Black Horizon

by James Grippando

  “The bank accepts deposits anonymously?” asked Jack.

  “Yes, of course. It’s a numbered account. The deposit is made when the account holder communicates his or her acceptance to the bank.”

  “So you can’t provide me a name?”

  “As I said: No.”

  Jack considered his options. “It may actually be more helpful to know what the person looks like. Would there be any surveillance video of the transaction that we can review?”

  Walters nodded. “Since the deposit was made here, at our main facility, surveillance cameras would have captured a digital image of the lobby at various angles about every ten seconds.”

  “I would love to see that,” said Jack.

  “I thought you might,” said Walters, “which is why I asked my head of security to retrieve it before you arrived. Unfortunately, it seems that the data no longer exists.”

  “What happened to it?”

  Walters didn’t miss a beat, no sign of concern or embarrassment. “Frankly, we don’t know.”

  Jack’s lawyerly instincts were on alert, but he did his best not to react too strongly. “The deposit was made barely five weeks ago. You don’t know what happened to last month’s surveillance footage?”

  “Under the bank’s retention policy, surveillance data is kept for at least ninety days. We have located the data for the Saturday before and Tuesday after the Monday in question. But we have been unable to find the data for the specific date of interest to you.”

  “If your policy is to keep it for ninety days, it should be there. Can you check again, please?”

  “Our search was quite thorough. It’s gone.”

  Jack’s instincts were churning. His gaze drifted back to the image of the deposit slip on the computer screen. “What about the actual hard copy of the deposit slip?”

  “What about it?” asked Walters.

  Jack had fingerprints in mind, but he didn’t want to make the bankers think that he worked for the FBI. “Can my client have the hard copy?”

  “We don’t release original bank records to anyone,” said Walters. “Not without a court order.”

  Jack glanced at Benson, trying to get the Bahamian barrister to weigh in on his behalf. “I don’t want to make this adversarial,” said Jack. “But if that’s the way things are done, should we be seeking a court order?”

  Benson was about to speak, but the bank manager interjected. “I think we can save you some time in that regard,” said Walters.

  “You’ll give me the original?” asked Jack.

  “No, no,” she said. “What I mean to say is that getting a court order would be a complete waste of your time. The original deposit slip appears to have gone missing.”

  “Like the surveillance video,” said Jack.

  “Yes,” said Walters. “Just like it.”

  Jack smelled an island rat. A Bahamian bank opens its doors on a Saturday night for the American lawyer of a widow who holds a measly fifty-thousand-dollar account. And all the bank manager could tell Jack was that the most crucial information had curiously or conveniently gone missing.

  Benson rose. “Well, that about covers it,” he said, shaking the banker’s hand. “Thank you so much, Samantha. Mr. Swyteck and I very much appreciate the bank’s courtesy.”

  “You are most welcome,” said Walters, escorting the men from her office. “I don’t suppose you and the missus would be interested in watching the members-only match tomorrow at Lucaya Cricket Club, would you?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Benson. “Love to, love to.”

  “Excellent,” she said, showing them to the main exit. “Henry and I will pick you up at seven a.m. sharp. The bank’s jet will have us in Grand Bahama by nine. There will be eight of us going. We’ll make a day of it.”

  “Sounds delightful.”

  The security guard opened the door. Another round of handshakes.

  “Mr. Swyteck, it was such a pleasure meeting you,” said Walters, smiling. “And let me assure you that you are in very good hands with Mr. Benson.”

  “I would expect you to say no less,” said Jack.

  “And I’m so sorry that the bank could not be of more help to you,” she said, still smiling as she directed him out the door.

  “I’m sure you are,” said Jack, his tone less than sincere. The door closed behind him. I’m sure you are.

  Chapter 57

  Noori followed her taxi to LaGuardia Airport.

  From their first meeting in the back room of N.Y.C. Gadets, something about Viola had put him on alert. Their lunch at Spice Market had only heightened his suspicion. She was too eager to make a deal, but that was only half of it. Too often she spoke directly to Noori, which was rude to any elder. It was beyond rude to a Chinese elder like Long Wu, who was no mere figurehead and actually called the shots in the counterfeit business. No one would conduct business that way.

  Unless her real interest was Noori.

  The crowds were gone. Just a handful of cabs were outside the American Airlines terminal, dropping passengers for the few remaining flights that Saturday night. From the backseat of his taxi, Noori watched several cabs ahead of him at curbside check in. Viola had one carry-on over her shoulder, but her larger bag needed to be checked. Noori knew what was inside it. He’d been watching her for the past two hours, having followed her on the shopping spree. She didn’t look pregnant to him, but she’d hit one baby shop after another, bags and bags of gifts crammed into a wheeled duffel bag that grew fatter with each visit to another store. By the time she’d hailed a cab for the airport, she was pushing the single-bag weight limit.

  Still in his cab, Noori watched her shell out the additional fee for overweight baggage. The attendant handed her a claim ticket and boarding pass. She tipped him and went inside the terminal.

  Noori got out of his taxi, let the driver go, and flagged the same baggage attendant. “Excuse me, sir?”

  The attendant stopped.

