by Nick Thacker
“Yeah, I’m picking up on that,” I said. “Thanks for telling me what you know, though, I guess. Next time don’t make me beg for it.”
“Next time there won’t be a next time.”
“So what’s your plan?” I asked. It was worth a shot, anyway. “You do have a plan, right?”
“We’re already working the plan,” he replied, sounding a bit short. “Follow you, watch the house, wait for more information.”
“Wait for infor — what the hell is wrong with you?” I asked. “If she’s in the house, go get her.”
“We can’t, Mason. It’s not that simple. First, we never had the visual confirmation that she is in the house. She could have left again, somehow. Maybe an underground tunnel or something. Or she might not have even gone into the house in the first place. My guy could have seen a maid, or someone coming to help with the funeral, or something like that. Second, these things always take time. She’s not just a hostage, Mason. She’s part of a major international investigation involving more services than just mine. And she’s either a major player in something much larger, or she’s not a player at all.”
“Which means what, exactly?” I asked.
“Which means she’s not the target.”
My mouth fell open. It was all clear to me, and I’d missed it. Of course they would wait. Of course they didn’t care about Hannah’s safe retrieval. She was a pawn in a larger game, or she was the queen herself. Either way, she was part of a game. Negotiating, espionage, maneuvering. It was all part of the game.
But she wasn’t the final victory. She was the spoils of war.
Truman’s job was to figure out who was playing the game, and take them down. His job was to disband the multi-whatever-illion-dollar gambit being played around all of us, stop Crimson Club’s illegal activity, and bring the players to justice.
A tall order, but I’d seen him tackle taller things.
At the moment, however, I didn’t give a shit about Truman. He was a big boy, and he had been one a lot longer than I had. I cared about Hannah, even more now that I understood what she had become a part of.
Everything was swirling around her, but I’m not sure there was a single sole involved outside of me who actually cared what happened to her by the end of it.
“You don’t care if she lives or dies, do you?”
“I — no, Mason, don’t put words in my mouth. Of course I want her to live, but —“
“There’s nothing that comes after that ‘but’ that’s going to convince me.”
“Dammit, Mason, it’s my job.”
“And mine is to make drinks for people.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means exactly what it sounds like. I have a simple job: ‘make drinks for people who come to my bar.’ You have a simple job, too: ‘do what your boss tells you.’ At the end of the day, it’s the same job. You mix up the drink that the big brass upstairs tells you to, and they drink it. But there’s more to any job. You know that. You know I know that. There’s nuance, and complexity. And you and I are cursed with a specific set of skills that makes it more than just simple oversight. We let people like Hannah die and it’s on us, just because we could have stopped it. We’re trained for this. Besides that —“
“I don’t need a damn lecture from you, Mason.”
I screamed again. “And I don’t need you to feign ignorance to qualify your shitty justifications!”
“Jesus, Mason,” Truman said, verbally distancing himself by dropping his voice to a near whisper and then pausing for a few seconds. “You care about this girl, I get that. But if you can tell me how to get her back without getting any of my guys killed, or me, you, or any of her captors — which we’ll need to bring in for questioning — then I’m all ears.”
I thought for a moment. I already had a plan, but I knew ‘run in and shoot everything in sight until I had Hannah, and then shoot my way out’ wasn’t going to fly for Truman. I thought harder. “You don’t need to bring in all of the guys.”
“I need at least one of them,” Truman admitted. “Preferably the ringleader, or one of the men in charge.”
“And you don’t need all of your agents to live,” I added.
“Mason…”
“Kidding. But seriously, though. You guys have a real thing for paralysis by analysis, you know that? Obviously you’ve heard of collateral damage?”
“We have an entire department dedicated to cooking up reports about it,” Truman said. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “They tell me it’s statistically likely that I’ll lose at least four percent of my agents on any live-fire mission.”
“And how many do you have on this mission?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Let’s say it’s four. That’s usually about what it is, right? In-the-field, buckled-down agents ready for anything, two hardened and two wet-behind-the-ears?”
No answer.
“Right. So four percent of four agents. That’s what — losing an arm? Maybe a little leg?”
“This isn’t a joke, Mason.”
“I’m not the one sitting on my ass waiting for something to happen!” I shouted, even surprising myself at the volume. I instinctively ducked a little lower in the car and looked around outside. “You need to get those men into the mansion and have them look around. Shake it out a little bit. I’d bet they’ll find something you can use, and if not — hell, you’re the FBI, just say it was a training exercise.”
I heard Truman trying to calm himself by breathing steadily. It didn’t sound like it was working.
“I’m not going to waste any more of your time,” I said. “I’ve got what I need, and —“
“You’re not going to do anything rash,” Truman said. It sounded like a question, as if he was trying to convince himself. I wasn’t sure if I should let him believe it or let him think he shouldn’t believe it. I said nothing. “You’re not moving on this one, Mason.”
I sat there, watching the empty streets roll slowly by until I saw the end of the road and just beyond that my tiny, lonely bar at the end of the strip. I turned the wheel to the left and pulled in to the access road toward the alleyway.
