Raindrops ran down the windows of Alexa’s sedan, creating diffuse golden halos around the streetlights. Winter sat in the front seat with his back against the door, so he could watch the front of Click’s house through the side window. Alexa, in the back seat, exactly mirrored his posture. Winter checked his watch. It was nine o’clock.
“So, how’s having a new baby?” Alexa asked.
“Sort of like déjà vu all over again. Only I’m older by fourteen years. I guess I’m paying closer attention this time. Or maybe it just seems like I am.”
“I like Sean,” Alexa said. “I should have known I would. She is totally different than Eleanor, except that she loves your rotten hide as much.”
“You’ll get to know her better, and you’ll like her even more.”
“I thought that, after Eleanor, I would hate whoever you ended up with. Truthfully, I was prepared to dislike Sean. I should have known that anybody you picked out would be a very special person. I can see in her eyes that she worships you . . . just like Eleanor did. What is it about you, Massey? Nobody gets two perfect matches. You know what it is, don’t you?”
“No,” he said. “Tell me.”
“If you get two perfect mates, then somebody out there doesn’t get their one. I was furious at you for marrying my roommate. Do you know how hard it was to find another one who was neat, entertaining, and responsible?” Alexa sniffed. “I brought Eleanor home to see the Delta, and she falls in love with you, my other best friend. I never had another roommate who wasn’t a nightmare.”
“I did apologize, and you said you forgave me.”
“I miss Eleanor,” she said, softly. “A day never goes by that I don’t see or hear something that triggers a memory of her.”
“Me too,” he said truthfully.
“I guess you think you loved her more than I did.”
He didn’t answer for a few long seconds. “I loved her as much as it is possible for me to love anyone.”
“And you love Sean that way?”
“It’s not the same and it is exactly the same. Love isn’t like some pie chart with a certain number of slices, Lex. There are degrees, but not that you can measure. I don’t love Sean any more or any less than I loved Eleanor.”
“Loved?”
“Love. I’m still in love with Eleanor.”
“She’s dead, Winter. Can you love a dead person the same as you can a live one? Isn’t it just the memories you love now? Isn’t that a different love? Sean can hold you, kiss you, laugh and cry with you. Do you feel guilty because Sean has taken Eleanor’s place in your life?”
“Lex, can we talk about something else?” Winter felt uncomfortable talking about Eleanor and Sean. Alexa was prying into his heart, and if it had been anyone else he would have been angry at the intrusion. But he knew how much Alexa had loved Eleanor, and that gave her a backstage pass.
“We used to talk about everything and anything, Winter. Have you forgotten?”
“That was a very long time ago.” He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. The silence that followed was bottomless and he couldn’t make himself fill it by trying to take it back, or make it right.
36
Winter Massey closed his eyes and listened to the rain drumming on the sedan’s hood.
It had been a very long time, but Winter remembered easily.
When he was asked to work on the yearbook staff his senior year, he had brought Alexa on board with him. He took her to the prom, and she was the most beautiful girl there. After graduation, while they were sitting on the eighteenth green of the local golf course drinking warm wine out of a screw-top bottle, he had kissed her. Her reaction had been instant and passionate. But a sneezing fit had ended the kiss and the mood passed, and she’d pulled back from him, joking about how close to losing their friendship they had come. A little hurt and confused, Winter had told her that he loved her and wanted her, and she had shaken her head.
“I love you, Winter,” she’d said. “I love you way more than that. We’ll always be able to trust each other. I know what you have done for me, and I will always love you for it. You showed me who I really was.”
“But we could have it all,” he had said. “Lex, we could be stars.”
She’d shaken her head slowly.
“No, Massey, it isn’t all right. I wish it could be.”
After that, it was never the same. She was accepted to Berkeley and left that summer to get an early start. Their good-bye had been painful for Winter. He wasn’t as sorry he had tried to change the ground rules as he was that he had ever made her the promise he had the day she’d come to his house for her notebook.
They had remained friends, but the closeness they had shared as teenagers was never there again.
He had thought back on their adolescent relationship thousands of times. He had been in love. Alexa hadn’t. Then he’d fallen in love with Eleanor and the direction of his life was set in stone.
He had thought about it from every angle he could look at it from.
It always came out the same way.
He and Alexa were just never meant to be.
And since the moment he’d first met Eleanor, Winter had been relieved his life had gone the way it had. Of course, he desperately regretted that Eleanor had died and that Rush had been blinded. But he didn’t regret meeting and falling in love with Sean and having Olivia. He had gone on with his life, and it had flowed from one thing to the next. . . .
“Massey,” Alexa said, breaking the spell. “You asleep?”
“Resting my eyes.”
“Sean was married before?”
“Widowed.”
“What happened to him?”
“Gunshot wound.”
