The Gentlemen's Hour

156

It’s a modest house at the end of a cul-de-sac on a nondescript street.

There’s nothing special about it if you don’t know what you are seeing.

Boone does.

He spots the two cars—a soccer mom–style van and a preowned sedan—parked out on the street with men sitting in them.

Sicarios, as they’re known in the narcotics trade. Gunmen, bodyguards.

Donna’s car is in the driveway.

Boone knows he can’t get closer—the sicarios in the cars would be watching and they’d shake him down before he got anywhere near the house where Cruz Iglesias is hiding. He turns around in the shallow opening of the street and does a U-turn, goes back down the avenue, and turns into the parallel street.

The rear of the house is visible, set behind a high stone wall. Sicarios will be on guard in the backyard, but he doesn’t see any on this street, so he parks the Deuce a house away, turns off the motor, and gets out the parabolic sound detector. He trains it at Iglesias’s safe house, praying that it has the range advertised.

It takes a few minutes, but he picks up the sound of her voice.

Begging for her husband’s future, begging for his life. Telling Iglesias that Dan knew nothing,

nothing

about Blasingame’s scam originally, and that he told the drug lord as soon as he found out. He wouldn’t cheat his partners that way, Don Iglesias. Their families have been in business together for generations.

“We came to you, didn’t we?”

she says.

“We came to you.”

“But what,”

Iglesias asks,

“if this scandal reaches you? How long before it reaches the rest of us?”

“It won’t,” she says. “Please, por favor, please. I beg you. What can I do?”

He tells her.

Boone listens to the sound of their lovemaking, if it can be called that, for only a minute or so, and then he drives away.