by Greg Iles
“Have some Scotch,” Russo suggests. “I’ll pour you one. This is all gonna work out, bro.”
“I don’t know,” Holland says. “Paul doesn’t look too happy. I figured this would be a relief for him, but he looks a little constipated.”
Paul gives Beau Holland his full attention. “That’s because I’m not as confident as you seem to be about how safe we are.” He turns to Buckman. “I told you Wednesday it was a mistake to kill Buck Ferris—which this asshole did, along with his sidekick.”
Paul must be referring to Dave Cowart.
“Still, you made a deal to contain that damage, and Marshall means to keep his promise.”
“That deal was too costly,” Buckman declares. “Especially given that we don’t need to honor it now.”
“Are you sure about that? If Marshall and Nadine die, it’ll draw a hell of a lot of attention to our little town. Especially after the newspaper that came out this morning. Marshall’s a goddamn celebrity in D.C., which none of you seem to understand.”
“That’s as may be,” Buckman concedes. “But we can’t afford any more stories like the ones he published this morning. It’s worth the risk to be sure we put an end to them.”
Paul looks around the semicircle again. “I still don’t know what you’re all here for. To watch me put a bullet in him? I’d think you’d want to avoid that.”
Before anyone can answer, I hear the sound of a helicopter over the trees. The distinctive whup-whup-whup I recognize from my early reporting days as a Bell 206B JetRanger. I know of only two locally owned JetRangers: Matheson Lumber has one; the other is owned by Prime Shot Premium Hunting Gear. Since Paul is the pilot for Matheson Lumber, I assume the pilot of the JetRanger overhead must be Wyatt Cash, the owner of the island beneath our feet.
Standing at the edge of the pavilion, I see a white nose-light boring in from the east. Red running lights appear behind it. Twenty seconds later, the JetRanger becomes discernible against the clouds, descending fast. Several men stand and turn away from the rotor blast while the chopper flares and lands in the space between the camp house and the pavilion, throwing up a hurricane of pinecones, pea gravel, and grit. If it hadn’t rained earlier, the storm of debris would be worse.
Sure enough, the white JetRanger has the Prime Shot logo painted behind its door. As we stare, the aircraft’s big side door pops open. A man wearing paramilitary gear gets out, then helps someone to the ground.
It’s Jet.
While I stare in shock, the guy in body armor reaches back inside and helps a heavy black woman to the ground. Tallulah Williams. Last of all comes Kevin Matheson, who leaps easily to the ground, looking around like a kid stunned to find himself on a night adventure.
Turning to Paul, I see but one emotion in his face: fear.
Chapter 55
“What the fuck is my son doing here?” Paul asks, standing rigid as a man waiting to be horsewhipped.
“You’ll see,” Beau Holland says over his shoulder.
Holland doesn’t realize how close he is to death at this moment.
Two guards appear behind Paul. One takes the pistol from the small of his back. The other checks his ankles for a holster. Apparently they knew Max’s carrying habits. Sure enough, they find a second gun. Paul must have put on Max’s ankle holster before or after we loaded his corpse into the truck. While they set aside Paul’s weapons, another guard wraps an iron-hard arm around me and snatches Nadine’s .32 automatic from my pocket. Paul and I make momentary eye contact, but if he’s sending me a message, I’m too thick to translate it. Paul didn’t protest being stripped of his guns because he knows there’s nothing he can do at this point but make a suicidal stand. And until he knows Buckman’s intentions regarding his family, he won’t do that.
His eyes go wide, however, when two armed guards take hold of Kevin and Tallulah and lead them into the main lodge. When Jet tries to follow, another guard restrains her and marches her toward the pavilion. There’s a scuffle as Tallulah resists being led into the lodge, and Kevin tries to help her, but the guards quickly subdue both the maid and the boy. I can’t help but feel that Paul is marking these transgressions on an internal ledger that he will square if it takes the rest of his life—however short that may be.
“Where are they taking my boy?” he asks softly.
“Kevin’s fine,” Buckman says. “He’s safe.”
“For now,” adds Holland. “Let’s see how this goes.”
