Whiplash River (3 page)

“A nickname.”

“I hope so.”

She hadn't asked him to sit down, but she hadn't asked him to leave either. Well, not in so many words. Shake decided to stay until she told him to leave, in so many words. He nodded at the paperback by her purse.

“So where do you stand on the scarlet macaw?” he said.

The book was a true story about the fight over a rare kind of bird. The government of Belize wanted to lower the cost of electricity by building a dam on a river where the scarlet macaws lived. Don't worry, the government said, the birds will be fine. A group of environmentalists called bullshit on that and said the scarlet macaws would not be fine. They suggested that eco-tourists would pay a lot of money to go watch the scarlet macaws, if the government would just be smart about it.

“Definitely pro-macaw,” the woman said. “But don't ruin the ending for me.”

The way she said it, the corner of her mouth turned up, Shake could tell she'd seen enough of the world to know how the story ended. The government built the dam, some government ministers made a whole lot of money, electricity prices went up, not down. And the scarlet macaws in Belize had disappeared.

“If you want to have dinner tonight,” Shake said, and then stopped when he realized how that sounded.

“Most people do,” she said. “I feel like I'm pretty conventional in that way.”

“What I mean,” Shake said, smiling again, “I mean I own a restaurant. I do the cooking there. If you're looking for a completely unbiased recommendation.”

“I see.”

“The Sunset Breeze. It's up north a little bit. You can take a taxi boat.”

Pijua's daughter brought the pork empanadas. The woman pretended to reach for the bottle of ketchup on the table and Shake laughed. And then he realized she was serious. And then she laughed.

“You should have seen your face,” she said. “I didn't think you'd fall for that.”

“You'd be surprised what I fall for,” Shake said.

She hit him again with that flash grenade of a smile.

“Good to know,” she said, and Shake felt the back of his neck flush with heat.

 

WALKING BACK TO THE WHARF,
Shake saw a thirty-six-foot Esprit cruiser slide by on its way to the Cut, between San Pedro and the north end of Ambergris. It had flames painted on the side and a couple of big Rasta bruisers lounging on deck. Baby Jesus's boat, the one he used to run product up to the Yucatán.

Shake didn't let the sight of the boat bring him down. He was still thinking about the woman back on the deck at Pijua's, that smile of hers. Evelyn. Whatever happened from here on out, Shake decided, his day had already turned out better than he'd hoped.

Chapter 3

S
pecial Agent Evelyn Holly had been at the table for twenty minutes, nursing a diet Mountain Dew and keeping an eye on the shithead inside. She knew that she couldn't lurk around the restaurant much longer without ordering food, but she was on her own dime this trip, not Uncle Sam's, and everything on the menu seemed to cost twice what it should have.

She ducked behind the menu when the shithead walked past. But then he turned around and came right up to her table. Charles “Shake” Bouchon, smiling right at her. Evelyn almost burst out laughing. He'd already made her, less than half an hour after she'd begun tailing him? But she stayed cool and realized that the shithead was just hitting on her. That almost made her burst out laughing too.

Well, no time like the present. She'd been planning to approach him in a day or two anyway, strike up a conversation.

“I'm not selling,” he said.

“Awesome,” she said. “ 'Cause I'm not buying.”

She hoped that might catch him on the wrong foot and it did. But Bouchon didn't get flustered like most guys would have. He didn't flee or try to force a clever comeback. Instead he just stood there, amused, and seemed to appreciate that she'd caught him on the wrong foot.

The waitress appeared. Evelyn bit the bullet and ordered one of the pricey entrées. And then realized, as she handed over the menu, what a knucklehead she was. Everything seemed to cost twice what it should have because the prices were listed in Belizean dollars. There were two Belizean dollars to every U.S. dollar.

“My name's Shake,” Bouchon said. “I know you were just dying to know that, be honest.”

Be honest, he was kind of a nice-looking guy for a shithead. Evelyn hadn't guessed it from the California Department of Corrections mug shot that she'd studied on the plane down from L.A. Grim stuff, that. Here in person, though, she saw that he had good sharp angles, chin and cheeks and brow. But the angles not
too
sharp, softened just so by the wry smile, the warm eyes, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He had a touch of an accent that sounded like it had a little Brooklyn in it, but Evelyn knew it must be New Orleans, where his sheet said he'd been born and raised.

