by Jeff Abbott
I took my hand away from the glass. “Sorry, this is just very upsetting.”
“He leave with anyone?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see him go. I cleaned up before I closed because there wasn’t any crowd. I was in the back and he just hollered he was leaving. I said goodnight to him. Then I locked up and went upstairs and turned on the TV.” Lies. “He rides his motorcycle here. He only lives a few blocks away.” Truth. They would know this from his wallet. And I let my emotion show, how distraught I really was, my friend was dead and my face crumpled. “I can’t believe this.” Truth.
“What kind of motorcycle?”
“I don’t know…he let me ride it with him once.” Lie, but my prints might be on the bike. My prints were not in any files, though, the CIA had made sure of that. “I don’t know about such things.” Lie.
“There’s no motorcycle out there.”
“But…he parks it out front. Under the awning when it rains. Always.”
The cop showed me that the bike was gone.
“You think someone shot him for a stupid motorcycle?” My crumpled face crumpled more. He and another officer began to confer.
“It’s a vintage bike…” I said, half to myself in shock. The officers stopped, turned back to me. “A 1968 BMW R60US. I remember now. He said they’re kind of rare.” And soon enough the police in North Miami would be checking the license plate on a rare motorcycle and soon enough the two police departments would talk. The two officers conferred again and wrote down notes and one searched on his phone. They love a motive, no matter how small. Motive is all.
The other detective said, “You live above the bar, sir?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And most nights you’re open until three?”
“But not on Sunday. I close at midnight.”
“I couldn’t stand to live where I worked.” Everyone was an expert about your business these days. I blamed the Internet.
“It’s not for everyone,” I said. I was not a witness, and I was not acting suspiciously. The detectives talked to me some more, probing to see if I had any holes in my story. It was not a hard role for me to play as the devastated, shocked friend. Finally they left.
I stared out at the empty street. The Jaguar. I couldn’t remember her plates. Maybe she’d simply run as soon as I was gone. She’d said something about ten million. That was a lot of reasons to vanish.
The heavy man’s words rattled in my head: You don’t know what you’re messing with! Tell her it’s for her own good.
I picked up the glass of bourbon. I drank it slowly.
You’re something, aren’t you, Sam, he had asked, and I’d given him the wrong answer.
3
THE CALL TO my parents the next morning went like this:
“Mom?”
“Oh, hi, Sam.”
“I have some bad news. Steve Robles was shot in front of the bar last night.”
Murmurs of vague shock, dismay, then, “What kind of bar are you running?”
“What?”
“You have people getting shot at your business.”
“It wasn’t like that, Mom. It wasn’t a bar fight.”
A long, painful silence. “Well. I suppose in his security work he knew unsavory types.”
Then I lied. “The guys who shot him stole his motorcycle.”
“He survives wars in Africa and then dies at home for a material possession.” This was followed by a lengthy diatribe against modern life and humanity’s need to cling to objects. “Oh. He was such a handsome man.”
“The funeral is in a few days.”
“Oh. Well, I’m afraid we can’t be there. We’re both scheduled to speak at a conference in Dallas later this week on global relief initiatives.”
“Mom,” I said. “Steve saved our lives, do you remember that?”
“Of course I do.” She spoke to me as though I were mentally slow. “But the conference, we can’t cancel. It’s a chance to do good.”
I often felt my mother and father didn’t know the difference between doing good and doing the right thing. “I’ll represent the family, then.” I couldn’t keep the chill out of my tone.
“I’ll send you money for some flowers.”
“No need, I’ll take care of it, Mom.”
“Well, then, put your name first on the card, if you’re paying for it.”
I closed my eyes. “I have to go, Mom, I just figured you and Dad would want to know.”
“I’m glad you called. Will we see you soon when you’re back in town?”
“Sure. Of course. I’ll bring over Daniel.”
“Daniel. Yes. All right, honey. I’m sorry about Steve. I need to go work on my presentation, so I’ll help you later.” My mother often did this, used “help” as a verb when it didn’t quite fit. I’d learned to ignore it. We told each other we loved each other and then I hung up. The relationship was one I wanted to improve, but it was strained. I had materialized in New Orleans a few months back, no longer working for a London consultancy that was a CIA Special Projects front (Mom and Dad never knew I was CIA), without a wife (I’d told them she’d left me, but actually she was in a coma in a secret government hospital), and with a child they didn’t know about. A son named for my lost brother, whose death was the giant crack in our hearts and our family. Once my mother said, “I’m not sure you should have named the baby for your brother. It feels like bad luck now.” You would think losing their oldest child would create a tighter bond with their youngest; but they’d pushed me to a comfortable arm’s distance since Danny died, as if to say, Thank you, Sam, but no. We were hurt very badly once and don’t care to be hurt again. So we’ll just be involved with you a bit less, if that’s okay. Insurance policy. Nothing personal.
The police came again, asked me more questions. I stuck to my story. I wondered if they would find a record of Steve’s mysterious client. The news sites stuck to the theft of the motorcycle as the motive. Nothing else emerged. I wondered what the police would think if the ballistics from the heavy guy’s gun didn’t match the bullet in Steve’s head. I couldn’t be sure which gun had been used on him. It would be an odd open question. Maybe they’d assume the murder weapon had been dumped.
