Authors: Paul Carr
Sam pulled a knife from his bag in the back seat and cut the plastic tie. Marcus rubbed his wrists. The bandage on his hand was soaked with fresh blood. He looked at Sam as if he didn’t know what to do.
“Get out,” Sam said.
“I need to call somebody.”
“Sure you do.”
“Not La Salle. I’m not going back there. He’ll kill me for sure. I need to call a girl to pick me up.”
Sam looked at him for a second and handed him the phone.
Marcus started to get out of the car.
“Call right here,” Sam said.
Marcus nodded, punched a number into the phone and held it to his ear.
“Hey, babe. You gotta come get me.” He looked up and down the street and told her the approximate address of the shopping center. “Okay, about ten minutes, then.” Marcus told her goodbye and punched the power button.
Sam took the phone. “You interested in doing some work?”
“Work for you?”
“That’s right.”
Marcus gave him a look that said,
I don't believe this.
“What would I have to do?”
“It might involve doing something bad to your boss.”
Marcus glanced out the window.
“Can I have an advance? Everything I got is back at that house.”
Sam had anticipated that request, and would have been disappointed had he not gotten it. He reached into the bag for a stack of the cash he’d stolen from La Salle and handed it to Marcus.
“This belonged to La Salle,” Sam said.
“Even better.”
“Double-cross me and I’ll tell him you took his money.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t plan on seeing La Salle again if I can help it.”
Marcus gave Sam his girlfriend’s number and got out. He stood there looking like a beaten dog as Sam drove away. The phone vibrated and Sam answered it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Candi.
“I don't know what you mean?”
“You drove off in La Salle’s Jaguar. That can only lead to trouble.”
“He won’t need it when we finish with him.”
A silence on the line stretched into a couple of seconds.
“Where are you, anyway? I lost you in traffic going over the causeway.”
Sam gave her his location and told her where to meet him in a half-hour. He drove to a garage run by a struggling Cuban businessman. Sam turned into the potholed parking lot and stopped next to the office. A small man with thick, graying hair walked out and leaned down to look inside as Sam lowered the window.
“Senor. Good to see you.”
“Hello, Hector,” Sam said, “I need to hide my new car for a few days.” He reached into the back seat, grabbed his bag and got out.
Hector looked at the Jaguar and then at Sam and grinned.
“Someone, perhaps, is looking for this car?”
“Yes,” Sam said, “perhaps.”
“Policia?”
Sam shook his head.
“No problem. It will be safe here.”
Hector opened the car door.
“Just a minute,” Sam said. He got back in the car, found the registration in the glove box and put it into his shirt pocket. “Okay, thanks, Hector. This’ll make us square.” Sam had loaned him five thousand dollars a few months ago, and Hector had repaid about half the money.
Hector smiled and displayed a gold tooth.
“You are too generous, Senor. I will make sure no one knows about the beautiful Jaguar.”
The older man opened a large door on the end of the garage, got into the car and drove it inside. Sam watched as he pulled a nylon cover from a shelf and threw it over the Jaguar. He closed the garage door, locked it and held the key out to Sam.
“You keep it,” Sam said.
“Come into the office. I have cold beer in the icebox.”
They went inside and Hector pulled two bottles of Dos Equis from a refrigerator that looked forty years old.
“Not Cuban, but it is good,” Hector said.
Sam nodded. “How’s business?”
“Pretty good, especially today.” Hector grinned and handed Sam his beer. They clinked their bottles together and drank.
Sam sat in a lime-green, plastic-covered chair that had seen better days, and Hector sat behind an old brown metal desk. An oscillating fan whirred on the corner of the desk, and soft Latin music emanated from a cheap CD player perched in the window behind Hector.
A toy hula girl stood in suspended animation on the desk. Hector punched a button and she did a dance for them.
“If only women were that simple, eh, Senor?” Hector shook his head and had a sad, faraway smile on his face. He punched the button and the dancing stopped.
“Trouble at home?”
