by J. A. Jance
The conversation ground to a momentary halt. “How much money?” Quentin asked finally, looking up.
Mitch shrugged. “That depends on quality and quantity of the merchandise, of course. But before my buyer will deal on any pots, he wants me to take a look at them. He wants me to see the pots as well as where you found them.”
Before Mitch could even finish the sentence, Quentin Walker was already shaking his head. “No way!” he said. “No way in hell! I can maybe bring them out for you to see them, but you can’t go there to look at them. It’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
“You just can’t, that’s all.”
“But I can make it worth your while,” Mitch said.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his wallet. He removed several bills and laid them on the bar. “Believe me, Quentin, there’s a lot more where this came from. It’s our chance to make some big bucks.”
Quentin looked at the money blankly for some time, as though lost in thought. “What’s this?” he asked at last.
“What does it look like?” Mitch Johnson smiled. “It’s a small down payment, Quentin. But remember, seeing the material on site is part of the deal. This is the first half. You get the same amount as soon as you show me the spot. After that, it’s a sixty-forty split of whatever my buyer pays.”
Mitch knew very well the kind of hand-to-mouth existence Quentin Walker had lived since being released from prison. He had expected the man to leap at the opportunity to make some fast money. Mitch found Quentin’s apparent reticence somewhat surprising. He waited impatiently while the younger man stared down at the bills without touching them.
“Drywalling money’s that good then?” Mitch asked in an effort to move things forward.
Tentatively, almost as if afraid they might bite, Quentin Walker reached out and moved the bills closer to him. He leaned down and examined them in the dim light of the bar. An unfamiliar picture stared back at him from the topmost one. Quentin may not have recognized Grover Cleveland’s likeness right off the bat, but the numbers in the corner of the bill were easily identifiable—a one and three zeros.
“There’s more where that came from.”
Not quite believing what he was seeing, Quentin thumbed through the other bills. “Five thousand dollars?” he mouthed silently.
Mitch nodded. Quentin glanced furtively around the bar. Most of the customers were engrossed in the San Diego Padres baseball game blaring from the television set at the far end of the bar. As the bartender pulled himself away from the game and started toward them with the next round, Quentin snatched the bills off the counter and stuffed them into his shirt pocket.
Watching him, Mitch suppressed a sigh of relief. The surge of power he felt was almost sexual in nature. It reminded him of that first time he had invited Lori Kiser to go on a date—a picnic in Sabino Canyon. She had said yes, even though they both knew at the time that she was saying yes to far more than just a picnic. There had been an implicit understanding in her saying yes that day, in the way she had blushed when she answered. Her yes was to the picnic, but it was also to something else. To going to bed with him, probably before the day was over. They had gone on the picnic. Mitch had taken a blanket along, just in case, and he had been absolutely right.
Sitting in the bar with Quentin Walker, Mitch sensed that this was the same thing. By taking the money, Quentin knew he was agreeing to break the law. Again. What he couldn’t possibly know was exactly which laws he would end up breaking.
“When do you want to go?” Quentin was asking.
Now it was Mitch’s turn to pull himself out of a reverie in order to answer. “How about tomorrow evening?”
He forced himself to ask the question casually, even though he knew from his scheduling discussion with Megan in New York that this was the one time when he could be reasonably sure that Brandon and Diana Walker were going to a banquet together. That meant they would both be away from the house for a predictable period of time.
Already more than a little drunk, Quentin tried to think his way through all the various ramifications. There were risks involved in selling the pottery, but that much money—ten thousand tax-free dollars—almost made the risks worthwhile. At least, it made them seem far less significant.
“I suppose that would work,” Quentin said. “In fact, it’ll probably be better if we go there in the dark. Fewer people will see us if we go then. This place is a secret, you know. I want to keep it that way. Not only that, it won’t be nearly as hot.”
“All right,” Mitch agreed. “What time?”
“Five?”