“Self-inflicted?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Once upon a time, he would have told her the whole story, that Sean’s first husband was a professional killer, and that he had met Sean on a witness security detail—an operation to protect Dylan Devlin so he could testify against the head of the Louisiana Mafia. Luckily, Alexa let it drop. Nobody was more curious about things than Alexa, and Winter was sure this subject would come up again later. Alexa had always interrogated people, which was why being an FBI agent had come so easy for her. If she wanted to know something, she’d ask the same question over and over in differing forms and from different angles until she had the truth. It was a natural talent born out of necessity. When you are a child that nobody wants, you learn to spot lies and you learn to hate liars. You want to know when you are about to be moved from one home to another. You learn about hidden agendas and ulterior motives, and you lose the ability to trust and accept things at face value. And, if you are trying to make sure your baby sister—the only person you have a real bond with—remains with you, it’s crucial to figure out the truth of things and plan ahead. You learn to manipulate the things in your world you can change to your advantage.
“I have a question,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“What kind of name is Ferny Ernest?” Alexa asked, bringing Winter back from his past. “What was his mama thinking?”
He shrugged. “No idea.”
She giggled. “I guess she could have picked Beanie Weenie, or Herkel Jerkel.”
Winter laughed. “We need to find Peanut or Click’s siblings,” he said. “They’re likely to be involved with the Dockerys. I think Click Smoot is a dry hole.”
Winter had been watching the flickering TV-generated light in two of the windows in Click’s house. Now he lifted the binoculars he had brought from his truck and focused them on one of the windows. “Click’s not moving around.”
A BMW passed slowly by the Lathams’ driveway, headlights out. It drew up at the curb outside Click’s house.
“Click’s got company,” Winter said, sitting straighter and watching the sedan.
There were two people in the car, and after a few seconds, the doors opened without the interior light coming on. Two
figures stepped out and quietly closed their doors.
Winter focused on the men as they approached the first illuminated window and peered in from behind the bushes.
“Who is it?” Alexa whispered.
“The Russian, Sarnov, and Max Randall.” Winter recognized them from pictures Clayton had shown them. “What the hell is this?” he asked. “They’re not involved in the grab. So why are they at a Smoot house?”
“This is good,” Alexa said. “Players gathering in the middle of the night. It sure doesn’t look like the hole is as dry as you thought.”
“Maybe this meeting isn’t in Click’s best interest,” Winter said. “Based on the fact that they’re lurking in the bushes, I don’t think he’s expecting them. What do you want to do?”
“Wait,” she said.
“Wait? What if they came to hurt him?”
“They’re professionals. If that’s the case, I doubt they will require any assistance from us. We should give them a wide berth. Remember Clayton’s admonition. An ‘Able’ admonition is not anything to ignore.”
Able had also said Sarnov and Randall weren’t directly involved in the kidnapping. “They’ve gone around the back. I’ll give them time to get inside, then I’ll go see if I can find out what they’re up to.”
“I don’t know—” she said. “Okay. Just don’t shoot anybody.”
“If they’re going to kill Click, should I just watch them do it?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Play it by ear. But remember what’s at stake. This isn’t about Click and Sarnov. It’s probably a side deal.”
“Obviously they are involved. Maybe the great oracle is wrong about that.”
“Clayton isn’t often wrong, Massey.”
“Often isn’t always, Lex. Ring him up while I’m gone.” Winter reached for the door handle.
“Wait for me,” she whispered.
“Call Clayton. Stay with the car. If I need help, you’ll know it.”
Winter pulled up the hood of his rain jacket and started for the house. He tried to clear his mind of the worry that had invaded it.
The Alexa Keen he knew had never seemed unsure of herself before.
37
Click Smoot reclined in a padded leather chair in front of the twelve-thousand-dollar plasma-screen television set that someone named Dakin T. Wilson had unwittingly bought for him. It was the first time Click had gone into the Advance Capital mainframe, using a code he had purchased from a programmer at the bank. If there was a trail to Click, the programmer would make it a circular track to nowhere.
He was watching a DVD called The Number One Stripper in America Contest, and at that moment he was imagining that he was right there in the club and the girl was stripping just for him. Had he not been engaged in a sexual fantasy, he might have heard the strangers coming in through the back door. He opened his eyes to get another look at a blonde who was doing a series of squat twists, when he noticed the two men standing in his kitchen doorway, looking right at him.
“What the hell!?” Click yelled. The men smiled, and he knew they were smiling at what he was doing to himself under the towel in his lap. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said indignantly.
“Saying hello,” the smaller of the two men said in a foreign accent. “Don’t let us interrupt your beeg show.”
Click was more embarrassed than frightened or angry, but he was plenty scared and pissed off by the intrusion. And he resented being pulled so violently from his engagement with the stripper.
“Get out,” he ordered.
“Sorry we didn’t have an appointment,” the smaller man, who looked like a detective, said. The larger one looked like he might be a plainclothes cop too.
The strangers walked straight into his den like they’d been invited, and the small one sat on the arm of the couch, while the larger one sat in the middle of it. Click’s closest handgun, a loaded Smith & Wesson .357, was under the couch cushion beside the larger guy’s right thigh.
Smaller weasel-looking guy took a cigarette out of a fancy red pasteboard box and lit it with what appeared to be a Dunhill lighter. “An excessive semen supply is the curse of youth. I know that as well as anyone.” He made a fist and imitated the deed in the air, leering. Larger guy smiled. “You don’t mind if I smoke, Click,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“You don’t got a search warrant, get out.”
