“It’s enough for now. Get this for me,” she says, rising and turning her back to Carr. He slides her zipper down.
“You have a better read on her?”
“I know she takes care of herself. Yoga, spinning, weights, laps in the pool—she’s at the club every day. She spends money on her hair and nails, and serious money on her wardrobe. St. John, Carlisle, Akris—nice stuff. Low-key, but classy. And that handbag of hers is no knockoff. Twenty grand, easy. She’s a loner, though. Never says more than a word or two to the staff, or to another member. Never has guests.”
“But she says hello to you.”
Valerie nods, and lets her dress fall in an orange pool at her feet. She wears no bra, and her panties are sheer orange silk. “I’m sociable,” she says.
She throws the spread off the bed and pulls down the blanket and top sheet. Carr leans against the desk. His heart is pounding and his words catch in his throat. “You see the video Dennis and Bobby shot of her house?” he asks. Valerie nods. “What did you think?”
“It’s modern—lots of glass.”
“I meant about the security.”
“No surprise: she’s president of a bank, and it’s a pain in the ass. She’s in a gated community, so there’s the gatehouse, the authorized visitor lists, the prowl cars, and lots of rent-a-cops—who, by the way, are all strapped. Bobby said the house itself is wired pretty good too—not that it slowed him much.
“On top of that, there’s the bank’s security people. She’s got a retired sheriff’s deputy that drives her everywhere in that nice black Benz, and her office, her car, and her house all get swept weekly for electronics.”
“On a set schedule?”
She shakes her head. “That’d make life too easy. And as far as her work laptop goes, Bobby says it rides to the office with her in the Benz and comes home the same way, and when she stops at the gym, it waits in the car with her driver.”
Carr nods. “Dennis send you anything from her personal computer?”
“He spiked it, and he’s supposed to send me her e-mail and her browser history. He confirmed it doesn’t have the Isla Privada software on it, and none of the security hardware to access their network.” Valerie sits cross-legged on the bed and pulls a pillow onto her lap. “You think I’m not doing my homework?”
“Maybe you saw something I didn’t.”
Valerie shakes her head. “It’s what we thought: we want access to Isla Privada’s network, we need their hardware; we want access to that—to Amy Chun’s equipment, anyway—we need somebody who can hang out in her house. And that would be Jill.”
Carr nods slowly and sits up on the desk. “How’s your apartment working out?”
She shrugs. “Mid-nineties generic. Lot of corporate types in the building, on long-term business trips, plus some divorced dads with cars they can’t afford. I can see a slice of the Intracoastal from the balcony. It’s right for Jill.”
“We could’ve met there.”
Valerie narrows her eyes. “No we couldn’t,” she says, scowling. “I told you: Jill’s on her own.”
“Yeah, I got that. You color in any other parts of Jill’s life?”
“I’m waiting for the take from Amy’s computer,” she says. Valerie looks Carr up and down. “You’re perched on that desk like it’s a lifeboat. We sinking or something?”
“I’m trying to figure out if you’re going to keep snapping at my ass. I’m thinking maybe I can hide behind this thing.”
Valerie is still for a beat, and then she sighs. “Yeah. Sorry. It takes me a while to let her go. I can’t switch her off just like that.” She snaps her fingers, like a branch breaking. “Jill’s pretty much had it with men. She’s a little angry.”
“I get that.”
Valerie sighs again, longer and more heavily. “Not me, though. I’m not angry.” She pats the mattress beside her, and Carr crosses to the bed.
Afterward, covered in gooseflesh and the sour breath of the air conditioner, Valerie pulls him back from the edge of sleep. Her head is on his chest, and her fingers comb gently through his pubic hair. Her voice is husky.
“Let’s play geography,” she says.
Carr sighs. He can’t remember who started it, or when they started playing, but it’s become a fixture of the long stretches the crew spends together in cars, in vans, in darkened rooms—a way to relieve the monotony of sitting for hours with earpieces jammed in their heads, watching, listening, waiting. Dennis called it retirement geography, and it was simple to play: tell a story about what you’re going to do once you’ve made your nut, and where you’re going to do it—your dream of life afterward. Which, Carr thought, told you a lot about a person.
