Instead he told them it was a question of work. “I need him for a job and I’m willing to pay to find him.”
“How much?” the till man, who was the more thickset of the two, asked.
“Five thousand,” Dwyer said, dropping the money on their coffee table. They were experienced enough not to reach for it right away.
“If you will pay five for the information, how much you pay for the job?” café con leche asked.
“The job?” Dwyer said. “Hell, the job pays a butt load more than that.”
“Maybe we do the job for you,” the till man said.
“Well, sure.” Dwyer nodded. “Where’d you serve? For how long? What was your specialty? How much combat did you see? Is your passport good? Is it under an alias? These are the questions
my boss is gonna ask. He’s always looking to hire on qualified dudes.”
The men waved the idea away with a
tsk
ing noise, as if it were all too much trouble, which told Dwyer there wasn’t much training to speak of.
“Maybe it’d be easier if you just told me where he is and keep the finders’ fee …” Dwyer suggested.
The men looked at each other and spoke in Spanish. Dwyer kept a dumb look on his face even though he understood what they said.
Why don’t we call Banco and ask if we can say where he is?
“You know Banco,” the café con leche drinker said. “He’s very
privado
. We call him for you.”
Dwyer had an idea what would happen if they reached Banco and described him and what he wanted, but he also saw his opportunity, so he just nodded slowly.
Till man went and got a mobile and punched through the phone’s address book until he found the number and pressed Send. The room got quiet and Dwyer could hear the muted sound of Banco’s phone ringing. It went on for a long time, a good dozen rings, with no voice mail picking up. It gave Dwyer the idea that they were calling a landline, not a cellular. Finally, the till man’s eyes flared.
“Hola, guanaco. Soy Benito …”
Dwyer listened as the till man—Benito—laid out the situation for Banco. He watched as the man listened to Banco’s response. The man’s face was placid, betraying nothing. He looked like someone reading a magazine in a doctor’s office, waiting for his appointment, despite the fact that Banco was probably saying, “Don’t fucking tell him where I am!” or “Kill him!” or “Run!” The lad across from him was good, Dwyer had to concede.
Dwyer held out his hand, as if it were his turn to talk. “Lemme say hi,” he said. Instead the man clicked off the call.
“He said ‘chill,’ he’ll be right over.”
“Great!” Dwyer replied.
Benito, the till man, stood and spoke to his
compadre
in flat
Spanish. Dwyer didn’t flinch or in any way reveal what he’d heard:
“I’m going to get this guy a cooler. We can’t let him leave.”
“Cerveza?”
Benito offered, heading for the kitchen.
“Sure,” Dwyer said. As soon as he stepped away, Dwyer turned to café con leche. “You can have that. Count it, make sure it’s five thousand even.”
Café con leche picked up the money and was counting greedily by the time Dwyer had crossed to the kitchen. The Česká was raised at head level as the freezer door closed, revealing Benito’s face. Dwyer fired and saw the “cooler,” a chilled .38, fall from the man’s hand. Dwyer was back in the living room just as café con leche was picking up the baseball bat. It wasn’t a fair fight.
The third to last thing Dwyer did was scroll the mobile and get Banco’s number from the contact list, memorizing it, then erasing it. The second to last thing he did was wipe down the phone and drop it on the couch and pick up his five thousand dollars. Then he noticed he was standing in blood, so the last thing he did was step out of his shoes and head for the door carrying them.
Now that he was back in his shite hole and all was cleaned up, including his shoes, he went on his computer to reverse directory Banco’s number. Banco had a bit of a head start, but hopefully it was one that Dwyer could make up.
Behr still got to work on the early side, and he watched as the office came to life around him. He would have preferred to be sitting in Potempa’s chair when his boss arrived for the day, surprising him into sharing some information. It was a technique Behr had learned from an old NYPD detective and had employed in the past when he had clients of his own who balked at paying their bills. They’d walk in the door of their office to find Behr had gained entry and was seated behind their desk, leafing through their bills.
“Telephone, office supplies, cable, electric,” Behr would say. “Why is mine all the way at the bottom of the pile?” Most of the time the shaken customer would pay him what was owed on the spot just to get him out of there. Of course that was when he was an independent operator. Now, at Caro, there was a billing department and accountants, and collection agencies after that, to chase down unwilling clients who refused to pay what they owed.
