What the hell was Drummond thinking?
Charlie opened his mouth to ask when the side mirror again filled with a muzzle flash. A bullet pounded through the cargo hold wall and ricocheted around like a hornet.
The Dodge sped to within a half block behind them. The gunman leaned out of the passenger window for a better shot.
“How’s that idea going?” Charlie asked.
“Stop at the red.” Drummond pointed at the traffic light dangling ahead.
“The rule is except when someone is shooting you!”
“Simple tactic. Listen, and we’ll lose them.” Drummond sounded intrepid and full of conviction. Like Patton-or at least unlike anything Charlie had ever heard from his father or thought within his range.
And it steadied Charlie. He threw the gearshift into neutral and pressed the brake. The truck slid, tires grating against the street and sending a whiff of rubber into the cab. They came to a halt on the crosswalk at the intersection with busy Utica Avenue.
“Now get ready to turn right when I say so,” Drummond said.
Charlie clocked the steering wheel and tightened his sweaty grip on the gearshift knob.
A block to the left, on Utica Avenue, a green light loosed a herd of traffic led by an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer.
The Dodge, meanwhile, glided to a stop five or six car lengths behind the Hippo, close enough that Charlie could see the face of the man in the passenger seat-so mild mannered in appearance that hope flickered in Charlie that this was all some sort of misunderstanding about to be resolved.
With a grin, the man stuck his pistol out of his window and fired. Now that the vehicles were in idle, the report was earsplitting.
The round blew another hole in the cab’s rear wall, buzzed past Charlie’s right ear, and, on its way out of the cab, created a small cavity in the ceiling. Heart bouncing around inside his rib cage, he shoved the gearshift into first.
“Not until I say so,” Drummond barked.
“But-”
“Just hold on.”
The Dodge’s driver rolled down his window. He was a fair-complexioned young man with hard eyes and thin bloodless lips set too tight to smile. He balanced his pistol atop the lowered glass. His shot pinged the doorframe by Drummond’s head, creating a starburst. Drummond eyed it with an almost mocking indifference.
“Okay, we’ve held on long enough,” Charlie couldn’t help shouting.
“Just a few more seconds.” Drummond pointed to the dense traffic rumbling along Utica from the left, led by the eighteen-wheeler.
The Dodge rolled closer, and another booming shot punched into the rear wall of the cab, creating a hole just inches left of Drummond’s chest. The air filled with grainy orange haze that smelled of salt, the remains of a bag of corn chips on top of the dash.
The eighteen-wheeler rumbled to within a half block of the intersection. Any more time and the traffic would be in front of the Hippo, effectively turning Fillmore into a dead end.
“How about now?” Charlie meant the question to be rhetorical.
“Almost,” said Drummond, fixating on the eighteen-wheeler.
Bullets rained against the Hippo. The smoke and the ear-wrecking reports and echoes made it feel like being inside a thunderhead.
“Go!” Drummond shouted through it all.
Charlie released the clutch and crushed the gas. With tires screaming, the Hippo bombed onto Utica. Its back end barely missed the eighteen-wheeler’s front fender.
The truck driver reflexively slammed on his brakes, sending his gargantuan vehicle into an abrupt, sliding deceleration. All sound was lost beneath the howl of his eighteen tires.
To avoid rear-ending him, the young woman driving the Honda Accord darted to the right, into a lane that was parking spaces by day.
The trailer jackknifed right, filling that lane too. The Accord came to a shrieking stop a foot short of a collision.
The teal Dodge, flying onto Utica, needed to pass the Accord. To the left was the jackknifed trailer. To the right, the sidewalk. The Dodge leaped onto the sidewalk, a viable byway, if not for the streetlamp the driver had no way of seeing. With a deafening thunk, it stopped the Dodge dead.
In the remains of Drummond’s side mirror, Charlie saw the streetlamp protruding from the teal hood like a stake. Much of the car was accordioned. Inside, the gunmen angrily swatted aside swollen air bags.
Exultant, Charlie said, “I hope that streetlamp is okay.”
