Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  Calvino switched off the light and let himself out of the room, using Casey’s keys to lock the deadbolts. He walked down the corridor and took the stairs down to the lobby. Opening the door cautiously, he saw no one. How long would it be until the police were notified and burst into the room? Entering the hallway, he closed the door behind him, walked to the emergency exit, and took the stairs to the underground parking garage. Casey’s key ring had a fancy electronic security gadget and a BMW key attached. The last time he had phoned Pratt, there had been a long pause as if Pratt had been waiting in dread to discover what trouble his friend had gotten himself into. This time Calvino would steer him to a body that looked like a mango caught in a lawnmower. Pratt had wanted to find Casey, but the condition Casey was in now was not what Pratt had in mind. Calvino eased off the idea, thinking there had to be a better way. Pratt didn’t need this. Calling him wouldn’t be doing him a favor.

  Calvino walked through the first floor of the underground parking, looking for Beemers, pointing the keyring at a row of cars. Nothing happened. He turned and pointed in the other direction, and the lights of a BMW flashed. He opened the door of a new black BMW and climbed in. It had the new-car smell and a 747 flight deck of instruments. Tinted windows made the interior seem like the cockpit of a plane too. Calvino inserted the key and drove out of the parking garage. Two other cars were ahead of him. There was no evidence of police in the parking garage or at the ground level as he pulled out. Other than him and the sniper, he thought, no one knew yet that Casey was dead.

  FORTY

  “HE’S GONNA CALL back,” said Jarrett. “Bet on it.”

  “You shouldnt’ve hung up on him.”

  “I don’t know who it was.”

  Tracer growled. “If the man hadn’t signaled us, you’d be dead. I’d probably be dead, too,” he said from the back. “What the fuck was he doing on that balcony? Why’d he do that?”

  “He got lucky, too. Otherwise, Casey would have killed him,” said Jarrett. “Or I’d have shot him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We saved his ass. That’s what I am saying. So we’re even.”

  It looked like Calvino would never know exactly how close he’d been to kissing the soft lips of a military-issued .308 round. But Tracer had a point: the private eye had given away Casey’s position just as Casey had him in the crosshairs. Jarrett shivered as both hands held the wheel. The feeling passed quickly, but he took note. There’s close, and then there’s very close. Like an orgasm, death edges to a boundary and flounders, falling forward or gripping the edge and pulling back. It was never a sure thing, and Jarrett still had a bitter taste in his mouth. The bile had crept up, and as much as he tried to swallow it back, it clung in his throat.

  Jarrett’s cell phone rang but he made no attempt to answer it. A moment later Tracer’s phone rang, and he exchanged a look with Jarrett.

  “Answer it,” said Jarrett. In the dim dashboard light he could see it was the same number as before.

  Tracer pressed the answer call button but remained silent.

  “This is Vincent Calvino. I’ve got a question for .308. Why did you hang up on me?” asked Calvino.

  Tracer covered the phone. “It’s Calvino.”

  “Ask him what he wants.”

  “Man, I don’t know what game you’re playing. But you should be way the fuck away from that condo and us. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Calvino sighed. “Let’s meet.”

  “Impossible.”

  The sound of traffic filtered through the phone. “Let me make an educated guess. You’re going to the airport. I could make a call and they’d lock it down. Or we could talk.”

  “I’ll call you back,” said Tracer, ending the call.

  A moment later Jarrett’s phone rang again. This time he answered. “Calvino, you have no idea what this is about. Go back to your office and tail expat husbands with bar girls.”

  “I’d rather have a talk with the two of you. I’m on my way to the airport. Half an hour won’t make any difference. The police aren’t involved. When I left Casey’s condo, it was quiet. They’ve got no idea he’s dead. You’ve got time.”

  “Casey?” Tracer caught the expression on Jarrett’s face as he said the man’s name. “Am I hearing you right? You said something about Casey?”

  “Who do you think you killed?” asked Calvino. He had a feeling that Tracer already knew they’d killed Casey and was playing him along. If that was their attempt at diversion, Calvino decided to let them have it.

