Suspicion

by Joseph Finder

  It took all the restraint he could muster to keep from lunging at the man again. Danny clenched his fists and bit his lower lip. He actually trembled with anger.

  “How do I know she’s okay?”

  “You have my word.”

  “Your—word?”

  “I’m afraid that’s the best you can do. But you’ll see that I am a man of my word.”

  Danny swallowed. He heard distant laughter, a girl’s squeal. “Okay, listen. If you let my daughter go—and if you absolutely guarantee my daughter’s safety—I’ll—I’ll try my best to find Galvin.”

  Dr. Mendoza smiled. “You’ll try to find him? This is your notion of good faith? You disappoint me. Good night.” Straightening his tie, Dr. Mendoza began to walk away.

  “Wait—”

  Dr. Mendoza stopped, made a half turn.

  “Hold on,” Danny said. He swallowed again. His face was taut, burning. Agonized, he said, “He’s on his boat.”

  “Thank you,” Dr. Mendoza said. “And where is that boat?”

  “Where’s Abby? Give me my daughter and I’ll tell you where his boat is.”

  Dr. Mendoza sighed and shook his head.

  “This is a game you really want to play? A game with your daughter’s life? No, this is how it will work: You will take me to Galvin. Then I’ll tell you where she can be found.”

  Danny looked around wildly, trying to regain some semblance of control. He swallowed, closed his eyes.

  “All right,” he said at last.

  90

  Danny sat behind the wheel of the Honda. In the passenger’s seat next to him sat the man in the suit, tall and lanky yet powerfully built.

  “Place the call,” Dr. Mendoza said.

  “He’s on his boat. I don’t even know if a call can get through.”

  “For your sake, for your daughter’s sake, let us hope it does.”

  Galvin was on his boat, waiting for Danny to give him the all-clear signal.

  But this call would change everything.

  Once again, Danny felt a terrible clarity. His daughter’s life depended on this. He remembered the morning when Sarah and he had strapped their tiny baby into a car seat and drove her home from the hospital. A howling snowstorm outside, and they’d covered her face with a pink-and-blue-striped baby blanket to protect her from the snow during the dash from the hospital to their car. He drove as if the baby was made of glass, as if the baby’s life was in his hands, and it was.

  As it was now.

  The most precious thing in the world to him.

  His stomach was roiling. He was frightened and alone and his baby’s life depended on him. Abby or Tom Galvin—was that even a choice?

  He punched the numbers for Galvin’s BlackBerry. It rang once, twice, three times, and he thought: What if he doesn’t answer? What will this monster in the seat next to me do?

  On the third ring, Galvin answered. “Danny?”

  “Tom—don’t leave yet. I have—something to give you.”

  “Danny? What, did you say—give me—?”

  “Don’t go anywhere,” he said, and he ended the call.

  “Where is Galvin?”

  “Boston Harbor,” Danny said softly.

  “The faster you take us there,” Dr. Mendoza said, “the faster our business will be concluded.”

  “What are you going to do to him?”

  A long silence. “That will be determined by his behavior.”

  Danny drove like an automaton. Not another word was exchanged between the two men on the way over. His chest was tight. He found it hard to breathe. He was acutely aware of Dr. Mendoza’s presence next to him. It burned his cheeks and ears like he was standing next to a raging fire.

  Traffic had gotten light, and they made it there in twelve minutes.

  He pulled the Honda into the Boston Yacht Haven parking lot. He got out, his legs leaden, a prickle at the back of his neck.

  As they came around the side of the clubhouse to the dock, Dr. Mendoza drew up close to him. “Do I need to tell you that if anything happens to me, if I do not place a call to my associate within an hour, harm will befall her?” He glanced at his wristwatch, a large white face with gold numbers and a brown leather strap. “You will see I am not in the business of making idle threats.”

  Danny nodded. He felt light-headed, thick and slow. He moved as if through sludge.

  “And where is his yacht?” Mendoza demanded.

  El Antojo wasn’t tied up at the dock. Its berth was empty.

