Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  I was still munching when my cell phone vibrated. Trying to get the phone out of my pocket and juggle the dog, I managed to smear mustard on my shirt. Joe Billy was on the phone.

  “The only spot I could find in the garage was three floors below the hotel. I can’t activate the bugs from there or receive their signals.”

  “How about aboveground in the garage?”

  “Not in a commercial van. I even offered the valet a twenty.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ve got to get this buggy out on the street.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Out of the garage, cruising Fifth Avenue. Even the cell phone won’t work down there.”

  “Okay. Let me see what I can do. Call you back in a little while.”

  I explained the problem to Willie as we walked. “We need a street parking pass,” I remarked superfluously.

  “Doesn’t seem like a difficult problem,” he replied. He finished his dog and tossed the napkin in a corner trash barrel. We hailed a taxi and rode over to the Javits Convention Center.

  The street around the center was lined with television and radio service trucks, corner to corner, one after another. People were everywhere, coming and going, carrying equipment and boxes, rolling loaded dollies. One outfit was using a small forklift. There were cops around, but only a few, strolling and observing.

  “Even if we get a pass, we have to find a space near the hotel to park,” Willie said.

  “The space is tomorrow’s problem,” I told him. “The pass is today’s.”

  The passes were taped to the passenger’s window of the trucks.

  We intended to walk around the entire building, looking for a likely truck, but we were only halfway when our moment came. A crew was unloading the back of a truck using dollies. The passenger door was standing open; the cab was empty. Without a word Willie climbed into the cab and closed the door.

  I stood on the sidewalk with my back to the cab, watching the men loading boxes on a dolly at the back end of the truck.

  Two minutes later Willie joined me. “Got it,” he said. “Cut it off with my pocketknife.”

  We walked away. When Joe Billy motored by the corner we were on ten minutes later, we gave the pass to him. All he had to do was tape it in the window. And find a parking place near the hotel.

  Willie and I rode the subway out to Yankee Stadium to improve our minds. We bought tickets from a scalper on the sidewalk for a mere ten-buck premium and settled into seats way up high behind first base.

  Joe Billy called in the second inning. He had found a spot near the hotel. The bugs worked. He was now on his way back to Jersey. The game was a dilly, the Yanks versus Boston. Low clouds hung over the city all afternoon, but it didn’t rain.

  That evening Willie and I were outside the Hilton watching the limos roll up when it began drizzling. By then the police had the sidewalk in front of the joint cordoned off to keep riffraff like us at a safe distance. Willie and I were huddled under the umbrella when I saw Dorsey O’Shea get out of a long black limousine.

  She had apparently been shopping in Paris; the outfit she was wearing was definitely not off a rack. She strolled across the red carpet looking neither right nor left and disappeared into the maw of the hotel while the limo driver and bellman wrestled with her luggage, four hard brown suitcases and a smaller vanity case. I would have bet my last dollar those suitcases were leather.

  So that’s the way my life was shaking out. I was standing on the sidewalk in the rain under a too-small umbrella that I was sharing with an ex-con when the multizillionaire hot woman that I wasn’t good enough for marched into the Hilton on her way to a penthouse suite. They weren’t going to put her in one of the suites I had bugged, according to Sarah Houston. Oh, too bad! It would have been fun to hear what in the world she was up to.

  And yet, it wouldn’t. The last thing I needed was to listen to Dorsey and some schmuck getting it on in a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel suite overlooking Manhattan. And she would probably pick a schmuck, like that outside artist I ran off. After the episode with the porno movie dude, I knew Dorsey’s taste in men was undiscriminating, to say the least. Hell, she had even rolled in the hay with me. I rest my case.

  “Wanta go get a toddy?” Willie asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like an Irish coffee.”

  “How about Scotch on the rocks?”

  “Man, if you’re buying I’ll drink any damn thing except soda pop.”

