling pirate turtle stitched above the bill, and joined a large group of tourists riding a shuttle bus to the airport. He’d spotted two of Rink’s men in the terminal, but he stayed with the crowd and kept his ball cap low, and he didn’t think they’d seen him. At the gate he’d made more phone calls, but with no more success.

The operational puzzles—clothing, transpo, evasion—had kept Carr’s mind focused, anchored to the present and to the next step. When they were solved, and his pace slowed, other questions had crowded in. Questions about timing, about passwords, about access to Amy Chun’s laptop. About where the fuck the money was. Carr had no answers to them, but he didn’t mind that they filled his head. They gave him something to do and left no room for his anger, or for the images that seemed to rise up whenever he closed his eyes—of Howard Bessemer, white and drowned and dropping through black water.