by Sandra Brown
“It’s me,” Coburn said.
With profound relief, she dropped her gun hand to her side. “I’d almost given up on you.”
“It was a long way back to the truck, especially going overland. By the time I got there, it was getting dark and raining hard. Then I had to find a road. Only waterways were on the map. I finally found a gravel road that runs out about a quarter mile from here.”
It was a miracle to Honor that he’d found his way back at all.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Emily wanted to wait up until you got back, but we ate, then played with Elmo a while. I started telling her a story, and she fell asleep.”
“Probably better.”
“Yes. She would’ve been afraid of the dark, and I didn’t want to turn on the lantern. Although I considered putting it on the deck to guide you back. I was afraid you would miss us in the dark. You left me few instructions before you left.”
If he noticed the implied rebuke, he ignored it. “You did right.”
Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and she could make him out. His clothes were soaked, his hair was plastered to his head. “I’ll be right back,” she told him.
She descended the steps and replaced the pistol beneath the mattress, then gathered up some items and returned to the wheelhouse. She passed him a bottle of water first. He thanked her, uncapped it, and drained it.
“I found these.” She handed him the folded pair of khakis and a T-shirt. “They were in one of the storage compartments. The pants will be too short, and they smell moldy.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re dry.” He peeled off Eddie’s LSU T-shirt and replaced it with one that had belonged to her father, then began unbuttoning the jeans.
She turned her back. “Are you hungry?”
“Yeah.”
She went back down the steps and flicked on the lantern only long enough to locate the food she’d set aside for him. By the time she returned to the wheelhouse, he had swapped out the pants. She set the foodstuffs on the console. “You forgot to get a can opener.”
“I got cans with pull tabs.”
“Not the pineapple. And of course, that’s what Emily wanted.”
“Sorry.”
“I found a can opener in a drawer under the stove. It’s rusty, so we may get lead poisoning, but she had her pineapple.”
Using his fingers, he ate his meal of canned breast meat chicken, pineapple slices, and saltine crackers. He washed it down with another bottle of water that Honor fetched from below. She’d also brought up a package of cookies to appease his noticeable sweet tooth.
He was sitting on the floor, his back propped against the console. She sat in her dad’s captain’s chair, which had suffered the ravages of the elements like everything on the boat.
The silence was broken only by the pelting rain and the crunch of cookies.
“It’s raining harder than ever,” she remarked.
“Um-huh.”
“At least the rain keeps the mosquitoes away.”
He scratched at a place on his forearm. “Not all of them.” He took another cookie from the package and bit off half.
“Will they find us?”
“Yes.” Noticing that his blunt answer had startled her, he said, “It’s only a matter of time, depending largely on when Hamilton kicks things into full gear. He probably has already.”
“If they find us—”
“When.”
“When they find us, will you…” She searched for the word.
“Go peacefully?”
She nodded.
“No, I won’t.”
“Why?”
“Like I told Hamilton, I’m not quitting until I get this son of a bitch.”
“The Bookkeeper.”
“It’s not just an assignment any longer. It’s one-on-one, him against me.”
“How did it work, exactly? The business between him and Marset?”
“Well, let’s see. Here’s a for-instance. Each time a truck passes from one state into another, it has to stop at a weigh station. Have you seen these arms that extend over the interstate near state lines?”
She shook her head. “I don’t routinely cross state lines, but in any case, no, I’ve never noticed.”
“Most people don’t. They look like streetlights. But they’re actually X-ray machines that scan trucks and cargo, and they’re constantly being monitored. Agents see a truck that looks suspicious, or that hasn’t stopped at the weigh station, it’s pulled over and searched.”
“Unless the person monitoring it is on the take and lets it pass.”
“Bingo. The Bookkeeper created a market out of doing just that. His business strategy was to corrupt the people enforcing the laws, effectively making the laws a joke. A human trafficker would pay for the protection and consider it a cost of doing business.”
“Sam Marset was a…?”
“Client. I believe one of the first, if not the first.”
“How did it come about?”
“Along with his honest business, Marset was doing a brisk trade in illegal goods. Since he was legit, no one suspected. Then Marset’s trucks started getting stopped often, his drivers hassled. The increased vigilance was enough to scare him. Above all, the elder of St. Boniface didn’t want to get caught. Enter The Bookkeeper with a solution to his problem.” Coburn grinned. “Thing was, The Bookkeeper had created the problem.”
“By orchestrating the searches.”
“And probably Marset knew it. But if The Bookkeeper could put a cog in his wheels, he could see to it that the cogs were removed. It was either pay The Bookkeeper for protection, or risk getting caught with a shipment of drugs. Life as he’d known it would be history.”
“Others would be forced to do the same.”
“And did. The Bookkeeper now has an expanded client base. Some are large commercial operations like Marset’s. Others are small-time independents. Men out of work due to the oil spill who have a pickup truck and kids to feed. They drive over to south Texas, pick up a couple hundred pounds of marijuana, drive it to New Orleans, their kids eat for another week.
