by Sean Rowe
25
I WAS LISTENING to her voice in the other room before I realized I was awake. She was saying all right, yes, midnight, then something about a freeway exit, a gas station. Then she stopped talking. I reached under the bed for the gun and walked into the living room. She was there with her legs drawn up in the armchair looking past the aquarium and out the window.
“Tell me you didn’t just make a phone call on a land line.”
“I didn’t,” she said. “I found a cell phone on the boat. I found it because it rang a couple of times. And no, I didn’t answer it.” She waited, looking at me. “That was Jack. He’s out.”
“What do you mean he’s out?”
“Of the hospital. They put him on a gurney and took him downstairs for an X-ray. The FBI guy who was watching him went down the hall to take a leak, and Jack walked out the door and got in a cab. He wants us to pick him up in Miami.”
“And what? Take him to a Dolphins game?”
“He wants to go with us. He says he has some documents we’ll need. Social Security cards, drivers’ licenses. Where’s Etna Furnace?”
“Kentucky, a few miles back from the river. Near Salyersville. Christ, is that where he wants to go?”
She nodded. “He says there’s a place we can rest up.”
“We need to start loading the money.”
“I did it already.”
I was surprised, but it was true. When I went outside and opened the trailer it was almost filled with powdered-milk boxes. I checked the leaf springs and the tires on the trailer and they seemed OK. The bow compartment of the Scarab was empty. I stood there in the cool darkness next to the dock and smiled a little, thinking how Dennis the Dentist would scratch his head that weekend when he showed up and saw what his sailboat had turned into.
THE TRAILER and the big Buick took up five spaces in the parking lot of the Gold Rush Motel, but there were plenty of empty spaces. It was a walk-up clientele. There were two black guys leaning on the railing of the balcony that ran around three sides of the parking lot, and a third black guy out on Biscayne Boulevard arguing with a white hooker.
It’s odd, the things you remember; the things that come back to you and the things that don’t. Odd how memories attach themselves to very particular, concrete things. Going up the stairs I didn’t remember going up them before, until I noticed a heart someone had drawn in the cement while it was curing, with two sets of initials inside the heart, and an arrow. The motel had changed its name and undergone a minor face-lift, and anyway still looked like half the other fleabag flophouses on the boulevard, but it wasn’t. It was a very specific motel, and I had been here before. I could remember everything now, the whole thing. More of it than I wanted to, anyway. We went upstairs to the landing, watching the two black guys watching us, and walked into the room, and it was the same room.
Fontana was lying on the bed watching the news on TV. His face was very pale, and he was breathing hard. Julia went to him and kissed him on the forehead and touched his cheek.
I looked out between brown drapes. The two guys were still on the balcony looking at the car and the trailer. Fontana clicked off the TV.
“What are we using for wheels?”
I told him.
“Sounds OK.”
A manila envelope lay on the bed.
“Go ahead and pass those out,” Fontana said.
I did. New drivers’ licenses, new passports, new Social Security cards. He must have done it weeks ago, and I had to say, it was pretty impressive. The various pieces of identification had even been weathered a bit so as not to seem too new. Julia looked hers over and put them in her purse.
“Congratulations,” Fontana said. “I wasn’t sure you’d actually pull it off. The pickup.”
“Well, we made it back.”
“That’s a good thing, Matthew, because it looks like you’re out of a job.”
He nodded at the TV set and clicked the sound back on. Tanel filled the screen, standing outside the administration building at the port with microphones stuck in his face. Paul Lewis stood beside him in a new suit, and when his turn came he said something polished and firm about working closely with the authorities. He said something else reassuring about terrorism and security measures and the cruise industry as a whole. The news anchor identified him as Festival Cruise Lines’ new security director. I noticed our Lloyds of London rep standing in the background.
