And West Is West (26 page)

“Which is to follow me? To threaten me?” Ethan says, resisting the agent's pleasantness, testing how far he can push the rights of his citizenship.

“We're asking for your help,” Daugherty says. “However, we really do need to locate Ms. Aldridge soon.” Daugherty is speaking with a quiet urgency, as if Jessica is being held by a dastard about to tie her to a sawmill log. “And
you
, Mr. Winter, are our best hope.”

That Ethan has never met Jessica makes no difference. He has an interest in protecting Zoe's sister. “If you were listening to my conversation with Don Aldridge,” he tells Daugherty, “then you know he never mentioned his daughter's whereabouts.” This is not an outright lie—Don had
shown
not
told
him.

“True.” Daugherty folds his hands together atop the table. He gives Pyle a glance before returning his eyes to Ethan's. Moments pass in silence.

“I mean, look,” Ethan says, feeling the need to explain his logic—there's a Monte Carlo simulation of possibilities running through his head. “If you've been monitoring him, then you know what he knows. What I'm saying is, if Don did know where his daughter is, so would you.”

“Uh-huh,” says Daugherty. Beads of moisture have collected on the agent's upper lip. Ethan also notices that Daugherty's face seems mildly bloated—perhaps the symptom of a fast food diet. “Do you mind?” Daugherty asks him and reaches for a clean napkin on Ethan's food tray. Daugherty mops his mouth and folds the napkin in quarters. “Don't you work for a bank?” he asks.

The agent's question chills Ethan. “Are you investigating
me
now?”

“No more than anybody might, using the internet. Your name showed up in a couple of places.”

“I worked for UIB. They terminated me.”

“That's not really surprising, is it?”

Ethan takes the insult silently.

Daugherty continues, “What I mean is, bankers add up numbers on paper and expect to get the same sums in the real world. But it never works out, does it?”

“What's this got to do with anything?”

Daugherty napkins his lip. “I think you're applying banker's logic to Don Aldridge's situation. You're only taking into account the
known
knowns, not the
unknown
unknowns. A prison can hold bodies, but it's a sieve when it comes to information. Another inmate could have told Mr. Aldridge the location of his daughter. Or a coded letter. Or a contraband cell phone. We have no way of knowing. Just as we have no way of knowing if he told
you
where she is. That makes you our
unknown
known, Mr. Winter.” Daugherty looks at his partner. “Or is he our
known
unknown?”

Pyle, adjusting his position on Ethan's bench, eliminates the air gap between them. Ethan feels a beefy right biceps pressing into his narrower left one.

“But there are some things we are sure about,” says Daugherty, recapturing Ethan's attention. “For example, we know you rented a car on Miami Beach today. We know that Don Aldridge talked to you about Jessica today. We know that just after you two talked you did not return your car to Miami Beach but drove forty miles north out of your way. Can you explain the trip?”

“Am I obligated to?”

“Not unless you want an obstruction of justice charge,” Pyle tells Ethan's left ear.

Turning from Daugherty to Pyle, Ethan releases his irritation. “Don't think you're intimidating me, asshole.”

Pyle's eyes go flat. A millisecond later Ethan sees, peripherally, the big agent's far hand arc over the tabletop. But Daugherty, with a smack, stops the open-handed slap before it reaches Ethan's face. “That's enough,” the older man says, and Pyle withdraws the hand. Ethan momentarily considers whether this is all just part of their good cop, bad cop game. “I'm sorry, Ethan,” Daugherty says. “You will have to come with us.”

“What's the charge?” Ethan says. He has his rights . . . he thinks.

Daugherty gives Ethan a questioning look. “There's no charge. Oh, that's right. You probably don't know that we can hold you without charges for forty-eight hours.”

Before Ethan can reply Pyle yanks him out of the booth—Pyle must outweigh him by forty pounds of muscle—and slams Ethan facedown onto the tabletop. Ethan's mouth cracks the edge of the serving tray, and behind his back he feels metal cut tightly into his wrists. When Ethan realizes that he's handcuffed and being frisked, he remembers Don Aldridge's last words to him—
This ain't no game
.

