An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  “You sure you didn’t tell them anything?” he asked.

  “Not a damn thing.”

  He smoked the cigarette, slumped on the edge of the pier, swinging his feet a little. He could hear the basso moan of one of the big ships standing off in the bay. Jesus, he liked hearing those ships.

  “If they were cops, I guess I don’t understand what they were doing looking for Synar,” he said. The Probst case was closed down over a year ago. What was happening here?

  “What if there is a real Colleen Synar?”

  “Naw,” Don said. Faeber’s people were supposed to have taken care of that. Now he wondered if they had. That greasy Greek was going to have to hear about this.

  Don scratched the hair on his stomach with a thumb. She looked at him. Here he was, his wavy hair kind of wild from being in bed—she guessed he had just run his fingers through it—and even slumped as he was, unconcerned about how he looked, she could see the rows of muscles in his stomach, the lumpy divisions of the different muscles in his arms and shoulders, swinging his feet like a kid. It made her wet just sitting by him.

  “Well,” he said, “don’t get too worked up about it If they come back—and I don’t think they will—but if they do, just stick with your story. There’s nothing they can do about that, no way you can get in trouble, as long as you don’t go making up any more than you’ve already told them. Hell, you can’t be expected to know any more than that. Just stick to your story.”

  That was kind of smoothing it over, but there was no need in getting her worked up about all the what-if’s in this situation.

  Heath didn’t know anything about the arrangements with the police department or anything about that whole operation, or that it even existed. All he had told her back then was that if anybody ever called looking for a Colleen Synar that she was supposed to tell them exactly what she apparently told them. On the other hand, it was decided that they would use his real name. The Greek told him they had it one hundred percent covered but, if for some unforeseen eventuality they had to have a real person to prove there was flesh and blood behind the information, then they wanted him to cover. He was good at that and could handle it. Of course, he got a bonus for allowing them to use his name for this “remote risk.” A one-time chunk. Now it looked like that unforeseen eventuality had happened. He was going to have to think about this real hard. It was time to talk to that goddamn Greek. If he didn’t know what was going on here, he’d better get his greasy ass in gear and find out. If he did know what was going on, then old Don C. wanted to know why he hadn’t been warned.

  “I’m not responsible for her not being a real person,” Heath said.

  “No, hell no,” Don sympathized. “Just tell them to piss off.” He dropped what was left of the shitty little cigarette between his bare feet into the water.

  “Yeah, I don’t even have to talk to them.”

  “Shit, no.”

  She was quiet for a while, and the water sloshed lazily against the pilings underneath them.

  “I tell you what,” she said, dropping her own cigarette into the water now, “for a long time I just took the money and didn’t think about it. I mean, it’s not like it’s drugs we’re dealing with here. I wasn’t going to get busted. And the money’s been so damn good, you know, unbelievable. But, I don’t know, this now…”

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  He didn’t like the sound of this too much. They had worked together a little over two years and everything had been fine. He had never allowed her to learn any more about him than his obviously bogus contact name. She didn’t know where he lived or even what he drove. She had always been able to get everything he had requested. She was smart enough to follow the security procedures he had taught her and even smart enough to expand her own little network—the pyramid idea of acquisitions was something she snapped to pretty quick—but she wasn’t that little bit smarter that she needed to be to give him any trouble, to be too curious. Or maybe it was just that she was too passive. She had told him one time that her former husband, the guy she had run away from just before he had met her, had knocked her around a lot, sent her to the hospital three times. Don guessed the guy must have beat all the spunk out of her. She was pretty easy to spook.

  “Looking back,” she said, “if I had it to do over and you asked me to cover for you on this Synar thing, I wouldn’t do it.”

  Sometimes she sounded like a high school kid, he thought.

  “I don’t guess I can blame you,” he said.

  “Really?”

  She seemed surprised by that, that he would understand. He was looking down at the water, at his white feet in the half light, the water moving under them, back and forth, back and forth around the pilings. He liked the smell of piers, of the way they smelled after years and years of standing in salt water, and people plopping fish up on them and cutting bait on them and spilling beer on them and the sun baking it all and drying it up and always the salt water. You didn’t smell that kind of smell, that exact smell, anywhere else in the world except on piers. He had noticed that all the piers in all the countries he had been in smelled the same.

  “I can’t help but wonder what they do with it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That stuff we get for them.”

  He had meant, What did you say, because he had been daydreaming, but he figured it out.

  “Oh.” He straightened from his slump and took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t ask myself that question if I was you.”

  She waited a second. “But I would like to know.”

  “Well, I don’t want to know,” he lied. “I just pass it on, take the money, and keep my mouth shut. I’ll give you a little insight. The people I pass it on to, you don’t want them to know you’re asking yourself that question.”

  “I can guess there’s big bucks in it,” she said. “They’re not going to give the ‘little people’ like us any percentage in an operation like this, so if I’m making what I’m making… and when you figure there’s more like us…” She shook her head. “I mean… God.”

