Bird Dogs: A John Crane Novella

by Mark Parragh

  “Write poems, build empires, make shiny baubles,” Alexa said. “Don’t be like him, John.”

  “I’m nothing like him.”

  “No, I don’t think you are.”

  Tamarind wrapped the bracelet around the blonde’s wrist, stroked the inside of her forearm. They leaned close to each other, their body language intimate.

  “My God, I’d love to spoil that moment,” Alexa said. “If I’d thought ahead, I could have set something up.”

  Realization flooded across Crane. It wasn’t just the hotel staff. “You paid them! You bribed that waiter to mess up his lunch. And the dry cleaner!” Crane loved it. He wished he’d thought of it himself. “How did you do the cab driver?”

  “Oh, that was all him.”

  Crane laughed. For a moment, he pictured her following the gigolo around South America, canceling his appointments, setting early morning wake-up calls with the front desk, pulling every high school prank she could imagine to puncture his air of effortless cool.

  “Pay attention,” Alexa murmured. “They’re moving!”

  She was right. Tamarind initialed the check and offered the blonde his arm. She molded herself to his side as they crossed the lobby to the elevators.

  Crane and Alexa followed and took another car up. On Crane’s floor, they followed the murmur of voices down the hallway. Around the corner they heard the electronic beep of a key card, then a door closing.

  “Well, we know where they’ll be for a while,” said Alexa.

  “Our time is our own,” he answered.

  Crane walked slowly down the hall to his own door. At some point he realized he’d taken her hand and led her with him.

  “John.”

  He stopped, turned, and then she kissed him, fierce and long. He ran his fingers through her hair. Then she pushed him back against the wall. His free hand fumbled with his key card. The door fell away behind him, and she let out a low, animal sound as they were pulled toward the bed as if by gravity.

  They fell together, grasping and pulling at clothing. When they touched it felt electric, a pure hunger of skin for skin. Who had seduced whom, Crane wondered for a moment. Which of them had won this game?

  They could sort that out later.

  Afterward, they lay together in a tangle of sheets. Her head rested on his chest as he stroked her hair. Alexa breathed softly as if nearly asleep, but he could sense her alertness.

  “I’ve been dying to ask you something,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Did you steal his phone?”

  She giggled and kissed him. “Of course I did. It’s over there in my bag. You held it in your hands before.”

  “Oh good,” he said. “If he’d really lost it, I couldn’t steal it myself.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Why are they taking the 3?” asked Alexa. “It’s nothing but toll booths. Just take the damn 205!”

  In the passenger seat, Crane smiled to himself. Alexa had still been in his bed the next morning when a bellboy had called her to say that Senorita Calvo had asked for her car. They’d gotten dressed, grabbed some things, and hurried down in time to see the Bentley pull away, the top down and the gigolo at the wheel.

  They’d followed in Alexa’s Volkswagen Gol hatchback. Crane found a map in the glove compartment. The National Route 3 led south out of Buenos Aires and just kept going. Here it was a modern six-lane highway. It would narrow to a rough, two-lane track farther south. If they followed it long enough, it would eventually take them all the way to Tierra del Fuego, just five hundred miles across the Drake Passage from Antarctica. Hopefully they weren’t going that far.

  They weren’t. Much to Alexa’s satisfaction, the Bentley exited after the Canuelas toll plaza. They drove through the suburbs and then headed southeast on the 205, toward Lobos. Soon they were in quiet ranching and farming country. The highway was two lanes here—a straight, black line slicing through the pampas. They passed great stretches of pale gold grassland punctuated only by fields, fenced pasture, and long gravel roads leading back to distant ranch houses.

  It was beautiful country to drive through in a Bentley convertible, Crane thought. In the Gol, perhaps not so much. It was a cheap car with a 1.6 liter four-cylinder engine that barely cracked one hundred horsepower—Crane had looked it up on his phone. If the gigolo spotted them, the Bentley would leave them in the dust.

