Bob Morris_Zack Chasteen 02 (30 page)

“The NPU? Why them?”

“Retaliation for arresting Kenya Oompong and her mother. If you remember, it was Jay Skingle who led the charge to get us to crack down on the NPU.”

“You favor one over the other?”

“The garrison drug lords aren’t shy about shooting each other because no one really cares about how many of them die. Killing Skingle and Connigan though, two Americans, that would bring down more heat on them than it was worth. They wouldn’t want any part of it,” said Dunwood. “So me, I’d put it on the NPU. Kenya Oompong might not be tied directly to it, but with all her other problems—stolen guns, the bomb-making material—she’ll be out of commission for a while.”

“No third-party possibilities?”

Dunwood shook his head, said, “No, what about you? Any thoughts on it?”

“No,” I said, although I had thoughts aplenty.

Dunwood’s colleagues called for him from across the parking lot. Before he stepped away, he reached into a pocket, pulled out a plastic evidence bag, and handed it to me. Monk’s Super Bowl ring, the one Dunwood’s men had found at the airport.

“Investigators are finished with it,” Dunwood said. “Thought his family would like it back.”

“Appreciate it,” I said.

I got into the Mercedes. I put the key in the ignition, and then I just sat there. I pictured this: Ramin the Gentle rising up
in the backseat of the BMW, just like he’d risen up behind me, and putting a pistol to the heads of Skingle and Connigan.

Was that the way it had happened? Had Freddie Arzghanian trumped everyone? Had he figured out a way to cut to the chase—simple, straightforward, problem solved, no outlay of cash?

I thought about how that might have worked. Or not.

Then I opened the evidence bag and took out Monk’s Super Bowl ring, held it in the palm of my hand. It seemed none the worse for wear—hardly scuffed, a heavy thing, diamonds sparkling. I picked it up, resisted the temptation to slip it on my finger, just to see how it might feel to wear a Super Bowl ring. I admired it, so bright and shiny; the inside of the band, smooth and unblemished.

I kept looking at it.

The cell phone was finishing its third ring before it dawned on me to answer it. It was still on the floor of the Mercedes, where I’d left it the day before. The voice on the other end was subdued. Hard to believe it belonged to Lanny Cumbaa.

“Get the money,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The five million, Zack. Get it.”

“But Skingle and Connigan, someone killed them.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But . . .”

“Don’t argue, Zack. Just get the money. Or else I’m a dead man, too.”

For the record, five million U.S. dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills weighs slightly more than one hundred ten pounds and can be divided easily between two large canvas duffel bags that will fit neatly in the trunk of a big black Mercedes.

We were standing in a narrow alley beside Freddie Arzghanian’s office. Ramin and Hamil had just finished the packing and the loading.

Freddie Arzghanian said, “I must tell you, yes, I did consider killing the two of them, Skingle and Connigan, but I feared it would create more problems with your government than it was worth. Now, though, I have some regret, especially since I am risking all this.”

He gestured to the canvas duffels. I closed the trunk.

“You have to pay to play,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose. A most interesting game,” he said. “And you are quite certain of what you tell me?”

I nodded.

“It is the only way the pieces fit,” I said.

“The only way they fit for you, perhaps. For me, I still could just walk away.”

“And leave two innocent people taking the blame?”

“Not my concern,” said Arzghanian. “Besides, how do you know they are innocent?”

“Because I know Scotty Connigan planted that stuff under Ida Freeman’s house. Just as I know he hired Cuddy Banks to wreak havoc and frame the NPU. Connigan and Skingle might be dead, but Kenya Oompong and her mother are taking the fall for them.”

Arzghanian said, “Plus, there is the matter of your friend, Monk DeVane.”

“Yes,” I said. “There’s that.”

“You wish to resolve it.”

“Once and for all.”

Arzghanian’s thin lips curled into a smile that wasn’t really a smile.

He said, “And if you are lucky enough to walk away, then . . .”

“Then we’ll discuss that when it happens.”

“Not if.”

“Hell no, not if,” I said. “You’ll be seeing me again.”

“Because there is the matter of the money.”

“Yes,” I said. “There’s that.”

