“Yeah,” she answered, “it definitely is.”
“Crazy about this guy… Steadman? That his name? He must’ve just flipped…”
She didn’t answer directly. Not this time. Instead, after a pause, she just said, “I’m simply asking my big brother for a favor, that’s all. If you worked at GE, I might be calling for a toaster.”
Instead, he just drew in a wistful breath. “Budget cuts, huh?” He chuckled dubiously. “We’re all deep in ’em. All right, give me the plate number. I’ll see what I can do.
“Thanks for the joke.”
The fax came in a couple of hours later. With a note attached:
“Here’s your favor, sis. How about we say 48 hours-and then I might be asking if I should look into this myself.”
The name behind the plate she was looking for. From the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles.
She stared at it awhile, glancing at the photos of Rick and Raef on her desk, until a drumming started up in her heart and in her blood, and she knew she was doing the right thing.
Her next stop was Akers’s office.
“Bill, I need a little more time,” she said, catching him as he was about to leave. “Raef needs some more tests. I know this is all bad timing. It’s just that maybe I wasn’t quite as ready as I thought…”
“How much time are we talking about?” her boss asked, surprised.
“Three or four days.” She shrugged. “Maybe a week.”
She could see he was disappointed; maybe even annoyed. It had been that way since she went in to talk about her doubts about Steadman the other day. But he put his sport coat on and nodded. “I’ll work it out with personnel. But,
She grabbed a few files she could work on and was almost on her way out the door when she heard the sound of an e-mail coming in
It was from an address she didn’t recognize. [email protected].
The subject line read, “March 2.”
Carrie clicked on it and there was no message, only a document attached. It looked like a page out of an appointment calendar that someone had scanned in.
Suddenly she realized it was Henry Steadman’s calendar.
There were a bunch of handwritten notations. “Discuss with Mark!” “Heat tickets 4/10 for JP.”
The rest was just his schedule for that day:
7:30-10:00 A.M.: OR-Lynda Fields
12:30: lunch, Paul Dipalo, U of M board
2:30: Patient consult: Andrea Wasserman
4:00-5:00: Conf call, Diamond-Murdoch
But then she realized just what the date was and what it meant-and a warm surge of triumph and vindication ran through her. And she found herself totally unable to hold back her smile.
That was what Steadman was trying to tell her the other day, about proving his innocence.
March 2 was the day he was supposedly in North Carolina buying the 9mm gun.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Vance found John Schmeltzer at a bar in Dania, Florida, just north of Hollywood. It was a dark, sleazy, sixties-style place, set between a Jiffy Lube and a debt company, with a heavily tattooed Hispanic behind the bar. Dog races were on the TV.
Vance wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a more depressing place as he stepped in, in his sweaty shirt and rumpled pants, removing his hat.
Schmeltzer was at a table drinking a beer in a wifebeater T-shirt and pink shorts. He was thin, with coarse, curly hair, bald on top, and sideburns clear down to his chin. Maybe forty. He was with a couple of other lowlifes who, Vance thought, might have recently crawled their way out of the Everglades, and didn’t look a whole lot higher up the food chain than Schmeltzer himself.
Vance walked up to his table. “Dexter Vaughn said I could find you here. He said you could help me with my back. Hurts like the devil. Show me how it works down here.”
“Dexter, huh?” Schmeltzer looked at him a bit skeptically, squinting over his shades. “He said that. Not that it really matters…” The guy grinned, clearly not sizing Vance up as much of a threat. “That’s the beauty of it down here. I know what you’ve come for and welcome to the Promised Land.”
He proceeded to try to raise Dexter by phone, just to be sure, but failing to for obvious reasons, Vance knew- Schmeltzer just said, “Ah, hell with it,” and offered to take Vance around. They climbed into a silver Mercedes convertible, Schmeltzer saying how he had to do a little business anyhow, so why not climb on in. “So
Vance pressed his fingers against the fancy leather console. He felt the gun in his belt dig into his back as he pressed against the seat. “Through his cousin. Del. From South Carolina.”
“That’s where you’re from?”
Vance shrugged. Didn’t really matter much if he told him the truth.
“
“No matter.” Vance shrugged, looking ahead. “You probably never will.”
“So what’s your story?” Schmeltzer asked. “Work accident? Chronic? Got any disability papers? X-rays you can show? A scrip?”
“Uh-uh.” Vance shook his head.
“Man, they really sent you down here cold, didn’t they?” Schmeltzer squinted. “Tell me, partner, no secrets here, you even
Vance looked at him and smiled thinly. “Nope.”
“Ha! No worries, bro. Your secret’s safe with me. You
“Sure, whatever,” Vance said. He sat back. He felt the gun. He felt he was close.
“So relax! Won’t be but a while, and that back of yours will be floating in the clouds. Welcome to paradise, dude. Take off that jacket… Enjoy the ride.”
Vance pushed back deeper into the seat. John got off the highway at Oakland Park Road. In Ft. Lauderdale. The street was busy and commercial. Gas stations. Car dealerships. Fast-food outlets on both sides. Lots of long lights and traffic.
There was something else Vance soon noticed. Pain clinics. Lots of fucking pain clinics. One after another.
“Welcome to Broward County,” Schmeltzer proclaimed, noticing Vance crane his neck. “Pharmaland, USA. More fucking pain clinics on the streets than there are McDonald’s. And that’s a fact!”
“This is where you get them?” Vance had thought Schmeltzer was going to take him to his source, maybe a doctor who wrote bogus scrips. But this… “A pain clinic.” He widened his eyes in surprise. This was starting to make him mad. “All legal?”
“Clinic?” Schmeltzer’s grin was wide. “Dude, I’m on the VIP list of half the pill mills from here to Palm Beach.