Gunning the Hippo away, he watched until the gunmen were specks. Left behind with them was his last shred of doubt about Drummond’s claim. In place of it came awe and a thousand questions he was dying to ask.
“So now what?” he said for starters.
“This may have something to do with work,” Drummond said.
Against a new tide of panic, Charlie said, “I know, I know-you work for the government. Clandestine operations.” He rushed his words to make use of Drummond’s last bits of light. “I need to know where exactly?”
Drummond sat up again. He eyed the bullet hole in the ceiling.
“I hope it doesn’t rain,” he said.
Part Two
Secrets of Appliance Sales
1
Fielding met Alice under strange circumstances.
He was in Havana, at a cocktail party. “Another woman asked to meet you, Nick,” the hostess told him. “I’m going to have to start handing out numbers.”
His physical appearance had something to do with it. He would have been just another bright-eyed, fortysomething surfer from San Diego, though, if not for his string of finds, which ranged from a cache of centuries-old gold coins to the wreck of a legendary pirate ship. And the thirty-room villa it bought him, which came with its own island off Martinique, didn’t hurt.
At the same time, his success had made life tedious. The motives of others were increasingly obvious to him, and almost always economic. And he’d seen enough of the world to know it was the same everywhere. Drinking restored some of the edge-or so he rationalized it.
No amount of alcohol could make this gold-digger fest endurable, he thought. With the right woman, however, the night might be salvaged.
The woman he had in mind was Mariana Dominguez, aged ninety-four. She could be found on the veranda of the Hotel Nacional, rolling tobacco leaves from her own field into cigars that he believed were the finest on the island and possibly the world. “They’re going to earn you sainthood,” he liked to tell Seora Dominguez.
On the way out of the party, he traded the bartender a roll of ten-peso notes for a bottle of dark rum. He worked the foil from the cap as he strolled along the deserted Malecon. He admired the once-majestic Spanish town houses, now boarded up to keep out squatters. It was an especially dark night. If not for the slapping of waves against the seawall, Havana Bay could have been mistaken for a vacant lot.
Because of the waves, at first, he couldn’t hear what the man ahead was saying, just the cruelty in his tone. Drawing closer, Fielding made out, “What’s a matter, puta, you too good for us?” spoken with a heavy Cuban accent.
Fielding accelerated, soon discerning from the shadows a trio of street toughs surrounding a cowering young woman. The tough closest to her face repeated, “You too good for us?” A stout man with apelike facial hair, he reminded Fielding of Blackbeard.
The woman was a jogger and, taking into account the way her muscles swelled her running tights, a devoted one. Also she was lovely. And a redhead-Fielding’s favorite. Minus the terror, he thought, her eyes would be spectacular.
The thugs reared on his approach, probably wondering whether he was drunk or crazy.
“Buenas noches, amigos,” he said. “I’m hoping you can direct me to the Hotel Nacional.”
Blackbeard aimed a thick finger at the radiant, twin-spired colossus a half mile down shore. “See that?” he said. It was the only structure in sight bigger than a house. The other men sniggered.
“Thank you ever so kindly
,” Fielding said, starting toward it.
He halted when he came even with the woman. She didn’t look up. Probably didn’t dare. “Are you staying at the Nacional too, by chance?” he asked, knowing she had to be. It was analogous to running into a man on the moon: The lunar lander had to be his.
She cocked an eye toward Blackbeard, seeking permission to speak. He gave it with a shrug.
“Y-yes, as a matter of fact, I am,” she said. Her accent was British. Fielding had presumed as much from what he would affectionately come to call her bathtub-white complexion.
“It’s really dark between here and there, and possibly unsafe,” he said. “Perhaps we ought to walk back together?”
The Cubans eyed one another, apparently trying to decide whether this was amusing or galling. Stepping his big chest into Fielding’s face, Blackbeard said, “She’s with us.”
“How about I buy all of you a drink?” Fielding asked. He flashed his rum bottle.
Blackbeard grabbed a handful of Fielding’s linen lapel, imprinting it with something oily. “How about you go to your hotel now?”
Fielding recoiled. “You had fish for dinner, didn’t you?”
