Thick as Thieves

28

They’re in a fourth-floor corner suite-two bedrooms separated by a living room, a kitchenette, a wet bar, a terrace, and glary views of pool and ocean. While Bessemer explores the bar, Carr carries his bag to a bedroom and drops it on a luggage rack. He steps into the bathroom and runs water in both sinks. Then he opens his cell and calls Bobby.

“Not bad here,” Bobby says. “You can practically smell the offshore cash.”

“It’s very fragrant,” Carr says. “You guys clean when you came in from the airport?”

“Sure. Clean last night, clean today. Why?”

“Two guys were with us on the drive here, and another pair picked us up in the lobby. I see one of them down by the pool. I don’t know where his partner is.”

“You think they’re Prager’s?”

“I hope like hell they are,” Carr says. “We don’t need new players at the table.”

“His security guy was supposed to be a joke.”

“Maybe he’s on the wagon again.”

“Fucking drunks,” Bobby says, “you can never count on ’em. I got your stuff; you want me to bring it over?”

“And you can check out the babysitters while you’re at it. Howie and I will take a walk around the grounds, starting with the bar by the pool. We’ll meet you back here. You need a key to the suite?”

Bobby laughs. “Now you’re just being a prick,” he says, and hangs up.

The Caiman Lounge is a broad expanse of terra-cotta tile, bleached wood, and sliding glass doors that let the bar merge with the patio around the pool. Carr and Bessemer pause at the entrance. Carr doesn’t see Bobby-doesn’t see anyone besides a few off-season honeymooners sitting close. He and Bessemer take a table near a large aquarium. Carr orders an iced tea, and Bessemer a gin and tonic. Bessemer is transfixed by a green and blue triggerfish swimming lazily behind the glass.

“Ridiculous fish,” he says. “Goofy-looking. It reminds me of my ex-mother-in-law.”

“Triggers are aggressive,” Carr says. “They’ll take a chunk out of you if you get between them and the next meal.”

“Definitely my ex-mother-in-law.”

Carr nods, and then he spots the lobby men. One takes a seat at the bar and orders something. The other walks in from the pool patio, sits at a table in back, and studies a menu. Bessemer is rambling on about his former in-laws, and Carr tunes out to regard the minders from the corners of his eyes.

Polo shirts, thick necks, bristly haircuts, heavy, confounded brows, and a general air of unfocused anger. Corporate security types, he thinks-ex-law enforcement, ex-military-the kind of foot soldiers he used to hire and fire at Integral Risk. The waitress delivers their drinks, and Bessemer interrupts his ramble to clink glasses. Carr sits for another ten minutes, not listening to Bessemer, not looking for Bobby, and then he gets up.

“Let’s walk, Howie.”

And so they do, for half an hour or so: around the pool, down to the beach, back to the lobby, in and out of the pricey shops, and through the barbered gardens. And the two minders stroll with them-never obviously, not to Bessemer at any rate, never too close, but never really out of sight. Carr leads them on a final turn around the marina, then back across West Bay Road and through the lobby again. He and Bessemer are alone on the elevator to the fourth floor. When they return to their suite, Bobby is there, drinking beer. He’s got the blinds drawn, and a Marlins game on the big plasma screen.

Bessemer is in the doorway, about to speak, when Carr raises a hand to stop him. Carr looks at Bobby and lifts an eyebrow.

Bobby holds up what looks like an old-fashioned beeper with a stubby antenna on top. “It’s okay,” he says. “I swept it. It’s clean.”

A tentative smile falls from Bessemer’s face. “What’s clean?”

“The room, Howie,” Bobby says. “And a pretty nice room too. First-class all the way with Greg, huh?” Bessemer nods vaguely, still confused.

“What did you see?” Carr asks.

“Just the two buzz cuts. They looked like a couple of water buffaloes, waddling around after you.”

“What are you talking about?” Bessemer asks. “Who’s a water buffalo? Are we still being followed?”

“It’s all good, Howie,” Carr says, shaking his head. He sits in a chair across from Bobby and opens the brown plastic grocery bag that Bobby has left on the coffee table. Inside, wrapped in a hand towel, is a holstered Glock, and beneath that a small box, about the size of a deck of cards. Carr opens it and empties the contents into the palm of his hand: three black, one-gigabyte flash drives.

