“Yeah, he would,” Margo confirmed.
“But he didn’t. You’re fine,” he said, turning back to Lea. “So if you want to go back there later that’s your call. Now, can we talk?” He looked at his partner, then Margo. “Just you and me, for now.”
Lea led him through the back room to Parker’s booth. Hopefully Margo wouldn’t curb stomp his little friend in the meantime.
They sat across from each other. Up close, his eyes were beautiful and intuitive. In the middle of a fight, on a dark street, those eyes had seen Slaski squint and known why. It wouldn’t do to underestimate him. She guessed he was no more than thirty, but he felt older to her. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the beard. Or the tired lines at the corner of his eyes that no night’s sleep would begin to erase. It was a kind face. Compassionate. But one thing life had taught her the hard way was that a face bore little relationship to the man beneath. He could be a saint or a serial killer: the face would be the same.
He was smiling at her.
“What?” she asked.
“The drive over here, I’ve been thinking of what to say to you. To convince you to trust me.”
“And that’s funny how?”
“About a year ago, I was in your exact position. Sitting at a booth with a man that I didn’t trust. And he knew I didn’t trust him but made his case anyway.”
“Did you? Decide to trust him?”
“Not at first, no.”
“But eventually?”
“Eventually.”
“So how did he convince you?”
“Baited the hook with something I couldn’t walk away from.”
“You got something like that for me?” Lea asked.
“Nothing comes to mind.”
“Tough spot. What to do?”
“Well, my first instinct would be to play you. Manipulate you. It’s what I’m good at.”
“But . . .”
“But it won’t work on you.”
“So maybe stroke my ego? Tell me how smart I am. Come clean about how you were going to run a game on me, but can see I’m just too gosh-darn smart for that? Something like that?”
“Like I said, that won’t work on you.”
“Tough spot.”
“Tough spot,” he agreed.
“What to do . . .” She studied him over the brim of her coffee cup. He wasn’t wrong that she didn’t trust him—the guy was a regular snake charmer with those dancing eyes of his. But the thing was, he also wasn’t wrong that she might need to trust him. She saw now that her decision to move on Slaski had been born of frustration and fear. The fear that with all the recent arrivals in Niobe that Charles Merrick was slipping through her fingers. She’d reacted to the news about Slaski impulsively, trying to regain the upper hand. Instead, tonight had provided unequivocal confirmation of one thing: this wasn’t her world. Everything she had done up until now was predicated on the idea that no one else knew about the money. A head start had been her only edge, and now that was gone. It had taken her a year to cultivate Parker as a source and for him to identify Slaski. While Mr. Dancing Eyes had made Parker and Slaski in one night. One night.
“How did you even know to go after Parker?” She watched him consider how to answer the question.
Finally, he pushed his baseball cap back and said, “Because you’re Chelsea Merrick.”
She hadn’t heard her real name spoken aloud in five years. Her heart thundered in her chest. “My name is Lea Regan.”
He ignored her. “I’ll admit, at first I assumed you were working with your father, but you’re not. Are you?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Look, I appreciate you’re angry. You knew about the money before the interview, didn’t you?”
She gave no answer, but he carried on like she had.
“Slipped into Niobe quietly. What? Two years ago?”
How did he know that?
“Dug in, set up shop. Turned Parker—he was a good call, by the way. Probably had yourself a nice, simple plan for taking down your dad. But judging by all the new arrivals, nice and simple left town. It’s got to hurt.”
“It’s my family’s money.”
“Well, that’s convenient; your family has it.”
“That man is not my family.”
“It’s stolen money, Chelsea.”
“Lea.”
“The thing about stolen money, Lea, is if it gets stolen, no one’s going to the police. It makes your father a very attractive target.”
She nodded grimly. “What are you proposing?”
“What do you think your father will do the day he gets out of prison?”
“Fly to a nonextradition country.”
“So do I. Want to stop him?”
