The Nomination (8 page)

You did whatever you had to do to stay alive, and you hoped that tomorrow, not today, would be the day you died. You killed so you wouldn't get killed. You set huts on fire, and sometimes you slaughtered women and children and old men, because if you didn't, they might kill you.

Larrigan himself had not done that. But he knew, if he'd been in the right situation, he would have. In a heartbeat. Without giving it a second thought. And without remorse.

The only other way was to blow your brains out. Plenty of boys did it that way.

That's how it was. Unless they'd been there, they had no right to judge.

But, of course, they would.

He turned to Moran. “Only four people know, and two of them are sitting in this car and one of them most likely died a long time ago.”

“Leaving Bunny,” said Moran.

“Get those fucking photos, Eddie.”

Moran looked at him. “You really think Bunny's gonna—?”

“Do what you have to do,” said Larrigan.

BLACKHOLE SAT IN his nondescript Subaru and watched the judge's Lincoln Town Car, parked in the corner of the McDonald's lot, through his zoom lens. When the unidentified man opened the passenger door and slid in, he snapped one picture in the brief flash of the dome light. Hard to say if the man's face would show up, although the computer techs could do wonders with blurry, underexposed digital photographs. Not that it mattered. Blackhole had already photographed the license plate of the Ford Explorer the man had parked on the other side of the lot. Identifying him would be no problem.

The two of them sat in the front seat for twelve minutes—from 6:42 to 6:54 by Blackhole's watch. From where he watched, he couldn't see what they were doing. Then the stranger opened the passenger door, stepped out, and went back to his Explorer.

Blackhole snapped several photos of the judge's friend in the light from the parking lot floods. He looked to be somewhere in his fifties. Five-ten, about one-seventy-five. Thinning hair, bony face. Bulky around the shoulders. He walked with his arms held a little bit away from his body. Wrestlers carried their arms that way on account of their overdeveloped upper bodies. But this man wasn't awkward or muscle-bound. There was a smooth efficiency to the way he moved. Graceful, almost, like a confident, well-conditioned athlete.

Most people, civilians, they wouldn't take a second look at this guy, and afterward, they wouldn't remember him, or if they did, they wouldn't be able to describe him. He was nondescript, ordinary. He blended in—which, of course, was the whole point.

Blackhole knew the type, though. He knew a lot of men who carried themselves like this one. They were highly trained. Former SEALs or Special Forces, civilians now, still valued for their particular skills. Dangerous men. Men without normal compunctions.

Blackhole himself was one such man.

The Town Car and the Explorer started up, flashed on their headlights, and headed for the parking lot exit at the same time. The judge turned left, which, Blackhole knew, would take him home. The Explorer turned right.

Blackhole was briefly tempted to follow the Explorer. But his orders were to stick to the judge, so that's what he did.

Perhaps that would change now that he had finally come up with something worth reporting. Blackhole's job was to gather intelligence, not to judge it or interpret it. But he knew that Federal District Court judges didn't meet highly trained, dangerous men in the shadowy corner of a McDonald's parking lot unless they were up to something.

E
ddie Moran drove slowly past the little square modular home. It was nearly three in the morning, and this was his fifth trip past the place since he'd gotten to Key Largo late that afternoon.

On his first pass, Moran had observed that the trash still hadn't been cleaned out of the carport. Nor had the boat's hull been scraped or the shutter repaired or the lawn cut or the gardens weeded.

Now, after five trips past her place, the maroon VW with the daisy on the antenna still hadn't showed up.

Bunny Brubaker, he figured, had gotten lucky. She was shacked up for the night.

He smiled to himself, remembering his night with her. If she was shacked up, he thought, it was definitely the guy who'd gotten lucky.

I could do it now, he thought. She's not coming home tonight.

Nope. Can't take that chance.

So he drove the rental—it was a Chevy sedan this time, rented under a different name with a different credit card from a different Miami rental agency—back up Route 1 to his motel. Not the same motel as last time, either.

THE NEXT MORNING he thought about going to the dolphin place, but he couldn't risk Bunny spotting him. So he looked up the number in the motel directory and called it on his cell phone, and when a guy calling himself Carlos answered, he said, “May I speak with Bunny Brubaker, please?”

If Carlos said he'd go get her, hang on a minute, Moran would hang up. If he said Bunny was busy, could he take a message, he'd make something up.

What Carlos said was: “She not here.”

“When do you expect her?”

“I don't,” said Carlos. “Bunny don't work here no more.”

Moran sighed. “Damn. That's disappointing.”

“Sorry, man.”

“Look,” said Moran. “I'm her cousin Joey, see. We used to be real close. I haven't seen her since she moved to Florida. I finally get down here, first thing I want to do is see Bunny. I talked to her, it was only a couple weeks ago, told her I was coming. I just got in this morning, tried calling her house. No answer. She mentioned that she worked there. I figure, she's at work . . .” He sighed. “You don't know how I could reach her, do you? Maybe she took another job . . . ?”

“Can't help you. Bunny told me nothing.”

“Is there anybody there who she might've told what she was doing?”

“No,” said Carlos. “Just me. She quit, that's all. Called last week. Told me she wasn't coming back. Too bad. Bunny a real nice lady, hard worker, good with the kids.”

“Well, okay,” said Eddie. “Thanks anyway.”

“Sorry, man.”

