Smoke (47 page)

Jeffrey and Lydia exchanged a look, both afraid that it was entirely possible … and that they’d been wrong about everything all along.

W
here are we going?” asked Jeff, gripping the dashboard as Lydia quickly wove the Kompressor through the thick street traffic. She saw him pump his right leg, instinctively reaching for the breaks. He didn’t like the way she drove. He said she was an “offensive” driver rather than a “defensive” driver. But Lydia believed that, even in driving, sometimes the best defense is a good offense.

“To Riverdale. To talk to Dax.”

“Why? What does he have to do with this?”

She glanced at him and then put her eyes back on the road. “Think about it.”

He stared ahead for a moment and then lifted his hands. “You lost me.”

“Something Lily said in the motel. When I asked her what secrets her stepfather could be keeping that were bad enough to sacrifice his children. Something her mother would go along with.”

“She said she didn’t know. She said something possibly to do with Body Armor or with his military career before he met her mother.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything.

“You think Dax might know something about that?” he said.

She cut across two lanes, leaving an angry cabby leaning on his horn. “Remember what Grimm said about Sandline?”

“What about it?”

“How you don’t get fired from a company like that; you get eliminated.”

“So?”

“Okay, so what if Samuels worked for Sandline, too? What if he and Rhames knew each other from way back then? And what if that’s the reason he couldn’t say anything to help himself. All the mistakes he supposedly made, like his wife and Lily said, this dark past. He was willing to sacrifice Lily and Mickey. Maybe he didn’t reveal it because he
couldn’t
, not because he just didn’t want to.”

“Out of some kind of loyalty to Sandline?”

“Or fear of what they would do to him.”

“But his life was already in shambles. The New Day killed his stepson—or so he believed—took his daughter, his wife had left him. He stood to lose all his money. What else could they take from him?”

“His life; until he took it himself.”

Jeffrey tapped his finger on the door handle, was silent for a moment. “Maybe Dax was right after all; suicide as the ultimate act of control.”

“Or surrender.”

“Okay, say any of this is true. What does Dax have to do with it?”

“I just think he knows more than he’s saying.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “If he knew something that would help us, he would have told us.”

“Not if he thought he was endangering us by doing so.”

More silence. Then, “Where does Mickey fall into this?” asked Jeffrey.

“If Detective Breslow truly did see him that night and he’s still alive, then we have to assume that he’s in partnership with The New Day and not a victim,” said Lydia.

Jeffrey shook his head. “Since Florida we’ve been thinking that he infiltrated The New Day to help Tim Samuels and either they fucked him up so badly that he killed himself, or he got too close and they took care of the job for him.”

“But maybe Mickey was working with them,” said Lydia, thinking aloud.

“But why? And how would they even have come in contact with one another?”

“Maybe Rhames sought him out. You know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“Did Mickey really consider Tim Samuels his enemy?”

“I guess it depends on what those dark secrets are, on what Trevor Rhames may have told Mickey about his stepfather’s past.”

When they got to Dax’s house, the windows were dark and the gate was locked. Lydia rolled down the car window and pressed the buzzer near the gate but the box was silent. She stared at it worriedly, as if doing so would cause him to answer. But it didn’t work. She felt a rise of dread in her chest.

“He’s not here,” she said pointlessly. She turned anxious eyes on him.

He released a breath. “Oh no,” he said raising his hand. “You don’t want to break in.”

She looked at him.

“Bad idea,” he said. “Very bad idea.”

She had to agree with him. She took her cell phone from the center console and dialed Dax’s number. The voicemail picked up before the first ring.

“Leave a message. No names, no numbers. If I don’t know who you are, you shouldn’t be calling.” A long tone.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. “It’s urgent. Seriously.”

She ended the call and looked with dark frustration at the windows of his house. She fought the urge to pound the dashboard with her fist.

“What now?” she asked, as much of herself as of Jeffrey.

He was quiet a second. Then, “I think I know where we can get some information.”

He got out of the car and walked around to the driver’s side. “I’m driving.”

She rolled her eyes and slid over to the passenger seat.