More than anything in the world. Truth was, she didn’t give a damn about the money. She only wanted Charles Merrick to be penniless. The real kind of penniless. Destitute. It was a beautiful word. And she wanted Charles Merrick to know who had done it to him. She wanted him to know it was his own daughter. That she wanted more than anything. So if this guy was her best shot, then so be it.
“What’s my name?” she asked.
“Lea Regan, far as I know.”
“So what’s yours?”
He took out a wallet and handed over a driver’s license. It read “Robert Quine.”
“My name is Gibson Vaughn,” he said.
“Good to know you, Robert.”
They shook hands over the table.
“Glad we got that settled,” he said.
“So if Slaski’s phone’s worthless, how do we find out who Merrick’s been calling?”
“I’m working on a plan.”
“We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Give me until tomorrow morning.”
She looked at her phone. “It is tomorrow morning.”
“Pick me up at the hotel at nine.”
“That’s three hours from now.”
“Like you said, we don’t have a lot of time.”
With that, he slid out of the booth and nudged his partner awake. When they were gone, Margo came back and took his seat. She looked pensive, not an expression Lea was accustomed to seeing from her boss.
“We need to talk.”
Lea braced, expecting Margo to strong-arm her for a bigger cut. “What’s up?”
“So I was standing in front of some man’s house at four in the a.m. with a baseball bat and a ski mask. If those two hadn’t stopped us, I would have gone into that house with you. Thank God they did, you know? Sorry, Gilmore, but I’m out. Can’t do this. Maybe I hang on to the bar, maybe I don’t, but I’ll live with those odds. You know?”
Lea nodded. “Okay.”
“You shouldn’t either.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what all’s going on here. Don’t want know. But it’s not going to end well. You have to know that.”
Lea shrugged, too tired to have this conversation now when she’d been having it with herself for the last two years.
“Working for me can’t be so bad you have to get yourself killed, can it?”
Lea smiled at that. “Thanks, Margo. I mean it.”
Margo sat back and sighed. “Just lock up before you go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It took Gibson and Lea a couple of hours to walk the perimeter of the prison. They kept to the woods and out of sight; it was public land, so they weren’t breaking the law, but they dressed for a hike in case they were stopped. He used the bars on his phone to rough out a map of cell tower coverage around the prison. A signal meter would have provided a more accurate picture, but those cost three hundred dollars, and they needed to conserve Birk’s meager four-thousand-dollar bankroll.
For probably the twentieth time since yesterday, he looked at the voice mail from Nicole. He still hadn’t worked up the confidence to listen to it. Instead, he adjusted the cap on his head and scrambled up a berm to join Lea. It had been a long night, and they’d bo
th spent the first half of the hike in a stupor, neither speaking more than necessary. Gibson was grateful that Swonger had been a no-show; he didn’t have the energy for his chatter this morning.
At the top of the berm, Lea stood staring at the prison through the trees.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
She hadn’t felt him standing there and flinched at the sound of his voice. She shot him a look like he’d caught her half-naked.
“I’m getting hungry,” she said. “Give me the map.”
She took over the mapping and jotted down his notes as he called them out to her. She also began peppering him with questions about his plan, which so far he had mostly deflected for the simple reason that he didn’t have a plan. No, that wasn’t entirely true; he had plenty of ideas, but none that didn’t cost a hell of a lot more than the limited cash they had on hand. Sooner or later, though, Lea would want answers that he didn’t have, and then she’d have no other option but to try her luck with Slaski in the hopes that Swonger was wrong about the SIM card.
It was past noon when they got back to her car. Gibson spread their map out on the hood and studied it. It confirmed what Parker had told them: cell coverage at the prison was thin at best. The nearest cell tower was off to the southwest, back toward Niobe, and the entire northern quadrant was one big dead zone. They’d stumbled across a clearing between the cell tower and the prison where he could set up shop and reasonably claim to be camping if discovered. It was perfect for what he had in mind. Unfortunately, what he had in mind required an exorbitantly expensive piece of hardware that wasn’t available for civilian use, even if he could afford it. Lea asked him about the plan again, but he put her off with some vague allusion to needing to mull things over.