When he asked about the book she was reading and then told her about the restaurant he owned, Evelyn thought:
Wow, could this be any easier?
She'd arrived in Belize without much of a plan. Take a few days and just get to know the shithead a little, let him think he was getting to know her. Develop a bond. And then, when Bouchon let his guard down,
wham!
Evelyn would put the screws to him.

Evelyn loved that saying:
putting the screws to someone.
She loved doing it.

But at this point, Bouchon definitely had his guard up. Evelyn didn't let the wry smile and the warm eyes fool her. You didn't stay alive as long as he had, in the kind of company he'd kept, without staying on your toes. He'd only done two relatively light stretches in prison, which in his line of work was evidence that he was one careful shithead.

She reached for the ketchup. He laughed because he thought she was kidding. She wasn't kidding. The empanadas looked like something you might reasonably put ketchup on. He stopped laughing when he saw her face. So she laughed.

“You should have seen your face,” she said. “I didn't think you'd fall for that.”

“You'd be surprised what I fall for,” the Shithead said.

Evelyn smiled. This would be so easy. It almost wasn't fair. “Good to know,” she said.

 

SHE ATE THE EMPANADAS, ADMITTEDLY
fantastic, talked herself out of dessert, and then drove her rented golf cart back to the resort.

From her bungalow, she called to check on Sarah. It was noon in L.A. Sarah told her that Andre had come by to take her to breakfast at the Farmers Market. Evelyn didn't say the approximately one thousand things she had to say about that. About how the sneaky asshole waited until Evelyn was out of the country to show even the slightest interest in his own daughter.

“Send me a text later,” Evelyn said. “Tell me how much you miss me.”

“Mom!” Sarah laughed. “You're such a dork.”

Evelyn had been gone less than twenty-four hours and already she missed Sarah so much it ached.

“Don't text when you're driving. Don't borrow my yoga mat and lose it again. Don't join a cult.”

“Check, check, oops,” Sarah said. “Too late.”

And don't believe anything that your asshole of a father tells you,
Evelyn thought but didn't say.

“Does it seem like a nice cult at least?” Evelyn said. “Do they have a cute secluded compound in the desert?”

Her daughter was, literally, the last teenager in California who would ever join a cult. Or text while driving. Evelyn knew that Sarah would probably spend the rest of her weekend studying for the SATs, practicing her jump shot, and downloading recipes for healthy, delicious, one-pot meals. Maybe taking a break to learn Farsi and help inner-city kids create a sustainable dairy farm.

She wouldn't, in other words, be smoking pot or luring a skateboard punk rocker up to her bedroom or sneaking into a club to see Social Distortion. Nor any of the other myriad transgressions that Evelyn would have committed, sixteen years old and left more or less on her own for a week.

Sometimes Evelyn couldn't believe that she and Sarah came from the same gene pool. If they didn't have the same laugh, the same scowl first thing in the morning, the same gangly legs, Evelyn might have seriously wondered about some mix-up in the maternity ward, a nurse switching one baby for another.

“Text me,” Evelyn said. “Every fifteen minutes if it's convenient, okay?”

“Mom!”

A few minutes after Evelyn hung up, there was a knock on the door. She took her firearm out of her purse, chambered a round, and checked the peephole. On the deck of her bungalow stood Cory Nadler, of all people.

Evelyn stuck the gun back in her purse and opened the door.

“Cory?” she said.

“Hi, Evi,” he said. He looked cranky and sweaty. “Can I come in?”

“Sure. Of course.” She took a seat on the edge of the bed. He sat in the wicker chair with the floral-print cushion. He was wearing a navy suit that looked way too hot for this climate. “What are you doing here, Cory?”

“I'm with DSS now,” he said.

“Diplomatic security?”

“Out of the embassy in Mexico City. But I've been doing liaison work in Belize the last couple of months. I happened to be looking through passenger manifests this morning and I saw your name.”

