Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“Not to worry, Howie,” Carr says, and then he nods at Bobby. “I’m going out, but he’ll keep you company while I’m gone.”

“Gone where?”

“No place far,” Carr says. “We’ll call Prager when I get back.” And then he goes into his bedroom, rummages in his bag for a bathing suit, and opens his phone.

Tina’s hotel is down the beach from Carr’s-practically next door, she said, but it turns out to be a mile-and-a-half swim. The water is warm and clear, but there’s rough surf around the reefs, and a powerful undertow at a break in a sand bar, and it takes Carr almost forty minutes to make the trip. He’s breathing hard when he pulls off his fins and mask and walks out of the ocean. His shoulders and thighs are burning.

Tina is waiting for him in a white canvas beach cabana, the last tent in a curving white line. She’s lying on a lounge chair, wearing a black two-piece swimsuit and big black sunglasses. Her skin is pale and petal smooth, and Carr can feel her eyes on him as he crosses the sand.

She hands him a heavy white towel. “I’m impressed,” she says, “but wouldn’t driving have been easier?”

“Sure,” Carr says, drying his hair. “Except I didn’t think you’d want me bringing my minders along.”

Tina sits up and pulls her glasses off. Her eyes are narrow. “What are you talking about?” she says softly.

“Minders. Two of them-big biceps, high and tight hair, milling around the lobby. Not to be confused with the pair who tailed me from the airport.”

“Where did you leave them?”

“On the hotel beach, trying to pick me out of a few dozen people snorkeling offshore.”

“At some point they’re going to realize you’re not coming in.”

Carr shrugs. “They can tell the lifeguard.”

Tina looks into the middle distance. “No idea of who sent them?”

“They’ve got that corporate look, but otherwise no clue.”

“Prager’s?”

“That’s the optimistic interpretation.”

“It seems awfully diligent for Eddie Silva.”

Carr nods. “Surprises were inevitable down here: security immediately around Prager is what I know least about.”

“Bessemer was supposed to be your ticket around all that.”

“And Silva was supposed to be a useless lush.”

Tina makes a sour face and raps her sunglasses idly against her lounge chair. “So much for theories,” she says. “What did you do with Bessemer?”

“Bobby’s with him, at the hotel.”

“He and Mike and the kid settled in?”

Carr nods. “In a place on the sound, with a yard and a dock and a straight shot to the airport. They like it better than West Palm.”

Tina gives him a speculative look. “You want the stones?”

Carr sits. “That’s why I’m here.”

“And I thought it was just to see me,” Tina says. There’s a canvas beach bag at her side, and she reaches in and pulls out a large nylon shaving kit, blue with a zippered top. She tosses it to Carr, who catches it and opens the zip. The diamonds are in three plastic bags inside. Carr takes them out and weighs each one in his palm. “Everything here?”

“Except what I used for belt buckles and toe rings,” Tina says.

Carr smiles and makes a show of weighing the bags again. “As long as you left me enough to get Prager’s attention.”

“From the minders, I’d say you already have it.”

Carr puts the stones back in the zippered case. He looks at Tina and gets another questioning look in return. “You worried?” she asks. “About these guys following you around?”

His first impulse is to laugh, and he almost does. Not because he isn’t worried about being followed-he is. Out from behind the listening end of a microphone, outside of anonymous cars and vans, Carr feels naked. The minders have simply added a spotlight and pointing finger. No, the almost laughter isn’t because the buzz cuts don’t scare him, it’s because they’re at the end of a long line. In the crowded landscape of Carr’s fear, they are mere foothills beside Valerie, Mike, and Nando, beside his galloping suspicions about what really happened on that bleak highway to Santiago, beside his dark fantasies of what might happen here afterward, if his crew is successful in stealing Prager’s money.

His second impulse-and it surprises him-is to tell her. The idea of giving voice to his fears, saying them aloud, confessing them to Tina, makes him dizzy for an instant. Words well up in his chest. They bubble and rush and nearly spring forth, and then he remembers who he’s talking to. The half-smiling woman on the lounge chair vanishes, replaced by a slender figure-a riding crop in a black dress-standing in the deep shade at the edge of a golf course. So Carr swallows the words with his laughter and shrugs.

“I’m not crazy about working the front of the house,” he says, “being the face Prager sees, the one he’ll remember.”

“First time for everything.”

“First and last time for this.”

“You never know-you might develop a taste for it.”

“Not going to happen,” Carr says, shaking his head. “Last time I saw you, you were headed down to Santiago, to have a look at Guerrero. How did that go?”

Tina sighs. “I wish I could say it was a breakthrough, but it wasn’t.”

“Guerrero wasn’t Declan’s guy?”

“He was the guy all right, but that was it. He had nothing to tell us.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Declan-or somebody very much like him-put down a cash deposit to fly that Saturday night. He paid cash, and booked for four passengers, plus baggage.”

“Going where?”

“Sao Paulo.”

“Declan.”

“Sounds like. Unfortunately, that’s all this Guerrero had to say. The date came and went, the guy didn’t show and didn’t call, and Guerrero happily kept the cash. End of story.”

Carr’s jaw clenches. “Which leaves us where?”

“No place great,” Tina says. “It takes us back to our two original questions: Who gave Bertolli’s men the heads-up, and what became of Bertolli’s missing money?”

“How about Bertolli’s former security guy down there-the one your people turned up?”

“How about him?”

“We could go back to him-push a little harder, or sweeten the pot-get him to do some digging into who warned Bertolli.”

Tina is doubtful. “The guy was pretty scared…”

“So that’s it then? I’ve spent my money on dead ends?”

“You want to keep spending, I’ll keep my guys working-knocking on Bertolli’s man again, trying to turn up another source, whatever. But if we’re going to do that, then we’ve got to work it from the other end as well.”

“Meaning what?”

“Who knew Declan’s plans, and who was in a position to leak them? And who might’ve benefited from doing it? Those are the questions-and I think you know who you need to ask.”

A gust of wind blows through the canvas walls of the cabana. Carr hunches like an old man and pulls the towel around his shoulders.

Tina buys him a T-shirt and flip-flops from her hotel’s gift shop, along with a beach bag for his fins, mask, and diamonds, and she drives him back to his hotel. They say little in the car, and she drops him at the roadside just past the resort’s flower-draped gate.

Bobby is watching television when Carr returns, a Dodgers game now. Bessemer is snoring in his room, diagonal across the bed, one arm flung out in a desperate reach for something. Carr closes the bedroom door.

“He went down about an hour ago,” Bobby says. “The guy is not looking forward to seeing Prager.”

Bobby is gone when Bessemer teeters into the living room, wiping crust from his eyes and spittle from his chin-a bedraggled teddy bear. He squints at the television, and then at the evening sky.