Long Way Down (26 page)

E
very time I closed my eyes, someone started yelling at me. I tried to tell the guy in the ambulance that I was just resting. I’d had a hard night. He thought I was drifting into a coma. I wasn’t. I had no intention of dying ever again.

All the pain that I had put in reserve during my surrender to the cold returned as my body warmed. There was a brief period of apparent panic—the staff’s, not mine—when my temperature dropped back into the low eighties, and the ER nurse became very stern with me, as though I had done it on purpose. But my vitals came back quickly and there were plenty of other cases to interest them on Christmas morning.

They moved me to a room upstairs—a private room, thanks to the insistence of the Nassau County police—where a new team of nurses gave me instructions, took my blood, hooked me up to machines, and otherwise fussed over me until I thought I might scream—if I thought my throat could handle it.

Eventually, someone with both a heart and a brain let me take a nap. I fell asleep to the beep of my vital signs monitor and woke up twelve hours later.

Special Agent Marcus Brady was sitting on the edge of the bed. Virgil Becker was asleep in the only chair.

“Welcome back,” Brady said.

“What day is it?”

“It’s still Tuesday.” He checked his watch. “For another three hours. You missed a snowstorm and
A Charlie Brown Christmas
.”

“We don’t have a television.”

“That’s un-American.”

“Maybe that’s my problem. How bad is the snow?”

“Couple of inches out here. The city got less.”

“I can get home, then?”

“How you feeling?”

I did an inventory. Head hurt. Back hurt. Ribs hurt. Fingers hurt. A lot. “Ready to go home.”

“That’s optimistic. I think they want you to stay a few days so that everybody gets a chance to take credit for saving your life.”

“I’m outta here. As soon as my clothes are dry.”

“Your buddy, Roger, just left. He’s going by your place and he’ll bring you some clothes in the morning. They were here for a couple of hours. Him and his . . .” He flipped his hand over and back to indicate that the relationship was unusual. It was.

“Assistant,” I said.

“If you say so. She’s very . . .” Brady arched his eyebrows.

“Yes. She is.”

“Roger tried to talk her into giving you the cure.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Which entailed her getting naked and hopping into bed with you to ‘warm your core,’ I think he said.”

“Really? What did she say?”

“She instructed him to do something anatomically impossible, but she said it in such a way that you knew she came from a good family.”

Virgil snorted in his sleep and his head came up briefly and flopped down again.

“He’s been here all day,” Brady said. “Anyway, you’re not supposed to leave here until Nassau County gets your story.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No, but they left a uniform here to keep an eye on you. He’s keeping busy flirting down at the nurses’ station.”

“What can you tell me?”

“You’re something that washed up on the beach. No one knows what to do with you. But they’ve pegged you as a victim for the moment, rather than a perp, based on the knife wound in your back.”

“What about McKenna?” I said.

“Who?”

“Haley shot a man. Back at the estate. I don’t know his real name, but I called him McKenna.”

“That’s intriguing. But no, we’ve been all over the property. No dead bodies.”

I thought it was more likely that McKenna had survived than that his body had somehow disappeared.

Brady was still talking. “But that might explain why the police in New Jersey found a VW van, registered to you, abandoned in Fort Lee. With fresh blood on the driver’s seat, and a backpack under the seat with your wallet in it.”

McKenna had made it. He was still free and on the run. I changed the subject.

“Did they find Haley?”

He nodded. “Some guy in a powerboat coming out of City Island almost ran into the boat.”

“It didn’t sink?!”

“It’s a Steiger. You can’t sink those boats. My brother-in-law’s got one.”

“What about Haley?” I said before I got to hear all about the brother-in-law’s boat.

“Very bad, I hear. He was hanging off the back. All chopped up.”

“He’s alive?”

“What? No. He bled out. He was a mess. Cuts all over his face and chest. And he was missing half his right leg. They pulled chunks of bone and strips of those insulated overalls he was wearing out from around the props. He must have fallen over and got caught up somehow. It was ugly, from what I hear. Were you there? Did you see it happen?”

I had been there. “It was dark,” I said.

Brady wasn’t fooled. “Do you need a lawyer?”

I thought about it. There were no witnesses to any of what had gone down the night before. I could sanitize the story, or tell it all. I knew not to talk to the detectives without a lawyer, but Brady was different.

“Wake up Virgil. He’ll want to hear this.”

—

They both had questions
when I was done. We kept going for the next two hours—well past when visiting hours were over. Brady had to badge the head nurse to get her to leave us alone. I described McKenna as “some homeless guy I paid fifty bucks to help me out.” Brady knew there was more to the story, but he didn’t push it.

