Though that didn’t mean Galvin would connect Danny to the DEA. That was a logical leap even a highly suspicious person wouldn’t easily make. Galvin had brought Danny into his orbit; Danny hadn’t wormed his way in. And Danny didn’t have the profile of a man working with the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Unless Galvin had other sources. That was possible. Assume Galvin had protection, people working for the cartel who watched out for him. People who stayed in the background and kept an eye on whoever he came into contact with, as Yeager had said. Was that such a stretch? Galvin was an important player for the cartel. Of course they’d take care of him, keep an eye on him. Make sure he wasn’t being compromised in some way.
Maybe Galvin had other sources. Maybe, finding that his BlackBerry had somehow moved to the wrong suit pocket, he’d asked around. Maybe the cartel’s people had turned their scrutiny on Danny and found out-somehow-what Danny was up to.
That wasn’t impossible at all, was it?
As he rounded around the circular drive, he saw that Galvin’s limousine was parked on the shoulder of the road by the school gates. Right by the exit. As if waiting.
Danny was tempted to gun the engine, get the hell out of there. But then Galvin’s new driver-what was his name, again?-stepped out of the car and waved him over.
Keep going? Ignore the guy?
He couldn’t. He couldn’t just drive by. That in itself would have been suspicious. He slowed, pulled over. Lowered his window.
“Mr. Galvin he like talk to you,” the driver said.
Danny parked the Honda behind the Maybach and got out. He approached the limousine, trying to appear casually curious. The rear passengers’ door came open.
“Get in,” Galvin said, looking grim.
35
“Something wrong?”
“We have to talk,” Galvin said.
Danny’s mind raced, trying to compose a plausible-sounding explanation. But nothing came. Only a flat-out denial. You serious? You think I took your BlackBerry? Why the hell would I do that? How? Come on, man, get real. Jesus.
“What’s the problem?”
Inside, it was even more luxurious than he’d imagined. It looked like a private club and smelled like expensive leather. The passenger compartment was large enough to contain two big, comfortable-looking seats in back, facing forward, and three facing rear.
Galvin, sitting in one of the two rear seats, patted the one next to him. He was wearing another one of his very expensive-looking suits, this one a nailhead worsted. Clambering in, Danny could smell Galvin’s cologne, something subtle and peppery, and he realized for the first time that this smell made him anxious. It smelled of power. It smelled vaguely toxic.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” Danny said. The seat was deep and comfortable, the leather buttery.
Between the rear seats was a console, its surface some kind of tropical wood veneer. Galvin touched it and it popped open. He pulled out two cold water bottles and handed one to Danny.
“Diego,” he said with a quick motion of his left hand, and a glass divider slid up between the passenger compartment and the cockpit.
“Come on, let’s take a quick drive. Just leave your car here for a while. We can talk, and I can show you my boat.”
“Your what?”
“My boat. My yacht. I’m heading over to the harbor now. Check out my new nav system.”
“I really should work.”
“Come on-take us half an hour. I’m launching it early this year so we can sail down to Anguilla over spring break.”
“Where is it, down in Quincy?”
“Boston Yacht Haven. Right here. Come on.”
Danny nodded. He unscrewed the cap from the water bottle and took a sip. “Okay. Sure.”
Ten minutes later they were pulling over a series of speed bumps and into a private marina in the North End, on Commercial Wharf on the Boston harbor. Danny waited for Galvin to bring up whatever it was he wanted to talk about, but he just chatted away, small talk.
“You can just wait right here, Diego,” he told his driver. “Shouldn’t be more than ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Si, señor.”
Danny could barely keep up as Galvin led the way around the side of the rambling, angled clubhouse and along a dock. The air was crisp and clean and tinged with salt. A gentle breeze came off the water. Moored to the pier were several yawls and a small boat-it was too early for most people to put their boats in the water-and on the other side of the building was what had to be Galvin’s boat. It was a big, beautiful, streamlined thing, cream and white, all swooping lines and aggressive angles. Painted on its bow was EL ANTOJO.
“That yours?” Danny said.
“Yep,” Galvin said. He stopped at a black-painted security gate on the dock and swiped a key card and pulled it open. Danny followed Galvin down a gangway to the slip.
“El Antojo?”
“It’s sort of an inside joke in our family. It’s one of those Spanish words that’s impossible to translate. It means ‘whim’ or ‘craving,’ something like that. When I bought it, Lina and I had a big fight-she said she couldn’t believe I’d dumped millions of dollars on an antojo-a caprice, a whim.”
“It’s a beauty, though. For an antojo.”
“Thanks. The Italians know how to build them.”
Standing on the slip, watching the yacht bob gently in the water, Danny experienced the momentary illusion that the dock was rocking, not the boat.
“What kind of boat is it?”
“It’s a Ferretti. Their Custom Line-the Navetta 26 Crescendo. Took almost three years to build.”
“It looks fast.”
“Not especially. Cruising speed is twelve, thirteen knots. She’ll get up to fourteen knots. But she’s sporty. And she can go all the way down to Anguilla without refueling. And she’s smooth. Semidisplacement hull. Know anything about boats?”
“I grew up in Wellfleet, remember?” Somewhere a distant ship’s horn sounded. A jet passed by low overhead, taking off from Logan Airport.
“Right, right.” Galvin climbed a short ladder onto a wide main deck. Danny followed him up another set of stairs to a spacious sky lounge.
“Do you drive it yourself, or do you have a crew?”
“Depends. For long trips I usually hire a captain, but most of the time I take it out myself.”
“It’s gotta be more exciting to drive it yourself, right?”
“Exciting? Lemme tell you something. Exciting is the one thing you don’t want when you’re at sea. Exciting is when you hit an iceberg or sail into a hurricane or have your bilge pump fail. Or hit a rocky shoal. I’ll take boring anytime.”
“Ever come close?”
“To what, sinking?”
Danny nodded.
“No. Not that I know of.”
Danny looked down at the water, green-tinged black with a surface that looked like velvet. “When I was a teenager, I helped scuttle a ship.”
Galvin looked at him, head tipped, half smiling, unsure whether this was a joke.
Danny could hear the hum of the fuel barge nearby. The pilings underneath the marina were exposed, like the mouth of a cave. It was low tide.
“Remember when they sank this big old navy warship in Cape Cod Bay to use for target practice?” Danny said.
“Sure, like twenty years ago or something.”
“The demolition guys hired to do it were one of my dad’s subcontractors. So when I was sixteen, I got a job helping place the explosive charges along the hull.”
“Really? Cool.”
“It was nasty work, actually. We had to put all these shaped charges on the hull below the waterline so when they went off, it was like cutting a line all the way around. And a twenty-thousand-ton ship went down like a rock in less than two minutes.”
“Must’ve been cool when it all went boom.”