Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“That kind of plan is always the most disappointing.”

“Then start small.”

Bessemer nods slowly. “I could get myself cleaned up-lose some weight, ease up on this.” He holds up his glass. “Maybe try to get fit.”

“All good ideas.”

“Then maybe I could spend some time with my kid. He’s twelve now, and I haven’t seen him in… a long time.”

“Baby steps, Howie. Baby steps.”

Bessemer stretches out on the office sofa and dozes. He shifts around occasionally and murmurs words that Carr can’t make out. Asleep he looks younger, Carr thinks, and much like his son. Carr empties ashtrays and fills the dishwasher and makes himself another cup of coffee. He looks out the window, at a jet crossing the sky, and thinks about Tina, flying down to Santiago, and Guerrero, who may have been Declan’s pilot. He thinks about Declan, and his hastily sketched exit plan from Mendoza, and he remembers Valerie’s words on the wharf in Portland.

You’re remembering a different guy, she said, and Carr knows she’s right. Sometimes it seems that he’s remembering several different guys. It’s like a hall of mirrors, and everywhere there’s a version of Declan-short, tall, skinny, fat…

There’s the grinning red pirate who recruited him in Mexico; the wise mentor who taught him the ropes; and the tough, charismatic soldier who executed plans with precision and economy, improvised like Coltrane whenever things went sideways, and always led from the front.

Then there’s the melancholy, whiskey-voiced raconteur, sitting in a darkened bar, spinning out tales of his days in the service-in Ireland, the Middle East, and at unnamed stops along the Silk Road-of the hell he raised with other crews, and the swag he hauled away. And there is the weary campaigner, aging, aching, and contemplating retirement with a mix of anticipation and dread. Those incarnations didn’t turn up often, and when they did it was always just before a job, or just after one.

And then there’s the Declan Valerie had in mind-the erratic, reckless Declan, the willful, capricious one. It’s hard-impossible, really-for Carr to reconcile her version with those others, but he can’t say he hasn’t seen them before. He has, in bits and pieces, several times over the years. And especially toward the end.

He hears Valerie’s voice again: There was Cesar, and before that the Russians. They were the last jobs they worked, before Mendoza, and she was right about them-Declan hadn’t been at his best.

Cesar was a transporter, and he’d ship pretty much anything to anyplace, according to Mr. Boyce and Tina. He’d started out, like so many in the region, with drug shipments, and found natural synergies in the movement of small arms and cash. Then, in the early years of the new century, he diversified into transporting heavier weapons, hijacked electronics, pirated software and DVDs, and human traffic headed north. Despite his success, or perhaps because he kept so busy spending its fruits on hookers, Ferraris, and thoroughbred horses, Cesar had, over the years, underinvested badly in his own security infrastructure.

“I’ve seen 7-Elevens with tighter perimeters,” Tina had said.

The perimeter she was talking about was in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, around a waterfront compound where Cesar kept an office, some odds and ends of his shipments-a pallet or two of flat-screen TVs, a crate of RPGs-a climate-controlled garage for some of his Testarossas, and $6.8 million in shrink-wrapped packs of hundred-dollar bills. The money was in a cinder-block annex to the Ferrari garage, and it should’ve been a simple job-three sleepy guards, a fence to scale, a video feed to interrupt, an alarm system barely worth the name, and a safe room that wasn’t. In and out, unseen and unheard, in seventeen minutes flat. It should’ve been simple, but it wasn’t, because Declan developed something of a mania for Cesar.

Not that that was difficult to do. Cesar was unlikable in the extreme-a thug, a beater of women and children, a liar, a casual killer, and an all-around swine. Though he was, in truth, no worse than any of the other people they stole from, Declan had for some reason decided that he was.

“I think it’s his girth, boys,” he confessed over beer one night in a Puerto Barrios bar. “He’s such a fat fuck, and he dresses like… What’s he dress like, Bobby?”

“Like an L.A. pimp, Deke, circa 1977.”

“Not even that well, lad. And he’s an insult to those cars of his. I just don’t know how he jams his guts behind the wheel.” It was a running joke through all their planning, and then, on the night of the job, in an instant it wasn’t.

Carr was on the fence, and Declan, Bobby, and Ray-Ray had the safe room. Carr watched through the nightscope as Bobby and Ray-Ray came out, bags over shoulders, and headed toward him.

“Where’s Deke?” Carr said into his headset.

There was a pause, a whispered chuckle, and then Declan’s raspy voice. “Leavin’ a little something for that feckin’ sack,” he said, and Carr saw him in the doorway of the Ferrari garage-saw him pitch something in underhanded, and then come running.

“Might want to add some quick, lads,” he said, and then the night lit up with an orange flash, a muffled blast, a symphony of breaking glass, and a shock wave that Carr felt even fifty yards away. He tore the nightscope from his head.

“What the fuck?” Bobby and Ray-Ray shouted, nearly in unison.

Declan was laughing when he reached them, and laughing later that night, when they passed a bottle around in the cabin of a sport fisher, halfway to Belize.

“He didn’t deserve those cars, the fat shite. All I did was restore order to the universe. And what the fuck was he gonna do with that box of pineapples anyway? Nothing so productive, I’ll guarantee you.” He looked at Carr. “Why’re you being a feckin’ old woman about it, anyway? It’s fireworks is all-nothing to fret over. It’s like a tonic.”

Bobby and Mike and Dennis and Ray-Ray had laughed with him; Carr and Valerie had not.

Nobody was laughing after Nicaragua, though. The Russians were called Dudek, and they were actually from Ukraine-two cousins who cashed out of the army and headed west when the Evil Empire dissolved. And weapons were their specialty. They bought them, sold them, shipped them, serviced them, and trained clients in their use. And unlike Cesar, they did not leave piles of money about in cinder-block sheds. They did, however, keep some petty cash on hand-$5.1 million, more or less-in a safe in the back office of Dudek Air Charter, not far from the Managua airport. The safe was a serious one, as was the security around it, which relied less on technology than it did on the presence of many guys with guns.

Carr hadn’t liked the job at first, hadn’t seen a way of doing it that didn’t devolve into a full-on firefight, but Declan had pushed, and eventually he’d come up with a plan. It relied on distraction, misdirection, and some painfully tight timings, but if it played as written, it would get them in and out without a shot fired. Carr was pleased with it; Declan less so. It was late, and they were sitting in the shitty kitchen of a shitty house, in a city-Managua-full of shitty houses.

“The way in is okay, I guess, but the exit is too clever by half. We’ll have the swag in hand, fer chrissakes, we don’t need yer feckin’ floor show. We just head for the door.”

“And do what,” Carr had said, “shoot your way out? Those aren’t rent-a-cops at Dudek, those are mercs-mostly kid mercs. They’re not big on judgment or hesitation or worries about mortality-theirs or anyone else’s. You light it up with them, it’s not a halfway thing.”

“I know who they are, boyo, and the last thing I need is a lecture on firefights. Not from you. I’m saying yer plan is riskier than it has to be because yer shy when it comes to heavy lifting-you always have been. You’re delicate, so to avoid the shootin’ you have us wastin’ time in that stairwell, while you sing and dance. Well, I say that’s a higher risk. I’d rather do the shootin’ than wait around fer someone to do it to me.”