I lifted fingerprints from the gun using tape and powder, scanned them into my laptop, and then had nowhere to send them. I couldn’t go back to my friend August in the CIA and ask him to run the prints; I didn’t work for him anymore. I supposed I could ask my friend Mila. But then I would have had to explain my actions, and I was already in trouble with her and my mysterious benefactors, known as the Round Table, who’d given me the bars and liked for me to serve as their private agent now and then. But asking Mila to do this would raise questions from her. The police had identified the two men, the dead one and the one hanging on to life, unconscious. The one I’d run over with the motorcycle.
The one who could wake up and possibly identify me.
So I waited to see what the news would bring. I drove by Steve’s house; the police were there, then his family. The police would find out who the woman was. It was best to stay away.
Four days after he died, Steve was buried in a beautiful old cemetery on 8th Street, also called Calle Ocho once it stretches into Little Havana. I noticed a mix of Anglo and Cuban names on the tombstones. Steve’s dad was Cuban; his mother was Anglo. The plot belonged to his parents and he was joining them in the final slot. I could see on the stone that his father had died fifteen years ago and his mother only two. Their plot was behind a huge mausoleum and we were parked in a line down a little side road. His family was represented by two cousins—male twins with narrow faces and narrow throats and narrow bodies—and some older aunts and uncles; they were weepy. Paige, one of Stormy’s regulars who seemed to know everyone’s history, told me that Steve’s branch of the family did not get along with the rest, he’d mentioned it to her more than once, he had no use for his own blood ties.
The cousins looked bereaved no
t only for Steve’s murder but that the fissure would never be fixed. I heard one say to an old aunt, “I thought we could mend fences. I was waiting on him.”
You can’t do that, I thought, because we don’t have forever.
Most of the other mourners were the regulars at Stormy’s. Most of them Coconut Grove folks who walked to the bar every night or so, treated it like a second home. Older guys, a couple of women in their forties, me. Six of us, and a young, solemn priest from St. Hugh’s in Coconut Grove, where Steve went to Mass.
At the end, while the priest murmured final prayers, I saw a car stop down away from everyone else. The Jaguar. And the honey-voiced woman got out. She stayed by the car, like a curious bystander. She looked at me, then looked away and walked over to another grave, as though paying her respects. I stared at her; she stared back at me.
“Sam,” Paige, the bar regular, eased close to me. She was fortyish, smart, pretty, always well dressed, favored Sauvignon Blanc, never had too much to drink at the bar. She was a daily regular, sometimes social, sometimes just with a book to keep her company. I knew from what others said she was a former librarian and maybe didn’t have to work due to family money. I sensed a bit of murkiness in her background, something that no one talked about but only around. Steve had introduced her to me this way, less than a minute after meeting me: She’s a librarian named…Paige! Clearly she had a calling. Note the past tense, never explained. And Paige shot right back: I’ll be happy to teach you to read so you can sharpen your sense of humor. She took charge in the midst of the numbing grief, organizing a post-funeral gathering for the regulars at Stormy’s. “Will you have the bar open now?” she asked.
“No,” I said, watching the woman. “I mean, not right now. How about we meet there in an hour or so?”
“You want everyone to stand around for an hour on the patio?” Paige’s tone was a little dry, annoyed.
“Paige, please. Something I have to do for Steve. Alone.”
“Well, we’ve all got to go home and get our potlucks anyway,” she said. I nodded and she went back to the regulars. I stood apart and watched the narrow cousins and the weepy aunts and the regulars toss flowers onto the grave and then they roamed back to their cars, clearly separate groups. They all left. I walked a fair distance away from the gravesite and sat on a stone bench.
I waited. I pulled a bottle of Red Stripe, Steve’s favorite beer, out of my suit’s pocket and watched the workmen tuck Steve’s coffin into the ground. I set the bottle next to me and finally the woman came and sat on the bench with me, the cold bottle between us. She didn’t really look at me; like me she watched them pile dirt on Steve. I don’t like the idea of being sealed up in the dark. I hope I get cremated; pour me out to ride the wind wherever it takes me. I reminded myself to tell Leonie, my son’s surrogate mother, to honor my wishes.
The woman spoke first. “A motorcycle. Two Colombians, down from New York for no clear reason, killed Steve for his motorcycle. And then one killed the other.”
“Maybe you should give a statement to the paper. ”
“You are a good friend.” Her gaze met mine. “A very good friend.”
“You’re not,” I answered. “I don’t think you’re his friend. You’re his client. I’m his friend.”
“I wasn’t his friend. I’m so sorry for what happened to him. I am so sorry.” Her voice cracked slightly and she cleared her throat. “But I couldn’t be tied to his death in any way.”
“You knew they were hunting you.”
“No…I thought they were following me.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know them.”
“Then who sent them?”
She said nothing.
“You don’t know who wishes you harm?” I asked.
“It’s over. I got the message.”
“It’s over for Steve, that’s for damn sure. One of the men talked about you.”