Hector took a long drink from the Dos Equis and said, “Papa moved in with us, and he drives Consuela crazy.”
Sam nodded as if he understood perfectly.
“He just sits in the kitchen drinking coffee, talking about the old days in the cane fields, like they were golden times or something.”
“Maybe they were,” Sam said.
Hector tilted his head for a second, looked at Sam and grinned.
“Yes, maybe they were. But Consuela does not think so. She says she is going to leave if Papa stays much longer.”
A bell rang behind Hector's desk. Sam looked out the window and saw an old truck roll into the driveway. Hector drained his beer and went out the door to take care of business.
Sam pulled the Jaguar registration from his pocket and saw that a company named NeoWorld Corporation owned the car. He called J.T. on his cell phone. “Anything on La Salle yet?”
“No, there’s no record of him, as far as I can tell. And I’ve just about exhausted my resources.”
That didn’t sound good. Sam gave him the string of numbers from La Salle’s computer and asked him to check the banks, thinking it might be an account number.
“How about looking up the NeoWorld Corporation too.” Sam spelled it out for him.
“Never heard of it.”
“Yeah, me either, but NeoWorld owns La Salle’s Jaguar, and it could be a key to what happened to all that money that went missing.”
J.T. said he would call back when he had something and hung up.
Sam saw Candi drive into the parking lot a few minutes later and went outside. Hector stood leaning under the hood of the truck, talking to the driver and pointing to something on the running engine.
Sam walked by and said, “I'll call in a few days. Good luck with your dad.”
Hector smiled and nodded, and Sam got into the Chevy with Candi.
“What’d you find?” Candi said as she drove back onto the thoroughfare.
Sam unzipped his bag and showed her the cash.
“How much?”
“About three hundred grand,” Sam said.
“Huh.” She looked annoyed. “Where do you think he has the rest of my money?”
Sam shrugged. “What did you expect; maybe he’d have a few million dollars stuffed in his mattress?”
She nodded and said, “Yeah, did you check his mattress?”
“No, I never went into the bedrooms.”
“Well, maybe you should have.”
“Maybe you should have gone in there yourself.”
Candi took a deep breath, sighed and looked straight ahead. Sam wondered why he'd signed on for this job. He waited a few seconds, then broke the silence and told her about the list of numbers he'd found on the computer.
“Maybe a bank account?”
“Yeah, maybe. I asked a friend who’s good with computers to check it out.”
“You think that's wise, giving someone a bank account number where you know there’s a lot of money?”
Sam knew the risks when he dealt with J.T., and it made him even more uncomfortable for her to point it out.
“I couldn't do anything without more information.”
Candi pressed the accelerator and the engine revved. They shot around an SUV, narrowly
missing an oncoming truck before getting back into the right lane. The truck horn blasted.
“Oh, yeah,” Sam said, “I had to take Marcus with me when I took the Jaguar. I just let him out a few minutes ago.”
Candi shot a glance at him, her eyes wide.
“What did he say?”
“He said you know something, and that’s the reason La Salle wants you dead.”
Sam watched her face for a reaction. She rolled her eyes, nothing else. The traffic thinned out and Candi jammed her foot on the accelerator.
“He said
I
know something?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t know what that would be other than he took Philly’s money and then knocked him off. That’s the reason he wants me dead.”
“He said La Salle has something cooking with a Russian named Danilov. You know anything about that?”
Candi pressed her lips together and sighed. “No, I don’t. I told you what I know.”
The car had sped up, and Sam peered at the speedometer; they were going almost seventy miles per hour.
“Better slow down. We don't want to get stopped by the cops.”
Candi glanced at the speedometer and took her foot off the gas.
Candi had kissed La Salle in one of the photos. She had lied about her relationship with him, and now about what she knew. Sam felt the familiar tickle at the back of his neck and wondered if this might be a good time to say goodbye to Candi Moran.
“I’ll split the money with you and we’ll go our separate ways.”
“What?”
“And you can have the account number, if that’s what it is. Maybe you can get your own money back.”
