Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  Bessemer looks around wildly and sees lights approaching. His chest heaves as he kicks off his shoes, and he’s fighting for breath when he calls to Carr. “Wait up!”

  45

  Carr is badly wrong about the bay: there is no protection—not from wind or wave or hungry currents, or from the constellation of debris that swirls and collides just below the angry surface. The lights from shore dim with the first swell, and disappear altogether with the second, and suddenly he’s fifty meters out. Or is it a hundred and fifty?

  The sea heaves in every direction, and the wind makes shrapnel of the whitecaps. Carr’s feet tangle in what feels like plastic netting, and something hard—a fence post swept from somewhere—glances off his thigh and leaves his leg numb and useless. A sheet of drywall—peeling, dissolving—shatters across his back. There’s a roll of carpet, a shipping pallet, chicken wire, and a drowned chicken. It’s like swimming through a landfill, or in Dorothy’s twister, though actual swimming is all but impossible. Carr flails and twists and tumbles, coughing, spitting, wrestling for breath, and the only thing louder than the wind and rushing sea is his hammering heart.

  Bessemer vanishes immediately, carried off without a cry, and Carr doesn’t see him for what seems a choking eternity—until he spots a white arm rushing past, struggling vainly against the riptide that he himself has just escaped. Carr sees him spin away—the white arm, the benign, round face, the sad, thin hair like sea grass—and then he calls Bessemer’s name, fills his lungs, and kicks out after him.

  The rip takes hold of Carr again—shoving, pulling, twisting him around—and he loses Bessemer behind a wall of water. He manages a sloppy breaststroke, but can’t keep the ocean out of his mouth. He calls out, but the wind tears the words from his throat. He sees a shape that may be an arm, or a leg, or a tumbling body, and he lunges forward, through a breaking wave.

  His fingers hook on something and he takes hold of an ankle. Bessemer is floating facedown. He finds his belt and flips him over. Carr slides an arm under Bessemer’s arm and across his chest, and Bessemer’s head rolls back against Carr’s shoulder. Even in the dark, through the spray, Carr can see the ashen face, the blood flowing down his cheek, and the deep, depressed gash at Bessemer’s left temple. He puts his ear to Bessemer’s mouth and hears faint, uneven breathing.

  “Howard,” he yells, again and again over the wind, and Bessemer mutters weakly. The rip is pulling them out and under, and pulling Bessemer from him. Carr strikes out perpendicular to the current—to what he thinks is the east.

  The current is twisting them, and he fights to keep Bessemer’s face out of the water. His legs and shoulders are cramping, and his fingers, wound in Bessemer’s shirt, are numb. He closes his eyes and concentrates on his breathing, on coordinating it with his kicks and his sculling arm, on ignoring the lead in his thighs and the weight clutched against his chest. And finally he finds it—the metronome he’s been straining to hear, the rhythmic four count that silences the wind and the flailing sea: his heart, his lungs, in, out.

  Carr loses himself in the cadence and loses track of time, and then, suddenly, the outbound surge is gone. They’re free of the rip. Carr keeps kicking and realizes that another current, a lateral one, is pulling them slowly eastward. He lets it carry them, lifting his head to look for lights or land or anything at all, but he sees only darkness. They’re well out of the bay now, he’s sure—well beyond the reefs—and the waves are larger here and even more chaotic. One lifts them up high, and for an instant Carr sees a light, or thinks he does, and then another wave breaks across them, nearly tearing Bessemer from his grasp. Carr catches his arm, pulls him close again, and gets a better grip across his chest, and it is only then he realizes that Howard Bessemer has died.

  46

  From this height there’s no trace of the storm—just pale sky, turquoise sea, and the edge of Cuba—brown and green and wrinkled as a fallen leaf. No trace, but he can still feel it moving in his arms and legs, and in his gut: a surge, a lift, a queasy drop. He can still hear the roar. Or is that the jet’s engines? Carr signals the flight attendant and asks for another coffee and a blanket. Half a day since he came out of the water, and still he can’t get warm.

  He doesn’t know how long he was in. Hours, certainly. Long enough for the lateral current to carry him miles to the east. Too long for him to hang on to Howard Bessemer’s drowned and battered body. A wave finally tore it from his grasp, and some time afterward—he didn’t know how long—Carr’s foot found a sandbar, and eventually the shore.