  He pointed. Galvin’s yacht had left shore. It was a few hundred yards off, its running lights illuminating the ship with an orange glow as if lit from within.

  “He’s left?” Mendoza said. “This is most unfortunate for you.”

  “He’s out there. I told him not to go anywhere.”

  Danny could taste the salt in the air. He heard the scuff of a shoe against pavement nearby, but when he turned he saw nothing.

  “You had better persuade him to turn back now.”

  Danny looked at Mendoza, then looked at the water. He said nothing.

  “Let us be clear, you and I,” Mendoza said. “If he does not return to shore, your daughter is dead. It is as simple as that. If you cannot persuade him, your daughter is dead. It all rests on you.”

  “Christ!” Danny said. His nerves felt stretched taut. He took out his cell phone and was about to hit REDIAL.

  But then he stopped. Shook his head.

  “Make the call,” Mendoza said.

  “No.”

  Mendoza’s eyes flashed. For the first time, Danny detected anger in the man’s face. Anger was good. Anger revealed vulnerability.

  “You give the order to release Abby,” Danny said, “and I’ll get Galvin back here. But you’d better do it now, or you’ll lose Tom Galvin forever. Once Galvin’s out of cell range, it’s too late for you.”

  “You do not make the rules of this game.”

  “Let her go and I’ll make the call. You want a hostage, you have me. But let her go now. I want to hear her voice. Then I’ll give you whatever the hell you want.”

  Mendoza gave Danny a basilisk stare. Taking a small mobile phone from his suit jacket, he spoke quickly in Spanish. Danny understood nothing of what he said.

  Mendoza handed the phone to Danny.

  “Daddy?” Abby croaked into the phone.

  “Abby!” Danny said, tears in his eyes. “Baby. Where are you?”

  “They tied me up! I think there’s a furnace? It’s like the boiler room—the basement of the school.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “He just left, Daddy, he’s gone. He cut off the things, the—those, like, plastic things for handcuffs?”

  “You can move?”

  “Yeah. I just want to get out of here. I—”

  “Call Lucy. Right now. Ask her to pick you up at school. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah. I—” She started crying. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I love you. I’m sorry—”

  “Boogie. Sweetie. Just call Lucy, would you do that for me?”

  He hung up the phone.

  Mendoza nodded, and Danny nodded back.

  “As I have said, I am a man of my word,” Mendoza said. “And now it is your turn.”

  Danny dialed the number for Galvin’s BlackBerry. It rang once, and then Galvin came on the line.

  “Danny, what the hell is it?”

  “Please, Tom, listen to me. You need to return to shore. Come back in. This is important.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just—it’s important. I’m here on shore. Come back.” He clicked off.

  Mendoza, he noticed, had suddenly flinched. Danny turned to look and felt an iron grip on his left upper arm and something cold and hard pressing
into the side of his head and he knew it was a gun. He froze.

  He heard another scuffing sound and saw someone was holding a gun to Dr. Mendoza’s head as well. They were flanked by two men who smelled of cigarettes and body odor and whose bulging arms were tattooed down to their wrists.

  In front of them stood Glenn Yeager. At his side he held a large stainless steel pistol. He wasn’t bothering to point it at Danny and Mendoza. He didn’t need to. His muscle was taking care of that for him.

  “Well, Daniel,” Yeager said. “Looks like you’ve brought us a Sinaloa legend. Dr. Mendoza, it’s good to finally make your acquaintance.”

  Mendoza stared straight ahead.

  Danny looked back at Yeager, dazed.

  “Oh, yeah,” Yeager said, smiling, “and thanks for the tip. As always, we’re three steps ahead of you. Forgot about Galvin’s BlackBerry, didn’t you? Forgot we were listening in to everything you and Galvin said. Well, you enjoy your new babysitters. Phil and I have some business to transact with your friend Tom Galvin. And, Daniel?”

  Danny looked at Yeager. Yeager smiled. “I knew you’d do the right thing.”

