“We could die of old age hiding out in this hole,” says Harry. “The FBI’s got a full plate, and Liquida probably doesn’t even show up on their list of hors d’oeuvres. We could be here for years. I’m not that patient. You want to know the truth, I’d just as soon be dead.”
“If you go after him, you probably will be,” says Joselyn.
“I don’t intend to go toe to toe with Liquida. But if I can find a lead, hand it off to Thorpe, or let the local police take him down, I’ll settle for that,” I tell them.
“Only if they lock him up at Supermax and I can swallow the key,” says Harry. “On the other hand, there’s nothing more permanent than death.”
“Listen to him,” says Joselyn. “Dirty Harry wants to kill him?”
“Why not? He wants to kill us.”
“Harry is a different kind of criminal defense lawyer,” I tell her.
“And how would you go about this?” asks Joselyn.
“Well, I wouldn’t try to take him in a knife fight, if that’s what you mean,” says Harry. “But then, this isn’t a duel, and Liquida doesn’t necessarily get to choose the weapons.”
“So what’s it to be, water pistols at twenty feet?” she asks.
“Show me where he hides his coffin and I’ll rent a cement truck, fly it through his window, and run over him in his sleep,” says Harry. “That way I can take my time driving the stake through his heart.”
“Listen to this man.” Joselyn thinks he’s joking.
The fact is, Harry is one of the few people I know whose capacity to kill I would never question, not if the motivation was sufficient. And knowing Harry, he wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep after he did it.
Harry has what you call a hair trigger. Some might call it an anger management problem. Rub him the wrong way and there’s no way of telling what might come out of the barrel. More than once I have had to pull him off someone before he did serious damage. I have seen Harry kick the crap out of drunks in bars who got in his face thinking it might be fun to push the guy in the rumpled suit with the bow tie. He once pounded the shit out of a client using a casebook off his shelf when the guy started slapping his wife around in Harry’s office. The fact that the man was there on a manslaughter rap didn’t even enter the equation. Not to Harry. It was all in a day’s work.
It’s not that Harry brawls. But if you push his button, he can go crazy all over you. His victims are often stunned and defenseless in the same way you might be if you stepped on a pit viper you thought was a common variety garden snake.
In a crowded room Harry is the guy you never notice, the one holding the smoking gun.
If I got a phone call in the middle of the night telling me that my partner was in the clink on a homicide charge, it wouldn’t exactly shatter my image of who Harry is.
“Fine, now that we know how we’re going to kill him,” says Joselyn, “how do we find him? What about that address in Thailand?” She looks at me.
“What address?” says Harry.
“Herman and I found a notepad in a hotel room in Puerto Rico when we were trying to track down Thorn. You remember, Liquida’s client in the D.C. bombing.”
“Yeah?”
“The note was from an impression left on the inside cover of a notepad. It mentioned something called ‘Waters of Death’ with an address in Thailand. It was something Thorn had jotted down. To me it looked like a contact address for Liquida.”
“Was it?” says Harry.
“We don’t know. I turned the information over to Thorpe. He had two of his agents from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok check it out. A few days later he told me they struck out. The address was for an office in a place called Pattaya. Thorpe told me his people found the office, but it was locked up and dark. There was nobody inside. There was nothing on the door or anywhere else in the building with the name ‘Waters of Death.’ ”
“Maybe they got the address wrong,” says Joselyn.
“No, according to Thorpe it was the right address. The one on the note. It even had the suite number. They had the local police check with the landlord. The office was on a year-to-year lease. The tenant was a Thai businessman. The local authorities told the FBI agents that the guy had no apparent criminal history. The cops found him, and the agents talked to him. The man told them that he used the office only to store business records. He said he never heard of anything called Waters of Death. He had no idea what it was.”
“He could have been lying,” says Harry.
“Chances are, if he had dealings with Liquida, it would have been under a different name,” I tell them, “an alias.”
“God knows he’s used a few of those,” says Harry. “All of his banking records here were under aliases, remember?”
“And, of course, they couldn’t show him a picture of Liquida,” said Joselyn. “The FBI was still working on that.”
“You’re right.”
“Do you know, did the agents actually get inside the office to look around?” says Harry. “Any kind of a search of the premises?”
“I asked Thorpe. He said he didn’t know, but that it was difficult sometimes to get local authorities to go along with a search unless there were formal documents.”
“What does that mean?” says Harry.
“He didn’t say. I’m assuming maybe a search warrant from a judge in the States, an affidavit, maybe something from the State Department by way of an official request.”
“Or maybe crossing the palm of the local cops with some coin,” says Harry. “But whatever it takes, it sounds like they didn’t do it. So the fact is, they don’t know any more about what’s in that office than we do.”
“It sounds like all they know is what the tenant told them,” I say. “Thorpe told me he’d have his people at the embassy keep an eye on the place. No round-the-clock surveillance-they don’t have the manpower over there-but they’d check back in a while. I looked on Google Earth. It’s a long way between the embassy in Bangkok and Pattaya. I’m guessing maybe two hours by car; that’s if the highway is good.”
“We know what that means,” says Harry.
“They think it’s a dead end,” I tell him.
“And they’re not likely to waste their time,” he says.
“No.”
“Do we have anything else?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“So it looks like we either sit tight right here…”
“We’re not going to waste a lot of money, take a chance, and fly off to Thailand?” says Joselyn.
“No, we’re not. I was thinking more along the lines of Harry and me,” I tell her. “Somebody has to stay here with Sarah.”
“Don’t look at me,” she says. “Besides, Harry already has experience in that field.”
“And you saw how much good it did,” says Harry.
“Yes, but you know her. You’re almost family. I’m just a stranger.”
“Maybe she’ll listen to you,” says Harry. “An older woman and all.”
“Watch it! Those are fighting words,” she tells him.
“I’m afraid I’m going to need Harry with me.”
“That’s fine. Then that’ll make three of us. Cuz if you go, you’re not leaving me behind.”
“That means I’ve got to bring Sarah.”
“The plane’s going to be crowded,” says Joselyn. “You, me, Harry, Sarah-and the dog,” she says.
“Shit! I forgot about the dog. We can’t take him with us,” I say.
“Why not?” says Joselyn. “From all accounts, he’s the only one of us qualified to deal with Liquida.”
“You can’t take a dog overseas. They’ll impound him. Probably want to hold him ninety days, maybe six months,” I tell her. “And if they don’t take him going over, U.S. Customs is sure to hold him coming back.”
“Not if he has all his shots,” says Joselyn.
“Over there they’ll probably want to eat him,” says Harry.
