“Just the one truck after you guys, though-just one of those four-by-fours.”
“One was enough.”
“So the other three were on Deke and Ray-Ray?”
“The fuck should I know? All Deke said was that they were on his ass. He didn’t say if that meant three trucks or one.”
“He called just once?”
“And I could barely hear him then. The service isn’t great out there.”
“He didn’t say that he wasn’t going to Mendoza? That he was making for Santiago instead?”
“He said they were on his ass, and that was it. If he’d said anything about Santiago, or not showing up at the fallback, we wouldn’t have spent two days waiting in that fucking hole, peeping through those moldy curtains, and jumping every time a toilet flushed.”
“So no idea how Deke and Ray-Ray ended up westbound on Highway Seven?”
Bobby ran a thick hand down his face. “Come on, Carr-enough already with this.”
“You were there, Bobby-you must have an idea.”
“Like what-they were cut off, couldn’t get back on Forty, took one of those horse trails to Seven, and got tagged in the mountains? You don’t like that story, make up one of your own. You know as much as I do about what happened.”
“You were there.”
“And you weren’t, and you don’t know how to give it a rest. Look, everybody gets that you never liked the deal-you and Val both. Not enough planning, too rushed, whatever. You guys made it clear, and it turns out you were right. Nobody thinks it’s your fault, Carr. Nobody holds it against you, except maybe you.”
“I’m not holding anything. I just want to know why it went bad.”
“There’re a million reasons. Crappy planning, crappy intel, crappy roads, crappy luck-take your pick. Who knows why, and who the hell cares? Deke is gone, and so is Ray, and picking at the roadkill won’t bring ’em back. You feel guilty, find yourself a priest. Talking to you about this is like talking to my Irish grandma, for chrissakes, or talking to a cop.”
Carr had smiled at that. He hadn’t been talking like a cop, but he’d been listening like one. That was the sixth time he’d gotten Bobby to tell the story, the third time since his talk with Tina, and every time Bobby had told it just the same way, down to the pitch-fucking-black, the bastards bouncing in his mirrors, the half-busted axle, and the moldy curtains. Always the same details-never more, never less, never different. Every time. The same.
Bobby comes up the alley, wiping the corner of his mouth, and Carr comes back.
Bobby unhitches his tool belt and tosses it into the van. “Ichabod’s name is Willis Stearn,” he says. “I got more pictures. I got a number and an address too. And I knocked over the kitchen for a tuna on white with the crusts cut off. Fucking master criminal, huh?”
Carr nods. “Nobody better, Bobby.”
9
In the maze of machines and shining bodies, it is her shoulders that he finally recognizes. They’re angular and broad for a woman, with well-defined deltoid muscles and a faded scar-a ragged-edged dime of unknown origin-over her left scapula. It appears and disappears beneath the edge of her sweat-darkened tank top as she works the fly machine. Carr forces himself not to stare, but to keep drifting around the perimeter of the vast gym.
It has taken him ten minutes of drifting to find Valerie, and no wonder. Her hair is shorter now, and expensively tinted-a champagne and honey cap with bangs swept to the side-and her skin is biscuit brown. But the hair and tan are just window dressing, sleight of hand. The real transformation runs deeper, and Carr is no closer to working out the trick now than he was in Costa Alegre.
So she is older today-thirty-five, maybe forty-and very fit. But also tired, though not from the exercise. It’s a longer-term fatigue, a kind of erosion-the product of a beating tide of disappointment, wrong choices, bad luck. Its etchings appear at the corners of her mouth and around her eyes, in her dye job, and in the concentration she puts into her workout. They tell a story of assets carefully managed but dwindling nonetheless-an inexorable spending of the principal. Carr has stopped and is staring again, and now she knows he’s here.
This is another bit of magic he can’t work out-some radar she possesses. Her look is fleeting-less than that- the barest flick of her eyes on the way to glancing at the wall clock, but Carr reads the anger there. He drifts back to the lobby, out the doors, and across Mizner Park to his Saturn.
In twenty minutes Carr is at the Embassy Suites, in a pale blue room with a view of some dumpsters and of planes departing the Boca Raton airport. Forty minutes after that Valerie is at the door, in flats and a sleeveless orange dress. She smells of honeysuckle, and her hair is still damp from the shower. She walks past Carr and sits at the end of the bed.
“What the hell were you doing there?” she says. Her voice is tight with anger, and Carr hears something else in it-the hint of a twang, a whisper of Texas or Oklahoma.
“I told them I was interested in a membership,” he says. “They let me walk around.”
“I don’t give a damn what you told them. What the hell were you doing? We were supposed to meet here. You want to fuck this up while we’re still at the gate?”
“Was Amy at the club?”
“She had a yoga class this afternoon; she left half an hour before you showed up. But that’s not the point. The point is I don’t want you there. I don’t want to be seen with anybody there. Jill’s supposed to be on her own.”
“You take the yoga class with Amy?”
Valerie’s lips purse. “Monday. I join the class Monday.”
“You talk to her yet?”
“In the locker room, to say hello,” Valerie says, and slips off her flats. Her bare feet are tanned; her toenails, like her fingernails, are pale pink.
“She knows who you are?”
“She knows I’m Jill. She’s heard me talk about being new in town.”
“That’s not much.”
“It’s enough for now. Get this for me,” she says, rising and turning her back to Carr. He slides her zipper down.
“You have a better read on her?”
“I know she takes care of herself. Yoga, spinning, weights, laps in the pool-she’s at the club every day. She spends money on her hair and nails, and serious money on her wardrobe. St. John, Carlisle, Akris-nice stuff. Low- key, but classy. And that handbag of hers is no knockoff. Twenty grand, easy. She’s a loner, though. Never says more than a word or two to the staff, or to another member. Never has guests.”
“But she says hello to you.”
Valerie nods, and lets her dress fall in an orange pool at her feet. She wears no bra, and her panties are sheer orange silk. “I’m sociable,” she says.
She throws the spread off the bed and pulls down the blanket and top sheet. Carr leans against the desk. His heart is pounding and his words catch in his throat. “You see the video Dennis and Bobby shot of her house?” he asks. Valerie nods. “What did you think?”
“It’s modern-lots of glass.”
“I meant about the security.”
“No surprise: she’s president of a bank, and it’s a pain in the ass. She’s in a gated community, so there’s the gatehouse, the authorized visitor lists, the prowl cars, and lots of rent-a-cops-who, by the way, are all strapped. Bobby said the house itself is wired pretty good too-not that it slowed him much.
“On top of that, there’s the bank’s security people. She’s got a retired sheriff’s deputy that drives her everywhere in that nice black Benz, and her office, her car, and her house all get swept weekly for electronics.”
“On a set schedule?”
