James Patterson - Lifeguard

“Guilty,” I said, and clinked my bottle to his. I leaned back next to him with my feet up, too.

“So, how was the party, mate? Any good women?”

“One,” I said.

“These tall bitches…” Geoff ignored me, nodding toward Nicole on the TV screen. “Always found them a little difficult to handle myself. Legs get in the way. I know this one gal -”

“Champ,” I interrupted, “do you want to hear about what happened tonight?”

“Actually,” he said, lowering his chair and facing me, “if you must know, I want to tell you what a well-formed decision you made when you signed me up. This gal I was mentioning is a real night owl. She’s a clerk twice a week. At the Brazilian Court.”

I brought down my feet and stared. “Okay.”

“First, you may have to accept, mate, that that pretty Aussie girlfriend of yours wasn’t all she led you to believe.”

“I think I’m past that,” I said.

He pivoted and faced me, forearms on knees. “Seems that she had some frequent visitors to her room there. Some prominent ones. How does the name Stratton sound to you, Neddie-boy?”

“Like old news,” I said with a sigh of disappointment. “Dennis Stratton. He was seeing Tess. I’m already there.”

“You’re barely in the neighborhood.” Geoff shook his head with a smile. “I’m not talking the old man, mate. I’m talking Liz Stratton. Dennis’s wife .”

He saw my shock and rocked back, taking a self-satisfied swig of his beer. “Whadya think, I got a knack for this sort of work, or what, Neddie-boy?”

A LOT OF THINGS had shocked me since I left Tess’s suite at the Brazilian Court and thought my life was about to take off. But what could Stratton’s wife have to do with Tess?

Ellie and I had settled on a code if I needed to contact her at the office. I’d use the name Steve, as in McQueen. And I did, first thing the following morning. I told her what Champ had told me.

“I think we have to talk to Liz Stratton, Ellie.”

“First,” she said, “I think we have to find out who Liz Stratton really is.”

I had a trump card I’d been holding back, and I was thinking now might be the time to use it. “I may have a way.”

“No, you don’t do anything,” Ellie shot back. “You stay put. I’ll get you when I know something. You comprende , Steve?”

So I played it like a good little fugitive. I spent the day holed up in the small room above Geoff’s garage, picking through some microwave lasagna and his John D. MacDonald crime novels, watching the news on TV. The next day, too. Ellie didn’t return my calls. I felt like Anne Frank hiding from the Germans. Except it wasn’t just the Germans who were after me, it was the whole world. And it wasn’t some doctor’s family who was protecting me, or Brahms I was hearing through the walls, but some loony cycle racer blaring U2, revving up his Ducati.

Late that next afternoon, Geoff banged on the floor. “Team meeting,” he yelled. “Coming up the stairs. You decent, mate?”

I figured “decent” meant my T-shirt and boxers, and “team meeting” was “beer time, four P.M.” I swung open the door.

To my surprise, there was Ellie, and Geoff hanging back with a grin.

“I want to thank you, mate, for your keen sense of discretion in keeping it just between us, and the fucking FBI , that you are here.”

“Guess you two have met,” I said, kicking open the door. I scrambled around for a second, putting my legs into a pair of jeans.

Ellie peeked around the disgusting storage room – boxes of spare parts; cycle catalogs strewn all over the floor; the unmade cot I’d slept in – trying to find a place to sit. “Nice digs…”

“Thanks,” Geoff said, kicking a box of twisted rims out of the way. “Used it many times myself. And I have to admit,” Champ said, nodding, approvingly at me, “when you said FBI agent, Neddie, I wasn’t exactly thinking Jodie Foster.”

She did look cute in a black suit and pink top, but not very cheery. “What’d you find out about Liz?”

“Not much.” She took a beer and tipped it obligingly toward Geoff. “The woman’s untouchable. Her maiden name’s O’Callahan. An old Florida family. Lawyers and judges, mostly. About as private and influential as you can get. She went to Vanderbilt, worked for a while at her daddy’s law firm. She married Stratton about eighteen years ago. I’m told she was his access into the circles that financed many of his business deals.”

“We have to talk to her, Ellie.”

“I tried,” Ellie sighed. “I wanted to question her without drawing the attention of my office. But I hit a wall with the family lawyer. Only with Stratton present, and even then only with a presubmitted list of questions.”

“Christ, the tart’s tighter than a nun in a condom factory,” Geoff said, then gulped a swig of his beer.

“Nice,” Ellie scrunched up her nose. “Stratton keeps her totally under wraps. She doesn’t even go out for lunch without guards. I don’t have enough to bring her in for questioning.”

“Jesus, Ellie, you’re the FBI…”

“What do you want me to do, run this by my boss? What we need is someone in her circle. Someone who can get to her. Make her talk. And I don’t have any contacts there.”

As I said, I had a trump card. And it wasn’t worth holding any longer. I rolled the beer bottle around in my hands. “I may have a way.”

SOMEONE SAYS HE’S your friend, but you never really know. Life has taught me that there are always barriers that get in the way. Like the rich siding with the rich, whatever side they’re on. What is it I hear the English say? There are no lifelong friends, or lifelong enemies. Only lifelong interests. And I guess you never know what those interests are until you try.

So the next morning I made the call. I might as well have been a sixteen-year-old asking a girl out for the first time. I was never so nervous dialing a number in my life.

“It’s me, Neddie.” My mouth went dry as soon as I heard him answer.

I waited. No reply. I started worrying I had made a mistake. I could be getting us all in an awful lot of trouble.

“You sure dropped the hose in the deep end – for a pool boy,” Sollie Roth finally sighed.

I didn’t laugh. He didn’t mean for me to. That was Sollie’s way of being dead-on serious. “You said something, Sollie, as I drove away. You said a man doesn’t run off in the middle of the night. That no problem was too big to solve. Maybe I should’ve listened to you. I know how things look now. What I need to know is, do you still mean that, Sollie?”

“I never turned you in, son, if that’s what you’re looking for. I said I was sleeping when you took off.”

“I know that,” I said, feeling a little ashamed. “Thanks.”

“No thanks needed,” he said matter-of-factly. “I know people, kid. And I know you didn’t do those crimes.”

For a second I hung my head away from the phone. I swallowed thickly. “I didn’t, Sollie. I swear to God. But I need some help to prove it. Can I trust you, Sollie?”

“You can trust this , Ned,” the old man said. “I’ve been where you are now, and I learned that the only thing that’s gonna keep you from spending the rest of your life in prison comes down to the quality of your friends. You have those kinds of friends, Neddie-boy?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. My lips were dry. “What kind are you, Sollie?”

I heard him chuckle. “In matters like this,” Sol Roth said, then paused. “The highest, kid. The highest .”