Glenn scratched behind his ear.
“Not much,” he said. “Unless maybe he’s waiting.”
Ricci turned to him.
“Waiting for what?”
Glenn shrugged.
“Somebody to meet or contact him, something to happen, no way for us to know,” he said.
Silence. Noriko slowly closed the file folder she’d been holding and flipped it onto her desk.
“I’ve seen something this morning besides the law-enforcement material,” she said. “An e-mail from Lenny Reisenberg.”
Both men looked at her.
“The shipping manager who got us mixed up in the Sullivan case?” Glenn said.
Noriko gave him a nod.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “What might be relevant here is that Lenny’s started to dig into some of Kiran’s shipping records, and a standout he’s already figured worth passing on is that a lot of the dual-use laser components Kiran’s been sending abroad in increased quantities — parts I’ve been wondering about for a while — have been freighted to an offshore distribution outfit in Singapore. That same company has major offices in Amman, Jordan, and Cairo.” A pause, a shrug. “None of it necessarily tells us anything’s fishy, since those countries are considered our diplomatic partners, but—”
“Those places are also major route-throughs for lots of neighborhood bad guys,” Glenn said.
She nodded again, and they all sat without speaking for a minute. Then Ricci sat forward in his chair, shifting his eyes from one to the other.
“We damn well better find out what’s in that moving van,” he said.
John Earl got out of the shower in his motel room, dried himself off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stood half naked and still mostly wet in front of the full-length mirror on the door. He touched the tattoo of the fire- engine-red Mack truck on his neck, thinking of the dream he’d had the night before. In that dream — more of a nightmare, truth be known — he was back in Thomaston, back in his prison cell, and working on the much larger version of the truck he’d painted on its wall over several years, after finally convincing the screws to look the other way… though he knew he hadn’t been the only con at Thomaston they’d let amuse himself with arts and crafts, ’long as he was quiet and did as he was told.
It had been quite a scenic picture that developed behind those bars over to the right of his cot, starting with a variation of the fuel delivery truck he’d driven for Hastings Energy before his row with that son-of-a-bitch deputy in Belfast had sent him down, and then growing little by little around the truck — a long black sweep of roadway beneath the heavyweight’s wheels, rolling green hills into forever, and, overhead, the wide blue sky with its bright round sun and cotton-puff clouds. Earl would work on that painting for hours every night till just before lights-out was called. He had always loved trucks. Step-frame trailers, cab-overs, tankers like the Hastings Energy rig. And all those nights he was in that cell working on his painting of the truck, or staring at it in the semidarkness after he’d turned in, Earl would imagine he was riding along in its cab with his windows rolled down, the roar of the wind in his ears blending together with the growl of its monster Detroit diesel engine and the loud chop of rock and roll guitars blaring from the radio.
Yeah, Earl thought, he would imagine himself in that big Mack truck, would dream about it when he fell asleep. All he’d need to do was close his eyes, and he’d be riding fast and free along some unmarked country road, the Mack redder and shinier than a fire engine, taking him anywhere but where he was, taking him nowhere he’d ever be found, carrying him away from that miserable old house of rock and steel as mile after mile of open, empty countryside spooled out behind him.
Earl frowned, once again remembering last night’s dream. Then he went from the mirror to get his clothes from where he’d tossed them on the bedside chair. In that dream, everything had been changed — turned inside out — and he’d been in his prison cell asking one of the guards for paint and getting turned down,
Earl put on his underwear, socks, jeans, and sweater, fetched his boots from where he’d left them by the door, and sat on the edge of the bed to get his feet into them, jerking their tops up over his ankles.
He didn’t care about the millions. Not a whit. If all those people didn’t make it into the next dawn, Earl would shed about as many tears for them as had been cried for him throughout his entire life… which came to a grand total of none.
They could fend for themselves, the same way he’d always looked out for himself.
The way he would
“Good to see you again… Mr. Friedman, that right?”
Malisse stood facing Jeffreys in the entrance lobby of the DDC building on West 47th Street, a black vinyl garment bag folded over his left arm, a hard-shell briefcase in his opposite hand.
“Right, indeed,” he said. “You have a knack for remembering names.”
“Don’t know ’bout that, unless you count bein’ able to match the ones in this here book with people’s faces.” The security guard tapped the guest register on his podium with a finger and flashed the exaggerated grin of a silent screen performer. “Norman Green called to leave word you’d be comin’ by early this morning.”
“Called?”
“He’s runnin’ a bit behind, but you can sign in an’ go right on upstairs to wait for him,” Jeffreys said. He leaned forward with a pen, a shaded look on his face. “Got yourself ’least half an hour, Hoffman’s sayin’ his prayers,” he said in a hushed voice. Then, in a still lower whisper that seemed to slip out unintended: “Hope the Lord has mercy on the sinner lookin’ for repentance.”
Malisse grunted, took the pen, and signed the guest book in the column beside his hand-printed alias.
“If God were obliging enough to ask my opinion, I would advise him to save his concern for the just, and piss an ocean down on the rest,” he said, turning toward the elevator.
Urban Jewelers on West 47th Street was a thirty-year-old, family-run storefront business that sold mediocre but affordable jewelry to the targeted walk-in consumer. The shop’s seemingly unimaginative name did, in fact, possess a certain double meaning that was not lacking in cleverness, since the bland reference to its location at the heart of metropolitan New York—
While Constantin still oversaw the store’s general affairs — with a close eye on tax-time bookkeeping — he had for the past seven years left its daily management to his daughter and son-in-law, a hardworking and borderline honest couple, who, when they gypped their customers at all, preferred exaggeration and embellishment to outright deceit, following examples they’d learned growing up with a steady diet of American television, on which multibillion-dollar corporations sold sneakers as schoolyard status, soft drinks as adolescent sex appeal, and expensive cars as adult success with flashy primetime advertising spots.
Constantin Urbaniak had never done any such straddling of the line. Not when he’d stood behind the shop’s display counters from morning till night, and especially not these days. In his opinion, honesty, or relative honesty, was for the uninspired, men like his daughter’s dull but diligent lug of a husband. An artisan by disposition, and a forger by heritage — his beloved uncle on the maternal side was the famed World War II counterfeiter Solomon
