Long Way Down (21 page)

Outside, the sun hit the side of La Salle’s face, revealing tiny lines around the eyes and nose. He turned and said, “Okay, now here’s
my
warning: drop the ball on this and you’ll all die, Candi included. Do you understand?”

“Yes, perfectly.”

La Salle put on his sunglasses, turned and stepped toward the passenger side of a Lexus parked next to the Chevy. It probably belonged to Marcus, purchased after Sam gave him the stack of money from La Salle’s safe.

J.T. brushed close to the Lexus as Marcus slammed his door. Sam saw J.T. close his pocket knife with one hand and put it into his pocket. They got into the Chevy, and Sam started it and drove out of the parking lot into the traffic heading toward the causeway.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Sam said.

“What do you mean?”

“Scraping the paint on Marcus’ new car.”

“Yeah, well, he got off easy, for now.”

Sam nodded. He hadn’t decided yet what
he
might do about Marcus before this ended.

“Where’re we going?”

“Carling Research.”

“The butcher shop? Why do you want to go there?”

“Just something Carling said.” He glanced at J.T. “I think she can tell us about La Salle.”

Chapter 21

S
AM SAID his name into the microphone at Carling Research and smiled for the camera. A man’s scratchy voice came from the speaker.

“What do you want?”

“I need to talk to Carling.”

“Sorry, she isn’t here.”

Sam looked at J.T., then turned his back to him, leaned in close to the microphone, and said, “Tell her I said I’m sorry,” his voice almost a whisper.

A pause stretched into several seconds, then Carling’s voice came back. “That’s a start. What else?”

“I’m a heel. How about that?”

J.T. snickered and Sam turned and stared at him until he stopped.

Carling sighed. “What do you want? Nobody looks hurt.”

“I need to ask you something.”

“This isn’t an information service.”

“Just let me in, okay? I’ll make it worth your time.”

Carling paused, “Okay, but this better be good.”

One of the doors swung open and Carling looked beyond them down the driveway and then at Sam and nodded toward the inside. They followed her down the hall to her office and sat in the two chairs in front of her desk.

Sam glanced at J.T., who couldn’t take his eyes off Carling.

“Have you two met?” Sam said.

Carling took a quick look at J.T. and said, “No. What’s this all about?”

All business.

“You do cosmetic surgery, right?” Sam said.

Carling nodded. “Why, you want a facelift?”

Sam smiled. “There’s this guy, and I think you might have done some work on him.”

Carling raised an eyebrow. “Why do you say that?”

“Just a hunch.”

Carling shrugged and leaned back in her chair. “Sorry, I don’t keep records. I thought you would realize that.”

“I think you’ll remember this man.”

“Why?”

“He’s a big dude, about six-foot-eight.”

Grabbing a pack of long cigarettes, she pulled one out and lit it. She drew the smoke into her lungs and cocked her head, squinted her eyes and blew a cloud across the desk toward J.T. “I don’t remember anybody like that.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

Sam nodded. “That’s okay. Maybe Jack will remember.”

“What does Jack have to do with anything?”

“When I came here before, you mentioned that he did some consulting for you. I wondered at the time what kind of consulting that might be. Then I learned that Jack is acquainted with this guy who had the plastic surgery. It seems like too much of a connection to be just coincidence. I figure you asked Jack to check him out before you did the work on him.”

Carling took another drag on the cigarette, blew the smoke into the air and crushed the butt in a clean ashtray on the desk. “Trying to quit.”

Sam leaned back and waited.

She smiled with her eyes and said, “Cosmetic surgery can be risky. After you finish, a guy might look in the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, good job,’ then turn around and pop you because you know what his new face looks like.”

“So you did get Jack to look into this guy?”

“What are you going to do to him?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know yet. He has the woman you patched up, and he said she won’t live if we don’t do something for him.”

She nodded. “Still about the girl, huh?”

Sam smiled and said, “Yes, it is.”

Carling took a deep breath and sighed. “Jack found out he’d been a Government agent of some kind working in Central America.”

“How did he do that?”

“I gave him a fingerprint I took from a glass when the guy first visited.”

“Did you get a name?”

“No, I didn’t want the name. Jack had it, though.”

“So, what did Jack say about him?”

