Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

“No, listen to me,” Ed pleaded. “You don’t understand. He’s just out to get us because we picked on him in high school.”

The agent beside Bigelow snickered. “Pathetic.”

“Take ’em to the van.”

The men disappeared. Bigelow ordered the cuffs taken off Lester Botts. “You can go now.”

The scrawny man glanced contemptuously around the room and stalked outside.

“Can I go too?” Nate asked.

“Sure can, sir.” Bigelow shook his hand. “Bet it’s been a long day.”

Nate Spoda put on a CD. Hit the “play” button.

Mostly, late at night, he listened to Debussy or Ravel — something soothing. But tonight he was playing a Sergey Prokofiev piece. It was boisterous and rousing. As was Nate’s mood.

He listened to classical music all day long, piped out onto the front porch through $1,000 speakers. Nate often laughed to himself, recalling the time he’d overheard somebody in town mention the “satanic” music he listened to. He wasn’t sure what the particular hail-the-devil piece was but the timing of the comment suggested that what the grain salesman had overheard was Rachmaninoff.

Sorry it ain’t Garth, fellas...

He walked through the house, shutting out lights, though he left on the picture lights illuminating the Miró and the Jackson Pollock — his mood, again. He had to get to Paris soon. A dealer friend of his had acquired two small Picassos and had promised Nate first pick. He also missed Jeanette; he hadn’t seen her in a month.

He wandered out onto his porch.

It was nearly midnight. He sat down in his mother’s JFK rocker and gazed upward. This time of year the sky above the Shenandoah Valley was usually too hazy to see the heavens clearly — the local joke was that Caldon should’ve been named Caldron. But tonight, where the black of the trees became the black of the heavens, a brilliant dusting of stars spread out in a hemisphere above him. He sat this way for some minutes, taking pleasure in the constellations and moon.

He heard the footsteps long before he saw the figure moving up the path.

“Hey,” he called.

“Hey,” Lester Botts called back. He climbed the stairs, panting, and dropped four heavy canvas bags on the gray-painted porch. He sat, as he always did, not in one of the chairs but on the deck itself, his back against a post.

“You left over ninety thousand?” Nate asked.

“Sorry,” Lester said, cringing, ever deferential to his boss. “I counted wrong.”

Nate laughed. “Probably was a good idea.” He’d thought Boz and Ed would fall for the scam if they’d seeded as little as thirty or forty thousand in the cave and getaway car. You wave double a man’s annual salary, tax free, in front of his face and nine times out of ten you’ve bought him. But a job this big, it was probably a good idea to have a little extra bait.

Nate and Lester would still net nearly $400,000.

“We’ve gotta sit on it for a while, even if it’s cash?” Lester asked.

“Better be real careful with this one,” Nate said. As a rule they never operated in Virginia. Usually they traveled to New York, California or Florida for their heists. But when Nate learned from an associate in D.C. that the local Armored Courier branch was moving a cash shipment up to a new bank in Luray, he couldn’t resist. Nate knew the guards would be lightweights and had probably never handled anything but check-cashing runs on paydays at the local plants. The money was appealing, of course. But what tipped the scale was that Nate figured that in order to make the scam work they needed two unwitting participants, preferably law enforcers. He didn’t have any doubt whom to pick; adolescent grudges last as long as those of spurned lovers.

“You have to shoot him?” Nate asked. Meaning the guard. One of his rules was no gunplay unless absolutely necessary.

“He was a kid. Looking like he was going to go for that Glock on his hip. I was careful, only tapped a rib ’r two.”

Nate nodded, eyes on the sky. Hoping for a shooting star. Didn’t see one.

“You feel sorry for them?” Lester asked, after a moment.

“Who, the guards?”

“Naw, Ed and Boz.”

Nate considered this for a moment. The music and the fragrant late-summer air and the rhythmic symphony of insects and frogs had turned Nate philosophical. “I’m thinking about something that Boz said. About how I didn’t see eye to eye with him and Ed. He was talking about the heist but what he was really talking about was my life and theirs — whether he knew it or not.”

“Most likely didn’t.”

“But it makes sense,” he reflected. “Sums things up pretty well. The difference between us... I could’ve lived with it if those boys’d just gone their own way, in school and afterwards. But they didn’t. Nope. They made an issue out of it every chance they could. Too bad. But that was their choice.”

“Well, good for us y’all didn’t see eye to eye,” said Lester, introspective himself. “Here’s to differences.”

“Here’s to differences.”

The men clinked beer cans together and drank.

Nate leaned forward and began to divvy up the cash into two equal piles.

“Maybe I’ll go to Baltimore.”

“You mean...” She looked over at him.

“Next weekend. When you’re having the shower for Christie.”

“To see...”

“Doug,” he answered.

“Really?” Mo Anderson looked carefully at her fingernails, which she was painting bright red. He didn’t like the color but he didn’t say anything about it. She continued. “A bunch of women round here — boring. You’d enjoy yourself in Maryland. It’ll be fun,” she said.

“I think so too,” Pete Anderson said. He sat across from Mo on the front porch of their split-level house in suburban Westchester County. The month was June and the air was thick with the smell of the jasmine that Mo had planted earlier in the spring. Pete used to like that smell. Now, though, it made him sick to his stomach.

Mo inspected her nails for streaks and pretended to be bored with the idea of him going to see Doug, who was her boss, an “important” guy who covered the whole East Coast territory. He’d invited both Mo and Pete to his country place but she’d planned a wedding shower for her niece. Doug had said to Pete, “Well, why don’t you come on down solo?” Pete had said he’d think about it.

Oh, sure, she seemed bored with the idea of him going by himself. But she was a lousy actress; Pete could tell she was really excited at the thought and he knew why. But he just watched the lightning bugs and kept quiet. Played dumb. Unlike Mo, he could act.

They were silent and sipped their drinks, the ice clunking dully in the plastic glasses. It was the first day of summer and there must’ve been a thousand lightning bugs in their front yard.

“I know I kinda said I’d clean up the garage,” he said, wincing a little. “But—”

“No, that can keep. I think it’s a great idea, going down there.”

I know you think it’d be a great idea, Pete thought. But he didn’t say this to her. Lately he’d been thinking a lot of things and not saying them.

Pete was sweating — more from excitement than from the heat — and he wiped the moisture off his face and his short-cut blond hair with a napkin.

The phone rang and Mo went to answer it.

She came back and said, “It’s your father, ” in that sour voice of hers. She sat down and didn’t say anything else, just picked up her drink and examined her nails again.

Pete got up and went into the kitchen. His father lived in Wisconsin, not far from Lake Michigan. He loved the man and wished they lived closer together. Mo, though, didn’t like him one bit and always raised a stink when Pete wanted to go visit. Pete was never exactly sure what the problem was between Mo and the man. But it made him mad that she treated him badly and would never talk to Pete about it.