“I already have another afternoon appointment. Five may be pushing it. Let’s make it six. Where should we meet?”
“Here,” Quentin said. “I don’t have wheels at the moment.”
“No problem,” Mitch assured him. “Meet me out front. You can ride with me.” He stood up and staggered slightly, waiting for his permanently damaged knee to steady under his weight.
Quentin noticed and seemed to relax. “At least I’m not the only one who’s had one too many.”
“I guess not,” Mitch said agreeably. “See you tomorrow.”
He limped outside and climbed into his waiting Subaru. He sat there for a few moments, eyeing the bar’s vivid neon lights and thinking. Originally the plan had simply been to do the girl in her parents’ house and to leave a drunken Quentin there to take the blame. In that basic plan, the pots had been intended as nothing more than bait, something off the wall enough to dupe Quentin into going along with the program.
In the months since Mitch had been out of prison, however, he had been doing some research. He had learned that these pots—if they actually existed—were probably worth a fortune in their own right. And if he could have Quentin Walker and his pots as well, why not go for broke?
The original plan had been a perfectly good one, and it gave every indication of working in a totally predictable fashion. That didn’t mean, however, that it couldn’t be improved upon. After all, Andy hadn’t left Mitch so much money that he couldn’t do with a little more.
See you tomorrow, sucker, Mitch thought, as he turned the key in the ignition. We’ll have so much fun that you won’t be able to believe it.
Once Mitch Johnson left the bar, Quentin Walker wasted no time in summoning the bartender once again. “Let me have one for the road,” he said. “Jack Daniels on ice. A double.”
“Why the sudden change?” the bartender asked. “Did you win the lottery or something?”
“Damn near,” Quentin replied, trying his best not to sound too enthusiastic. He patted his shirt pocket, checking to make sure the five bills were still there. They rustled crisply beneath his hand. He hadn’t dreamed them, then; hadn’t made them up. He hadn’t made up Mitch Johnson, either.
The money was good. In fact, the money was great, better than he would have dreamed possible. The only problem was taking Mitch Johnson up to the cave.
The prospect of doing that left Quentin almost sick with fear. There must be a way around it, he thought as the bartender delivered his next drink. There just has to be. All he needed was a good solid shot of whiskey to clear his head.
Not long after that, Quentin left the bar. He was afraid that if he stayed around too long, he might shoot his mouth off and tell somebody about the money. In this neighborhood, walking around with a wad of money on you was almost as bad as being handed a death warrant.
Glancing warily over his shoulder, Quentin staggered the block and a half to his alley-fronting apartment. It would have been a crying shame if somebody had hit him over the head and rolled him on his way home.
A hell of a crying shame!
Brandon waited until he and Diana were getting ready for bed before he brought up the subject of Fat Crack’s visit. They had been having so much fun together out chopping and stacking wood that he hadn’t wanted to spoil things by bringing it up. And then again, during dinner, he hadn’t wanted to mention anythi
ng at all about Andrew Carlisle in front of Lani.
He was just gearing up to say something when Diana beat him to the punch. “What did Fat Crack want?” she asked.
“It drives me crazy when you do that,” Brandon told her.
“When I do what?”
“When you read my mind. I was about to tell you, and then you asked me before I had a chance to spit out the words.”
“Well?”
Brandon Walker took a deep breath. “He came to talk to us—to me, really—about Andrew Carlisle.”
Diana finished slipping her nightgown on over her head. “What about Andrew Carlisle?”
“Fat Crack says he’s coming back.”
“Andrew Carlisle is dead.”
“That’s exactly what I tried to tell Fat Crack when he was here,” Brandon explained. “It didn’t make any difference. He says he’s read your book and it convinced him that, dead or not, Andrew Carlisle’s still after us. That he’s after you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Diana said at once. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe not, but I can tell you Fat Crack is serious as hell about this. He wanted me to call up the department and ask Bill Forsythe to send more patrols out this way.”
