by Thomas Perry
After a couple of long minutes, Richard said, "What's up, Dad?"
"Want to take the helm?"
"No, thanks."
"Suit yourself." The old man throttled back a bit, so the big yacht slowed, and the side-to-side motion became more pronounced. "I've been thinking of talking to you for some time now."
"What about?"
"I'm sure you're smart enough to know that your mother and I keep an eye on you. Just because we might not be actively in your business at any given time doesn't mean we don't know what it is."
"What is it?"
"For months we've been wondering why you haven't seen fit to mention to us that your girlfriend was pregnant."
"What girlfriend?"
"All right. Your secretary, then. Whatever the hell she is to you. Christine. She's sort of a cute little thing, and people tell me she isn't stupid. A bit on the young side for a thirty-eight-year-old man, but that could pay off later. When you're my age, you'd have a woman who was still on the young side for you. Your mother has been trying to think of a way to do a party for you, complete with presents and so on. But she couldn't get very far with that, because you haven't told us. So I'm forced to ask."
Richard Beale felt even sicker. He could see that his father had reverted to his military personality again. His father was still a marvel to him. At various points in Richard's life he had been prompted to ask himself what the hell the navy did to people in four short years to change them so much. His father had been an Oklahoma farm boy until he went in the navy, and he had come out like this, and stayed this way for forty years. Richard knew he had to say something. "Oh, I don't know. I guess I didn't feel ready to start all of that in motion. I don't want any parties or fuss, at least until I know if this is going to work out."
"Seems a little late for that kind of wondering, doesn't it? If you weren't prepared to make a decision about her, maybe you should have kept it in your pants."
"I don't mean that."
"Not that we weren't pleased. Your mother has been running around with a pen and a special notebook writing down things for the wedding. She hasn't even finished figuring out the lists for the engagement party yet, but she has to make some moves to streamline this whole process so the bride won't be too obviously far along at the wedding. I haven't seen her this happy in twenty years."
Was the boat just drifting and rolling with the swells? Richard kept feeling worse. "Look, Dad. I've been trying to protect Mother from getting all excited and then being disappointed later, and you, too. I don't know how you found out Christine was pregnant. She didn't actually come out and tell even me."
"That's not good," said Andy Beale.
"How did you find out?"
"If I had wanted you to know that, I'd have told you. And for weeks, the mistake I thought you were making was trying to keep this to yourself and then springing it on your mother too late. But I guess you were making a different kind of mistake. With you, it's always some kind of mistake."
"That's not fair."
"Pah!" Andy Beale spat out something that was almost a laugh, but carried no happiness. "What I told you four years ago hasn't changed, Richard. I was the one who started this life with nothing but a pair of calloused hands and a reasonably serviceable brain. When the navy sent me here, they sent a million other guys here, too. I was one of the ones who had his eyes and ears open. I could see that lots of those guys were from cold, hard, barren places. Once they'd been here, they were going to come back. Hell, that's been going on since World War Two. That's why there is a San Diego. Some of us were willing to take risks and work hard. I bought my first duplex apartment by working two jobs before your mother and I were even married. I saved the rent on that one to put a down payment on another, and used your mother's savings from her nurse job to buy the third. I never looked back. We both worked for other people until we were over fifty while we were doing real estate deals at night and showing rentals to prospective tenants on our lunch hours. You get to be a big shot and tool around in a Porsche at twice the speed limit and live in a house like a palace and make milliondollar deals all day. But you'd do well to remember that none of it is yours. I let you get used to all of it because I'm not going to live forever, and I need somebody who knows how to run it after I can't. I didn't want you to inherit it at the age of fifty or sixty and know so little that you let somebody take it away from you."
"I know, Dad, and I'm grateful. I've always been grateful. I don't say it often, because I know you wouldn't think much of me if I followed you around all day saying how grateful I am."
"No, I wouldn't. But there are certain things that you are required to do, and you've known that from the beginning. Your mother wants grandchildren. Sometimes I think that's all that keeps her interested in staying alive. She's waiting to see them and spoil them. I want grandchildren, too. All the work and sacrifice and agony I went through to make something of this family is going to be thrown away and wasted if there are no more Beales to make use of it. I didn't do all that—work eighteen or nineteen hours a day, leveraging everything I had on each new deal over and over again—just so you can live this bachelor existence, screwing around until you're eighty, and then die and have everything I built confiscated by the fucking State of California. I want heirs, and I want the first one this year."
"Dad, if you know about Christine, you must realize that I'm trying to do what you expect of me."
"It's about time. I was pretty much convinced that you were gay, and she was just around to type and pick up your clothes at the cleaner's."
"So now you know I'm not gay."
"Yeah, yeah. You like girls. It's an enormous accomplishment. Now I want you to see something." He reached into the rack where the nautical maps were stowed, and pulled out a long white envelope with a string-tie closing at one end.