  Danny saw where Yeager was heading: down the ramp to the lower level of the pier where some of the smaller ships were tied up. Down there, Philip Slocum and several other guys with guns were boarding what looked like a large black inflatable raft with an outboard motor. Slocum had a large assault rifle slung around one shoulder.

  Then the inflatable’s motor roared throatily to life. Danny turned instinctively to the loud noise, and he felt Mendoza’s left arm twitch.

  Suddenly, Mendoza torqued his body to his right, whipping his free left hand around. Something caught the light, something glinting and lethal and slashing. In almost the same instant, the man on Mendoza’s right turned questioningly toward Mendoza. Around his throat was a thin red seam. As the man moved, the seam in his throat gaped open and a geyser of blood spewed forth, and the man’s knees buckled and he sank to the sidewalk.

  Then Mendoza spun to his other side as Danny jumped out of the way. The man who a moment earlier had been holding a gun to Danny’s temple now lurched away from the blade concealed in Mendoza’s left sleeve.

  The blade whooshed in the air, missing its target. Danny dove to the ground, taking cover behind a tall concrete planter.

  What happened next took no more than ten seconds, but it seemed to take minutes, as if time had somehow slowed.

  Dr. Mendoza juked behind a broad wooden column, a large gun in his hand. He moved with balletic grace. The other man fired, the muzzle flash a tongue of orange flame, and a shot splintered the wood a few inches from Mendoza’s head.

  Another muzzle flash and a bullet zinged against the brick sidewalk near Danny. He could feel sharp fragments sting the side of his face. He crabbed on his knees toward where Mendoza was crouching behind the column, and with one forceful lunge, he shoved Mendoza, hard.

  Mendoza lost his balance, sprawling out from behind the column, and a bullet exploded in his abdomen. Mendoza gasped. Then suddenly came another muzzle flash, and a bullet whizzed, striking him in the chest. Holding his gun level in a perfectly steady grip, he squeezed off one more shot. There was a scream, and the shooter’s weapon crashed to the ground.

  For a moment, there was just the whine of the outboard motor.

  Mendoza’s white dress shirt bloomed red. He’d been badly wounded. He reached down with one hand to feel his abdomen, and his pistol slipped from his hand and clattered to the sidewalk.

  A moment later, he seemed to list to his left and then toppled slowly, tripping over the chain-link barrier, plummeting headlong with a great splash into the black water.

  A frenzied splashing in the water as Mendoza struggled to stay afloat . . .

  Then nothing. Just the growl of the motor.

  A distant shout from the water.

  Danny lay flat against the brick. He waited for another gunshot, but nothing more came. He waited some more. Then he turned toward the harbor and saw the inflatable racing toward the El Antojo.

  Danny scrabbled to his knees, then onto his feet. His ears rang. Transfixed, he watched the speedboat pull up alongside Tom Galvin’s yacht. Its motor sputtered and died.

  The former DEA agents and their cartel associates began boarding the yacht, intent on killing Tom Galvin.

  Danny found himself praying. All was now beyond his control. He had done his best. He had done everything he could.

  He took out his disposable cell phone and hit the only number he’d programmed into it. He listened to it ring precisely three times and then stop.

  He waited. Three, four, six seconds . . .

  And then the night lit up with an immense flash of fire, as if somehow the sun had suddenly climbed back up over the horizon, bleaching the sky, and a second or two later came the explosion, an enormous deafening boom, seemingly out of sync, like a badly dubbed movie, and the El Antojo had become a vast ball of fire. The sky was ablaze with orange and red and plumes of black smoke, a great roaring inferno.

  And as he sank to the ground, he kept watching the burning yacht, and he felt an emotion he did not at first recognize because he hadn’t felt anything like it in such a long time.

  It wasn’t despair and it wasn’t elation.

  It was, quite simply, relief.