Then an image came on that really made me watch. It was a picture shot from a helicopter, and it showed the Norwegian Empress foundering in whitecaps, her stern tipped steeply upward, and the rest of her pitched down in the water. The ship was surrounded by Coast Guard vessels and lifeboats and debris. Another shot, also from the air, showed her going under, the stern disappearing in a rush of foam. It made me catch my breath, then take another deep one. The scale of it was stunning. The ship sank like any other thing would sink in water, but it wasn’t supposed to do that. I had never seen something that big sink. I had an impulse to throw something at Fontana.
“Holy shit!” Julia said.
The way to do it is wait till it’s right between the jetties, the narrowest point. You do it with some dynamite in the bow, say fifteen pounds. Nothing fancy. Dynamite and sandbags, a directed charge.
“You need to explain this,” I demanded.
“It’s a long story,” said Fontana, “but I can sum it up in two words: insurance fraud.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “That’s absurd.”
“It’s not absurd. You ever try to sell a forty-year-old cruise ship? It’s not worth the trouble. You might as well scrap it. Or hire someone to sink it. Tanel had delays and cost overruns on two new ships coming out of the yard in Helsinki. That’s all it was about. It’s all about capital. It’s all about cash flow and debt structure and new acquisitions and margins. It’s all about money, Matthew, like it always has been.”
“You’re telling me Tanel blew up one of his own ships?”
“Yes, with the help of the mysterious October Twenty-eighth Brigade.”
“No. It doesn’t add up. It would cost him more in cancellations than he could ever collect.”
“That blows over, Matthew. People forget. It’s been studied. The ship was evacuated, by the way. No civilian casualties.”
I laughed. “No. Just Neal Atlee and Carlos Menoyo. And Krystal Purvis. And three DEA agents.”
“Neal Atlee and Carlos Menoyo almost blew themselves up rigging the explosives. They were fools, and they knew too much. I never should have used them, but I made a mistake and then I fixed it the only way I could. The DEA agents were something I didn’t count on. Look, Tanel knew about the bombing because he set it up. But he didn’t know about the money on board. Miriam Benages knew about the money, but she didn’t know about the bombing. The DEA got into the act at the last minute. They didn’t know about the money, and they didn’t know about Tanel’s insurance scam. All they knew, or thought they knew, was that they had gotten Miriam Benages to flip for them. They were going to cruise down to the islands with her and finger a big important Cali connection and then make some highly dramatic bust that would help out the agency when budget time rolled around. Let me tell you what was really going to happen. Benages was going to pull a vanishing act on the DEA, right after your three precious agents got gunned down in the street in Grand Cayman. They were dead men already; we just sped up the film a little.
“I’m sorry I made some mistakes, but guess what? I forgive myself. Like I said, it was just about money. The difference is who wound up with the swag this time. It’s over now. By the time anyone sorts it out, if they ever do, you’ll be long gone. So congratulations. How does it feel?”
He looked at me, waiting.
“No,” he said. “You don’t want it to be over. You don’t want to let go of anything and move on.” He paused. “I’ll tell you a story, Julia.”
“Don’t,” I said.
“Once upon a time, Matthew was
working a big investigation right here in our wicked city. A very complex investigation that was probably not the thing a grief-stricken alcoholic should be working on. At any rate, one strand of the whole mess involved trying to arrest a legendary doper in a motel room. Some bullshit informant told somebody this kingpin was going to be sitting in the motel room at such and such a time. As if people at the top of pyramids do that. As if things worked that way.
“Matthew decides he doesn’t want to just hang out in the office for this one. He wants to be the star of the show, put the cuffs on the mystery doper, whose name isn’t even known, who’s like some ghost in the machine. You see, Julia, Matthew actually believes in good and evil. In the worldly embodiment of evil. And he’s talked himself into believing that this particular drug baron is evil incarnate. He’s been a supervisor for five years, sitting behind a desk, but he thinks the thing to do is suit up in black and lead the squad into the motel room.
“Oh, I almost forgot. A couple of rookies got the search warrant from a federal judge in the middle of the night, and their supervisor forgot to double-check it.
“The entry team comes up the stairs, eight guys in full battle gear, and rams the door off its hinges. The wrong door. That door.”
