festival for some god who looks like a mutant animal.”
“Then find Hawkins and get out of there.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing? You know how big Hyderabad is? Seven million dirty, sweaty, smelly people.”
“Are you even sure he’s there?”
“Positive. Some girl in his house overheard him tell a cop in town that’s where he was going.”
“Why do you believe her?”
“Because I gave her enough money to buy her folks two of them Brahma bulls and told her I’d come back and slit the throats of the cattle and her parents if she was lying to me.”
“How are you going to find him?”
“I’m hoping he’ll come to me. I hired some ex-cops to watch the dhabas. They’re food shacks along the highway where the hookers work. It’s the only place around where you can get teenage girls easy, and that’s what he’s into. Sometimes two, three at a time. Costs him about seventy-five cents each. Sneaking out to the dhabas is safer than bringing his own girls from Gannapalli. They might talk to neighbors and give him away.”
“And when you find him?”
“My guess is he’ll have a heart attack the moment he looks at me.”
“Get it done. I need you back here. We’re going to have to do something about Gage. He’s been cozying up to Porzolkiewski. Been to see him a couple of times.”
T he mob of Indian truck drivers surged like an amoeba as the fighting cocks jabbed and clawed and pursued one another in the trash-strewn dirt patch behind the row of food stalls and shacks along the Hyderabad Highway.
Despite the setting sun and the gray-brown haze of the dusty road, Boots Marnin caught flashes of rooster wings rising above the screaming men. He was hunched low in the rear sleeping seat of the tractor cab parked to the east, hiding his face from the drivers passing by and from the prostitutes trolling for customers.
The circle surged again as the cocks tumbled toward the legs of the men standing close to the rear of the nearest shack. Boots heard the thump of sweaty backs slamming against the wooden wall as the men dodged the razor-sharp spurs cinched to the roosters’ legs. They re-formed the circle as the birds rolled the opposite way, toward the mango trees bordering the lot to the north.
Diesel fumes pumping out from the dozens of trucks parked around him once would have reminded Boots of his father’s garage, but now they merely choked him and engendered not thoughts of Houston, but fantasies of escape. The only break came in the form of the wind-driven odor of reused coconut oil, deep-fried samosas, chickpea balls, burned wheat chapattis, and cumin and coriander and turmeric and a dozen other spices that made Boots want to reach for a gun. For the few days of his surveillance, Boots would look at the cows wandering along the highway or grazing in the fields, then daydream about a T-bone steak. Now the thought turned his stomach because he knew the meat would taste like India.
Boots heard a cheer and saw triumphant brown hands raise the victorious cock above the crowd. He then watched men separate into groups and exchange rupees before wandering back to their trucks or to the small wooden tables spread along the front of the dhaba.
The skies darkened as he watched them eat, then disappear into the shacks, and drive off twenty minutes later, making room for a continuing stream of other drivers stopping to eat at the tables or screw on the dirty cots or sleep in their trucks.
Boots leaned forward toward the ex-cop sitting in the driver’s seat of the tractor cab.
“You sure this the right place?” Boots asked. “We’ve been here a long time.”
“I am still believing this is the only dhaba he is visiting along the Hyderabad Highway.”
They sat without speaking for another hour watching trucks, cars, and vans arriving and leaving, men cooking rice and lentils in stainless steel pots over open gas flames, women chopping vegetables and mincing herbs.
The ex-cop tapped Boots’s shoulder, then pointed at a yellow, canvas-topped auto-taxi pulling to a stop along the side of the nearest shack.
The taxi walla remained seated inside the three-wheeled, open-sided vehicle while a potbellied man slipped out the far side, into the shadows along the wall, then disappeared around the back of the shack.
“That is Mr. Wilbert, yes?” the ex-cop said.
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
W ilbert Hawkins, beer in hand, bald head illuminated by the shack’s dangling lightbulb, pants around his ankles, stared down at the naked teenage girl on her knees before him. He grabbed her hair and rocked her head back and forth-
Then flinched at the sound of the wooden door scraping the dirt.
“Close that thing,” Hawkins yelled. “I got this one.”
But the door didn’t close.
Hawkins glared into the darkness at an unmoving charcoal gray figure framed in black.
“Who the…?”
The man stepped forward, but his head and torso remained in a shadow that cut him off at the knees.
Hawkins’s eyes alerted to the pressed Levi’s, then widened in terror as they fixed on dusty alligator-skin boots poised at the threshold. His scream choked in his throat as his erection died in the girl’s mouth.
D id he have a heart attack when he saw you?” Marc Anston asked during Boots’s call from India.
“Not immediately.”
“What about the body?”
“The Indian police will have it cremated.”
“Do they know who he is?”
“No. Just a white guy who could’ve been from anywhere and collapsed while getting a blow job. Dead men don’t have accents.”
“How much did Gage find out?”
“Gage knows Hawkins got a million dollars from Pegasus. He knows TIMCO understood from the get-go why the valve blew. And he knows Hawkins believed you were behind Palmer-but dead men don’t have beliefs either.”
“Any way to control the fallout?”
“Not easily,” Boots said. “Gage made a tape.”
“So removing Gage won’t solve our problem.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Gage has been telling pieces of what he knows to too many people,” Anston said, “but I’m not sure any of them would be able to put it together but him.” He fell silent for a few seconds, and then said. “We need to go after Gage’s weakness.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s like a bloodhound. We just need to keep dragging the scent down the wrong path.”
“Why not just take him out?”
“Gage is too well connected. And his pals Joe Casey and Spike Pacheco would never let it go. Especially Pacheco. He’s like a Gila monster. You’d have to cut off his head to separate his jaws.”
Chapter 63
' Look Quinton,” Gage said, “we’ve got two dead people linked through Pegasus. Charlie Palmer and the OSHA inspector.”
Cayman Island barrister Leonard Quinton, QC, pressed his fingertips together on the top of his desk in his office overlooking Hog Sty Bay in George Town, Grand Cayman. He looked back at Gage with the dead-eyed gaze of British ex-pat lawyers trained to keep secrets.
“That’s no concern of mine,” Quinton said. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told you when you were here chasing after Phillip Charters. What companies do is their business, not mine. That would be like Citibank telling their clients what they can and cannot buy with their credit cards.”
