Thick as Thieves (5 page)

Latin Mike sips and sighs and stretches in the cooling air. “Nice,” he says. “Whose choice?” Carr nods toward Valerie, and Mike smiles. “You can book all my hotels,
chica.
” She lifts her wineglass and smiles back.

“Lucky to be here, no,
jefe
?” Mike continues. “Those two stoners could’ve screwed us up but good.”

Carr shakes his head. “The luck was that you didn’t start banging away. Otherwise we’d be picking brains off our lapels around now, instead of drinking wine.”

“That’d work too,” Mike says. “My tastes are simple.”

“So instead of nobody knowing anything, we’d have had maybe ten minutes to haul ass before the cops got there. And that works for you?”

Mike shrugs. “Not everybody’s so squeamish,
cabrón.
”

Carr takes off his sunglasses. “Not everybody’s so stupid, either.”

“You saying Deke was stupid, bro? ’Cause he didn’t mind a little juice.”

“He didn’t mind when there wasn’t another option.”

“Traffic moves fast. There’s not always time to figure the options.”

“Which is why you’re not supposed to figure anything—you’re supposed to listen to me. For chrissakes, Mike, we’ve put months into this gig, and you nearly ended it in the first act.”

Valerie mutters something, and Dennis shifts nervously in his chair. Bobby clears his throat. “Which is something we’ve been wondering about,” Bobby says, “ending it in the first act, I mean.”

It was hard travel from Houston—dusty, hot, and bumpy—and though he’s washed off the grit, Carr can still feel the ride in his shoulders. He looks at Bobby and then at Latin Mike. “We made a deal,” he says, “a commitment. We’ve got big sunk costs in this thing, and so does Boyce. He’s not going to like it if we walk away.”

Mike clasps his hands behind his head. “
Señor Boyce—el padrino.
”

“Fucking ghost, more like,” Bobby says.

Carr rises from the table and walks to the terrace railing. He looks at the darkening vineyards and sighs. He’s been down this road before with Mike and Bobby, more than once—do the job, don’t do the job; one last run, or not—but with three and a quarter million in swag in a room upstairs, the potholes and blind curves are less theoretical now.

“You’ve worked for him longer than I have, Mike,” Carr says. “You were working for him when I signed on.”

“True that,
cabrón
, but I’ve never met the guy. None of us have had the honor—only Deke and you.”

“I didn’t ask for it—it’s the way Deke set it up. It’s the way Boyce wants it.”

“But you see how it makes a guy nervous.”

“You never had a problem before—no worries about the intel he feeds us, or the logistics; no complaint about the splits or the banking service; no gripes at all that I heard about.”

Latin Mike nods slowly, but concedes nothing. “Still, a guy gets older, he starts to like the bird in the hand, right, Bobby?”

Bobby smiles. “Three bucks and a quarter—we used to call that a nice payday.”

There’s wood smoke in the air, something fragrant, mesquite maybe, mixing with the scents of warm earth, bay laurel, and sage that rise from the hillside. Carr breathes in deeply.

“Back when Declan brought me on, you guys thought half a buck was Christmas morning. Times change; prices rise. Three and a quarter isn’t what it used to be, especially after expenses. It’s not beach money anymore.”

Mike empties his wineglass. “And you’re all about retirement, right,
jefe
?”

“I thought we all were. I thought that’s what we said the last five times we had this conversation. But if you’re saying something different, let’s not dick around. Tell me now and I’ll tell Boyce when I see him day after tomorrow.”

Bobby pops up, as if he’s sat on a tack, but he’s smiling. “Nobody’s saying anything. We’re just thinking out loud.”

Valerie’s laugh is like ice in a glass. “Is that how you split the labor, Bobby—Mike thinks, and you do the out loud part?”

Bobby flips her the bird, but he’s laughing too, and so is Dennis, and so—finally—is Mike. Carr is still watching purple shadows spread over the valley when the waitress reappears and says that their table is ready.

It’s set with heavy linen, battered silver, and votive candles in thick blue glass. Valerie is at the head, between Bobby and Latin Mike, and Carr sits at the other end, between Dennis and the vacant chair. Valerie’s playing hostess tonight, smiling, laughing, keeping glasses filled and conversation weightless. It’s a part she plays well: conspiratorial and flattering with Mike; flirtatious and profane with Bobby; and with Dennis simply present to be gazed upon. Carr can relate; he can’t look away either.

