Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  Then came the cash withdrawals. There were nearly forty of those, over the course of five days, in Zurich, Basel, and Luxembourg—in amounts ranging from one million to three million euro. They made for heavy briefcases, but nothing a healthy courier couldn’t handle. Once in cash, the money became nearly impossible to trace. Carr suspects it didn’t travel far—to banks down the street from the banks it came out of, most likely, and into another set of accounts.

  It was elaborate, and it must’ve taken at least a year, and a fair amount of money, just to set up the shell companies and open the bank accounts. A lot of planning, and more discipline than Carr would’ve expected from him, but maybe that was her influence. There’s motion on the beach, and Carr shifts the binoculars. The dog is in the water now, snapping at sea foam, his jaws closing on nothing. Carr knows how he feels.

  Three months of staring at account numbers, wire transfer logs, bank statements, flight manifests, and security camera footage have left him feeling alternately like an accountant and a cop, and both of them empty-handed. But dead ends, bleary eyes, overcaffeination, and exhaustion notwithstanding, he hasn’t minded the work, or even Boyce’s microscopic scrutiny of him while he does it. In fact, he’s welcomed it—welcomed anything that occupied his brain, and left room for nothing else. Not for thoughts of how blind he was, how foolish, or how wrong. Not for guilt or hungry rage.

  Mostly, the job has fit that bill, but even amid the columns of numbers, the megabytes of data, and the stacks of paper, there’s been downtime. The flights are the worst, and commercial or private makes no difference. Something about the long sleepless stretches, or the darkened cabins, or the dead, cold air, or the unceasing grind of the engines, or maybe all of those things together—something summons them. Memories of Bobby and Dennis in the workhouse, in Boca—the flies and the smell—of Ray-Ray in the morgue, in Mendoza, his blackened bones and clawing fingers; of Howard Bessemer, white and bloated and spinning through the waves; of Amy Chun’s hands—

  “Kitchen window,” Mr. Boyce whispers.

  Carr shifts his binoculars and sees a silhouette moving in the yellow square. “Can you tell who?” he asks.

  “No,” Boyce says. He touches the mic on his neck and whispers something. They watch in silence, and after a while the shadow disappears from the window. After another while, Boyce sighs and lowers his binoculars.

  “You called your father last night?” he asks Carr.

  “You know I did.”

  Boyce nods imperceptibly. “How is he doing?”

  “He’s okay. I’m sure you know that too.”

  “I don’t eavesdrop.”

  “Your distinctions are too subtle for me.”

  Boyce smiles. “How’s he getting along with Margie?”

  “As well as he does with anyone. Which is not well.”

  “She was an army nurse for twenty years—I think she can handle it. Margie can stay on with him, you know. She likes it up there.”

  Carr shakes his head. “After this, I go back. That was the deal—that, and the money. Nothing’s changed.”

  “I just want you to know you have options.”

  Carr points down the hill. A door has opened near the kitchen window, and a rectangle of yellow light falls on the patio stones. A shadow—the elongated shape of a man—fills the rectangle. The shadow is still, and Carr finds that he’s holding his breath. The door closes again and Carr sighs.

  Boyce chuckles softly. “He’s like a dog, sniffing the air. His hackles are up, but he doesn’t know why.”

  Carr looks at his watch and looks at the sky. Three months, and the end is a hillside away. He feels his heart rate rise, and a tightness spread through his shoulders and down his arms. “He’ll know soon enough.”

  Boyce turns to look at him. “You’re sure about going in alone?”

  “I’m sure. You’ll be cleaning up with sponges otherwise.”

  “And you don’t want to bring anything?”

  “The wire is enough,” Carr says. “There’ll be more than enough guns in there.” Three months.

  Mr. Boyce reads his thoughts. “It’s been a long time,” he says in a quiet rumble. “A long time chasing. A lot of time to think. To brood. I know a little something about disloyalty, but now’s not the moment to get impatient or sloppy or … emotional.”

  Carr’s laugh is quiet and rueful. “I thought I was just tired.”

  “You are. Anger is tiring.”