“So you’ve got nothing. Do you?”
He squinted at her over the hood of the car and chuckled. “Not unless you’ve got a half a million socked away somewhere.”
“Are we partners, or was last night a con?”
“Partners,” he confirmed.
“Then don’t string me along.”
He really did like her.
They were halfway back to town before Lea spoke again. “You know my grandfather was a surgeon? Chief of staff at a hospital in Connecticut. My grandmother founded four separate charities. They passed within a year of each other.”
“Yeah, I read about them.”
“Didn’t have my parents’ resources, of course, but they were well off. Put money aside in a trust to pay for my education. We didn’t need it, but I was their only grandchild, and the gesture was important to them. I never really thanked them for it. I never thanked anyone for anything back then. Man, I wish I had.”
“You were a kid.”
“Yeah, well, anyway, they named my father the executor of the trust, and after the feds ceased everything, it was the only legit money left. He made this tearful plea. Swore he was the victim of a witch hunt, that he would be exonerated and everything would go back to the way it had been. But he needed the money. I loved him. I gave him my blessing. Felt proud to be able to help. Figured out later, he’d drained the trust weeks before he asked. It was all a lie.” She pulled into the hotel parking lot and put the car in park. “So, no, I don’t have a half million socked away anywhere.”
Swonger, sitting on top of a dumpster with a Red Bull, hopped down and met them at the car.
“Something’s up,” Swonger said.
“Something good or something bad?”
“Well, it ain’t Daytona. Them boys that booked the fifth floor? Got it on lockdown. Won’t let nobody up there. Lot more than four of them now too. Two of them outside the elevator. Another in the lobby. Got those earpiece deals so they can talk to each other.”
“Are they armed?”
“Oh, they strapped. Guarding somebody.”
“Who?” Lea asked.
“Dunno. Came in through the loading dock. Never saw ’em. But they heavy. That the Sherman they rolled up in.” He pointed to a massive black SUV with Texas plates.
Subtle.
“What are we gonna do?” Swonger asked.
“Take a shower to start.”
“Y’all are pretty ripe,” Swonger agreed.
They agreed to meet in Gibson’s room in an hour.
Jimmy Temple stood behind the front desk and welcomed Gibson back to the hotel, but his smile was forced and thin. Gone was the twinkle in his eyes, which darted to Gibson’s left. Gibson followed them to an intense Hispanic-looking man with a prominent jaw that lent him a near-permanent scowl. He wore his hair long on top, short on the sides, and slicked back in a gleaming black crest. The crease in the leg of his suit was freshly ironed, and his shoes glistened with a military attention to detail. Gibson recognized him from the Toproll last night. The man sat reading a newspaper. He closed it crisply and studied Gibson, who was glad to be dressed like a tourist back from a hike—even he wouldn’t take himself seriously. At the elevator, Gibson glanced back. The man had moved to the front desk, where he paged through the guest registry while Jimmy Temple stood by silently with a look of embarrassment. It appeared to Gibson that the Wolstenholme Hotel might be under new management.
Up in his room, Gibson opened his laptop and used his cellular modem to log into Marco Polo, one of dozens of black-market sites that had sprung up in the void left by the Silk Road bust. Powered by Bitcoin and masked by Tor encryption, it offered anything and everything for sale: drugs, weapons, stolen credit cards. It was here that he’d purchased his Robert Quine IDs, but the tech he was after represented another order of magnitude entirely. But what other options did he have? So far, inspiration wasn’t returning his calls. He left encrypted messages with the handful of vendors who might traffic in such high-end equipment and logged off feeling discouraged.