Bobby’s ideal retirement changed venues now and then—shifting from Nassau, to Vegas, to Macao, to Monte Carlo, and back to Nassau again—but regardless of the particular locale, it was always the same: a high-roller suite at a high-end gambling resort.
“These new villas, they have private elevators right down to the casino floor, and private hostesses who spoon-feed you caviar and wipe your ass with silk. I’ll make sure they all have pictures of my ex, with orders to shoot on sight.” A simple man, Bobby, with a simple plan.
Latin Mike’s vision of his golden years was also straightforward, if less gilded: he wanted off the grid. “A thousand acres in the high desert. I put up a wind turbine, solar cells, and a tall motherfucking fence. I have a few horses, maybe a goat, and nobody needs to send me a Christmas card.”
Ray-Ray had a second career in mind—a ski school in British Columbia, with a bar attached. “I’ll run the tourist babes up and down the mountain all day, and at night I’ll ply their sore little bods with alcohol.”
And Dennis dreamed of setting up a venture capital shop on Sand Hill Road and financing the next Google. Bobby always laughed at that. “You’re a fucking pure breed, Denny; you’re geek to the bone.”
Carr didn’t play the game, and neither did Valerie. He would simply shake his head when his turn came around; she chose deflection.
“I’m falling off the map, boys,” she said, the last time Bobby tried to goad her into it. “Over the edge, like those ships when the world was flat.”
Bobby laughed. “C’mon, Vee—that’s not how you play.”
“Fuck you—you think I want you guys showing up on my doorstep, looking to borrow money?”
Of all of them, Declan liked the game best, and he was best at it. It called to some Celtic storytelling gene in him, and he would spin elaborate yarns about his retirement by the sea. Over the years he’d had several shores in mind: Hoi An, in Vietnam, and Hua Hin, in Thailand, La Barra, in Uruguay, was a favorite for a long while. He would talk about them at length and in detail—the weather, the waters, the cuisines, and local real estate markets. Carr remembers him hunched over binoculars, waxing poetic about asado and fish empanadas, while the smell of his cigar filled the van.
“Yer young now, but you’ll see, when yer all wizened bastards like me, you won’t want to be working or whoring or—forgive me, Mike—roasting in the feckin’ desert. You’ll want a cottage by the sea, I’m telling ya, and a boat, and maybe a garden with a fruit tree. And who knows, but maybe you’ll want to do some breeding yerselves. Me, I’m hoping the local publican has a daughter of marrying age, or maybe the baker—a homely but grateful girl. That’s the ticket, lads.” The gravel whisper went on and on about the meals he’d cook, the wine he’d drink, the darts he’d play, and the dog he would buy.
Carr rubs his eyes and sits up in bed. “I thought you didn’t like that game,” he says.
“I didn’t,” Valerie says, “when it was just a game. Now it’s less abstract. Come on—you show me yours …”
Carr shakes his head. “I have nothing to show. I haven’t given much thought to afterward.”
Valerie sighs and settles herself again, her cheek on his thigh. “Bobby said you were talking to him about Mendoza. Asking about what happened again.”
“And?”
“And it worries him.”
“Worries him how?”
“He thinks you’re picking at something, and he doesn’t know what. He’s worried you’re taking your eye off the ball.”
“Screw him. He should keep his mind on his own goddamn job, and let me take care of mine.”
“He says you feel guilty.”
“Bobby’s a psychiatrist now? That’s a sure sign of the apocalypse.”
“I don’t like what happened down there either. It was a waste, and I was as broken up about it as anybody—but I don’t feel guilty.”
Carr shakes his head. “No offense, Vee, but I’m not sure you’re the best yardstick.”
Valerie sits up and pulls a sheet over her breasts. “If I wasn’t such a cold-hearted bitch, I might take offense at that,” she says with a bitter laugh. “Maybe I didn’t know those guys as long as you, but I trusted them with my life more times than I can count. I trusted them to back me up, and they didn’t disappoint. Not ever. Ray was like a kid brother, for chrissakes, and Deke …”
She looks at the ceiling and breathes deeply—once, twice—to steady her voice. “We told Deke what we thought about that job—you and me both. We said everything there was to say about the planning, the intel, the risks—everything and then some. Maybe you remember, he was pretty pissed at us when he left. I thought the two of you were going to come to blows. You tell me, what else were we supposed to do?”
