Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  “What’s your name?” Kathy Rink says. “We know it isn’t Greg Frye.”

  “I don’t give a shit about his name,” Prager says. “I want my fucking money back.”

  Carr’s having trouble with the words—their meanings don’t keep up with the sounds. And he hasn’t taken any money—not yet. He tries to look at his watch, but again the restraints stop him. He hasn’t taken any money. The air is damp and smells of newly turned earth.

  There’s a noise to Carr’s right, something between a groan and a sob. He turns and sees the hood torn from Bessemer. His head lolls to one side. His face is white and wet with tears, and there’s a triangle of blood spreading from his nose down across his mouth and chin.

  “And you, you fat lying fuck!” Prager shouts. “I trusted you.”

  There are shuffling feet and urgent whispers behind the lights, and Carr tries to look around. He sees a concrete floor beneath him, and open space above. To his left, half in shadow, there is a workbench covered with empty terra-cotta flowerpots, coils of garden hose, and sacks of potting soil. To his right, in a sodden heap in the corner, he sees what’s left of his and Bessemer’s luggage. Everywhere there is the clatter of rain on a tin roof. Bessemer groans again.

  “Not me,” he mutters.

  “Anything broken, Howie?” Carr says softly.

  Prager steps from behind the wall of light. He’s in shirtsleeves, and his hair is wet and wiry. Cords pop in his neck, and veins pulse. Carr is fascinated by them. Prager grabs him by the collar, and Carr can smell his sweat and his fear. “What the fuck did you say? Come on, say it again.”

  “Curt, please,” Kathy Rink says sharply. “Let me do my job.” She emerges from the glare and puts a hand on Prager’s arm.

  He flicks her away like a bug. “I keep waiting for you to start,” he says disgustedly. “Find my money. Find out what the hell he did to my system.”

  Carr blinks his eyes, trying to clear them. Maybe it’s the lingering effects of the Taser, or his collision with the pavement afterward, but his mind is split into several pieces. One piece is trying to establish a basic fact set, and to make it sit still. Someone has hit Isla Privada, ahead of schedule. Prager has found out about the theft. Prager has found out about him. Prager is going to kill him.

  Another piece is a storm of questions. How did Prager find out? Was there a camera he hadn’t seen, a switch he’d tripped? Was he spotted in the house? He doesn’t think so, but anything’s possible. The biggest question—who has stolen Prager’s money—Carr scarcely needs to ask, even in his fractured state. It’s someone in his crew. Maybe everyone in his crew.

  Yet another part of him tries to figure the timing. How many hours passed between Dennis reporting that his spyware had scooped up Prager’s passwords, and Carr being tasered in the hotel lot? Enough time, certainly, for Dennis to call Valerie. Enough time for Valerie to sit down behind Amy Chun’s desk. Enough time to do any number of things, if the people doing them had discipline and a plan. Carr tries to look at his watch again and strains against his plastic cuffs.

  The last scrap of his mind is the busiest—a panting, scrambling thing, searching every inch of this arena of light, probing the shadows at its boundaries, looking for a way out. Flowerpots, garden hoses, potting soil, an upside-down wheelbarrow, what might be a spade, what might be a rake, a garden tractor that is missing a wheel—he’s struggling to turn any of it into a key. Kathy Rink isn’t letting him think.

  She’s sitting on a stool now, her face close to Carr’s. “I said, ‘What do I call you?’ ” Her skin is grainy, and there are deep lines around her mouth. Her breath smells of old coffee.

  “My name’s Greg Frye, but call me what you want.”

  “But that’s not your name, is it?” Carr tries a smile, but the cut in his mouth hurts. “Though your diamonds are for real, and your prints came back as Greg Frye, which—I gotta admit—gives me a scare. You some flavor of cop, Greg?”

  Carr shakes his head. “You seem to have your mind made up about things.”

  “Your prints come back as Greg Frye, and there’s a file for Greg Frye with the Bureau of Prisons, but after that …” Rink shrugs. “How’d you manage that?”

  “If you think I’m a cop, shouldn’t you be a little more careful with the merchandise?”

