Joseph Finder - Power Play

Danziger shrugged. "How else could Russell know so much?"

"What do I know so much about?"

A voice with the grit of fine sandpaper.

Russell.

I looked away, stared at the log walls. I didn't want to catch his eye. Didn't want him to notice that I'd moved.

My heart hammered.

"I know a lot of stuff," he said. "Like the fact that you were sitting over there before."

I looked at Russell, shrugged nonchalantly.

"I think you and I need to have a talk, Jake," he said. "Right now. Where's the cook?"

A small woman with a big mop of unruly curly hair, who'd been dozing against the stone side of the fireplace, looked around and said, "I'm the chef."

"Man, I never trust a skinny cook," he said. "How's your coffee?"

"My coffee? We have Sumatra and Kona-"

"How about java? You got java? I'd love a big pot of coffee. Nice and strong."

She looked at the manager, frightened. He nodded.

"He's not the boss anymore, babe," said Russell. "I am. Now, my friend Verne is going to take you into the kitchen while you make us some coffee."

"How do you like it?" she said. "Cream? Sugar? Splenda?"

"Now you've got the right attitude. I like it black. Those artificial sweeteners will kill you."

After I'd been at Glenview a few months, Mom was allowed to visit.

She looked like she'd aged twenty years. I told her she looked good. She said she couldn't believe how I'd changed in a few short months. I'd gotten so muscular. I'd become a man. It looked like I was even shaving, was that possible?

Most of her visit we sat in the molded orange plastic chairs in the visitor's lounge and watched the TV mounted high on the wall. She cried a lot. I was quiet.

"Mom," I said as she was leaving. "I don't want you to come here again."

She looked crestfallen. "Why not?"

"I don't want you to see me in here. Like this. And I don't want to remember why I'm here. I'll be out in a year or so. Then I'll be home."

She said she understood, though I'll never know if she really did. A month later, she was dead from a stroke.

The screened porch was cool and breezy. It had a distinctive, pleasant smell-of mildewed furnishings, of the tangy sea air, of the oil soap used to wash the floor. It was obviously not a place that saw much use.

"Come into my office," Russell said. He'd taken off his tactical vest and had put on a soiled white pit cap that said DAYTONA 500 CHAMPION 2004 on the front and had a big number 8 on the side.

The moon, fat and bright, cast a silvery light through the screens. The sky glittered with a thousand stars.

He pointed to a comfortable-looking upholstered chair. A glider, I found, when I sat in it. He sat in the one next to it. We could have been two old friends passing the time in relaxed conversation, drinking beers and reminiscing.

Except for his pewter gray eyes, flat and cold: something terribly detached about them, something removed and unnerving. The eyes of a sociopath, maybe; someone who didn't feel what others felt. I'd seen eyes like his before, at Glenview. He was a man who was capable of doing anything because he was restrained by nothing.

I felt a cold hard lump form in my stomach.

"You want to tell me what you were doing out there?" he said.

"Trying to help."

"Help who?"

"I was passing along word from the CEO."

"Word?"

"To cooperate. Telling the guys not to cause trouble. To just do whatever you say so we can all get out of here alive."

"She told you to walk over there to tell them that?"

"She prefers e-mail, but it doesn't seem to be working so well."

He was silent. I could hear the waves lapping gently against the shore, the rhythmic chirping of crickets.

"Why'd she ask you?"

"No one else was crazy enough."

"Well, you got balls, I'll give you that. I think you're the only one out of all of them who's got any balls."

"More balls than brains, I guess."

"So if I ask Danziger and Grogan what you were talking about, they're going to tell me the same thing."

The hairs on the nape of my neck bristled. "You're good with names, huh?"

"I just like to come prepared."

I nodded. "Impressive. How long have you been planning this?"

I registered a shift in his body language, a sudden drop in the temperature. I'd miscalculated.

"Am I going to have trouble with you?" he said.

"I just want to go home."

"Then don't be a hero."

"For these guys?" I said. "I don't even like them."

He laughed, stretched his legs out, yawned.

I pointed to his cap, and said, "I saw that race."

He looked at me blankly.

"That's Junior, right?"

"Huh?" It took him a few seconds to remember he was wearing a NASCAR cap.

"Dale Earnhardt Jr.," I said.

He nodded, turned away, looked straight ahead.

"Junior crossed the finish line a fraction of a second ahead of Tony Stewart," I said. "Yeah, I remember that one. Seven or eight cars just wiped out. Michael Waltrip's car must have flipped over three times."

He gave me a quick sidelong glance. "I was there, man."

"You're kidding me."

"Also saw his daddy get killed there three years before."

I shook my head. "Crazy sport. I think a lot of people tune in just for the crashes. Like maybe they'll get lucky and see someone die."

He gave me a longer look this time, didn't seem to know what to make of me. One of the snotty rich executives who followed NASCAR? It didn't compute. I guess I was doing a decent job pretending to care.

"Nothing like the old days," he said. "NASCAR used to be like bumper cars. Drivers used to race hard. A demolition derby. The old bump-and-run."

"Reminds me of that line from a movie," I said. "Rubbin's racin'."

"Days of Thunder, man!" He was suddenly enthusiastic, his smile like a child's. "My favorite movie of all time. How's it go again? 'He didn't slam you, he didn't bump you, he didn't nudge you-he rubbed you. And rubbin', son, is racin'.' That's it, man."

"That's it," I said, nodding sagely. Bond with the guy. Connect. "Sometimes a driver's just gotta shove another car out of position. Spin the other guy out. Wreck his car. Trade a little paint. But that's all changed now."

"Exactly. Now you race too hard, they sock you with a penalty. Everyone's got to stay in line."

"NASCAR got sissified."

"They turned it into a corporation, see."

"Damn straight."

He gave me another quizzical look. "How come you're so much younger than the rest of the guys?"

"I just look younger. I eat right. Saw-tooth palmetto."

A smile spread slowly across his face. "Saw palmetto. You some-one's assistant or something?"

"Nah, I'm just a ringer. A substitute."

"That why you're not on the original guest list?"

So he does have a guest list. From Hammond? It could just as well be someone who works at the resort. Someone who doesn't have the most up-to-date information.

No, it had to be a source inside Hammond: How else could he know so much about Ron Slattery's personal life?

He has an inside source: but who?

"I was a last-minute replacement."

"For Michael Zorn?"

Interesting, I thought. He's keeping track. "Right."

"What happened to Zorn?"

So his information was at least a day or two old. Also interesting: He knew a lot about money laundering and offshore banks, about kidnap-and-ransom insurance, yet he didn't know everything about Hammond's finances. Not, at least, what he needed to know.

"Mike had to go to India for some client meetings," I said.

"So how'd they choose you?"

"I have no idea."

He nodded slowly. "I think you're full of shit."

"Funny, that's what my last quarterly performance review said."