“Far as I’m concerned, Truman, we’re on completely different cases. You’ve got your hands full with this Crimson Club crap. I couldn’t care less about those jokers. I’ve got one job, and I’ll be damned if you or anyone else is going to stop me from doing it.”
I knew Truman long enough to know that a direct threat like that would severely piss him off.
But I also knew that his hands were tied, and I had a good feeling he wanted nothing more than to hear me speak those words.
38
I WAITED ON THE ACCESS street and watched out the rearview mirror. The headlights of Joey’s car flooded the fence and section of alley road in front of me and bounced back to light part of the tiny strip of road the car was sitting in. For a minute I thought they’d already pulled off, but then I saw what I was looking for.
The car that had followed me all the way in had turned off its headlights and was cruising real slow, the way a man gets followed when he’s on the wrong side of a city on the wrong side of the tracks with the wrong color of skin. Because they were in the dark and the only real light was from my own headlights, the angle made it impossible to see the person in the driver’s seat. They knew it, too, because they stopped fully on the other side of the main road I’d just turned off of. They just sat there for a few seconds, and I could feel the agent’s eyes on mine. He wouldn’t be able to make out any details because of the light — I would just be a dark silhouette to him — but he would already know what I looked like.
He may even have had a dossier open on the seat next to him, my glossy 8x10 face from fifteen years ago glaring up at him in two dimensions. More likely, Truman had force-fed him the information he’d needed to tail me, and the guy already had my face burned into his short-term memory the way only an FBI
agent can do.
Whatever. The next few seconds were crucial, as it determined whether or not I’d gotten the nonverbal go-ahead from Truman. I watched the car, he watched me. A standoff. I knew Joey was waiting for me, probably already waiting out on the back steps. Maybe wondering why he saw the headlights but not the car.
Finally, just when I thought Truman might have smartened up in his old age and done something I wouldn’t have expected, the car pulled away.
The agent drove off, accelerating naturally and easily, the least excited way to move a vehicle I had ever seen. He had simply fallen into motion, as if pulling away from a curb after picking up kids from soccer practice.
Truman had, with that order, given me the all-clear: he wanted me where he couldn’t yet go. He wanted me to push on, to get Hannah, to cut loose and clear the way for his far more civilized experts to enter unobstructed to clean up the mess.
It was a good call, and it was what I had been hoping for. Truman was still the same grouchy old curmudgeon, but he was a grouchy old curmudgeon who was brutally efficient and tactically logical. He had a ‘free play’ card with me, and he’d decided to use it. I was a bit of a loose cannon to him, I figured, but a loose cannon that was at least facing the same enemy he was facing.
I figured his agents would still be paying attention to me, but they had been called off the all-night watch. I probably had a tracking beacon somewhere on my person or car, and they’d let that be enough for now.
I was fine with that, and I was fine with Truman’s decision. As much as I wanted to believe it was out of loyalty or respect to me, or preferential treatment, I knew it was, in truth, a utilitarian decision. By sending me in first, he could not only claim plausible deniability — he would say he had no idea what my plan was, which was mostly true — and he would have much less of a chance to lose men.
The possibility of achieving what his bosses wanted him to achieve without having to do the bulk of the work himself or with his field agents would be a huge win for him.
And he had decided that knowingly allowing me to run headfirst into danger was a smaller price to pay.
And I was fine with that decision as well.
I pulled the car forward into the alley, turned left, then backed it up so I could get out right on the steps leading up into the kitchen and office area.
“Hey boss,” I heard Joey say as I stepped out. He had been just out of the light of the steps.
“Joey,” I replied. “Everything wrapped up tight here?”
“With a bow. You see the sign on the door?”
“No, sorry. You went with something other than ‘gone killing,’ right?”
“Yeah, sure.” He winked at me.
“Well I’m glad you had fun. I’m afraid the fun’s over. You ready?”
“Honestly?” he asked. “No. I have no idea what we’re doing.”
“You wrote the sign, Joey. What the hell do you think we’re doing?”
He didn’t answer.
I followed Joey up the steps into the darkened bar. Joey had shut down, cleaned up, and prepared the bar for the next opening day’s service. A few emergency lights were on at all times, and it was enough to cast the entire place in an eerie, post-apocalyptic glow. Aside from making the labels on the bottles hard to read, I didn’t hate it. It toned everything down a bit and made all the imperfections melt away into the soft glow of my imagination’s perfection. I walked into the main room and took up a seat on the customer side of the bar.
“Pour you one?” Joey asked. He walked to the opposite side of the bar and raised an eyebrow, waiting for me to deliver my order.
“What are you drinking tonight?”
“Oh, I’ve had a daiquiri with a gal in from Charleston for the weekend, staying with her parents, and a Mai Tai with a middle-aged guy on his midlife crisis who thought South Carolina was the Bahamas and was pissed the surfing wasn’t any good.”
I smiled. “He’s a surfer?”