The cell phone rang. I answered. It was Cumbaa. He told me the route to follow.

“That will get you to the intersection of the C-3 and Dunkirk Road. Should take about twenty minutes. I’ll call again then,” Cumbaa said. “And, Zack, remember. Just you. Don’t bring anyone else. That will only make things worse.”

I opened the driver’s door on the Mercedes.

“No one follows me,” I told Arzghanian.

He shrugged.

“As you say,” he said.

I pulled out of the alley and drove north on Dover Street. The route Cumbaa had given me led into the hills east of Mo Bay and toward the mountains. The further I went the more the road twisted and turned. I watched the rearview mirror. The road curlicued behind me, and when I hit the top of a hill and looked back I could see all the way down the road for the better part of a half mile.

A road like that, it’s hard to follow someone without being seen. Ramin and Hamil weren’t doing a bad job of it. They were hanging back in the white Range Rover as far as they could without chancing me making a turn and them not spotting it.

I knew they’d be back there. I knew Freddie Arzghanian wasn’t about to give me all that money and let me go it alone. It had to be what it had to be. All we could do was see what happened next.

It was a lot like playing football. Especially defense, my side of the game. You huddled, made your best guess, and set your formation. Then out came the other side with its secret plan, trying to score, reading what you had going, maybe juking things around, calling an audible if they perceived a weakness. Then backs went in motion and you were countering that, stunting and shifting, maybe showing a blitz.

God, I loved to blitz. Zack the Sack, that’s what they called me. Got six in one game against the Jets, just one shy of the record. Good timing, a fair amount of guts, then feets don’t fail me now and go straight at ’em. When it worked you were a goddam hero; when it didn’t, they’d pick your back door and hang you out to dry.

So I was stepping up to the line of scrimmage, showing my formation, waiting to see what they would throw at me. Stunt and shift, wait for the snap, and don’t you dare screw up.

I pulled off near the intersection of the C-3 and Dunkirk Road and waited. Ramin and Hamil didn’t appear behind me; they were keeping a safe distance. The phone rang. I wrote down more directions. I headed south on Dunkirk Road and turned where I’d been told to turn—a dirt road barely wider than the Mercedes, branches and thornbushes playing hell with the paint.

I was getting close now. One more turn, between a pair of crumbling stone columns, and I was heading downhill, toward a wooden bridge that spanned a gully maybe twenty feet deep with a clay-colored stream trickling through it. Two hundred yards beyond the bridge, at the crest of a low hill, sat the house. A stand of cotton trees and mahogany started near the house and ran down one side of the dirt road, all the way to the stream, and from it back to Dunkirk Road. The other side of the dirt road was overgrown field.

I drove slowly across the bridge, its timbers creaking and moaning. Then I was back on the dirt road again and heading up the low hill toward the house.

The house was in shambles but not unsubstantial. Two stories, walls of quarried limestone, a mossy slate roof that had caved in on one corner. Old, a couple of hundred years or more, it had been built when colonial plantations once ruled the Jamaican landscape. Behind it, the ruins of a few outbuildings, a tumbledown stone tower that once was a sugar mill. Another road, gashed with washouts, ran out the back of the property, through fields high with wiregrass and weeds. Once these same fields had been planted with cane. Great fortunes had sprung from them. It had been a long time ago.

Cumbaa’s green Honda was parked outside the house. I stopped the Mercedes beside it and got out. No sound but the wind blowing through the trees and across the field.

I walked to the front door. It was halfway open. I stepped onto the threshold, waited. Nothing. I stepped all the way inside.

The place was musty and damp and dark. It was cluttered with old furniture, none of it worth anything, just big heavy pieces that took up space. Some old rugs on the floors.

In the room to my left, in the middle of what once was a Victorian-era parlor, I could make out a figure sitting on a wooden crate.

Lanny Cumbaa was bound and gagged now, duct tape around his hands, his mouth. He sat very still, not struggling against the bindings.

He wore a black BCV, a buoyancy compensator vest, the ones scuba divers use. The weight pockets were stuffed with something that was definitely not lead weights. I’d seen images on television of similar devices. Used by suicide bombers. Yes, someone had wired Lanny Cumbaa to blow to Kingdom Come.

