“The last jelly’s mine,” he says, and Carr watches him shamble down the alley to the Barton’s small loading dock.
For the job of following Howard Bessemer around Palm Beach, Bobby is Carr’s first choice. Valerie is distracting, and besides, she is otherwise occupied in Boca Raton, and Dennis is too jumpy. He sweats and fidgets whenever he has to playact, and his anxiety glows like neon. Latin Mike is poised and utterly capable but, with Carr at least, sour and taciturn. His shuttered face and silent disapproval wear on Carr and remind him of his father.
Bobby is easier to take, especially without Mike around. Without Mike to impress, he’s more relaxed and accommodating-funnier, and less inclined to carp or balk. More likable. Carr knows that Bobby isn’t as comfortable with him as he is with Latin Mike-Carr lacks Mike’s working-class credentials-but one-on-one, Bobby gives him the benefit of the doubt. And, most important, Bobby likes to talk.
A steady stream of it has issued from him as he and Carr have tailed Bessemer-a miscellany of profanity-laced observations on Bessemer’s choice of car and clothing, the latest heartbreak served up by Bobby’s beloved, despised Mets, the crappy house he, Mike, and Dennis are staying in, the ass of any woman who crosses his line of sight, his Brooklyn boyhood, his truncated air force career-McGuire Air Force Base, Ramstein, Aviano, and back to McGuire for the court-martial-his shrew of an ex-wife. A grab bag, but short on the topic that interests Carr most-the topic that has circled his thoughts like a scavenging bird ever since his last conversation with Tina.
Carr tries to keep in mind his long-ago training, incomplete though it was, on agents and their early cultivation. Walk softly. Come at it obliquely. Keep your shopping list to yourself. Let them broach the topic first, but change the subject the first time they do. Change it the second time too. But he was impatient at the Farm-one of his many failings-and he’s been impatient in Palm Beach too, and in neither place did it help his cause. His instructors scowled and shook their heads, and so did Bobby.
Another truck, another alleyway, three days before.
“For fuck’s sake,” Bobby said, “you ask about this I don’t know how many times. What else is there to say about it?”
Carr put on a pensive look. “I’ve got no one else to ask, Bobby. Valerie wasn’t there, and Mike won’t say shit about it.”
“Well, you know it all already. Deke thought it was a layup, but it wasn’t. Bales of cash sitting in a barn on Bertolli’s ranch. No real security besides a little local talent, and the ranch being at the ass end of nowhere, and all we have to do is drive in, deal with the locals, load up, and drive away-straight through to Santiago. Deke had a flight lined up out of Los Cerillos. The driving-in part was fine; after that it was a shit storm.”
“You had two trucks.”
Bobby sighed. “Two vans-Fords-four-wheel drive conversions. Ray-Ray lined ’em up in B.A., and we drove ’em north. Me and Mike in one, Deke and Ray-Ray in the other. You know all this.”
“Deke decided who rode where?”
“Deke decided everything. Ray-Ray was the best driver, then me-so he split us up.”
“And he rode with Ray.”
“He always got a kick out of the kid.”
“Everybody did; he was a good kid. So you drove in the main gate?”
Bobby squinted at him. “You not listening the first ten times I told it? We came up a service road-three miles of washboard in the pitch-fucking-black-and clipped the chain on a cattle gate. It was another two miles from there to the airstrip and the barn.”
“And then you hit trouble.”
“Soon as we got out of the vans. They came around back of a tin hangar on the other side of the strip-four big four-by-fours-and fucking fast.”
“You didn’t get into the barn?”
“Didn’t get closer than twenty meters. We got out of the vans and they lit us up like fucking Vegas.”
“They seem like regular security, or something laid on especially for you guys?”
“The fuck should I know? All I know is they could shoot.”
“Deke said there wouldn’t be much opposition.”
“That was the intel.”
“Where’d he get it from?”
“Might as well been from a cereal box, for what it was worth. He’d been looking at Bertolli a long time, I know that, but he always played his sources close to the vest. He was big on that need to know crap.”
“You guys put up a fight?”
“It was like pissing in the wind. We had MP9s; they had like a dozen guys with AKs. Mostly we ran like hell.”
“But not in the same direction.”
“It was Deke’s call-split up and regroup in Mendoza. We had a fallback off the Avenue Zapata, near the bus station. He and Ray-Ray went out the main gate, me and Mike went out the way we came.”
“And only you and Mike made it.”
“Only by the hairs on our asses, lemme tell you-those motherfuckers were serious. Two-plus hours hard running down Highway Forty, and those bastards were bouncing in my mirrors the whole time. We could barely put a mile between us and them. Half busted an axle, and my rear panels were like Swiss cheese. Wasn’t till we got to town that I could shake ’em.”
“Just the one truck after you guys, though-just one of those four-by-fours.”
“One was enough.”
“So the other three were on Deke and Ray-Ray?”
“The fuck should I know? All Deke said was that they were on his ass. He didn’t say if that meant three trucks or one.”
“He called just once?”
“And I could barely hear him then. The service isn’t great out there.”
“He didn’t say that he wasn’t going to Mendoza? That he was making for Santiago instead?”
“He said they were on his ass, and that was it. If he’d said anything about Santiago, or not showing up at the fallback, we wouldn’t have spent two days waiting in that fucking hole, peeping through those moldy curtains, and jumping every time a toilet flushed.”
“So no idea how Deke and Ray-Ray ended up westbound on Highway Seven?”
Bobby ran a thick hand down his face. “Come on, Carr-enough already with this.”
“You were there, Bobby-you must have an idea.”
“Like what-they were cut off, couldn’t get back on Forty, took one of those horse trails to Seven, and got tagged in the mountains? You don’t like that story, make up one of your own. You know as much as I do about what happened.”
“You were there.”
“And you weren’t, and you don’t know how to give it a rest. Look, everybody gets that you never liked the deal-you and Val both. Not enough planning, too rushed, whatever. You guys made it clear, and it turns out you were right. Nobody thinks it’s your fault, Carr. Nobody holds it against you, except maybe you.”
“I’m not holding anything. I just want to know why it went bad.”
“There’re a million reasons. Crappy planning, crappy intel, crappy roads, crappy luck-take your pick. Who knows why, and who the hell cares? Deke is gone, and so is Ray, and picking at the roadkill won’t bring ’em back. You feel guilty, find yourself a priest. Talking to you about this is like talking to my Irish grandma, for chrissakes, or talking to a cop.”
Carr had smiled at that. He hadn’t been talking like a cop, but he’d been listening like one. That was the sixth time he’d gotten Bobby to tell the story, the third time since his talk with Tina, and every time Bobby had told it just the same way, down to the pitch-fucking-black, the bastards bouncing in his mirrors, the half-busted axle, and the moldy curtains. Always the same details-never more, never less, never different. Every time. The same.
Bobby comes up the alley, wiping the corner of his mouth, and Carr comes back.
Bobby unhitches his tool belt and tosses it into the van. “Ichabod’s name is Willis Stearn,” he says. “I got more pictures. I got a number and an address too. And I knocked over the kitchen for a tuna on white with the crusts cut off. Fucking master criminal, huh?”