“That’s it, cabron.” Blackbeard balled his free hand into a fist.
“Now, now, sir, please,” Fielding said. “We can settle this without resorting to violence.”
The second thug clucked his opinion that Fielding was chicken. The third called Fielding, “Maricon.” Fielding knew enough Spanish to understand it as an appraisal of his sexual bent.
He told the group, “Recently I took a seminar called Emotional Balances, which, if you haven’t heard, is like anger management, except it’s conceived by accredited behavioral scientists. What we learned is that people feel better when they talk about their feelings. It eases the burden of facing our fears and offers us an emotional release. So what do you say we listen to one another, give it the best of our understanding, and see where it leads?”
The woman studied him, her mouth wide open in mystification.
She had beautiful lips, he thought.
“You a fucking crazy little pedazo de mierda, aren’t you?” Blackbeard said to him.
Fielding turned the other cheek. “It’s not easy, talking about your feelings, I know. But let’s try, okay? Just try? One of my favorite sayings is, ‘Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.’”
He would have attributed the saying to “that great friend of Cuba, John F. Kennedy.” But Blackbeard’s fist was flying at his face.
He sidestepped it with ease.
“I tried,” he sighed.
He set his bottle of rum on the wall in time to meet the advance of Blackbeard’s confederates. He hit the first with a karate slash, causing the man to grab his wrist and cry out like an injured beast.
Fielding ducked the haymaker thrown by the second thug, then three-sixtied, gaining force, leverage, and surprise. To the man’s exposed elbow, he delivered a karate strike with perhaps a little too much squash backhand. Still, it sounded like it broke bone.
Hearing Blackbeard rushing him from behind, Fielding whirled around and seized him by the waist, bursting the wind out of the big man. In the same motion he heaved him over the seawall. No splash rose from the bay ten feet below, just a heavy smack against a slab of sea rock.
Fielding spun around again, gearing up for the others’ retaliation.
They were running away.
“The good news,” he told the woman, “is now there’s more rum for us.”
She smiled, restoring some healthy pink to her face.
2
“So who sent you?” Fielding asked Alice.
He was fond of saying that the time they’d spent together-four weeks now-was like the mid-romantic movie montages that invariably feature the couple romping through the surf, except, despite a shared affinity for both jogging and the beach, he and Alice had yet to get around to that.
“Sent me?” She shifted uncomfortably on the silk-upholstered Louis XV settee in his den. Behind her, the exterior wall had been opened; the starlit beach appeared to be a mural. He paced before her, beneath the great white shark jawbone he’d kept above the mantel despite the decorator’s pleas.
“Sent you, yes,” he said. “Who sent you?” For the first time in a month there was no mirth in his tone. This, as opposed to some combination of the bare arms and legs protruding from her cocktail dress, the breeze off the sea, and the bamboo ceiling fans, probably explained her shiver.
Delicately, she said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean, darling.”
“Let’s save the trouble and pretend I’ve now asked, ‘Who sent you?’ ad nauseam, and endured all your variations of ‘Sent me where?’ and ‘Why, nobody sent me anywhere, darling,’ with you looking at me all the while like I’ve spent too much time in the wine cellar, shall we?”
“Okay, but I still won’t know what you mean.”
“All right, stick with that tack. I’ll counter with a threat. But first, so you won’t think it’s an idle threat, let’s broach for the first time the topic of what I do for a living. Alice, what do I do for a living?”
“You hunt for buried pirate treasure.”
“Sometimes I do, yes. But have you ever thought about buried pirate treasure?”
“How should I think about it, Nicky?” She was playing along as though he were a seven-year-old.
He resolved to keep his emotions out of it. “Say you’re a pirate. What sense would it make for you to take your treasure, which likely came at the sacrifice of lives and limbs, and dump it into an unguarded hole in the ground on a remote island you might never be able to find again?”
“What about the treasure of San Isidro?” she asked. His well-publicized search for the legendary pirate hoard was into a seventh month.
“Actually, the treasure of San Isidro is the maritime equivalent of an urban legend.”
