Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

Mike empties his wineglass. “And you’re all about retirement, right, jefe?”

“I thought we all were. I thought that’s what we said the last five times we had this conversation. But if you’re saying something different, let’s not dick around. Tell me now and I’ll tell Boyce when I see him day after tomorrow.”

Bobby pops up, as if he’s sat on a tack, but he’s smiling. “Nobody’s saying anything. We’re just thinking out loud.”

Valerie’s laugh is like ice in a glass. “Is that how you split the labor, Bobby-Mike thinks, and you do the out loud part?”

Bobby flips her the bird, but he’s laughing too, and so is Dennis, and so-finally-is Mike. Carr is still watching purple shadows spread over the valley when the waitress reappears and says that their table is ready.

It’s set with heavy linen, battered silver, and votive candles in thick blue glass. Valerie is at the head, between Bobby and Latin Mike, and Carr sits at the other end, between Dennis and the vacant chair. Valerie’s playing hostess tonight, smiling, laughing, keeping glasses filled and conversation weightless. It’s a part she plays well: conspiratorial and flattering with Mike; flirtatious and profane with Bobby; and with Dennis simply present to be gazed upon. Carr can relate; he can’t look away either.

Candlelight flickers on her arms and throat and softens her elfin features. Her green eyes glow and, as the night wears on, her braid loosens and two honey-colored strands slip down to frame her face. Always in motion, the face, the hands, the voice-lifting, lilting, insinuating. It must be exhausting, Carr thinks-it exhausts him just watching her, but he watches just the same. The room darkens, the crowd thins, wine bottles march steadily past, good soldiers all, and by the time the entrees are cleared Carr is drunk and drifting backward again, to Costa Alegre.***

It was off-season in Chamela-white mornings, the narrow pastel streets empty until noon-and Carr was on R amp; R between jobs, nursing a row of bruised ribs. He was sticking close to his rented casita, swimming, reading, sleeping, and he’d never have seen her if not for Fernando.

Fernando did alarms for Declan when Carr first joined up, and his brother Ernesto did surveillance, but their skills didn’t line up with Declan’s ambitions and they’d slipped into retirement about a year later-Neto to a sport fishing business on the Riviera Maya, and Nando to invest in Jalisco real estate. Carr had always liked the brothers, their unfussy competence and soft-edged cynicism, and he’d been happy to hear from Nando and accept his invitation to drive up the coast for lunch by a hotel pool.

Nando was thicker, darker, and more jocular than he’d been the last time he and Carr had shared a meal. He was working steadily through a platter of chicken tacos and a long story about some condos he was building in Manzanilla when he paused and pointed with his beer to the far side of the pool. “ Oye, cabron -you like a little mystery?”

She wore a green two-piece, and her skin was the color of toast. Her hair wasn’t blond then, it was a sun-streaked copper, cut blunt to her shoulders, and there was a tattoo on her lower back, a tangle of blue Sanskrit, that looked as if it had been there a while, but which proved to be window dressing. The freckles were real though, and so were the quick green eyes. And the catch at the back of his throat. And the ache he felt through his arms and fingers.

“ Muy bien, no?” Nando continued. “At first I think she’s a tourist, but then I’m not sure. All week I see guys make their play, and all week she’s ice. She shuts them down before they get a word out-even me, if you can believe it. Then these skinny guys check in a couple days ago, from up north, and suddenly she’s Miss Congeniality. She lets them buy her drinks, lunch, dinner, whatever, and they’re practically slitting each other’s throats to get next to her.”

“You think she’s a working girl?”

“She’s working something, cabron. I just can’t figure out what.”

Nando was flying up to Monterrey that afternoon for his niece’s quinceanera, and he picked up the check before he left and promised to let Carr buy dinner when he returned. “You keep your eye on her, bro. Maybe you can tell me what the mystery is all about.” It took him three days to work it out.

Carr spent a few more hours poolside that afternoon, watching her talk to the skinny men. The next day, he took a room at the hotel and followed her: to the beach with the tall skinny man, into town with the balding one, on the cliff-side hiking trail with the blond one who wore a strand of Buddhist prayer beads around his wrist. Poolside, in the cottony twilight, the men bought her drinks, fidgeted, laughed too long, and looked away from one another and scowled.

The day after that, Carr spent some dollars with the hotel staff to learn that her name was Carrie Lyle and that she was from L.A. The three men were from Milpitas, California, and they’d each given the same address on McCarthy Boulevard when they’d registered. Online, in the hotel’s business center, he found that the Milpitas address was the headquarters of Null Space Integrated, a manufacturer of specialized graphics chips, and that the men were NSI’s three most senior design engineers. Of Carrie Lyle he could find no trace at all.

A pro then, trolling for technical intel, or maybe for talent. It didn’t surprise Carr, but the knowledge left him feeling somehow disappointed, as if such mundane loot wasn’t deserving of her performance. Because it really was an exceptional performance-maybe the best he’d seen-subtle, unhurried, and finely calibrated to each member of her small audience. He saw it in her body language-the way she arranged herself at their sides-and he heard it in the snippets of conversation he’d managed to steal. She was tentative, almost shy, with the tall man; coltish, nearly awkward, with the bald one; and with the blond Buddhist she was ethereal and dreamy. Three women, beckoning.

It didn’t seem much work for her to reconcile her various selves when she entertained the three men at once. It was a matter of small adjustments as far as Carr could tell from his corner of the patio-something in her laugh, her posture, the way she touched her hair. A matter of little intimacies bestowed like candies: a fingertip on the back of a hand, a tanned thigh pressed for a moment against a pale one, a tanned foot sliding on a pale ankle, a hand on a nervous hip. The skinny men were like cats under a full moon, and at his shaded table Carr himself felt a lunar itch and an urge to howl.

So, mystery solved. Carr sighed heavily at the squandering of talent and hoisted himself from his seat. He headed toward his room and wondered what he and Declan might not get up to with someone like her on their crew. They’d been talking about recruiting someone with that kind of knack-a roper, a honeypot-but neither of them could come up with a likely prospect. Carr slid his key into his door and wondered if Carrie Lyle, or whatever the hell her real name was, might do. And then a gun was in his back and a hand was on his neck, pushing him inside.

The man didn’t wait until the door had closed. “The fuck you want, motherfucker?” His voice was American and nervous.

Carr turned slowly and took a slow, deep breath. The man was maybe thirty, and wore jeans and a polo shirt. He had short, black hair and a narrow frame, and something about his tapered head, and the way it swayed on his neck, reminded Carr of an otter. The man was sweating and breathing hard, and a vein throbbed at his temple faster than Carr’s pulse was racing.

“The fuck you want with her?” the otter said, and Carr sighed with relief that this was about Carrie Lyle and not some older piece of business. He studied the damp face. He didn’t think he’d seen the otter around the hotel, but he knew he wasn’t perfect when it came to those things.