26
‘He did what?” Laura shrieked. She studied her son, who was angry and not about to listen to anything she had to say. His face was bright red, his eyes seemed to be on fire.
“Nothing I could do,” Thorne said. “He insisted he had to speak to Paul. Threatened to blow the whole surveillance.”
Reb’s bottom lip was extended in anger. “If he’s not in the mountains like you said, I wanted to talk to him. He has a telephone now. What’s so special about him that I can’t talk to him? He’s my father, isn’t he?”
“You go upstairs,” she said. She didn’t move until she heard his bedroom door slam.
“What on earth did he say to Paul?” she asked.
Erin stood in a nearby doorway, listening with her head cocked.
“Reb told him that he should come here. He told Paul that he was selfish. He told him that growing up without a father was a hardship. He basically said that Paul was a selfish asshole and to come now or never.”
“He said that?”
“Oh, more than that. But that was the gist of it-the high points. He spoke to Paul like Paul was the child.”
Laura smiled. “Good,” she said. “What did Paul say?”
“I’ve no idea. I think he hung up.”
Reb was lying on the bed when Laura came up a few minutes later. Wolf put his head on Reb’s leg, and his mother sat on the edge of the bed.
“Reb. You want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“You know what you did was wrong?”
Reb fought to control his quivering lip. “He doesn’t love us, Mama. Why?” He sat up, and she hugged him as he sobbed against her shoulder. “What did we ever do to him? Were we bad? Cause we were just little… we didn’t mean to make him mad.”
“Reb, you didn’t do anything, and it isn’t that your father doesn’t love you. He does.”
“But he yelled at me like he hates me. He said I should be turned over someone’s knee and that my behavior could cost us all our lives and that this wasn’t a game. He yelled some other stuff, but I wasn’t listening. He’s a horrible, mean man. I wish I hadn’t called him. I wish he was dead. I wish those bad men had killed him dead and dead.”
Laura did the best she could, but Reb would not be consoled. His face was like a mass of tight cables all pulling in different directions. Laura had never seen him in such a state. She left his room and ran into Erin in the hall.
“Just who the hell does he think he is?” Erin yelled.
“Erin!” she said. “Language!”
“The hell with him!”
“Erin, please.”
“Just because he looks like a damned scarecrow doesn’t give him the right to treat Reb like that! I don’t care how he treats me, but I do care how he treats my little brother. How dare he?”
“Erin, I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.”
“Oh, so just keep on taking up for Mr. Slime Varmint. I’m sorry he got shot in his precious face.” She looked directly into her mother’s eyes. “I’m sorry it didn’t kill him, too.”
“Erin!”
“Oh, Mother, you’re as bad as he is.” Erin ran to her bedroom and slammed the door. The noise echoed through the hallway like a shotgun blast.
Laura went to the kitchen, poured herself a large glass of red wine, and drained it. “Thorne,” she said, speaking to the window, which was like talking directly into his earphones, “do us all a favor and tell him we don’t need to see him ever again. Tell him he can go straight back to his mountain. Tell him if he hurts my children again, I’ll kill him myself.”
Then Laura took her bottle of wine into the studio and turned up the stereo so she could cry in privacy.
Erin was furious. Her father had turned her family’s lives upside down, put her social life on hold, and she didn’t appreciate it a bit. She thought about the new boy in school, who might be the most beautiful boy she had ever laid eyes on. Eric Garcia had told a friend of hers that he had a crush on her. Earlier that day he had spoken to her while she’d been eating lunch. He had asked Erin out, and normally she would have jumped on it in an instant. Her friends had been sick, they were so jealous. But with everything that was happening she had had to put him off by saying that she was busy, although she had been careful to leave the door open for the week after. I mean, how long can it take all these experts to nail one old creep? After school that agent, Sean Merrin, had been waiting and had shadowed her, even on the streetcar from her high school. It made her feel like an idiot, a small child.
She decided that she would show them. She’d slip Eric a note arranging to meet him, and then she’d slip Sean Merrin. Fuck ’em.
27
Gravel crunched under the dark Cadillac Brougham, its running lights burning orange, as it floated out of the fog like a manta ray. It slid up the truck ramp, swung out onto the dock, and pulled into the shadow of a rusting freighter. The freighter was a ghost vessel, abandoned for the evening, its crew scattered about the bars of the upper French Quarter. The car stopped, and after a few minutes the rear door opened as a single figure got out.
Lallo Estevez carried himself with the aplomb of an aristocrat. He wore his hair in a rolling silver mane. He had a pencil-thin mustache and wore heavy black-framed glasses. The all-weather coat hung shroudlike from his shoulders, and the gold signet ring with his ancient family crest had doubled as a sealing-wax stamp two hundred years before. He thought he heard something behind him and gave the Cadillac a proprietary glance, lit a blond Dominican cigar with his gold Dunhill lighter, then turned and walked up the gangplank to the deck. He thought the vantage point might be more advantageous from that altitude. The thin soles of his loafers slid against the damp boards, slick leather against the light coating of oil and beads of condensation. He stood at the top of the walk and looked up and down the deck. The broker could barely make out the window to the pilothouse through the fog. Not that anyone was in there. Privacy had been arranged with a word to the captain. The ship belonged to Lallo’s coffee company. He looked around trying to spot the man with his rifle. No matter.
Lallo spent ten minutes standing and puffing on the cigar and listening for any foreign sound. As usual he wasn’t armed. He had never liked weapons personally, though he had fenced at college in England, and he was a fair clay-target shot. He had never had to handle a weapon in violence. As long as there was poverty, there would be those willing to do anything for a TV set and a few dollars. He checked his Omega. Ten past the time Martin had set for the meeting.
Lallo wasn’t nervous about the shooter, except he hoped the shot was clean. Sometimes these men weren’t as concerned with what was behind the target as the target itself. And he hoped the CIA hadn’t decided to end their uneasy partnership after all these years. He could describe Spivey’s build and his voice but had never looked into his eyes. It was better not to see too much. The only other time he had met with him, Spivey had been wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, a thick mustache and matching wig, neither of which looked convincing or had meant to be.
“Marty, where the fucking hell are you?” he whispered to himself.
“Such language.” The voice shocked him like a cup of cold water tossed in his face, and Lallo was frightened to find himself standing two feet away from the author of the words. A stranger. He thought he heard the car door close, and he prayed the men in the car behind him would stay put. “Martin? Is this you?” Lallo had not seen Martin
