Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“Fuck you. Nothing else.”

“No? You didn’t kill Declan then? You didn’t sell him to Bertolli?”

Bobby’s face and fists clench tight. “You keep talking like that, ocean or no, you’re gonna catch a beating.”

Carr shakes his head. “So what was the take?” he asks.

“I told you-we got about half.”

Carr pulls off his sunglasses. “Don’t give me this about crap, Bobby. How much exactly?”

Bobby reaches into the ice chest and pulls out a fistful of crushed ice. He sits down and runs it over his neck and shoulders. “One point two even.”

“And what happened to it?”

“In a bank-banks-finally, and what a pain in the ass that turned out to be. That much cash-it’s a fucking albatross. Took forever to get it moved, converted to dollars, give it an acceptable past, and get it deposited. I see why we pay Boyce to handle all that crap. Mike needed help to get it done.”

Carr is standing now, out from under the canopy. “Help from who, Bobby?”

Bobby smiles and reaches into the ice chest for another beer. He pulls the cap off and takes a long drink. “That’s a funny story,” Bobby says. “Nando fixed it for us-set us up with a couple of friendly bankers in Miami. Remember Nando? It was a real blast from the past when Mike told me he was in touch. He knows all about this shit now. Guess he’s come up in the world.”

The dream leaves him sweating and breathless, grasping for the story line even as it fades in the predawn light. Something with his father. Something with his mother. The courtyard in Caracas, the bedrooms in Mexico City. The beds empty. A booming, piratical laugh. Carr wakes holding nothing more than sheets.

He runs water on his face and walks into the living room. The walls are bathed in shifting blues and yellows from the television, playing silently to Latin Mike, who is stretched out on the sofa. A shopping channel from the States-makeup and jewelry that is not quite gold.

“You buying, Mike?” Carr says quietly.

Mike yawns widely. “Maybe the eyeliner.”

Carr nods at Bessemer’s bedroom. “Howie sleep tight?” he asks.

“Went in there with a bottle about midnight,” Mike says. “Hasn’t come out since.”

Carr opens the bedroom door and looks inside. Bessemer is a snoring mound in a landslide of pillows and blankets. A bottle of Bombay Sapphire lays on its side, on the end table. Carr closes the door. “The guy puts it away,” he says.

“More every day,” Mike says, and he stretches and scratches and wanders to the terrace doors. He looks out at the glowing pool and the gray ocean. “You want to watch that. He’s got to be upright for Prager.”

“He will be.” Carr walks to the bar and fishes in the little refrigerator for a Coke. “You’re good to stay the morning?”

Mike nods. “You think Dennis got anywhere last night?”

“We’ll find out.”

A new salesman appears on the screen, with a pitch about a moisturizer.

Mike points and laughs. “Should buy some of this shit for Bobby. Guy looked like Larry the Lobster when you brought him back.”

Carr nods. “I told him to use sunscreen.”

Which is a lie. Carr had watched as Bobby drank beer and grew ever more pink, but he had said nothing about getting burned. What he had done was make Bobby repeat his story several times more, and answer questions about Nando and Valerie.

About Nando, Bobby had said little, besides that Mike had kept in touch with him over the years, and that the fee Nando had charged for helping them launder money “wasn’t robbery.” About Valerie he’d said less.

“She’s never asked about the money, and I’ve never told her. If she knows something, she heard it from Mike.”

“Mike tell her a lot of secrets?” Carr had asked, and he’d gripped the canopy rail tight enough that his fingers ached.

“Fuck should I know?” Bobby had said, but he’d looked away.

A silence followed, during which Bobby drank another beer and Carr replayed his afternoon in Miami against the new backdrop Bobby had painted. It was Bobby who’d broken the silence, with a decorous belch and an observation.

“Mike won’t put that money in the pot.”

“I’ll save him the trouble-I’ll just deduct it from his cut. From yours too.”

“He won’t like it.”

“And how about you, Bobby?”

Bobby had shrugged. “I’m not crazy about it, but I wasn’t crazy about the sneaking around, either. I figure if we’re gonna do this job, then let’s get it done. I want this fucker over with. But that’s me-Mike’s another story.”

“I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.”

“So, am I supposed to tell him about this, or what?”

“Do what you want, Bobby.”

It doesn’t seem to Carr that Bobby has yet told Latin Mike anything, though with Mike it wouldn’t necessarily be obvious. Maybe Bobby has been too busy tending his sunburn.

Bessemer is still asleep when Carr leaves the suite, and Mike is still on the sofa. Carr is careful on his way through the lobby, and watchful, but there is no reappearance of Kathy Rink’s men. The sky is painted pearl gray as he crosses the visitors’ parking lot, and already the day’s heat is building beneath it. There’s a rumble of thunder off to the east as he climbs into Mike’s SUV and drives away.

The workhouse is at the end of a quiet lane, on a canal that feeds into North Sound. It’s a stucco box in faded blue, with a tiled roof and plaster embellishments around the windows. From the street, Carr can see into the sandy backyard. There’s a metal dock there and the fishing boat is tied up alongside it. Dennis opens the door. A week on Grand Cayman and he’s paler and thinner than ever-a red-eyed, unshaved reed. He puts a finger to his lips.

“Bobby’s still crashed,” he says softly. Carr follows him in.

The main room is white and raftered, and the big front window has a view of unkempt hedges, milky sky, and planes angling toward the airport. The furnishings are a hodgepodge of hotel castoffs: fraying slipper chairs, sagging leather and chrome armchairs, water-stained end tables, and the ashtrays of a dozen defunct lounges. Dennis has three laptops open side by side on a chipped glass dining table, behind a stack of highspeed modems, coils of cable, and a platoon of empty soda cans.

“You want coffee?” he asks Carr. Carr nods and Dennis disappears into the kitchen, reappearing with a steaming mug.

Carr takes a drink. It’s bad. “When’s the last time you slept?” he asks.

Dennis’s smile is skewed and slightly goofy. “A while ago.”

“Hope you were doing more than just surfing porn sites.”

A blush spreads up Dennis’s neck. “Not just porn.”

Carr puts his coffee aside. “So what’s new in the virtual world of Isla Privada Holdings?”

“That’s a nontrivial question,” Dennis says, rubbing his chin and taking a seat before one of the laptops. Carr girds himself: Dennis gets pedantic when he’s tired, and he’s tired now. “Security on their VPN wasn’t totally stupid to begin with. I mean, aside from the happy gap we want to exploit, the multifactor authorization is pretty cute. And the rest of the stuff-it may be textbook, predictable, maybe even lazy, but it’s not totally stupid. It’s good enough, for instance, that if you look at it too hard-look actively, I mean, poke around too much-they’re going to know you’re there. And they’re going to poke back.” He looks up at Carr, his eyes shadowed but earnest. “We don’t want that.”

“We don’t,” Carr affirms.

Dennis opens four packs of sugar over his coffee mug, stirs with a pencil, sips at it, and smiles. “So, a nontrivial question-how do you look inside the box without taking the lid off? Not so easy, unless…” Dennis taps a forefinger lightly on his temple.