"If that's your will, you showed it to me when we talked about this four years ago. If I don't have a child before you die, then the money goes to the cousins. How could I forget?"
"I changed it again. This is a new one, and there are copies with people I trust all over the country, so don't even think about waiting until I die and tearing it up. It can't happen." He held out the white envelope.
Richard Beale had been up on the bridge too long. He was in a bad state of seasickness brought on by the slower speed, which had permitted some of the diesel exhaust to find its way up here. He waved the envelope away. "Why don't you just tell me what it says?"
His father shook his head in a gesture of disdain for people who had no sea legs. "All right. It says that when your first child is born, you get a one-tenth share of everything—the business, the property holdings, the bank balances." He lifted his eyes from the will and glared at Richard. "That was going to be the first of your presents that we had intended to reveal at the engagement party. I can see you know there's more coming. You're waiting for that. You're right. We waited and waited for you to share your news with us, until I got a bad feeling about it, so I added something. You've got until the end of this year."
"What do you mean?"
"We figure this baby, our grandchild, is going to be born around September or October. Is that right?"
"I don't know. Yeah, I guess so. The fall, anyway."
"Then you'd better make it work. If I don't have a grandchild by the end of this year, I give up on you."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"What does it mean? That if I don't hand you this baby by New Year's Day, I don't inherit anything when you die?"
"That's part of it. You'll also be out of the company on January 2. I'll pick somebody else to run it for me. You can go off on your own and work with what you've got, and maybe grow up and make something of yourself, or maybe not. Either way, you will have blown the opportunity you got by being born."
"You didn't say this before. It's June. If Christine doesn't work out, I don't have time to father another baby by the end of December. This is completely unfair."
<
br /> "You think I got what I have by being fair to the guy on the other side of the table?"
"But this is one twenty-year-old girl. Sometimes relationships don't last. Maybe she doesn't want to marry me. Maybe she'll abort the baby."
"If she was going to, she would have. She's almost six months."
Richard was feeling worse. He couldn't meet the old man's eyes, but when he looked out the window to the side of the bridge, all he saw was the sea, then the sky, then the sea again. How did the old man know the exact moment of conception? "Then she might give it up for adoption. She always said she wants to go to college."
"Have her give the baby to you then—to us. I'll settle for a second chance to raise an heir with some sense of duty. I'll give the girl the cost of four-years' tuition and living expenses in exchange for the baby. More, even. You can keep screwing around and playing with cars, and keep being caretaker of the business until the kid is ready to take over."
"Why are you suddenly in such a rush? This doesn't have to be the only chance for a grandchild. There are millions of other girls out there who might work out."
"This is the only one you knocked up."
Richard, in his nauseated state, almost protested that it wasn't, but caught the words before he ruined himself. "What I'm trying to tell you is that I want to do what's expected, but this isn't a situation where I have absolute control."
"Then take control, for Christ's sake. Be a man. As you just said, she's a twenty-year-old kid who's pregnant. She liked you well enough to let you get her that way. She's young, she's alone, she's probably broke. How hard can it be to persuade her to marry you?"
"Hard."
"Christ. You want me to talk to her? Or your mother? She's another woman, and if she tells the girl how welcome she would be, that ought to do it."
"In this case it wouldn't. Let me handle this myself."
Andy Beale's sharp eyes stayed on Richard's for a moment. "All right. Do it."
"Are we done?"
"Yeah. You can go down and puke now. I'll head back to the harbor and let you off so your mother and I can get back out here in time to fish a little."
Richard Beale walked off the dock, stood in the parking lot, and watched as the Ruby B. slowly turned its fat stern toward him and began chugging back out of the harbor. He could see his father was feathering the throttle, trying to bring it up beyond the speed limit of the harbor without getting caught by the patrol. The boat sent waves spreading from its wake to rock the rows of boats tied in their berths, and make them buck and strain against their lines and shoulder into the bumpers, trying to break loose.
He stood on solid, unmoving asphalt and watched for ten minutes, long after the Ruby B. was out of his sight. He took deep, regular breaths to settle his stomach and get rid of the smothered, choking feeling. When he felt like less of an emergency case, he took out his phone and punched in Steve Demming's number, then changed his mind and deleted it.
Richard dialed Sybil Landreau instead. He knew that calling one of the women instead of Steve Demming and Pete Tilton wasn't terribly subtle, but he didn't want to be subtle. He hoped the bastards were shocked enough to begin worrying about their reputations. That was what people like them lived on. They couldn't put an ad on Channel 10.
"Yes?" said Sybil's voice.
"It's me," he said. "I'm calling to find out what's going on."
"Hold on. I'll give you to Steve."
"No!" He realized too late that he was shouting. He looked around to see if anyone in the parking lot was near enough to have noticed. "Don't hand me to anybody. I want to talk to you. Are you still there?"
She said, "Yes."
"Then you tell me. Do you have her?"
"Not yet."
"That means no."