  Carr rubs a hand across the stubble on his jaw. “The light’s coming up,” he says.

  Boyce checks his watch and whispers something into his mic. He waits for an answer, and then looks at Carr. “It’s time then.”

  Inhale, exhale, not too fast.

  49

  Carr is quiet down the hillside and across the patio, but when he opens the door he knows he hasn’t been quiet enough.

  Declan is looking up from a newspaper spread on a long table. He’s holding a pair of reading glasses in one big hand, and a Taurus nine-millimeter casually—almost carelessly—in the other. Neither one of them moves or speaks, and blood rushes madly in Carr’s ears.

  Then Declan smiles. It’s huge and crooked, and it engages every crag and freckle on his ruddy face. His eyes gleam, and Carr would swear the light gets brighter. “You got grass stains on your knees, lad, and you look like pickled death. You better have yourself a coffee.” The brogue is stronger than ever.

  Carr nods slowly. “Coffee would be good.”

  “I just put the pot on. There’s breakfast too, if you like. Fry up some eggs?”

  “Just coffee, I think.”

  “Coffee then,” Declan says. He slips the gun into the waistband of his pajamas and pads barefoot across the tile floor. He takes two mugs from a cabinet. “And would you close the door, lad—unless your friends are comin’ too.”

  Carr shuts the door. “Not yet.”

  Declan smiles. “Not yet,” he repeats.

  “You lost some weight,” Carr says. “And I like the beard—even with all the gray. You look good.” Actually, he looks older to Carr—leathery, smaller, and somehow desiccated, like an old boot.

  “Death agrees with me.”

  Carr smiles. “You don’t seem too surprised.”

  “Had a feeling the past few days. Not even a feeling—more like an itch I couldn’t reach, or a yen for something, but I didn’t know what. So, not entirely surprised.”

  “Surprised it’s me?”

  Declan shakes his head. “When I heard you’d gotten yourself away from Prager, I figured if it was anyone, there was a better than even chance it’d be you.” He points a thumb across the open living room, at what Carr knows is a bedroom door. “I told her that. And I told her yesterday that something was up. But she wasn’t havin’ any. She said I was paranoid—an old woman was how she put it. She can be … unkind.”

  Carr nods. “Yes, so I’ve seen.”

  The coffee is ready, and Declan pours it out and carries the mugs to the table. He fetches a can of condensed milk from the pantry, shakes it, and punches the top with a can opener. “I remember you like this stuff,” he says. Carr pours some milk in, stirs, and takes a sip. Declan smiles. “I can see you’re feeling more spry already.”

  Carr nods, but actually he’s more exhausted than ever. He studies Declan across the table and tries to find some other feelings. Rage? Hatred? Disgust? He’s harbored them all over the long months—nurtured them, savored them sometimes—but now they’ve abandoned him. He tries to conjure them up, recalling images of Bobby and Dennis, of Howard Bessemer’s white face and Amy Chun’s pleading hands—images that he’s run from for three months—but it’s like turning out empty pockets. There’s nothing there.

  Or almost nothing. He looks at Declan’s shoulders, slumped in striped pajamas, his gray-streaked beard and graying hair, the little gold hoop—that’s new too, and even more ridiculous than the beard—his reading glasses and bloodshot eyes, and finds a speck of something. A grain of �
�� pity? It confuses Carr, and he’s relieved to have questions to fall back on.

  “So, how was it supposed to work?” he asks.

  Declan drinks some coffee and smiles ruefully. “Not to put too fine a point on it, lad, but you weren’t supposed to walk away from Prager’s.”

  “It was hardly a walk.”

  “I can only imagine. But if you’d stayed put, it would’ve looked like your crew had fucked you, and then fucked one another: three down and the other two in the wind, and no one to say different. Boyce could beat the bushes for them as long as he wanted, but in the end who would he find?”

  “And of course no one would be out looking for you.”

  Declan smiles. “Death benefits.”

  “Which, I gather, was the point of the theatrics in Mendoza.”

  “I needed room to move, yes, and also some extra operating capital. Setting up that pipeline wasn’t cheap.”

  “It was goddamn expensive for Ray-Ray.”