Joey laughed. “Hardly. Weighed about three-hundred pounds, balding in all the wrong places and growing hair in all the worse ones. Couldn’t barely stay balanced on the barstool. But he could’ve drank me under the table. Three Mai Tais and a Bahama Mama to finish it off.”
I never prohibited Joey from drinking on the job, figuring it was better for business if he could throw a few back with the locals every now and then. Besides, I was usually liquored up quite a bit when I served, and I never wanted to be the type of boss that held a double standard.
The rule for me was that I condoned drinking, but not being drunk. Being drunk meant being unable to maintain the situational awareness required to serve well, and serve fast. It meant being unable to engage in the type of conversation I knew our customers came to us for — smart, quick, and witty. Drunkenness significantly diminished anyone’s ability to engage in useful conversation.
Finally, I never wanted to be unfit for identifying and pressing a mark. And since Joey worked for me as an employee and a contracted laborer for our moonlighting gig, I needed him to be mostly sober as well.
We laughed about the midlife-crisis guy for a few minutes. We got that sort of thing in here every now and then, I told him. They’d come down from somewhere up north, sometimes even North Carolina or Virginia, hoping to find a Florida Keys-esque tiki bar dripping free rum and cokes and nubile women waltzing around seductively on wide-open white sand beaches. They ended up here, for whatever reason, and they could never hide their disappointment.
We always treated them nice, explaining that the sort of escape they were looking for was still a few hundred miles straight down the map, at least. But they should stay and enjoy a drink while they were here. They’d ask for something fruity, boozy, and sweet.
“So a tiki drink it is, then,” I said. “Seems fitting.”
“How’s that?” he asked, turning to reach for two different kinds of rum.
“Sweetness for revenge, boozy for bold and rash decisions, and feeling like shit the next day for…”
“For hoping there is a next day,” Joey said.
I smiled again. “I like that. A tiki drink it is.”
“Perfect,” he said. “I’ll whip up two of this concoction I’ve been working on, but you start telling me this amazing plan you’ve been working on.”
He grabbed another bottle — I couldn’t read the label in the dark, but I knew it was Velvet Falernum. I watched him pour a jigger of it into a Boston shaker filled with ice, along with a few jiggers of the rums, then finally a half-jigger of pineapple juice. He shook it for a solid twenty seconds, just like I’d taught him, then strained out the fruity, foamy mixture into two copper mugs.
I thought he was done, but then he grabbed a bottle of one of our best bourbons and a bar spoon and poured a floater of whiskey on top of the drinks.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s a hell of a drink.”
“For a hell of a plan,” he said, not looking up from his work.
“In that case, you’d probably better pour another shot of bourbon on that.”
39
JOEY AND I DRANK HIS creation, a delicious medley of a tiki drink with a boozy finish, and I asked for another. I didn’t want him to think I was getting to be a lightweight, but I had to admit to myself that the drink was very boozy — I wasn’t sure how many more of them I could handle. Thankfully, however, rather than mix up another round of tiki drinks he poured straight from the bourbon bottle this time, then asked about the plan again.
“‘Plan’ is really too strong a word,” I said. “It’s more like ‘general idea.’”
“Okay, fair enough,” Joey said. “What’s the ‘general idea’ about what we’re going to do?”
“Well, my first inclination is to go in Rambo style. Figure we find the bad guys right away because they’ll be shooting back at us. Then we can pick up the pieces later, when it’s all clear.”
“But that won’t work?”
I nodded, holding a sip of bourbon in my mouth for a
few seconds until I felt it burn the edges of my gums where they met my teeth. I held it just another second, closing my eyes and breathing in through my nose, then swallowed. Corny, vanilla aromas transformed into beautiful oaky caramel flavors as the expensive bourbon fell through my senses.
I nodded again, this time for the whiskey. “Yeah,” I said. “That won’t work. They’re holding her at the mansion, and there’s a funeral there on Sunday.”
“They gave you an ultimatum, though, right?” Joey asked. “Something about ‘by Saturday?’”
“Yeah, they want this whole mess cleared up no later than Saturday. They think I offed her father, or something like that, because I wanted the company.”
Joey’s eyes widened. “Well that’s a twist.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it is. But it makes sense. They can’t really ignore me, since they’re not entirely sure of my involvement. I helped Hannah and her brother, and that makes me something to them.”
“But a person interested in their company? Why?”
I thought for a minute, and recounted my reasoning on the way back to Edisto Beach. “Because I was in the right place at the right time — Bradley Rayburn ends up dead, likely not a suicide, and then I’m ready to go when a hitman comes in for her. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, I get all bent out of shape and take it out on another one of their guys, after I killed one of them and injured two more.”
“Don’t forget about the fishbait you brought back in the trunk.”
“Right, so I killed two of their guys. Whatever. Doesn’t help my case any. From their perspective, I’m the silent partner — I’m the one who wants that piece of Crimson Club. They — whoever they are — have probably been working on this play for years. And I show up out of the blue and start messing around in Hannah’s affairs, it’s going to piss them off.”
“Not to mention make you look like the culprit.”
“Right,” I said, nodding again. “Which also doesn’t help me out with the government types.”