by Jeff Lindsay
What had he called it? A “nice anonymous” card. I’d thought nothing of it at the time, so I tried to make up for that lapse now. Brian could not possibly have a credit rating of any kind; he had no fixed address—for that matter, I wasn’t sure he even had a fixed identity. That obviously meant that the card was either fake or stolen. Most financial companies would look on this with very strong disapproval. But as evil and mercenary as they are, most credit card companies stop just a wee bit short of actually killing people who abuse them, even if unwillingly.
Could it be the hypothetical person Brian had possibly stolen the card from? That was a little more likely—but then why were there two of him?
I thought deeper. Aside from this faux card, Brian had a sudden excess of cash, enough to hire Kraunauer. Where do sudden large chunks of money come from, and what connection could they have to the corpses in my room? I stood and looked at them again, first on the bed, then in the closet, and then I went back and stood over One, where he lay so peacefully on my bed.
All of us who work in law enforcement are taught to shun racial profiling, so I tried not to leap to any conclusions that might offend anyone, no matter their ethnic background. But it was not possible to avoid the observation that the dead men looked very much like they might be Mexican or Central American. And having said that, one could not help adding, with all possible political correctness, that if indeed they were Mexican or Central American, and since they had actually been violently murdered, and it had happened right here in Miami—and if, additionally, there truly were significant amounts of money lurking in the background, then it was at least possible—possible, mind you, no more than a chance that had very little to do with the men’s ethnic identity—it was, as I say, possible that drugs might be involved somewhere along the line.
Brian would certainly have no moral scruples about the drug trade. In truth, he had no actual morals at all. He had all the advantages I enjoyed of being heartless, soulless, empty inside, and devoid of human feelings—but he was not burdened with any of my disadvantages of artificially grafted-on standards. The business of buying and selling drugs would seem like a perfect opportunity for profit, and even self-expression, considering the nature of the competition. He might well have gotten involved in some way. And knowing Brian, he could just as easily have done something that made someone in this ultraviolent world just a trifle peeved.
That didn’t explain who my new friends were. But it did offer the first clear explanation of how and why, and it had the added virtue of being very easy to check.
I picked up my phone and called.
After only three rings, Brian answered. “Brother,” he said with low-quality artificial bonhomie. “How art thou?”
“Not bad,” I said. “A great deal better than my uninvited company.”
“Company?” he said. “Is this wise in your present circumstance?”
“Terribly unwise,” I said. “Especially since they are both exceptionally dead.”
For a long moment Brian said nothing.
“Should I add that I have no idea who they are?” I said at last. “And that I also didn’t do it?”
“Good additions,” Brian said softly, and there was a dangerous edge to his voice I hadn’t heard before. “Describe them.”
“Both about five-foot-six and stocky,” I said. “The nearer one is mid-thirties, dark hair, olive skin, pockmarked face.”
Brian hissed. “The left wrist,” he said. “Please examine it.”
I stepped over to the bed and flipped the left arm off the chest. There was a tattoo, about four inches long. It showed a bleeding Jesus wrapped in the coils of a cobra. “Interesting tattoo,” I said into the phone.
“Jesus with a snake?” Brian said.
“Yes,” I said. “You know this guy?”
“Stay put,” he said. “I’m on my way.”
“Brian, there are cops in the lobby,” I said. But he had already hung up.
I looked at my phone and wondered whether I should call Brian back. I decided not to. He probably wouldn’t answer, and anyway, I felt that somehow the phone had let me down. I didn’t trust it anymore.
But I had to do something. “On my way” could mean a few minutes—but it also might mean half an hour or more. I still had no idea what was going on here, but whatever it was, I didn’t think I could simply stand in my room and wait for the next piece of the puzzle to fall into place. The stakes were very high, and the next piece might well land on my head. Clearly I needed to get out of this room as quickly as possible.