As the chopper’s engine spools down, Wyatt Cash climbs out of the pilot’s seat and trots across the ground, catching up to Jet as she’s led into the pavilion. Cash seems surprised by the size of the gathering, and even more so by the mood of the men, which feels like the quiet before a crack of lightning.
In the threatening silence, Jet looks up and sees Nadine on the TV screen. “Oh, my God,” she whispers. “What have you done to her?”
“What do you care?” Holland asks. “You gave her up to us.”
“Sweet Jesus.” She looks at me. “I’m so sorry, Marshall.”
“We may do the same to you yet,” Holland says, and I see Paul shift his weight.
Jet scowls at the real estate developer with contempt. “You sick bastard.”
If Paul weren’t here, I have no doubt that Holland would have struck her for that. Instead he walks to the fireplace and comes back with a roll of duct tape. While a guard holds Jet’s head, Beau rips off a length and tapes her mouth shut. Wyatt Cash looks like he’s about to protest, but Buckman waves a hand, silencing him.
“There’s no call for this,” Paul says to Buckman. “No reason for it.”
“Here’s the thing, Paul,” croaks the old banker. “Nadine Sullivan poses no further threat to us. Neither does Marshall. The X factor is your wife.”
“My wife? How do you figure that?”
“She was close to your mother. She’s a lawyer. She’s been trying to nail our asses for years. If Max hadn’t been protecting her, she’d have had an accident a long time ago. She’s the natural person for Sally to give another copy of this cache to.”
“She doesn’t have it, Claude.”
“Well, Paulie,” Russo chimes in, “you gotta forgive us if your word isn’t quite enough. You’re probably the last person who’d know what Jet’s really up to. In fact, Marshall here’s probably the only one who would.”
“She doesn’t have it, guys,” I tell them. “Seriously.”
Holland laughs, as do several other men—Warren Lacey the loudest.
Buckman signals Holland with a nod, and Beau picks up the TV remote again. The image changes from Nadine in the skinning room to security camera footage of a long balcony. It’s the interior of the Aurora Hotel. The mezzanine. The view is from above, shooting along the balcony rail. The screen flickers as Holland presses a button to fast-forward. Two figures hurry along the rail at quadruple speed, and it’s hard to make out what’s going on. Then Holland removes his finger, bringing the playback to normal.
Panic hits me all at once, sending adrenaline shunting through my veins. Jet’s eyes have gone wide above the duct tape, but I can’t read her emotions. Fear, yes, but something else, too. The desperate drive for survival. She senses how close we are to being killed. Paul doesn’t yet know what’s coming, but he will any second.
On the screen, a woman who is unmistakably Jet leans against the rail in profile and hikes her dress over her hips. From the side she looks like a textbook illustration of lordosis, the behavior during which female mammals arch their backs and make themselves most receptive to being mounted by males. She glances back over her shoulder and speaks. I say something, then turn and walk away from her. The camera follows me.
“How about that tracking function?” Holland marvels. “Tommy’s casino contractor set us up with pan-tilt-zoom rigs.”
Paul stares wordlessly at this further evidence of his wife’s infidelity—or desire for it. The view switches to a different camera, this one apparently near the serv
ice elevator. Now we’re looking straight-on at Jet’s behind, the dark tangle below the cleft in her derriere shockingly visible, even with the thong.
“I don’t appreciate everybody looking at my wife’s ass,” Paul says quietly.
Holland chuckles. “If she didn’t spread it around like she does, we wouldn’t have to.”
This guy is clueless, I think. Or else he’s betting that Paul won’t make it through this meeting alive.
“Can’t believe she ever delivered a kid,” says Dr. Lacey. “She’s still high and tight. I’d like to give that a workout.”
Paul cuts his eyes at Lacey, marking him down for future attention.
“Point is, Paulie,” says Russo, “you don’t know what the hell she’s been up to, or how much of a threat she is to us.”
“I think it’s time we heard from the lady herself,” says Buckman.
Holland rips off the duct tape. Jet yelps, then raises her hand to slap Holland, but he easily catches her arm.
