A Gift of Thought (8 page)

Dillon felt torn between his choices. Did he want to stay with his dad or did he want to hurry and catch up to his mom? He definitely wanted more time with Sylvie—not to mention that haunting Rachel’s high school might be fun—but he wanted to talk to his dad, too.

And his dad might give him answers. Yeah, he could either spend the next two days trying to convince Sylvie he was real and hoping she didn’t throw her phone away again, or he could hang out with his dad until Wednesday night and maybe find out what had happened between his parents and why his dad had never told him about seeing his mom.

His dad it was. With one last glance at Sylvie, Dillon entered the car through the open door, then shifted through the seat and into the back. Being sat on didn’t hurt, but it made it tough to see.

The driver slid behind the wheel, saying, “Chesney’s an awfully big fish to be messing with, you know. Are you sure you want to show up on his radar?”

Dillon eyed him curiously. He was on the skinny side, with a receding hairline, a wrinkly forehead and ears that stuck out, but his face was friendly. Dillon knew he must be some kind of a cop, but he sure didn’t look it.

Lucas grimaced. “Call him what he is,” he suggested. “A shark.”

“Ha.” The other man grunted in agreement. “An octopus, maybe. Tentacles everywhere.”

“Don’t insult the octopi,” Lucas muttered. Dillon smiled. His dad always claimed that the octopus was the smartest animal in the ocean.

“Seriously, man, I was willing to do this one for you. No ticket, no record, everybody’s cool. But Chesney’s got half the senate in his back pocket. You mess with him and you’re going to find yourself legislated into a black hole. Or worse.” The cop started the car and pulled out onto the road.

“Worse?”

“The IRS. The SEC. OSHA. Chesney’s got connections everywhere. If he decides to destroy you, you’re already dead. He could probably get the CDC to investigate you for potential zombie outbreaks if he wanted to.”

Dillon’s smile disappeared. That didn’t sound good. Not the zombies, he was cool with them, but all those other initials. Was his dad in trouble? Was that why he’d been using a fake name?

Lucas shook his head. “The guy is corrupt as hell.”

“Not the point, my friend.”

“I’m serious. He’s selling guns to the Mexican drug cartels. I know he is. God knows how many deaths he’s responsible for.”

The driver sighed. “Proof?” he asked, as he turned onto the highway.

Lucas let his head fall back against the head rest of his seat. From the back seat, Dillon winced. He recognized that look. His dad was not a happy camper.

“Look, you know I believe in you and what you can do. You guys at GD have been invaluable for me. That little blonde—”

“She’d probably kill you if she heard you call her that,” Lucas interrupted.

“Yeah, whatever,” the driver said. “Tell me she’s not married yet.”

Lucas chuckled. “Still engaged.”

Dillon frowned, trying to think of who his dad meant, then said, “Oh, you’re talking about Serena!”

He’d met Serena a couple of times. She was a clairvoyant. She could touch an object and tell you its entire history: the last place it had been, who had held it, what it had been used for. None of the information was admissible in court, of course, but he could see that a cop might like working with her. And yeah, she might murder a guy who called her a little blonde, even if it was technically true. Despite her name, Serena was not the serene type.

“Is she ever gonna dump him?” The cop’s voice was plaintive.

“Nope.” Lucas sounded sympathetic.

The cop heaved a sigh, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel before returning to the subject. “Still, compared to Chesney, you’re small potatoes. The dude has an inside track on everything that happens in DC.”

“Yeah,” Lucas replied, sympathy gone and voice grim. “And he’s selling guns to the cartels, Andy.”

“But why?” protested Andy. “He’s got more money than God, more power than the devil. Why would he take that sort of risk?”

Dillon didn’t care about that. He wanted to know the important stuff, like why was his mom working for a bad guy?

Lucas shook his head. “Zane did a job last year. With Maia out of the Orlando office, you remember her?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Andy nodded, taking one hand off the wheel and gesturing as if trying to hurry Lucas’s story along.

“It was a local job. He found a stash of drugs, guns and cash. No big deal. Completely unimportant. But they’d built a tunnel.”

Dillon remembered that tunnel. It had been right after Akira moved to Florida. His Uncle Zane had taken her with him that day and she’d come back muttering things about quantum entanglement and paradoxes.