“Cory,” she said, “take your coat off. That suit looks way too hot for Belize.”

“It's fine,” he said.

“Is it wool? You look like you're dying.”

“It's tropical wool.”

Evelyn cocked her head, dubious. “I don't think it is.”

“Evi, shut up for a second, okay?” Cory was eight or nine years younger than she was, in his early thirties, but he'd probably been one of those kids who, in kindergarten, listened to classical music and wore sweater vests. The kind of man her daughter would probably marry someday. “You can't be here, Evi.”

“I'm on vacation,” she said.

“Vacation.”

She shrugged.

“Did you pack a bathing suit?” he said.

“Maybe.”

Cory sighed. “Evi,” he said, “I've known you for how long?”

“So you know I need a vacation.”

“I know you've still got a major, major hard-on for the Armenians, even after you were explicitly told to cool it with all that.”

“Real girls don't get hard-ons, Cory. You've spent too much time in Bangkok.”

“I know that Charles Samuel Bouchon, aka ‘Shake,' alleged former wheelman for and close associate of the Armenian
pakhan
in L.A., allegedly owns a restaurant on this island. I know that you're still pissed off that your ex-husband—”

“Stop. Thank you. Right there.” She didn't need anyone to walk her back through it. Seriously.

The short version was that Evelyn, a couple of years ago, had helped build a slam-dunk case against the Armenian mob. Evelyn had been
this close
to taking them down, top to bottom,
pakhan
to foot soldier, when the district attorney in Los Angeles blindsided her by negotiating a deal between the Armenians and the feds. It turned out that the Armenians knew the whereabouts of a fugitive Wall Street swindler that the Department of Justice was desperate to nail. So DOJ got their swindler, the Armenians got a time-out called on the racketeering investigation, and the asshole D.A. in Los Angeles—Andre Guardado, Evelyn's ex-husband—was the hero of the hour.

Well, that was then, this was now. Now, as far as Evelyn was concerned, whatever time-out the Armenians had earned two years ago had expired. Game on.

“Here's the thing, Evi.” Cory leaned forward, the shoulders of his allegedly tropical wool suit coat bunching up. “DEA has been down here since October with a major, major ongoing. Okay? Serious stuff, a drug kingpin here in Belize with ties to the Zeta cartel. You have any idea how long it took me to get the Belizean government on board?”

“Good for you, Cory. I always thought you'd make an excellent liaison.”

“DEA has put the kingpin together with Bouchon a couple of times. It's maybe nothing, it's maybe something. So help me God, Evi, if you step on this investigation, if you disrupt or compromise it in any way . . .”

“I'm not going to step on anything.”

“Because you're on vacation.”

“Exactly.”

It had taken Evelyn almost a year to track down Bouchon. Alleged former wheelman for and close associate of the Armenian
pakhan
. Alleged, her ass. He'd worked with the Armenians for years, and his relationship with Alexandra Ilandryan, if the rumors were true, had been closer than close. With his cooperation, Evelyn could put her, and every Khederian, Ghazarian, and Bazarian, behind bars till the end of time.

Bouchon wouldn't
want
to cooperate. That was okay with Evelyn. She did her best work with shitheads who didn't want to cooperate. Back in elementary school she'd been a gleeful playground bully, taller and stronger and craftier than the other kids. Her brothers, whom she had bullied relentlessly, still called her Evil Lynn.

Cory was studying her. “And Mike,” he said. “If I called your ASAC, he'd confirm that?”

She shrugged again. Mike was her supervisor, the assistant special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office. “Mike knows I'm on vacation,” she said.

“But not
where,
I bet.”

Evelyn had learned early in life that the advantage of having a great smile was the impression you could make when you shut it off abruptly.

She did it now. Cory shifted uncomfortably.

“I'm not, you know, I'm not going to call Mike,” he said. “I just want to make clear that if you stay down here—
on vacation
—you have to keep a low profile. It's critical. A low, low profile. And
stay away from Bouchon.
”

Evelyn turned the smile back on. “Of course,” she said. “Absolutely.”