  He let her dwell on that a moment.

  “What you’ve got to think about, Val, is where you’d be if this hadn’t come along for you.”

  “Why, what do you mean?”

  “I mean, that you’ve got to think about what the hell you’d do if this dried up on you.”

  “Why have I got to think about that?”

  “Because you keep asking yourself questions about what they’re doing with the information you give them,” he said, his hands flat on the pier on either side of him as he looked down into the water, “and you could find yourself out of this deal quicker’n shit.”

  This was sobering for her, not only because of the prospect to which he alluded, which she had to admit, was indeed grim, but also because it was a none too thinly disguised threat If she had learned anything over the two years she had been doing this, it was that someone had done a hell of a job in planning the structure of the “organization.” She always paid her people in cash, and she was always paid in cash, even though the money was big. One of the first things Don taught her was how to deposit the stuff in banks without drawing attention, spread it out She didn’t know the real identity of anybody in the whole operation except the people below her whom she had recruited herself. But she had gathered from little snippets here and there in her conversations with Don over the two years that there were maybe half a dozen people like her that Don dealt with, and that maybe there were half a dozen people like Don that the guy above him dealt with. She couldn’t even imagine how far it went.

  “The thing is,” Don said, interrupting her thoughts, “nobody’s indispensable. They’ll just get somebody else. We just do our business, make our deliveries, take the money, then we get to keep on taking the money. If we cause any trouble, hell, they just don’t need trouble, everything dries up. No more Don C. That number you call? It disappears, and I won’t exist anymor
e.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw her looking at him again. “All they gotta do is say it, and it happens.”

  “Hey, Don, I was just wondering,” she said defensively. “Hey, I don’t care about anything but doing what I do. I don’t care at all… about anything but just doing that Just doing my job, that’s all I want to do.”

  “Good,” he said. “It’s the best money you’ve ever made, and if this dries up you’ll never make this good again, not even selling dope.” He swung his legs bigger, sort of indicating a change of pace or subject matter. Not too far out in the bay some kind of craft, a big cabin cruiser, with red and green lights, plowed by and you could hear the frothy sound of the salt water spraying up from the bow and splashing back into itself. “How you like that new ‘Vette?”

  “How did you know I got a new car?”

  “I saw you drive up in it, honey,” he said, grinning.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, somehow not entirely convinced. “It’s great.” She tried to brighten up, really wanted him to know she wasn’t thinking about the other anymore. “It smells so damn new. I’d like to get a new car every time that smell wears off.”

  “Hell, you can buy that smell in a little spray can at the car wash,” he said.

  “Yeah, well I’ve tried that It’s nothing like the real thing.”

  “How’s it handle?”

  “You never driven a Corvette?”

  “Nope.” He was looking at her, grinning.

  “Well, you’ve been missing something, Donny. It’s better’n sex.” Pause. “Well, as good as, anyway.” Pause. “Nearly.”

  He laughed and ran his hand through his hair, and the muscles in his bare arm rippled when he did it, and she laughed too. She wished he would lean over and just pull down her top, just pull it down and put his mouth on her, and then she would lie back and he could have her right there on the damn dock. She didn’t think there was a sexier man alive than Don C.

  That’s what she was thinking when he said:

  “Okay, we’d better get out of here.”

  It took her a second to come down out of that imaginary thing that she would let him do.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” she said.

  “You’re supposed to have something for me in a couple of days, anyway, right?”

  “That’s right,” she said, putting down one hand to steady herself as she got up. He got up too, and jammed his hands into the pockets of his tight jeans while she fished in her purse for the keys to the Corvette. She always left first. “I’ll call you.”

  “Don’t worry about anything,” he reassured her. “I don’t think they’ll be back to see you. I’d even lay a little bet on it.”

  “You’d better keep your money,” she said, finding the keys. She was pretty sobered by his abrupt interruption of her fantasy. “See you later.”

  She turned and started walking back along the long pier. There were a few people as she got nearer the land, a guy crabbing, a couple sitting on the pier looking out to the bay. When she got to the light where the pier connected to the land, she turned around to look back. He was still there, and though he was a little more obscured by the night she could tell he wasn’t looking at her anymore. As a matter of fact, she thought she could see him pissing off the end of the pier.

  Chapter 34

  By the time Paula and Neuman had called in—their call was closely followed by Arnette’s—Graver had read several times through the intelligence reports on Victor Last as well as the crime analysis reports that detailed occurrences of MO’s fitting the description of Last’s known operations. The exercise was educational. He put a few things in his briefcase, grabbed his coat, reset the security system, turned out the lights, and pulled the door closed behind him.

  Riding down in the moaning elevator, he thought of how Besom’s death suddenly had galvanized the investigation. None of them, Neuman or Paula or himself, could imagine anything but the worst now. It still felt like he was living a bad dream when he thought of Burtell’s role. Even when he spoke to Ginette on the telephone earlier, he felt as if the expression on his face was unnatural. He simply found the whole distorted situation too bizarre to know how to behave. The hardest part now was trying to decide whether Dean was in danger, or whether he was the danger. The thought of it ate at Graver like an ulcer.