On the other hand, I also needed to meet Brian, and he was coming here. But once again, my newly revived brain rose to the challenge, and this time I wasn’t even sitting straight. Brian would arrive and, just as I had, he would see the cop car out front and proceed to the rear door.
I left the room, making double sure the door latched securely behind me, and the Do Not Disturb sign was still in place. I walked to the stairway. I went all the way down to the ground floor and stood to one side of the door, so I could see out into the parking area without being too easily seen myself.
Ten minutes passed. A woman in a business suit walked by outside and climbed into her car—or at any rate, I assumed it was her car. If not, she was a very smooth car thief.
Five more minutes went by. Two teenage kids came clattering down the stairs from the second floor and slammed out the door to the lobby without paying me any attention.
I looked out the window in the back door. I couldn’t see very much, but none of it was moving. I wondered whether Brian had met with some kind of accident—or, all things considered, more likely an on-purpose. How long should I wait for him? Sooner or later something unpleasant was almost certain to happen. The cops would decide to come up to my room and push me around, or the maid would come to change the sheets. It was even possible that whoever had sent the two Strangers would send another one. Failing that, they might come around in person to make another corpse out of anyone hanging around in my room—or in the stairwell, for that matter. Where the hell was Brian?
I looked out the window again. No sign of him; nothing but a white van. It rolled slowly closer, until I could see the side of it. In big black letters, it said, ATWATER BROTHERS CARPET.
I blinked. Atwater again? Really?
The van backed up into a position that blocked the door where I stood, and a moment later Brian appeared. He wore a pair of tattered gray coveralls and carried a heavy canvas tool bag, and when he put his hand on the door he saw me, and nodded.
I opened the door and Brian stepped through. “Brother,” he said. “We may not have a lot of time.”
“That thought had occurred to me,” I said. “Along with a few others of a more personal nature.”
He showed me his teeth and took my elbow. “Time for recriminations later,” he said. “Right now there’s work to do.”
I nodded and let him hurry me along up the stairs and down the hall to Room 324. I opened the door and we went in, and Brian stepped directly over to look at the body on the bed.
“Octavio,” he said. “As I feared.”
“You do know him,” I said.
He nodded. “He was an ally. Perhaps even a friend.”
“Friendship is such a fragile thing,” I said.
“Like life itself,” Brian said, looking down at Octavio with an expression that might almost have been regret, if I hadn’t known Brian so well.
“I don’t want to intrude on your grief,” I said. “But—”
His head snapped up and he looked at me, all traces of expression completely gone. “Yes,” he said briskly. “You said there were two?”
“I did,” I said. I motioned him over to the closet, and he pushed the door open and knelt beside Stranger Two for no more than three seconds. Then he stood and said, “I don’t know him.”
“Well,” I said. “Even so…”
“Right,” Brian said. “Let’s get them out of here.” He reached into his
canvas bag and took out a rolled-up gray cloth something. “Put this on,” he said, tossing it to me.
I unrolled coveralls that matched his own, and pulled them on over my clothes. By the time I had them buttoned up, Brian had rolled up the bedspread, with Octavio snugly inside. “If you would, brother?” he said politely. “Take that end, please.”
I picked up the near end of the bundle. It felt like the feet. Brian picked up the other end, nodding toward the door, and together we clumsied Octavio out, into the hall, and down the stairs. For some reason dead bodies always seem to be heavier than live ones, and Octavio was no exception. He was surprisingly heavy for such a small corpse, and by the time we had him down the stairs to the back door I was thoroughly winded, and had acquired a brand-new cramp in my back muscles.
Brian bumped the door open with his backside, and we carried Octavio the short distance to the back of the van. Showing surprising strength, Brian held the bundle with one hand while he opened the van’s rear door, and then lifted the body up and in while I came forward with my end. I looked casually around as Brian pulled the bedspread out and slammed the doors shut. I saw nothing at all except a few dozen parked cars.
“All right,” Brian said. “Next?”