Carr shrugs. “We should’ve been more convincing.”
“Right—’cause Deke was always so open to suggestions.”
“He listened to me.”
“He listened when he felt like it, but he didn’t listen then. And really, how many ways can you say bad idea and stupid fucking plan? I think we tried them all.”
Carr runs a hand through his hair. “Maybe it wasn’t just the plan that was bad. Maybe something else was going on.”
Valerie sits up and looks at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?” Carr shrugs again, and Valerie’s hand is on his biceps. “Something else like what?”
“I don’t know. Bertolli might’ve gotten wind of something.”
Valerie shakes her head. “Are you for real with this? What was Bertolli going to get wind of? The only guy as insane about operational security as you are was Declan. You really think he got sloppy with that?”
“Maybe somebody got sloppy for him.”
“You’re not serious with this paranoid shit, are you? You think Bobby or Mike dimed him out? Or maybe you think it was me?” She slides her palm up his arm, over his shoulder, to his neck. The smell of honeysuckle is strong. Her voice softens. “Guilt does that, you know—it makes you paranoid. You feel bad, you feel responsible, so you feel like there’s a bill coming due. Then you’re looking over your shoulder every other minute, waiting for it to arrive. Paranoid.”
Carr rolls away from her, out of bed, and goes into the bathroom. He turns the water tap, drinks from a cupped hand, and looks in the mirror. The angular face, the cropped black hair, disheveled now, his mother’s hazel eyes, smudged with fatigue, the wiry frame, the white sketch marks of scars here and there, are somehow unfamiliar to him—pieces he can’t assemble into a working whole. He stands in the bathroom doorway. Valerie is sitting cross-legged, the sheet down around her waist.
“Our being down there wouldn’t have changed anything,” she says, “except maybe we’d be dead on the side of a road too. So we were someplace else—so what?”
“I know where we were,” Carr says, his voice rising suddenly above the drone of the air conditioner. “I know what we were doing.”
Valerie laughs, and there’s a note of satisfaction in it—a long-held theory finally confirmed. Jill’s twang reappears in her voice. “So you feel bad about that too—that we were in St. Barts, fucking, while it was going on. You sure you weren’t raised Catholic, or maybe Jewish? ’Cause, baby boy, you got the guilt down cold.”
“You and Bobby can talk it out in your next session. Compare notes.”
“That might be deep water for Bobby,” Valerie says, and throws off her sheet. She pushes past Carr into the bathroom and runs the shower.
Carr watches as she steps in—the muscles in her back, her brown ass, her skin flawless but for the ragged-edged dime on her scapula. “Why the hell are you talking to Bobby about this anyway?” he says.
Valerie works her fingers through her water-darkened hair. “I thought you wanted me to—that you wanted my help with these guys. To take their temperature—make sure their heads were on right. I thought we both wanted this job over and done with, and done right. Then, if you want, we can work out that guilt and whatever other little bugs are crawling around your head. We could have ourselves some fun afterward.”
Valerie builds a creamy lather on her arms and breasts and belly. She beckons to Carr, and through the scrim of water and curling steam her smile is bright.
The sky above the hotel parking lot is gray, and it’s heavy with car exhaust and the metal heat of the fading day. An erratic breeze sends a paper cup back and forth across a patch of cracked cement. Sitting in the Saturn, Carr is similarly restless. He doesn’t know why he started talking to Valerie about what happened in Mendoza, or why he stopped. Maybe he was fishing for something—for her to tell him to forget his suspicions, call them paranoid shit, and remind him to keep his mind on the job. He thinks about the game she tried to play—retirement geography, and all those stories of afterward. He hears his own voice—I haven’t given much thought to afterward—and wonders if maybe he should.
Certainly, afterward is easier for him to think about. Easier than thinking about how Bertolli’s men came to be waiting for Deke in the dead of night. Or why Bobby always tells the story just the same way. Easier than dealing with Mike’s snide comments and hostile silences. Or finding a useful handle on Howard Bessemer. Or thinking about Valerie and Amy Chun. Easier by far than thinking about his father, and the tar pit of brochures, applications, and FAQ pages Carr has drowned in every night for nearly three weeks. Assisted living facilities, nursing homes, dementia units—the nomenclature sticks to his arms and legs, and fills his ears with static. Eleanor Calvin has left messages—six, eight, Carr has lost count—but he hasn’t returned a one.