The small man laughed. “We’re not police officers. Of course, you don’t know who we are. How rude of me.”
Click shrugged. “Why would I know you?”
“Maybe your father mentioned me. I am with a company that does some business with your father’s boss, Mr. Laughlin.”
Click chortled. “You don’t know jack. Mr. Laughlin isn’t my father’s boss. He’s his lawyer.”
“Max here is an associate of Hunter Bryce. You know who he is?”
“Yeah, I know who he is. He’s a loser on trial for murdering a Fed. That doesn’t tell me who you are.”
“Has Peanut ever mentioned a Russian he isn’t very fond of?”
“My father hates all foreigners. He hates Russians worse than all the others put together.”
“My name is Serge Sarnov. My associate is Max Randall.” The Russian wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Cool. Now, get the hell out of my house. You know who my daddy is, then you know you don’t want to piss him off.”
“I am not concerned with angering your father,” Sarnov said.
“You ought to be,” Click said. “You sure ought to be.”
Click noticed the Randall guy wasn’t a talker. He was watching the girl on the screen. He had fought back a smile on the tonsil zinger.
Sarnov waved his hand in the air, lit cigarette and all. “Your father is a crude man,” the Russian said. “No worldview. No grasp of current events and how things outside his realm might affect him. If he feels wronged by someone, he has to retaliate physically. He is doomed.”
“He does pretty fine.”
“As long as he is in his environment, so does a red-ass baboon. Does that offend you? You are not like the other people in your family. Not at all.” Sarnov shook his trigger finger at Click like a teacher gently admonishing a student. “You are brilliant, my young friend. I have to wonder if you were adopted. I mean, I have seen your family. I know why you live all alone. You have all of the class they lack. According to Mr. Laughlin, you are a genius about to come into your own. You are the future of the Smoots.”
Click had to smile to hear that Mr. Ross Laughlin talked about him. He felt himself blushing. “So what? Peanut doesn’t allow outside people to mess with his folks, especially not his kids.”
“I didn’t come to mess with you, Click. On the contrary, I came to discuss exploring some mutually profitable opportunities that could make you an extremely rich young man.”
“Like what?”
“Like using your burgeoning skills to make a lot of money. My organization has international reach and influence. And we have intelligence channels you wouldn’t believe.”
Click said, “I can do just fine with my own people, thank you.”
“I know things you wouldn’t think I’d know.”
“About what?”
“You. You can make a little money using your credit card scams, your little computer schemes. I think if we work together, you will end up with far more than you imagine is possible. Think way above your father’s level. Mr. Laughlin is a good boss for your father, but even he is well below where you can go.”
Click wondered if Ross Laughlin was his father’s boss—the mystery moneyman who protected them. If so, this was news. According to Peanut, Ross Laughlin was an extremely powerful lawyer with major government connections. “You know about Mr. Laughlin, then you know we’ve got all the connections we’ll ever need.”
“A lesson in structure, Click. Your father works for Ross Laughlin and Ross Laughlin works as a partner in a domestic syndicate. We are a hundred times strong
er in this country than Laughlin’s aging syndicate. If you are as successful as you surely imagine you will be, which you can be, how much will they let you keep?
“You know I’m telling you the truth. You know your father. You put millions of dollars on the table, and Mr. Laughlin and your father will take . . .” Serge crushed out the cigarette. “. . . ninety-five points, maybe more, because they will see you only as a worker and they are greedy and suspicious. They never even trusted you with the fact that Mr. Laughlin is your daddy’s and therefore your boss. And if this Judge Fondren extortion-by-kidnap scheme doesn’t work as planned, your father is going to have to accept the blame, and he might not live much longer than the woman and her child do. Even if the Fondren thing comes off, your father’s days are numbered. Your only chance at long-term security lies with me, my firm. We will let you be a real partner, and for what we offer we will take but a small percentage. I can get you the things you need to make your plans work, like access codes to accounts to loot with numbers so large you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Like what kinds of accounts and numbers wouldn’t I believe?”
“Antiquated systems controlling accounts with a combined hundred and fifty billion dollars floating around in them gathering cobwebs, with nobody keeping a very close eye on them. A man with the right ability could nibble on them for years before anybody noticed. And there are more like that all over the world.”
“You’re crazy as hell.”
“Is that a no?”
“Damned straight it is. You’re a dead man.”
“Okay.” Sarnov stood and aimed a silenced pistol at Click’s head. “Sorry we couldn’t do business.”
“You said you didn’t come to hurt me!”
“This won’t hurt at all,” Sarnov said. “At least no one has ever complained to me later that it did.”
38
Lucy Dockery swam up out of the void slowly, regaining consciousness to find herself back in the gritty bed in the darkened room. She was naked, and in a lot of pain, certainly made worse because she couldn’t see and had to imagine how serious the damage to her was. Her face was bruised, hair and blood was matted into stiff wafers, and she could feel lines where the skin was laid open. Her lips were split and swollen, her teeth sore but she didn’t think any were broken. Her nose was swollen to twice its size and filled with dried blood. She didn’t think any of her bones were broken, because she could move her arms and legs, fingers and toes, but the joints in her hands ached.
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