We went back up the stairs and repeated the process with Stranger Two. Luck was with us, and we saw no one—and hopefully no one saw us, either. In any case, it was only a few more minutes before we had the second body in the van. I stretched and wondered whether I would ever again have feeling in my back that wasn’t pain.
Brian slammed the van’s back doors, locked them, and nodded at me. “One more trip,” he said.
“Really?” I said. “I only counted two bodies.”
“Your things,” he said, moving past me to the hotel door. “It might be best if you check out now?” He turned and showed me a small and knowing smirk. “Even better if you do it by phone,” he said.
“You may be right,” I said.
He nodded. “It had to happen someday.”
We went up together, pausing cautiously on the third-floor landing, and again at the door to my room—or ex-room, to be more precise. There was no sign of anything or anyone, and I went on in. It took me less than a minute to gather my meager possessions, and we trudged back down the stairs and out to the parking lot. I walked past the van and threw my suitcase into the trunk of my rental car while Brian climbed into the driver’s seat of the van.
“Follow me,” he said, and then added, “Not too far.”
“All right,” I said. I got into the rental car and followed Brian as he nosed slowly out of the lot.
The police car was still parked by the front door, and there was no sign of its occupants. We crawled by and out onto U.S. 1, and a few blocks up, Brian made a U-turn and drove south. I followed along, wondering what he had gotten himself into, and why it should be my problem.
A few minutes south, Brian pulled into a strip mall that held, among other things, an all-night doughnut shop, and I nodded. Nobody would notice my rental car here. I parked it in a spot close enough to the doughnut shop that some of the bright fluorescent lights spilled onto the car, and walked to the far corner of the lot, where Brian sat in the van, engine idling. I climbed into the passenger seat, and he drove back out onto U.S. 1 again, heading south.
Neither of us spoke for several minutes, until finally, as we passed Sunset Drive, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’m very sorry about your friend,” I said.
Brian sighed. “Yes,” he said.
I stared at him expectantly, but he said no more, and I was miffed enough to feel that I shouldn’t have to drag it out of him, so I was silent, too. We drove still farther south, almost all the way down to Homestead. Then Brian turned off U.S. 1 and headed west, inland, turning several times. We straightened out at last on a long stretch of badly maintained pavement that led due west. The sun was going down, and it shone directly in my eyes, so I turned sideways and looked out the window. There wasn’t a lot to see in this old residential area. The houses gradually got older and smaller and farther apart, and then finally they disappeared altogether and we were driving along a dirt road through a landscape of scrub, canals, and saw grass. We had come to the very edge of the Everglades. I looked at Brian, hoping he might be ready to explain all, but he looked straight ahead at the road and the setting sun.
After another ten minutes of awkward silence, Brian finally turned off the dusty road and drove us through a gate in an old and sagging chain-link fence. The gate itself hung forlornly from one rusty hinge. There was an ancient faded sign on it, but I couldn’t see what it said.
A hundred yards or so past the gate we came to the lip of a large old quarry filled with milky water, and Brian put the van into park. He turned the engine off, and we continued our silence for a moment. The engine ticked a few times as it cooled, and not too far away an entire symphonic chorus of insects began their evening concert.
And then Brian shook his head, took a deep breath, and turned to me.
“And now, brother,” he said, in a dead and very serious voice, “I’m afraid I have to tell you that you have placed us both in grave danger.” He leaned closer. “I need to know who you told about your hotel room.”
TEN
For just a moment, I could do nothing but stare at Brian and blink my eyes. I seemed to be doing that a lot lately. Was it a sign that I was really losing it, sliding off the edge into permanent stupidity? Or was it merely an indication that I had never been quite as clever as I’d thought I was?
In any case, I stared, and I blinked. Brian’s question caught me completely off guard; Who had I told? It was an absurd question on so many levels that I didn’t know where to start. I had already concluded that someone had traced Brian, not me, because of his credit card. That seemed so obvious to me that it didn’t even bear mention—how could he fail to figure that out? On top of that, Octavio was his friend, not mine, so his death meant nothing to me—it was clearly aimed at Brian.