So afterward. The problem is, Carr doesn’t know much about afterward—with Valerie, or with anyone else.
His relationships with women haven’t lasted long—a few weeks, a month or two—no longer than the gaps between his jobs with Declan. But there was a sameness to them all, a sense of melancholy that suffused them from the start—the feel of a beach in midwinter.
The women themselves were not much alike, not at first glance anyway. Hannah was from Seattle, a filmmaker shooting a documentary on the Costa Rican rainforests and staying in the same hotel as Carr, in Puerto Viejo. Ann was from Zurich, a geologist with ABB, analyzing core samples taken off the Belize coast and drinking at night in a bar in San Pedro that Carr also favored. Brooke was a UNICEF pediatrician from Toronto, on vacation in Antigua between a stint in Haiti and a posting in Phnom Penh, and she and Carr dove the same reefs.
The list went on—different ages, different nationalities, different professions and appearances, but still, a sameness. They were all nominally married, but they were solitaries by nature—self-sufficient, emotionally reticent, even prickly. They were all obsessive about their jobs, and chronically exhausted by them. And they all possessed a certain brand of low-key intellectual charisma—a smart-girl glamour—that pulled at Carr like the moon pulled the seas.
The other thing they had in common, of course, was Carr himself. He understood something of his own appeal. Yes, he was attractive enough, enthusiastic and inventive enough, articulate and reasonably amusing when he had something to say, and smart enough to keep quiet otherwise. But his main draws, he knew, lay elsewhere. He was convenient. He was unburdened by backstory. And he was, without question, impermanent. It made him the perfect ti
me-out from the rest of their lives—ephemeral, essentially anonymous, as disposable as the aliases they knew him by. And it left Carr entirely ignorant of afterward.
His thoughts find no forward traction with Valerie, and inevitably they slide back, to St. Barts. The vast, glassy plain of Flamands Bay, the crescent of bone-white sand, the white umbrellas, like a line of portly nuns, and their rooms overlooking it all. Their rooms that they never left. All that time working together, and St. Barts was their first time. And there, amid the ravaged bedding and the ruins of room service trays, was the first time it occurred to Carr that perhaps things didn’t have to be quite so temporary.
Then the calls came in. The first was at five a.m., local time. Bobby’s voice was low and flat and affectless, difficult for Carr to understand. It wasn’t until after he’d hung up that Carr realized Bobby was in shock. The next calls, hours later, were from Mike, and they were confused and angry and scared. By then Carr had packed his bag and arranged his transit to B.A.
The heat has put him nearly to sleep, but there’s movement across the lot, a flash of orange and short blond hair, and Carr wakes himself. He sees Valerie get into her Audi and drive off. He counts off thirty seconds and starts up the Saturn.
She takes Military Trail south and Palmetto Park east, to a stretch of stores and low apartment buildings. Valerie’s building is glass and concrete, and as generic as she described. She pulls into the residents’ lot, and Carr parks across the street. He doesn’t see her enter, but in a while he sees a row of lights in some third-floor windows, and a slender orange figure crossing a room. In another minute he sees Valerie on a balcony, a glass in her hand, her face turned east, looking perhaps at a slice of the Intracoastal.
It is full dark when she goes inside again and draws the curtains. Carr watches her blank windows for an hour afterward, and then gets on 95 and drives back to Palm Beach.
10
No palms on this street—barely any green at all besides a runty saw palmetto, and its fronds are mostly gray. Bobby was right about the house; it’s crap: a low concrete bunker the color of dishwater, with barred windows, a tin-roofed carport, and a sagging school yard fence. In a neighborhood where chipped breeze block and auto parts on the lawn make up an architectural school, it’s still the worst house on the street. But the locals don’t worry much about how the hedge next door is clipped, or if they do, they know better than to say. Which makes the house crap but also ideal. A jet passes low, directly overhead. It casts a broad shadow and shakes Carr’s stomach, and leaves behind the tang of spent kerosene.
Thick as Thieves Page 8
