Whiplash River (24 page)

“We'll all hang out together another time,” she said. “You have my word.”

Chapter 36

S
hake waited for Gina to unload on him. She let him wait.

They watched Evelyn cross the lobby and exit the hotel.

“I guess dinner's off,” Shake said.

“Really?” Gina said. “But why?”

They took the elevator upstairs. Quinn was just leaving his room.

“We need to talk, Harry,” Gina said.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Though if this is something that can wait? I only ask because that nice British lady I met earlier, we were planning to have dinner in the gardens. They're serving this delicacy the Egyptians are famous for. They take a pigeon and stuff it with nuts.”

Shake shook his head. Quinn couldn't have had a buddy with a scheme in Bologna or Paris or Bangkok? Somewhere people knew how to eat?

“Your boy Shake has an FBI agent on his ass,” Gina said. “Did you know about that?”

Quinn frowned and led them back into his room. He shut and bolted the door. “He never mentioned that,” he said. “No, in fact.”

“I didn't mention it because I didn't know,” Shake said.

“Really?” Gina said. “You two seemed awfully chummy to me.”

“I know her. I didn't know she was FBI.”

“The FBI agent on your ass is here?” Quinn said. “In Cairo? Now? God Almighty, Shake.”

Gina took a seat. She seemed perfectly happy, for the moment, to let Quinn do the unloading on Shake.

“I was surprised too,” Shake said.

An understatement. When he'd opened his eyes and seen Evelyn sitting there on the sofa next to him, he'd just about fallen off the sofa. He put it together pretty fast, that she must be some kind of cop, but when she told him she was FBI and that she'd followed him all the way to Cairo so he'd dime out the Armenians, he'd just about fallen off the sofa again.

“That's it?” Quinn said. “That's all you got to say? You were surprised?”

Shake sighed and filled them in. He explained how he met Evelyn in San Pedro. How he thought she was just your typical tourist. How she'd pulled a gun and saved his life on the beach after his restaurant blew up.

“Was the gun maybe a clue?” Gina asked. “That she wasn't your typical tourist?”

“I didn't give it a lot of thought at the time,” Shake said. “There were so many people trying to kill me I was losing track.”

“You never told me about some woman saving your life on the beach,” Quinn said.

“I'm telling you now.”

“What aren't you telling us now?” Gina said. “That's the part I'm curious about.”

“I'm telling you everything.”

Everything, of course, except that he'd been attracted to Evelyn back in Belize and was still attracted to her. Shake left that part out. Gina knew it already. Shake didn't know how long she'd been watching them from the elevator, but it had been long enough.

“Let me get this straight,” Quinn said. “We're on the eve of a big score. Score of a lifetime, tricky and dangerous, as previously discussed. And suddenly we discover there's an FBI agent on your ass, and she's here in Cairo. Is that about the size of it?”

“Another thing I'm curious about,” Gina asked Shake. “Were you and Miss FBI planning to do it right there on that couch? In the hotel lobby? I worry about your back is all, Shake. At your age. Because it looked like you were about to flip her skirt up and go to town right there on the couch.”

Shake didn't think Gina was really jealous. Evelyn was pushing forty, she was a cop. She might be attractive and smart, tough and funny, and she seemed interestingly complicated in a way that only a woman pushing forty could be, but . . .

Shit
.

“It gets worse,” Shake said. To Quinn, but that put the brakes on Gina.

Shake told them how Evelyn had threatened to hink their score if he didn't agree to dime out the Armenians.

“Well, it's been fun, fellas,” Gina said. She stood up.

“Now just hold on,” Quinn said. “Let's think this through.”

The guy, Shake had to give it to him, he never stayed down for long.

“It's not the end of the world,” Shake heard himself saying. He thought it might actually be, in terms of their score, but he didn't want to see Gina walk out that door. That would be the end of the world for Shake. The end of something.

Or maybe, Shake worried, Quinn's demented optimism had rubbed off on him, God help us all.

“You're both cu-fucking-ckoo,” Gina said.

“I'm just saying let's think it through,” Quinn said. “Let's sleep on it. Because what does this change? We were gonna have to be extremely careful one way or another, whether there's an FBI agent on Shake's ass or not.”

“She doesn't have any idea about Devane,” Shake said. “Or Teddy Roosevelt's speech. She's just punching in the dark and hoping she hits something.”

“Yeah she is!” Gina said.

“She doesn't have jurisdiction. I doubt she's even supposed to be here, not officially.”

“She must be smitten.”

“This FBI gal,” Quinn said. “She's bluffing.”

“Does she seem to you like the kind of gal who bluffs?” Gina asked Shake.

Shake hesitated. “No.”

“I don't think so either.”

“When's that ever scared you?” he asked her.

“Don't do that,” Gina said. “Asshole. You have no right.”

“God Almighty,” Quinn said. “Will you two just go ahead and jump in the sack already?”

“This isn't about jumping in the sack,” Gina said.

“No,” Shake agreed. “That was never the problem.”

“Then buy the girl an engagement ring, or you, tell him it's over for good and put him out of his misery. Both of you, I don't care, get your heads in the goddamn game.”

Shake didn't say anything. Gina didn't say anything.

“I apologize for being brusque,” Quinn said. “All I'm saying, I'm saying let's just all of us get a good night's sleep and in the morning we revisit the issue of the FBI gal on Shake's ass, decide in the light of day if it's a deal breaker or not. Okay?”

Shake waited to see if Gina would answer first. But he knew she never would, not in a million years.

“Okay,” he said.

“Whatever,” Gina said.

Chapter 37

B
abb waited until a little after midnight, then strolled up to the hotel. The metal detector in the lobby didn't worry him because he didn't have any metal on him that might be detected. Gardenhire had made arrangements.