She looks down at Buckman, her arm still locked in Holland’s grasp. “You’d better tell him to let go, Claude. Because you are well and truly fucked already. And this is making it worse, I promise you.”
Buckman assesses her with a practiced eye. “Let her go, Beau.”
She focuses on the old banker, and in her eyes I see implacable fury. “You threaten my child? You kidnap me by force, when you could have just invited me here? What the hell were you thinking?”
“Business is business, dear.”
“You’re the one here to answer questions,” says Holland. “Not us.”
“Why is our son here?” Paul asks in a barely controlled voice.
“To ensure that your wife tells us the truth,” Buckman replies, nodding to Holland once more.
Holland works the remote, and the video of Jet is replaced by an image of Kevin Matheson pacing a small bedroom, while Tallulah Williams sits at the end of a bed, looking frightened.
“You’re saying you’d torture my son?” Paul asks, his eyes on Buckman, then Blake Donnelly, who looks away in shame.
“We didn’t create this situation,” says Buckman. “And I don’t think it will come to that. But I’m very concerned about what your wife just said.”
“You should be, you dried-up bag of bones,” Jet says. “What I said is you’re fucked. Screwed. Dead meat. Either you put us back in that chopper and fly us home, or the FBI will be kicking down your door by eight a.m. Every one of you. Federal prison. Bank on it.”
“Bullshit,” says Holland, clearly discomfited by her bravado. “She’s bluffing.”
Jet regards him with regal disdain. “Beau, you shouldn’t think. You’re not good at it. Selling time-share condos in Gulf Shores . . . that’s your ceiling.”
Holland laughs. “Big talk for an Ole Miss grad.”
“You think? I figure my IQ surpassed yours when I was about ten.” She looks around the semicircle. “Make no mistake, gentlemen. Each and every one of you has a sword hanging over your head. Sally Matheson put it there. You want to know if I have a copy of the cache? You bet your wrinkled old balls I do.”
She’s bluffing, I think. She has to be—
“She’s lying,” insists Holland. “She never had it. If Sally was going to give it to her, why bother giving it to Nadine, too?”
“That I can’t tell you,” Jet replies, still radiating supreme confidence. “But I can tell you this: Royal Bank of Seychelles, account number three-seven-six, six-eight-one-five, two-two-seven. That ring any bells for you boys?”
At least six men have gone bone white. Several sit up in their chairs as though a psychic has started reading their credit card numbers on television.
“Is that a yes?” Jet asks in a game-show host’s voice. “Anybody need a Valium? Maybe a little nitro under the tongue? You will. Because here’s the important thing: I don’t just know that information. I’ve set up an automatic trigger to release it in the event that I go missing or die. That’s my personal insurance policy. I set it up months ago, when I targeted Max. You put a bullet in my head tonight? You touch my child? You’re paying a deposit on your prison cell.”
She looks from face to face without a shred of fear. “And you,” she says, poking Holland in the chest, exactly the way she did Paul’s an hour ago. “You will get down on your knees and beg me not to feed you to the FBI.”
Holland gapes at her in astonishment.
“I said kneel, bitch,” Jet repeats.
Holland looks from face to face, gauging his support. “You don’t really believe her? Nobody would memorize account numbers.”
Jet sighs as though bored with this game. “I don’t have to memorize them, Beau. They just stick in my head. For example: CDB Offshore Bank of Seychelles. Account nine-three-six, seven-two-nine-nine, one-six-four-three.”
Gasped obscenities burst from the semicircle of chairs.
Jet smiles with satisfaction. “Aaaand the Prince’s Trust Bank, Seychelles. Account one-one-six, eight-five-one-seven, two-two-nine-six. Anyone . . . ? Bueller? No?”
One man comes up out of his chair.
“There,” Jet croons. “I believe Arthur Pine just wet his diaper.”
I’ve never seen anyone turn the tables on a group of powerful men so fast. It’s as though Jet took hold of the corner of a killing box and flipped it inside out with a single jerk. Suddenly she’s protected, and everyone else is facing destruction.