  “You should back off a little,” said Crane. “Less traffic here. We don’t want them to make us.”

  Alexa sniffed. “In this? This is the most popular car in the country. There are millions of them. I could rear-end them in this car and they wouldn’t notice it.”

  “We’re not going to lose them out here. Humor me.”

  “Fine.” She let the Bentley pull farther ahead. They drove on under an endless blue sky spattered with bright clouds.

  Crane glanced at the black plastic box on the backseat. The gigolo’s phone stuck straight up out of a docking port in the top. The phone’s screen was dead. Alexa had wisely turned it off as soon as she took it. If they turned it on someplace with network coverage, it would immediately report its location. Crane had planned to make a trip out into the country even if Tamarind wasn’t leading them there. He checked his own phone and saw he still had two bars of signal.

  They passed through Lobos and kept going. They were more than an hour outside of Buenos Aires now, but the Bentley kept leading the way deeper into the countryside.

  “How’d you come to be a detective?” Crane asked.

  Alexa shrugged. “It was work, and I was good at it. I started with divorce cases. I took pictures of drunk men hanging off women in bars. If a man came around they would be on their guard, but I always got the good pictures. For me, they would show off, but I didn’t like it. It was…sleazy. Finally, my boss suggested it would be easier if we just let the men hang off me. So I quit and went out on my own. I took missing persons cases. Plenty of those in Mexico.”

  She fixed her eyes ahead on the Bentley and drove silently for a time.

  “I never found a damn one,” she said at last. “Not alive anyway. Then this job came along. It’s better.” She paused, and he could see she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “And you? What did you do before?” she asked.

  “I worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”

  “Right.”

  “Seriously!”

  “Okay, and before you were a weatherman. A soldier? A cop?”

  “I was a philosophy major.”

  “Really? Why philosophy?”

  “Because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. So, that being the nature of the problem, philosophy seemed like a good place to start.”

  She clearly didn’t believe a word. Which Crane found funny since it was true as far as it went.

  “So did you learn what the meaning of life is?”

  “No, you had to get your PhD for that,” he said. “Hold on, they’re turning.”

  Ahead, the Bentley’s brake lights flashed. Alexa slowed. A low stone wall ran alongside the road here, with deep green, manicured grass beyond it. Then the Bentley turned through an open cast iron gate.

  “Do I follow?” Alexa asked.

  “No. Cruise past, nice and slow.”

  The sign on the gate read Estancia de Santa Esmeralda. Crane watched the Bentley pull up before a sprawling Spanish style mansion and a liveried valet run to meet it. The lawn was scattered with Land Rovers and horse trailers. Beyond the main building, Crane saw horses in white-fenced riding rings.

  Then the Volkswagen rolled past the gates and she sped up again.

  “He took her to a place like this too,” Alexa said. “Chilito,” she added under her breath. “We have to warn her. Tell her who he is.”

  “We will,” said Crane, “but not yet.” Alexa’s job was to wreck Tamarind’s schemes, but his job was to follow him to bigger players. They couldn’t knock him off his game just yet.

&
nbsp; “When?”

  “Soon,” Crane answered. “But for now I need him thinking everything is fine.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Alexa.

  Crane checked his phone. “No Service,” it said.

  He showed her the screen. “Find a place to pull over.”

  She pulled onto the shoulder and stopped the car. A half dozen curious cows watched them from behind a fence.

  Crane leaned back into the backseat and powered up Tamarind’s phone. Then he switched on the box it was plugged into. The box beeped a series of tones. An LED lit yellow, then turned green and the display read, “Connected.”

  “You may have every waiter and bellboy in Buenos Aires in your pocket,” said Crane, “but I have these cool toys.”

  Then he sat back, enjoyed the scenery, and let the gadget do its work.

  CHAPTER 10

  Back in his room at the Palacio Duhau, Crane sat on his bed with a laptop and went through the data from Tamarind’s phone. Alexa had taken the phone itself back to her room, but he had what he needed.