Behr figured
he
was owed something on this one too—namely answers. He’d put himself in harm’s way doing his job for the company, after all. But Potempa had a career in law enforcement behind him and wouldn’t be rattled by a cheap parlor trick like an office bushwhack.
Potempa walked in a little before 9:00, his perfect steel-gray coif floating above the tops of the cubicle dividers. Behr checked
an urge to rush him with questions. He managed to sit out most of the day, doing a little work—as well as some Internet searches of Terry Cottrell that turned up nothing—but shortly after lunch, while the office was nearly emptied out, Potempa arrived back, and Behr made a beeline for his door. He had a hand against it before it had closed all the way.
“Karl, can I have a word?” Behr said.
“Make some time with Ms. Swanton—” Potempa began, before seeing the manila envelope in Behr’s hand.
“Now would be better,” Behr said, shaking the envelope a bit.
“All right,” Potempa said, a slight rigidity gripping his body.
Ms. Swanton looked on with muted curiosity as Behr went into Potempa’s office.
Potempa slid into his leather desk chair, and to Behr he appeared to have aged five years since the day before.
“Are we scheduling daily chats now?” Potempa said, a wary veil over his black eyes.
“I saw your conversation on the street in front of the Canterbury last night,” Behr said.
“Oh yeah?” Potempa said, the veil dropping lower.
“Yeah,” Behr said. A lot of people debated whether or not to tell a friend when they find out his wife is cheating on him. Behr preferred to lead with the truth, even if it was bad news. But then this wasn’t about a cheating wife, and he and Potempa weren’t friends.
“How’d that happen—coincidence or are you surveilling me?” Behr looked over Potempa’s shoulder at the photos of his daughter, pictured her as a dyed blonde, and was sure of what he’d discovered. By way of answer, Behr raised the envelope and flipped it onto Potempa’s desk.
“Is that …?” Potempa almost barked, leaning forward and reaching for the envelope. He tore into it like a battlefield medic ripping open a compression bandage over a wounded soldier. A gamut of emotions played over his face as he slid the jewel case free: horror, elation, relief. “I can’t believe you got it. I can’t believe you got it …” he said.
“Karl,” Behr said. “Karl,” he repeated. Potempa finally looked to him, his hands shaking slightly as he held the case. “We have to assume this isn’t the original. That there are copies. Multiple copies.”
Potempa’s shoulders sagged and he rocked back in his chair as the reality landed on him. “Right … of course …” It was too early for a drink, but Behr caught the older man’s eye glancing longingly at the decanter on the credenza.
“Did you look at it?” he asked.
“I did—”
“Ah, goddammit, Frank,” Potempa erupted, before his head sank into his hands.
“I’m sorry, Karl, I had to know what I was dealing with.”
“And do you now?” Potempa asked.
“It’s pretty clearly a sex-video blackmail scheme,” Behr said. “But I’d like to know the particulars.”
“Would ya?” Potempa said. His eyes went to the Scotch once again, but he turned admirably away from it. “I suppose you deserve to know,” Potempa said. “But first the video. Is it … bad?”
“I have the girl as your daughter,” Behr said.
Potempa nodded forlornly.
Any puritanical thinking about sex aside, Behr knew what he was asking. “Yeah, it’s bad.”
“Should I watch it?”
“It’s pretty rough. I wouldn’t if I were you,” Behr said, somehow feeling that Potempa
would
watch it at some point, perhaps late at night, alone in his house or this very office, driven past the point of good sense by a morbid need to know.
“Does he hurt her?” Potempa wondered.
“No. It’s what I’d call … consensual,” Behr said.
“How’d you get this? Did you hurt
him
, by chance, or buy it?” Potempa wanted to know.
“Uh-uh, I entered his house and took it when he wasn’t there.”
“I’ll have to get that address from you, I’ve wanted it for some time. I’ve had other guys on this and they didn’t get this far …”
Potempa said distantly. Behr couldn’t help but admire the man’s skills. Though he’d come in with the advantage, and his boss was clearly struggling, Potempa had been the one to ask about a half dozen questions in a row and had Behr providing information, not vice versa. But enough was enough.