  AFTER

  He became aware of a bright light and a throbbing in his eyeballs and an insistent beeping, a cacophony of beeps from everywhere. Voices murmuring; someone groaning in pain. Shapes floated across the scrim of his closed eyelids. His eyes felt glued shut. It hurt when he opened them. He saw a ceiling, a curtain rod, became aware of commotion, the hubbub of many voices.

  He was in a hospital bed.

  He swallowed and his throat hurt immensely. He groaned aloud.

  “Baby?” A woman’s voice. “Danny?”

  Lucy’s. He smiled. “Luce?”

  “He’s awake,” she said. To him? He wasn’t sure. Why was she here? He didn’t want to ask.

  “He,” Danny said, “has a headache.” It took effort to speak. He felt drugged, slow and gauzy and a thousand miles away. “And the worst sore throat in the world. He tried to smile. “You finally got me in a hospital. You know I hate hospitals.”

  “I figured it was better to leave the trauma surgery to the experts. If I could have taken the bullet out myself, I would have.”

  Danny squinted, thinking he’d misheard. “I didn’t get shot.”

  “Yeah, you did. You’re gonna be fine, but you’re going to have a nasty scar on your shoulder.”

  He struggled to sit up, felt a burst of pain. An alarm began to sound, a different sort of beeping, rapid and high.

  “Where’s Abby?”

  A nurse yanked open the curtain. “What’d he do now?”

  “Where’s Abby?” he repeated.

  “Abby’s at the Galvins’,” Lucy said.

  The nurse pulled the sheet away, tugged something off his chest, ripping chest hair painfully. She adjusted whatever it was—an adhesive lead, he saw—and pressed it back down on his chest. “Please don’t try to sit up again, Mr. Goodman.”

  “Can I get a glass of water? I’m really thirsty.”

  “Not until your blood pressure stabilizes, and not until we see some urine. Lie back down and please stop moving.”

  He shrugged and felt the pain shoot down his right side.

  “Abby’s doing fine,” Lucy said. “Shaken up, obviously. She was pretty traumatized, but she seems to be doing okay.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “She was here for a bit while you were asleep. Now you’re going to have to talk to the FBI.”

  “FBI? Wait . . .”

  “There’s two of them, but the nurse will only allow one in here at a time. They say they just want information. They’re sitting in t
he waiting room. I could tell them to come back.”

  “But why . . .”

  “The explosion, sweetie, remember? Getting shot, everything at the dock?”

  Danny closed his eyes, felt it coming back to him now. The gunfire, the blat of outboard motors, the immense, deafening blast.

  A minute or two later, he heard the scuff of a chair on the floor nearby. “Mr. Goodman, I’m Agent Steve Nocito with the FBI, and I was wondering whether I could ask you just a few questions.”

  Danny, lying down, turned his head to one side. He remembered the elaborate con perpetrated on him by the impostors Slocum and Yeager. “Can I see some ID?”

  “Of course.” The agent handed him a black leather folding credential wallet. Danny glanced at the badge and ID—it felt heavy, substantial. He handed it back.

  “Mr. Goodman, you were at the scene of the . . . explosion last night.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Why were you there?”

  Why was he there? Ah, yes. How much could he say? As he thought—his brain was working far too slowly—he remained silent.

  “Did you know the deceased, Thomas Galvin?” the FBI man prompted.

  The words hit him in the gut. The deceased. “I did.”

  “Were you a friend?”

  Danny thought a long while. “Yes. I was.”

  “Was he planning to flee the country?”

  He thought some more. What was supposed to be known, and what wasn’t?

  “Yes, I believe he was,” Danny said.

  “Do you know where he intended to go?”

  Danny shook his head.

  “Might it have been Anguilla? He and his family used to vacation there regularly.”

  “Could have been. Yes, I think so.”

  “Did he have enemies?”

  Danny could hear one set of beeps accelerate as his heart sped up. “Of course.”

  Agent Nocito waited for more, but Danny had fallen silent. After a moment he went on: “Our preliminary investigation indicates three other deaths in the explosion. Two of them are former employees of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Were you familiar with them, by any chance?”