Стюарт Вудс - Standup Guy

Still later, Stone was half wakened by what sounded like an electronic beep, but then he drifted off to sleep again.

• • •

In the morning, Helene sent up a big breakfast on the dumbwaiter, along with the morning papers, and they dawdled in bed. Halfway through the morning, the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Stone, it’s Bill Eggers. I’m doing some work on the Arrington account, and I can’t find the year-to-date statement. Have you got a copy?”

“Sure, Bill. I’ll go downstairs and fax it to you.”

“Thanks. See you later.”

Stone got out of bed and put on some pants, a shirt, and a pair of slippers.

“Going somewhere?”

“I just have to run down to my office and fax a document to my law partner, Bill Eggers. He’s doing some weekend work.”

“Don’t be long,” she said.

• • •

As Stone approached his office door, he heard the sound of machinery running and wondered if Joan was doing some weekend work, too. He opened the door and saw some sort of business machine on his desk and realized it was counting and sorting money. Joan must have found a machine after all.

Then something solid struck him on the back of the neck. He didn’t remember falling to the floor.

51

Stone smelled leather, and he couldn’t understand why. There was a murmur of voices from somewhere and the fluttery sound of a machine running. He opened his eyes and found himself facedown on his office sofa; his hands were chained behind him and his feet clamped together. He had a headache centered at the base of his skull, and he was having trouble thinking clearly.

He decided not to move for a while, just to listen and get oriented.

The machine stopped, and there was the sound of something tapping from the direction of his desk. He turned his head sideways so that he could see. There was a strange man seated at his desk; he was removing stacks of bills from the machine, tapping them on the desktop to square them, then banding them and arranging them in a suitcase that lay open beside the desk, while reading numbers from the machine and noting them on a yellow legal pad. Then he heard a voice he hadn’t expected to hear.

“How long do you think this will take?” Hank asked.

Stone moved his chin down enough to allow himself a view of the other side of the desk. Hank was removing a double-handful of money from one of the leaf bags, squaring batches of the bills, then stacking them into the machine. That done, she switched it on, and it began separating and sorting the tens and twenties.

“Shit,” the man said, “even with the machine, it’s going to take us all day, at least.”

“I guess there’s no faster way to do this,” she said.

“Not unless we had a couple more counter-sorters and more people to help, and we sure as hell don’t want more people in on this.”

“No,” she said, “we don’t.”

Stone saw her begin to look his way and closed his eyes.

“He’s still out,” Hank said. “How hard did you hit him?” Her tone was one of idle curiosity, not of concern.

“Jeez, I don’t know. Hard enough to put him down and out, but not hard enough to kill him, I hope. We may need him at some point.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Hank replied.

Okay, Stone said to himself, I think I’m getting this. He rewound his memory to earlier in the evening and watched the replay on the inside of his eyelids. They had drinks; he gave Hank a key; he showed her how the security system worked; she spent ten minutes in the Four Seasons’ ladies’ room while he got a cab; she must have made a phone call. Who else could the guy be but Marty Parese? They stopped talking and worked, and that gave him more time to think. He had come down to fax Eggers the year-to-date statement. If Bill didn’t receive it, would he send somebody over here? Stone’s question was almost immediately answered.

The phone rang three times, and the voice mail system picked up. “Stone? It’s Bill. Never mind faxing the document, we found our copy. Sorry to trouble you.” Eggers hung up.

Shit. No cavalry arriving from that direction. He did some more thinking. God knows where Joan is; long weekend . No conceivable cavalry from any other direction, either. Assuming they didn’t kill him—and that, he thought, might be an unwarranted assumption—nobody would find him until Tuesday morning. Where would Hank and her friend be by then? Acapulco? Rio? Answer: anywhere they damn well pleased. They would have a lot of luggage, of course, given the bulk of his five million dollars, even neatly stacked in suitcases. Unlikely that they would take a commercial flight; they wouldn’t want to be separated from their bags. So, they’d drive. Somewhere they could exchange the money for hundreds. Where the hell could they do that? They couldn’t just wheel it into a bank and make reverse change. Any banker in his right mind would call the FBI.

Wait a minute; why would Marty Parese have a cash counter-sorter handy on short notice? You couldn’t rent one at a tool rental place. Chop shop had to be a cash business; if you sold somebody a few thousand bucks’ worth of Mercedes bits and pieces, you wouldn’t take a check, and you wouldn’t put the cash in the bank. You’d launder it, somehow. Run it through a legit business account, maybe? One that dealt in a lot of cash? Casino? Check cashing service? Dirty bank? There must be dirty banks.

“Marty, tell me you got the groceries,” Hank said.

“A week’s worth.”

“I gave you a list.”

“Yeah, I got most of that. I couldn’t find truffle oil.”

She gave him a shopping list. When? On the phone from the ladies’ room, or maybe before that. She had a plan; she called him for dinner, not the other way around. Where would they need groceries, especially Hank’s kind of groceries? Someplace with a kitchen.

A wave of nausea struck Stone. Could a blow to the back of the head do that? He answered his own question by vomiting over the edge of the sofa.

“Jesus,” Marty said.

“Oh, Stone, poor baby,” Hank said. She went into his office bathroom and came out with a couple of towels and a trash can. She wiped his face with a damp facecloth, cleaned up the mess, and put the towels in the trash can. “Let’s sit you up,” she said. She rolled him onto his side, put his feet on the floor, and sat him up. “Is that better?”

Stone nodded and looked as dazed as he could, which, given the circumstances, wasn’t hard. He moved his hands: cuffs. He looked down at his feet: duct tape. He was secured.

“You want some water, Stone?”

He nodded. She went to the bathroom and came back with a glass. He took a sip, swished it around in his mouth, and spat into the trash can. “More.” He drank half the glass.

“Put some of that duct tape on his mouth,” Parese said.

“I can’t do that,” Hank replied. “If he vomits again, he could choke on it.”

“So what? I don’t care if he chokes, I’d just as soon put a bullet in his head.”

“Marty, I’ve told you before: if we kill him they’ll never stop looking for us, wherever we go. It’s not like killing Bats—nobody cares about him. Stone has friends in the police, and they’d really come after us. Stone can take the five-million-dollar hit without blinking. He might even be too embarrassed to tell anybody.”

“Whatever you say, babe. Now keep feeding the machine money.”

“How much are we up to?”

“Two hundred and twenty thou.”

“God. We’ll be here until Tuesday.”

“Not that long—we’re getting the hang of it now.”

They went back to work.

Stone felt better for throwing up; his head was clear now; he could think. Trouble was, he couldn’t think of any way out of this. There were things in the office he could use, but he couldn’t move. They could do with him as they willed.