“Christ,” I said, staring into his armory.
“What are you looking for, Simon? A handgun? A rifle? A shotgun, maybe?”
“Handgun, Cliff.”
“Sure, I’ve got Ruger, Beretta, Smith and Wesson, Springfield, Browning—”
“A Smith and Wesson will do.”
“Revolver? Automat—”
“Auto. Nine-millimeter.” I pointed at a gunmetal Chief’s Special. “She’ll do.”
He set it in my hand.
It was lightweight, compact. Had a rubber grip. I turned, extended my right arm away from Shermer and Mariana. “Yeah,” I said. “She’ll do nicely.”
Shermer asked Mariana if she wanted a weapon but thankfully, she declined.
I stuffed the handgun into the waist of my jeans and we started back toward the stairs.
“You know,” I said to Shermer when we reached the deck, “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but with the gun laws down here—”
He waved me off. “I know. Should’ve turned them in to customs. But I’ve got enough money stashed down there that if I got found out by la guardia, they’d look the other way. Rather give it to crooked cops than the goddamn pirates, ya know?”
I savored the cool breeze blowing in from the sea. “Sure, I guess.” As he led us off the boat, I said, “Say, Cliff, how’s your boy doing? Gotta be what, fifteen now, right?”
“Sixteen,” Shermer said with a sigh. “To tell you the truth, he’s back in Monaco with Jackie.” He motioned back toward his yacht. “The kind of lifestyle I wanted to live, I couldn’t do it with a kid anchored to my neck. Even with the child support I was receiving from the ex, it wasn’t worth the hassle. I realized it less than four months after you returned him to me. Our next stop was the French Riviera with six dozen roses and a handwritten apology. I had to beg Jackie to take him back.”
I stared past him into the blackness of the Caribbean. After all that, he’d only wanted his son out of spite and for the abundance of child support he’d receive. The poor kid had been nothing but a pawn in Shermer’s chess match with his ex-wife. And I’d helped move the pieces.
Cliff Shermer tilted his head and scrutinized my face as Mariana tugged gently on my arm for us to leave.
“Something wrong, Simon?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said. “I was just thinking that it probably would’ve been wise for you to tell me about Kenny before you handed me a loaded gun.”
Chapter 56
Mariana and I walked into the first bar we found, an open-air joint alive with good music and cool trade winds.
“You would like something to drink?” Mariana said, pointing to the bar.
After that last conversation with Cliff Shermer, I could have used a fifth of Irish whiskey attached to an IV. As difficult as it was, I pushed thoughts of him aside and instead recalled the old man in the Caribbean, the treasure hunter on Seven Mile Beach. After a few seconds, I felt my pulse begin to slow a bit.
“I’ll have a rum,” I said. “Neat.”
Mariana started toward the bar then swung her head back around as she came to a realization. “I forgot, we have no money, Simon. We will have to go to an ATM.”
“I’ll go,” I said. “You wait here. Get a table. Open a tab if you can, have a drink. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I pushed through to the bar. Waited as a young American bartender finished mixing a mojito. He asked what I’d like to drink and I asked for directions to the nearest cash machine. The directions he gave me seemed kind of roundabout but I thanked him and tossed him a small tip as he turned, picked up the house phone and dialed out.
I left the bar, rounded the block, turned right, then left, and found myself on the first truly quiet street I’d visited since we arrived in Venezuela. I inhaled the fresh night air deeply, relishing the break from the noise.
I crossed the street to the outdoor cash machine leaning up against a small Banco Central. I quickly scanned the block before pulling out my wallet.
As I fished for my debit card, it struck me again that I wouldn’t find Olivia unless I could figure out the “why.” Why had she been taken? If the late Kellen had anything to do with her kidnapping, then he’d been working for someone other than the Costa Ricans who’d held Mariana and the other women; that much was clear. But it was beginning to seem just as likely that Kellen had nothing to do with the Calabasas home invasion at all. He’d been killed because I was (inadvertently) getting too close to the sex traffickers, not because I was getting too close to figuring out what had actually happened to Olivia Trenton. Kellen was likely killed because I’d been following the wrong trail.
I’d been following that trail because of Olivia’s missing day in Grand Cayman—the Tuesday following Olivia’s night at the Next Level. I remained convinced that Olivia’s missing day was key. But what could Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Affairs possibly have to do with an American teenager’s missing day in the Caribbean?
It made no sense. If there was a plausible connection, I couldn’t see it.
I was feeding my debit card into the machine when I heard the click of a gun being cocked a few feet from my ear.
I sighed, blew air through my lips in frustration, my blood beginning to simmer again. At that moment I never wanted so badly out of a place as I did out of South America.
In slaughtered English, the guy holding the gun on me said, “I desire to sell to you your life.”
“Really.” I summoned what little Spanish I knew, because I couldn’t bear to hear him speak English again. “¿Cuanto cuesta?” I asked, reasonably enough. How much is it?
“Cinco mil.”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought that was about five thousand dollars. Then again, he was probably thinking in terms of Venezuelan bolívars. If that were the case, he wanted about a thousand dollars U.S.