  Declan’s face darkens for a moment. “Don’t think I was happy about it—I wasn’t. I’d planned for him to drive with Bobby and Mike on the way out, but things were a little crazy.”

  “No crazier than you wanted, though. I mean, it was you who gave Bertolli and his men the heads-up about the raid, right?”

  Again the smile. “They were more eager than I expected.”

  “They didn’t shoot you off that road, though. That was you again, right?” Declan nods modestly. “And you had a ride waiting out of there?”

  “A four-by-four. I drove off-road after that, back to Mendoza, and it was hell on my kidneys.”

  “And the body alongside Ray-Ray’s?”

  “The fellow that brought me my four-by-four.”

  Carr shakes his head. “What did you do in Mendoza?”

  “I laid up for a couple of weeks, then made my way to Mexico. Short hops, nice and easy.”

  “Home free, while we were weeping at your grave.”

  “From what I heard, you two weren’t doing much weeping—you and Val.”

  Carr’s throat tightens. “You didn’t worry we’d scrap the job?”

  Declan laughs. “Walk away from that payday? I knew you a lot better than that.” He points his thumb at the bedroom door again. “She was worried about it, though—worried about you running things, frankly—but I told her you were the man for the job. Told her to help you out too—lend a sympathetic ear, and so forth.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Carr says softly. He drinks some coffee and struggles to get it down. “Bobby and Mike didn’t share your faith. They didn’t like my management style. Half the time they were ready to walk. So was I, for that matter. The rest of the time I was thinking that they’d sold you to Bertolli. That’s why I made a deal with Boyce—told him I’d stay on only if he’d look into what happened down there. But I guess you know all about that.”

  “I was touched when I heard, lad—really.”

  “But not worried.”

  Another rueful smile. “Well, no—there was never much chance you’d find anything I didn’t want found. And you know my thoughts about idle hands—I figured the more you had on your mind, the less opportunity there was of you getting into anything too troublesome. Bobby and Mike and their money-laundering shenanigans were a surprise, it’s true—those feckin’ pirates—but it helped to keep you busy.

  “And in the end, you pulled it off! It was a knotty piece of work, with all sorts of unexpected shite falling on your head, but you made it happen. A true classic!”

  Carr shakes his head. “Then I went and fucked things up by not letting Prager kill me.”

  “You left us scrambling, yes, but I was still a dead man, and we had faith in the pipeline we’d laid down, and that we’d left no trail to this little hidey-hole. And so I must ask you, lad—what brought you to our doorstep? It wasn’t following the cash, was it?”

  “No, you covered those tracks too well. We did find Mike’s body, out in the ’Glades, and we found that guy you dropped in Lake Worth—the Russian kid. He was what—your computer guy?”

  “He was no Dennis, but he was good enough to steal Prager’s password off the server Dennis’s spyware sent it to. Of course, we did tell him where to look, didn’t we? But he was good enough to bring Prager’s systems down for close to a week. That was a help—a nice head start.”

  “We found one of your couriers too, in a landfill outside Frankfurt.”

  Declan snorts. “And he deserved every screaming second of it, the suited prick—running off with my luggage like that. I’d kill the bastard again if I could.”

  Carr nods. “I’m sure. Anyway, he’s about as far as we followed the cash.”

  “Then how did you manage it?”

  “It was the real estate.”

  “What—this place?”

  “You used to talk about this neck of the woods, once upon a time, when you played retirement geography—you and Bobby and Mike and Dennis and Ray-Ray. You used to talk about Punta and José Ignacio and La Paloma—this whole stretch of coast. How wide the beaches were, the blond sand, the fishing. And then, about two years back, you stopped talking about it. You just dropped it—never mentioned it again. You talked about plenty of other places afterward—in Vietnam, in Thailand—but not here.”

  “Fuck me. I didn’t think anyone was paying attention.”

  “I was. It was your favorite place, and then it wasn’t. Was that when it started, the planning for all this—two years ago?”

  “Who keeps track?” Declan says, smiling. “A pretty slim reed, though, wasn’t it—some game we used to play?”

