Persuader (42 page)

“Don’t you think so?”

I shrugged. “Seems like a lot to me. For a lawn dart?”

She pointed at the tape player. Pointed at Quinn’s voice filling the air. “Well, that’s what they’re paying, obviously. I mean, how else did he get half a million dollars? He didn’t save it out of his salary, that’s for sure.”

“When will you make your move?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll have to. He’s got the final blueprint. Gorowski says it’s the key to the whole thing.”

“How will it go down?”

“Frasconi is dealing with the Syrian. He’s going to mark the cash, with a judge advocate watching. Then we’ll all observe the exchange. We’ll open the briefcase that Quinn gives to the Syrian, immediately, in front of the same judge. We’ll document the contents, which will be the key blueprint. Then we’ll go pick Quinn up. We’ll arrest him and impound the briefcase that the Syrian gave to him. The judge can watch us open it later.

We’ll find the marked cash inside, and therefore we’ll have a witnessed and documented transaction, and therefore Quinn will go down, and he’ll stay down.”

“Watertight,” I said. “Good work.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Will Frasconi be OK?”

“He’ll have to be. I can’t deal with the Syrian myself. Those guys are weird with women.

They can’t touch us, can’t look at us, sometimes they can’t even talk to us. So Frasconi will have to do it.”

“Want me to hold his hand?”

“His part is all offstage,” she said. “There’s nothing much he can screw up.”

“I think I’ll hold his hand anyway.”

“Thank you,” she said again.

“And he’ll go with you to make the arrest.”

She said nothing.

“I can’t send you one-on-one,” I said. “You know that.”

She nodded.

“But I’ll tell him you’re the lead investigator,” I said. “I’ll make sure he understands it’s your case.”

“OK,” she said.

She pressed the stop button on her tape player. Quinn’s voice died, halfway through a word. The word was going to be dollars, as in two hundred thousand. But it came out as doll. He sounded bright and happy and alert, like a guy at the top of his game, fully aware he was busy playing and winning. Kohl ejected the cassette. Slipped it into her pocket.

Then she winked at me and walked out of my office.

“Who’s Quinn?” Elizabeth Beck asked me, ten years later.

“Frank Xavier,” I said. “He used to be called Quinn. His full name is Francis Xavier Quinn.”

“You know him?”

“Why else would I be here?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a guy who knew Frank Xavier back when he was called Francis Xavier Quinn.”

“You work for the government.”

I shook my head. “This is strictly personal.”

“What will happen to my husband?”

“No idea,” I said. “And I don’t really care either way.”

I went back inside Paulie’s little house and locked the front door. Came out again and locked the back door behind me. Then I checked the chain on the gate. It was tight. I figured we could keep intruders out for a minute, maybe a minute and a half, which might be good enough. I put the padlock key in my pants pocket.

“Back to the big house now,” I said. “You’ll have to walk, I’m afraid.”

I drove the Cadillac down the driveway, with the ammunition boxes stacked behind and beside me. I saw Elizabeth and Richard in the mirror, hurrying side by side. They didn’t want to get out of town, but they weren’t too keen on being left alone. I stopped the car by the front door and backed it up ready to unload. I opened the trunk and took the ceiling hook and the chain and ran upstairs to Duke’s room. His window looked out along the whole length of the driveway. It would make an ideal gunport. I took the Beretta out of my coat pocket and snicked the safety off and fired it once into the ceiling. I saw Elizabeth and Richard fifty yards away stop dead and then start running toward the house. Maybe they thought I had shot the cook. Or myself. I stood on a chair and punched through the bullet hole and raked the plaster back until I found a wooden joist.

Then I aimed carefully and fired again and drilled a neat nine-millimeter hole in the wood. I screwed the hook into it and slipped the chain onto it and tested it with my weight. It held.

I went back down and opened the Cadillac’s rear doors. Elizabeth and Richard arrived and I told them to carry the ammunition boxes. I carried the big machine gun. The metal detector on the front door squealed at it, loud and urgent. I carried it upstairs. Hung it on the chain and fed the end of the first belt into it. Swung the muzzle to the wall and opened the lower sash of the window. Swung the muzzle back and traversed it side to side and ranged it up and down. It covered the whole width of the distant wall and the whole length of the driveway down to the carriage circle. Richard stood and watched me.

“Keep stacking the boxes,” I said.

Then I stepped over to the nightstand and picked up the outside phone. Called Duffy at the motel.

“You still want to help?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then I need all three of you at the house,” I said. “Quick as you can.”

After that there was nothing more to be done until they arrived. I waited by the window and pressed my teeth into my gums with my thumb and watched the road. Watched Richard and Elizabeth struggling with the heavy boxes. Watched the sky. It was noon, but it was darkening. The weather was getting even worse. The wind was freshening. The North Atlantic coast, in late April. Unpredictable. Elizabeth Beck came in and stacked a box. Breathed hard. Stood still.

“What’s going to happen?” she asked.

“No way of telling,” I said.

“What’s this gun for?”

“It’s a precaution.”

“Against what?”

“Quinn’s people,” I said. “We’ve got our backs to the sea. We might need to stop them on the driveway.”

“You’re going to shoot at them?”

“If necessary.”