“Haley killed his wife,” I said. “He was going to kill me. You find that gun and I’m sure it will be a perfect match.”

“And so what?” Brady answered. “Haley’s dead. You can’t try him for you or the wife. Penn’s wanted for questioning, but that will go away as soon as his lawyers begin looking at those doctored pictures.”

“Find the gun,” I said.

“It’s in a hundred feet of water, somewhere a mile or so east of the lighthouse.”

“No, it’s closer.”

He laughed. “I admire your tenacity, but there is no way. If this was
CSI: Miami
, maybe, but not in the real world.”

I knew he was right; it just felt wrong. “What about the insider trading? The setup. That’s what put all this in motion and now there’re dead bodies from here to Bermuda.”

“What’s your take?” Brady asked Virgil.

Virgil rubbed his temples before he spoke. “The insider trading setup? The proof is gone. Prosecutors will take the path of least resistance. We can’t prove who was behind it, though we think it was Penn. No one is going to listen to your story. Haley is dead, therefore he was guilty. The SEC guys are upset that they’re not going to get their day in court, but no one else cares. Case closed.”

“What about the firm’s stake in Arinna Labs. Aren’t you going to take a bath on this?”

“Yes, but the best thing I can do for the firm is to let all this go away and be forgotten. Focus on our core businesses and make the money back.”

Brady stood up, wrapped his arms around both shoulders, and cracked his back. It was loud enough to make Virgil wince. “He’s spot-on, Jason. Whoever was working with the wife has covered his tracks too well. I think you’re right. It’s Penn behind it all. But so what? I can’t sell that story to the U.S. Attorney’s office.”

Virgil cut in. “What makes you so sure it was Penn? I’m not disputing it—I agree with you—but I want to hear why you’re so sure.”

Brady answered. “It fits Penn’s pattern. This is the way he works. He’s done it before, more than once. And he’s made enemies on six continents. What else? He has a private army of mercenaries he uses. Many have been with him since the beginning, killing
Peruvian peasants who got in the way of his mining operations and calling them terrorists.”

“He tried to have me killed,” I said to Virgil.

“An event that still does not officially exist,” Brady said with an
I told you so
glare. “But I’d take comfort in the fact that it’s over. With all the witnesses dead and all evidence gone or suspect, he’s got no reason to go after you anymore. The story is old news already. You’re no longer a threat to him.”

He was right. I wasn’t going to get justice and revenge doesn’t pay bills. Or get me any closer to what I really wanted. I stared out the window. There was nothing to see.

“I would like to go home.”

Virgil and Brady shared a smile. “We’ll see if we can break you out tomorrow morning,” Brady said.

“I’d like to go see my son.”

T
he night nurse checked my vitals at four. I passed. Temperature normal. Blood pressure and pulse normal. I told her I was hungry. She said I could wait. They served breakfast early. I went back to sleep.

Breakfast
was
early. Pancakes and paper-thin slices of orange. Thin coffee. It all tasted extraordinary. Virgil called and said he would be there to pick me up in an hour. Then he said, “Check out the morning news.”

“What am I looking for?”

“You won’t be able to miss it,” he said.

The television in my room didn’t work. I was used to not watching and hadn’t given it a thought. I tightened up my gown so a bit less of my butt showed, and hurried down to the nurses’ station.

“Is there somewhere I can watch the morning news?”

“In your room. You should be in bed, sir.”

“By the time I get some technician up to turn it on, I’ll be checked out and on my way home. Cut me some slack, would you?”

She thought hard about giving me a hard time, but must have decided it was too much trouble.

“Try the waiting room outside radiology,” she said, pointing farther down the hall.

The television was on, droning to an empty room. That always made me feel uncomfortable, as though I had stepped into some dystopian universe, with mankind mysteriously wiped out, but where the great idiot box continued to spew out reruns of sitcoms I never watched when they were on the first time around. I found the remote control and switched from
Mayberry R.F.D.
to CNN. Virgil was right. I didn’t have to look very hard to find the day’s big story.

Chuck Penn had been killed the night before while leaving a London restaurant. Two men had begun firing at him as he walked to his limo, killing both the billionaire and one of his bodyguards. A parade of thoughtful talking heads opined on whether the killers were terrorists or the remnants of some South American guerrilla group taking a belated revenge. They all made reference to the three prior attempts on Penn’s life. Two other bodyguards were in the hospital and unavailable for comment.