“Control freak,” she said.

M
anny Underwood looked as if he’d been on the losing end of an argument with a jackhammer. He lay on a thin cot in the center of a stone room beneath the streets of the diamond district. He turned swollen eyes on them when they entered the room.

“You can’t keep him here forever,” Jeffrey said to Chiam Bechim.

“We’re very patient people. But, no,” the old man said solemnly, “we can’t.”

“So what are you going to do with him?”

“All we want to know is where the rest of the stones are,” he said vaguely.

“And who he was working for.”

Chiam shifted on his feet, his eyes on Lydia. He leaned into Jeffrey and whispered, “This is not a place to bring a woman, Mr. Mark.”

“She’s no ordinary woman,” said Jeffrey with a smile. “She’s my wife.”

Chiam made some kind of uncomfortable throat-clearing noise and looked over at Underwood. “He has been wholly uncooperative. But I have the sense that under the right circumstances, he might begin to loosen up.”

Jeffrey looked at him.

“We’re employing a program of gradual escalation,” Chiam said softly, as if he were a doctor discussing the treatment of a terminally ill patient.

The man on the cot released a low groan. He didn’t sound healthy and Jeffrey felt a wash of compassion for him.

“Don’t feel too badly for him, Mr. Mark,” said Bechim, reading his expression. “This is a very bad man, guilty of some heinous acts. When
we enter this business and conduct ourselves poorly, we all know where we might wind up.”

The old man’s words were a warning and Jeffrey felt them in his bones. He felt Lydia stiffen at his side. He turned a cold stare on Chiam.

“All I’m saying is that you might just ‘escalate’ yourself out of what you want to know.”

“If you think you can do better, be my guest,” he said. He turned and left, leaving Lydia and Jeffrey alone in the cellar with Underwood. Jeffrey didn’t hear the door at the top of the staircase open or close so he knew Chiam was nearby, listening.

“Mr. Underwood,” Jeffrey said softly. “If you talk to us, we might be able to help you out of this mess.”

Underwood jumped at the sound of his name, struggled to sit up and couldn’t. Another low groan accompanied by a gurgling sound in his chest.

“You’re thinking if you tell them what you know then they’re going to kill you. And you might be right. But if you cooperate with me, I’ll do my best to see that doesn’t happen.”

Manny turned to look at Jeffrey, moving his head slowly to the side. His face was purple and swollen and Jeffrey doubted that he’d recognize the man before the beating he’d received.

“Did Trevor Rhames hire you to steal those diamonds?”

He jumped at the sound of Rhames’s name but didn’t say anything. Jeffrey waited a minute for him to speak.

“We found a pink diamond in an abandoned house in Riverdale that we know is connected to The New Day. We believe that diamond was in the cache stolen from the dealer who was killed at the JFK airport. Who hired you to do that job?”

Still nothing from Underwood. Jeffrey waited a beat and then released a low sigh.

“Okay, this is what we’re thinking, Mr. Underwood. We’re thinking that Rhames had an issue with Tim Samuels, your former employer. That he bought Body Armor when Samuels put it up for sale and has been using it as a front to launder stolen money and gems. We think that you went to work for Rhames when he bought the company, just
like the mercenary that you are and shifted easily from doing legitimate bodyguard work to being a thug for hire. You were unlucky enough to get caught by the people whose diamonds you helped to nab; now you’re stuck. No one’s going to help you because you’re a mercenary. If you give up your employer, you’re going to die. If you don’t, you’re going to die. So what are you doing—just buying time?”

Underwood started to shake a bit and made a low, horrible noise. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“Make me understand,” said Jeffrey

More shaking from Underwood. It was disturbing, making Jeff uncomfortable. He looked over at Lydia who was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, eyes narrowed on Underwood.

“He gets
in
you. Whatever they do to me here can’t compare to what he can do.”

Jeffrey heard Lydia draw in a breath and release it slowly.

“Rhames?” he asked.

Underwood nodded. Jeffrey noticed that a pool of blood was collecting beneath him, thick and black in the dim light.