“How about your gold escudos, then?” He’d supposedly found the cache after weeks of searching along the Argentine coast. News photographs showed him neck deep in a hole on a beach, holding one of the coins aloft, its gleam matching the one in his eyes. A neophyte collector, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Saqr, bought the lot for six million dollars.
“I suspect you already know this, Alice-or whatever your name really is-but in case the brief you were given glossed over it, the truth is that the authenticity of the coins was questionable at best. Al Saqr knew that and didn’t care. Because the coin deal was really a cover for… what, you tell me.”
She looked away to hide her anguish. “Of course I’ve heard the rumors.”
He stopped pacing, waited for her to look, then locked eyes with her. “Ever hear the one about Nick Fielding, illegal arms dealer?”
“Look, if that’s the case-” She was embarking, he suspected, on an explanation of how she’d made her peace with it.
“It’s the case,” he said. “Moreover, as a dealer in illegal arms, one has to be ruthless, probably to a psychotic extent, though I’m probably an exception-then again, what psychopath thinks he’s a psychopath? In any event, I had a man keelhauled recently. Know what that is?”
“I don’t think I want to.” Her eyes pooled with tears.
“Sorry, you’ve got to. ‘Keelhauled’ means dragged under a ship’s hull so you drown, if you’re lucky. Otherwise you’re shredded by barnacles and whatnot. It would’ve been easier for me to put a bullet through the guy’s head, of course; the keelhauling was something of a public relations move.”
Weakly, she asked, “Are you going to keelhaul me?”
“Are you going to tell me who sent you?”
“Nicky, please, I-” Her voice broke into a sob.
“Then what good would keelhauling you do? You wouldn’t be able to tell me who sent you.”
“I wouldn’t be able to tell you regardless. I haven’t the first clue even why you think someone sent me.”
“How about the night on the Malecon, when the Bl
ackbeard look-alike said, ‘What’s a matter, puta, you too good for us?’ First, the script was laughable. And how about the way he delivered the line a second time, just in case I missed it the first time because of the loud waves? Also, my dear honey trap, your hair was, and remains, red-my weakness for which is widely known. Now, before you accuse me of being vain, know I’ve done some homework. You claimed to be the only child of parents now deceased. You said you had an idyllic upbringing in Chiswick in West London, and you fled a tedious assistant solicitor’s life in Bristol to study marine biology in the Bahamas. And your story held water, as it were. Whoever sent you did a bang-up job on your legend, if that’s the right term. Probably you’re one of those spooks with the single-mindedness of a mountaintop monk; you can set your real life aside for months at a time. Still, you’re human, which means you can’t entirely extinguish your feelings for your real life. I’m willing to wager that that will be so in the case of Jane.”
Alice looked at him as though “Jane” were some strange-sounding word from the language of the indigenous Carib tribe.
She ought to have been curious which Jane he meant, though, for surely she knew several, let alone her de facto goddaughter.
“Poor play,” he said. “You’re masking your apprehension that I mean the little girl in South Yorkshire with pigtails the color of sunshine, who, on Christmas morning, opened an airmail package sent from this neck of the planet and delighted in its contents, a radio-controlled mermaid.” He was certain this detail would get a rise out of her.
She didn’t blink.
Could he be wrong about her?
“Well, then, that brings us to the evening’s threat,” he said. “Note the FedEx pouch over there on my desk. It arrived earlier from the UK, sent by a fellow limey of yours known as ‘the Knife’-trite, sure, but if anyone deserves the moniker, it’s him.”
He strolled to his desk, automatically checking his computer screen for new e-mails. Nothing. Then he took up the sealed pouch. “This contains the pinky finger from Jane’s left hand, removed late yesterday afternoon at the Rotherham rail yard, where she was found in what was believed to be a state of shock.” Fielding disliked having had to dispatch the Knife to South Yorkshire yesterday to chloroform and butcher an innocent child, but he believed it was for the greater good. “As you may know, Jane had been warned repeatedly against playing with the feral dogs there. The dogs are currently viewed as the culprits. Now, unless you tell me who sent you, the ‘dogs’ will revisit Jane and tomorrow’s pouch will contain-” Fielding stopped himself.
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