Penn’s oldest son bloodlessly assured investors that there would be no problems with the transition. An emergency board meeting was being called. The man was remarkably dry-eyed in front of the cameras.

Maybe there just wasn’t any more he cared to say.

I
checked my pockets—cash, keys, passport, sunglasses—and ran through my mental list again. One carry-on bag stuffed with presents for all, a few T-shirts, one bathing suit, a razor, a toothbrush. And a paperback copy of
Mother Warriors
—more to see why people got so angry with Jenny McCarthy than to discover the single great key to my son’s condition or how to “cure” him by changing his diet.

Carolina was coming in next Monday. The apartment smelled dusty, unused, and a bit stale. I made another mental note to check with the office to see if there were any larger units for sale, and immediately forgot about it.

I took a look in the mirror. The hat I had picked up in Denver hid the bandages on my scalp—barely. There were still bags under my eyes—I would need another few days of sleep. I could get it lying on a beach.

The car service was due, so I locked up and took the elevator down to the lobby.

There was a new doorman on the downtown side of the building. He was talking on his cell phone as I approached. It struck me
that I had never seen any employee of the building talking on a cell phone—but it didn’t strike hard enough. He saw me looking and dropped the phone in his pocket.

“Where’s Raoul today?” I said.

“Taking some vacay, Mr. Stafford.”

“Is my car waiting?”

“Right outside.” He opened the door and I stepped out into glaring sunlight. The realization that a new employee, whom I had never seen before, knew me on sight, despite the fact that I had not been there for the past week, came as I was already halfway across the sidewalk—much too late.

A black Rolls-Royce was sitting at the curb on Seventy-third Street, engine idling. The rear door was being held open by a man with the kind of Neanderthal forehead and deep, hooded eyes of a medieval torturer. Someone well-versed in the rack, the iron maiden, and the heated grating. I stopped and looked around for a path to escape. There was none. The doorman and three other men were already behind me, boxing me in, and one was the bruised-faced boxer from Newark Airport. The driver for the first attempt on my life. He wasn’t smiling.

They didn’t rush me. There was no need. I wasn’t going to get by them and there were few people on the street who would pay attention—or be able to help—if I started screaming. I was caught. I turned back to the big car.

Harvey Deeter was sitting in the backseat on the far side. “Y’all better hop in before I catch a chill and sue your pitiful ass.”

I held back. “I’ve got a car coming. Thanks anyway.”

“No, you don’t. I took the liberty of canceling your car, as I plan to take you out to the airport myself.”

“Am I going to get there?”

He laughed. “You have my word. I’m not always what my wife, bless her memory, would have called a good Christian, but my word
is still good. Come on now.” He patted his hand on the leather seat as though coaxing a reluctant child.

I didn’t have anything I wanted to say to Harvey Deeter. The investigation had cost me too much and I just wanted some peace and to see my family. The presence of the guy I had defeated with bottled soap a week before set off a series of changes in some of my assumptions. I had been wrong. Penn hadn’t sent the bad guys after me. Deeter had.

“Mr. Deeter, thanks for the invite, but I would prefer to make my own way to the airport.”

“I’m afraid that is not negotiable.”

I could feel the heavies crowding in around me. There were no choices left. I pictured Skeli and the Kid under a tropical sky, smiling, expectant, and safe. Then I got in the car. The chauffeur closed the door behind me and the hired muscle dispersed. A moment later, we pulled away from the curb.

“Relax, Mr. Stafford. You have my personal guarantee—you are perfectly safe.”

My mental tic on directions kicked in. “Would you tell him to go up through Harlem and take the Triborough? It’s much faster than trying to get over to the Midtown Tunnel.”

“No matter, it’s the Van Wyck that’s always a crapshoot, isn’t it?” He pronounced it “Van Whike.” Where I grew up—almost in the shadow of the highway—it was always “Van Wick.” I didn’t correct him. He pressed an intercom button. “Mr. Stafford suggests we take the Triborough Bridge, Hector. We will defer to his local knowledge.”

“American Airlines,” I said.

“Hector knows,” he answered.

I sat back and waited. He had called the meeting, let him set the agenda. I didn’t have to wait long.

“Hector, would you be so kind as to scan Mr. Stafford for any
recording or transmitting devices? And if there’re no issues, turn off the intercom and give us some privacy.”

There was a slight hum—almost a high-pitched whistle—that went on for a few seconds and then quit.

“All clear, Mr. Deeter.”