Candlelight flickers on her arms and throat and softens her elfin features. Her green eyes glow and, as the night wears on, her braid loosens and two honey-colored strands slip down to frame her face. Always in motion, the face, the hands, the voice—lifting, lilting, insinuating. It must be exhausting, Carr thinks—it exhausts him just watching her, but he watches just the same. The room darkens, the crowd thins, wine bottles march steadily past, good soldiers all, and by the time the entrees are cleared Carr is drunk and drifting backward again, to Costa Alegre.

*    *   *

It was off-season in Chamela—white mornings, the narrow pastel streets empty until noon—and Carr was on R & R between jobs, nursing a row of bruised ribs. He was sticking close to his rented casita, swimming, reading, sleeping, and he’d never have seen her if not for Fernando.

Fernando did alarms for Declan when Carr first joined up, and his brother Ernesto did surveillance, but their skills didn’t line up with Declan’s ambitions and they’d slipped into retirement about a year later—Neto to a sport fishing business on the Riviera Maya, and Nando to invest in Jalisco real estate. Carr had always liked the brothers, their unfussy competence and soft-edged cynicism, and he’d been happy to hear from Nando and accept his invitation to drive up the coast for lunch by a hotel pool.

Nando was thicker, darker, and more jocular than he’d been the last time he and Carr had shared a meal. He was working steadily through a platter of chicken tacos and a long story about some condos he was building in Manzanilla when he paused and pointed with his beer to the far side of the pool. “
Oye, cabrón
—you like a little mystery?”

She wore a green two-piece, and her skin was the color of toast. Her hair wasn’t blond then, it was a sun-streaked copper, cut blunt to her shoulders, and there was a tattoo on her lower back, a tangle of blue Sanskrit, that looked as if it had been there a while, but which proved to be window dressing. The freckles were real though, and so were the quick green eyes. And the catch at the back of his throat. And the ache he felt through his arms and fingers.

“
Muy bien, no
?” Nando continued. “At first I think she’s a tourist, but then I’m not sure. All week I see guys make their play, and all week she’s ice. She shuts them down before they get a word out—even me, if you can believe it. Then these skinny guys check in a couple days ago, from up north, and suddenly she’s Miss Congeniality. She lets them buy her drinks, lunch, dinner, whatever, and they’re practically slitting each other’s throats to get next to her.”

“You think she’s a working girl?”

“She’s working something,
cabrón
. I just can’t figure out what.”

Nando was flying up to Monterrey that afternoon for his niece’s
quinceañera
, and he picked up the check before he left and promised to let Carr buy dinner when he returned. “You keep your eye on her, bro. Maybe you can tell me what the mystery is all about.” It took him three days to work it out.

Carr spent a few more hours poolside that afternoon, watching her talk to the skinny men. The next day, he took a room at the hotel and followed her: to the beach with the tall skinny man, into town with the balding one, on the cliff-side hiking trail with the blond one who wore a strand of Buddhist prayer beads around his wrist. Poolside, in the cottony twilight, the men bought her drinks, fidgeted, laughed too long, and looked away from one another and scowled.

The day after that, Carr spent some dollars with the hotel staff to learn that her name was Carrie Lyle and that she was from L.A. The three men were from Milpitas, California, and they’d each given the same address on McCarthy Boulevard when they’d registered. Online, in the hotel’s business center, he found that the Milpitas address was the headquarters of Null Space Integrated, a manufacturer of specialized graphics chips, and that the men were NSI’s three most senior design engineers. Of Carrie Lyle he could find no trace at all.

A pro then, trolling for technical intel, or maybe for talent. It didn’t surprise Carr, but the knowledge left him feeling somehow disappointed, as if such mundane loot wasn’t deserving of her performance. Because it really was an exceptional performance—maybe the best he’d seen—subtle, unhurried, and finely calibrated to each member of her small audience. He saw it in her body language—the way she arranged herself at their sides—and he heard it in the snippets of conversation he’d managed to steal. She was tentative, almost shy, with the tall man; coltish, nearly awkward, with the bald one; and with the blond Buddhist she was ethereal and dreamy. Three women, beckoning.