“Manny, he can’t do anything more to you.”

“You saw what he did to Samuels and his family. And they were friends once. Imagine what he’d do to my kids.”

Jeffrey watched as tears mingled with blood and traveled down Manny’s face. He reached for Jeffrey’s arm and gripped his wrist hard. “He knows everything. They’ll never be free. No matter where they go or how they try to hide. And he’ll wait until they think they’re safe, until they think he’s forgotten them or that he’s dead. And then he’ll move in and lay waste to their lives. That’s what he does.”

Jeffrey looked at Underwood’s eyes and saw that he was starting to get a dazed look. He wasn’t sure what to ask next.

“How did they know each other?”

“I don’t know. It was a long time ago; that was the rumor anyway. There was bad blood. No one knew what.” He was using all his strength to force the words out; it was painful to hear the horrible croaking of his voice.

“They worked together at Sandline?” asked Lydia.

Underwood didn’t say anything. He turned his eyes back to Jeff; his face was too ruined to read his expression.

“Do yourself a favor,” he said softly. “Stay out of it.”

Jeff nodded. Underwood’s eyes went blank then and he didn’t say anything else. Ever.

Thirty-Two

T
hey brought the Kompressor to a stop in front of Lily Samuels’ apartment building and idled.

“We shouldn’t be here. What if we’re wrong?” said Lydia anxiously.

“Well, then. We’re wrong.”

“We need more evidence before we bring this to them. Right now we just have our hunches, the damaged memory of an injured police officer and the word of a man who was being slowly tortured to death,” said Lydia. “Lily’s fragile, just barely able to accept that her brother is gone. If we bring this to her and then it turns out that we’ve made another wrong assumption, we’ll be hurting someone who doesn’t need any more hurt in her life.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“Let’s go home, regroup, and try to corroborate some of this info.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh.

“Why would Underwood lie? He knew he was dying; that’s why he told us as much as he did.”

“Why does anyone lie, Jeffrey? Because they can.”

“Awfully cynical.”

“Just drive. Please.”

B
efore the elevator doors opened into their loft, they heard the television on inside. Jeffrey reached for his gun and Lydia quickly put her hand on his.

“Dax has a key, remember?”

Jeffrey rested his hand on the Glock at his waist but didn’t draw the weapon. He’d given Dax a key when he was charged with protecting Lydia from Jed McIntyre and never asked for it back. Dax hadn’t been up and around without their help much in the last year so he hadn’t had the need to let himself in recently. Still, it wasn’t good to make assumptions.

The doors opened but the apartment was dark except for the large flat-screen television in the living room. A huge dark form sat on the edge of the couch, feet up on the coffee table. An episode of
South Park
was turned up too loud. An arm the size of a jackhammer reached out and the light on the end table came up. Dax turned to look at them.

“What are you two looking so tense about? You said it was urgent, yeah?”

Lydia started to breathe again and wondered when she’d become so jumpy.

“Yeah,” she said, dropping her leather coat over one of the chairs and stepping down into the sunken living room. “It’s urgent.”

“Great,” he said. “Can we talk over pizza? I’m starved.”

She sat on the coffee table and looked at him, reached for the remote, and flipped the television off.

“This is what I’m thinking. I’m thinking all of this started a long time ago. I’m thinking Rhames and Samuels both worked for Sandline.”

The smile dropped from Dax’s face and he got that granite look, those flat eyes he got when she pushed too hard into his past.

“I think Rhames and not The New Day was trying to ruin Tim Samuels’ life. And I think he convinced Mickey to help him.”

Dax sat silent and Jeffrey came up behind him.

“What I don’t understand is what Tim Samuels did that could cause Rhames to hate him so much for so long, what could cause Mickey Samuels, the boy Tim raised like his own, to join forces with a psychopath and do all the awful things he’s done.”

“And you think I know the answer to that?”

“I think you know something about Sandline. And if you do, maybe you know something about what might have happened between those two.”

Dax got up and walked toward the window on the other side of the television. He drew in and released a breath.

“If I knew something that would help you, do you think I would keep it from you?”