out into the Florida steam bath and back into the Mercedes and gave the driver the address of Darryl Becker’s gym.
“We need to pick up a couple of guys in West Palm,” he explained. “Then we’re going to visit a man on South Ocean Boulevard.”
Chapter 60
As anyone who’d attended one of his academy lectures quickly realized, Gurney’s approach to undercover work was more complex than the average detective’s. It wasn’t just a matter of wrapping yourself in the manners, attitudes, and backstory of an assumed identity. It was more devious than that, and proportionally more difficult to manage. His “layered” approach involved creating a complex persona for the target to penetrate, a code for the target to break, a path the target could follow to arrive at the beliefs Gurney wanted him to embrace.
The current situation, however, added another dimension of difficulty. He had in past instances always known precisely what end-point belief about his identity he wanted his target to arrive at. But this time he didn’t. Because the appropriate identity would depend on the exact nature of the Karnala operation and Ballston’s connection to it- both still unknowns in the equation. It left Gurney in the position of having to feel his way forward, knowing that a misstep could be fatal.
As the car turned onto South Ocean Boulevard a couple of miles from Ballston’s address, the absurd difficulty of what Gurney was attempting began to sink in. He was walking into the home of a psychopathic sex murderer, unarmed. His only defense and only chance of success lay in the creation of a persona he would have to make up as he went along, following the currents of Ballston’s reactions as best he could, moment by moment. It was a challenge out of
He realized he was running too fast, that adrenaline was driving his decisions. It was a mistake that could easily lead to more mistakes. Worse, it deprived him of his main strength. It was in his analytic ability that he excelled, not in the quality of his adrenaline. He needed to
He knew that the man was afraid and that his fear was related to Karnala Fashion. He knew that Karnala was reputedly controlled by the Skard family-who were, among other ugly things, high-end procurers. It also appeared that Melanie Strum had been sent to Ballston to satisfy his sexual needs. It was not too great a leap to imagine Karnala involved in that process. If evidence could be uncovered linking Karnala to both Ballston and Strum, then Ballston’s conviction would be assured. That could explain his fear. Except… Gurney had gotten the impression that the man had been frightened not only by his mention of Karnala, and therefore by Gurney’s knowledge of some link, but by Karnala itself.
And what was the significance of Ballston’s odd insistence on the phone that everything was “under control”? That wouldn’t make sense if Ballston believed that Gurney was any sort of legitimate detective. But it might make sense if he thought Gurney was a representative of Karnala or of some other dangerous organization with whom he was doing business.
This was the logic that led to the presence in the car of the two hulking, granite-faced men he’d just picked up in front of Darryl Becker’s gym. Apart from minimally identifying themselves as Dan and Frank and informing Gurney that Becker had filled them in and they “knew the routine,” they hadn’t said another word. They looked like linebackers on a prison football team, whose idea of communication was to smash into something at full speed, preferably another person.
As the car glided to a stop at the Ballston address, Gurney realized with a sinking feeling that his assumptions were, in reality, too iffy to support the course of action he was taking. Yet it was all he had. And he had to do something.
At his request, the two big men got out, and one of them opened his door. Gurney checked his watch. It was eleven forty-five. He put on his five-hundred-dollar Giacomo sunglasses and stepped out of the car in front of an ornate iron gate at the end of a yellow-pebbled driveway. The gate was the only break in the high stone wall that enclosed the oceanfront estate on its three land-facing sides. Like its neighbors on that stretch of luxury coastline, the property had been converted from a barrier sandbar of coarse grasses, sea oats, and saw palmettos into a lushly loamed and mulched botanical garden of frangipani, hibiscus, oleander, magnolia, and gardenia blossoms.
It smelled to Gurney like a gangster’s wake.
With his two hired companions standing by the car, radiating a barely suppressed violence, he approached the intercom on the stone pillar beside the gate. In addition to the camera built into the intercom, two separate security cameras were mounted on poles on either side of the driveway-at intersecting angles, which covered the approach to the gate as well as a wide segment of the adjacent boulevard. The gate was also directly observable from at least one second-floor window of the Spanish-style mansion at the end of the yellow driveway. In such a leafy, flowery environment, it said something about the owner’s obsessiveness that not a single fallen leaf or petal had been allowed to remain on the ground.
When Gurney pressed the intercom button, the response was immediate, the tone mechanically polite.
“Tell Jordan I’m here.”
There was a brief pause.
Gurney smiled, then let the smile fade to zero. “Just tell him.”
Another pause.
“Of course,” said Gurney, smiling again.
He recognized that he was at a fork in the road. He ran through the options and chose the one that offered the greatest reward, at the greatest risk.
He let the smile fade. “My name is Fuck You.”
Nothing happened for several seconds. Then there was a muted metallic click, and without another sound the gate swung slowly open.
One thing Gurney had forgotten to do in the rush to do everything else was to check the Internet for photos of Ballston. However, when the mansion door opened as he approached it, he had no doubt at all about the identity of the man standing there.
His appearance fulfilled the expectations one might have of a criminally decadent billionaire. There was a pampered look about his hair and skin and clothes; a disdainful set to his mouth, as though the world in general fell far below his standards; a self-indulgent cruelty in his eyes. There also seemed to be a sniffly twitch in his nose, suggestive of a coke addiction. It was abundantly apparent that Jordan Ballston was a man to whom nothing on earth was remotely as important as getting his own way, and getting it quickly, at whatever cost to others the process might entail.
He regarded Gurney with ill-concealed anxiety. His nose twitched. “I don’t understand what this is all about.” He looked past Gurney down the driveway at the well-guarded Mercedes, his eyes widening just a fraction.
Gurney shrugged, smiled like he was unsheathing a knife. “You want to talk outside?”
Ballston apparently heard this as a threat. He blinked, shook his head nervously. “Come in.”
“Nice pebbles,” said Gurney, ambling past Ballston into the house.
“What?”
“The yellow pebbles. In your driveway. Nice.”
“Oh.” Ballston nodded, looked confused.
Gurney stood in the middle of the grand foyer, affecting the gimlet eye of an assessor at a foreclosure. On the main wall facing him, between the curving arms of a double staircase, was a huge painting of a lawn chair-which he recognized from the art-appreciation course he’d attended with Madeleine a year and a half earlier, the course taught by Sonya Reynolds, the course that had launched him on his fateful mug-shot art “hobby.”