  Calvino had set in motion a paying-back-Jack moment. Tracer had been right about one thing: Calvino had saved his life.

  “Arrivals. Phone again in thirty minutes.”

  Jarrett handed him the cell phone on the passenger’s seat. “You agreed to meet him?” asked Tracer.

  “As you said, I’d be dead without his SOS.”

  The international airport, a mammoth structure that had enriched politician clans, was a perfect place for the meeting Calvino had in mind. Built under a cloud of corruption, the runways had cracked in places, and the surrounding neighborhoods threatened to release balloons in the flight pathway to stop aircraft from taking off and landing. The constant noise of jet engines had driven them crazy. The attempts to pay kah pit pak, or money to shut them up, had failed. They wanted silence, not money. As a quasicriminal enterprise, the airport had all the grandeur of a greenhouse lowered over an ultra-cool shopping mall.

  Jarrett parked the car in a long-term lot and walked into the departures level of the terminal. They saw a row of empty seats, walked over, and sat down. They had been sitting for more than a minute when Tracer rose and walked over to check the big board listing the departure schedule. Flights to London, New York, Frankfurt, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, and Jakarta scrolled up with times for departure and gate numbers. They had a lot of cities to choose from. Tracer detached himself from a crowd of package tourists and sat next to Jarrett.

  “Casey. Fucking Casey. He nearly pulled it off,” said Tracer. “I told you something wasn’t right. I smelled it. When the papers said he was on the run, I said to myself, ‘Tracer, that man’s a walking time bomb, and when he goes off, there’s gonna be a lot of collateral damage.’” He fished his mojo bag out of his pocket and rubbed it against his cheek. “But we got him. We had the mojo working for us tonight. Mr. Mojo saw what was coming and sent us an assistant.”

  “London is good in August,” said Jarrett. “I know a place in Bays-water. That’s my suggestion, for what it’s worth.” All around them hundreds of people passed, pulling or carrying their luggage, pushing trolleys, and drinking or eating on the run.

  Tracer grinned, made a fist, and tapped Jarrett’s shoulder. “You and me, we’re gettin’ soft. You asked me once if we’d ever make it to forty. That’s a hundred-and-eight years old in sniper-team years. And I said, man, we don’t want to live that long. It almost happened tonight. We almost got our early checkout. And we didn’t survive just to go to London. Fucking Casey, he had some plan. He sees the muzzle flash, and bam, he shoots you, and before I can react, bam, he hits me.”

  “Why would Casey wanna shoot us?”

  “Fuck if I know. Why’d he put that blue pool table in the condo? Was that some kind of an accident? Or was he trying to tell us something?”

  “About Jack?”

  Tracer fingered his mojo bag as if some genie would pop out and grant him three wishes. “Jack? The Colombians? There’s a long list if you think about it. You can’t forget we aren’t the only one’s in the pay back business.”

  “Casey knew about our job in Gijón.”

  “He knew from Waters what Harry and you did in Hua Hin. He knew about half-a-dozen other assignments.”

  Jarrett scratched his nose. “Think for a moment. Casey had his back channels with the Colombians. Those guys bury money, right? You said yourself the forty grand had that smell. But that business guy in Perth, the guy whose thugs killed Jack, he could have buried mon
ey, too. So I don’t know. It’s making my head hurt.”

  Tracer leaned forward, folding his hands around the mojo bag, as if studying it for inspiration. “Concentrate on Casey, man. He had heat coming down on him in Bangkok. He must have known it was just a matter of time before they dragged his ass kicking and screaming to Washington to tell them what he was doing in Bangkok. Why didn’t Waters see this coming? He should’ve put Casey in the risk category, taken away his clearance, and taken away the green badge. That was stupid to leave him in the field. But that’s what Waters did. He didn’t wanna hurt a man’s pride.”

  “You win an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas,” said Jarrett. That was his backup city after London.

  “How much you figure someone was willing to pay Casey to kill us?”