He took a long shower and contemplated the degree of competition they faced for Merrick’s money. For most of the players, the general plan would be to take Merrick after he was released from prison. Which made it all the more important that Gibson beat them to the money and leave them to fight over Merrick. Which brought him back to the Stingray. He just couldn’t think of another way to intercept Merrick’s calls to his partner on the outside.
A knock came at the door. Gibson wrapped himself in a towel, let Swonger in, and went back to the bathroom. In the mirror, Gibson trimmed up his beard and cleaned away the stubble. When he was done, he spread his wet beard between his fingers and examined the scar on his neck. He hoped with time that it would fade, but beneath his fingers it remained livid: an ugly reminder of how close he’d come to following in his father’s footsteps. He didn’t care for the beard, but he needed to get used to it, because he still wasn’t ready to bare his scars with anything resembling pride.
He heard the television in the next room. He dressed and found Swonger sprawled out on the bed, head propped on some pillows, surfing channels too quickly to see what was on.
“Get off my bed.”
“What for? Maids are gonna change the sheets.”
“Just get off.”
Swonger thought about it, and then, with dramatic slowness, stood up and flopped down in a chair. Everything with him was a test of wills. It was the only way Swonger knew to navigate the world. Gibson understood where it came from—this inability to back down from any challenge, no matter how inconsequential—but it meant Gibson had to keep his thumb on him. If he let Swonger lie on his bed now, the ex-con would be that much harder to control when it counted. Such were the inconsequential details of manhood’s pecking order.
Gibson laid out a new set of rules for them. “From here on out, we don’t know each other. That means we eat separately. We stagger coming and going, never at the same time. Don’t acknowledge me in public. We communicate by text only, except when we’re sure we’re in private. We meet here every morning. Go over things.”
“That’s cool. Very Sun Tzu.”
“Sun Tzu?”
“What? I can read. Art of Wa
r only like sixty pages, dog. Old-timer in stir gave me his copy for a pack of Marlboros. ‘Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.’ Sun Tzu’s the man.”
Not for the first time, Gibson was taken aback at Swonger’s more insightful moments. Another knock came at the door, and Gibson let Lea into the room. Her hair, still wet, was tied back in a hurried ponytail.
“So what do you have?” she asked.
Gibson laid out his plan. Lea and Swonger listened in rapt silence up until Gibson got to the sticking point.
“What the hell’s a Stingray?” Swonger asked.
Gibson explained how it worked.
“Whoa, that even legal?”
“Not for civilian purchase. Government use only.”
“And we need this thing?” Lea said.
Gibson nodded. “It’s the only way, but there’s no way we’re getting ahold of one.” He gave them the price tag.
Swonger whistled. “Dog, you don’t think small.”
“It would have been ideal, but there’s just no way. We’re just going to have to go back to Lea’s plan. Figure out a way to take the SIM card off Merrick without him knowing. Maybe Parker could—”
“I’m telling you, ain’t no way that’s gonna work,” Swonger interrupted. “Merrick will keep it close. Probably sewn into the hem of his blues so if he gets searched, he can snap it in half just as a precaution. Easier to get another one down the road. All this time and Merrick never been caught with it on him? Then he real careful.”
“I agree with Gavin,” Lea said. “There has to be another way.”
Gavin? Gibson braced for the inevitable tirade from Swonger about his name, but none came. Instead, Swonger seemed pleased to have his opinion taken seriously.
“The only other way’s the Stingray,” said Gibson.
Swonger asked if he was absolutely sure the Stingray would work.
“Yeah. I’d need to make some modifications, but it’d work.”
“Let me make a call,” Swonger said. “Maybe I know a guy.”
“Who?”
“My boy Truck.”
“Truck?”
“Truck Noble.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Seemed Truck Noble ran a crew out of Virginia Beach and wasn’t much for crossing state lines without good reason—the best coming in stacks of green. Unfortunately, cash was in short supply, and Truck Noble wasn’t interested in any kind of layaway plan. Appeals to his friendship with Swonger didn’t do much to move the needle either. Still, Swonger swore he could convince Noble to meet them.
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