“A tunnel in Florida?” Andy glanced at Lucas. “What were they gonna try? Digging under the Gulf?”

Lucas chuckled. “Exactly. Total overkill for the location. Florida’s not prime territory for border crossings. So why a tunnel?”

The cop scowled as he smoothly navigated the heavy traffic on the roadway. “The Sinaloas do the tunnels. They’re West Coast.”

“Yeah. So two possibilities—”

Andy shook his head. “One,” he said, voice grim. “The Sinaloas shouldn’t be challenging the Zetas. Not after the BLO in 2008 and the AFO situation. It’s gotta be the Zetas, planning to expand their operations into Sinaloa territory.”

Dillon scowled. He had no idea what Andy was talking about. He’d never heard any of those names before. But the tone in Andy’s voice made it clear that it was not good.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Lucas answered. “One way or another, though, Maia figured this was trouble. And the guy they caught was a Mexican national. She sent him up here and I sat in on the interrogations.”

“And the guy tagged Chesney?” Andy raised an eyebrow, voice skeptical.

Lucas rubbed his hand across his forehead, looking tired. “Of course not. That would be too easy.”

“Not that it would matter. Even if the guy swore on a stack of Bibles and his mother’s grave, no way would anyone believe him.”

“He didn’t. He didn’t talk. Didn’t say a word.” Lucas looked out the window of the car.

“Uh-oh,” Andy said. “I’m detecting guilt, my friend. Let me guess—murdered in prison?”

Lucas shrugged. Dillon tried to see his dad’s face and find out what he was feeling but Lucas had his head turned away, still looking out the window.

“You didn’t kill him.”

Lucas rocked his hand back and forth in a gesture of equivocation.

“You didn’t kill him,” Andy repeated, enunciating each word. “The Zetas killed him. Hell, he was dealing drugs for them. He had to know the risks.”

“During the interrogation, I caught a name. It was a guy who worked at the Mexican embassy. We arranged surveillance. He spotted it, but not before he’d met with Chesney.” Lucas’s sentences were short and clipped.

“It’s a long way from a casual meet to selling guns.”

Lucas shook his head again. “I was there. The conversation was innocuous but the thoughts weren’t.”

“Ahh,” Andy said. “And he made you?”

“Not Chesney. But the Mexican, yeah. Enough to be suspicious, anyway.”

“And you think he put a hit on the dealer because he thought the dealer identified him to us?”

Lucas shrugged. Dillon sat back in his seat, scowling. He knew his dad did jobs for the government, sometimes dangerous jobs. Lucas had already been shot twice, once in Oregon with Zane and another time somewhere overseas. He’d been home for two whole months the summer Dillon was twelve because of it. But listening to them talk about hits and dealers and cartels made it more real. And scarier.

“He was a drug dealer, Latimer.”

“He was twenty-four years old with two kids and a third on the way. Yeah, he screwed up. But he didn’t do anything that deserved a death sentence.”

“You didn’t kill him,” Andy repeated.

“No,” Lucas agreed, but he was back to staring out the window.

“Is that why you’re after Chesney? Guilt?”

“No.” Lucas shook his head immediately, and then looked at Andy and smiled, a little rueful. “I have easier ways to soothe my guilt. A good immigration lawyer and a trust fund for the kids worked wonders.”

“Ha. Must be nice.”

Lucas sobered. “It has its pros.”

There was a silence. Dillon wondered what his dad was thinking. Andy must have been wondering as well because he shot Lucas a pointed look before prompting, “So, Chesney?”

“A nice, clear thinker. When he met up with the guy from the embassy, he was trying to figure out if he could offload a bunch of Calico M960s on him.”

“Huh.” Andy looked intrigued. “Submachine guns? Old, though. They stopped making those in the 90s, right?”

“Most of Chesney’s money comes from AlecCorp, a private military contractor. They did great in Iraq for the first few years of the war, but by 2008 the money over there was drying up. And then the market crashed. Not everyone recovered. Chesney was rich, but I’m not sure he’s rich anymore.”

“Dude still has money.”

“Yeah, but maybe not money like he used to have. Or maybe he panicked when the market tanked and got into something that there’s no way out of. Or he sees it as a profitable line of business and doesn’t care about the human costs. I don’t know what his motives are. But he’s working with the cartels.”