Deeter waited another half a minute before turning to me with an intense look and a forced smile.

“I don’t get much practice at this, so I don’t know if I’m any good at it, but I owe you an apology. I underestimated you, and that’s a crime. You are a very resourceful human being.”

This was a very different Harvey Deeter. The voice still came from the Deep South, but the cracker-barrel philosopher was gone, replaced by the Rhodes scholar. Yet beyond the veil of his quiet words were the eyes of a predator.

“You tried to have me killed,” I said.

Directness did not faze him. “It was business. I was concerned that your meddling might upset my plan. I was wrong. You were good. And while I can’t say that everything came down just the way I expected, it did turn out in my favor. And for that I thank you.”

“Why are you telling me this? What is it you want?”

“We’ll get to that. But for now it costs me nothing to answer your questions. Penn is dead. And the Haleys. There is no evidence, no trail leading back to me. Who would believe you? You served me well. I suppose I owe you something.”

“I didn’t do anything for you.”

“Oh, I know that. Young Virgil just set you out and let you hunt ’em up. You flushed every bird. Nice work.”

“Virgil? Was he part of this?” I said.

“No, not at all. This was my work, though it was Selena who came to me. We made an arrangement.”

“She wanted revenge on her husband for cheating.”

“Not quite. The cheating didn’t bother her as much as the fact that he made that woman pregnant. She couldn’t get pregnant, you know about that?” he said.

“I suspected.”

“The grandfather. Nasty old piece of work. He raped her. Repeatedly. Then forced her to have an abortion, and that ended up ruining her chances of ever getting pregnant again. Pushing his drunken ass off that cliff was much too good for him. I would’ve given him to Hector for a day or two first. Hector worked with the contras in Nicaragua as a young man. He’s slowed down some, but I doubt he’s lost his touch.”

“She pushed him?”

“Certainly. Not much later, the two Nassau County detectives who were in charge of the investigation both retired early. Now they both live in a gated, luxury community in Costa Rica, thanks to Selena’s largesse.”

“So why didn’t she kill her husband, too?” I asked.

“I don’t think she wanted him dead. She just wanted to take him down a few pegs. Break his spirit. She thought she could tame him.”

“Why did she come to you?”

“Well, she needed help, the kind I can provide, and she knew I wanted to buy out the rest of the company. Only not at the going price.” He snickered, quite proud of his plotting. “We agreed that I would buy her out in a private transaction at current levels. After Haley got into trouble, the stock would tank and I could pick up a lot more shares at a nice discount. I did warn her, you know.”

“About Haley?”

“I told her she was shooting fireworks in a hand grenade factory. Eventually, there was going to be hell to pay.”

“You were there that night. Is this the car I saw on the security tapes?” I asked.

“Oh yes. But she was alive when I left. But then, you know that, don’t you? No one will believe it, of course. But you know Haley killed her.”

“He set the cameras to fail before he left, drove to the marina, and came back in the boat. The same way as he did the other night. Then he killed her and tossed her over the rail.” I couldn’t prove it, but I knew it.

“And when he got out on bail, he doctored the pictures of the license plate to put the blame on Penn.”

“You knew? That computer is sitting in one hundred feet of seawater. No one will ever be able to prove it wasn’t Penn that night.”

“Which suits me just fine. I’ve already made arrangements with the son to buy out Penn’s stake in Arinna.”

“What happened that night? When you went out to the house?”

He leaned back into the seat and closed his eyes for a moment. “Selena called me all in a lather. Told me to stay away. But I had my people hack into Haley’s email and got his password. Then Hector drove me out there. She was sure you’d scoped out the whole game and we were going down. She was a mite agitated, but she convinced me.” He opened his eyes and turned his head toward me. “There was nothing for it, then, but to take you out of the game. As I say, it wasn’t personal, it was business. Just business.”

“I hid my family.”

“And you did a fine job of it, I’m sure of it. But I have to tell you, they were never in danger. I understand why you had to do it. I would have done the same.”

“I watched my ex-wife get murdered while protecting our son, and all because of me.”

“I don’t think that’s a healthy way of looking at it, if you don’t mind me playing uncle for a bit.”

“I had in my hands the very thing those men wanted. A few hours earlier, and there would have been no attack.”

“You’re not a religious man, are you?” he said, almost kindly. “I didn’t think so. One subject the secular humanists always avoid is the question of evil. There is evil in this world. I don’t mean original sin. That’s just a way of forcing some humility and guilt on the flock. No, I mean Satan. Pure evil. Ted Bundy. Dahmer. That Mexican—the Zetas fella they finally caught up with. You didn’t kill your ex-wife, and you did your best to prevent it. That’s all any of us can do.”