The color tipped from her face. “What?”
“He said that it was for your own good.”
She shuddered. I watched her. People decide to keep a secret, a terrible one, for really only two reasons. Because they don’t want to be hurt, or they don’t want someone they love hurt. “It’s over,” she said. “Neither of us can go to the police.”
“I thought they would have found records that he was working for you.”
“I asked him to keep none. I signed no contract. I paid him in cash.”
“What did you want him to do for you? Protect you? Find something for you? What? I heard you mention ten million…dollars?”
She twitched. “I hired him for protection, but I stopped doing what I was doing, so it’s over. I’m not a threat to anyone.”
“Don’t you dare lie to me,” I said. “He wanted me to be his inside man. His spy. You don’t need an inside man just for a protection job. So you hired him for another reason.”
“Please let it go. Please. I can’t bear the thought of someone else getting hurt. So let it go now.” A bit of fire crept into her voice, like she was used to getting her way.
“I told him no.”
She seemed to relax and I added, harshly: “Of course, that was before. Is that why he wanted to meet at my bar? Let me see you, then pitch me again?”
She shook her head. “I simply told him I needed to see him and he told me to meet him at the bar that night.”
“There will be a record of that call.”
“On his phone, yes. Not on mine. I always called him on a throwaway I bought for cash in Little Haiti.” And even now she looked over her shoulder, as if worried she was being watched. I saw no one.
“What was so urgent? He hinted that he had been threatened in some way. You said something about money. I overheard you.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” And then she wiped a tear from her eye. “I am so sorry about him. I left him, dead in the rain. I ran like a coward. I have never been so awful in my whole life.” Her voice began to shake. “I didn’t have to come here today. It was a risk for me. But I couldn’t not come. Do you understand that?”
I didn’t know if her tears were genuine. I couldn’t tell. But the pain on her face seemed real. “The story could still fall apart if there’s any surveillance video at the complex in North Miami. I had on the helmet, so my face won’t be seen. But they’ll know someone on a bike followed them.”
“Maybe they’ll think it’s a third thief.”
“Yeah, it takes three to steal a bike.” I stared at Steve’s grave. You might wonder what the conversations will be like after you’re in the earth, people talking about you, and this wasn’t one he ever could have imagined.
“I’ll keep my mouth shut,” she said.
“I’m sure you will.”
She studied my face. “Why didn’t you tell the police about me?”
“I didn’t care to explain my own actions.”
We listened to the wind hiss in the trees, the distant honk of a horn. The steady traffic on Calle Ocho was just a hum, like the soundtrack to a dream.
“It’s not a normal man who chases after gunmen,” she said quietly.
“It’s not a normal woman who doesn’t call the police and vanishes after a man is shot.”
“So we’re not normal,” she said. “What are we?”
“I’m just a bartender.” I held up the bottle. “Gonna pour this on his grave when they’re done covering him up.”
“Is that all you’re going to do for him?”
I didn’t answer her.
“I mean, you took off after those men. And now one of them is dead and the other is in a coma. He might never wake up.” She put her gaze down into her lap. “But if he does, I suspect he won’t talk about me. But he might tell the police all about the guy who chased him from the bar.”
That left me silent for five long beats. It doesn’t take long to fill a grave; the workers were nearly done. The bottle I’d brought for Steve sweated in my hand. “Is that a threat?”
“I own a business here.”
“It doesn’t appear to be thriving. Cut your losses and go, Sam.”
“Who are you? Why are these bad guys after you?”
“I admire that you went after those two creeps. Seriously. It’s a rare quality. But…No one can help me now, all right? I’m not going to endanger anyone else. I’ll handle it myself.” She stood.
The workers finished with the grave. They moved the floral tribute from the regulars, who had gone in together on a spray of chrysanthemums, and the roses from the narrow cousins, onto the grave. The banner on the regulars’ spray read THIS ROUND’S ON ME. Steve always bought the first round, with a stirring motion of his finger. He never failed to be generous.
She watched the banner flicker in the wind.
“This is a celebrity town,” I said. “It’s easy to find incredibly competent personal security, brokered by big firms. Why Steve? Why a small one-man shop?”
She didn’t answer.
“But you needed more, I’m guessing. Did he have a certain skill set? Something in his background?”
She didn’t answer.
“Maybe it was because he was slightly down on his luck. He might not ask so many questions.”
She stood. “Might I join you in pouring that beer on his grave? I can’t make this right for him, and I liked him.”
“Who’s behind his death?”
“I actually don’t know,” she said. “Believe me or not.” She started walking toward the grave and I followed. We studied the fresh earth, a new blanket for Steve. I’ve been around a lot of deceptive people. I am a deceptive person, when I have to be. And deceivers often try too hard to convince you. Mostly what I read off her was frustration—I saw it in her closed fists as she walked, her slight hunch, the whiteness of her lips pressed together, the rise in that honeyed voice. Frustration that Steve was dead, that she couldn’t stop it.
You can do a lot with frustration. It can be a rich fuel.
I opened the bottle. “Steve,” I said. “I’m sorry. And—what’s your name?”