  Rink holds his Greg Frye passport up. “Not so much, Greg. You and Bessemer checked out of your hotel, and the last anyone heard you were headed for the airport. I want to, I can have a couple of guys with your names on a plane to the ass end of nowhere, just as soon as the airport opens up again. Your handler’ll think you two ran off together.

  “Now, how ’bout you tell me where your buddies are—the ones who put on the little show this afternoon?”

  Carr smiles again. “It seems like something’s happened here, and you think I’m involved.”

  “Something’s happened here?” Prager calls from the shadows. “My whole system is locked up. I might as well be fucking blind.” Kathy Rink looks sharply at him, and then turns back to Carr.

  “I know a lot of people,” Carr continues. “Let me make some calls. Maybe between the two of us we can figure out what’s going on.”

  Kathy Rink produces Carr’s cell phone from somewhere. “Who do you want to call, Greg? Give me your password, and I’ll ring ’em up for you. And speaking of phone calls—who do you think would call Curt, out of the blue, with a heads-up about wire transfers? What reason would they have, and why would they throw your name around?”

  “There are people up in Boston who don’t like me much.”

  “They’re not alone,” Rink says, smiling, and she pats the side of his face.

  There’s a noise behind Rink—a metallic complaint, like a rusty garage door—and the sound of rain grows louder and a breeze blows in. There’s movement beyond the lights, and a man steps into the arena. It’s one of Rink’s crew cuts, carrying several rolls of duct tape. His nose is packed and bandaged, and there’s dried blood on his polo shirt. He glares at Carr through blackened eyes.

  There are two other men with him, and they don’t have crew cuts. One is a suntanned fireplug, with a peroxide ponytail, a camo wife-beater, and tattoos from his collarbones to wrists. He’s got towels over his shoulder and a slant bench under his arm, and he smiles at Rink with crooked teeth. His colleague is small and slim and shaved egg-bald. His skin is the color of oatmeal, and he’s wearing dark glasses and pressed fatigues. He’s got a plastic water jug in each hand—the five-gallon kind that go on water coolers—and he sets them down in front of Carr.

  “I tol’ him we didn’t need so much,” the fireplug says to Rink. His accent is deeply Southern. “When does it take even a gallon? But he don’t listen.”

  “I like to be prepared,” the egg says. His voice is soft, his accent from nowhere.

  Kathy Rink tosses Carr’s phone and passport into the corner, onto the remains of his luggage. “We won’t waste a lot of time going round with threats, or any of that we can do this hard or we can do this easy crap, okay? We both know you’re not gonna say shit unless you have to—and even if you did, I wouldn’t believe it. Besides, after what you did to me today, there’s no way I’m gonna miss this opportunity.”

  The fireplug laughs and puts the slant bench down. He kneels and begins to adjust the angle. Howard Bessemer moans. “Jesus Christ,” he says, his voice a choked whisper. “This wasn’t me. None of this was me.”

  Rink turns to him and frowns. “My problem with you, Howie, is I’m not sure what you’re good for. I mean, I don’t need to put you on the board here—I could just smack you in the head and you’ll tell me whatever it is you think I want to hear. So what exactly do I need you for?”

  Bessemer cranes his neck, trying to see beyond the glare. “Curt! Come on, Curt!”

  And then the lights go out.

  Prager’s is the first voice Carr hears. “Son of a bitch!” he shouts. “Son of a fucking bitch!”

  “Flashlights!” Kat
hy Rink calls. “Somebody get some lights here.”

  There’s scraping, stumbling, cursing, and then two thin, shaky beams cut the black. A pool of light spreads at Kathy Rink’s feet, and another at Prager’s, and then there are radio voices in the air. Someone calls from the darkness: “Power’s out at the main house too.” To which Prager responds: “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  Two more flashlight beams emerge from the dark. Two crew cuts, wet with rain, emerge behind them. “It’s a blackout, sir,” one reports. “The whole north end of the island’s dark.”

  Prager’s voice quivers with anger. “Which is why I have emergency generators and two big tanks of diesel. So where the hell are my lights?”

