He took the photograph he’d found in her diary out of his wallet, pushed it across the table.
She stared at it dumbly for a split second before she realized what it was. Her head snapped up, a frown creasing her forehead.
‘Where’d you get that?’
‘I found it in your room while I was waiting for you to not turn up.’
‘What do you want it for?’
‘I think that’s obvious.’
The frown intensified.
‘You need to work on your confused face, Carly.’
She shook her head.
‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘The other person in the photo,’ he prompted.
‘There isn’t anyone else in it.’
‘Okay Mrs Picky, the other person’s arm.’ He jabbed it with his finger. ‘The arm that’s around your neck.’
She held it up, studied it carefully.
‘I honestly don’t remember who that was. I’m not even sure when it was taken. I grabbed the first photo of Dixie I came across.’
‘Why cut it in half?’
‘For Christ’s sake, Evan. If I’d found one of Dixie on his own—’ She stopped mid-flow, suddenly let out a howl of laughter. ‘I don’t believe it. You think it’s Sarah, don’t you?’
‘I recognize the bracelet.’
She looked again, shrugged.
‘It doesn’t mean anything to me.’
‘But it does to me. I bought it for her.’ He was sounding increasingly desperate to his own ears. And the force of her denial, the way she laughed, made him question it again himself. He was glad he hadn’t shown the photograph to Guillory the other day. She’d have shown Carly what a proper derisive laugh sounded like.
‘You’re clutching at straws. It’s not her. Do you want me to tell you what’s going on or not?’
He knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere. It would have to wait. She took his silence as an invitation to move on.
‘I was working for pennies in a roach-ridden shithole bar. One day the manager said did I want to make a bit extra on the side. I jumped at it. Just driving, making deliveries. No big deal, he said.’
‘You knew what the deliveries were?’
‘I’m not stupid. But I was desperate. I didn’t think about it, about the consequences if I was caught. It was easy work and I didn’t get caught—’
‘Until you did.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Dixie caught you?’
‘He didn’t make the arrest, he was working undercover. But they had me in an interview room and in he walks. He gave me a straight choice. Work for him or go to prison.’ She shook her head in frustration then glared at him defiantly. He wasn’t sure what the emotion in her eyes was. Self-pity, most likely. ‘What would you have done?’
He gave a small twitch of the shoulders, didn’t bother answering.
‘Dixie had a special relationship with Chico, the guy in charge. I was still just driving, but suddenly it wasn’t little deliveries anymore.’
‘Okay.’
‘I saw a way out. You don’t know what these people are like. Once they get their hooks into you, they don’t let you just walk away, thanks for all your help. I saw an opportunity to get out for good—with enough money to disappear forever.’
‘You ripped them off.’
She nodded, her eyes uncertain, pride and satisfaction mixed with what have I got myself into?
‘How much?’
‘Three million.’
He almost felt sorry for her. Out of her depth, caught up in something rapidly spiraling out of control. Except he was more inclined to think you made your bed, now lie in it. He didn’t actually see why he should care.
It didn’t take long for her to put him straight on that.
‘Do you have any idea how difficult it is to store stuff temporarily after 9/11?’
He shook his head.
‘Immediately afterwards they removed all the lockers in airports and train stations. Then they relaxed a bit, brought them back. Except they’re biometric now. They work with your fingerprint. But the biggest problem is you can’t leave stuff for any length of time. They get cleared out after twenty-four hours. I put the money in a locker at the train station to begin with.’
The words begin with gave him the first inkling that something he wouldn’t like was on its way. That, and the way she swallowed, refused to meet his eyes.
‘I needed somewhere longer term.’
He knew then where this was going. It made his stomach turn over. He didn’t want to hear any more. Thought about clamping his hand over her mouth to stop her next words from coming out, from doing their damage. But he knew stopping the words wouldn’t turn back the clock, change what she’d already done.
‘I asked Sarah to look after it for a few days.’
They say perception is a process of informed guesswork by the brain, combining sensory inputs with prior expectations and beliefs to form a best guess of what the hell’s going on.
Evan heard the words. But his prior expectations and beliefs sure as hell didn’t stretch to doing what she just said.
So his mind refused to process the information. Slackened the muscles that held his mouth shut instead.
After a while he was aware she was waiting for him to say something. Lots of things went through his head. Most of them contained words like selfish and bitch. None of them were very helpful.
He dug deep inside himself, found a reserve of self-control people—himself and Guillory head of the line—would have said he didn’t possess.
‘Spit it out, Carly. Tell me what you’ve done.’
‘Chico sent Dixie after the money. He found Sarah.’
Her voice was dead. He wished he could’ve believed remorse made it that way, instead of the prospect of the money hightailing it out of her life.
‘How?’
She shook her head, still not meeting his eyes.
‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’
‘Not really. Apart from the fact that he manages to do in a couple of days what I couldn’t do in five years.’
It was very lucky for her he was still shell-shocked. His brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders—an event that Guillory had said many times she wanted to be present for—so he didn’t make the obvious connection. That Carly might have supplied the information.
‘He made her tell him where the money was.’
Somehow, he managed to not think about the implications of that statement. What she just said didn’t make any sense.
‘What do you mean? You said she had it.’
‘She wasn’t happy with it lying around the house. She moved it to a self-storage facility.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you do that in the first place?’ he snapped, his tone making the approaching waitress do an abrupt about-turn.
She shrugged helplessly.
‘I wasn’t thinking straight. I was scared, worried about who might be coming after me.’
He felt a rising tide of disgust inside him. It was all about her, always had been for as long as he could remember. Then he asked a stupid question which only made it worse.
‘How did he make her tell him?’
‘Are you serious? You want to know what these people are like? Here, what do you think of this?’
She shifted along so that he was shielding her from the rest of the diner. Then she unbuttoned the middle button on her blouse. She pulled it apart, slipped her hand inside and lifted one of her breasts. Under her bra, in the crease of flesh between her breast and ribs, was a four-inch-long adhesive bandage.
‘They were going to slice my breast off.’
Her voice cracked. She sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand, then buttoned herself up again.
He knew then how it was that Dixie had found Sarah so easily. Carly had given them the information to save herself. He had to get her out of his sight, for a moment at least. He was glad they�
��d met in a public place. Who knows what he might have done otherwise?
She tried to say something as he pushed himself to his feet but he cut her off.
‘I’m going to the men’s room. Wait there.’
He slammed the door after him, almost ripped the hinges out of the frame, then filled the sink with cold water. He buried his face in it. Held it under until his lungs burned, then shook the water from his face like a dog come out of the sea. He pulled the plug, stared at the water as it swirled and disappeared down the drain. Imagined it streaked with blood as some happy maniac cleaned his knife.
‘I was trying to say she’s okay,’ Carly said as he slid into the booth.
Jesus Christ, you couldn’t have said that in the first place?
‘Badly shaken up, but not hurt. She told him what he wanted to know. Here, I got you a glass of water. You looked like you needed one, not more coffee.’
He drained it, called for another, wondering if she thought the small kindness evened the score in any way.
‘So Dixie’s got the money. That’s why you want to find him. You think he’ll give you some of it if you ask nicely?’
‘No, he hasn’t got it.’
He shook his head.
‘I’m getting lost here.’
‘Sarah gave Dixie the key but she told him the wrong storage facility. On the way over they stopped at a red light. It was on a busy street. She jumped out and lost herself in the crowd.’
‘But he’s got the key.’
‘He’s got one of the keys. We’ve got the other one. And he doesn’t know where to go. He can’t check every unit in every location.’
‘You’ve still got it?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘What about Sarah?’
The smug grin that had crawled across her face when she said she still had the key melted away.
‘I can’t get hold of her.’
‘I’m not surprised after you put Dixie onto her—’
‘I didn’t put Dixie onto her. I didn’t have any choice.’
He didn’t have the energy or the will to argue with her. And there was no point going over old ground.
‘I don’t understand why you want to find Dixie. I’d have thought he was the last person you wanted to meet.’
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, hands clasped together. Earnest, you-can-trust-me face. Nitty gritty time.
‘I’m willing to split the money with him. In return, he leaves me alone. I can’t spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.’
‘And I’m meant to help you in setting up this deal? Breaking I don’t know how many laws in the process.’
She shrugged. ‘The door’s right over there.’
That’s what came out of her mouth. What he heard was:
Good luck finding Sarah on your own.
They stared at each other for a long time. Without a word, he got up, headed for the door she just indicated. The only difference being they both knew it was on her terms, not his. Besides, he had a personal interest in finding Dixie now. A score to settle.
She watched him go, a satisfied smile on her face— the face of someone for whom everything is coming together nicely—and slipped what she needed into her bag while the waitress wasn’t looking.
Chapter 16
‘AND HE’S ON,’ Guillory yelled, leaning back in her seat, her left hand gripping an imaginary fishing rod, the right winding furiously.
Evan had just finished recounting the story Carly had fed—sorry, told—him. He hadn’t expected her to take it seriously. She hadn’t disappointed him. Now he just had to sit back and let the tide of ridicule wash over him.
‘Today,’ Guillory went on in her best excited sports commentator voice, ‘sports fisherwoman extraordinaire, Carly Can’t-Be-Trusted, landed the biggest Buckley caught so far this season. Buckleys, known for their big mouth and their stupid and dangerous habit of biting at anything and everything that comes along are becoming rarer—’
‘Forced into extinction by the smaller, more aggressive Guillory, a fish known for its cynicism, its startling blue eyes and refusal to wear lipstick.’