  His consternation was one of the main reasons he was keeping a detailed journal of the developments and of his reasons for his decisions and actions. He hoped that keeping a precise record somehow would help clarify the events. He felt like an alchemist performing rituals he didn’t wholly understand in the hope that magic would happen and with the magic would come knowledge and the fine gold of the truth.

  This journal remained in the computer in a password file while he kept a printed copy at home. His initial thought had been to keep the copy with him at all times, an impulse that was the emotional equivalent of the fetal position. Later a saner view prevailed, and he decided to keep the second copy at home. If the investigation became increasingly unstable, he would put a third copy in the safety deposit box at his bank. This was a flat-out effort to cover his ass, and even at that he had no idea how something like this would hold up in an inquiry, if it ultimately came to that.

  Outside, the night was warm and moist, and the smell of sticky weeds and bayou mud was laced with the pungent odor of the oil-stained asphalt that, even at this late hour, was still radiating an uncomfortable fever. Pausing, he looked toward the city across the bayou, at the high urban sierras of scattered light He recalled Arnette’s observation that trying to anticipate the “bad guys of this world” was like gazing at the stars, by the time you saw the light it was all over. You had to use your imagination, she said, to get the jump on the physics of iniquity.

  In her own inimitable way, of course, Arnette had been giving him good advice. Under the circumstances, he was dealing with this entirely too cautiously. In the normal course of events he was used to looking way out in front of the curve, having plenty of time to gather information methodically, to think it through. But this wasn’t the normal course of things, and it clearly was looking like a Darwinian lesson: adapt to change or perish. He had better start thinking imaginatively, or this was going to be over before he even knew what it was that had happened.

  The pager on his belt vibrated. He pushed back his coattail and looked down at the number. He didn’t recognize it But fewer than a dozen people had his new number, and he would want to talk to any of them. Without hesitating he turned around and walked back into the building to the pay telephone in the lobby. He set his briefcase on the floor, put a quarter in the slot, and dialed the number. It rang only once before someone answered.

  “This is Graver.”

  “Graver, good.” Victor Last sounded as controlled as ever, but there was an undercurrent of eagerness in his voice. “I’ve got something for you. I think you’re going to like this. Can you meet me now, at La Cita?”

  “Not there,” Graver said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m rather in the north part of the city,” Last said vaguely.

  “Okay. There’s a little Italian restaurant called La Facezia just off Montrose. Do you know where Renard is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, it’s very near that intersection, on Cerano.”

  “I’ll find it,” Last said and hung up.

  Graver pressed the lever on the pay phone, dropped another quarter in the slot, and dialed another number. When Lara answered on the third ring, her voice was husky with sleep.

  “Lara, this is Graver.”

  Pause.

  “Yes… hello…”

  “I’m sorry to have to wake you, but I need your help for a little while.”

  “Now?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “Yeah, okay, sure.” She was still a little fuzzy with sleep. “Uh… it’ll take me a few minutes to get dressed,” she said, sounding more awake now. “What do I wear?”

  “Anything.
I’ve got a meeting with someone at a small restaurant. I just want you to watch us from across the street.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s no big deal. I just need another pair of eyes.”

  There was a hesitation as if she were mulling over the questionable veracity of this claim. “Okay, where are you?”

  “At the office.”

  “Okay, I’ll be ready when you get here.”

  “Oh, Lara, bring a fairly good-sized shoulder bag.”

  He made good time since the traffic was sparse at this hour of night, and when he pulled up to her apartment fifteen minutes later, she was waiting for him at a small gate that led out of the courtyard that her apartment shared with three others. She was wearing a sleeveless summer shirtwaist dress of a dark color, maybe chocolate brown, and her thick hair was combed out, pulled back loosely, and clasped behind her head. She was carrying a shoulder bag which she held with one hand as she reached down to open the car door.

  “You’re quick,” Graver said, as she got in and closed the door.

  “Well, Jesus,” she said, “once I finally woke up… I don’t know why it took me so long to clear my head. Sorry.”

  A hint of fragrance—though not perfume, something softer, the way he imagined her body, her skin, must smell—wafted into the car with her, and as Graver pulled back onto the street she settled into her seat, putting her purse between them and turning slightly toward him, angling her legs.

  “I hope this dress is all right,” she said. “I thought, God, I shouldn’t wear anything with a light color.”

  “No, that’s just fine,” Graver said. The dress, of course, fit her perfectly, buttoning up the front, the several topmost buttons left undone, the belted waist snug above her hips. Just having her there beside him relieved some of his exhaustion.

  “You’ve been at the office all this time?” she asked. There was a note of concern in her voice, as if she sensed something important had taken place since she had seen him that afternoon.