“Gave you two extra, for backup,” Bobby says. “Prager plugs it in and we’re good to go.”

“He doesn’t have to open a file or read the directory?”

“Nope. All he has to do is plug it in and the worm loads.”

“You make it sound easy,” Carr says.

Bobby shrugs. “You’re the guy who’s got to get him to do it.”

Bessemer’s eyes lurch from the gun to Carr. “Do what? Plug what in?” His voice is brittle and shaky.

“Not to worry, Howie,” Carr says, and then he nods at Bobby. “I’m going out, but he’ll keep you company while I’m gone.”

“Gone where?”

“No place far,” Carr says. “We’ll call Prager when I get back.” And then he goes into his bedroom, rummages in his bag for a bathing suit, and opens his phone.

Tina’s hotel is down the beach from Carr’s-practically next door, she said, but it turns out to be a mile-and-a-half swim. The water is warm and clear, but there’s rough surf around the reefs, and a powerful undertow at a break in a sand bar, and it takes Carr almost forty minutes to make the trip. He’s breathing hard when he pulls off his fins and mask and walks out of the ocean. His shoulders and thighs are burning.

Tina is waiting for him in a white canvas beach cabana, the last tent in a curving white line. She’s lying on a lounge chair, wearing a black two-piece swimsuit and big black sunglasses. Her skin is pale and petal smooth, and Carr can feel her eyes on him as he crosses the sand.

She hands him a heavy white towel. “I’m impressed,” she says, “but wouldn’t driving have been easier?”

“Sure,” Carr says, drying his hair. “Except I didn’t think you’d want me bringing my minders along.”

Tina sits up and pulls her glasses off. Her eyes are narrow. “What are you talking about?” she says softly.

“Minders. Two of them-big biceps, high and tight hair, milling around the lobby. Not to be confused with the pair who tailed me from the airport.”

“Where did you leave them?”

“On the hotel beach, trying to pick me out of a few dozen people snorkeling offshore.”

“At some point they’re going to realize you’re not coming in.”

Carr shrugs. “They can tell the lifeguard.”

Tina looks into the middle distance. “No idea of who sent them?”

“They’ve got that corporate look, but otherwise no clue.”

“Prager’s?”

“That’s the optimistic interpretation.”

“It seems awfully diligent for Eddie Silva.”

Carr nods. “Surprises were inevitable down here: security immediately around Prager is what I know least about.”

“Bessemer was supposed to be your ticket around all that.”

“And Silva was supposed to be a useless lush.”

Tina makes a sour face and raps her sunglasses idly against her lounge chair. “So much for theories,” she says. “What did you do with Bessemer?”

“Bobby’s with him, at the hotel.”

“He and Mike and the kid settled in?”

Carr nods. “In a place on the sound, with a yard and a dock and a straight shot to the airport. They like it better than West Palm.”

Tina gives him a speculative look. “You want the stones?”

Carr sits. “That’s why I’m here.”

“And I thought it was just to see me,” Tina says. There’s a canvas beach bag at her side, and she reaches in and pulls out a large nylon shaving kit, blue with a zippered top. She tosses it to Carr, who catches it and opens the zip. The diamonds are in three plastic bags inside. Carr takes them out and weighs each one in his palm. “Everything here?”

“Except what I used for belt buckles and toe rings,” Tina says.

Carr smiles and makes a show of weighing the bags again. “As long as you left me enough to get Prager’s attention.”

“From the minders, I’d say you already have it.”

Carr puts the stones back in the zippered case. He looks at Tina and gets another questioning look in return. “You worried?” she asks. “About these guys following you around?”

His first impulse is to laugh, and he almost does. Not because he isn’t worried about being followed-he is. Out from behind the listening end of a microphone, outside of anonymous cars and vans, Carr feels naked. The minders have simply added a spotlight and pointing finger. No, the almost laughter isn’t because the buzz cuts don’t scare him, it’s because they’re at the end of a long line. In the crowded landscape of Carr’s fear, they are mere foothills beside Valerie, Mike, and Nando, beside his galloping suspicions about what really happened on that bleak highway to Santiago, beside his dark fantasies of what might happen here afterward, if his crew is successful in stealing Prager’s money.