  So away we went, two really cool unattached dudes with money in our jeans, out on the town in the Bad Apple on a Sunday night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Monday morning the sun illuminated a hazy, gauzy summer sky. The humidity was already high and going higher at seven in the morning when we set out from New Jersey for Manhattan. Joe Billy Dunn, Willie Varner, and I were in the van, and Sarah Houston was still sacked out in her motel room, which she announced last night was a far cry from her digs at the Hilton. Her observation almost broke my heart. Slumming can be so hard on a girl.

  “I have to go back to Washington this evening,” Joe Billy said. “I thought I’d hop a train this afternoon.”

  “Can’t you tell them you’re still sick?” He had called in sick before we left the motel.

  “No. And I haven’t earned enough vacation to get days off. It’s back to work or go looking for another job.” Fortunately Sarah had taken a week’s vacation, so I knew I could count on her. That is, if and when she woke up and got sufficiently caffeinated to be of some use.

  “Maybe we could take Joe Billy on at the lock shop,” Willie said to me. “He could sweep out and work the counter while we teach him how to duplicate keys and stuff.”

  “Maybe you could sorta cut class like I’m doing and hope everything shakes out okay,” I said, and turned the rearview mirror so I could see Dunn’s face. “After we’ve saved the free world from the forces of evil, all will be forgiven.”

  Joe Billy made a rude noise. “With your luck, Carmellini, you’re going to be still rotting in prison when they find a cure for the common cold.”

  “Hey, man, don’t be so negative,” Willie chided. “Too early for bad vibes.”

  “Take a train,” I told Joe Billy. “The Musketeers will soldier on without you.”

  “Mail me a little medal when you get your big ones, okay?”

  “Negativity sucks, you know?” Willie said, continuing his soliloquy. “You gotta think positive as you travel the road of life. Tommy gets prosecuted, they’ll probably let him plead to desecration of a body or obstructin’ justice, something like that. Hell, he’ll only be in eight, ten years max.”

  “Desecration of a body?”

  “Yeah. You know, fuckin’ a corpse, something along those lines. Tommy will make out all right. Have faith.”

  Easy enough for Willie to say, but mine was shaken an hour later, after we parked on a narrow east-west street just north of the Hilton. Willie was listening on the bugs, I was working the computer making a digital recording, and Joe Billy was munching a banana, three spies in the house of love, when Willie asked, “Who in hell are these people, anyway?”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “You listen a while. You tell me what we’re listenin’ to.” He handed me the earphones.

  A guy and a gal, talking about getting it on with another couple they knew from Tampa. The guy sounded lukewarm, the woman enthusiastic, trying to persuade him.

  “What suite are they in?”

  “Royston’s.”

  “Naw.”

  “Yep.”

  “These aren’t the right people. That couldn’t be Royston. His wife is in Washington.”

  “For Christ’s sake, I know that, Tommy. These are two goddamn swingers from California. They were talking about car dealerships in L.A. a minute ago. Who are they?”

  I called Sarah Houston, woke her up, sounded like. “We’ve got a problem. Get on your computer and find out who the hotel
put in these suites we bugged.”

  “Please.”

  “Get on your computer, please.”

  “Okay.”

  She called back twelve minutes later. “They’re registered as a Mr. and Mrs. Bronson Whitworth from Beverly Hills, California.”

  Joe Billy and Willie were both wearing earphones now. “It’s the woman she’s got the hots for,” Joe Billy said gleefully. “This one’s a switch-hitter.”

  “What suite did the hotel put Royston in?”

  I slapped one phone on my left ear in time to hear the woman say, “Bronnie, you can watch. You know how much you enjoy that.”

  He didn’t think the convention was the place.

  “Royston’s party is in Penthouse Ten, Twelve, and Fourteen,” Sarah said.

  “We bugged Fifteen, Seventeen, and Nineteen.”

  “A delegation from California got all three of those suites. Someone shuffled the parties around. There is a notation in Royston’s reservation about a good view. Royston must have demanded a view room.”

  “What suite is Dorsey O’Shea in?”

  In the silence that developed while she checked, I heard the woman in the suite cooing softly in my left ear.

