Sins of the Father (8 page)

Using a fake credit card, he’d bought a ticket to New Zealand, but he wouldn’t be on that flight. The ticket had just been used to get him through security. Instead, he was waiting by the gate for the arrival of Trans Global flight 177 from Heathrow.

He was waiting for Tess.

Her flight had been delayed by twenty minutes, and when it did arrive, they let off all the passengers first. Tired families with fussy children. Irascible businessmen. Dreadlocked backpackers. Peter watched the last of them wander through the gate with the now familiar squinty, bloodshot eyes and jet-lagged shuffle they all shared.

Must’ve been a rough flight
, he mused. Finally, once all the passengers had deplaned, the flight crew followed, each with their own matching roller bag. Tess was last.

She was blond and petite with dark eyes and expressive hands. Her hair was slicked back and tied into a simple knot, and she wore the same dated and unflattering uniform as her fellow flight attendants—a scratchy navy-blue polyester suit and garish orange scarf printed with the Trans Global logo.

But to Peter, she looked beautiful.

She didn’t see him. Instead, she turned toward her left, a warm, sultry smile blooming on her lips as she walked across the waiting area to meet a dark-haired Caucasian man in a flashy suit.

His back was turned toward Peter, so at first he didn’t recognize the man. But when he turned to greet and embrace Tess, Peter saw his face.

Sonofabitch…
Michael Kelly. His old partner in crime. Apparently Kelly had taken over more than the business after Peter had ducked out.

He watched as Kelly whispered in her ear, reaching down to grip a tight handful of her ass. Then he slipped something about the size of a playing card into her pocket and walked away.

She just stood there for a moment, watching him go with a closed, unreadable expression on her face. Then she put her hand into her pocket, feeling whatever he’d put in there, but didn’t remove it.

As she turned to walk away, Peter double-timed his steps to catch up with her.

“Tess,” he said.

She jumped without stopping, then turned to him, and her face went hard, eyes cold and narrow. She looked away and kept walking without answering.

“Please, Tess,” he said. “Just five minutes of your time.”

She stopped and looked at her watch.

“You have three,” she said. “What do you want, Peter?”

“You…” Peter paused, tried a smile. “You look fantastic.”

“I look exactly the same as I did when you tossed me away like an empty beer can. I’ve moved on. You should do the same.” She looked at her watch again. “Now you have two and a half minutes.”

“So, it’s you and Michael now, huh?” Peter said before he could stop himself.

“That’s none of your damn business,” she said, turning again and walking away.

“That guy’s a real piece of work,” he replied, following her.

“He was there,” she said. “Where were you?”

“Come on, Tess,” he said. “I’ve seen how he treats women. You can do so much better than a loser like that.”

She stopped dead in her tracks.

“Look,” she said without turning. “You don’t get to walk out of my life, with no explanation, and then suddenly turn up out of nowhere and start lecturing me.”

To be fair, she wasn’t wrong.

And he’d allowed himself to lose sight of his immediate goal—to get her to help him. Not to give her grief about her romantic choices.

So much for charm…

But it wasn’t that simple. Part of the reason he’d run away from their relationship in the first place was that he was having a hard time dealing with the way he felt about her. She did things to his head. And seeing her again brought all those complicated, contradictory feelings back to the surface.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said, backtracking as best he could. “You’re right, I just… Is there somewhere we can talk?”

She looked back at him, eyes softening just a little. Something in his voice must have touched a nerve.

“I’m on the 6:45 to DC tomorrow morning, but I’ll be at the Lucky Star for the next—” she checked her watch—“eleven hours. You remember the Lucky Star, don’t you?”

He did.

“Thanks, Tess,” he said.

She didn’t reply, just walked away, pulling her little roller suitcase along behind her.

The bar in the lobby of the Lucky Star Hotel was a strange, schizophrenic knock-off of what a reclusive Asian entrepreneur had been convinced Americans would want.

In reality, it looked like something aliens might have come up with, based on a single blurry photo of an eighties-era franchise where the waitresses wore short shorts, and the menu was printed on a football.

Tess was sitting at the end of the bar, alone, drinking her usual Manhattan with two cherries. She had changed out of her frumpy flight attendant uniform and into a sheer, barely-there wisp of a white dress that floated around her lithe body like mist. All the other Americans and Europeans in the bar looked sweaty and rumpled, but Tess seemed perfectly at ease, despite the tropical swelter.

She had the knack. Supremely adaptable—a chameleon, able to pass as native wherever she went.

Seeing her dressed like that, he found himself hoping for… what?

“Hey,” he said, easing himself onto the stool beside her.

“You want something,” she said. “Other than my charming company, I mean.” She held up a finger to the bartender, who brought Peter a Tiger beer. “So why don’t you just get it over with. I don’t have all night.” There was a subtext to that, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

“It’s good to see you, too,” he said, clinking his bottle against her glass and taking a much-needed slug.