Candi’s face turned red and she glanced at Sam, back at the windshield, then at Sam again.
“Wait a minute. You
have
to help me, there isn’t anybody else.”
“Sorry, no can do,” Sam said, his tone firm.
Candi stepped on the brakes and turned into the edge of a liquor store parking lot, the Chevy’s tires screeching to a halt. She turned off the engine and looked at Sam, her eyes watering and her lips pouting.
“Please....” Then her lips parted as if to say something else, but remained silent. She reached her hand to Sam’s face and touched his cheek.
Something fluttered inside his chest, and he wondered if having her close to him might be as fatal as putting a gun to his head. He wished he had the strength to tell her where to go.
Sam sighed and looked out his window. A pay phone hung from the outside wall of the liquor store, and he decided to try the telephone number from La Salle's safe.
“I’ll be right back.”
He glanced at the note, dropped coins into the phone and punched in the number. It rang four times before a man answered and said, “About time you called.”
Sam listened for a second and his head began to throb. He hung up the phone, walked back to the car and got inside.
“Who did you just call?”
Sam looked at her and wondered why things had to be so complicated.
“I don’t think you know him.”
“Try me.”
“His name is Jackson Craft.”
Chapter 9
“
W
HO’S JACKSON Craft?” Candi asked, her face a question mark.
“He’s the man whose phone number happened to be in the safe with La Salle’s money.”
Maybe Jack had been waiting for La Salle to dial the number. Sam didn't know the answer, but he knew Jack Craft, and that man could be up to just about anything.
“So, what does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.” Sam opened his cell phone and punched in the number he normally used to call Jack Craft. Jack answered immediately.
“Sam?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you hang up?” Jack sounded like nothing out of the ordinary had happened, just shooting the breeze with an old friend.
“Well, I guess I might have been a little surprised to learn that La Salle had a pipeline straight to you, especially since you never mentioned anything about knowing him.”
“Yes, I can see how you might have that reaction.”
“How did you know it was me calling?”
“La Salle called about an hour ago and said you had the telephone number. He also said you cleaned out his cash.” Jack chuckled on the other end of the line.
“How did he know
I
did it?”
Jack didn't say anything for a couple of seconds. Probably making up his answer.
“He might’ve learned about you from those guys who followed you,” Jack said.
Sam decided to let it go for now.
“How about telling me what’s going on, Jack.”
Another pause.
“Not on the phone. Meet me in the parking lot of the restaurant where we last ate. I’ll be on the far side toward the back at seven o’clock.”
“Why would I do that? Could be a set-up.”
“When did I ever betray you, Samuel?” His voice had an edge to it.
Sam took a deep breath and sighed.
“Okay, I’ll see you then.” Sam closed the phone and put it into his pocket.
Candi started the car again and pulled out into the traffic. “Okay, what's the deal?”
“I’m not sure. He said he’ll tell me about it if I meet him tonight.”
“You trust that guy?”
Sam thought about Jack Craft, shook his head and said, “I really don’t know. I need some answers.”
He decided they would go back to the Palma Hotel, since no one knew they were there, and wait for his meeting with Jack. They ordered room service and were finishing the meal when J.T. called on the cell phone.
Sam held his hand over the phone and said to Candi, “It's the guy checking on the numbers for me.” He went to the sitting area where a sofa and a picture window overlooked the Atlantic and spoke into the phone. “What did you find out?”
“Those numbers don't have anything to do with a bank. I checked several, especially those in the Caymans, and none of them resembled that coding structure.”
“That’s too bad,” Sam said. “Might have been an easy answer.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. I did have another idea, though. The numbers might be GPS coordinates. Reading the string of numbers like it's written points to a place up around Greenland. In another order the numbers point to somewhere in Asia. But one sequence puts the location on Grand Cayman.”
Sam remembered what Marcus had said about the project in the Caribbean, and wondered if there might be a connection.
“Yeah, well, might not be anything important, but tell me the Grand Cayman sequence anyway.”