Snake slammed his fist against the escalator’s rubber hand rail. That’s why you never snatch a kid. Adult to adult, it’s one thing… a snatch is the cost of doing a certain kind of business, a price they pay for not being careful. The packages lick their wounds and slink away, poorer but wiser.
But involve a kid and you’re on a whole other level. You tap into something primal. You wind up dealing from a different deck. Suddenly everybody’s taking it personally. And that’s when people became unpredictable… dangerous. Snake didn’t understand it but recognized it when he saw it. And he sure as hell had seen it in Vanduyne’s eyes.
So he’d told him about Maggie Simpson. To calm him down. Make him more predictable. He starts thinking his kid is dead, pretty soon he decides he’s got nothing to lose—a very bad situation all the way around.
Up on the sidewalk he checked his watch. He’d wasted too much time jerking around with Vanduyne. He’d left his car at the Mayflower, so he started jogging up Connecticut Avenue. He’d have to hustle if he was going to make the meeting with Salinas.
He thought about Vanduyne again. Before this was over, he was going to need a persuader.
31
As planned, Paulie stepped onto the Metro train and waited until the platform emptied; then he stepped off again. And watched. No one else got off. He watched the doors close and the train slide away into the dark gullet of the tunnel.
All right! Nobody following him.
He headed back up to street level. He’d been twitchy as a strung-out crackhead since he’d walked into that drugstore, half-expecting a gang of feds to jump him as soon as he asked for those pills.
He checked his pocket to make sure he had the drugstore bag. A lot of risk to get that little vial. But things had worked out okay. Better than okay. He’d hit Snake up for some cash to cover the jogging suit and the prescription, and a little extra to keep the home fires burning.
He checked his beeper in the other pocket. The readout said no calls. Which reconfirmed that he hadn’t been followed—Snake was to have beeped him if he’d spotted anyone on his tail. So everything was cool. He felt the tension ooze out of him.
He passed a guy leaning against a wall, looking for all the world like he was crying. Maybe he was sick. Or drunk.
Which gave Paulie an idea. Why not pick up a little bubbly as a gift for Poppy? She was all strung out babysitting the kid. She liked champagne and a bottle might get her to lighten up a little.
Yeah. Great idea. Buy her a goddamn magnum. Buy her two.
32
It took Snake a while, but he finally found a parking spot off M Street within half a block of Il Giardinello—he needed his car close by. He opened the glove compartment and started the tape recorder, then snapped his fingers in front of his chest. The mike in his shirt button picked up the sound and the needle on the receiver jumped. All right. All systems go—as long as he didn’t get too far away.
Snake walked around Georgetown a little before approaching the restaurant—just to be sure no one was tailing him. What’s the big attraction in owning a restaurant? he wondered as he approached the kitchen door. Actors, comedians, jocks, TV geeks—they all seemed to want one. Why? Looked like a royal pain in the ass. He checked his jacket buttons and his lapel pin, then knocked.
One of Salinas’s guards, a beefy guy named Llosa with dark skin and thick, Indian features, let him in. Snake handed him his .45 but the guy patted him down anyway. Satisfied that Snake wasn’t going to murder his boss, he led him to the back office.
“Miguel!” Salinas said, from his recliner. His beige silk suit was wrinkled where it bunched around his rolls of fat, and his gold-toothed smile was humorless. “You’re late!” Mr. Fatso Drug Lord didn’t like to be kept waiting?
Tough. Snake wasn’t about to incite Salinas, but he wasn’t going to kiss his ass either.
“Had to arrange to get some medicine for the kid,” Snake said pointedly. “You know, the kid no one knew was sick? Took me longer than I’d anticipated.”
“But it is all taken care of, no?”
“Yeah. All taken care of.”
“Excellent!” Now his smile was genuine. “Alien, pour our friend a drink.
Scotch, right?“
“Right. A little soda.”
“Give him the good stuff.” Salinas’s financial butt boy hopped to the task.
“We’ve got some beautiful sixty-year-old MacCallan single malt here,” Alien Gold said. “Cost Carlos thirteen big ones at auction.”
Thirteen grand for a bottle of Scotch? Now that was conspicuous consumption. Snake glanced around. Just like the rest of this dive. Look at the furniture, all dark and heavy and intricately carved, with real Tiffany lamps and Persian rugs; the walls were worse, hung with heavy burgundy drapes and all shades of garish Colombian art.
And in among the paintings, a signed photo of Tricky Dick. Very weird.
Gold handed Snake his Scotch, neat. “I held off on the club soda,” he said. “You don’t want bubbles getting in the way of the taste of this stuff.” Snake bit back a sharp retort. No profit in being ungracious, but he wondered about a guy with an MBA acting as gofer.
“To the success of the project,” Salinas said, raising a glass of red wine.
They all drank. Snake smacked his lips around the sixty-year-old Scotch. Pretty good, but not worth five hundred bucks a pop.
“Alien,” Salinas said, wiping off his mustache, “give Miguel his next installment.” Gold bent and lifted a leather attachê case. He handed it to Snake.
“You want to count it?”
“Not now,” Snake said. “I’ll count it later.” He smiled to make it clear he was joking.
Salinas chuckled and his gut shook like the proverbial bowl full of jelly. A round man, Salinas—a round face with a round mouth on a round body. His smile was all white and gold except for the space between his upper front teeth—a gap big enough to shoot watermelon pits through.
Always polite, soft-spoken, almost formal. Yet Snake knew that behind that jolly exterior hid a diamond-hard, laser-sharp mind. An obsessively security-conscious mind. He’d realized that the first time they’d met here.
Snake had recorded the conversation—he admitted to his own security hang-up—with a standard transmitter mike, but when he’d checked the tape, all he heard was thirty minutes of hiss. Which meant Salinas had a bug jammer in his office. A good one—randomly varying frequency and amplitude. But there were ways around that…
Snake took another sip of Scotch and dropped into a chair. “All right. I’ve got the kid. I’ve got her daddy dangling on a string. What’s this service he’s supposed to do?” Salinas looked at Gold.
“Alien, will you please excuse us?”
Gold looked hurt. “You don’t think you can trust me with this?”
“I think you can be trusted with anything. Alien. But I do not think you want to be trusted with this. Comprende?”
Gold stared at him a moment, glanced at Snake, then shrugged. “Okay. If that’s the way you want it.” He started for the door.
“It is not a burden you wish. Alien,” Salinas said, smiling solicitously.
“Fine. I’ll be at the bar.”
As the door closed, Salinas said, “He is upset. He thinks he should know everything about my business. And perhaps he is right. But in this matter, I am not so sure.” Snake was beginning to get an uneasy feeling about “this matter.”