She steps away from Holland as if to get some distance from a bad smell. “As you mentioned, Claude, I am an attorney. And I happen to know that the penalties for tax evasion and criminal fraud amount to a life sentence for most of the men under this pavilion. My little insurance policy also contains copies of emails between Max and officials of Azure Dragon Paper, which will prove conclusively the selling of U.S. Senate votes. I’m not sure what the Justice Department does to you for that. I’d call it treason. But that’s only the beginning. I suspect the stock value of Wyatt Cash’s company would drop ninety percent by market close Monday.” She turns to Cash. “Say goodbye to this island, Wyatt. Also to your helicopter, which is nice, by the way.”
“Okay, hold up,” Cash says. “This is getting out of hand. It wasn’t my idea to kidnap this lady’s kid. Paul, you’ve got to take my word for that.”
“You flew them here in your helicopter.”
“Claude told me you wanted them here! Tell him, Claude.”
“Your stock’s going to take a hell of a beating, too, Claude,” Jet goes on. “Selling out your country to the Chinese? You’ll be off the board of your own bank in forty-eight hours.”
“Goddamn it,” Holland says. “Everybody’s losing their nerve.”
“Agreed,” says Russo. “She may have some of this cache, or she may just have a set of balls. I know some tough women gamblers. I don’t plan to spend the rest of my days living in fear of what this lady might do. I think she’s bluffing. And I call. Let’s tie her to a tree and spend fifteen minutes finding out exactly what we have to worry about.”
“I second that motion,” says Warren Lacey.
Somebody in the semicircle whoops in anticipation.
Buckman and Donnelly share a glance. They don’t look happy with the turn things have taken. Buckman looks over at Pine. “Arthur?”
The old lawyer runs his hand through his silver hair and regards Jet critically. “Jet Matheson isn’t my favorite person. But she’s smarter than any two of us put together. On the other hand, if her life over the past year has proved anything, it’s that she’s a consummate liar. I think the only way to find out whether she’s bluffing is to do what Tommy suggested—as much as I detest that kind of thing.”
Paul shakes his head in disbelief. “My vouching for her isn’t enough?”
“Regrettably, no,” says Buckman. “Mr. Russo? If you would?”
Tommy signals some security guys at the periphery of the pavilion. “Take her to the skinning room, for the sake of our ears. You guys can watch on TV if y
ou want.”
“Wait!” I shout. “For God’s sake, give me sixty seconds before you start this. You already tortured Nadine, and that was pointless.”
Buckman is busy relighting his cigar. “On the contrary, Mr. McEwan. We learned that we don’t have to honor the deal we made with you.”
“But you do. Remember the audiotape I played you at the bank? Of you talking about the deal you made with the Chinese? I’ve made copies of that and placed them with friends, much as Jet did, I suspect.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” says Russo. “We’ll take you to the shed, too.”
The two thugs who took Paul’s pistols move toward me.
“You can’t win this thing, guys,” I tell them, trying to hold my voice steady. “Not like this. But the real question is, why are you even trying to?”
“Because,” says Buckman, “Mr. Holland and Mr. Russo have argued quite convincingly that you, as a journalist, cannot be relied upon to honor your end of the bargain. Sooner or later, you’ll be tempted to publish the story. And we can’t risk that.”
“This is where you’re wrong, Claude. We made one deal and you broke it. The result was the newspaper that hit you guys this morning. Then we made a second deal, and now you’re trying to break that. But I fully intend to honor our deal. Nadine wanted that, too. She never wanted to blow up the paper mill and hurt the town. But you had to torture her. Stupid, man.”
“You’re lying,” Holland says. “You’ve got too much ego to sit on this. It would kill you. This is your ticket back to the big leagues. You’d tell yourself you were breaking it to honor your father.”
I shake my head at the Realtor. “Jet’s right, Beau. You’re not too smart. My father died earlier today, at my brother’s grave. Before he did, I told him about the agreement I’d made with the club. I told him I’d betrayed every principle of our profession, and I thought he’d damn me for it. But you know what? He didn’t. He said I’d probably done more good than I could have in twenty years of writing newspaper stories. Once he told me that, I knew I could live with it.”
