“He’s the one who put this thing together, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Bennett said, looking a little sick. “He was. The thing is…”
“What?”
“The thing is, I’ve been trying to get hold of him. He hasn’t been answering his phone.”
“You think somebody got to him?”
“I hope not,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think so. After a couple of days, I called some of his friends down there. I didn’t like what they were telling me.”
“What did they say?”
“He had money, Alex. All of a sudden, Sean’s walking around like he’s loaded. Sounds like he paid off some debts, celebrated a little. And then left.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Nobody knows. He quit his job, moved out of his apartment. He just disappeared.”
“So what are you telling me?”
“That maybe there was more money in that safe. That maybe he did hold out on his partners.”
“Oh, this is beautiful,” I said. “This is just great.”
“Either way, it doesn’t change anything. We’re in the same spot.”
“Only this way, it’s your son’s fault,” I said.
“He’s gone, Alex. Okay? He’s gone. There’s nothing I can do.”
Jonathan stood up like he was about to go over the table at him.
“Jonathan, take it easy,” I said. “Let’s take care of Jackie first. You can take this up with him later.” Jonathan may have been twenty years younger, but he was giving up six inches and fifty pounds, so I hoped he never did.
“I’ve got one good son,” Bennett said, putting his hand on Ham’s shoulder, “just like Jackie does. I should have stopped there, okay? I’m sorry for what Sean did. What else can I say? I’m sorry.”
“All right,” I said. “Just keep thinking.”
We sat there some more. We were getting nowhere fast. I got up and made the one phone call I had to make.
A half hour later, the door opened. It was bad enough I woke up Leon Prudell and asked him to come over here in the middle of the night-the reception when he arrived was downright hostile.
“What’s he doing here?” Bennett said. “Alex, you didn’t really call him, did you?”
“Good evening, everybody,” Leon said.
“Leon always has ideas,” I said. “I figured we could use some about now.”
“Come on, Alex,” Bennett said. “What can he do for us?”
“He got you guys arrested, didn’t he? He’s a man of many talents.”
“He works for Vargas,” Bennett said. “He can’t help us.”
“I got fired,” Leon said. “I’m a free agent.”
“Why’d you get fired?” Bennett said.
“He wanted Alex’s head on a platter. I refused to help him.”
That shut Bennett up, but he still didn’t look happy. Leon pulled up a chair, had a cup of coffee, and listened to me as I went over it one more time.
“This Blondie is a pro?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“He’d kill Jackie if he had to? And anybody else?”
“In a second.”
“Doing this on the open water. That’s a total sucker bet, you realize. He can dump anybody he wants to, right in the lake.”
“Yeah, I sort of figured that was his plan.”
“He’s holding all the cards here,” Leon said. “Somehow, we have to outmaneuver him.” He sounded like the Leon of old, and for once, on a night that was too cold for July, with Jackie tied up somewhere on the other side of the bridge, his voice was exactly what I needed to hear.
“So how do we do that?” I said.
“Do you have some paper? We’ve got to draw some diagrams.”
Ham got him some paper and a pen. Bennett still didn’t look happy, but he watched carefully as Leon started drawing.
“Okay, we know there’s two of them, right?” He drew two circles at the top of the page. “Any chance there’s more?”
“Could be,” I said. “But I’d bet on just the two.”
“Okay, so they have Jackie.” He drew a square under the two circles. “And there’s how many of us?” He counted out the five men in the room, giving Margaret a little smile as he skipped over her.
“I’m a part of this,” she said.
“You’re the home base,” he said.
“Like hell.”
“He’s right,” I said. “We’ll need somebody here.”
“If anything happens to that man…”
“We’re gonna get him back,” I said. “I promise.”
“Okay, five men,” Leon said. He drew five squares in the middle of the page. “And me.” He drew another square below the five. “And Margaret.” He drew another square below that. “We’ve got them outnumbered, seven to two.”
“They’re not gonna let all of us come out to give them the money,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll only want one or two of us.”
“The rest of us can hide in the boat,” Ham said. “We can surprise them.”
“That puts Jackie at risk,” Leon said. “You know they’ll have a gun to his head.”
Margaret covered her face with her hands. Bennett tried to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged him away.
“We need another way to bring our number advantage into play,” Leon said. “We need a second boat.”
“We’ll be on open water,” I said. “They’ll start shooting as soon as they see it.”
“That’s the problem. There’s no place to hide it.”
“What if we don’t even try?” I said.
“How do you mean?”
“What if we don’t try to hide the second boat?” Something was coming to me. On a normal night I wouldn’t have even said it. But this was not a normal night. “What was that thing you tried once? Where you made those hockey goons think they were surrounded?”
“The illusion of overwhelming force.”
“Yeah, that was it.”
“The illusion of what?” Bennett said.
“Overwhelming force,” Leon said.
“You mean like in Desert Storm?”
“No,” Leon said. “That wasn’t an illusion.”
“How does it work?”
“You have a boat, right?” Leon said.
“A friend down the road has a good boat,” Bennett said. “I’m sure he’ll let me use it.”
“Okay, so now we need one more. It has to be big and it has to be fast.”
“Where are we gonna get a boat like that?” Bennett said.
“I know the perfect boat,” I said. “What do you think, Leon?”
“What’s he gonna do?” Leon said. “He can’t fire me twice.”
Bennett went off to wake up his neighbor, to ask him if he could use his boat. Leon and I drove across town to the Kemp Marina. At four in the morning, the streets were deserted.
“You think the marina’s open?” he said.
