Side by Side

had lunch with the judge,” Alexa told Clayton. “If the kid was watching the dining room, we all left separately. You and I went up in separate elevator cars.”

“You know,” Clayton said to Alexa, “I think he was at a table in the dining room. Had a backpack by his foot. Hailey came in after you and I were already seated at different tables. I’m not sure when the kid showed up. I was watching for the judge and you, but I’m sure he wasn’t there when I came down.”

“Christ. Christ. Okay, let’s think this through,” Alexa said. “Did I look at you? I can’t remember. Did the judge? I think he might have turned to look at you.”

“I was monitoring you through a reflection in the glass. I never looked directly at you.”

Alexa was freaking out, which was not at all like her, Winter thought. He smiled reassuringly. “Relax, Lex. Click’s just snooping.”

“Relax? If they know the judge called the FBI in, Lucy and Elijah are dead.”

“You’re thinking that Click being onto you is a bad thing?”

“He saw you, too,” Alexa reminded him. “Of course it’s a bad thing. What the hell could be good about it? We don’t know what he knows.”

Winter smiled. “And he doesn’t know that we know about him. Seems like a good thing.”

21

Peanut Smoot’s back was killing him, and his dislike for Sarnov was a full-blown hatred. There wasn’t any repairing the #3 NASCAR jacket, but that wasn’t nearly as bad as the fact that the Russian bastard had made Peanut look like a fool in front of Mr. Laughlin. No matter how much plain-sense talk Mr. Laughlin came up with about business necessities or how dangerous the Russians were, Peanut was going to deal Sarnov a hand of slow death. Damn the whole bunch of Russians. Their business would go on no matter where the buyers came from, because the merchandise was in demand and profitable to their buyers.

What was one more hole in the good earth? Who could prove it was Peanut who did anything to Sarnov? Accidents happen and people go missing all the time.

Planning the bastard’s end made Peanut feel better. Wasn’t going to be as simple as a twelve-gauge root canal. It was a fact that Serge Sarnov had a dirt nap in his close-up future.

There were so many possibilities for dealing punishment out that a man would have to flip a coin all day to figure which one it was going to be. For example, you might wrap a little foreign bastard in sheets soaked in blood and let a brace of dogs go to work on him for a while to get him screaming and begging. Then, while he was just scared good, you could hang him up in the skinning shed and use lopping shears and take him apart a piece at a time. No, there was no shortage of ways to pay a feller off who’d wronged you.

Peanut checked his rearview religiously as he drove. Fixes or not, you could never be too careful when it came to the cops. And that wasn’t just the Feds, who were always looking for some new way to stick their noses into your business. If old Judge Fondren did go to the FBI, and they were looking for the woman and that baby, there just wasn’t any way they could tie a Smoot in on it. Only members of Peanut’s immediate family knew about the judge’s daughter and her baby, and not a one of them would ever tell anybody squat. Mr. Laughlin was one secret-keeping son of a bitch. Sarnov and Randall knew some of it, but, they had more to lose if the cops solved it than anybody. So let old Judge Fondren do whatever the hell he wanted, and let him tell everybody he could find-it wouldn’t do him a little bitty bit of good.

Once Bryce was cut loose, there wasn’t nothing that anybody could do no matter if Fondren said he was forced or not. Double jeopardy wasn’t going to happen, because there wasn’t no proving that Bryce was part of anything.

Peanut was starting to feel better. His back was going to have a hell of a sore spot where the gun had been tucked in his belt, and he’d have to get a new jacket to replace his personally autographed #3, but Dale sure couldn’t sign it. .

Peanut picked up the cell phone and dialed Click.

“Yeah?”

“Anything?”

“Naw.”

“Okay, then get on out of there,” Peanut told his son. “I’ll call if I need you for anything else.”

“Like when?”

“Like when I damn well please,” Peanut snapped good-naturedly.

“To do what?”

“Wait and see, son.” Peanut closed the phone. Most of the time, Peanut was fond of all his children. Click was the special one. And not just because he was the baby and all. He was as smart as any contestant on Jeopardy, spoiled rotten, and too good-looking for his own good. But once Peanut was out of the picture-and that wouldn’t be very soon-that boy was the future of the Smoots. The others would either accept it when the time came or they’d end up like all those hairy elephants that got stuck in the ice way back when. Extinct.

Truth be told, once Peanut was dead, it wouldn’t really matter if the whole bunch did piss away everything he had accumulated for them that Mr. Laughlin had legitimized. Not like any of them appreciated any of it anyhow.

Peanut slammed his Johnny Cash at Folsom CD into the player, turned the volume up, and sang along to the music.

Click would be all right.

And to hell with the rest of them hairy-ass elephants.

22

The second he was released from his spy duty, Click Smoot shoved his laptop into his backpack and rushed to the parking garage to get his car. He planned to spend the rest of his day burning holes in other people’s credit in a few choice stores.

He got into his new Nissan Z, laid the backpack on the passenger floorboard, and drove out of the garage. The rain was falling heavily, so he flipped on both his headlights and his wipers.

Click reached under the dash and pressed a button opening a secret compartment large enough to hold two packages of credit cards each joined with a rubber band. Each package included two or three credit cards in an actual name and a driver’s license also in that name but with a recent photograph of Click on it.

Click used his intellect to make money the modern way and was already expanding the family’s take despite their amazing technological ignorance. Robbing, hijacking, illegal gambling clubs, whores, drugs, extortion, insurance fraud, murder for hire, and all the rest of what the family was into was the old way, and Click wanted no part of it. He wasn’t interested in being killed over some whore, or drugs, or a failed hijacking because some driver belonged to the NRA and had a gun he wanted to fire at some criminal so he could get written up in their magazine.

Click was concentrating on a future that few of the people in the family’s business could grasp. As far as his siblings were concerned, anything that was computerized, digitized, or involved something they couldn’t fold and hold was too abstract for them. The average Smoot’s capacity for grasping new technology was akin to a cat’s ability to appreciate fine art.

Click wasn’t like the other Smoots. Once upon a time the difference had been painful, but as he grew up he had come to appreciate how lucky he was. He had an I.Q. of 160. He had discovered early that a clean-cut young man was practically invisible.

Click didn’t hate his family. He just felt sorry for and was overwhelmingly embarrassed about them. He had come to the conclusion that the only thing he had in common with them was a larcenous gene. Like all Smoots,