“It's okay, people. We're FBI,” Daugherty says generally. From the corner of an eye Ethan can see the frightened onlookers. “Let's move it,” he tells Pyle.

Propelling Ethan into the parking lot, Pyle manhandles him the way UIB security did on the day Ethan was fired. Ethan stumbles but the big man's grip keeps him upright, until he shoves Ethan headfirst into the backseat of an overheated car, a red car. Agent Pyle slams the door, locking him in the swelter.

Ethan pushes himself upright and twists around to look out the car's back window. The two agents are heatedly but quietly talking behind the trunk. Daugherty is wearing a sour look and after a minute Pyle gets in on the driver's side.

“Where are you taking me?” Ethan asks—and tastes metal. Wiping his mouth on the shoulder of his shirt, he smears it with blood. “I'm hurt,” he says.

“Quiet,” Pyle says, then starts the engine.

Minutes pass. The car's climate control exhausts the swelter. Then Daugherty joins them. He rests an elbow on the front seat back and half turns to Ethan. His face, in profile, is gray. “You could have made things easier on yourself.”

Aware that he will spout gibberish if he replies, Ethan bites his tongue. But his hands are tingling from lack of blood and his desire to be unhandcuffed is immense. Already his decision to be silent about Jessica has weakened. What, after all, does he know about her situation . . . about any situation? Less and less it seems. Jessica might be a threat to herself. It might be wrong of him not to help these men.

Pyle twists the car out of its parking space and Ethan topples onto the floor between the front and rear seats.

“Because if you think,” Daugherty says, looking down at him and apparently continuing a thought Ethan has missed, “that I've spent the last year in pursuit of this woman for no good reason”—the agent reaches over the seat back and presses an index finger against a vein in Ethan's neck—“then, my friend, you are dangerously mistaken.” Daugherty is breathing hard.

“You okay?” Pyle asks his partner.

“Drive,” Daugherty says, releasing his finger. “Someplace secluded.”

“The Everglades?”

“Gator land it is.”

“This is bullshit,” Ethan mumbles.

“Bullshit?”
Daugherty says. “I'll show you bullshit.” He turns to Pyle. “Bring up that picture on your phone. Let's show our guest some of the enhanced interrogation you applied in Afghanistan, just so he knows where his noncooperation is taking him.”

“You're the boss,” Pyle says.

What Ethan sees on the BlackBerry, looking up at it from the car's rear floor, is not an image he can easily absorb. Daugherty is showing him a naked, bearded man with his arms bound behind his back. The man is standing crouched and has a bit of a belly. Beneath the belly, a penis, a rather small penis but one that is quite erect, pokes from a matted nest of pubic hair.

“So here's how this will go,” Pyle, at the wheel, says. “We work on a person's weak spots. Muslims, for example, are particularly attuned to personal shame. If, say, you have a Haji in custody who is not well endowed, you offer him some green tea laced with Viagra, strip him bare ass, and then get a female interrogator with a superb Afghani accent to comment on his shortcomings in Pashto. It's a process.”

“Bullshit,” Ethan manages to whisper.

“What's
your
weak spot, Winter?” Pyle asks him. “That dead girlfriend of yours. Oh, yeah, we know all about her. But don't worry, I doubt she killed herself because of you. I mean she was a real babe, and man, did you ever
look
at yourself in a mirror?”

“That's enough,” Daugherty says. Pyle's BlackBerry is buzzing and Daugherty studies its screen.

“Like hell that's enough,” says Pyle. “We're finishing this today.”

“Have you been communicating with Wagner behind my back?” Daugherty asks his partner unhappily.

“Yeah. So what? He likes me,” Pyle says. “More than you.”

“He sent you an address. Aldridge's cellmate just gave it up.” Daugherty looks over his seat back and down at Ethan. “Your lucky day, isn't it?”

“Fuckin' A,” says Pyle hitting the brakes. The car skids a little and then Pyle bounces it over the landscaped median. The vehicle stops sideways in the oncoming lane. Fortunately there's a break in traffic.

“That was dramatic,” Daugherty says.

“End of the line, shithead,” Pyle says exiting the car. Then he is pulling Ethan off the backseat floor. The cuffs come off and blood rushes like nettles into Ethan's hands.

