Стивен Хантер - G-Man

But why was he being tracked? Because it’s always and only about money. It’s never vengeance, justice, irony, curiosity, envy, romantic competitiveness, any human motive, except the oldest of them all: greed. Cain probably whacked Abel out of greed. He figured he’d get an extra quart of goat’s milk from the old man if his brother wasn’t there. Somewhere, there had to be a money angle in all this, but, damn, if he could find it.

He drove to the Dallas Airport for tomorrow’s flight back to Boise and his upcoming speech, and that night, in the hotel, he did what he’d done twice already. He inspected every single item with him, feeling, probing, shaking, sniffing, and if licking was suggested, he’d have licked. But nothing from sock to jock to razor to toothpaste, to the stuff you wore underneath, to the stuff you wore on top, to the thing you carried it all in, suggested a dual purpose, an intelligence usage. It was just bland, dreary stuff, like anybody’s stuff. No bugs, no microprocessors, GPSs, new spy toys, James Bond buzzers or decoder rings, just… nothing.

Then he rose early and spent an extra hour before breakfast looking at the car, even though it was a rental selected randomly from a row of rentals. No way anybody could have anticipated in Little Rock which car he was going to choose of ten available. He didn’t even know; he just picked the first one, and, he supposed, maybe he always picked the first one, so that’s how they knew. But that was ridiculous, because there was no possible motive for such a thing, and the expense to penetrate a car agency and plant a bug to listen to a lone man who didn’t talk to himself would be out of scale with any possible gain.

You are losing it, you old bastard, he thought, as he drove to the airport to fly back.

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS

Two months earlier

Leon Kaye was the most respected rare-coin dealer in Little Rock, and his high-end retail outlet, The Coin, was swank, plush, serene, and soothing. There, he found and sold and bought and traded the most unusual specimens of the world’s four-thousand-year history of money, with a mid-South clientele of many well-off collectors. If it was money, or looked like it, he was interested. He was represented as well on the Internet, which meant globally, and was an active traveler who would view and bid on spectacular items as they periodically came up. He dressed as one might expect, in sedate J.Press blazers and charcoal suits; shirts, blazing white, from Brooks Brothers; ties so trustworthy, they put you to sleep; and of course Alden wingtips, jet-black, and narrow in the British fashion. Manicured, buffed, coiffed, polished, shined, and blow-dried, he looked like a wealthy priss who’d been to Yale.

But there was another Leon Kaye whose eccentricities might have surprised, perhaps even dismayed, his many respectable clients. They never realized that he was also Mr. K of Little Rock’s nine Mr. K’s Pawn & Gun Shops, whose proud claim, on billboards all through the black, Hispanic, and poor-white neighborhoods of the Queen City, was I Buy Gold. I Buy Silver. I Buy Diamonds. I Buy Guns! Hell, I Buy ANYTHING . He did too. Then he sold it for more.

All his shops prospered, as a pawn license, extracted only via great criminal or political leverage from the Arkansas state licensing bureaucracy, was an excuse to xerox money. He also owned a few car washes, three strip malls, a laundromat, and the larger interest in a chain of Sonic Drive-Ins throughout the area. And a restaurant or two. And a porn shop or two. And a bar or seven, including three of the strip variety. He owned a Jeep agency, a country club, of which he was president and head of the greens committee, and a private airplane.

No one ever said of Leon that he lacked a nose for opportunity, and when opportunity came, he was shrewd in manipulating his way toward it. This is why he sat in the back room of The T&T & A$$ Club — his, naturally — in Little Rock’s seedy little tenderloin, talking intently to two large men.

They were Braxton and Rawley Grumley. By profession, they were skip tracers, a sort of modern-day bounty hunter, by which effort they man-tracked those who’d skipped out on the money owed bail bondsmen — and bail bondsmen aren’t the sort of fellows who can let such a thing happen. They take even the smallest sums quite seriously, and there is no humor or irony in their business. In all states, the law is vague on what skip tracers are allowed to do to recover the missing man, but some states allow more leniency than others. Arkansas allows a lot of leniency, which is why Braxton and Rawley had a ninety-seven percent recovery rate. They were extremely good at finding people, and though they looked like Country-Western singers channeling ’50s professional-wrestling-style types, they were technically adept, cunning, cruel, and relentless — all career prerequisites. It was also said they could be influenced to do certain other things for the right clients, and for the right fee, and nothing would ever be said about it.

They were large men, and one tended to notice them. They liked red or purple (or both) cowboy boots and belts, polyester jackets, paisley scarves, gold chains, tattoos of the figurative, heroic variety, and polished white teeth. Each had a blond pompadour and wore a selection of gaudy but expensive rings on hefty fingers. If you looked at the fingers, you noticed the hands, and if you noticed the hands, you noticed the knuckles, and if you noticed the knuckles, you noticed the scars. They looked like their hobby was beating up radiators.

“All right,” said Braxton, the more loquacious of the two, “we are here, Mr. Kaye. You have our attention, and I assume you will soon be making us a pitch.”

“Boys,” said Mr. Kaye, who for this meeting had forsaken the Ivy trad look and was in jeans and a jean jacket — the so-called Arkansas Tuxedo — over a Carhartt work shirt, and who had driven to work not in his black Benz S but in his white Cadillac Escalade, with its vanity license plate I PAY CASH, “I want you to think back with me to the year 1934. Maybe you saw the movie Public Enemies ? John Dillinger, Tommy guns, bank robberies, and, boys, think on this: cash. Lots and lots of cash. In thirteen months the Dillinger Gang stole over three hundred thousand dollars, and most of it was never recovered.”

Mr. Kaye let that sink in, but Baxter and Rawley were not the type to be impressed by old-time crime stories.

“Sir, we are Grumley,” said Braxton. “We have been working our side for one hundred and fifty years, against revenue agents, sheriffs, constables, federals, even congressional investigating committees. Millions done passed through the Grumley hands. That amount of swag, and supposed big shots like John Dillinger do not impress us, no more than a Moon Pie without a Dr Pepper to wash it down, so to speak, if you get my drift.”

“I do, I do. However, three hundred thousand in cash is nothing to scoff at, but suppose — think about this — that cash were uncirculated 1934 bills, valued far more than for its face value. Depending on the bills, it could be worth twenty times as much, dispensed carefully and discreetly to collectors, of whom there are many. Three hundred thousand times twenty comes to six million dollars, and think how nice that would be, especially when the only thing you have to do is follow a seventy-year-old man who has a line on where it’s buried. He has a map, he just ain’t figured out what it’s to.”

“Is he dumb?”

“He’s not. He’ll figure it out. He’s known for figuring it out. He always figures it out. He’s working on it now. His father was good at figuring out before him, and his father’s father before him. All of them, more or less, of the law. All of them, more or less, having conked many a head with the Grumley label. And that’s the second part of this pleasure for you. It has a personal angle which you will oh so enjoy. So what I have for you is an odd confluence of opportunity. Cash money, unaccounted for and long forgotten, very rare, thus immensely valuable, untraceable in ways that many large sums might not be. Maybe other relics of extreme value. All of it being searched for by a fellow named Swagger, of the Polk County Swaggers. You know the family?”