The Last Family (26 page)

Paul turned and opened the file closest to him. He tried to read it, but he was shaking. “If that’s all,” he said.

“I didn’t mean to upset you, Mr. Masterson. Really I didn’t.”

“I have work to do—I imagine you do, too.”

She went to the door and stopped and turned. “Should I leave? Am I fired?”

“No, you aren’t fired. Do something constructive. You shouldn’t waste your time wondering about … me.” He almost swallowed the last word.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “if I offended you. Sometimes I let my curiosity get me in trouble.”

“It’s all right. I opened the door but let’s close it.” He looked up and slammed the file closed. “Two things. One, don’t ever try to analyze me, because you don’t have any idea what’s gone on in my life or what I think or how I feel. And keep up the good work.”

She smiled. “Thanks,” she added. “Sorry.” She stood still and stared at him.

He knew what he wanted to say.
I’m lonely right now. I need company. Companionship for a little while. I want to
 … After Sherry left the room, he spent a half hour staring out the window at downtown Nashville, thinking about what had happened before the seizure had struck.
How many days since I took the antiseizure medicine?
Paul thought about the medicine and knew that because he was back in the saddle, he had almost unconsciously decided he wouldn’t need it.

Paul had been in a rage when the seizure had taken him down. He regretted what he had said and how he’d said it. But he decided that his instincts had been fine. It was better that the child forget him. Better they all do. Even if he wanted to, he could not go to New Orleans until the time was right.
You’ll see me soon enough, Martin
.

26

‘H
E DID WHAT?”
L
AURA SHRIEKED
. S
HE STUDIED HER SON, WHO
was angry and not about to listen to anything she had to say. His face was bright red, his eyes seemed to be on fire.

“Nothing I could do,” Thorne said. “He insisted he had to speak to Paul. Threatened to blow the whole surveillance.”

Reb’s bottom lip was extended in anger. “If he’s not in the mountains like you said, I wanted to talk to him. He has a telephone now. What’s so special about him that I can’t talk to him? He’s my father, isn’t he?”

“You go upstairs,” she said. She didn’t move until she heard his bedroom door slam.

“What on earth did he say to Paul?” she asked.

Erin stood in a nearby doorway, listening with her head cocked.

“Reb told him that he should come here. He told Paul that he was selfish. He told him that growing up
without a father was a hardship. He basically said that Paul was a selfish asshole and to come now or never.”

“He said that?”

“Oh, more than that. But that was the gist of it—the high points. He spoke to Paul like Paul was the child.”

Laura smiled. “Good,” she said. “What did Paul say?”

“I’ve no idea. I think he hung up.”

Reb was lying on the bed when Laura came up a few minutes later. Wolf put his head on Reb’s leg, and his mother sat on the edge of the bed.

“Reb. You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“You know what you did was wrong?”

Reb fought to control his quivering lip. “He doesn’t love us, Mama. Why?” He sat up, and she hugged him as he sobbed against her shoulder. “What did we ever do to him? Were we bad? Cause we were just little … we didn’t mean to make him mad.”

“Reb, you didn’t do anything, and it isn’t that your father doesn’t love you. He does.”

“But he yelled at me like he hates me. He said I should be turned over someone’s knee and that my behavior could cost us all our lives and that this wasn’t a game. He yelled some other stuff, but I wasn’t listening. He’s a horrible, mean man. I wish I hadn’t called him. I wish he was dead. I wish those bad men had killed him dead and dead.”

Laura did the best she could, but Reb would not be consoled. His face was like a mass of tight cables all pulling in different directions. Laura had never seen him in such a state. She left his room and ran into Erin in the hall.

“Just who the hell does he think he is?” Erin yelled.

“Erin!” she said. “Language!”

“The hell with him!”

“Erin, please.”

“Just because he looks like a damned scarecrow doesn’t give him the right to treat Reb like that! I don’t care how he treats me, but I do care how he treats my little brother. How dare he?”

“Erin, I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.”

“Oh, so just keep on taking up for Mr. Slime Varmint. I’m sorry he got shot in his precious face.” She looked directly into her mother’s eyes. “I’m sorry it didn’t kill him, too.”

“Erin!”

“Oh, Mother, you’re as bad as he is.” Erin ran to her bedroom and slammed the door. The noise echoed through the hallway like a shotgun blast.