“What about my husband?” she asked.

“Do you care?”

She nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“I’m going to shoot at him, too.”

She said nothing.

“He’s a criminal,” I said. “He can take his chances.”

“The laws that make him a criminal are unconstitutional.”

“You think?”

She nodded again. “The Second Amendment is clear.”

“Take it to the Supreme Court,” I said. “Don’t bother me with it.”

“People have the right to bear arms.”

“Drug dealers don’t,” I said. “I never saw an amendment that says it’s OK to fire automatic weapons in the middle of a crowded neighborhood. Using bullets that go through brick walls, one after the other. And through innocent bystanders, one after the other. Babies and children.”

She said nothing.

“You ever seen a bullet hit a baby?” I said. “It doesn’t slide right in, like a hypodermic needle. It crushes its way through, like a bludgeon. Crushing and tearing.”

She said nothing.

“Never tell a soldier that guns are fun,” I said.

“The law is clear,” she said.

“So join the NRA,” I said. “I’m happy right here in the real world.”

“He’s my husband.”

“You said he deserved to go to prison.”

“Yes,” she said. “But he doesn’t deserve to die.”

“You think?”

“He’s my husband,” she said again.

“How does he make the sales?” I asked.

“He uses I-95,” she said. “He cuts the centers out of the cheap rugs and rolls the guns in them. Like tubes, or cylinders. Drives them to Boston or New Haven. People meet him there.”

I nodded. Remembered the stray carpet fibers I had seen around.

“He’s my husband,” Elizabeth said.

I nodded again. “If he’s got the sense not to stand right next to Quinn he might be OK.”

“Promise me he’ll be OK. Then I’ll leave. With Richard.”

“I can’t promise,” I said.

“Then we’re staying.”

I said nothing.

“It was never a voluntary association, you know,” she said. “With Xavier, I mean. You really need to understand that.”

She moved to the window and gazed down at Richard. He was heaving the last ammunition case out of the Cadillac.

“There was coercion,” she said.

“Yes, I figured that out,” I said.

“He kidnapped my son.”

“I know,” I said.

Then she moved again and looked straight at me.

“What did he do to you?” she asked.

I saw Kohl twice more that day as she prepared her end of the mission. She was doing everything right. She was like a chess player. She never did anything without looking two moves ahead. She knew the judge advocate she asked to monitor the transaction would have to recuse himself from the subsequent court-martial, so she picked one she knew the prosecutors hated. It would be one less obstacle later. She had a photographer standing by to make a visual record. She had timed the drive out to Quinn’s Virginia house. The file I had given her at the start now filled two cardboard boxes. The second time I saw her she was carrying them. They were stacked one on top of the other and her biceps were straining against their weight.

“How is Gorowski holding up?” I asked her.

“Not good,” she said. “But he’ll be out of the woods tomorrow.”

“You’re going to be famous.”

“I hope not,” she said. “This should stay classified forever.”

“Famous in the classified world,” I said. “Plenty of people see that stuff.”

“So I guess I should ask for my performance review,” she said. “Day after tomorrow, maybe.”

“We should have dinner tonight,” I said. “We should go out. Like a celebration. Best place we can find. I’ll buy.”

“I thought you were on food stamps.”

“I’ve been saving up.”

“You’ve had plenty of opportunity. It’s been a long case.”

“Slow as molasses,” I said. “That’s your only problem, Kohl. You’re thorough, but you’re slow.”

She smiled again and hitched the boxes higher.

“You should have agreed to date me,” she said. “Then I could have shown you how slow can be better than fast.”

She carried the boxes away and I met her two hours later at a restaurant in town. It was an upmarket place so I had showered and put a clean uniform on. She showed up wearing a black dress. Not the same one as before. No dots on it. Just sheer black. It was very flattering, not that she needed the help. She looked about eighteen.

“Great,” I said. “They’re going to think you’re dining with your dad.”

“My uncle, maybe,” she said. “My dad’s younger brother.”

It was one of those meals where the food wasn’t important. I can remember everything else about the evening, but I can’t remember what I ordered. Steak, maybe. Or ravioli.

Something. I know we ate. We talked a lot, about the kind of stuff we probably wouldn’t share with just anybody. I came very close to breaking down and asking her if she wanted to find a motel. But I didn’t. We had a glass of wine each and then switched to water.

There was an unspoken agreement we needed to stay sharp for the next day. I paid the check and we left at midnight, separately. She was bright, even though it was late. She was full of life and energy and focus. She was bubbling with anticipation. Her eyes were shining. I stood on the street and watched her drive away.

“Someone’s coming,” Elizabeth Beck said, ten years later.

I glanced out the window and saw a gray Taurus far in the distance. The color blended with the rock and the weather and made it hard to see. It was maybe two miles away, coming around a curve in the road, moving fast. Villanueva’s car. I told Elizabeth to stay put and keep an eye on Richard and I went downstairs and out the back door. I retrieved Angel Doll’s keys from my hidden bundle. Put them in my jacket pocket. I took Duffy’s Glock and her spare magazines, too. I wanted her to get them back intact. It was important to me. She was already in enough trouble. I stashed them in my coat pocket with my Beretta and walked around to the front of the house and got in the Cadillac.