  Noori had no luggage. Just a twenty-dollar bill in hand. “That woman you just helped,” said Noori. “I’m wondering where she’s flying to.”

  The attendant hesitated only a moment, then took the twenty. “Miami. She’s on the nine-ten flight.”

  “Thank you,” said Noori.

  Miami. A little curious. She’d told Long Wu that she lived in northern Virginia. But if she was buying counterfeits in bulk, tons came through the Panama Canal to the Port of Miami.

  Noori walked to the taxi line for a ride back to Manhattan. A young couple was ahead of him.

  “You want to split a cab to Midtown?” the man asked.

  In a flash, the couple was gone, the wife dragging her husband out of the line to talk sense into him. “Split a cab? Really? This is New York, you idiot, not . . .”

  Noori climbed into the next taxi.

  “Hudson and Canal,” he told the driver.

  As the cab pulled away from the curb, he checked his smartphone. Several e-mails promised to make his penis larger, but the most recent one caught his attention. The subject line would have looked like spam to just about anyone else on the planet, but Noori knew better.

  NR050527, it read. It was the account number from the New Providence Bank and Trust Company.

  Noori opened the message. Just two sentences long:

  One million by Monday. Or the attached goes viral.

  Noori clicked on the attachment. The file opened, and a series of still images appeared on his screen. Six frames in total, each from a bank surveillance camera. The date and time were posted in the corner. They were from the fifth of September, a series of shots between 10:07 and 10:12 a.m. The images were a bit grainy, but they were clear enough. It was Noori entering the bank. Noori at the teller window. Noori filling out a deposit slip. Noori handing over an envelope. Noori stepping away from the teller window. Noori leaving the bank.

  You son of a bitch.

  He closed the attachment and tucked his phone away. “Turn around,” he told the driver.r />
  “What?”

  “Turn around now,” he said harshly, his anger misdirected. “Take me back to the airport.”

  Chapter 58

  Jack spent Sunday morning in the radiology department at South Miami Hospital. Andie had promised that they would do the first ultrasound together, and she’d held true to her word. Her phone call to Jack on Saturday night, telling him that she was in Miami, had come as a complete surprise. Jack got the first flight out of Nassau the next morning.

  “Are you nervous?” he asked.

  “A little,” said Andie.

  She was lying on the examination table, a warmed glob of clear gel resting on her exposed abdomen and upper pelvic area. The typical recommendation for women over the age of thirty-five was an ultrasound at eight weeks. Andie was at least seven, and she had no idea where her undercover assignment might lead her for week eight. She had a one-day window in Miami to get it done. Her ob-gyn was unavailable, but the hospital worked her in.

  “Just relax,” said the technician. “Nothing to worry about. The only thing you might feel is a little pressure on your bladder. It’s full, right?”

  “She’s been drinking water for two hours,” said Jack.

  “Good. That will help the image.” She placed the transducer on Andie’s belly. “Here we go.”

  Jack watched the monitor, but the black-and-white image on the screen didn’t look like much of anything to him. “What should we be looking for?”

  “Everything’s pretty tiny, so I’ll point things out as we go along. I’ll take measurements and get a more exact calculation of gestational age. At seven weeks there will be a heartbeat, so I’ll get some video of that for you.”

  Andie squeezed Jack’s hand. It made him smile.

  The technician moved the transducer around Andie’s belly. Jack kept his eyes on the screen.

  “What are we looking at now?” asked Andie.

  “That’s your cervix,” said the technician. “And there’s the uterus.”

  “Where’s our baby?”

  The technician moved the transducer one way, then the other. “Let me get one little picture here,” she said.

  Jack still didn’t know what he was seeing on the screen. “A picture of what?”

  “Would you excuse me one minute?” said the technician.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  She got up and left, closing the door behind her. Andie reached out and took Jack’s hand. “She’s acting weird,” said Andie.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “What if it’s not ‘nothing’?”

  “Let’s just wait and see.”

  The door opened. The technician had an older man with her.

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Peters,” he said.

  “Is there something wrong?” asked Andie.

  “Let me just have a look here,” said the doctor. He studied the image on the screen, showing no expression. He applied the transducer to Andie’s belly. Rather than the sweeping motions of the technician, his placement seemed more specific, almost surgical in its precision.

  “Have you been experiencing any morning sickness?” he asked.

  “I did,” said Andie. “It stopped about ten days ago.”

  He put the transducer down and looked straight at Andie. He didn’t have to say anything. It was in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This pregnancy is not viable.”

  “What?”

  “Are you sure?” asked Jack.

  “There’s no heartbeat,” the doctor said. “There never was. Development stopped at five weeks.”

  “But . . . why?”

  “There could be any number of reasons. It’s nothing you did.”

  Jack could hear Andie catch her breath, as if all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked from the room.

  “But I was . . . I was so sure I was pregnant. Just two days ago I was running to the bathroom, getting false alarms.”

  “Sometimes when you read the pregnancy books, you memorize what the symptoms are supposed to be, and you almost will yourself to feel them.”

  “No, it was real. I had to pee so bad.”