  “Whoever it was, they knew Casey could be turned for a price. Our company was about to throw him to the wolves. Someone inside had to know Casey was in trouble and open to a business proposition.” Jarrett shook his head, balled his right hand into a fist and slammed it into his open hand.

  Tracer swallowed hard, shaking his head as he looked at Jarrett. “This is gonna fuck them up. When they find their boy didn’t deliver, they’ll find someone else to finish the job.” Tracer sighed and watched the faces of strangers passing by: young women, old people, a man in a wheelchair, a Singapore flight crew in scooped-top uniforms, looking like movie stars on their way to a sound stage. He preferred waiting outside under the starless sky. Darkness was a man’s friend; a man could shelter in the dark.

  “Someone paid Casey for the job,” said Jarrett. “Only he didn’t get it done.”

  “That means whoever set this up will send someone else to finish the job.”

  Jarrett raised his hand like he wanted to ask a question. “Casey had to have help on this,” he said. “And I wanna know who that is.”

  “Maybe someone high in the company chain of command.”

  “One of the suits?” asked Jarrett, thinking of a connection to the Perth businessman.

  “What about Waters?” Tracer’s eyes grew large.

  “Can’t be Waters.”

  “Because he’s close to your dad?” Tracer had the expression of a man suffering from an acute case of sensitive-bowel syndrome.

  Jarrett glanced at him. Tracer had been talking about Waters for days, worrying and twisting his mojo bag like it was a string of worry beads. He’d had a hunch all along, feeling something in the equation hadn’t added up.

  “Waters is the only one who had the operational details,” said Jarrett.

  “You think Casey hired a private eye to track us?” asked Tracer.

  “He hired a private eye to cover his ass, you mean.”

  “Looks like Colonel Waters and Casey went into a business deal together.” Tracer shook his head, exhaling a long, low whistle. “We have a long history with that man. Harry recruited him, supported him, saw he got promoted, and recommended him to the company after he left the service. He owes Harry. That means he owes you.”

  There was a boarding call for a flight to Paris. Men in blue uniforms and sidearms walked German shepherd dogs along the corridor. They passed Tracer and Jarrett without stopping.

  “We can talk about possibilities all night but we ain’t getting any closer to the truth. More than one person had enough money to have turned him, just like they did Casey. All it takes is to find a man’s price, and he’ll pull up anchor and sail away. Don’t matter all the things Harry did to help. That was the past. This is today.” A second detail of police, this time in brown uniforms, walked past, and Jarrett put his hands behind his head, yawned, and stretched out his legs, waiting for the police to move on. Tracer and Jarrett looked like a couple of passengers waiting for a flight: nothing special or out of the ordinary, just a couple of faces no different from thousands of others.

  Tracer exhaled, put his head back against the seat, and closed his eyes. “Money does funny things to people. But the smell of money didn’t bother Waters. It smelled of clay. Buried money.” He tried to remember the smell of dirt in a dozen different places. He’d never been able to come up with a place he remembered that had that smell.

  Jarrett nudged him and he looked up. “You were right about the money. You said that before. The point is, we had no direct proof. We were just talking it through. We didn’t know.”

  “How we ever gonna know? That’s the question.”

  “You can’t say Waters was working with Casey. It’s just words. We need to find some evidence. Otherwise, we got ourselves a real problem.”

  “Roger that,” said Tracer. “Like the infertile man who gets himself a vasectomy.”

  “Because a man can never be too careful.”

  “But where are we going to find that evidence?” He saw Jarrett look away, knowing that they both knew the answer to that question. “You could always phone your father. You know, run it past him.”

  Jarrett shook his head. “I don’t know if I should get my dad involved. This is going to blow big, and when it does it’s gonna knock down a lot of big trees.” Harry had taught him there was a category of basic doubts that no man could ever resolve.

  “I’m thinking that maybe they were working on a success fee. What’s Waters gonna do? Who’s he gonna send to finish what Casey screwed up? Is he gonna do it himself? Harry would have some ideas that might be useful.”