“He said he didn’t think the guy would be any trouble.” Carling rolled her eyes.

“You look as if you wish you hadn’t listened to him.”

She smiled and showed her beautiful teeth, and Sam wondered how he could have left her the night they kissed on the sofa.

“Yeah, he threatened me when we finished his face.”

She probably had decided then that she’d get even if she ever had the chance.

“When was that?” Sam said.

“Several months ago.” She glanced at a clock on the wall and said, “Time for you to go. I have an appointment.”

They stood and left the office, and Carling escorted them back to the door they’d entered.

“Nice meeting you,” J.T. said as he opened the door and backed out, smiling.

“Sure, same here,” Carling said. She squeezed Sam’s upper arm and said to him, “Wait.” He turned and almost bumped into her, their faces only an inch or so apart. “You don’t look so good,” she said. “Maybe you should think about another line of work.”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that.”

Carling said, “You owe me,” pushed him out the door, and closed it.

They got into the car and drove away, and Sam tried calling Jack Craft again. He punched both numbers into the cell phone and didn’t get an answer on either.

“Other than a person in law enforcement, there probably aren’t many people who could check out a print,” Sam said.

“And I know most of them,” J.T. said, then added, “Carling has a thing for you. It was written all over her face.”

“Yeah? I didn’t notice. Why don’t you make some calls and see if you can find out who ran that print.”

****

DARKNESS HAD fallen by the time they got back to Sam’s boat. Sam left J.T. working his contacts on the phone, and strode down the dock to Jack’s boat,
The Clipper
. It looked as abandoned as it had before. He crossed the gangway to the hatch, looked around to make sure no one watched, and worked the pick in the lock. It opened within a few minutes and he stepped inside.

Sam could see well enough without lights to navigate around the furniture in the lounge. He stepped to the chair by the telephone and turned on a wall lamp. A notepad lay next to the phone. Thumbing through it, he found notes about times for high and low tides on one page and something about a boat Jack sold to a man in Georgia on another page. Sam dowsed the light and stepped into the galley where a wall lamp lit the surface of a small desk. He opened the desk drawer and found a note dated about three weeks earlier that read, “Dave at the restaurant 7:00.” The reference to Dave might be the man Jack occasionally employed for confidence schemes. His real name was Rutger Longstreet, but they had called him Uncle Dave when they ran a game on an English Duke a few years before, and the name stuck.

Candi had said a man approached La Salle about investing in the casino. La Salle’s part in the deal would be a cool hundred million, and he would get to manage the whole deal. Candi didn’t know the identity of the man, but said, “...who would try to swindle somebody like La Salle?” Who, indeed? Would Uncle Dave and Jackson Craft be up to that kind of con? Uncle Dave could convince someone he ran Harvard Business School if he needed to.

Sam put the note back into the drawer, closed it, and looked around another few minutes before giving up and leaving. He locked the hatch when he went out and wondered if Jack would know someone had been aboard, although he didn’t really care. Jack should have answered his phone at least once the last five times Sam had called.

Sauntering toward the end of the dock, Sam watched a middle-aged man navigate a motorized yacht into a ninety foot slip. A shapely woman in her twenties ran around the deck trying to get ropes ready to tie up while the man yelled at her.

Feeling sorry for the woman, Sam told her to toss him the lines and he would tie them off. She did as he asked and he waited while the engines revved and the sides of the big boat banged into the dock bumpers. Ten minutes passed before the man got it parked.

The yacht reminded Sam of the casino La Salle had built: big and flashy with an inexperienced captain at the helm. He secured the last line to the cleat and backed away. The man yelled some more and the woman told him what he could do with his fancy boat.

The marina lay silent after that, the air still and hot. Looking into the night sky, Sam saw only darkness. Cloud cover had moved in and he wondered if a storm might be brewing in the Caribbean where they would be in an hour or so.