  “They’re trying, sir. There’s a problem—with a fuel line, they think. They’re working on it, but it’s slow going in the dark.” Prager curses fluently, and Carr stifles a laugh.

  There’s throat clearing, and then the fireplug’s voice. “This isn’t the kind of thing you want to do by flashlight, Kath. I’m up for it if you are, but truth is, we might drown the fucker without meaning it.”

  Rink curses under her breath. “How long till we get the lights back?” she yells.

  There’s whispering and radio static, and then an answer. “An hour, maybe two.”

  “Fuck!” Prager shouts in the dark.

  For a moment there is just the rain, hammering at the roof, sweeping through the foliage, and then Rink speaks. “I’m thinking we should take a break, Curt—wait till we have light to work by.” There’s no response from the darkness, and she tries again. “Curt?”

  There’s an embarrassed cough, and one of the crew cuts answers nervously. “He left, ma’am. I think he went up to the house.”

  “Shit,” Rink whispers, and then, in a louder voice: “Let’s button it up for an hour, boys.” She points at two of her crew cuts. “Colley, Marco—you two are outside.” And she looks at the fireplug. “C’mon, Vic, I’ll buy you and Amory a beer.”

  The fireplug nods, and the egg smooths his fatigue pants. “I want Pepsi,” he says.

  44

  There are footsteps, and the beams of light tremble and diminish, and the garage door scrapes down. The sound of rain is muted, the breeze vanishes, and the darkness is complete.

  Bessemer sobs. “Is this part of it? Leaving us in the dark.”

  “It’s a blackout, and let’s hope it lasts.”

  “I don’t even know where we are.”

  “There’s a shed next to the greenhouse, with garden equipment in it. I’m pretty sure this is it.”

  Bessemer sobs again. “What the hell did you get me into?”

  “Now’s not the time, Howie. Now we get the hell out of Dodge. Can you walk?”

  “Walk? I don’t know if I can stand. My face hurts like a son of a bitch; I think they broke my nose. Besides, where am I supposed to walk?”

  “I’m leaving, and you’d better come along.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not going anywhere—you think I want to get in deeper?”

  “It doesn’t get deeper than this,” Carr says, and he stands and shuffles slowly forward, navigating from memory. Around the slant bench, the water jugs, the light stands, toward the tractor. His shin smacks into something smooth and metal.

  “What are you doing?” Bessemer says.

  Carr turns around and stretches his arms back. “I hope I’m turning on a light,” he says. He runs nearly numb fingers across a landscape of plastic textures—pebbled, cross-hatched, tacky, and smooth—until he finds the ridges of the tractor’s little steering wheel. Then he reaches down and scrabbles over knobs and switches until he touches a key. Carr turns it, and the tractor’s headlights come on—sickly beams that barely cross the room. To Carr, they are flares in a mineshaft.

  Bessemer’s voice is a frightened hiss. “They’ll see!”

  “The only windows are in back, Howie—those narrow slits near the ceiling. No one will see.”

  Carr follows the light to a workbench on the wall. He peers at the tabletop, then turns around and strains his arms back until his fingers catch the garden shears. “Stand up,” he tells Bessemer.

  “Why?”

  “Because that way there’s less chance I’ll slash your wrists.”

  “What?”

  “And for chrissakes stand still.”

  It takes two tries, back-to-back with the shears, and though Carr doesn’t slash Bessemer’s wrists, he does slice through his trousers and a chunk of his belt.

  “Now cut mine,” Carr says.

  Bessemer cuts the plastic in one clean pass, and Carr massages his wrists and cold hands. “Now what?” Bessemer says.

  “Now sit down again, and put your hands behind your back.” Carr carries his own chair to the back of the room and places it beneath one of the narrow windows. He goes to the workbench, retrieves a pry bar from a hook on the wall, and stands on his chair.

  “What are you doing?” Bessemer says. “We can’t get out that way.”

  “No?”

  “Maybe you can fit through, but I can’t. Are you going to leave me here?”

  Carr reaches up and slips the pry bar between the cinder-block wall and the window’s aluminum frame. He grunts with effort and then there’s a sound of rending metal and breaking glass, and he looks down at Bessemer. “Better sound the alarm, Howie.”