  It was a spur of rock off Old Robin Road, and there was a house under construction nearby, and a trailer to shelter in, once Carr had kicked in the door. He collapsed on a sofa, slept, and dreamed of nothing. In the drizzly morning, he’d hitched a ride with some housepainters to George Town.

  A barefoot man in damp, salt-stained clothes hadn’t raised as many eyebrows as Carr had expected. Maybe the locals wrote it off to the exigencies of the storm, or the eccentricities of tourists. Maybe it was Carr’s still-wet cash that preempted their questions. In any event, it got him a ride to the strip mall, where he bought clothes and a toothbrush and a prepaid cell in a discount store. He washed up and changed in the store’s bathroom, then sat on a curb and made phone calls.

  The first one was to his father, and the relief he felt when he heard Arthur Carr’s voice—Why the devil are you calling? You never call—took him by surprise. The next ones were to Valerie, and Bobby, and Dennis, and Mike, and Tina, and they all went unanswered.

  Two tries, three tries, and then he’d taken a taxi to a cruise ship pier. He’d invested in sunglasses and a ball cap there, with a smiling pirate turtle stitched above the bill, and joined a large group of tourists riding a shuttle bus to the airport. He’d spotted two of Rink’s men in the terminal, but he stayed with the crowd and kept his ball cap low, and he didn’t think they’d seen him. At the gate he’d made more phone calls, but with no more success.

  The operational puzzles—clothing, transpo, evasion—had kept Carr’s mind focused, anchored to the present and to the next step. When they were solved, and his pace slowed, other questions had crowded in. Questions about timing, about passwords, about access to Amy Chun’s laptop. About where the fuck the money was. Carr had no answers to them, but he didn’t mind that they filled his head. They gave him something to do and left no room for his anger, or for the images that seemed to rise up whenever he closed his eyes—of Howard Bessemer, white and drowned and dropping through black water.

  Carr wakes with a start, and for an instant Bessemer’s soft round face floats before him. He squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again and looks out the window. In the distance he sees the towers of Miami.

  It’s blue dusk when he arrives in Boca Raton. The rendezvous is on a quiet street of breeze-block homes in earshot of 95, and just two exits from the airport. Like every other house in the neighborhood, it’s a neat, one-story rectangle, with a shallow pitched roof, a carport, and a brown lawn. It’s painted some pastel shade, maybe pink, maybe yellow, though in this light everything is gray to Carr. He drives past the house and turns the corner three blocks down.

  The whole ride up from Miami, he’s thought more about the timing—how tight it was, how rapid the sequence of events. Dennis gets Prager’s password. Prager’s money is stolen. Prager gets a call, telling him he’s been robbed by Greg Frye. Prager grabs them from the hotel lot. All in the space of not quite three hours. By then, Dennis, Bobby, and Mike would’ve been in the air, en route to Miami—according to the plan, at least. But no one seemed to care much about the plan these days—not about Carr’s plan, anyway.

  He’s thought about Dennis too. Young Dennis, skinny Dennis, pimply Dennis, tentative Dennis, genius Dennis. It’s hard for Carr to believe that he’s involved, but impossible to figure a way that he’s not. Dennis and Valerie both. Dennis had Prager’s password, Valerie had access to Amy Chun’s hardware. They couldn’t do it on their own, but they could
do it together, and Valerie could be very persuasive.

  He drives past the house a second time. The carport is empty; the shades are drawn; no lights—the house has a buttoned-up look. The streets are quiet. Few cars and no pedestrians. He turns the corner, parks two blocks down, and sits behind the wheel for forty-five minutes, until night has finished falling.

  There’s a tension in his stomach as he walks down the empty sidewalk, and it winds tighter as he vaults the alley fence into the darkest corner of the house’s backyard. No lights back here either, and no open windows. Buttoned up. He’s soft and quiet moving up on it, but that’s more habit than anything else. He has the feeling he could launch fireworks and no one would care. The house has that look.