Laura went to the kitchen, poured herself a large glass of red wine, and drained it. “Thorne,” she said, speaking to the window, which was like talking directly into his earphones, “do us all a favor and tell him we don’t need to see him ever again. Tell him he can go straight back to his mountain. Tell him if he hurts my children again, I’ll kill him myself.”

Then Laura took her bottle of wine into the studio and turned up the stereo so she could cry in privacy.

Erin was furious. Her father had turned her family’s lives upside down, put her social life on hold, and she didn’t appreciate it a bit. She thought about the new boy in school, who might be the most beautiful boy she had ever laid eyes on. Eric Garcia had told a friend of hers that he had a crush on her. Earlier that day he had spoken to her while she’d been eating lunch. He had asked Erin out, and normally she would have jumped on it in an instant. Her friends had been sick, they were so jealous. But with everything that was happening she had had to put him off by saying that she was busy, although she had been careful to leave the door open for the week after.
I mean, how long can it take all these experts to nail one old creep?
After school that agent, Sean Merrin, had been waiting and had shadowed her, even on the streetcar from her high school. It made her feel like an idiot, a small child.

She decided that she would show them. She’d slip Eric a note arranging to meet him, and then she’d slip Sean Merrin.
Fuck ’em
.

27

G
RAVEL CRUNCHED UNDER THE DARK
C
ADILLAC
B
ROUGHAM, ITS
running lights burning orange, as it floated out of the fog like a manta ray. It slid up the truck ramp, swung out onto the dock, and pulled into the shadow of a rusting freighter. The freighter was a ghost vessel, abandoned for the evening, its crew scattered about the bars of the upper French Quarter. The car stopped, and after a few minutes the rear door opened as a single figure got out.

Lallo Estevez carried himself with the aplomb of an aristocrat. He wore his hair in a rolling silver mane. He had a pencil-thin mustache and wore heavy black-framed glasses. The all-weather coat hung shroudlike from his shoulders, and the gold signet ring with his ancient family crest had doubled as a sealing-wax stamp two hundred years before. He thought he heard something behind him and gave the Cadillac a proprietary glance, lit a blond Dominican cigar with his gold Dunhill lighter,
then turned and walked up the gangplank to the deck. He thought the vantage point might be more advantageous from that altitude. The thin soles of his loafers slid against the damp boards, slick leather against the light coating of oil and beads of condensation. He stood at the top of the walk and looked up and down the deck. The broker could barely make out the window to the pilothouse through the fog. Not that anyone was in there. Privacy had been arranged with a word to the captain. The ship belonged to Lallo’s coffee company. He looked around trying to spot the man with his rifle. No matter.

Lallo spent ten minutes standing and puffing on the cigar and listening for any foreign sound. As usual he wasn’t armed. He had never liked weapons personally, though he had fenced at college in England, and he was a fair clay-target shot. He had never had to handle a weapon in violence. As long as there was poverty, there would be those willing to do anything for a TV set and a few dollars. He checked his Omega. Ten past the time Martin had set for the meeting.

Lallo wasn’t nervous about the shooter, except he hoped the shot was clean. Sometimes these men weren’t as concerned with what was behind the target as the target itself. And he hoped the CIA hadn’t decided to end their uneasy partnership after all these years. He could describe Spivey’s build and his voice but had never looked into his eyes. It was better not to see too much. The only other time he had met with him, Spivey had been wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, a thick mustache and matching wig, neither of which looked convincing or had meant to be.

“Marty, where the fucking hell are you?” he whispered to himself.

“Such language.” The voice shocked him like a cup of cold water tossed in his face, and Lallo was frightened to find himself standing two feet away from the author of the words. A stranger. He thought he heard the car door close, and he prayed the men in the car behind him would stay put. “Martin? Is this you?” Lallo had not seen Martin face-to-face since the operation.

“Not hardly,” the man said, raising his chin. “Behind you.”

Martin was indeed there when Lallo turned. The Latin broker almost had trouble drawing a steady breath. How Martin had come up the gangplank without rocking it, and so soundlessly, Lallo couldn’t imagine. He was dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans. His face was smeared with something dark and moist. Lallo didn’t recognize him at first. And not because of the face paint—the face was vastly altered from the one he had last seen, years before.