They stared at each other for a long moment, grinning stupidly. She’d stopped winding with her right hand although her left was still held up as if gripping the rod.
‘I had some on earlier,’ she said.
He had the sense not to mention that, just like fingerprints, the transfer of lipstick from lips to beer glass was a well-documented phenomenon.
He suddenly smiled as a memory came out of nowhere.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Just one of those random thought processes. All the talk of Sarah and then you saying how Carly’s hooked me like a fish. It just reminded me how much Sarah liked to prepare Sushi. One time—’
She looked as if she wished she hadn’t asked, changed the subject.
‘I was thinking of calling you pinball.’
‘I thought I was Speed Dial.’
‘Hey, give the Grim Reaper a break. How’d you expect him to catch up with someone who bounces around as fast as you do?’
He got the feeling the evening would be pleasant, if not productive.
‘What I want to know—’
He learned with her a long time ago that conversations beginning with what I want to know rarely went his way. It usually prefaced an accusation that one hare-brained scheme or idea—one she’d only just come to grips with—had now been superseded, replaced by a new one. The assumption was also that new was synonymous with more outrageous.
‘—is what happened to asking how high every time Adamson tells you to jump? Does it mean you don’t believe Adamson anymore?’
She knew all about Jack Adamson, about the Zippo lighter Evan carried around and believed had belonged to Sarah, about Adamson’s claim to be able to tell Evan where it came from. She’d always thought Adamson was stringing him along, that he didn’t have any information relating to Sarah’s disappearance, that he was just playing on Evan’s hunger for answers to trick him into helping him.
In truth, she believed everyone was—and didn’t hesitate for one moment to tell him so. That didn’t mean she didn’t understand what drove him, what made him jump at every new piece of information. She understood more than anyone how determined he was to make his own life difficult.
But it sure as hell wasn’t going to stop her from giving him a hard time over it, especially after she’d got a couple beers inside her.
‘Or can you multi-task? You can be jerked around by two different people at the same time?’
There was no way he could win. He could no more prove that the bracelet and the arm around Carly’s neck in the photograph belonged to Sarah than he could prove the Zippo lighter in his pocket belonged to her. He was just glad he hadn’t shown her the photograph.
Her eyes suddenly narrowed and he knew he was done for.
‘There’s something I’m missing here,’ she said in a slow, measured voice. ‘Something you’re not telling me which explains why it’s Carly all the way at the moment.’
He saw her glance at his jacket pocket. After that it was just a question of reaction times. And he always came a poor second. Her right arm snaked out, circled his waist. She pulled him towards her. Then her left hand dived into his pocket, came out with the two halves of the photograph.
‘Ha! I knew it.’
He didn’t try to stop her as she laid them side by side on the bar. It had to come out at some point. Now was as good—or bad—a time as any.
‘That’s Dixie, is it?’
‘Yep.’
‘He looks like a 70’s porn star. And that’s Carly?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘She looks like a lying bitch.’
She placed the half photograph of Carly on top of the Dixie half. It was just a matter of time now.
‘And that there is Sarah’s arm, is it?’
He didn’t say anything.
‘Because tha
t’s her bracelet.’ She stabbed the photo with her finger. ‘Twenty-first birthday?’
‘Twenty-fifth.’
‘Jesus, Evan. You want me to start calling you Levi now?’
She knew all of his cases, according to her did most of the work on them while he just sat back and watched. She shook her head slowly, her eyes still on the photograph.
‘It’s not even a very nice bracelet.’
He scooped up the two halves of the photograph, tucked them back in his pocket.
‘Talk me through it again,’ she said.
Obviously, she hadn’t been paying much attention the first time, just nodding along to show interest in a story she’d already written off. He ran through it again.
‘She’s definitely stringing you along.’
Evan shook his head.
‘What does that mean? You don’t believe it, or you don’t want to believe it.’
‘You don’t understand—’
She put a hand on his arm to stop him.
‘Hang on. Of course I understand. It’s only natural that you’re jumping at anything—’
He shook her hand off but she carried on.
‘Like I said before, she’s playing you. First, she simply mentions she can tell you where Sarah is, and bang’—she snapped her fingers and thumb together like a fish’s mouth closing—‘you’re hooked. She thinks that was easy. So she ups the ante, tells you this story about Dixie coming after her and you’re off. Chomping at the bit. There’s no holding you back. You’ll bite the guy’s head off if she tells you to.’
She saw from the look on his face she wasn’t going to change his mind.
‘Just think, if anyone asks me what I’ve been up to I can tell them I’ve had a few beers and a good chat with a brick wall.’
She leaned back in her chair, gave him an exasperated look.
‘Anyone who disagrees with you is a brick wall, is that it?’
Hunting Dixie Page 7