His eyes were wide. He was looking past me. The door swung shut. I turned around.

There, with a pistol pointed at me, stood Monk DeVane.

If I hadn’t been expecting to find him there, I might not have recognized him. The head was shaved, the beard was gone. Bruises marked his cheeks and jawline, along with the puffy reddish traces of stitches recently removed. He didn’t necessarily look better, but he did look different. Just walking down the street, unsuspecting, I might not have picked him out.

“Like my new look?” Monk said. “Found this Indian guy, Dr. Ghogawala, did it on the sly at his clinic after hours, a discreet little place near Negril. I’d highly recommend him. Except for the fact that, well, he’s no longer in business. After he was done with me, I had to revoke his license.”

“You won’t get away with this,” I said.

“Sure I will,” said Monk. “As soon as we’re finished here, I’m heading to Kingston, boarding a freighter bound for Argentina. It’s a private charter, actually. Paying the captain $50,000 to haul me down there, no questions asked. Then I think I’ll head for Bariloche, up in the lake district. Buy a little ranch, run a few cattle, maybe find an Argentine honey. Amazing what you can do with money. Speaking of which . . . it’s in your car, right?”

I nodded.

Monk kept the pistol aimed at me while he stepped to a window
in the parlor. A big desk sat by the window, filled with all sorts of tools and contraptions, along with a dozen or so cell phones and a pair of binoculars. Monk looked out the window, then he picked up the binoculars and peered through them. He scanned the road, then the stand of trees and the field that flanked it. No telling where Ramin and Hamil might be. And no telling what Monk might do should he spot them heading our way.

Cumbaa hadn’t moved a whisker since I’d walked through the door. He was taking long hard deep breaths, like he couldn’t get enough air.

I said, “Can you at least take the tape off his mouth?”

Monk ignored me, kept looking through the binoculars.

If Ramin and Hamil were out there, it was time for them to do something. Then it occurred to me: They didn’t care what happened to me. I couldn’t count on them to save my butt. They were only interested in the money. They would lay low and let Monk do whatever it was he intended to do to us, then try to grab him when he made his move to leave. It would be much simpler for them that way, no sticky hostage situation to deal with.

Satisfied with what he saw outside, Monk set down the binoculars and stepped my way. He said, “Knew I could count on you to play it straight, Zack. Although you should have left here when you had the chance. I didn’t plan on it ending like this for you. Really, I didn’t. I only needed you at the beginning.”

“To do what? Verify that you’d been in the van when it blew up at the airport parking lot?”

“Bright boy,” Monk said. “See, the problem, the whole sticking point in the plan, was physical remains. I figured if I created a big enough blast, then that would explain why there wasn’t anything to find. Still, there would be questions, and I needed someone who would be a credible witness, who could tie me to the scene and let the world know that Monk DeVane was no more.”

“Four people died there that day, four innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Monk shrugged.

“Collateral damage. There was no other way. That bomb had to blow everything to hell.”

“Except the fake Super Bowl ring.”

I glanced at the real one, still on the ring finger of Monk’s right hand, the hand that was pointing the gun at me.

He said, “Come on, Zack, you didn’t really expect me to just toss my ring away, did you? I flew to St. Martin, found a jeweler there, and paid him a shitload of money to make a copy, a pretty damn good one, you ask me. My only worry was that someone would find it and keep it instead of giving it to the police. I mean, it wasn’t a deal breaker if that happened, but it helped nail the notion that I had headed off to the hereafter. And it all worked out, didn’t it? I just love it when a well-laid plan comes together.”

“Only, you forgot the initials in the fake one.”

Monk looked at me.

I said, “Rina told me you had her initials and yours engraved on the inside of the band. I saw her at your funeral.”

Monk smiled.

“How was my funeral, Zack? Did I get a good turnout?”

“Not bad. I mean, for someone who ran off and left his wife and kids, set up an old friend, and killed anyone who got in his way. Put it this way: you got a lot better than you deserve.”

Monk tensed, glaring at me.

“Don’t get all high and mighty with me, Chasteen. I saw my chance and I took it. Now I get to reap the rewards.”