  And Bessemer does. Loudly. Loud enough to be heard over the lashing rain.

  The metal door rolls up and two flashlight beams catch Bessemer in mid-yell. “The bastard, the son of a bitch—he left me here. That fucking prick went out the window and left me here!”

  The lights dart and circle and find Carr’s chair, and the broken glass and mangled window frame on the floor. Rain is blowing through the rectangular gap.

  “Shit,” the taller crew cut says. He draws his Glock and crosses to the window. His partner draws his gun too, but stays in the doorway, and Carr takes him first—the pry bar to the crotch, to the kidney, to the back of the head. There’s an explosive bellow and the taller crew cut turns, is frozen for an instant, and brings his gun up.

  And Carr is on him at a run. He clamps both hands on the Glock, forces it down, and drives his shoulder into the crew cut’s chest. The crew cut goes back against the wall and the gun goes off and Carr snaps his head down hard on the bridge of the crew cut’s nose. There’s a crack and the crew cut’s grip loosens. Carr tears the Glock free as the crew cut hits him with the flashlight. It catches him on the shoulder and bounces hard against his ear, and Carr hammers the crew cut again and again on the side of his head until he goes over.

  Carr is breathing hard as he strips the guards of flashlights, guns, radios, cash. He goes to the corner and runs a light over their wrecked bags. He picks through the pile and retrieves their wallets and passports.

  Bessemer is still sitting, gripping the seat of his chair. “Jesus Christ,” he whispers. “Are … are they dead?”

  Carr rubs the side of his head and stands in the open doorway. “Not yet,” he says, “though Rink might change that. We better get a move on; someone probably heard that shot.”

  Outside they are drenched in an instant, and their flashlight beams are swallowed whole.

  “Christ!” Bessemer says, struggling to keep up. “Is this even a path?”

  “It’ll take us to the boathouse,” Carr says, “assuming we can stay on it.”

  “What do we do there?”

  “Get in a boat.”

  “In this? Are you crazy?”

  “I don’t like it, but I don’t like cutting across the property either, much less making it over the fence. I don’t know how many men Rink has here, but it won’t be long before they’re all out looking for us. They’re not going to look for us out there.”

  The wind gusts and twists, shoving them sideways, shoving them forward, shoving them back. Palm fronds snap past them and sand scours their faces. The ocean is a flailing, howling thing, much too close in the dark.


  “The money,” Bessemer shouts, though he is right at Carr’s back. “I thought nothing was going to happen until we were in Florida.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” Carr says, and he pulls his mind away from a thousand questions about who did what, and when they did it, and where they are right now. There’s a squawk on the radio, and Carr stops and holds it to his ear.

  “Dammit,” he says. “Someone’s calling the guys at the toolshed.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Go faster.”

  But they’re not fast enough. They’re not halfway to the boathouse when a ribbon of light appears behind them. “They’ve got power in the guesthouse,” Carr says, and he looks up through the whipping trees. “And in the main house too.”

  “And there,” Bessemer says, pointing. There are lights at the boathouse, and more lights moving down the path.

  Carr looks back. “They’re coming from the greenhouse too,” he says. He grabs Bessemer’s collar and hauls him off the path, through bushes and branches, onto wet sand. The surf is white and frenzied before them, streaming across the beach and past the line of palm trees. The bay is boiling ink.

  Carr drops the guns and radio to the sand. “Take off your shoes,” he shouts.

  Somehow Bessemer’s face finds new terror. “What?”

  “You a strong swimmer?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a simple choice: stay here and die, or take our chances out there.”

  “There is no chance out there.”

  “We’ll head west, around the jetty. There should be some protection in the bay, but we need to stay clear of the rocks.”

  “We … we could hide.”

  “They’re going to search every inch of this property until they find us, Howie, and when they do, they’re going to torture us and kill us. So now’s the time.”

  Carr wades in and the cold is like a fist clenched around his lungs. He loses his breath and nearly loses his footing, and in two steps he’s up to his neck. “Now, Howie.”