Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

Carr shakes his head. “You seem to have your mind made up about things.”

“Your prints come back as Greg Frye, and there’s a file for Greg Frye with the Bureau of Prisons, but after that…” Rink shrugs. “How’d you manage that?”

“If you think I’m a cop, shouldn’t you be a little more careful with the merchandise?”

Rink holds his Greg Frye passport up. “Not so much, Greg. You and Bessemer checked out of your hotel, and the last anyone heard you were headed for the airport. I want to, I can have a couple of guys with your names on a plane to the ass end of nowhere, just as soon as the airport opens up again. Your handler’ll think you two ran off together.

“Now, how ’bout you tell me where your buddies are-the ones who put on the little show this afternoon?”

Carr smiles again. “It seems like something’s happened here, and you think I’m involved.”

“ Something’s happened here?” Prager calls from the shadows. “My whole system is locked up. I might as well be fucking blind. ” Kathy Rink looks sharply at him, and then turns back to Carr.

“I know a lot of people,” Carr continues. “Let me make some calls. Maybe between the two of us we can figure out what’s going on.”

Kathy Rink produces Carr’s cell phone from somewhere. “Who do you want to call, Greg? Give me your password, and I’ll ring ’em up for you. And speaking of phone calls-who do you think would call Curt, out of the blue, with a heads-up about wire transfers? What reason would they have, and why would they throw your name around?”

“There are people up in Boston who don’t like me much.”

“They’re not alone,” Rink says, smiling, and she pats the side of his face.

There’s a noise behind Rink-a metallic complaint, like a rusty garage door-and the sound of rain grows louder and a breeze blows in. There’s movement beyond the lights, and a man steps into the arena. It’s one of Rink’s crew cuts, carrying several rolls of duct tape. His nose is packed and bandaged, and there’s dried blood on his polo shirt. He glares at Carr through blackened eyes.

There are two other men with him, and they don’t have crew cuts. One is a suntanned fireplug, with a peroxide ponytail, a camo wife-beater, and tattoos from his collarbones to wrists. He’s got towels over his shoulder and a slant bench under his arm, and he smiles at Rink with crooked teeth. His colleague is small and slim and shaved egg-bald. His skin is the color of oatmeal, and he’s wearing dark glasses and pressed fatigues. He’s got a plastic water jug in each hand-the five-gallon kind that go on water coolers-and he sets them down in front of Carr.

“I tol’ him we didn’t need so much,” the fireplug says to Rink. His accent is deeply Southern. “When does it take even a gallon? But he don’t listen.”

“I like to be prepared,” the egg says. His voice is soft, his accent from nowhere.

Kathy Rink tosses Carr’s phone and passport into the corner, onto the remains of his luggage. “We won’t waste a lot of time going round with threats, or any of that we can do this hard or we can do this easy crap, okay? We both know you’re not gonna say shit unless you have to-and even if you did, I wouldn’t believe it. Besides, after what you did to me today, there’s no way I’m gonna miss this opportunity.”

The fireplug laughs and puts the slant bench down. He kneels and begins to adjust the angle. Howard Bessemer moans. “Jesus Christ,” he says, his voice a choked whisper. “This wasn’t me. None of this was me.”

Rink turns to him and frowns. “My problem with you, Howie, is I’m not sure what you’re good for. I mean, I don’t need to put you on the board here-I could just smack you in the head and you’ll tell me whatever it is you think I want to hear. So what exactly do I need you for?”

Bessemer cranes his neck, trying to see beyond the glare. “Curt! Come on, Curt!”

And then the lights go out.

Prager’s is the first voice Carr hears. “Son of a bitch!” he shouts. “Son of a fucking bitch!”

“Flashlights!” Kathy Rink calls. “Somebody get some lights here.”

There’s scraping, stumbling, cursing, and then two thin, shaky beams cut the black. A pool of light spreads at Kathy Rink’s feet, and another at Prager’s, and then there are radio voices in the air. Someone calls from the darkness: “Power’s out at the main house too.” To which Prager responds: “You’re fucking kidding me.”

Two more flashlight beams emerge from the dark. Two crew cuts, wet with rain, emerge behind them. “It’s a blackout, sir,” one reports. “The whole north end of the island’s dark.”

Prager’s voice quivers with anger. “Which is why I have emergency generators and two big tanks of diesel. So where the hell are my lights?”

“They’re trying, sir. There’s a problem-with a fuel line, they think. They’re working on it, but it’s slow going in the dark.” Prager curses fluently, and Carr stifles a laugh.

There’s throat clearing, and then the fireplug’s voice. “This isn’t the kind of thing you want to do by flashlight, Kath. I’m up for it if you are, but truth is, we might drown the fucker without meaning it.”

Rink curses under her breath. “How long till we get the lights back?” she yells.

There’s whispering and radio static, and then an answer. “An hour, maybe two.”

“Fuck!” Prager shouts in the dark.

For a moment there is just the rain, hammering at the roof, sweeping through the foliage, and then Rink speaks. “I’m thinking we should take a break, Curt-wait till we have light to work by.” There’s no response from the darkness, and she tries again. “Curt?”

There’s an embarrassed cough, and one of the crew cuts answers nervously. “He left, ma’am. I think he went up to the house.”

“Shit,” Rink whispers, and then, in a louder voice: “Let’s button it up for an hour, boys.” She points at two of her crew cuts. “Colley, Marco-you two are outside.” And she looks at the fireplug. “C’mon, Vic, I’ll buy you and Amory a beer.”

The fireplug nods, and the egg smooths his fatigue pants. “I want Pepsi,” he says.

There are footsteps, and the beams of light tremble and diminish, and the garage door scrapes down. The sound of rain is muted, the breeze vanishes, and the darkness is complete.

Bessemer sobs. “Is this part of it? Leaving us in the dark.”

“It’s a blackout, and let’s hope it lasts.”

“I don’t even know where we are.”

“There’s a shed next to the greenhouse, with garden equipment in it. I’m pretty sure this is it.”

Bessemer sobs again. “What the hell did you get me into?”

“Now’s not the time, Howie. Now we get the hell out of Dodge. Can you walk?”

“Walk? I don’t know if I can stand. My face hurts like a son of a bitch; I think they broke my nose. Besides, where am I supposed to walk?”

“I’m leaving, and you’d better come along.”

“Are you kidding? I’m not going anywhere-you think I want to get in deeper?”

“It doesn’t get deeper than this,” Carr says, and he stands and shuffles slowly forward, navigating from memory. Around the slant bench, the water jugs, the light stands, toward the tractor. His shin smacks into something smooth and metal.

“What are you doing?” Bessemer says.

Carr turns around and stretches his arms back. “I hope I’m turning on a light,” he says. He runs nearly numb fingers across a landscape of plastic textures-pebbled, cross-hatched, tacky, and smooth-until he finds the ridges of the tractor’s little steering wheel. Then he reaches down and scrabbles over knobs and switches until he touches a key. Carr turns it, and the tractor’s headlights come on-sickly beams that barely cross the room. To Carr, they are flares in a mineshaft.