“How did you do that?” he said, trying to inject levity in his tone. “You took ten years off my life. And this one”—he nodded at the other man—“who looks strangely familiar to me, I must say.” He made the sign of the cross and put his hands on Martin’s shoulders.

“You’ve met before,” Martin said. “Years ago. In our training facility in Colombia.”

“I see. Now, Marty, we meet and speak face-to-face again like old friends.”

“Well, my friend, I delivered my end on schedule, and we agreed on a price up front,” Martin said in flawless Spanish. “Weren’t you pleased with the quality of the merchandise? All you had to do was connect the Semtex and set the clocks. Sweet as it gets, and so any fool becomes a professional bomber. Pablo is having a cash-flow problem, you said?”

“Sí,”
Lallo said. Then he reverted to English, looking from Martin to the other man as he spoke. In his mind he prayed that the shooter waited and got both of them. The additional man was a problem, but one Ramon could handle easily. “A small problem getting his money moved around. Very temporary, he assures me. He moves from Guatemala to Colombia, and he is never where I look for him. Communication is a terrible problem, but as history has shown us, he is always good for it.”

“I saw where his cousin and brother met with an accident.”

“Police bullets, very bad for the digestion.” Lallo
shrugged and laughed. “And that didn’t help with these troubles.”

“That was just a few weeks ago. I’ve been owed my money for six months now. Am I some worrisome dog who sneaked under the table?”

Lallo opened his arms expansively. “Oh, no! You are like my own family! I never thought that!”

“Still, Uncle Lallo, I haven’t been paid. In the old days I was always paid, and well. Information I gave saved many lives in Pablo’s organization. And millions upon millions of dollars in merchandise that would have been lost to seizure.”

Martin smiled, but the smile was not a pleasant thing to see.

“But, my friend,” Lallo said, “I have brought you your money, after all. That is why I wanted to meet out here this time of night. To pay you what Pablo owes you. He told me to wait … but I said no, Martin Fletcher is my dear friend, and
I
will pay him. If he doesn’t like that”—Lallo put his fingers to his chest—“too bad. It’s not your problem. I’m paying you out of my pocket, and I must collect later. You have changed so much! You look so many years younger. Handsome!” Lallo’s eyes related that the familiar voice coming from this stranger was disconcerting. He tried not to look at the warehouse roofline, but he did, just fleetingly.

“Oh, Lallo, you make me feel guilty.” Martin smiled sheepishly. “And I wasn’t certain I could trust you any longer.”

Lallo patted him on the shoulders, and the nervous smile grew larger. “It’s nothing.”

“Where is it? The money?”

“In the car. You come and I will pay you now. All this fog is like vampire movie, no?” Lallo laughed.

Martin smiled. “Blood from the neck.” He laughed. “In the car, you say?”

“Yes. Come.”

Martin walked behind Lallo until they made the dock and on to the car. Lallo was nervous.
What about the other man? Will he be shot at the same time?

He opened the door slowly and said, “Your money is in there, Marty.”

As he pulled the door open, he stepped back so Ramon, the man in the rear seat, would have a clean shot with the double-barreled shotgun—and the other man a shot from the warehouse roof. But as he stood there braced for the explosions, nothing happened. Martin Fletcher stared at Lallo, who stood holding the door handle with his left hand. Martin waited a full thirty seconds, eye to eye with Lallo, before he bent down and reached into the open door, grabbed an ankle, and tugged a limp body from the car to the dock, where it landed with a squishing sound not unlike that of a foot being pulled from the mud. The left side of the man’s face had exploded out. There was a small hole in his left temple, and the window he had been seated against was perforated with tiny cracks that formed a spiderweb of shattered lens radiating from a small hole.

“Imagine my surprise when I found Ramon here! Was this sorry sack of shit supposed to give me my money, Lallo? Or was he supposed to give me something else? I have to tell you the money wasn’t inside the car—only this.” Marty reached behind him, under his jacket, and pulled a pistol complete with a silencer from his belt. “And a shotgun. So is the money in the trunk? All I see in there is two dead pieces of shit, your driver and a dead
pistolero
of dubious lineage. But money? No, I don’t see my money.” Martin’s face was twitching, the anger floating from him. Lallo prayed for the man on the roof to shoot and end this. He scanned the roofline of his warehouse.