He told her a heavily edited version of the bad deal and the encounter with the strange Englishman, trying to paint himself as an innocent bystander who’d wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He played up the helping sick kids angle, and how he just wanted to do the right thing by returning the virus to its rightful owner in the States. Though he didn’t call it a virus.

He called it a “cure.”

She listened quietly until he was done, then burst out laughing.

“What?” he asked, trying to look hurt.

“Sick kids?” she asked. “You really expect me to believe that? Come on, Peter. Come clean. What’s the real angle? It’s Big Eddie, isn’t it?”

“Well…” He looked away.

“I thought so.” She shook the ice in her glass and then, polishing off the last sip of her drink, continued. “Remind me how this is my problem?”

“Look,” he said softly, taking her hand. She jerked slightly, but didn’t pull it away. “I know you’ve got no reason to help me, after the way things went between us.”

“The way things went.” She rolled her eyes. “You say that like it rained, or your soufflé fell. Things didn’t just go that way, Peter.
You
went that way.”

“You’re right, I know,” he said. “I admit it, I was a jerk. Probably still am, but I’d like to stay alive, and maybe to try and make it up to you, if I can. If you’ll help me.”

He could see in her dark eyes that she was wrestling with herself over this, and the fact that she was even considering it felt like a major victory. He didn’t want to push too hard, so he backed off and let her come around in her own time.

“What do you need me to do?”

He took the vial out of his pocket. He’d wrapped it in several layers of waxed paper and packing tape to hide the glaring red biohazard sticker. Nevertheless, the package was small—about four inches long. It could have been anything.

“I need you to get this to DC, that’s all,” he said. “It’s the cure—and if the wrong people get their hands on it, it’ll never make it back to the laboratory. They’ll keep it to themselves, find a way to profit from it.” He winced inwardly at that. “But it’s fragile, so be careful.” He pushed it toward her gently. “I’ll meet you there. At Finley’s, okay?”

“You really are a jerk,” she said, taking the vial and slipping it into her purse. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Tess,” he said, pressing her other hand to his lips. “I owe you big time.”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling a little bit in spite of herself. “You do.”

Suddenly she pulled away and stood, turning toward the entrance. Michael Kelly appeared in the doorway, frowning toward them with suspicious eyes. She moved quickly to him without another word to Peter, taking his arm and leading him out onto the street, all the while speaking softly near his ear. Peter had no right to feel jealous, and yet in that moment, he could have happily punched Kelly in the face.

But he squelched the thought. That kind of testosterone-fueled drama would blow the fragile truce he’d forged with Tess, and just then it was more important to get the virus back to the States, so he could score the payoff he needed to keep his neck out of Big Eddie’s noose.

So he sat quietly and finished his beer. When it was done, he left a few crumpled bills on the bar and was about to head out into the bustling street when his latest disposable cell phone rang. There was only one person who had that number.

“Jaruk, you dog,” he said when he picked up. “How’s it hanging?”

The voice on the other end was female and hesitant, speaking in a heavy Thai accent.

“Sorry,” the voice said. “I am Pim. Jaruk’s wife. This is Peter Bishop?”

“Yeah,” Peter said, frowning. “That’s me.”

“He want me tell you Little Eddie is coming,” she said. “You run now.”

“Jesus,” Peter said, an icy dread congealing in his belly. “Let me talk to him.”

“He in hospital,” Pim said, her voice breaking. “He say he very sorry for telling. You run now, Peter.
Run now
.”

The line went dead.

Peter just stood there for way too long, staring at the dead phone, his mind blank except for a shrill, echoing fear filling his head like a car alarm.

Little Eddie.

Jesus, that was bad.

Physically speaking, there was nothing particularly big about Big Eddie Guthrie. He was pretty average in height, about five foot nine, with a stocky build and more wiry gray hair growing out of his large ears than on his shiny freckled head. But he was known as Big Eddie because he had a son, also named Eddie.

Unlike his dad, Little Eddie was big in every dimension. He was six foot four, broad-shouldered and thick through the middle. The kind of hard, heavy build that didn’t come from working out at a gym. He was handsome in a thuggish, gangster-actor kind of way with dark hair and pale-blue eyes that were only pretty if you didn’t look too close. He was a dog-kicker. Two hundred and fifty pounds of bad news.

And he was coming for Peter.

Peter sidled up to the door and peered down the crowded Monireth Boulevard, first one way, then the other. Motorbikes and pedicabs jockeyed for position with cars and vans, and the sidewalk was bustling with pedestrians. Unlike his Bangkok accommodation, the Lucky Star was clean and modern, as was the section of town in which it stood.

He noticed Tess and Michael standing by a rickety food stall about a half a block away, talking to someone who had his back to Peter. Someone large, towering far above the dark heads of the bustling locals. He’d recognize those hulking shoulders anywhere.