“Es demasiado caro para mí,” I told him. That’s too expensive for me. “Podría bajar un poco el precio?” Could you lower the price?
“No!” he shouted as he smacked me on the back of the head with his gun. The strike smarted like hell, but at least I’d drawn him in closer.
The ATM was beeping, pleading with me to do something already. I peered into its monitor and studied our blurred reflection to try to gauge the distance between me and the assailant.
I placed my hands close together about chest high.
“All right,” I said. “Lo llevo.” I’ll take it.
As I said it, I took a step back with my left foot; then I pivoted with my right, taking myself out of the line of fire.
I grasped the gunman’s wrist, twisted it away from his body.
“This wasn’t a good time to try this,” I told him.
Fear swept over the gunman’s face as he looked into my eyes and saw that I was no amateur. That was when I realized he’d probably received a phone call from the bartender who gave me the directions.
I was about to let him go when I heard an intermittent drip splashing the sidewalk beneath us. I looked down at the puddle, disgusted. “Really?” I said.
I ripped the gun from his hand, pushed his body away, and delivered a swift kick into his solar plexus, throwing him back against the cash machine.
I took a step forward, punched him in the gut. When he doubled over, I grabbed him by his shirt, lifted him up under his arms, and tossed him into the puddle of his own piss.
He hit the cement with a pained groan.
I leaned over him. “Get the hell out of here,” I said calmly into his face. “And learn to control your bladder before you pull a gun on someone else.”
He pushed himself up and started scrambling.
I watched him vanish around the corner, his boots still pounding the pavement well after he was out of sight.
I sighed again. Shook my head at the world.
Then I finished my transaction, gathered my bolívars, and headed for the bar so that I could throw back that glass of rum and maybe another.
Chapter
57
When I returned to the bar, the bartender I’d gotten the directions from was gone. Mariana was waiting at a small table, sipping a rum and Coke with a twist of lime. As I took a seat next to her, she slid over the rocks glass I’d ordered. I took a good, long swallow. Upon seeing me nearly finish the rum in a single shot, our waitress came over and asked if I’d like another. I handed her what was left of the rum, and asked her to get me an espresso instead.
“Any troubles?” Mariana said.
“None,” I told her.
She reached across the table and grabbed one of my hands. “Good news, Simon. I was watching the television, and there is still a reporter covering the events here in Puerto La Cruz.”
“And the president?”
“No, I don’t think so. But this reporter, I asked the waitress about him. He is very—how you say?—antagonistic to the regime.”
“Terrific,” I said. “Did you recognize where he was reporting from?”
“I think so. An area not far from here. If he’s not still reporting, we will find him in a bar. He is a heavy drinker, the waitress told me. He was drunk even on the news just now.”
The waitress set my espresso in front of me. I fired it down, tossed some bolívars on the table, and stood.
“Then we’d better go now,” I said, “before our reporter decides to pass out.”
* * *
As we dodged revelers on the main boulevard, I scanned the throngs. Looking for a particular drunk in Puerto La Cruz during the second-to-last night of Carnaval was like searching for a specific bee in a swarm.
“There,” Mariana shouted. “I recognize that intersection. The reporter was standing in the far right corner when he gave his report.”
The Venezuelan police were out now, shoving people aside, walking purposefully against the flow of pedestrian traffic. Dressed in menacing dark blue uniforms, they were difficult to miss. Ask most locals in Venezuela, and they wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that the cops presented a far greater threat to them than the common criminal.
“All right,” I said. “This is a college town, so there are plenty of bars. Our best bet is to just drop by each one and start looking. You’ll recognize this guy if you see him?”
“Better,” she said, pulling me close to her again. As she dipped into my front pants pocket for the second time in hours, I could smell the sweet scent of rum on her breath and it dizzied me.
She pulled out my BlackBerry, opened the browser, and typed in a name. She clicked on a link and showed me a picture of the reporter.
“You’re an angel,” I said.
“And here I thought you do not believe.”
I smiled. “I meant it in the metaphorical sense.”
Before I finished the sentence, her lips were on mine and we kissed, long and deep, with the floats gliding by us, guys in windows throwing beads, women all over lifting their tops and exposing their breasts. Even so, it felt impossibly romantic.
When I opened my eyes, I held her to me. Glaring over her shoulder, I saw more police. They seemed to be advancing in a pattern.
Toward us.
“Let’s go,” I said, gripping Mariana’s wrist and dragging her toward the first bar I spotted.
The bars were crowded, but not terribly so. The revelers obviously preferred taking their drinks outside, and in the chaos, it was relatively easy to enjoy a libation or two on the street.
As soon as we entered the bar, I headed toward the rear with Mariana right on my tail.
“Wait, Simon, I am looking.”
“Look faster,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. Through the open door, I could see the officers approaching the bar from the street.
I pulled Mariana with me as I crashed through the door leading into the kitchen, knocking over a young busboy and his gray tub full of dishes.
“Disculpe!” I shouted to him. Sorry. Or something of the sort.
Cooks fired obscenities at us; one stood between us and the door leading outside with a butcher knife held at eye level.