  Jarrett didn’t have an answer. Those were the kinds of doubts a man had to learn to live with. Sitting in the airport departure area with nothing but the clothes on his back, he saw no other choice but to move on and do what needed to be done. Go to ground, stay low, wait out the other side, at least until he and Tracer could figure out who was playing on the other side. Whether Waters had known about Casey’s plan from the beginning or had been tricked by Casey didn’t matter much. He didn’t want to think that it could be Waters. But he kept going back to the reality that Waters knew—and more than his knowing, had been instrumental in setting the mission in motion. Had Waters the team player decided to start his own league with Casey? A lot of cash had appeared from somewhere, and had bought an act of revenge. The idea that sex was the ultimate pull on mankind might have had the ring of truth, but revenge followed one step behind and in a footrace beat sex to the finish line every time.

  Jarrett pulled out his cell phone and scrolled down to the last call. He stared at the number. The private investigator had phoned from a number Jarrett didn’t recognize. He thought about the number of people who had that phone number. The SIM card had been reserved for operational purposes only. Tracer had the number, so did Waters. Harry had the number. But no one else, as far as he knew, had the number. Not even Mooney, who’d lent them the weapons. There would have been some people at company headquarters who had access to the number. That was standard procedure.

  “Who you calling?” asked Tracer.

  “My fortune-teller. I want to ask him for an auspicious time to leave Bangkok.”

  “Any time is good, Jarrett.”

  “We’ve got some lead time,” said Jarrett. It would still be a while before the police found what was left of Casey.

  “Anyone else you wanna call?” asked Tracer, looking at his own cell phone.

  Jarrett thought about the beekeeper’s daughter. He smiled to himself. It would have been good to hear her voice again. And he thought about the Western woman in the bar with the little kid, wishing he could phone her and say that he was sorry that she had witnessed a man being shot. “There’s no one I want to call,” said Jarrett.

  “That was some crazy shit Casey tried.”

  Jarrett eased the cell phone back into his pocket.

  “Change of plan,” said Jarrett. “We’re leaving the country.” He got up from the chair and looked at Tracer.

  “I like that idea.”

  Together they walked toward a Thai International sales counter.

  “Fuck Mooney.”

  “Fuck Waters and the Colombians.”

  “
The car’s in long-term storage. In a couple of months they’ll find it.”

  Each of them carried, strapped around their bodies, a pouch with credit cards, cash, and passports. They had enough cash to buy business-class tickets and fly out in style. Training had taught them that where they were going the first order of business would be to acquire new passports, new identities; that would take some money and time, maybe forty-eight hours. Making a new life, that would take a lot longer. They would be cut off from the company, friends, and family. It wasn’t clear how long they’d have to stay in the shadows.

  “Waters will come looking for us. He has to. You know that,” said Tracer.

  Jarrett smiled, head to the side, looking at the departure schedule. “We’ll find him before the cops find the car.”

  Tracer liked that. “It reminds me of a blues song: ‘Take me down the road where I’ve done wrong. Take me back to a place we used to go. I don’t blame you, baby, ’cause I had it coming.’”

  Jarrett’s phone rang as they reached the counter. It rang until the ying behind the counter asked why he didn’t answer the phone. She wondered if he might be hard of hearing. When he finally took out the phone he heard a voice with a familiar Brooklyn accent.

  “I’m at the airport. Where are you?” the voice asked.

  FORTY-ONE

  CALVINO FOUND THE TWO MEN inside an airport coffee shop, sitting far back in a sea of untidy passengers and even untidier tables. The self-service restaurant served greasy half-cold noodles prepared by a staffer with that startled, unsettled look of someone who’d been stabbed. The two passed for average tourists killing time until their flight was called, their hands wrapped around large cups of coffee. Tracer drank it black, stirring it with a spoon as if something inside hadn’t dissolved. Jarrett dropped two sugar-loads from tiny paper pouches into his cup. He was, after all, a man with a sweet tooth and a love of honey. At the tables around them were Thais and foreign travelers sitting with their carry-on bags in clusters of twos or threes, the cattle-class passengers who had no access to the VIP lounge.