  Crane wasn’t familiar with the iPhone’s data formats. Josh’s people would be able to learn much more from it than he could. They’d be able to track his movements, make sense of the headers on his emails. But there were some things Crane could read. Josh’s people had included a developer’s kit with a phone simulator. It let him interact with a virtual copy of the phone the way a regular user would. So Crane dug through the gigolo’s calendar, recent phone calls, text messages.

  He must be going mad without his phone, Crane thought. The thing was packed with dialed numbers, incoming calls, texts, notifications. He had an app that tracked his weight—up a couple pounds over the last month; that was probably worrying him. His to-do list was full of entries like “Get shoes w Zegna slacks,” and “Lk up romantic restaurants Bangkok.”

  But what Crane really wanted to see was one particular text message—the one Tamarind had sent from Villa 31. The one Crane had watched him send as soon as he got his security token back from the puntero who had held it for him. He scrolled through the stored messages, looking for the right date and time. If Crane was right, that message would consist of a six-digit code Tamarind had read from the token.

  And there it was. A text that read simply, “104485.” The time and date matched. The message had been sent to a contact listed as “Birchard Hayes.”

  Crane switched to the contacts app. The entry for Birchard Hayes included only a phone number. The number didn’t look right. The country code was +425. Crane looked it up online. There was a good reason why he didn’t recognize it. It was a Zone 4 code, from a group of codes assigned to the UK and a handful of countries in Central and Northern Europe. But +425 was an unassigned code. It shouldn’t work at all. And the rest of the number’s format didn’t parse either.

  Crane rolled over to the nightstand and picked up the landline phone there. He dialed an outside line and punched in the number, expecting an intercept telling him his call could not be completed as dialed. Instead, the call connected immediately.

  “Your interest has been noted. Thank you,” a synthetic female voice said. It repeated the same phrase in French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese—all the official languages of the United Nations, Crane noted with bemusement. Then it beeped at him and disconnected.

  So whoever or whatever Birchard Hayes was, it had an impossible and untraceable phone number. One to which Tamarind had texted code numbers from an equally untraceable security token. And not just once. He’d texted different codes to the number more than a dozen times. And then the voice calls had begun.

  Crane counted more than fifty calls to “Birchard Hayes” since he had retrieved the token. Not a single call had been answered. Crane assumed he had reached the same recording Crane himself had just gotten. But Tamarind kept calling. Hardly an hour went by without another unanswered call. Tamarind was going mad trying to get through to a number that shouldn’t exist, and wasn’t accepting incoming calls.

  It meant something. Crane had no idea what, but he had an idea of how to find out.

  That night, Crane called Josh Sulenski. From the background noise and Josh’s shouting, it sounded as if he was having a party.

  “John! How are you? We’re on the boat! It’s sweet! You should be here! I poached Zuckerberg’s chef! How’s Argentina?” The words tumbled out of him, thoughts coming faster than he could speak, one on top of the next. Crane often imagined Josh’s ideas piling up around his feet and drifting about like dust bunnies.

  “It’s fine. I’ve got an iPhone dump to send you.”

  “Excellent! I’ve got some new plist decoders I want to try out. You really have to try these Earl Grey caviar martinis, John. Remind me when you get back.”

  “I’ll do that. Look, I found something in his call records.”

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Does the name Birchard Hayes mean anything to you?”

  There was a brief pause. “You mean the president?”

  “President?”

  “Rutherford B. Hayes,” said Josh. “The B. was for Birchard.”

  “How in God’s name do you know that?”

  “Duh. Pub trivia at Stanford. I know all the presidents’ middle names.”

  “So you’ve got a skill to fall back on if the whole Internet billionaire thing doesn’t work out. That’s great. Our guy’s placed more than fifty calls to a Birchard Hayes since he got here. They have a phone number that shouldn’t exist. And they never answer.”

