Black River (37 page)

“That will be a most unfortunate mistake for you.”

“I don’t think so. I told you Silas Jackson saw me lift the diamond from Jack’s van. Jackson want’s a cut.”

“Will hush money keep Jackson quiet for now? Greed, like amoebic dysentery, breeds and infects the gut.”

“I guess you’ll have to take that chance. Jackson is my insurance policy. He stays silent and gets paid his blackmail money. If I disappear, he lets police know you’re the mastermind behind this, and you’re carrying the diamond.”

“If you gave him my name, that is the dumbest mistake you’ll ever make. But right now you have the Koh-i-Noor. Remember, Nelson, it carries a centuries-old curse. Any man who possesses it too long dies a painful death. I’d suggest you turn it over to me now.”

“Curse? You wanna hear a curse? Fuck you! Come with the cash. I’m out of time. O’Brien
made
me. You grasping that? I
have
to vanish.”

“And so you will. Just calm down. Even if there is video of a bullet coming out of your muzzle, police will have to prove premeditated intent to kill—that you loaded the gun. Why? Because you were on a movie set with a number of people having access to props like the muskets the men use.”

“Time’s up! I can’t even go home to pack my bags. I’m stuck hiding in fuckin’ Super—a super mess—a motel—and I can’t even go pack a damn bag. Show me the money—”

“Show some respect for this process. You just don’t pawn overnight what is now the most famous diamond in the world. I told you I have two buyers—both big players. Both very private in their negotiations. The auction is about over. You will be paid soon.”

Nelson said nothing for a few seconds. The man on the line could hear the sound of a low-flying jet arriving or taking off. Nelson said, “I’ll see you tonight. “I get paid now or I’m flying to India to hock it. From what I hear, they’d love to get this rock back, and they’ll pay through the teeth to get it. Meet me at the Hilton on Airline Road after dark. I’ll be in the bar, back table. Be there at nine o’clock or I’m flying and the rock’s coming with me.” Nelson disconnected. He set the phone on the kitchen table, held his hand out, fingers spread, trembling.

N
ick sauntered down L dock, head pounding from pain, dark glasses on, trying to get to
St. Michael
without answering questions from marina neighbors. A brown-skin boat owner wearing swim trunks and a white bandana stood up from sanding the deck of a 47-foot Vagabond ketch. He squinted in the sun as Nick came down the dock, turned off the sander and yelled, “Hey, man. I heard they rushed you to the ER. You okay, Nick? Was it your heart, dude?”

“Bad case of food poisoning.”

“That sucks. Maybe you got ahold of some nasty fish. I heard you’ve eaten urchins underwater right out their spiny shells when you’re diving out there. How the hell you do that without getting a mouthful of seawater down your throat?”

“Same way a porpoise does it—the old Greek, open your gills a little wider.” Nick grinned and kept walking, not making eye contact with anyone else.

Max barked once as Nick came closer, her tail wiggling. “Hot dog, where you been when that witch nearly poisoned me? I need a guard dog like you to bite her ankles.”

Dave and O’Brien stepped from
Jupiter’s
salon onto the cockpit. Dave asked, “How you feeling?”

“Like I got the hangover from hell. I need to get some protein back in my blood.” He held up the grocery bag. “Bought a big damn steak. I’m thinkin’ about eatin’ it raw.”

O’Brien smiled. “That might put you back in sickbay.

“Kim said you caught that crazy woman, Sarvarna? Cops got her now?”

Dave nodded. “And her name’s not Sarvarna. Come down here. We’ll sit in the shade, and I’ll tell you more about the woman who gave you the headache from hell.”

As Dave explained who the woman was, where she was from, and why she was in the U.S., Nick swallowed three extra-strength aspirins with orange juice. He sat on the couch in
Jupiter
and propped his feet up on a shellacked cypress tree table, which had come with the boat when O’Brien bought it in a DEA drug-boat auction in Miami.

Dave finished by saying, “She said her employer will pick up the tab for your treatment in the ER.”

“That’s damn generous of her and her fuckin’ employer. Do I look like a spy? Hell no. James Bond couldn’t have seen that coming. Whatever it was that bitch put in my ouzo was a wide awake sexual nightmare. It was like I was asleep and awake at the very same second. My mind sort of left my body. I couldn’t feel a damn thing. She stroked my Johnson, hiked her dress above her waist, and wanted to ride the bull. I wanted to take her there. But man-o-man, I just lay there like a scarecrow with no stuffin’ in his pants. Even after eatin’ two dozen oysters earlier in the bar with her, my man was a limber timber. Not a damn pulse outta my boy. He couldn’t wink with his one eye if he wanted to. I never experienced anything like it. Her hot breath in my ear, straddling and slow rockin’ on me…it’s like I was goin’ into body hypnosis. I didn’t want to tell her where the keys to the boats were, but she had this strange drug-induced power over me. Like I had no will power left in my mind. My voice was the only thing that worked, and it didn’t sound like it was coming outta me. Did she use the key to get in your boat, Sean?”

“Yes. Dave saw her enter. He packed his Springfield and followed her. Caught her going through drawers in the master.”