“To protect us from a dead man,” Diana said.
“Right.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That Bill Forsythe would laugh himself silly at the very idea.”
“Good, because that’s exactly what would happen.”
“But still,” Brandon cautioned, “maybe it would be better if you didn’t run around by yourself too much for the next little while. What are you doing tomorrow?”
“I have that interview, the one New York set up out at La Paloma, but first I go to the beauty shop for hair, nails, and makeup. There’s a photo shoot along with the interview. And then in the evening, there’s the dinner. You’re already going to that.”
“If you want me to, I’ll be happy to go along in the morning as well,” Brandon offered.
“To the beauty shop and the interview?” Diana asked incredulously. “Have you lost your marbles?”
“I love you, Diana,” Brandon said. “Sure it sounds crazy, but Fat Crack scared the hell out of me. If anything happened to you…”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Diana said firmly. “And if you wouldn’t go with me to the damn Pulitzer banquet, you sure as hell are not going to come hold my hand in the beauty shop or bird-dog me through an interview. That’s final.”
“But—”
“No buts,” she said, shaking her head. “I could have used you at the ceremony, but the beauty shop is absolutely off limits. I’d say that’s true for both of you,” she added with a smile. “You wouldn’t be caught dead there, and neither would Andrew Carlisle.”
Back home in his RV on Coleman Road, Mitch Johnson tried to sleep but couldn’t. He was too excited. He felt like a little kid again, and thinking Christmas Eve would never end, that morning would never come, and it would never be time to unwrap the few presents that his impoverished parents had somehow managed to put under their scrawny tree.
His own son, Mikey—Michael Wraike, as he was now called—had never known the kind of grinding poverty that had shaped his biological father. Raised in the affluence provided by his hotshot developer stepfather, Mike was now a tall, handsome, rangy kid, a student at the University of Arizona, who had attended his stepfather’s funeral service with no idea that his natural father—his real father, as Mitch liked to think of himself—was standing in the fifth row only a few yards away.
Mitch had known that going to the funeral was risky, especially since Lori’s relatives would be there right along with her dead husband’s. But using the makeup techniques Andy had taught him, Mitch had taken great pains to disguise himself. Obviously it had worked. He had held his breath when Lori’s Great Aunt Aggie had plopped her ample butt down on the pew beside him.
Even though being so near her made him nervous as hell, he nonetheless had to smile to himself at the realization that after years of good living, Lori had gone to fat as well, just like her well-fed auntie.
Aunt Aggie had given Mitch the benefit of one of her cursory and universally disapproving glances. Then, with no hint of recognition, she had sighed and settled back in the pew, turning her attention to the beginning of the service.
Larry Wraike’s funeral was, of course, a closed-casket affair. That may have been a surprise to Aunt Aggie and a few of the other attendees. It was no surprise to Mitch Johnson. He had made a very conscious effort to make sure that would be the case.
“Greedy targets are easy targets,” Andy had told him once. In Larry Wraike’s case, that had proved absolutely true. Using a simple electronic device that altered his voice, Mitch had called his wife’s second husband at his plush office at Stone and Pennington in Tucson to give him some unwelcome news.
“The problem is, Mr. Wraike, that the land you’ve developed wasn’t yours in the first place.”
“Now wait just a goddamned minute here!” Larry had sputtered. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but—”
“I think you’d better hear me out,” Mitch interrupted. “As I understand it, there’s been a mistake of some kind, back in D.C. Kiser Ranch Estates is actually supposed to be part of the reservation.”
“But that’s impossible. It’s been in my wife’s family for years.”
“Illegally,” Mitch said.
“But the Kiser land isn’t anywhere near the reservation. This doesn’t make sense.”
“Since when does anything that happens in Washington have to make sense? Here’s the deal. A few people out on the reservation—a very few—are aware of this situation. And they’re prepared to forget it—for a price, that is.”