  “Never?”

  “Not a single completed call.”

  “What do you suppose that’s about?”

  “Good question. Can you get that name whitelisted on the company credit card?”

  “Sure. What’s your play?”

  “If he wants to talk to a Birchard Hayes so badly, let’s give him one and see what he has to say.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The next morning, Crane and Alexa drove out once more to the Estancia de Santa Esmeralda. This time Crane drove a Maserati GT convertible while Alexa lounged in the passenger seat, enjoying the sudden taste of luxury. Crane had fitted them out in high fashion. Alexa’s plan might have been to be nondescript, but Birchard Hayes was meant to be noticed.

  They turned through the Estancia’s ornate gates and drove up the long, curving driveway. On the way up, they passed a group of horses on the riding path that paralleled the drive, and Crane noticed that Tamarind was among them. He wore polo gear, and a mallet lay across his saddle, a white helmet dangling from its head. Crane saluted the group as they drove by.

  “Well, he’s still here,” he said. “Polo. I guess that’s in character.”

  “I need to find the woman,” said Alexa. “I have to warn her before she’s in too deep.”

  “Not yet,” said Crane. “I need him thinking he’s running the show.”

  She gave him a look.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll tell her.”

  He handed the Maserati over to a valet, and they strolled into the lobby like catwalk models.

  The desk clerk confirmed that Mr. Hayes’s assistant had called to book a suite. Would he care to participate in tomorrow’s polo matches? Crane said he would, but admitted he hadn’t ridden in years. The clerk helpfully arranged a horse and tack for him, and signed him up for a practice session that afternoon.

  As soon as the porter dropped off their bags and left them alone, Alexa fell laughing onto the bed. “I need to renegotiate my expense account! Look at this!”

  “Don’t get attached,” said Crane. “We need to be out there being visible. I’ll need you to page me.”

  Alexa gave him a sly look. “Oh, he won’t be out to notice you this time of day. He’ll be having a nap after his ride.”

  “Will he?”

  “Oh yes, everybody does this time of day.” She slid over invitingly. “He won’t be out and about for at least an hour. Maybe more.”

  “Well, I suppose we should stay i
n character.”

  “And what would this Birchard Hayes do on finding himself in this luxurious room with a beautiful woman?”

  Crane slipped the lock on the door and crossed to the bed. “I’m not sure. Let’s try a few things and see what feels right.”

  Crane felt the rhythm of the hoof beats, put his mallet into position. The ball was a white dot coming up fast. He leaned over, swung.

  He overshot the ball by at least a foot.

  Damn it. He ticked the reins, and the horse obediently swung off to the left. Behind him, Ramon came up to take his shot.

  Crane wore brown leather knee boots over white breeches, a shirt in the Estancia’s club colors, plus leather knee guards and a helmet. He looked the part at least. He’d understood the basics well enough. Polo had four-man teams, a field three hundred yards long by 160 wide, lined by low, white sideboards. There were seven-minute periods called chukkas. It wasn’t that complicated.

  He also understood the safety rules—he’d paid very close attention to those. The most important was to never cross the ball’s line of travel lest you collide with someone charging in for a shot. Collisions between fast-moving horses could be disastrous. It was a rare occurrence, but players had been killed on the field.

  But quality equipment and an understanding of the concepts weren’t proving much help in actually hitting a small white ball with a long mallet from the back of a galloping horse. Crane hadn’t ridden since summer camp when he was twelve. The staff had quickly realized he was lacking in basic skills and had paired him up with the other rank beginner. Ramon was a bank executive from Buenos Aires. Crane gathered he was moving up the career ladder and learning the game to help him move in the right circles. The shared difficulty had made them natural allies.

  Ramon’s shot wasn’t much better than Crane’s. He got his mallet onto the ball, but chipped it off to the side. He swore, then waved Crane in to take his turn.

  “Sport of kings,” said Crane as they passed.