“What the hell was the woman lookin’ for, the diamond? She think you hid it in your sock drawer?”

“Apparently.”

Dave said, “Nick, don’t beat yourself up over the incident.”

“Incident? Dave, this was a life-altering train wreck.”

“You had no idea you were being set up by an agent working for the Indian counterintelligence branch called IB. Her sole purpose for being here is to try to locate and secure the diamond. If it is the Koh-i-Noor, its return to India will be a major coup, an unprecedented achievement for that nation. If the diamond was, and this is a big if—if it was illegally taken out of India by the British East India Company, its return would be celebrated by one-point-three billion people in India, and Indians living all over the world. It’d be as if India won the World Cup—a big celebration.”

“And the chick who slipped me a tricky mickey would be a hero.”

Dave shook his head. “No, outside of those she directly reports to, no one would ever know she had anything to do with its return.”

Nick grinned. “No wonder she has sexually repressed issues. Turn a man to stone, well sort of, and come on to him all because she wanted to search Sean’s boat.” He grinned. “My man, Sean, is popular. Recently, a tourist, least I freakin’ think he was a tourist, he was asking me about chartering Sean’s boat. That’s no big deal, but when he bought a round of drinks, and started asking me stuff like had I been following the news about the diamond and the Civil War paper? When he asked, ‘w
as Sean helping the widow of the dead guy find the stolen stuff ?’
…I said yassas in Greek, which means I’m outta here.”

“What’d the guy look like?” Dave asked.

“About Sean’s height. Probably six-two. Blond fella. Green eyes. Maybe early fifties. He looked in good shape for his age.”

“Did he have an accent?”

Nick nodded. “English or maybe Australian. The witch that slipped me her witches’ brew asked me if he had an accent.”

O’Brien said, “That’s because she knows the UK has someone over here trying to beat her to the punch, to find the diamond and the contract before she does.”

Dave blew out a long breath. “That’s true, but the fly in the ointment here is the description Nick just gave us.”

“What do you mean?” Nick asked.

“A British agent showed up here at the marina. The agent was assigned to this case from my former colleague in the UK. Sean and I spoke with
him. We debriefed the agent. He’s doing his own investigation. The man we spoke with doesn’t match your description at all.”

“So, what the hell does that mean?”

O’Brien said, “It mean’s someone else is looking for the goods. And I’m betting the guy who bought you a drink was the same person who killed Professor Ike Kirby and the hotel clerk.”

Nick tossed another two aspirins into his mouth, chewed without blinking, cracked a beer and took a long pull. He cut his red eyes to Dave and said, “If I’d only known, Dave. I know you and the professor were tight. Had I known that was the guy who killed him, I woulda knocked the dude off the barstool.”

Dave shrugged and looked over the tops of his bifocals. “No sweat, Nick. Sean is making an assumption. He may be correct, but we don’t know that.”

O’Brien asked, “Is there anything else you can remember about the guy, Nick?””

Nick sipped his beer and started to answer when O’Brien’s phone buzzed in his pocket. The man on the line said, “Hey, Sean this is Larry Tiller at the jail.”

“Thanks for calling. What do you have?”

“That guy, Silas Jackson, his release papers are being processed right now. He ought to be hitting the streets soon. I saw the guy when he first arrived and got into his county-issued orange jumpsuit, you couldn’t help but notice the tat across the guy’s entire chest. It’s a tattoo of a human skull wearing a Confederate flag as a bandana. Below the skull is a red rose next to a hangman’s noose and letters that spell out,
Southern Justice
.”

O
’Brien parked his Jeep on the road beyond the razor-wire fence, just outside the Volusia County Jail Complex. He watched a parade of the exploited enter the jail. The users, losers, abusers—the trampled women with litters of dirty children in tow. Girlfriends with bruises as apparent as their tattoos—most visiting wife beaters and callous boyfriends conditionally remorseful because their rage was now trapped in a cage with them. When their freedom was entombed in a six-by-eight cell, sobriety was their first visitor. Guilt was a transient shadow.

Some were being held for violating parole, domestic abuse, selling or using drugs, theft and fraud—most riding the roller coaster track of the habitual offender in the macabre theme park of the criminal mind. Others were locked up and scheduled for jury trials on capital charges ranging from rape to murder.

O’Brien watched a heavyset bail bondsmen in a banana-yellow shirt stop on the sidewalk to light a cigarette. The bondsman waited as a man in a wrinkled gray suit joined him. The man had dark, hooded eyes, feral face and a small mouth. O’Brien recognized him as an attorney, a late-night infomercial king—an ambulance chaser: ‘
In a legal jam? Call Sam - One eight-hundred dial Sam’s law.’

He thought about Silas Jackson, picturing the image of Jackson that the casting director, Shelia, had shared with him on her computer screen. He visualized Jackson in his Confederate uniform, eyes black, narrow and hard
as marbles, 1950’s sideburns, and a scruffy handlebar moustache. Jackson’s attitude was captured in the photo as well.
Go to hell
.

When O’Brien glanced back at the entrance to the county jail, Silas Jackson was coming outside, squinting in the late-afternoon Florida sun like a hibernating animal rousted from its den of thieves.