‘Painful,’ Bucks said. ‘Friend, you’re gonna learn nine new meanings of the word.’ He patted Gooch’s cheek. ‘If you won’t deal, you’ll just have to take what comes. I have an idea on how to keep you on the table as a bargaining chip.’ He went to the top of the stairs. ‘Dr Brewer, come up here, please.’ Chad Channing stressed the importance of keeping all your bases covered.
Twenty minutes later, Bucks went back downstairs. Tasha Strong was on the phone. She nodded, hung up, and Bucks sat down across from her. Frank Polo sat at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of red wine, rubbing his face. The blond kid, Gary, was on the sofa, frowning, while Doc Brewer, who had tended to Frank’s injury last night, returned to his interrupted work of stitching up a cut on Gary’s head. The muscle assigned to watch the Pie Shack lot, Max, with the spare tire now on his Mustang, was out in the garage surveying the damage to Eve’s car.
‘That was Paul,’ Tasha said. ‘Wants the guy brought to his house. Easier to keep him hid.’
‘The guy still hasn’t regained consciousness,’ Bucks said. Forced himself not to look over at Doc Brewer. ‘I mean, a head injury like that, he may be out for a while.’
‘Long while,’ Doc Brewer chimed in.
‘So he can’t give us information yet on Eve.’ Bucks crossed his arms, looked hard at Tasha Strong. ‘Tell me again what happened.’
‘Paul wanted to see if there were any incriminating files on Eve’s computer. I didn’t think there would be, because she would have taken the whole laptop, but she didn’t.’
‘Why you?’
‘I used to be a Web designer, I’m comfortable with computers,’ Tasha said. ‘He said go check it out, so I did.’
‘Why didn’t he ask me?’ Bucks said.
‘Ask him,’ Tasha said.
‘Sounds like a matter of trust to me.’ Frank sipped at his wine.
‘Shut the hell up,’ Bucks said.
‘So I come inside with the key Paul gave me, and I hear a noise. I go up to check the computer, but before I can do anything, Mosley surprises me with the gun. And then he starts asking questions. About you, Bucks.’
‘What about me?’
‘Where you live. Where you eat. How often you got muscle with you. Are you even a decent shot. Stuff like that.’ Tasha gave him a thin smile. ‘They must be planning to come after you. Tit for tat, since you put a hit on them.’
Bucks commanded himself not to flinch. ‘And what did you say?’
‘I told him I didn’t know you well. Didn’t know where you lived, anyplace you hung out other than the Topaz. He fired a shot, through the window, to scare me. I told him I didn’t know. Then he told me to stay quiet when y’all came in, and he went out the window.’ She folded her arms.
‘You find anything interesting on Eve’s computer?’ Bucks asked.
‘I didn’t have time to look. I’ll do that now.’ She stood.
‘We’ll take the computer with us when we move Guchinski over to Paul’s house,’ Bucks said. ‘All have a look together.’
‘Whatever,’ Tasha said.
Frank set down his wineglass. ‘If there was anything valuable on the computer, Mosley would have taken it.’
‘Shut up,’ Bucks said again, and Frank laughed against the rim of his wineglass.
‘Mosley might have copied the information instead,’ Tasha said. ‘If I hadn’t caught him, no one would know he was here. And they’d have information we didn’t know they had.’
‘Major strategic advantage,’ Bucks said.
‘Baby, You’re My Moron,’ Frank sang.
Doc Brewer stood in the kitchen alcove. He was a short, gray little man with a face the color of faded concrete, and his voice was always soft, as though he preferred to sidle through life unnoticed. ‘Usually I don’t volunteer my opinions,’ he said, ‘but look at the other side of the coin. If he wasn’t here taking something, he was leaving something behind.’ Tapped his ear.
Everyone shut up. Bucks stood on a chair, inspecting the ornate light fixtures. He looked along the window-panes. He pulled the phone off the wall, checked its back. He ducked his head under the kitchen table.
‘Well, hello there.’ Bucks reached for the digital voice recorder.
26
Friday evening, darkness settled over Houston, the sun painting the clouding sky the orange of joy, the gray of sadness. Whit wanted to drive back to the house on Timber; Eve forbade him and he decided it was a bad idea, an ambush waiting to happen. Or maybe they’d chased Gooch and he’d had to lose them and was taking his time getting home, ensuring he wasn’t followed back to Charlie’s house. The news came on; there was no report of a shooting along the quiet of a River Oaks street. No report of a man matching Gooch’s description turning up dead.
Whit sat with Eve at Charlie’s PC, studying the data on Tasha’s disc.
‘This isn’t exactly a backup of the hard drive, Whit,’ she said.
He leaned down, looked at the spreadsheets before him. Columns of numbers with annotations and footnotes inserted beneath that made no sense to him.
‘So what is it?’
‘These spreadsheets show operations from the legit Bellini businesses. And then these are the semilegit businesses, like Alvarez Insurance. We use them to clean the money from the drug deals, by making it look like the funds are coming from legit accounts from various holding companies. But these files’ – she pointed to an array of spreadsheet icons – ‘I’ve never seen before.’
‘But she was copying from your drive.’
‘You sure she wasn’t copying from this CD onto my hard drive? You were tense. Maybe it was the other way around.’
‘I should have taken the whole laptop,’ he said.
‘Then they’d know someone had been in the house.’
‘They’d know anyway once Tasha talked.’
She shook her head. ‘Honey, you think I kept records so a Fed with a search warrant could walk in, seize a system, and indict us? No. I switched out hard drives every few weeks and destroyed the old ones. But I kept the files that made the drug money look legitimate.’
‘So how would Tommy Bellini know if his books balanced?’
‘He and I would review them together before I destroyed the drug files. Of course that stopped after his stroke.’ She glanced at him. ‘The idea was to park a certain amount of real money in his legit interests. So you go ahead and pay the taxes on those. The rest went into his pocket, backed by the money-cleaning books. Out of that he paid salaries, expenses, and so on.’
‘And supplies. Like the coke.’
She nodded.
‘Why would Tasha have these other files and want to put them on your laptop?’ he said. ‘Unless she’s part of the frame. She’s in with Bucks.’
Eve scrolled down through the spreadsheets. ‘This looks more like an extra set of cooked books.’ She began to click open files, studying them. ‘Hey. These are files for businesses Paul doesn’t own. With lots of money parked in them. Look at these revenue figures.’
‘So why does a stripper at his club have an additional set of cooked books on a CD? Why?’
Eve frowned. ‘Let’s say Paul gives her the CD, asks her to back up the data on the laptop. Then these are extra files already on the CD – data he was keeping secret from me. I didn’t think he had operations I didn’t know about but now anything’s possible with Paul.’
‘Again, why not simply take the laptop? It’s his.’
‘Because he doesn’t want Bucks or Frank to know it’s gone.’
‘Because he suspects Bucks but doesn’t want to tip his hand,’ Whit said. ‘Or Frank’s. You said he embezzled from Paul.’ Whit leaned over her, watched the screen. ‘Let’s consider another possibility. She has these files on the disc. But did she also copy these files to the hard drive in return?’
‘Why?’
‘Part of the frame-up on you,’ he said. ‘Bucks could say you were incorrectly cooking the books with this data.’
‘Those files would have a date stamp for when they were placed on the hard drive.’ She clicked the mouse, expanded a view. ‘See. They’re showing as transferred today.’