Jeffery Deaver - Speaking In Tongues

In the car Belt asked him timidly, “You have it?” the way a college girl might ask her boyfriend if he’d brought a condom on a date.

He nodded.

“Is it loaded?”

“Oh.” He’d forgotten to look. He took it out and fiddled with the gun until he remembered how to open it. Five silver eyes of bullets stared back from the cylinder.

He clicked it shut and put the heavy gun in his pocket.

“It’s not going to just go off, is it? I mean by itself.”

“No.” He noticed Belt staring at him. ‘What?” he asked, starting the engine of the Lexus.

“You’re… you look scary.”

He laughed coldly. “I feel scary. Let’s go.”

Manassas, Virginia, is this:

Big-wheeled trucks, sullen pick-a-fight teenagers (the description filling both the boys and the girls), cars on the street and cars on blocks, Confederate stars ‘n’ bars, strip malls, PCP labs tucked away in the woods, concrete postwar bungalows, quiet mothers and skinny fathers struggling, struggling, struggling. It’s domestic fights. It’s women sobbing at Garth’s concerts and teens puking at Aerosmith’s.

And a little of it, very little, is Grant Avenue.

This is Doctors’ and Lawyers’ Row. Little Taras, Civil War mansions complete with columns and detached barns for garages, surrounded by expansive landscaped yards. It was to the biggest of these houses-a rambling white Colonial on four acres-that Tate Collier now drove.

“Who lives here?” Bett asked, cautiously eyeing the house.

“The man who knows where Megan is.”

“Call Konnie,” she said.

“No time,” he muttered and he rolled up the drive, past the two Mercedeses-neither of them gray, he noticed-and skidded to a stop about five feet from the front door, nearly knocking a limestone lion off its perch beside the walk.

“Tate!”

But he ignored her and leapt from the car.

“Wait here.”

The anger swelled inside him even more powerfully, boiling, and he found himself pounding fiercely on the door with his left hand, his right gripped around the handle of the pistol.

A large man opened the door. He was in his thirties, muscular, wearing chinos and an Izod shirt.

“I want to see him,” Tate growled.

‘Who are you?”

“I want to see Sharpe and I want to see him now.”

Pull the gun now? Or wait for a more dramatic moment?

“Mr. Sharpe’s busy right at the-’

Tate lifted the gun out of his pocket. He displayed it, more than brandished it, to the assistant or bodyguard or whatever he was. The man lifted his hands and backed up, alarm on his face, “Jesus Christ!”

“Where is he?”

“Hold on there, mister, I don’t bow who you are or what you’re doing here but-”

“Jimmy, what’s going on?” a voice called from the top of the stairs.

“Cot a problem here, Mr. Sharpe.”

“Tate Collier come a-calling,” Jack Sharpe sang out. He glanced at the gun as if Tate were holding a butterfly net. “Collier, whatcha got yourself there?” He laughed. Cautious, sure. But it was still a laugh.

“Was he driving the white van?” Tate pointed the gun at the man in the chinos, who lifted his hands. “Careful, sir, please!” he implored.

“It’s okay; Jimmy,” Sharpe called. “Just let him be. He’ll calm down. What van, Collier?”

“You know what van,” Tate said, turning back to Sharpe. ‘Was he the asshole driving?”

‘Why’n’t you put that thing away so’s nobody gets hurt. And we’ll talk… No, Jimmy, it’s okay, really.”

“I can shoot him if you want, Mr. Sharpe.”

Tate glanced back and found himself looking into the muzzle of a very large pistol, chrome plated, held steadily in Jimmy’s hand. It was an automatic, he noticed-with clips and safeties and all the rest of that stuff

“No, don’t do that,” Sharpe said. “He’s not going to hurt anybody. Collier, put it away Be better for everybody.”

Jimmy kept the gun pointed steadily at Tate’s head.

Tate put his own pistol back into his pocket with a shaking hand.

“Come on upstairs.”

“Should I come too, Mr. Sharpe?”

“No, I don’t think we’ll needya, Jimmy. Will we, Collier?”

“I don’t think so,” Tate said. “No.”

“Come on up.”

Tate, breathless after the adrenaline rush, climbed the stairs. He followed Jack Sharpe into a sunlit den. He glanced back and saw that Jimmy was still holding the shiny pistol pointed vaguely in Tate’s direction.

Sharpe-wearing navy-blue polyester slacks and a red golfing shirt

– was now all business. No longer jokey.

“What the fuck’s this all about, Collier?”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“Your daughter? How should I know?”

“Who’s driving the white van?”

“I assume you’re saying that somebody’s been following you.”

“Yeah, somebody’s been following me.”

When Tate had seen the Liberty Park sign he’d remembered that his clients in that case had complained to him last week that private eyes had been following them. Tate’d told them not to worry-it was standard practice in big cases (though he added that they shouldn’t do anything they wouldn’t want committed to videotape). “Same as somebody's been following my clients. And probably my wife-”

“Thought you were divorced,” Sharpe noted.

“How’d you know that?”

“Seem to remember something.”

“So if you were following us-”

“Me?” Sharpe tried for innocence. It didn’t take.

“-you’ve been following my daughter too. Who just happened to disappear today.”

Sharpe slowly lifted a puller from a bag of golf clubs sitting in the corner of his study, addressed one of the dozen balls lying on the floor and sent it across the room. It missed the cup.

“I hire lawyers to fight my battles for me. As you well know, having decorated the walls of the courtroom with their hides recently. That’s all I hire.”

Tate asked, “No security consultants?”

“Ha, security consultants. That’s good. Yeah, that’s good. Well, no, Collier. There ain’t no private eyes and no see-curity consultants on my payroll. Now, what’s this about your daughter?”

“She’s missing and I think you’re behind it.” Another putt. He missed the cup again.

“Me? Why? Oh, I get it. To take you outta the running at the oral argument next Thursday down in Richmond, right?”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Well, it don’t make sense to me. I don’t need to do that to beat you. You know, I fired those half-assed shysters you reamed at the trial. I got the big boys involved now. Lambert, Stone and Bums. They’re gonna run right over you. Don’t flatter yourself. They’ll bum you up like Atlanta.”

“Liberty Park, Sharpe. Tell me. How much’ll you lose if it doesn’t get built?”

“The park? It don’t go through? I don’t lose a penny.” Then he smiled. “But the amount I won’t make is to the tune of eighteen million. Say, ain’t it unethical for you to be here without my lawyer being present?”

Tate said, ‘Where is she? Tell me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on, Jack. You think I don’t know about defendants harassing clients and lawyers so they’ll drop cases?”

Sharpe ran his hand through his white hair. He sat down beneath a picture of himself on the eighteenth tee of the Bull Run Country Club, a place that proudly had not a single member who wasn’t white and Protestant. Male too-though that went without saying.

“Collier, I don’t kidnap people.”

“But how about some of those little roosters that work for you? I wouldn’t put it past a couple or three of them. That project manager of yours. Wilkins? He was in Lorton for eighteen months.”