“Who is he—the guy you were talking to, and the one I assume is in the video?” Behr asked.
“My daughter’s boyfriend. Lenny Brennan Barnes. Little pimp motherfucker. I hated the cocksucker the first time I saw him, and it grew from there.” Potempa didn’t go in for blue language most of the time, so it marked the depth of his emotions on the topic. “He got his filthy hands on my Mary and just … ruined her.”
“What’s he threatening?” Behr asked.
“To release it,” Potempa said, thumping a finger on the DVD case, “on the Internet. To IPD e-mail addresses, Bureau offices. Her old high school. Local colleges. All over the damned place. To make it ugly for me. For her future.”
“Unless you pay?” Behr asked.
Potempa made an “of course” gesture with his hands, and Behr didn’t think much of it because of what was on his mind.
“Hold on, you said ‘boyfriend’?” Behr said, trying to assemble it. “And I saw them together. They look like they
live
together.”
“I know, I know. My daughter, she just … turned against me. By and by, I guess, though it felt like all at once. We started fighting. Over her friends. Men. Her lifestyle. Drugs. Back and forth like a couple of badgers, until it seemed like she was willing to go down herself just to see me suffer.” Potempa shook his head. Suffering he was.
“But if she’s party to it, if she’s okay with the clip getting out there,” Behr ventured as delicately as he could, “why not step aside and let it? The burn rate on this shit is like thirty seconds in today’s world. It’ll be forgotten before it’s done playing.”
He hoped to remind Potempa of what he, as a professional, already knew: that removing the leverage caused any extortion plot to fall apart instantly.
“Behr,” Potempa said, “
she
may be out of her mind, and willing to play at this, but
I’m
not. I can’t have it. I can’t have it. You read me? That’s my little girl …”
Even if Behr had never heard the English language, he couldn’t have missed the desperation and vulnerability in Potempa’s tone. Only a child in peril could bring forth such a sound. Only being a parent could make one that weak and susceptible. Behr just nodded, suddenly feeling as weary as the older man looked.
“Final numbers aren’t in yet, but second quarter operating expenses are running constant at roughly negative twenty-seven thousand per day. Projected per-player revenue is off target day by day at two sixteen, one forty-two, one eleven, two nineteen …”
The numbers washed over Lowell Gantcher. All bad news. He looked around him at the paneled walls of the L.G. Entertainment conference room. He glanced at the people sitting at the long table. Senior operations managers, project managers, sales managers, accountants, bean counters of every stripe, the ineffective marketing ass wipes, the pricks from promotions with their dinner giveaways and frequent player cards as the height of their uninspired ideas. All of them sat there at the trough, waiting for their next paycheck. But the truth was, they weren’t going to get them the following Thursday. There was no money left. They were alien beings to him, these workers, from another planet where you went to work, did your job, got paid for what you did, and lived on what you earned. If they understood overleveraging at all, it wasn’t something they did. It wasn’t their religion.
He
was the real alien, he supposed. He wondered what he looked like to them: whether all the Xanax he’d been taking made him appear like a broken robot whose faceplate was about to spring off, or if their faith in him convinced them he looked normal.
It was supposed to be easy to be a CEO. The hard part was
supposed to be getting there. Twenty years of building, working long hours, sucking up to bosses and bankers, hitting numbers, winning bids. But now look at him. He’d tripped at the finish line and gone facedown on the asphalt.
Gantcher raised his gaze to the glass that looked out into the main office in time to see a bulked-up, stocky figure moving quickly.
Dwyer
. A rush of adrenaline hit him in a sickening burst that almost had him throwing up and lunging out of his chair to run at the same time. The figure continued past the room. It was just Williams or Willoughby or whatever his name was, some fireplug he didn’t know well who worked in site planning. Gantcher caught himself gripping the edge of the table.
Relax, for god’s sake
, he urged himself to no effect, when Janine Mohrer, a young woman from accounting who issued checks for most of her day, walked in.
“Mr. Gantcher …” She interrupted the meeting, her face chalky white with fear, causing his own alarm to deepen in a way he hadn’t thought possible moments before. “There’s a problem with the insurance policy on the town house job. It had lapsed.”