He pointed at the door.
“Matthew is the first one through. He’s got a penlight on the barrel of his gun. What he sees isn’t what he expects to see. A guy and a girl in bed together. Imagine waking up in the night in a sleazebag motel on Biscayne Boulevard and someone’s breaking down the door. The guy reaches to grab something on the bedside table. Matthew sees a glint of metal in the beam of his flashlight. He’s drunk. Or he’s hung over. He puts a bullet through the kid’s head. Later on—a lot later on—I believe he did some research on the young lovers. This was right before Matt thought up the brilliant idea of getting shitfaced one night and cutting off his own trigger finger with a pair of pinking shears. What he found out is that the kids were both freshman law students at U.M. doing a little slumming. The boy was reaching for his glasses.
“There’s one more thing. Matthew wasn’t just the first guy through the door. He was the only guy through the door. There wasn’t any entry team. At the last minute Matthew had them stand down and roll back to the field office. He decided to fly solo, make the arrest on his own. When things went to shit, my pager started going off. It was Matt, hysterical. Lucky thing I was eight blocks away eating a steak at the 1800 Club. And a lucky thing we had worked a lot of the early parts of the case together on an interagency task force. You can see the rest. Matt and I switched places, and I took the fall for him. It made sense: he had a wife with pancreatic cancer he needed to be there for. If he’d lost his job, she would have lost her medical insurance.
“I almost forgot. The kingpin Matthew was after? He never even found out his name. Partly because it wasn’t a he. It was a she. Miriam Benages. How’s it feel, Matthew? Fortuna’s Wheel, right? Here you sit with thirty million of Miriam’s money. She’s history, and you’re still walking around.”
I looked at him for quite a while. Julia got up and whispered something in his ear and went outside, closing the door of the room behind her.
“I’m feeling a tad grumpy,” Fontana said.
“No shit. I can tell. How much longer you think you have?”
“Not much. So let’s go to Etna Furnace. It’s more for you.”
“I know. Speaking of which, did you forward any mail to the house up there? Set up new phone service? An account at the power company?”
“Relax, slick. You’re a ghost now. You and Julia both. There’s no way anyone can trace you from here to there. But look, there’s a couple facts I want to hit you with. It’s about Julia. Her and you and me. She wanted me to talk to you about some things, and I think you probably want to sit down for this.”
“I’ve got something to tell you, too.”
“Fine. You go first. I already know what happened to Kip and Manuel. Jesus. Getting nailed to a cross can fuck up your whole week.”
“But you don’t know Miriam Benages is alive.”
He sat up on the edge of the bed.
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. I saw her yesterday morning on Flagler Street.”
“Christ. Fuck!”
“Yeah. We gotta go.”
I took his hand and helped him stand up and walk over to the door. Downstairs in the parking lot Julia gave us both a big hug.
Fontana settled into the back seat of the Buick. As I drove the car out of the lot, the trailer hitch scraping the pavement, he was saying, “This duck walks into a bar, hops up on a bar stool, and orders a pair of Heinekens. . . .”
26
WE TOOK THE OLD WAY out of town, the way people once came into the city from up north before the turnpike or interstate existed. The way led north and west, a diagonal cutting through Little Havana and then past the edge of Hialeah beside a canal where love motels lined one side of the road. After a long while, when the country opened up, there were miles of sugarcane fields, and then the land changed again and started to roll: hills and lakes, with cattle and citrus and, later still, fancy horse farms with white rail fences.
We crossed the Suwannee River and stopped while Fontana took our picture using a throwaway camera, with Julia and me standing beside a sign that read: Welcome to Georgia, State of Adventure. We gassed up and kept going, past Valdosta, Tifton, Macon, on the interstate now, coming into the morning sprawl of Atlanta and sleeping a few hours at a Days Inn.
