called that number from this phone? I’d do it myself, but I’d have to go through channels and it might take a couple of days. We’re really working against the clock here.’
‘Well, he was only here one night, and he came quite late. I don’t know when he would have called.’
‘Mrs. Foerster, a man like Davey can be quite resourceful.’
‘Well, OK,’ she said, but she sounded uncertain.
‘Good. That’s good. Here’s the phone.’
Gordo and Jonah waited while she sat on hold. Jonah was pacing a little bit, and if he was going to do that, Gordo wished he would go out on the street where Mrs. Foerster didn’t have to look at him. But she was a good girl, a trooper. When she got someone on the phone, she did just as he told her – she asked them to outline all the calls made from her phone in the past twenty-four hours. As she listened, she jotted something down on a piece of scrap paper. She turned it around so that Gordo could read it.
3:07 AM.
She looked deeply into his eyes. He noticed her eyes were bloodshot, and yellowing. He nodded. She nodded.
Jonah floated closer and looked at the note.
‘OK, thank you,’ Foerster’s mom said into the phone just before hanging up. ‘You know, I have some family visiting, and I just don’t like the way they think my phone is their phone. Calling wherever they please, anytime they want. I have to keep close tabs on them.’
Gordo liked the story. She was clearly a veteran liar. She had flowed into it just as smoothly as he would have.
‘Well, you were right,’ she said. ‘He called there in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. But the call lasted less than a minute.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ Gordo said. ‘I wonder what it means.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Jonah said as they walked back to the car. ‘The guy called some random office in the middle of the night when he knew nobody would be there. He probably did it so he could lie to his mother a little more about some place that was supposed to hire him. I can’t imagine anybody hiring that guy.’
‘Sure, that could be,’ Gordo allowed. ‘Or he might have called there for a hundred other reasons. He’s a crazy person, so he might actually think that some private security firm wants to hire him. For all I know, he’s so delusional he thinks he works for the government, or for some clandestine foreign spy agency.’
‘Or the New World Order,’ Jonah said.
‘Right. He might go to South Carolina and walk in the office there, and they won’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. It could be bad for them because it might set him off.’
They were almost to the car. For some reason, it bothered Jonah to think that any firm, especially a security contractor, would want Foerster to work for them. It burned him up. He didn’t want his mind to think it.
‘Or, and I know this is a little hard to swallow,’ Gordo said. ‘Foerster might have some skill or combination of skills that makes this security company want to hire him. Hey, these guys might be people who hire rent-a-cops with tinfoil badges to hang around empty shopping malls and make sure nobody walks off with the sheetrock or the wiring. But we know one thing about Foerster – he thinks about two steps ahead, and he can be pretty fucking hard to catch. These might be enticing traits to somebody. And we know one thing about private security companies in this day and age – it’s not always clear what they’re really up to.’
‘So you’re saying?’
‘I’m saying I’m going to do a little research on this company, see what I can find out. Then I might give them a call and try to talk to this guy Tyler Gant.’
‘Are you going to tell him why you’re calling?’
Gordo unlocked Jonah’s door, then went around to the driver’s side. ‘That’s the tricky thing. I want to find out if Foerster’s headed there, if I can, but I really don’t want to tip my hand and let this guy know we’re looking for Foerster. I mean, fifty grand is fifty grand. Better we get it than he does.’
They slid into the car, and Gordo started it up. ‘So let me get this straight,’ Jonah said. ‘You’re thinking of going down there?’
Gordo gave Jonah a wide-eyed look as if they’d got their signals crossed somehow, as if something so simple a child could understand it had been nonetheless misunderstood. ‘Of course I am. Aren’t you? I mean, if we find out that’s where he’s going. This is the biggest single score we’ve ever seen. We’re not going to give it up that easy.’
Jonah said nothing.
‘Are we?’
Jonah shrugged, hating the tight, petulant sound in his voice that he knew was coming. ‘It’s going to cost money.’
Gordo nosed into the traffic on Richmond Terrace. The new realities – the bikes, the scooters, the pedestrians, and all the rest – meant that if you were still driving a car it wasn’t always clear when you were free to merge. ‘Think of it as an investment,’ he said. ‘I mean, this is the big one. This is the white whale. We can’t just walk away from this, right?’
Jonah wasn’t sure. They had missed the guy twice already, even though the cops had caught him on more than one occasion. Foerster’s slippery moves had Jonah thinking maybe he, and maybe even Gordo, weren’t cut out for bounty hunting after all. Sure, they’d caught a couple of nickel and dime skips. But when they went for the real money, the guy juked them and jived them and faked them out of their shoes. Beyond that, what if the whole South Carolina thing was a decoy or some scam Foerster was playing? What if he headed west, or north, instead of south? They could go down there, spend at least a couple of thousand dollars they didn’t have, go deeper into the hole, and it could all be a washout, a big nothing.
‘Jonah, am I right?’
‘I think we should wait a minute and think about this,’ Jonah said, knowing his words were exactly what Gordo didn’t want to hear. Already Gordo’s face looked pinched, as if a painful cramp had seized his lower abdomen. Jonah plunged on anyway. He had an opinion, so he might as well express it. ‘I think we should be a hundred percent certain he’s headed down there before we make a move that way.’
Gordo followed the flow of congested traffic towards the bridge into Brooklyn. It was amazing to see that on this monster span, one that went so high in the air and had such wicked crosswinds, an entire lane in each direction was now reserved for bicycles. What was next – a lane for oxen?
‘Jonah, don’t kill it, man. We’ll never be one hundred percent sure of anything.’
‘OK, ninety-nine percent. Ninety-eight percent.’
Gordo sighed. ‘I’ll do whatever I can to put together enough evidence so you will know that going to South Carolina is the right move.’
‘Well,’ Jonah said, and again the sound of his voice irritated him. ‘I’ll be waiting to see it.’
Patrick Quinlan
The Hit
CHAPTER 4
There was a delay with the plane.
The pilots were up front, dickering with some part of the instrumentation. At one point, Gant saw the younger of the two take out a screwdriver and remove a panel, then start poking among some wires inside there. Rather than watch these guys fool around with things they probably didn’t understand, things they would need to keep Gant alive and up in the air in the very near future, he went outside onto the tarmac.
It was just after eleven o’clock, and the sun was riding high and hot. Gant walked a little way from the plane and took out his cell phone. He had world service, so he could call Vernon from here. Three goons milled around over by the shed where Gant had stripped down yesterday, waiting for the plane to take off. A black SUV was