Andy shook his head. “And all you’ve got is what you heard?”

Lucas grimaced. “I know, I know. Not admissible. Not enough for a wiretap, not enough for a search warrant, not enough for anything. But selling guns to drug dealers is about as low as a human being can go these days.”

“The Zetas deserve their reputation.”

“Only thing worse would be dumping guns into Somalia. And I wouldn’t put that past him.”

Andy sighed as he turned onto the bridge into downtown DC.

Dillon sighed, too. He desperately wanted to ask his dad questions, starting with the first one that had occurred to him: why was his mom working for a bad guy?

*****

Sylvie stumbled over the box on her way out the door for her morning run on Wednesday.

Lucas.

It had to be. Who else would find a way to get a box into a secure building and then leave it lying in the hallway?

Not that it mattered. She wasn’t going to let him get to her.

Bending over, she picked up the box. It was silver, light cardboard, a gift box from a department store if she had to guess. An envelope taped to the outside had her name on it. With a sigh, Sylvie tossed the box, Frisbee-style, into her apartment before closing and locking the door.

She’d look at it after her run.

Maybe.

If she felt like it.

Or maybe she’d just ignore it, try to stuff it out of her mind the way she’d been trying to stuff Lucas out for the past forty-some hours, ever since Monday morning.

Running, though, didn’t work the way it should have. She couldn’t find the sweet spot, the place where her brain went quiet and all that mattered was the thud of her feet against the ground, the burn of her breath in her lungs, the pleasant stretch of the muscles down the back of her legs. Instead her mind kept churning.

Lucas.

The first time she’d met him, she hadn’t known it was him. She’d been panicking during a math final. It was the end of her junior year; she’d been in Tassamara for about six weeks; and she was about to fail geometry for the second time. And she’d studied, she had, but the classroom was so noisy, she couldn’t concentrate, and the more she stared at the paper and thought about how bad it was going to be if she failed again, the less she could remember. Then suddenly the answer to the first question was in her head.
‘42. Write it down.’

One after another, the answers came to her. She didn’t ask questions, she just wrote them down. And that was that. End of the school year, she’d passed geometry. She was thankful for the miracle, but she tried not to think too hard about it. Because if she questioned it—well, who could she ask? Her mom had enough to worry about without thinking that her daughter might be going crazy.

But then she met Lucas. Really met him. She’d gotten a summer job at the concession stand at the state park. She’d been storing a kayak, lifting it above her head to slot it into the storage rack, when suddenly he was helping her.

“Thanks, but I had it,” she’d said.

“I like helping you,” he’d answered.

Great. Another tourist looking for a vacation fling, she’d thought. “I don’t need help.” The words were dismissive, and she’d turned her back on him without waiting for a response.

“Ouch,” he’d said
. ‘I cheated on a test for you,’
he’d thought, and she’d whirled around at the words.

He’d grinned at her, and that was it. The dark hair, the bright blue eyes, the even features—sure, they added up to handsome, but Sylvie didn’t trust handsome. Yet when Lucas smiled it was like the sun breaking through the clouds on an overcast day.

Never once, never, had he told her he was fifteen. And he’d been in her math class.

Not that it would have mattered if he had. Lucas didn’t look at her like she was insane. He had his own gift and understood hers and together they were stronger; thoughts flowed back and forth between them like water running downhill.

Feelings, too.

She was pregnant before summer’s end.

Her mom was great about it. A little disappointed, a little worried, but she’d been a sixteen-year-old mother herself. His parents were not quite so calm, but by the time Dillon was born, they’d been excited to have a grandson. They were nice people, Lucas’s parents.

What could have happened?

How had Dillon died?

And why was Lucas in Chesney’s study?

And what was in the box?

Six miles and not once had Sylvie hit the zone.

She glared at the box lying on the floor and walked around it as if it were dangerous on her way to shower.

Dressed, hair dried, she ate a bowl of granola while standing in the kitchen, eyes on the box. What if the note said something important? That he couldn’t make it tonight? What if the box held . . . but she couldn’t think of anything that fit the box’s shape and light weight. Papers? Information? Answers?