  Carr nods. “It was grasping at straws, for sure—but what else was there to do? The money trail was cold. So I looked for purchases of private homes—beachfront property only—made by foreign individuals or companies where payment was in cash. Anytime in the past two years. Anywhere from Punta, north to Costa Azul. It was a shot in the dark, but this stretch of coastline isn’t all that long. Hell, the whole country isn’t that big. Turned out there weren’t so many purchases to sort through. And, of course, Boyce has the resources.”

  Declan’s face darkens and he shakes his head. “Doesn’t he though, lad—a whole feckin’ empire at his feet. And have you finally sussed out who it is you’re working for?”

  “It didn’t take much figuring. All that access, all that data, the intel reports …”

  “Your old dad will be pleased to know you’re serving your country again.”

  “I’m a consultant,” Carr says, frowning. “A subcontractor.”

  Declan’s laugh is bitter. “That’s what you tell yerself. That’s how it starts. The bastard doesn’t want Prager’s money, you know—he never did. He wants Prager himself—his very own bent banker as a pet, and all that intel on Prager’s clients, current and future. He was going to squeeze Prager—threaten to rat to his clients that a hundred million of their money had walked out the door—if Prager didn’t roll over.”

  Carr nods. “Which is what he did. Boyce squeezed, and Prager rolled over.”

  “So things worked out fer him after all—that’s grand.”

  “Don’t kid yourself—Boyce is out of pocket one hundred million plus some hefty expenses. He wants his money back. And I want mine.”

  Declan’s laugh is full of irony. “Ah, young Carr, is that what all this is about to you—nothing more than money?”

  Carr pushes his mug across the table. His face is hot. “I could ask you the same. Was this just about money to you? Was it worth the fucking body count?”

  “Don’t moralize, lad. I’m a thief—same as them. Same as you.”

  “I didn’t slaughter the men I worked with.”

  Declan stands quickly and runs a hand through his hair. “You think that’s what I set out to do?”

  “I think you have an amazing ability to rationalize just about anything. That firefight at Bertolli’s place, being out there in the dark, blasting away, making it up as you go�
�I think you love shit like that. It’s right up your alley. I think the only thing you love more than money and yourself is risk—and fuck the collateral damage. If there are bodies in the street, it’s their own damn fault for getting in the way.”

  “They knew the downside of this work, same as you. They knew what could happen.”

  “Bessemer didn’t know it. Amy Chun didn’t know it.”

  “Bessemer was never going to make it, and Chun was questionable.”

  Carr’s jaw aches from clenching. “And what about our own guys? Did they know that their biggest risk was the man they were working for? For chrissakes, they trusted you!”

  “Trust? You naive ass—you think they wouldn’t have sold you out? You thought they’d ratted me to Bertolli. You thought they were going to do the same to you—and they might’ve, lad, given half a chance. Look what they did in Mendoza: ran off when the shooting started—with a chunk of my money, mind—and then lied to you about it. They’re professional liars! You’re telling me you trust men like that?”

  Carr shakes his head in disbelief. “You don’t seriously believe that, do you?”

  “You should thank me for opening your eyes. They were thieves and killers, not my feckin’ kids. You were on borrowed time with them, same as me—only I had borrowed more.”

  “So that makes it okay, then? We were going to fuck you eventually, unless you fucked us first?”

  Declan waves a hand, as if he’s shooing a fly. “This is a young man’s game, and I was too long at it. It was just a matter of time, and that bastard Boyce wasn’t going to let me retire. He won’t let you go either, you’ll see.”

  Carr pushes away from the table and looks out the window. Light is swelling in the sky now, and the ocean is yellow and scored with whitecaps. He looks at Declan—a grizzled old man in rumpled pajamas, with a gun in his hand. He reaches once more for those feelings, but it’s just empty pockets.

  “I can’t even follow your bullshit anymore, Deke. It’s too convoluted, or I’m too tired. It’s all just noise.”

  Declan squints at him and at the Taurus, and slides the gun onto the table. His smile is thin and tired. “Maybe the simple answer’s the best, then. Maybe I did it for her.”