  He stands against the back wall, by the screen door, and listens. A chorus of night bugs, a television playing in Spanish, half a block down, and the ceaseless whisper of 95. Nothing from inside. He takes out his cell and punches Dennis’s number once more and holds the phone away from his ear. He rests his head against the door, and hears—very faintly—a ringing from inside.

  “Fuck,” he says aloud, and he cuts off the call and punches Bobby’s number. Again, faintly, a ringing inside. “Fuck,” he says again. He snaps on plastic gloves, takes a flashlight and a screwdriver from his pocket, and wishes he had something more substantial.

  He slides the screwdriver into the frame and the back door opens with a whisper, and the smell hits him right away. It’s one that’s familiar, but still, his stomach nearly empties. He rubs his eyes and pulls his shirt up to his nose and steps inside.

  It’s a small house, and the smell has filled it to bursting, and so have the heat and the flies. It takes no searching to find them: they’re in the living room, Bobby sideways on the sofa, Dennis genuflecting by a card table. Carr can’t tell how long they’ve been dead.

  He stands over Bobby’s body and runs the flashlight up and down. There’s a beer bottle on the cushion next to him, and the remains of a cigarette that scorched his pants and the flesh underneath. The flies buzz and hover and Carr shoos them away from Bobby’s head. He can see the entry wounds then—one to the back of the neck, one to the back of the head. He can’t tell if there are powder burns.

  Dennis also has two wounds, also to the head and neck. His laptops are missing, but his clothes are there, still packed in a duffel, as are Bobby’s. Mike’s are not. Carr stands stock-still as a van drives slowly past, and then he leaves. He waits until he’s in the alley, two blocks away, before he throws up.

  47

  There’s only one place left for Carr to go, but it isn’t late enough yet, and he needs a shower. He takes a room at a Fairfield Inn near the airport and stands under the spray for a long time. He uses all the little bars of soap and all of the shampoo, but still it’s not enough. Wrapped in a towel, lying on the bed, he tries to work the puzzles—the efficient double taps in both bodies, the lack of struggle, the missing laptops, no Mike—but nothing will sit still. He sees Dennis, dumped like lost luggage beside the table. He sees Bobby’s wry, irritated, tired face. Fuckin’ Carr, he hears him say. He can hear the flies and feel them lighting on his hair and arms.

  Amy Chun’s gated community has decent security, but the golf course abutting it does not. The cart path that runs along the sixth fairway is bordered on one side by palms and lush plantings, and on the other side by an eight-foot wrought-iron fence. Amy Chun’s house lies just beyond, across an empty street. Crouched on the golf course side, Carr watches. Just past midnight, just after the security cruiser makes its half-hourly run, he climbs over.

  The house is modern and glass, all planes and angles, and the landscaping is all about privacy—tall bamboo, fanning palmettos, and long ornamental grasses. Path lights pick out a white gravel walk that disappears into the foliage.

  All the windows that Carr can see are dark. He crosses the street quickly, finds heavy shadows, and waits. Nothing moves, nothing but bugs make a sound. Carr is quiet approaching the front door. It is massive and metal clad, and there’s a discreet sign nearby, warning of alarms and armed response. Carr would be more concerned if he couldn’t see the control pad through the door sidelight, and the status indicator glowing green, for disarmed.

  He follows a path around the back to a long deck. It looks out on a man-made pond and a garden of rocks and combed gravel. In the dark it looks to Carr like the surface of the moon. Glass doors run the length of the deck, but the glass is dark, and Carr can see nothing inside. He takes out his phone and tries Valerie’s number, and then Mike’s. He gets no answer, and hears nothing from inside. He’s not sure if he’s relieved. Then he punches Amy Chun’s number.

  The phone is loud through the glass. It rings five times, and then the voice mail kicks in. Amy Chun’s voice is crisp and businesslike, and her message is brief. Carr closes his phone and pulls on his plastic gloves. He turns on the flashlight, takes out the screwdriver, and takes a deep breath.

  Amy Chun’s air-conditioning is efficient, but the cool temperature doesn’t mask the odor. It hits Carr harder this time, and he has to hold the door frame until his head stops spinning. He turns on the flashlight, shrouds the beam with his hand, and follows the smell.