“They’re breaking the law, but the bigger criminal is the individual who’s making it profitable for them to become felons. The smugglers run a much greater risk of being caught, and when they are, they can’t rat out the facilitator because they rarely know who it is. They only know their contact person, and that individual is low on the totem pole.”
“If Marset was such a good customer, why was he killed? You mentioned something to Hamilton about his whining.”
“Things rocked along okay for a time. Simpatico. Then The Bookkeeper started getting greedy, started increasing his commission for the services provided. Marset didn’t need a crystal ball to tell him that without a ceiling, the cost would keep going up, and soon a large slice of his overhead was going to be The Bookkeeper’s fee. But if he refused to pay it—”
“He’d get caught, exposed, and sent to prison.”
“Right. And The Bookkeeper could make it happen, because his tentacles reach into the entire justice system. So Marset, ever the diplomat, and a little naive as it turns out, proposed that they meet last Sunday night and settle on terms that both could live with.”
“You smelled a rat.”
“The Bookkeeper is the freaking Wizard of Oz. I couldn’t see him strolling into that warehouse, shaking hands, and negotiating.”
“Did Marset know his identity?”
“If he did, he died without telling. I’ve been through his files, read every scrap of paper I could get my hands on, including the one with your husband’s name on it.”
“Surely you don’t suspect Eddie of being The Bookkeeper.”
“No, The Bookkeeper is alive and well.”
“How do you think Eddie fit in?”
“You said he had moonlighted for Marset. Maybe he was in on the illegal side of his business. Or maybe he was a dirty cop on The Bookkeeper’s payrol
l. Maybe he was playing both ends against the middle, or holding out for a larger take. Maybe blackmail was his angle. I don’t know.”
She stared him down until, with a trace of reluctance, he added, “Or he was a cop trying to make a case against one or both. But crooked or straight, he would have tried to protect himself by collecting hard evidence that he could use for whatever his purpose was.”
Honor was steadfast in her confidence of Eddie’s integrity, but for the time being she let the matter drop. “Royale Trucking. Are all the employees crooked?”
“Not at all. Those six who died with Marset, yes. He had a separate set of books that only he and one other guy ever saw. People in the corporate office, even members of his own family, didn’t know about his sideline.”
“How could they not?”
He shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t look too deep. They didn’t want to. All they knew was that the business continued to do extremely well in a weak economy.”
“So they’ll be okay? Mrs. Marset?”
“In terms of prosecution, yes. Won’t be easy for her when the truth about her husband is exposed.”
Honor pulled her feet up to the edge of the seat, looped her arms around her legs, and propped her chin on her knees. Quietly she said, “They’ll kill you.”
He bit into another cookie, saying nothing.
“Doral or one of the Hawkins clan. Even the honest policemen, who only see you as Sam Marset’s killer, would rather bring you in dead than alive.”
“Hamilton’s told everybody I’m already dead. Wonder how he’ll wiggle out of that one.”
“How can you joke about it? It doesn’t bother you that you could be killed?”
“Not particularly.”
“You don’t think about dying?”
“I’m only surprised that it hasn’t happened yet.”
Honor picked at a cuticle that had been torn loose while they were working on the boat. “You know how to do things.” She glanced at him. He was looking up at her curiously. “Survival things. Lots of things.”
“I don’t know how to bake cupcakes.”
For the first time since she’d found him lying facedown in her yard, he was teasing her, but she wouldn’t let it divert her. “Did you learn all those skills in the Marine Corps?”
“Most of them.”
She waited, but he didn’t elaborate. “You were a different kind of Marine than my father-in-law.”
“He’s a recruiting poster?”
“Exactly.”
“Then, yeah, I was different. No marching in formation for the kind of Marine I was. I had a uniform, but didn’t wear it but a few times. I didn’t salute officers, and nobody saluted me.”
“What did you do?”
“Killed people.”
She had suspected that. She’d even deluded herself into thinking she could hear him admit it without flinching. But the words felt like tiny blows to her chest, and she feared she would only feel them stronger if she heard more, so she carried the subject no further.
He finished his last cookie and dusted crumbs off his hands. “We need to get to work.”
“Work?” She was so exhausted her whole body ached. She thought that if she closed her eyes she would fall asleep where she sat. Stained mattress or not, she looked forward to lying down on it beside Emily and sleeping. “What work?”
“We’re going through it again.”
“Through what again?”
“Eddie’s life.”
Chapter 26
Diego approached the property under cover of darkness, rain, and dense, sculpted shrubbery. Bonnell Wallace’s home was one of the stately mansions on St. Charles Avenue.
From an intruder’s standpoint, it was a fucking fortress.
Landscape lighting had been well placed for flattering accent. The risk it posed was negligible. Diego saw a hundred ways that the artificial moonlight could be avoided.
Problematic, however, were the spotlights projecting from ground level up onto the exterior walls and bathing them with thousands of watts of illumination. A shadow cast by that light would be thirty feet tall and would look like an ink-print on the gleaming white brick.
