Steve Hamilton - North of Nowhere

“Yes.”

“I want him, Alex.”

“I want him, too,” I said. “Believe me.”

The locks were getting closer.

“Who was the third man?” he said.

I hesitated. “Somebody from out of town,” I said. “You don’t know him.” It was half a lie. I didn’t want to get Vargas going on the O’Dell family yet. There’d be time for that later. “Like I said, I’ll make sure you know everything when we’re done.”

He picked up the radio handset and called the locksmaster. When we were in the lock, he cut the throttle down to an idle. We waited for the water to lift us twenty-one feet.

“I thought I was being pretty smart keeping that money in the safe,” he finally said. “No IRS, no first wife, no soon-to-be-second wife. I should have known something like that would happen. You can’t hide that much money for long. Some people can just smell it. You know what I mean?”

“Let me ask you one thing,” I said. “You remember that pewter mug you had in your collection? The one from the Royal Navy?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“I assume the police will give it back to you someday. You can put it back in that glass case of yours. If anybody ever asks you if they can have it, do me a favor, will ya?”

“What’s that?”

“Give it to him.”

It was just after six o’clock when we docked behind O’Dell’s place. There was another boat already there, a twenty-five-foot cruiser. It wasn’t half the boat Vargas had, but it looked like enough.

Bennett and Ham were both looking out separate windows when we walked in. Gill was sitting by himself in the corner. Margaret was nowhere to be seen, and apparently Leon was still out picking up supplies.

Bennett’s eyes got big when he saw Vargas walk in behind me. “What the hell’s he doing here?”

“He’s letting us borrow his boat,” I said. “He’s got a gun, and I bet he knows how to use it. We need all the help we can get.”

“He’s not going out there with us.”

“Bennett, whatever your problem is, just keep it in your pocket, all right? We’re gonna get Jackie, and then the two of you are gonna sit down and have a nice long talk. I’m sure you’ll have some interesting things to tell him.”

He swallowed hard, but didn’t say another word.

I pulled a chair out for Vargas. “Have a seat,” I said. “We all better eat something. We’re gonna need the energy.”

Bennett kept one uneasy eye on Vargas for the next couple of hours. “What the hell did you have to bring him here for?” he said when he finally had me alone in the corner. “And what’s this about me having a long talk with him?”

“I figured you’d want to tell him the truth about what happened,” I said. “One piece of advice, though. If you guys end up going at it, you better fight dirty.”

“That I know how to do, don’t worry.”

“Do you have a bag we can use? To hold the money in?”

“You mean what we’re gonna pass off as the money.”

“Unless you think your son will show up with it.”

“Alex, we’ve been through this, okay? What else do you want me to say?”

“Show me the bag,” I said.

He picked up a blue gym bag. “I put all the money I could dig up on the top,” he said, opening it. “There’s about two thousand dollars on top. The rest is torn-up newspaper.”

“That’ll have to do.”

“It’s Sunday morning, Alex. The banks are closed. This is all the money from the till, every dollar I could get my hands on.”

“Relax, Bennett. It’s not gonna matter. Blondie’s probably planning on shooting you as soon as he sees you. This will be your little joke on him.”

“Then what the hell are we doing, Alex? How’s this going to work?”

“Wait ’til Leon gets here. Then we’ll talk about it.”

Leon came in around seven o’clock, with Kmart bags in both arms. We had one hour to go until Blondie’s phone call. We spent that time wrapping all of the hunting rifles in black electrical tape. Leon took a black bicycle grip out of the bag and taped it to the bottom of one of the rifle barrels. “From a distance, what do you see?” he said, picking up the gun.

“An assault rifle,” Bennett said.

“A big assault rifle,” Ham said. “The kind that’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“Whoever goes in Vargas’s boat, they put on one of these windbreakers.” He pulled them out of another bag. They were all black. “One of the black baseball hats. These sunglasses. Alex says this guy has seen all of you at least once, right? So I’ll be up front.”

“What,” Bennett said, “you mean he’s supposed to think we’ve got the feds coming to the rescue or something?”

“That was what I was thinking originally,” Leon said. “Now I think I’ve got something better. Or for Blondie, anyway, it’s worse.”

“What’s worse than the feds?”

Leon looked over at Vargas. Vargas was sitting quietly in his chair, a few feet from the table, watching us.

“Mr. Vargas,” Leon said. “We need a name.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Somebody in Canada,” Leon said. “We need the one name that’ll make Blondie wet his pants.”

He thought about it. “If we use this man’s name,” he finally said, “you forget you ever heard it. When we’re done here, the name gets erased from your mind.”

“Understood.”

“The name is Isabella.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“I can see why he’d be scared,” Bennett finally said. “That’s the most terrifying name I’ve ever heard. For a ballerina, anyway.”

“It’s Mr. Isabella,” Vargas said.

“Yeah?” Bennett said. “Is he some mobbed-up wiseguy over in Soo, Canada?”

Vargas stared at him. It was the same look I got just before he did his Moo Duk Kwan act all over my body.

“Blondie and Isabella,” Bennett said. “Not exactly Bugsy and Scarface, are they. Dumb Canucks can’t even get their names right.”

“Take it easy,” I said. “You heard what he said. We use the name and then we forget it.”

“Is that the plan?” Jonathan said. “The second boat comes in like this Mr. Isabella is breaking up the party?”

“That’s the idea,” Leon said. “It only has to work long enough to catch them off guard. We want them to think that giving up Jackie is in their best interests.”

“And then what?”

“We see what happens,” Leon said. “We react accordingly.”

Jonathan didn’t look happy. But he didn’t say anything else.

It was almost eight o’clock at that point, almost time for Blondie’s call. We all sat there with our own thoughts, waiting for the phone to ring. Eight o’clock came and went. Five more minutes passed. Then ten.

When the phone finally rang, everybody jumped.

“Let me answer it,” I said. I went behind the bar and picked it up.

“Good morning,” he said. “Is this Alex?”

“Yes.”

“Good man. Are you ready to come get your friend?”

“Let me talk to him.”

“He’s tied up at the moment, Alex. You remember that gun I had stuck to your head at your little poker party? Your friend is getting the same treatment right now.”

“I swear to God, if anything happens to him…”

“If anything happens to him, it’ll be your fault, Alex. It’ll mean that something didn’t happen exactly as it was supposed to. Are we clear on that?”

“Tell us what to do.”

“That’s more like it. I want you and Bennett to meet us at a certain location on the lake. I’m going to give you the GPS coordinates. Are you ready?”

“Go ahead.”

He gave me the latitude and longitude in digital format. I wrote them down and showed them to Bennett.