“For a price?” Wraike protested. “They can’t do that. That’s blackmail!”
“My principals would prefer you didn’t call it blackmail,” Mitch Johnson said smoothly. “They’d like me to meet with you to discuss a possible settlement. If I were you, in advance of that meeting, I’d make damned sure I didn’t mention a word of this to a soul.”
There was a long silence on the phone. “A meeting where?” Wraike asked at last, and Mitch Johnson knew he had him.
They had met in a darkened bar in Nogales, Arizona. It had been an easy thing to slip a dose of scopolamine into his drink. Larry was so upset at the thought of losing his real estate empire that he never suspected a thing, never saw through Mitch’s simple disguise that made a much older man out of a middle-aged one.
It was only later when the makeup was gone and as the drug started to wear off that he recognized who Mitch was. Even then Wraike didn’t tumble to the full extent of his danger.
That was something Mitch regretted now, as he sat looking up at the stars over Kitt Peak. He had rushed things. He hadn’t made sure Larry Wraike was fully aware of what was going on before it happened. Mitch had only himself to blame that he hadn’t taken time enough to savor the moment.
“So whaddya want, Mitch? Money?” Larry had asked. “I have plenty of that. We can make a deal.”
Mitch shook his head. “No deals,” he said.
Larry Wraike’s mumbled, half-drugged offer of a deal constituted his last words. Moments later, Mitch shoved a fist-sized gag into the man’s mouth. Looking down at his trussed and helpless victim, Mitch peeled off his own clothes and set them out of harm’s way. That was another piece of Andy’s sage advice. No sense in getting blood anywhere it wouldn’t be easy to wash off.
When Mitch turned back to the bed, he was holding the knife. As soon as he saw it, Larry’s eyes bulged with fear. He thrashed on the bed, trying to get loose, but Mitch’s expert knots held firm. It would have been fun to tease him with the knife for a while, to prick the son of a bitch here and there, just to get his attention.
That was where the scheduling problem came in. Without realizing how long it would take for the drug to wear off, Mitch
had hired a young prostitute to show up later in the afternoon. Now her scheduled arrival was less than an hour away. By the time she showed up and let herself in with the room key Mitch had thoughtfully provided, Mitch had to be finished with Wraike—finished, cleaned up, and long gone.
“It can be a beautiful thing if you do it right,” Andy had said. “It’s almost like a dance. All you have to do is touch them with the tip of the knife, and you can watch their flesh try to crawl away from it. A knife has far more nuances than a gun.
“Given your history, I can understand your peculiar fascination with what an exploding shell can do to the human anatomy. But let me ask you this: When you shoved the barrel of your rifle up that little gook girl’s twat, you couldn’t feel her heart beating, could you?”
Still shocked that Andy had used the effects of the drug dose to trick him into revealing his darkest secret, Mitch Johnson had shaken his head.
“I didn’t think so. With the tip of a knife, though, if you hold it right here in the hollow of someone’s neck, you can feel their pulse,” Carlisle said. “It comes right up through the handle with a vibration that’s so faint you can barely feel it. And the more scared they are, the better you can feel it. There’s nothing quite like it,” he had added, twisting his distorted lips into what could only have been a smile of remembrance.
“There’s nothing like it at all. And then, after you let them know that you own them, that there’s nothing they can do, that’s when it gets personal. You stand there and you’re God, and all you have to decide is where to cut them, where to draw the first blood. Just wait,” he added. “You won’t believe how great it feels.”
“Like getting your rocks off?” Mitch asked.
“No,” Andy Carlisle had said. “Better than that. Much better.”
And so, with his rival lying naked on the bed, Mitch tried touching the tip of the knife against the hollow at the base of Larry Wraike’s throat. The thrashing stopped. Larry lay there still as death beneath the weight of the knife. The only thing that moved were his eyes. They swung back and forth between Mitch’s face and the slightly trembling blade.