  “They’re gettin’ it on,” Willie announced gleefully. “She’s goin’ to screw him around to her way of thinkin’.”

  “God almighty,” Joe Billy said with a smile on his face. “Wish we had put a little video camera in there.”

  “What is going on?” Sarah asked. Apparently she could hear the comments of my colleagues.

  “Gimme Dorsey’s room number, huh? I don’t want to run into her when I’m in the hotel trotting around.”

  “You’re going in again?”

  “Someone has to move the bugs. I planted everything we brought.”

  “Twelve twenty-one,” she said crisply. Then she added with a trace of envy in her voice, “She paid several hundred extra for the room. It must be a small suite.”

  “Next time around inherit some money, please,” I snarled, and snapped the cell phone shut. Damn women, anyway.

  Years ago I learned that prior planning prevents piss-poor results. I call it my P5R rule. Sarah could check to ensure the master code I had put in my plastic door pass the other day was still in use. Or I could put in the new code. Getting into the rooms was not the problem.

  However, getting in without arousing the suspicions of the people monitoring the hallway surveillance cameras was a problem. Unfortunately my suit, white shirt, and tie were in the motel room in New Jersey, and I didn’t want to drive two hours to retrieve them. Should have brought them along, just in case.

  I left Willie and Joe Billy to be audio voyeurs and got out on the sidewalk to walk and think about the problem.

  I didn’t have enough cash left to pay for a suit, and my Zack Winston credit card was bogus. I had high hopes that I would eventually be able to convince the powers that be that I had been merely defending myself and others since that Tuesday at the Greenbrier River safe house, but I didn’t want to try to explain credit card fraud. Some people get downright pissy about money.

  If I used my own personal credit card, would it light up alarms in Dell Royston’s universe?

  Maybe I should go back to Jersey and get the damned suit. We couldn’t move the van without losing the parking place, and I didn’t want to waste cash on a taxi.

  What the heck, I had plenty of time. I couldn’t go into those rooms until the people were out of them. The dinner hour would be the most likely time.

  Over on the East Side on Lexington I found a large men’s shop that opened at ten. Looking in the window, I thought I saw some sports coats on manikins that might fit. The problem is my shoulders and arms, which are so big that an off-the-rack coat that I can get around my shoulders doesn’t hang right around my small waist.

  I strolled along soaking in the sights, sounds, and smells of New York, had a bagel and cup of coffee at a small breakfast place, then wandered back up Lexington to arrive at the men’s shop a few minutes after ten.

  The owner was a former prizefighter, I surmised. Scars on his eyebrows, one permanently mashed ear, and huge shoulders and arms.

  “You have a pair of trousers and a sports coat that might fit me without alteration?”

  “You some kind of athlete, ain’t you?”

  “Rock climbing.”

  “Yeah. I got the stuff to fit guys who work out, take care of theirselves. Lot of pro athletes come here for their duds. Not the high dollar guys, but the guys who watch their wallets.”

  “That sticker in the window says you take credit cards.”

  “MasterCard and Visa.”

  He did have a sports coat that didn’t make me look like an ape, and the price was reasonable. I decided the risk of using my own credit card was small, so I surrendered my Visa card with TOMMY CARMELLINI embossed on the bottom. He ran it through the machine, I signed the invoice, and he bagged my purchases, which included a tapered shirt and subdued tie.

  Walking crosstown, I called Sarah. “Where are you?”

  “Eating breakfast,” she said.

  I told her what I needed. “I don’t want the entire surveillance camera system to crash, just temporarily go on the fritz floor by floor as I move around. I’ll call you on your cell.”

  “The motel doesn’t have a high-speed Internet connection. I dropped off the Net twice this morning and had to log back on and go back into the system. Takes about four minutes to get through.”

  “I don’t have the money to pick up another night at the Hilton, Sarah, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I don’t have the bucks either. No, I was merely warning you that there may be problems.”

  “Okay. Warning received.”

  “You’re going into Dorsey’s room, aren’t you?”