  Through the living room, down a short hall, to a frosted-glass door, half-opened and marred by a jagged crack. Amy Chun’s office. Despite the overturned chairs, the crooked pictures on the wall, and the books and papers on the floor, Carr recognizes it from Dennis’s spycam video. The desk is askew, but Chun’s Isla Privada laptop is there, along with the other hardware—the password generator, the fingerprint scanner, and Chun’s cell phone. And there is blood too.

  It’s on the edge of the desk, and the arms of the chair, but most of it is on the floor, in the corner, around Amy Chun’s body. Her back is against the wall, and one bare leg is bent beneath her. The other is straight out in front. Her arms are at her sides, and her hands lie palms up on the floor—a supplicant’s hands, Carr thinks. Her head hangs down, and her long black hair hides her torso. Carr is grateful he can’t see her face.

  The smell is stronger here, and Carr’s head is spinning again. He can’t look away from her hands, her pleading fingers, and he feels embarrassed—as if he’s come upon her in the midst of something deeply private. The flashlight seems a terrible invasion, and Carr turns it off, but even in the dark he can see her hands.

  He remembers her walking with Valerie beneath the arcade, their heads bent close, their fingers brushing. He remembers the bar in Houston, the green paper lanterns hanging, the smell of beer and cigarettes, Bobby and Dennis watching Valerie. He sees Howard Bessemer’s pale hands, and his pale, round face drifting away. And suddenly, desperately, he needs air. Carr turns and the beam hits him full in the face.

  It’s a hard blue light, and he can’t see who is behind it, but the glint of the chromed gun barrel is unmistakable, and so is the bass rumble of the voice. Like thunder, but not at all distant.

  “Where are you rushing to?” Mr. Boyce says. “And where the fuck is my money?”

  48

  Inhale, exhale, not too fast, Carr tells himself, and he shifts carefully in the long grass.

  November is early summer down here, but to Carr the predawn sky looks like winter, and the ocean—dead calm—looks frozen. The beach below is like a field of ice, and the sun—still a waxy splinter on the horizon—looks coated with frost. Carr knows the forecast calls for another warm day, but there’s nothing warm about the ground he’s lying on, and nothing soft about the grass. It feels like winter ground to him.

  Carr moves the binoculars slowly along the coastline, but there is little to see. Some fishing boats to the north; to the south something larger, and farther out at sea. A tanker maybe, or a cargo ship. The beach is empty but for a stray dog worrying a carcass—a gull’s perhaps—a quarter mile away. He can hear a jet far off, but can’t see the lights. The only other noise is the wind. Of the ten armed men ranged along the hilltop with him, he sees and hears nothing. Eve
n the man beside him is practically invisible, which is a considerable achievement given his size.

  “Watch the flare off the lenses,” Mr. Boyce whispers. Carr nods and scans the binoculars down, to the house at the bottom of the hill, at the edge of the sand.

  It’s a modest house by local standards, a cottage really, without the cantilevered decks, sweeping windows, or vast infinity pools common to its newer neighbors. But still, a nice house. Thick, whitewashed walls, red tile roof, fences and patios of rough local stone, a vegetable garden in back. Carr studied the site survey at the records hall, in town, and knows it sits on nearly a dozen acres—from beachfront to the top of this hill. Nice, and not cheap.

  A yellow light appears in a window—a kitchen window, Carr knows. Boyce sees it too. “He a morning person?” Boyce asks.

  “I don’t know what he is,” Carr says.

  Nearly three months of tracking him—tracking both of them—following money and rumors and bodies across half the world, and Carr still doesn’t know. He knows they were damn smart, though—that he knows without a doubt. The web of wire transfers that emanated from the initial one—the one that relieved Curtis Prager of one hundred million dollars—was intricate and broad, similar in concept to what Carr had planned, but more complicated.

  Prager’s money was quickly split into fifty separate transfers of two million each, and sent to fifty different banks around the world, into accounts owned by fifty shell corporations. Within hours of the theft, while Prager was still struggling to get Isla Privada’s systems working again and to notify his correspondent banks that something was amiss, those accounts had themselves been emptied by still other transfers. The layering and structuring of electronic payments continued for days, until the money came to temporary rest in banks in Luxembourg and Switzerland, in accounts owned by yet another set of shell companies.