His second impulse-and it surprises him-is to tell her. The idea of giving voice to his fears, saying them aloud, confessing them to Tina, makes him dizzy for an instant. Words well up in his chest. They bubble and rush and nearly spring forth, and then he remembers who he’s talking to. The half-smiling woman on the lounge chair vanishes, replaced by a slender figure-a riding crop in a black dress-standing in the deep shade at the edge of a golf course. So Carr swallows the words with his laughter and shrugs.

“I’m not crazy about working the front of the house,” he says, “being the face Prager sees, the one he’ll remember.”

“First time for everything.”

“First and last time for this.”

“You never know-you might develop a taste for it.”

“Not going to happen,” Carr says, shaking his head. “Last time I saw you, you were headed down to Santiago, to have a look at Guerrero. How did that go?”

Tina sighs. “I wish I could say it was a breakthrough, but it wasn’t.”

“Guerrero wasn’t Declan’s guy?”

“He was the guy all right, but that was it. He had nothing to tell us.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Declan-or somebody very much like him-put down a cash deposit to fly that Saturday night. He paid cash, and booked for four passengers, plus baggage.”

“Going where?”

“Sao Paulo.”

“Declan.”

“Sounds like. Unfortunately, that’s all this Guerrero had to say. The date came and went, the guy didn’t show and didn’t call, and Guerrero happily kept the cash. End of story.”

Carr’s jaw clenches. “Which leaves us where?”

“No place great,” Tina says. “It takes us back to our two original questions: Who gave Bertolli’s men the heads-up, and what became of Bertolli’s missing money?”

“How about Bertolli’s former security guy down there-the one your people turned up?”

“How about him?”

“We could go back to him-push a little harder, or sweeten the pot-get him to do some digging into who warned Bertolli.”

Tina is doubtful. “The guy was pretty scared…”

“So that’s it then? I’ve spent my money on dead ends?”

“You want to keep spending, I’ll keep my guys working-knocking on Bertolli’s man again, trying to turn up another source, whatever. But if we’re going to do that, then we’ve got to work it from the other end as well.”

“Meaning what?”

“Who knew Declan’s plans, and who was in a position to leak them? And who might’ve benefited from doing it? Those are the questions-and I think you know who you need to ask.”

A gust of wind blows through the canvas walls of the cabana. Carr hunches like an old man and pulls the towel around his shoulders.

Tina buys him a T-shirt and flip-flops from her hotel’s gift shop, along with a beach bag for his fins, mask, and diamonds, and she drives him back to his hotel. They say little in the car, and she drops him at the roadside just past the resort’s flower-draped gate.

Bobby is watching television when Carr returns, a Dodgers game now. Bessemer is snoring in his room, diagonal across the bed, one arm flung out in a desperate reach for something. Carr closes the bedroom door.

“He went down about an hour ago,” Bobby says. “The guy is not looking forward to seeing Prager.”

Bobby is gone when Bessemer teeters into the living room, wiping crust from his eyes and spittle from his chin-a bedraggled teddy bear. He squints at the television, and then at the evening sky.

“Jesus,” he says. “What time is it?”

“Time to make a phone call, Howie,” Carr says.

Bessemer’s hair is a weed patch, and he pushes clumsy fingers through it. “Call to who?”

“Come on, Howie, wake yourself up.”

“You want to call Curt now?” he asks. His voice is a rusty hinge. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Greg. Really, I’m not my best.”

Carr shakes his head. “Room service will fix you. Coffee and a club sandwich.”

Bessemer waves his hands and drops onto the sofa. “No, really, Greg, now isn’t a good time. How about I give you Curt’s number? Just say that I told you to call.”

Carr goes to the bar and fills a glass with crushed ice and Coke. He places it on the coffee table in front of Bessemer, takes a seat next to him, and drapes an arm across Bessemer’s hunched shoulders. Carr’s voice is low and intimate, almost a whisper.

“And how about I put your face through those glass doors, Howie, and drop you four floors off the terrace? Because unless you pull yourself together and remember who you’re talking to, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And I’ll be long gone while they’re still figuring out which pieces of you go where. So drink your soda and have a think, Howie, but don’t take too long. I’ll get the room service menu.”

Carr gives Bessemer’s shoulder a friendly squeeze as he finishes, and he sets a cell phone down next to the sweating glass.