I removed the handgun from my waistband and leveled it at him as we hurried toward him. He dropped the knife on the tiles and scattered, ran straight for the freezer and hid himself.
Mariana and I burst through the door, and we were back outside. The back alley was empty except for a hooker plying her trade on a kid who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old.
We ignored them, ran as fast as we could down the alley. On the corner was an open steel door, steam billowing up into the night.
I pointed to it. “Another restaurant. Let’s check it out.”
“Wait,” Mariana yelled as she tried to catch her breath. “Are we running from the police or looking for the reporter?”
I turned. In the distance, the door we’d exited from blew open, and three cops spilled out into the alley.
“Both,” I said, then dragged Mariana into the blanket of steam.
Chapter 58
As far as I could tell, we’d lost the cops. Thirty minutes after I first spotted them, we were standing in a hot, crowded bar on the edge of the city, trying to rehydrate with tall bottles of Zenda mineral water.
Mariana offered to do a quick spin around the pub before giving up and heading back to Caracas.
I was standing alone, watching the door, when a Hispanic man of about my age stumbled into the bar by himself. He looked ready to drop, but he had a wide weatherman smile on his face. Other patrons seemed to know him, offering handshakes and hugs. Someone even broke into song.
I plucked my BlackBerry from my pocket and pulled up the picture of Jorge Tejata.
“There he is,” I said to Mariana when she returned from the back of the bar. He was seated at a booth now, alone. For all the cheers upon his arrival, apparently no one wanted to actually sit and drink with the man. In fact, the party that had been at the booth promptly took off as soon as Tejata slid in.
Mariana said, “He is a bad drunk, from what I was told.”
I shrugged. “Well, let’s hope he’s also a talker.” I motioned her ahead of me since a self-invite from Mariana was bound to be more appealing to Tejata than a self-invite from me. “Let’s drop in on him.”
Tejata was a thin man, the kind of man who carried thin well, who looked both tough enough to play American football yet sensitive enough to cry during a romantic comedy. He wore a wrinkled yellow and orange aloha shirt, open; chest hair creeping out over a thick gold chain. He held a lit cigarette between his lips, but he seemed more focused on the pint of beer in front of him.
“Buy you one?” I said, pointing at his glass.
“Do I have to buy you one back?”
“Not at all.”
“Then you can buy me as many as you’d like.” He pointed to Mariana. “And get the lady one too while you’re at it.”
His English was excellent, even if a tad slurred from drink. With a wave of his hand, he summoned a young waitress and ordered a tableful of pints.
“To what do I owe your wonderful company?” Tejata was speaking to me but studying Mariana as though she were some kind of specimen. “Love your cheekbones,” he told her.
“Your station is covering the missing American girl?” I said.
He looked at me. I’d apparently earned his attention and sobered him up, all with a single question.
Tejata said, “Who are you?”
“My name’s Simon Fisk. I’m a private investigator of sorts. I was hired by the girl’s father to track her down.”
“The father’s locked up, you know.”
“I know.”
“Hope you were paid up front.”
“I was.”
The waitress set a few pints on the table and said she’d be back with the rest in a few moments.
“So, what is it you want from me?” Tejata said between gulps.
“Information.”
“What kind of information?”
“Information about the regime. The kind that might lead me to t
he Minister of Foreign Affairs, possibly all the way up to the president.”
Jorge Tejata took it in as he stubbed out his cigarette. Narrowing his eyes, he said, “That’s going to cost you more than a few pints of beer, you know.”
I said, “What do you want?” Though I thought I already knew.
“The story, man. All of it. Beginning to end. Right here, right now. Then I’ll take you to Vicente Delgado’s doorstep in the hills if you want me to.”
I took a sip of beer, pretended to mull it over.
“The girl was taken,” I said. “Happened during a home invasion in Greater Los Angeles. Only the mother, Emma Trenton, was home with her. The father was in Berlin at a film festival. The assailants roughed the mother up, pumped her full of a sedative, then left the house with her daughter.”
“How many of them?”
“Four. Spanish-speaking. All wearing black ski masks. One was carrying a bandola case with equipment; another had a laptop. They left a ransom note requesting eight and a half million, U.S. The father paid the ransom but they never had any intention of returning the girl. It was a setup from the start.”
Tejata took a long pull off his beer. Sweat was beading on the fine line of hair above his upper lip. “Go on,” he said.
“Two months before the kidnapping, the girl had spent winter break in Grand Cayman with three other girls. The girls were together the entire time, except for one day. I was just there, in George Town, a few days ago. Looks as though she met someone there, someone with enough dough to buy her an expensive diamond pendant.”
“Any idea who?”
“I followed this American kid named Kellen down to Costa Rica. He’d hooked up with one of Olivia’s girlfriends. When I started asking questions about him in San José, the kid turned up dead. A few minutes after I found the body, there was an attempt on me and an old friend who was helping me. Two assailants; one wound up hog-tied in the back of my SUV, the other was accidentally shot to death by his partner. The lucky one directed us north to a dense jungle near the Nicaraguan border. In a clearing, we found a camp with four men and more than a dozen women being held captive.”
Payoff Page 22