Letting go of my guilt was harder than living with it. I was comfortable there, being angry at myself.

“What about you?” I said.

“I doubt very much that I will see my late wife in the glorious hereafter, and I imagine she will take that disappointment in stride. I have looked into your history, and I believe that you are a man who can be bought. You frown. Am I wrong? Forgive me. I spoke with a man in Venezuela—an acquaintance of yours—who assured me that you are one of those rare men who can be bought and stay that way. Was I misinformed?”

The Kid’s trust fund, which paid for his school, his doctors, therapist, and Heather, would not exist if I had not sold my silence. I had no qualms about that—it was worth all that and more. But there was another cache that I had squirreled away in Switzerland that sometimes gnawed away at my conscience.

“I’m well paid. I don’t need more.”

“I could use someone with your skills and I would pay better than Virgil—I know your arrangement. This is why I came to see you today. I am willing to answer any question you have—honestly—because I want you working with me. You could name your price.”

He could afford honesty—he knew no one would easily believe me. Even Brady and Virgil would have a hard time after I had worked so hard to build a case against Penn. “Tell me why you
wanted so badly to buy Arinna. It’s all yours now, but without Haley to run that lab, there’s no product. It’s worthless.”

“Maybe not. Haley solved all of the big problems. The rest is fine-tuning.”

“So you’re not going to close it down?”

“Oh, no. I will close it down. That’s the point. I’m an oilman, Jason. Oil may be past its prime, but it’s still got legs. When the time is right, I’ll still own all the patents on Haley’s product. I may yet bring Arinna back. But not yet.”

“Suppose someone beats you to it?”

“No one has beaten me yet. I don’t know if it’s possible. But if it is, and somebody does it, well, God bless ’em. That’s the American way.”

“And in the meantime we keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Believe me, I never give it much thought, but when I do, I think it’s pretty obvious we are seriously screwing with the environment. Someday soon we are going to have to pay the piper.”

“Global warming? I spend a lot of money each year supporting research to prove that it’s just a myth.” He laughed. “It’s just like all those studies that Big Tobacco used to do, proving that tobacco wasn’t bad for you. They had to keep funding them just to muddy the waters. But I’m no idiot. The science is there. The earth is warming up, and it is only going to get worse, and it’s all because of man’s lust for fossil fuels.”

“Then why perpetuate it? Even for a minute? Fix the bugs in Haley’s system and you’ll be the man who saved the planet.”

“Don’t think there aren’t reasons. I’m no hero, that’s true, and I don’t think I could change if I tried. But there are reasons.”

“Do I take that on faith?”

“No, I’ll explain. First, you’ve got the Chinese.”

“That was Haley’s paranoid fantasy.”

“They are the world’s starlings. Starlings imitate better than
mockingbirds. They imitate car alarms, women’s screams, dogs barking. And they steal sparrows’ nests to lay their eggs. Right now, the Chinese government is focused on solar cells and batteries. They’re cornering the world’s supplies of raw materials for both. But the minute they see that these algae are a real threat, they’ll steal the code and make their own.”

“So you bury it? That’s the solution?”

“For the moment. Meanwhile, there’re other considerations.”

“Such as.”

“Is global warming really all that awful? Man is adaptable. He is the most adaptable creature on the planet. Raise the average temperature five or ten degrees and man will find a way to produce cheaper air-conditioning. Hell, we survived how many ice ages? We keep coming back stronger. And if the sea level rises twenty feet and we lose some shorefront property, I will shed no tears. And those who can’t adapt will not survive. I understand that. But you read the news. Tell me it’s not time to thin the herd, son. We get all in a snit over racism in this country. Are we being PC enough? Too much? Look at northern Africa. They’re enslaving, torturing, raping, and killing each other over shades of skin tone that we’d ascribe to a good tan. Or how about the Arab Spring? They take to the streets, overthrow the dictator, have an election, and elect a different dictator. That’s the Russian model, I believe. I ask you, who do you want in charge at the end of the day? We’re not perfect, I admit. But the fact that this country’s Congress is incapable of passing one bit of legislation that has any effect on the world gives me great satisfaction. Do we really want to be another China, with the government telling us how many babies we can have? How many widgets we can produce? Where we can live and with whom? Freedom, Jason. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s what our forefathers fought and died for. The freedom to run our lives, our businesses, as we see fit.”