  “It’s possible. That’s the strange thing about silent miscarriage. Women sometimes continue to experience the symptoms of pregnancy. But the real indicator here was the end of your morning sickness.”

  Andie was silent, her gaze cast toward the blinking monitor.

  The doctor rose. “Stay here as long as you need. But before you leave, stop at the front desk. We’ll need to schedule a D and C.”

  “A what?” asked Jack.

  “Dilation and curettage. It’s a simple outpatient procedure to clean out the uterus. I am sorry.” The doctor left the room.

  The technician wiped the gel from Andie’s belly. “We’ll talk more in a minute,” she said. “I’ll give you two a little time alone.”

  The door closed.

  Jack and Andie locked eyes, each staring at the other in disbelief. She sat up, and Jack sat next to her at the edge of the table.

  “There are some tissues in my purse,” she said. “Could you hand me one, please?”

  “Sure.”

  He reached inside. He found the tissues, but something else caught his eye. He wasn’t sure what made him pull it from Andie’s purse, but he did. It was a little stuffed animal, a pink duck with the tag still on it. Dinosaur Hill.

  “Her first toy,” said Andie, her voice quaking.

  “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

  “I saw this cute little shop in the East Village on Friday. I knew I shouldn’t go in, but I did. I thought, Oh, you can buy just one thing. And then yesterday, like an idiot, I went shopping again. I was so sure we were having a baby girl. I bought all this stuff, blankets and blocks and—”

  “It’s okay, Andie. Everything is going to be o—”

  Before he could get it out, Andie was in his arms, clinging to him, holding him tighter than she’d ever held him before. Jack wanted to say the right thing, but there was nothing to say.

  In the four years he’d been in love with Andie Henning, Jack had known her to run down drug dealers in a dark alley at midnight. He’d seen the cuts and bruises on her body after an undercover assignment that she couldn’t tell him anything about. He’d lain on the other side of their bed and listened to her talk on the telephone until three a.m., comforting a mother who’d lost a daughter to a serial killer. He’d seen a tear of joy in the corner of her eye on their wedding day, and he’d seen her choke up at movies. But this morning was a first.

  It was the first time he’d seen Andie let go and cry. Really cry. Like a baby.

  Chapter 59

  At two p.m. Jack was in the waiting room at the hospital’s surgical center.

  Andie’s doctor had described the D and C as a fifteen-minute procedure. He’d left out at least three hours of waiting around. The prep was minimal, since she’d requested only local anesthesia, but Jack was getting zippo in the way of status updates from the nurse at the front desk. Since Andie’s transfer to the surgical suite, Jack had been stuck sitting three chairs away from a hard-of-hearing old man who was “sick and tired of spill coverage,” and who insisted on blasting Family Feud on the only television in the waiting room.

  Survey says: Your time is up, old man.

  “Sorry, I really need to change this,” said Jack, as he switched to cable news. A wetland ecologist from the Everglades Foundation was being interviewed live from Islamorada, the turquoise waters of Florida Bay behind her.

  “Most of Florida Bay is part of Everglades National Park,” said the scientist, “and it contributes approximately one-point-one billion dollars to the Monroe County economy in terms of boating, bird watching, and recreational fishing. Scientifically speaking, the bay is an estuary, approximately one thousand square miles of shallows where freshwater from the Florida Everglades on the mainland flows into the sea. The next twenty-four hours will be cri
tical in telling us how much oil we can expect to intrude north from the middle Keys into these estuaries, and how much is carried east into deeper waters.”

  From three chairs away, Jack felt an angry stare coming from the game-show addict. He glanced in the old man’s direction, which triggered a snarky comment.

  “You realize I’m missing the lightning round.”

  Jack’s time in Key West and the Caribbean had left him out of touch with the mainland, but the old man was surprisingly typical. To anyone in the Keys, the spill was a nightmare, but to the average Joe in the next county, it was at most a nuisance. Jack supposed that when restaurants on South Beach started serving fresh Florida stone crabs with a side of brake fluid, people in Miami-Dade County might tune in.

  The television interview continued. “There are folks who will call scientists like me Chicken Little, but this is an area that could be lost forever to future generations.”

  Future generations.

  It reminded Jack why he was at the hospital, what he and Andie had lost.

  Jack’s cell rang. He tossed the TV remote to the old man, told him to have at it, and walked outside to take the call. It was Theo, from Nassau.

  “When are you coming back?” asked Theo.

  It was about the last thing on the Jack’s mind. “Theo, I’ve only been gone six hours.”

  “I hate to sound needy, dude. But you were exactly right about how this murder was gonna play on the news here. My picture is on the front page of the Nassau Guardian right next to Jeffries. It’s like we hit the lottery. Jeffries is the hundred-twenty-ninth murder this year, which breaks a freakin’ record for the Bahamas, and it’s only October. Everyone is making a huge deal out of this, saying how the Bahamas needs to get crime under control, how all these murders are killing tourism, no pun intended—that kind of thing.”

  “Can you e-mail me the story?”

  “Just go online. Search ‘Theo Knight, Royal Bahamas Police,’ and”—he turned on his Bahamian accent—“‘frightfully scary murderous scoundrel,’ mon.”