But most basic of all, there was absolutely nobody left for me to tell, not about hotel rooms or anything else. Aside from Brian himself, nobody would talk to me.
After a long pause that was just right for conveying dramatically my sense of dumbfounded surprise at his question, I finally managed to yank my powers of speech out of the ditch and back onto the conversational highway. “Brian,” I said, “did you truly think somebody killed Octavio to get at me?”
Almost as if he was working hard to make me feel better, Brian responded with a gratifying gape-and-blink of his own. I thought it lasted much longer than mine had, but it may be that such things seem longer to watch than to perform. But I gave him all the time he needed, and he finally closed his jaw and slumped over just a little. “I did,” he said. “I actually thought that. Silly me.” He looked at me and shook his head. “I seem to be doing some very stupid things lately.”
“There’s a lot of that going around,” I said.
“But then how did they find me so quickly?” he said, with truly puzzled dismay.
It began to occur to me that, in spite of his many other fine qualities, Brian was not quite as adept as I was at life in the cyberworld. “It’s just a guess,” I said. “But I think they traced your credit card.”
He looked at me with such blank astonishment that I revised my opinion: Brian didn’t have a clue about life in the cyberworld. “Can they really do that?” he said. “That card was clean—I’ve had it for only a few weeks.”
“Throw it away,” I said. “Put it in the quarry here, with Octavio and—Oh. Are we putting them in the quarry? I just assumed—”
“We are,” Brian said. “The water has a very high lime content. Nothing left in a couple of months.” I didn’t ask him how he knew that—but I did file it away for future reference. Assuming I actually had a future, which seemed to be somewhat in doubt at the moment. Brian frowned, and looked very puzzled. “But seriously, I thought a credit card was…well, you know. Do
n’t the banks guard the data pretty carefully?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “It would take me almost a full ten minutes to hack in and trace somebody.”
“Oh, dear,” he said, and he shook his head again, very slowly. “I can see that there are some rather glaring holes in my education.” He leaned back in the seat and furrowed his brow, looking like he was trying to remember if he’d done anything else that might come back and bite him. “Perhaps I spent too much time learning to get rid of bodies, and not enough on the more pedestrian side of things.”
“So it seems,” I said. “Let me suggest that for the time being, cash is probably safest? Um—you do have plenty of cash, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, not a problem,” he said absently, apparently still cataloging the sins of his recent past.
“Perhaps this would be a good time to tell me where it came from,” I said. “And who is trying to kill you to get it back. Did you take their drugs, too? Or just the money?”
Brian jerked upright and looked at me, and then nodded. “Sometimes I forget that you’re a trained investigator,” he said. “Of course you would figure that out.”
“Elementary, dear brother,” I said.
“I’m not sure how much to tell you,” he said slowly, obviously stalling while he thought about it.
“Tell me enough to keep me alive,” I said.
“Yes. That much, at least.” He inhaled deeply, then blew the breath out again noisily. “Well,” he said. “As you have guessed, I took a little jaunt into the drug trade. Nothing really out of the way, just a new venue for my well-practiced talents.” He smiled modestly. “But at a much higher pay grade.”
“All right,” I said encouragingly.
Brian shrugged. “It’s an old and tawdry story,” he said. “I was doing very well out of it, financially speaking, and rather enjoying my work.” He gave me his terrible smile, but this time there seemed to be real pleasure behind it. “Lots and lots of little jobs. A surplus of…encounters?”
I nodded. Brian shared my sense that actually speaking aloud about what we did was somehow indelicate, but we both knew what he meant. He had been permanently and painfully removing people who his employers considered obstacles. It seemed like a wonderful job, and apparently quite lucrative. “Freelance?” I asked. “Or working for one particular outfit?”