  “I haven’t decided,” I answered, a trifle evasively I suppose.

  “You will. I know it.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I think you have a thing for her, that’s all. Very unprofessional, I must say.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  She made a noise and hung up.

  I knew she wasn’t jealous—heck, I knew what she thought of me. Still, the fact that she guessed right on Dorsey bothered me a little. Maybe I was getting too predictable. If Sarah Houston could guess my next move, so could someone with lethal intentions. It was a thing to think on.

  Joe Billy Dunn shook hands with me and Willie and left about two in the afternoon. Just when I needed someone that Dorsey didn’t recognize to act as a lookout, there he went.

  After he closed the van door, Willie and I sat in the back of the thing—which was about the size of my closet at home—looking at each other. “Well, nothing ever goes perfectly,” the Wire remarked.

  I was in no mood for philosophy. I grunted unpleasantly.

  “How do you get yourself into these messes, anyway?” he asked.

  “Do you want to go play pool or get a beer or something?” I said. “There’s nothing to do until I get ready to move the bugs.”

  “You want me to go inside and act as lookout?”

  “No. I want you to sit right here in the van and watch the floor surveillance camera on that monitor”—I pointed to the one mounted high in the corner—“and communicate with me on the cell phone. The cameras will still work even when Dorsey diddles with the computer downstairs.”

  “I could do that, I reckon,” Willie Varner admitted as he picked at a scab on his arm. “I just don’t want to put myself in harm’s way. Can’t handle it, the shape I’m in. I’m already runnin’ on two gallons of other people’s blood. Been gettin’ these urges to read romance novels, drink white wine, and listen to white music—I figure the blood was from some white women. Republicans, probably. I’m all crippled up from that cuttin’, still wearin’ bandages, and here I am workin’ anyway. You know I oughta be on that Social Security disability, gettin’ a little check in the mail, takin’ life eas
y till I’m feelin’ myself again.”

  “Take a hike, goddamn it.”

  He went, leaving me in splendid solitude in the back of a stolen FBI van parked beside a fancy hotel in New York that I couldn’t afford to stay in. Ah, the glamour of the clandestine life. And to think I could be heisting jewels on the French Riveria!

  I felt like a fool strolling in the side entrance of the hotel in my new duds. Dorsey O’Shea was in there somewhere, and I certainly didn’t want to run into her.

  I had waited until six in the evening—the cocktail hour in civilized climes. Willie was out in the van; he’d come back an hour ago well hydrated with beer. He didn’t have a set of Hilton clothes, and he would have drawn security men like flies if he had walked in there in his jeans and ratty T-shirt. Not that I could have used him as a lookout even if he had the right clothes—Dorsey might recognize him. She might recognize me, too, but putting more people she knew in the building made no sense. Willie had the penthouse corridor surveillance camera on the monitor when I left the van.

  The three penthouse suites where we had our bugs were empty just now; I had listened carefully before leaving the van and locking Willie in. Knowing Dorsey, she would be someplace swilling white wine with the beautiful people while nattering about outside artists and spiritual advisers.

  I dialed Sarah on my cell phone. “I’m going up to the penthouse now.”

  “Give me one minute, then call me back.”

  I paused just inside the entrance and surveyed the lobby. The cocktail bar was in a slightly raised area on the right, and it was packed. Every seat was taken, and people were standing around and talking loudly. I didn’t see Dorsey. Nor did I see Dell Royston. I had certainly seen enough photos of him through the years to be able to recognize him in the flesh, I thought. For a brief second I wondered if the California car dealer and his AC/DC wife were in this crowd. Might be.

  I glanced at my watch, then dialed Sarah again.

  “Coast is clear,” she whispered conspiratorially.

  “Terrific.”

  I walked on through the lobby, past the desk to the elevators. The penthouse had its own elevator. A group was coming out. I held my breath, half expecting to find myself face-to-face with Dorsey, but my luck held. The person who did step out was Dell Royston, surrounded by four guys in expensive suits. They didn’t even glance at me.