Pyle gets back in the car without shutting either side door. When he hits the gas the doors slam by themselves. Ethan, standing in the road, wonders how much he could have taken before telling the agents Jessica's address. He hopes it would have been a lot.

A BUS, LIKE
a trained elephant, kneels to take him aboard. Seated by a window Ethan gazes at the gated communities and sun-bleached strip malls, the plots of land cleared for storm drainage or imminent development. The bus passes over the Florida Turnpike and glides down below the tree line. Ethan presses a yellow strip bordering his window and makes his ride pull over. It can't be twenty minutes since Daugherty and Pyle released him. There might still be time. He crosses the street and gets into his leased Hyundai.

His phone's GPS steers him into a neighborhood of cinderblock homes with tar-paper roofs. Ahead, above in the treetops, a red glow hiccoughs off palm fronds.

You don't have to do this, he tells himself. You can just turn around.

But he doesn't. Ethan pulls up a few houses from where the emergency vehicles flicker. A senior in a quilt robe glares as he crosses her gravel. Then the flashing fire truck, leaving, eases through the spectators. Ethan goes into the small crowd, which stands back from a stationary ambulance that silently winks its various lights.

“What's up?” asks a shirtless twenty-something in Bermudas. The man's not talking to Ethan but to his companion.

“There were these guys looked like detectives.” The companion, barefoot and in jeans, points his chin toward a pink, two-story apartment building with an exterior staircase.

“They come for that chick?” asks Bermudas.

“What chick?”

“Lives upstairs. Lotta tats. Seen her walking a dog.”

“Never saw any chick.”

“Skinny. But doable.”

Ethan looks up at the staircase landing. A man in a blue shirt is slowly backing out of an open door there. He's supporting one end of a stretcher.

You are part of this, Ethan's conscience says. She's Zoe's sister.

Straps hold a draped body as the paramedic angles the stretcher to get it onto the narrow staircase. Then the other lifting paramedic appears—but Ethan cannot see the victim's face, only the breathing mask that hides it. Pyle appears at the landing's door and follows the stretcher bearers downstairs.

Ethan feels, then, what he felt when he first saw Zoe, crossing in front of that cab—a longing, a desire to save her. He
can
save Jessica. He will. This time and from now on, he will do the right thing.

But as the stretcher comes closer he sees that the hair and eyes of the victim are not female. It's a man lying on the stretcher.
Daugherty
. Ethan is standing only two feet away as the paramedics pass with their burden. But Daugherty's dark coffee eyes don't see him. They are staring up at the sky without blinking.

“What happened?” Ethan asks Pyle, who is still following the stretcher.

“Back off.”

“Where's Jessica?” Ethan steps in front of Pyle, and Pyle shoulders him out of the way.

Seconds later a siren blip warns the bystanders and chunks of lawn fly as the ambulance spins onto the tarmac. Pyle follows fast behind in the red car. Ethan looks back to the second-floor landing, at the open door there, and heads for the staircase.

“You looking for Jessica?' someone says.

Ethan turns around. It's a heavyset man in a guayabera.

“THANKS,” ETHAN SAYS.
He takes the iced tea from Kelso's wife. She is slender and wearing a blue dress that exposes her tanned knees. Ethan is in her kitchen seated at a table covered by a plastic cloth.

“Have you known Jessica a long time?” the woman asks.

“I was a friend of her sister's.”

“
Was
a friend?”

“She passed away.”

“Oh, that's terrible,” says the woman.

The sound of a toilet flush comes through the drywall. Kelso, who had introduced himself to Ethan as Jessica's landlord, rejoins them.

“So you think they were real FBI?” Kelso asks. “They showed me ID, but you can fake documents at Kinko's. I know that much from renting apartments.”

“Does that mean you didn't tell them where to find Jessica?” Ethan asks.

“I made out like she was home and brought them to her door.”

“Even though you knew she'd left?”

“Once you start lying there's no turning back. I pretended a little surprise when I knocked and got no answer. That's when the big one kicked in the door. I don't know what he was trying to prove since I had my key out. Well, once we were inside anyone could see no one's living there anymore—there's no personal stuff, no dishes in the sink. Jessica left it neat as a pin. That was when the other guy . . .”