Carr nods. “In a place on the sound, with a yard and a dock and a straight shot to the airport. They like it better than West Palm.”
Tina gives him a speculative look. “You want the stones?”
Carr sits. “That’s why I’m here.”
“And I thought it was just to see me,” Tina says. There’s a canvas beach bag at her side, and she reaches in and pulls out a large nylon shaving kit, blue with a zippered top. She tosses it to Carr, who catches it and opens the zip. The diamonds are in three plastic bags inside. Carr takes them out and weighs each one in his palm. “Everything here?”
“Except what I used for belt buckles and toe rings,” Tina says.
Carr smiles and makes a show of weighing the bags again. “As long as you left me enough to get Prager’s attention.”
“From the minders, I’d say you already have it.”
Carr puts the stones back in the zippered case. He looks at Tina and gets another questioning look in return. “You worried?” she asks. “About these guys following you around?”
His first impulse is to laugh, and he almost does. Not because he isn’t worried about being followed-he is. Out from behind the listening end of a microphone, outside of anonymous cars and vans, Carr feels naked. The minders have simply added a spotlight and pointing finger. No, the almost laughter isn’t because the buzz cuts don’t scare him, it’s because they’re at the end of a long line. In the crowded landscape of Carr’s fear, they are mere foothills beside Valerie, Mike, and Nando, beside his galloping suspicions about what really happened on that bleak highway to Santiago, beside his dark fantasies of what might happen here afterward, if his crew is successful in stealing Prager’s money.
His second impulse-and it surprises him-is to tell her. The idea of giving voice to his fears, saying them aloud, confessing them to Tina, makes him dizzy for an instant. Words well up in his chest. They bubble and rush and nearly spring forth, and then he remembers who he’s talking to. The half-smiling woman on the lounge chair vanishes, replaced by a slender figure-a riding crop in a black dress-standing in the deep shade at the edge of a golf course. So Carr swallows the words with his laughter and shrugs.
“I’m not crazy about working the front of the house,” he says, “being the face Prager sees, the one he’ll remember.”
“First time for everything.”
“First and last time for this.”
“You never know-you might develop a taste for it.”
“Not going to happen,” Carr says, shaking his head. “Last time I saw you, you were headed down to Santiago, to have a look at Guerrero. How did that go?”
Tina sighs. “I wish I could say it was a breakthrough, but it wasn’t.”
“Guerrero wasn’t Declan’s guy?”
“He was the guy all right, but that was it. He had nothing to tell us.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Declan-or somebody very much like him-put down a cash deposit to fly that Saturday night. He paid cash, and booked for four passengers, plus baggage.”
“Going where?”
“Sao Paulo.”
“Declan.”
“Sounds like. Unfortunately, that’s all this Guerrero had to say. The date came and went, the guy didn’t show and didn’t call, and Guerrero happily kept the cash. End of story.”
Carr’s jaw clenches. “Which leaves us where?”
“No place great,” Tina says. “It takes us back to our two original questions: Who gave Bertolli’s men the heads-up, and what became of Bertolli’s missing money?”
“How about Bertolli’s former security guy down there-the one your people turned up?”
“How about him?”
“We could go back to him-push a little harder, or sweeten the pot-get him to do some digging into who warned Bertolli.”
Tina is doubtful. “The guy was pretty scared…”
“So that’s it then? I’ve spent my money on dead ends?”
“You want to keep spending, I’ll keep my guys working-knocking on Bertolli’s man again, trying to turn up another source, whatever. But if we’re going to do that, then we’ve got to work it from the other end as well.”
“Meaning what?”
“Who knew Declan’s plans, and who was in a position to leak them? And who might’ve benefited from doing it? Those are the questions-and I think you know who you need to ask.”
A gust of wind blows through the canvas walls of the cabana. Carr hunches like an old man and pulls the towel around his shoulders.
Tina buys him a T-shirt and flip-flops from her hotel’s gift shop, along with a beach bag for his fins, mask, and diamonds, and she drives him back to his hotel. They say little in the car, and she drops him at the roadside just past the resort’s flower-draped gate.
Bobby is watching television when Carr returns, a Dodgers game now. Bessemer is snoring in his room, diagonal across the bed, one arm flung out in a desperate reach for something. Carr closes the bedroom door.
“He went down about an hour ago,” Bobby says. “The guy is not looking forward to seeing Prager.”
Bobby is gone when Bessemer teeters into the living room, wiping crust from his eyes and spittle from his chin-a bedraggled teddy bear. He squints at the television, and then at the evening sky.
“Jesus,” he says. “What time is it?”
“Time to make a phone call, Howie,” Carr says.
Bessemer’s hair is a weed patch, and he pushes clumsy fingers through it. “Call to who?”
“Come on, Howie, wake yourself up.”
“You want to call Curt now?” he asks. His voice is a rusty hinge. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Greg. Really, I’m not my best.”
Carr shakes his head. “Room service will fix you. Coffee and a club sandwich.”
Bessemer waves his hands and drops onto the sofa. “No, really, Greg, now isn’t a good time. How about I give you Curt’s number? Just say that I told you to call.”
Carr goes to the bar and fills a glass with crushed ice and Coke. He places it on the coffee table in front of Bessemer, takes a seat next to him, and drapes an arm across Bessemer’s hunched shoulders. Carr’s voice is low and intimate, almost a whisper.
“And how about I put your face through those glass doors, Howie, and drop you four floors off the terrace? Because unless you pull yourself together and remember who you’re talking to, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And I’ll be long gone while they’re still figuring out which pieces of you go where. So drink your soda and have a think, Howie, but don’t take too long. I’ll get the room service menu.”
Carr gives Bessemer’s shoulder a friendly squeeze as he finishes, and he sets a cell phone down next to the sweating glass.
29
Isla Privada Holdings is headquartered in a six-story slab of concrete and tinted glass that would be anonymous in an actual city, but that in George Town is a soaring office tower. It’s off Elgin Avenue, not far from a police building that looks like it’s made of orange sherbet. Carr parks next to a Land Rover with a large man leaning on the bumper. He’s wearing a dark suit and fiddling uncomfortably with his shoulder holster, and he gives Carr a hard look as he and Bessemer pass, but Carr knows it’s just for practice.
It’s not yet noon, but the asphalt is already soft underfoot as they cross the parking lot. Bessemer is shaved and combed and barely bloodshot, but his steps are hesitant.
“We take it nice and easy, Howie,” Carr says softly as they approach the glass doors. “And we keep things simple.”
Carr has said it before-spent much of last night saying it. “You introduce me, and you let me talk. He asks about Otisville, you stammer, look embarrassed, and you let me talk. Just do what you said you always do when you arrange these get-togethers-make the introductions and fade into the woodwork.”
“Why are we doing it at his office?” Bessemer asked a dozen times or more. “He always has me over to the house. I’ve never even been to the office before. Curtis hardly goes there himself.” And a dozen times or more Carr replied with comforting noises, none of which he himself quite believed.