At the metal detector in the lobby, Babb pretended to be rumpled and ruffled. He pretended he needed a pot of coffee. That darn message alignment, harrumph, harrumph. The soldiers barely glanced at him. Babb collected his wallet and change from the tray and continued on.

Gardenhire had made arrangements for the gun to be placed behind an ice machine on the third floor. A suppressor too. Babb was ambivalent about an arrangement like this. It took a lot of the sauce off a job, to be honest. Some of the sauce.

He used the house phone in the lobby to request, in a rumpled, ruffled way, immediate housecleaning for room 519. Babb picked that number because May 19 was his birthday.

He went to the fifth floor and waited. A few minutes later a housekeeper pushed her cart out of the service elevator. She knocked lightly on the door to room 519. No answer. It was almost one o'clock in the morning. The housekeeper used her key to let herself into the room. Babb walked quickly toward the housekeeping cart she'd left in the hallway.

A commotion had erupted in room 519. What's going on? Who are you? So sorry! Housekeeping! What? So sorry! What's going on, honey? You called for housekeeping! We did not! So sorry!

Or so Babb imagined, since the commotion was in Arabic.

He plucked the clipboard from the housekeeping cart without slowing down and continued on to the privacy of the fire stairs.

The clipboard listed the names and room numbers of every guest in the hotel. Babb ran his finger down the list. Only about half the rooms were occupied.
Cleary, Quentin
was in room 1011. That was Quinn's Armenian mob bodyguard, Bouchon, the alias he used. Across the hall, in room 1012, was
Clement, Gina.
The woman Babb had seen with the bodyguard, she'd joined the gang in San Francisco. Next door to her, in room 1013, was
Atwood, Fritz.
That was Quinn, the primary target, his nom de guerre. There were no other guests on that side of the floor.

Babb always had a hard time deciding whom to kill first. It was a big decision! There were so many variables to consider. In general, logistical concerns aside, Babb liked to save the best for last. But that in itself, a definition of
best,
was complicated. And people could surprise you. Who tried to scream, who tried to fight back, who mutely accepted the cool breeze of fate, a look of sullen aggrievement in his or (usually, when it came to sullen aggrievement) her eyes.
Oh, fate,
those eyes seemed to say,
what shit have you pulled on me now?

This hotel didn't have cameras in the hallways, and Gardenhire had made arrangements for a master key card to be left with the gun. Babb took the fire stairs up to the tenth floor. He slipped the master key card into the slot of room 1012. He'd decided to kill the woman first. It just seemed appropriate. Ladies first?

The lock turned green. Babb opened the door. It was not bolted. He was disappointed, a little. He knew several different ways, each of them simple and elegant, to get past the bolt of a hotel room door. He could have taught a child to do it. Hotels didn't want their guests to know how easy it was to get past a bolted hotel door.

He slipped inside the room. Dark, the drapes pulled. He could tell instantly that the room was empty, but he checked anyway. It was empty.

Okay,
Babb told himself.
Hmmm
. Maybe the woman was across the hall in the bodyguard's bed. A double Dutch. That would add some sauce to the job.

Don't get your hopes up,
he told himself.

Babb told himself, in the hotel on the bank of the Nile, not to get his hopes up.

He let himself into the room across the hall. That room was empty too. The bed was empty.

Well, crap,
Babb thought. Because he'd gone and let himself get his hopes up.

He checked the bodyguard's closet and drawers. Empty. There was no toothbrush next to the sink.

Babb went back to the woman's room. Nothing in the closet, nothing in the dresser, no toothbrush next to the sink. The same situation in Quinn's room.

The three of them were gone.

But why? To where? Not too far. Babb had a feeling.

It was a mystery, but Babb didn't mind. He liked mysteries. He liked a job with sauce.

 

“MOHAMMED,” EVELYN SAID. “HEADS UP.
There they are.”

Evelyn and her driver had been lurking for a couple of hours. Down the drive from the hotel, parked across the street, with a good view of the main entrance. Mohammed sitting on the hood of his spotless Mercedes and working his way steadily through a pack of unfiltered Camels. Evelyn sitting next to him, using her hand to beat away the smoke. Assuring Mohammed that everything he'd learned about the FBI from American TV shows and movies was exactly accurate. Mohammed practicing his English by waxing nostalgic about his salad days as a dive instructor, long ago, in Hurghada, a city on the Red Sea.

Mohammed was close to fifty years old, but the joys of Hurghada made him squeal like a teenage girl. “Oh, my Gaaaawwwd, Evelyn! The water so clear! You do not believe it!”

Evelyn had started asking certain questions just to hear him squeal.

Was the fish tasty and fresh in Hurghada, Mohammed?

The fish, Evelyn, oh, my Gaaawwwd!

“I see them,” he said. He took a long last drag of his latest Camel and flicked it away.

Gina had a roller bag, as did the International Man of Mystery. Shake was carrying a plastic sack. Evelyn had thought they might switch hotels after she dropped in on them. She loved being right.

She and Mohammed got back in the Mercedes. Mohammed started the car. They watched a hotel bellhop load the roller bags into the trunk of a cab. Shake, Gina, and the International Man of Mystery squeezed into the backseat. The cab looped around, drove down the drive, and turned left just across the street from where Mohammed and Evelyn sat idling.

Evelyn waited until the cab was a block away, two blocks. Mohammed eyed her.

“Yalla bina!”
she said. Mohammed had taught her that phrase. He said it meant “Let's go!” in Arabic.

“Giddyup!” he said, the phrase that Evelyn had taught him back, as he swung into traffic behind the cab.