Now he sounded just like his old man. Jack Blackwell always got right to it, but he never showed impatience, and he never rushed.
“That phone is imperative,” Gerry said. “I need it fast, and Carlos is no longer able to assist.”
“I heard he was... deported, yes.”
Now this was his uncle’s personality, everything about it pure Patrick — no twitch of a smile, and yet you knew he’d amused himself with the comment.
“Unless you want an expedited trip to the same place, spare me the wit,” Gerry said. The kid didn’t so much as blink. Gerry wasn’t sure whether he liked the kid’s response or if it infuriated him. Composure was appropriate. But fearlessness in front of Gerry? Less appropriate.
“I’ll get the phone, then,” Dax said. “You should have just let me take the whole job from the start.”
Gerry looked at him over the gleaming toe of the Moreschis, considered his response, and let silence ride. If it bothered the kid, he didn’t show it.
“It was supposed to look like an accident, and it was time-sensitive,” Dax said. “There were many better ways to do that than what he chose. He brought a brawler’s touch to a finesse job.”
“Just go find that fucking phone, and maybe I’ll have more patience for your input in the future,” Gerry said, frustration getting the better of him now, partly because the kid wasn’t wrong and partly because he didn’t understand one crucial element of the deal — Gerry had spared Dax’s life. The German had been very clear that anyone involved with hitting Oltamu needed to be expendable. Carlos, already a risk to Gerry on other matters, had thus been ideal for the job. But Dax could’ve gone too. Should have, in fact, by the terms of the deal.
But he was too promising.
If I can own one of them, Gerry thought, visions of the Blackwell brothers coming back to him, it will be worth it. If he grows into one of their kind, and he is all mine, loyal to the throne and not just the checkbook, then he will certainly be worth the trouble.
The kid stood without being told they were done. For a moment, Gerry thought about ordering him to sit his ass back down, but what was the point?
“Go on,” he said, and he waved at the door. “Get me the phone. It’s an iPhone, but it has no signal. That’s all I know. If the phone puts out a signal, it’s the wrong one.”
Dax Blackwell didn’t move right away. Instead, he stood there looking at Gerry, and then he said, “The phone is one problem Carlos left behind. There might be another. Do you have an opinion on that yet?”
He meant the girl, of course.
“She’s as good as gone, is my understanding.”
“That’s enough?”
“She’s brain-dead. And even if she wakes up, what’s she gonna say?”
“You don’t know,” Dax said. “That would be precisely my concern.”
Gerry flushed and swung his feet down.
“I understand my fucking liabilities, son. I don’t need your assistance with the big picture. I need you to bring me the phone. Now get out of here and do it.”
He didn’t like the way the kid studied him and then nodded and turned away as if he’d seen something in Gerry’s anger that interested him.
No, it was more than interest, Gerry thought as he stared at the closed door, Dax Blackwell’s footsteps reverberating across the tiled floor on the other side. That expression hadn’t been one of intrigue or curiosity but something deeper, something darker.
Like whatever he’d seen in his boss had made him hungry.
“He’s just a kid,” Gerry said aloud. The words echoed in the empty room, and when they bounced back at him, they weren’t reassuring. He sounded nervous, sitting in his own office and talking about his own employee. What in the hell was that about?
About the kid’s old man and his uncle, of course. Jack and Patrick were long gone, yes, but they cast long shadows too, a pair of dark smiling ghosts.
The best hitters you ever saw. So trust the kid, Gerry thought. At least a little longer. He was a beta-Blackwell. But if he bloomed? Well, then.
Wouldn’t that be something.
15
Dax had spent an hour the previous night listening to the idle chatter in Tara Beckley’s hospital room, enough time to confirm both that they’d kept his flowers and that she remained mute, but each day had the potential for new blessings, as the Team Tara Facebook page reminded him that morning, and so he checked back in after leaving Gerry Connors’s office.
The recorder he’d placed in the flower vase was of excellent microphone quality but he was disappointed with its computer interface and mobile options. He had to use the web browser to log in, and then he had to sort through multiple files that captured dialogue exchanges of longer than two minutes. He wished he’d used a better system, but Tara Beckley was only of value-added potential for Dax; she wasn’t a threat. With threats, you spared no expense. The microphones he had planted in Gerry’s office, for example, were cutting-edge, and he’d paid accordingly.
He sat in his car and updated himself on A Day in the Semi-Life of Tara Beckley. He listened to her mother talk endlessly and aimlessly, scrolled past that, found the same with the sister, and then some nurses chattering, and then...
What was this?
“Abby’s an investigator. She tells me she’s working on your behalf.”
That was the sister talking. The investigator, when she spoke, sounded nervous. Well, no surprise there — Tara’s empty-eyed stare and those tubes could be unsettling to some. Dax doubted many people had given her the kind of deep eye contact that he’d offered.
The investigator blathered on awkwardly, not saying much of interest, but then the sister said something that made Dax sit up straight.
“Nobody talked about her phone until your boss called.”
Her phone? Well, now. The investigator might be more interesting than Dax had thought.
He listened through more chatter, the investigator agreeing that Carlos Ramirez was at fault — apparently she didn’t yet know that Carlos was also in the morgue — and then carrying on about how she didn’t like Carlos’s story. Dax had to give her some credit for this because she seemed to understand the physics of it all in a way the police hadn’t, and thus she got what a colossal disaster Carlos Ramirez had been. Time-sensitive, make-it-an-undeniable-accident instructions be damned; Carlos had picked an awfully dumb way to go about the hit. Perhaps he hadn’t cared because he knew he’d be out of the country by the time anyone showed real interest. That was fine, but the mess he’d made of things reflected poorly not only on Carlos but on Gerry Connors. And since Dax worked with Gerry, there was the risk of contamination. The Blackwell brand could be damaged before he’d had a chance to re-introduce it if Gerry stumbled. You had to be careful who you worked for in this business. Independent contractors are not immune to the perils of poor management, his father had told him often.
For a hick insurance investigator, Abby was surprisingly astute. She was also scared, it seemed, which was interesting. Information and fear didn’t go together in Dax’s mind — knowledge was power, the cliché promised, and so far in his young life, he’d found that to be true. Then why was this woman so nervous?
Probably it was Tara’s dead-eyed stare. Abby the investigator kept pushing, though, almost grudgingly, as if she couldn’t help herself.
“And one of these,” Abby said, and there was a rustling sound, “belongs to him. Unless the salvage guy kept it or sold it already. Neither would surprise me.”
“I’ve wondered about her phone,” Shannon said.