We kept going. Fontana was flying, rambling, his eyes glassy. He would sleep and then wake up and start talking in midsentence, not realizing he had been asleep. We kept going north, past Chattanooga, Knoxville, then the long haul to Lexington, Julia driving until we turned east on I-64 and finally got off the interstate onto 203, bearing north again toward Ironton. The heater had stopped working.
“I’m cold,” she said. She nestled into me, and I felt her shaking. I put my arm around her shoulders and drew her against me.
Fontana groaned. She listened for a time, but nothing more came from the backseat.
I felt like talking. “Did you ever look for your real parents?”
She laughed and gave me an odd look. “Last year. Jack helped me. But you know that.”
“Jack again.”
“Yes. Pull over. I want to check on him.”
I stopped, and she got out and opened the back door on her side. She listened to Fontana’s chest with the stethoscope. Then she bent down with her ear next to his mouth and adjusted the wadded-up clothes under his head. She got back in the front seat, and I started the engine.
“Wait,” she said.
“What?”
“There’s something —”
I waited, but she didn’t say anything. She was shaking again. I drew her close to me. I waited a little longer, and then I turned and kissed her. She drew back and started to speak, but instead she reached out and took me by the back of the neck, her fingers holding tight to my hair. She looked into my eyes, frowning, and then pulled my face toward her and pressed her lips against mine. This time she was right there with me, not pushing away anymore. I kissed her neck, and her hand moved down over my stomach.
I unbuttoned her blouse, and she pulled me down onto the car seat. I listened for sounds from the back, but Fontana was breathing steadily.
“Hurry,” she said. “Go fast.”
She had already unbuckled my belt and started pushing my pants down. I ran my hands up the sides of her thighs and tore at her underwear until the elastic broke. She had one arm around my back and the other around my neck, holding my head down next to hers so that I couldn’t see her face. Then I was inside her, and then all the way inside her. She grabbed the hair on the back of my head, holding my face down. She tried to wrap her legs around me but there were too many clothes in the way, and her foot kept hitting the steering wheel. “Go fast,” she said, and I did.
She arched her back, making a small
, high-pitched sound, a moan that went on and rose and became rhythmic. I pulled her back toward me on the seat so her head wouldn’t smack against the door. She shifted under me and arched her back again. Then she let go of my hair and put her hands above her, behind her head. I held her wrists down on the seat and sucked on her nipples, first one, then the other, with my eyes closed. Inside me I could see white specks and stars. I could hear her moaning, saying something, but at the same time that I was right there on top of her on the car seat I was a long way off, somewhere else. She had gotten one hand free and had it around the back of my head now, pushing my head down against her breast. Just before everything went red I pulled my head up and away from her and felt myself falling forward. My head hit the window and kept going through the glass, little pieces of safety glass crunching and falling everywhere. She had screamed and turned her head to the side with her eyes closed. I looked down, and she was crying and had been all along. Her face was wet with tears.
“Are you —”
“Don’t stop!” she said. “Don’t stop!”
I kept going and then everything was red and deeper red, and I heard my own voice and inside a starburst of red I could hear her saying something again and again, crying and holding me as hard as she could and saying something over and over that sounded like Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. That’s what I remembered later, but right then I wasn’t thinking about it. I felt her freeze, and then I froze, too, hearing the noise in the backseat, a choking cough that might have been going on for some time.
She was trying to get out from underneath me, and I was trying to help her. She got her legs free and got the door open, glass crunching and falling when she opened it. She pulled the rear door open and tore the clothes away from under his head. For a moment I thought she was kissing him, but of course she was trying to make him breathe. She kept tilting his head back, one hand on his chin, another behind his head, breathing in and putting her mouth to his and then breathing into him. She stopped and put her head down on his chest, her hair falling over his face. Then she shoved at his chest, surprisingly hard. She was crying while she did it, tears running down her face and down her breasts. Her nipples stayed erect in the cold, and she was shaking. I got in the other side and straddled him on the backseat, and when she went back to blowing air into him I pumped at his chest. I would pump ten times, and she would breathe into him, and I would go back to pumping. We kept going and going, and it was a rhythm now.