It didn’t seem much work for her to reconcile her various selves when she entertained the three men at once. It was a matter of small adjustments as far as Carr could tell from his corner of the patio—something in her laugh, her posture, the way she touched her hair. A matter of little intimacies bestowed like candies: a fingertip on the back of a hand, a tanned thigh pressed for a moment against a pale one, a tanned foot sliding on a pale ankle, a hand on a nervous hip. The skinny men were like cats under a full moon, and at his shaded table Carr himself felt a lunar itch and an urge to howl.

So, mystery solved. Carr sighed heavily at the squandering of talent and hoisted himself from his seat. He headed toward his room and wondered what he and Declan might not get up to with someone like her on their crew. They’d been talking about recruiting someone with that kind
of knack—a roper, a honeypot—but neither of them could come up with a likely prospect. Carr slid his key into his door and wondered if Carrie Lyle, or whatever the hell her real name was, might do. And then a gun was in his back and a hand was on his neck, pushing him inside.

The man didn’t wait until the door had closed. “The fuck you want, motherfucker?” His voice was American and nervous.

Carr turned slowly and took a slow, deep breath. The man was maybe thirty, and wore jeans and a polo shirt. He had short, black hair and a narrow frame, and something about his tapered head, and the way it swayed on his neck, reminded Carr of an otter. The man was sweating and breathing hard, and a vein throbbed at his temple faster than Carr’s pulse was racing.

“The fuck you want with her?” the otter said, and Carr sighed with relief that this was about Carrie Lyle and not some older piece of business. He studied the damp face. He didn’t think he’d seen the otter around the hotel, but he knew he wasn’t perfect when it came to those things.

“Want with who?”

“Don’t screw with me, asshole. You’re fucking bird-dogging her, and I want to know why.”

The gun was a little S&W, and Carr didn’t like the way it jumped around in the otter’s hand. “You mean the redhead? Take a look at her, brother—what do you think I’m interested in?”

The otter almost spit. “Right—that’s why you duke the desk guy a hundred bucks to see all those registration cards.”

Carr nodded slowly. She’d set up trip wires. She’d had someone watching her back. Carr was impressed, even if her guard dog was a lightweight. She’d known someone was trailing her and still she hadn’t broken stride. Carr took a half-step closer. The otter didn’t notice. “I wondered what she saw in those geeks,” he said. “A girl like that—I couldn’t figure it. I still can’t.”

The otter swallowed hard. “Bullshit. What are you—NSI security? Something private?”

Carr took another step forward and put a quaver in his voice and a frightened look on his face. “Seriously, I’m not anybody,” he said, and he raised his hands in the air. “I’m just here on vacation from—”

Carr jabbed his thumb into the otter’s throat, then into his eye, and then he took the otter’s gun. The man gagged and put his hands to his
face. Carr pushed him backward into a chair. He tried to get up and Carr pushed him down harder and flipped him over. The otter had a wallet in his hip pocket and Carr took it, and slapped the back of his head when he tried to resist.

According to his driver’s license, his name was Kenneth Kern, from Van Nuys, California, and according to his business card, he was a partner and senior investigator with Victory Security Services, Inc. Carr tossed the wallet at Kern’s feet.

“I don’t work for NSI,” Carr said. “And I could give a shit what you guys are up to. I just want five minutes of her time—a quick chat, and nothing else.” He emptied the S&W while he spoke, and put the bullets in his pocket. Then he popped the cylinder out of the gun and tossed what was left into Kern’s lap. He held up the cylinder. “She comes to see me, I’ll give this back.”

She showed up around midnight, wearing a gray linen shift and an expression of impatience and disdain. She looked years older than she had poolside, and even ignoring the little automatic in her hand, she was about as seductive as the taxman.

Valerie’s voice was flat and without accent. “Your five minutes started fifteen seconds ago, so if you’ve got a pitch, make it now.”

Carr handed her the S&W cylinder. “I promised your boss I’d give this back.”

She snorted. “Kenny’s barely the boss of his shoelaces,” she said, and dropped the cylinder into her purse. She looked at her watch again.

Carr nodded and said his piece. Two days later, after she’d e-mailed the specs for NSI’s next mobile phone chip to her client in Shanghai and shorted a thousand shares of NSI stock, Valerie arrived for lunch in Chamela. Her expression was wary when Carr greeted her at the door of his casita, and warmed only slightly when Declan offered her a drink.