He assessed the perfectly maintained lawn and the eighty-thousand-dollar car parked in the circular driveway, and determined that the security system’s quality would also be the best that money could buy. State-of-the-art contacts would be on every door and window, with motion and glass breakage detectors in every room, and, in all likelihood, an invisible beam around the perimeter of the property. If it was broken, a silent alarm would be activated, so that by the time an intruder reached the house, police would already be surrounding it.
None of these obstacles made breaching it impossible, but they presented difficulties that Diego would rather avoid.
Through the front windows, he could see into a room that looked like a study. A heavyset, middle-aged man was seated in a large chair, his feet up on an ottoman, talking on the telephone and frequently sipping from a glass he kept close at hand. He looked relaxed, uncaring that the lighted room was on display and that he could be seen from the street.
That was a statement in itself. Mr. Wallace felt safe.
In this neighborhood, someone who looked like Diego would immediately arouse suspicion. He was confident of his ability to be invisible when he needed to be, but even so, he kept a wary eye out for patrol cars and nosy neighbors out walking their dogs. Rain trickled beneath his collar and down his back. He disregarded it. He hunkered there, nothing except his eyes moving as they periodically scanned his surroundings.
He watched and waited for something to happen. Nothing did, except that Mr. Wallace traded his telephone for a magazine that held his attention for almost an hour. Then he tossed back the remainder of his drink and left the room, switching out the light as he went. A light on the second story came on, remained on for less than ten minutes, then went out.
Diego stayed where he was, but after another hour, when it became apparent to him that Wallace had gone to bed, he decided that his time was better spent somewhere else. He would resume his surveillance in the morning. The Bookkeeper would never be the wiser.
He slithered from his hiding place and walked a few blocks to a commercial area where several bars and restaurants were still open. He spotted a car in a dark and unattended lot and used it to drive himself to within a mile of his home, where he walked away from it, knowing that within minutes urban predators would have it stripped down to the wheels.
He went the rest of the way on foot and let himself into his building without turning on a light. He didn’t make a sound as he entered his underground living quarters. For once, Isobel was sleeping free of bad dreams. Her face was peaceful.
Diego wasn’t at peace and he didn’t sleep.
He sat gazing at Isobel’s serene face and puzzling over why The Bookkeeper had assigned a talent like him to such a Mickey Mouse job as “keeping an eye on” Bonnell Wallace.
“I don’t know.”
Honor’s voice had grown hoarse from repeating those three words. For two hours, Coburn, who was seemingly inexhaustible, had been hammering her with questions about Eddie’s life, going back as far as his early teenage years.
“I didn’t even know him then,” she argued wearily.
“You grew up here. He grew up here.”
“He was three classes ahead of me. We didn’t notice each other until he was a senior, I was a freshman.”
He wanted to know about every aspect of Eddie’s life. “When did his mother die? How did she die? Does she have family he was close to?”
“Nineteen ninety-eight. She was on chemotherapy for breast cancer. Her system was weakened by the treatments, and she died of pneumonia. She had one surviving sister. Eddie’s aunt.”
“Where does she live?”
“She doesn’t. She died in 2002, I think it was. What does she, or any of this, have to do with what you’re looking for?”
“He left some
thing with someone. He put something somewhere. A file. Record book. Diary. Key.”
“Coburn, we’ve been through this. If such a thing exists, I don’t know what it is, much less where to look for it. I’m tired. Please, can’t we wait until morning and pick this up again then?”
“We may be dead in the morning.”
“Right, I may die of exhaustion. In which case, what’s the point?”
He dragged his hand over the lower half of his face. He stared at her long and hard through the darkness, and she thought he was about to relent, when he said, “You or his dad. One of you has to have it.”
“Why not another cop? Fred or Doral? Besides Stan and me, Eddie was closest to the twins.”
“Because whatever it is, it surely implicates them. If they had it, they would have destroyed it. They wouldn’t have been hovering around you for two years.”
“Waiting for me to produce it?”
“Or just to make certain that you never did.” While he thought, he repeatedly socked his fist into his opposite palm. “Who ruled Eddie’s car wreck an accident?”
“The investigating officer.”
He stopped the hand motions. “Let me guess. Fred Hawkins.”
“No. Another cop. He happened upon the wreckage. Eddie was already dead when he arrived.”
“What’s this officer’s name?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to know how he happened upon the wreckage.”
Honor stood up quickly and went out onto the deck but stayed near the exterior wall of the wheelhouse so the slender overhang of the roof would protect her from the rain.
Coburn followed her. “What?”
“Nothing. I needed some air.”
“My ass. What?”
She slumped against the wall, too tired to argue with him. “The officer who investigated Eddie’s car crash was found floating in a bayou a few weeks later. He’d been stabbed.”
“Suspects?”
“No.”
“Unsolved homicide.”
“I suppose. I never heard any more about it.”
“Thorough sons of bitches, aren’t they?” He stood shoulder to shoulder with her, staring out at the rain. “What did Eddie like to do? Bowl? Golf? What?”