"It means we're working on it, and that we will have her, but it takes more time than this. We're doing all the right things. It just hasn't happened yet."
"Wow," he said. "Wow. You're a bigger bullshit artist than Demming."
"I'm a woman. I'm verbal. You want to talk to him now, or do you want to flirt some more?"
"Talk to him. But I want all four of you individually to know that I'm not a happy client. This should have been done the first night, when she was in Buffalo, which is—what?—three weeks ago?"
"I'll give you to Steve."
He heard Steve Demming's voice, and he could detect the irritation in it. "Yes?"
"It's me. I'm calling to find out what's the matter. I expected to see her back here three weeks ago."
"Richard. You know we're on this, and we're doing the best job possible. This isn't a time to start losing faith and insulting each other."
"There were six of you to one of her. I gave you her phone's Global Positioning locator so you knew exactly where she was at every second."
"It's not six to one. You know this. She met up with a pro the very first night we were on this. They managed to slip her phone into the back of a truck on the New York State Thruway. We caught up with the truck when it was almost to New Jersey. If you want her phone back, I can give it to you. I just don't have the girl yet."
"Tell me about this pro. Who is she?"
"We don't know a lot about her yet. She's probably a private detective working as a bodyguard. A lot of women don't want a man protecting them. They want somebody who can go into the ladies' room with them. We think that Christine flew all the way to New York just to hook up with her. She took over that night at the hospital, and we haven't been able to catch up with them yet. We will."
"Come on. I don't believe this. How could Christine know anybody like that?"
"You wouldn't be the first one to think he's the only guy some chick knows, and be wrong. Somebody sent this woman to pick Christine up at the hospital. When we tried to keep her from driving her off in a car, she broke Ronnie Sebrot's knee. We had to drive him to a hospital seventy miles away in case the police knew somebody got hurt that way. He was in such pain he was screaming half the time."
"Jesus, that's awful."
"But we didn't give up. All the time we were still tracking her cell phone's signal. Late that night we blocked a road ahead of them, had two cars coming up behind them. What does this woman do? She clips Carl McGinnis with her car and takes off. We couldn't leave him lying out there by the road waiting for the state troopers to find him, could we?"
"I guess not. But did you have to shoot him?"
"That again? Yes. We had to shoot him."
"Why?"
"The woman ran him down. He was hurt bad. We couldn't leave him there to suffer, and we couldn't take him in. He was in and out of consciousness and might have said just about anything on painkillers."
"It's unbelievable."
"We're not animals, Richard. The girls held his hand and talked to him, and never let on that we were even thinking about doing it. Claudia just waited until he lost consciousness for a second and shot him in the head. He never knew."
"I still can't believe this," said Richard. "It's awful." He was breathing hard through his open mouth. There didn't seem to be enough air. He felt as though he were falling—dizzy and faint.
"You're the one who wanted us to do this. Sometimes this is what it takes."
Richard lowered his voice to a raspy whisper, so he wouldn't be overheard. "But you killed somebody. It doesn't matter if it was your friend or not. If they connect us with this, we'll all go to jail for the rest of our lives."
"Richard. You hired us to kidnap a pregnant girl and bring her back to you, remember? What do you think the penalty is for that? Or for setting off a bomb in a hospital so she'd be evacuated and left in the open? Whatever we've done since then is just extra stuff they add on beyond your life sentence to make themselves look like hard-asses for the next election. The point is to not let them catch you and give you any sentence."
Richard Beale didn't answer. He was light-headed, but his stomach felt as though it contained a rock that was somehow expanding. He looked out acros
s the parking lot at the boats bobbing beside their docks in the marina, but they only made him feel that the ground under him was moving, so he stared far past them at the line of the horizon.
"Are you still there?"
"I'm here."
"You have any other questions?"
"Not a question," Richard said. "I called you because this is getting critical. I need to have Christine back. She needs to be alive and not too beat up. Do you hear that?"
"Yes. Alive. That's what we've been doing. If we hadn't been trying to take her alive, we wouldn't have lost Ronnie and Carl. We're doing it."
"It matters a hell of a lot more than I thought. I need that baby. Christine has to be alive and healthy long enough to deliver that baby. You don't know the kind of pressure I'm under. It's got to happen as soon as possible."
"We're doing our best, but if I've got to be on the phone all day, well, what can I say?"
"Nothing. Go do it." Richard Beale slipped the phone into his pocket and took his eyes off the ocean, but it didn't help. His fate had been settled on his father's boat. Staring and heavy breathing had only made him dizzy. He walked with purposeful determination to a trash barrel at the side of the parking lot, grasped its rim where the plastic bag was fitted over it, bent at the waist, and succumbed.
11
Jane drove from Minneapolis to O'Hare International Airport to return the rental car. There was little chance the four hunters could know that the car existed, let alone trace it from the Buffalo airport to O'Hare. If they managed to trace it, they would only conclude that she and Christine had driven to Chicago and gotten on a plane.