Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“And afterward?” she asked softly, and slid a bare foot up his calf. “You ever been to New Zealand? It’s really something down there-Middle Earth, just like in the movies. I know a place where we could have a cottage to ourselves, just us, a few thousand acres, and some sheep. Nothing to see out the windows but cliffs and sky and ocean. What do you say-you take care of the airfare, and I’ll pick up the tab at the Wharekauhau?”

“New Zealand’s a long way.”

“You can afford it. And besides, isn’t that what you want-something far away?”

He had no answer for that, so he nodded vaguely and went into the bathroom. When he came out, Valerie was standing by the balcony doors. She’d opened the drapes to the width of her shoulders, and she wore nothing but the long bar of light that came through the glass. Carr stared at her for some time, looking for he didn’t know what. A mark? A sign? Some sort of clue? But there was nothing except that body, slender, wanton, tinted pale saffron by the streetlight. She turned to look at him, and her face, half in shadow, was suddenly exhausted.

“We moved a lot when I was a kid,” she said quietly. “Base to base-never anyplace longer than a year or two. My mother was useless around the house, but my father could do things, and he’d always try to fix up whatever crappy billet we’d been assigned. He’d paint, hang pictures, plant a window box, that kind of thing. But those places weren’t ours, and all the petunias in the world couldn’t change it-couldn’t make us belong somewhere. I get the feeling you know what that’s like.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be glad when this is done. I’m tired of hotels and furnished apartments and putting on these lives like somebody else’s clothes. I want someplace I can sit still. Someplace that’s mine.” The air conditioner came on and she shivered in the breeze. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I want my skin back.”

Carr swallowed hard, and Valerie stepped away from the window and began to collect her scattered clothes. “Something’s on your mind,” she whispered.

Did they show, he wondered-the questions that still spun through his head? He shrugged. “Prager, Bessemer, a bunch of things.”

“You need help,” she said. “Let me help you.”

The resort grounds are vast: a golf course, clubhouse and marina on the sound, and, across West Bay Road, a curving, coral-pink hotel complex on Seven Mile Beach. The Nissan doesn’t follow when Carr turns through the main gates, but any relief he feels is short-lived. There are two more men in the lobby, watching them from behind day-old newspapers.

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.