He ambled toward
Slipstream
and tried to visualize how the pieces of the La Salle puzzle might fit together. Carling had said La Salle had come in for the surgery a few months ago, and she asked Jack to check him out. Jack called a connection or two and learned the owner of the fingerprint, and maybe more, and told Carling she could take the risk. After the surgery Jack probably followed the man who became La Salle, maybe learned why he wanted to have his face changed, and watched him take over the business from Philly Moran. Jack knew Tommy Shoes, so he cozied up to him, maybe did him a favor or two, and listened to Tommy complain about La Salle horning in on his clients. Tommy probably mentioned La Salle’s plan to build a gambling paradise in the Caribbean, and that crystallized the con for Jack. Uncle Dave came onto the scene and convinced La Salle that his investment group would put up most of the money to build the casino, if he would weigh in with a hundred million. La Salle didn’t have the ready cash, but he knew about the treasure, and he started the salvage operation to pay his part. Then whatever he did that made him want to get his face changed came into play, and some bad men with guns and a helicopter came after the harvested gold.

It might have happened like that, but it really didn’t matter. La Salle had Candi, and if Sam didn’t find the statue and deliver it as requested, she might disappear. Jack liked this kind of con: everybody watching the game on the table, the shells moving round and round, back and forth, eyes tracking the one with the billion dollars underneath, and nobody noticing the one percent that slops over the edge onto the floor.

Inside the boat Sam entered the lounge. J.T. put down the phone and said, “Looks like La Salle used to be a man named Thomas Beeker. My contact didn’t keep a record, so he couldn’t be certain of the spelling. Beeker worked in Central America for a long time, but disappeared almost a year ago, and nobody has heard from him since.”

“Who did he work for?”

J.T. shrugged. “That’s all my contact had. If I could get another computer I might find out some more.”

Sam looked at his watch and shook his head. “Maybe later, if we still need to know. We need to catch our plane.”

They strode down the dock to the place where La Salle said Randy would be, and got there a few minutes before midnight. The seaplane sat at the tip of the dock normally reserved for over-sized boats. A man stood on the gangway of his houseboat several slips away, watching, and probably wondering what business an airplane had at the marina. He lost interest when he saw Sam and J.T. going to the plane, and disappeared inside.

The engines still ticked as they cooled down from the flight in from the Caribbean. Randy stood waiting, his eyes red and darting around the marina. “Get on the plane. I refueled before I got here, so we’re ready to fly.” Sam wondered how long Randy had been on the clock without a drink.

They climbed aboard and took a seat directly behind the cockpit close enough to see the instruments. A couple more seats sat empty behind them. The rest of the space was open deck with inset eyelets for tying down cargo. Coiled on the floor was a rope with an odd-looking anchor on one end and a float the size of a basketball on the other. Two diving tanks lay strapped down in the corner, and masks hung on the bulkhead. A spear gun also hung there, and Sam wondered if they had ever had occasion to use it.

Randy untied the lines, climbed inside, and secured the hatch. He glanced at Sam as he passed between the seats, and hesitated as if he might say something, but then sighed and made his way forward.

The lights went off in the cabin and the plane became dark except for the glow of the dash in the cockpit. Randy started the engines, taxied out of the marina, and gave the plane full throttle. They lifted above the water a few seconds later, and Randy banked south. A web of lightning lit the sky to the southeast and Sam saw the tops of boats in a neighboring marina. Thunder rumbled in the distance, barely audible over the hum of the engines.

A drop of perspiration rolled down Sam’s cheek. “How about some air back here?”

Randy glanced back at them and nodded. A few minutes later the air got slightly cooler and Sam dozed in his seat. He dreamed about being at the bottom of the sea, sifting through the wreckage of a Spanish galleon. Gold coins lay everywhere, glittering in the light of the diving lamp. Sam reached for one and it disintegrated at his touch, as if made of paste. Then he swam around the bow of the ship, the ancient hull almost completely buried in the sand, and saw a gaping hole in the wood. He shone the light inside and saw the statue. It gleamed in the light and its eyes beckoned Sam. He reached in but couldn’t quite touch it, then pushed through the hole and the rotted planks scraped against his sides. He got closer and saw a skeleton beside the statue, its bony hand wrapped around it as if protecting it even in death. When he reached for the statue, the skeleton rose up like a cobra and grabbed Sam by the wrist. Sam’s pulse fired in his ears and he dropped the light. He pulled a flare from his belt and fired it into the skeleton’s ribcage. The hull flooded with light and exploded, and the old ship began to turn over, collapsing against Sam’s body. He tried to push his way out, but couldn’t budge. His heart felt as if it might explode, and the air tasted like sour milk in his throat. Another light flashed, and he woke.