HE LEFT THE Chevy at the turnaround at the end of her street and walked back. It was a little after noon, the best time to commit a burglary. That's when houses were empty and most of the neighbors would be out, and in the midday heat of the Florida Keys, those who were home would be huddled inside with their air conditioning turned up high and their curtains drawn against the sun.

Besides, normal law-abiding citizens always assume that burglars work at night, which is, of course, fallacious. But it's what they assume. They're more likely to notice a stranger in the neighborhood after dark than at noontime.

All the burglars Moran knew, which was quite a large number, worked in the middle of the day.

He strolled up the street, a middle-aged guy in khaki pants and a blue short-sleeved shirt and a straw hat, neither tall nor short, fat nor skinny, an average-looking white guy with sunglasses and a forgettable face, although Bunny thought he was still cute and women seemed to remember his deep brown eyes and the tiny starshaped scar on his cheekbone and the hard bulk of his chest and shoulders when he slipped out of his shirt.

“Well, officer, I remember a man. He was wearing a straw hat and sunglasses. No, that's really all I remember about him.”

He assumed he was being watched. It was always best to operate on that assumption. He turned up the path to her front door and rang the bell. If by chance she was home and answered the door, he'd grin and say, “Hey, surprise! I'm back in town. Thought I'd take a chance, see if you were home.”

Of course she didn't answer the bell.

He stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, feigning impatience for whatever eyes might be watching him.

Then he shrugged, walked back to the street, hesitated, shrugged again, putting on a show for his imaginary audience, and went up her driveway, into the carport, around the smelly trash barrels, to the back door. Out of sight, now, from all eyes.

He had his tools with him, but first he ran his hand over the ledge above the door, then lifted the doormat. No dice. Probably she'd hidden her spare key somewhere in the chaos of the carport, but Moran figured it'd be quicker just to pick the damn lock.

It took him four minutes. He was a little out of practice.

When he opened the door and stepped inside, the heat almost blew him back out. It must've been a hundred-and-twenty in there. Well, okay. That confirmed that she'd been gone for a while. When she'd been living there, he recalled, she kept the AC on all day.

He went straight to the bedroom, opened the closet door, fumbled behind the pile of sweaters, and took down the shoebox.

He dumped the photos out onto the bed.

Fifteen minutes later he left the house, strolled back to his car, and drove a couple of miles down Route 1. Then he pulled to the side of the road and took out his cell phone.

When Larrigan answered, Moran said, “She's not there and those photos aren't there, either.”

“What do you mean?”

Moran explained that Bunny had quit her job, left her house, and taken the photos of her and Larrigan and Eddie and Li An, Larrigan's Vietnamese girlfriend, with her to wherever she'd gone. “It doesn't look like she moved permanently,” he said. “Hard to say if she took a lot of clothes with her. But as near as I can remember, everything else was the way it was.”

“So now what?” said Larrigan.

“Up to you.”

“Find her.”

“It's gonna—”

“Goddamn it, Eddie. Do what needs to be done. Get the damn pictures.”

JAKE IN NEW York told Moran it would take ten or twelve hours to get what he needed—if he could get it. No guarantees. So Moran spent the day in his motel room alternating between his Elmore Leonard paperback and the television.

It was nearly ten that night when his cell phone chirped. Moran had been dozing.

“Yuh,” he mumbled.

“It's Jake.”

“Get anything?”

“She's been in Davis, Georgia, for at least the past two days, including yesterday afternoon. Before that Jacksonville, and before that West Palm Beach. She's heading north.”

“Credit card?”

“Nope. That would've been easier. ATM card. She used it three days ago and then yesterday, same place in Davis. Maybe she's still there. Worth a shot, anyway.”

“Well, good,” said Moran. “So where the fuck is Davis, Georgia?”

“Christ, Eddie, I gotta check the map for you?”

“No, I guess I can—”

“Well, I did, anyway. It's a few miles northwest of Valdosta, just over the line from Florida.”

“I know where Valdosta is.”

“Just tryin' to give you your money's worth.”

“You did. Thanks.”

HE GOT UP at six the next morning, drove to Miami, returned the Chevy sedan to the rental place, and caught a flight to Atlanta. There he switched planes, and he landed at the Valdosta Municipal Airport a little after two in the afternoon.

He rented a Dodge minivan with one of his many credit cards under one of his many names. The girl at the Budget desk gave him a map of the area, and he found Davis. It was about twenty miles outside the city, the third exit north off I-75.

Moran found the town and spent the afternoon driving around, orienting himself.

Davis turned out to be a nondescript little Southern town, mostly red-dirt farms, a few residential streets lined with big old houses with wraparound verandas, trailers and shacks scattered along the back roads, a couple of rib joints, and several roadside taverns. What passed as a business center was a couple of strip malls.

There were three banks. Bunny Brubaker had used her ATM card twice at one of them.

There were two motels, and at eight-thirty that evening he spotted the maroon VW with the daisy on the antenna and the Florida plates parked outside the motel nearest the bank she'd used. It was a run-down sixteen-unit flat-roofed boxy structure tucked into a little grove of scrub oak on the main drag heading west past the second strip mall.

What a brilliant fucking detective I am, thought Moran. Less than twenty-four hours ago I had no idea where she was. She could've been anywhere.

Now I've got her.

He drove back into town, found a Burger King with a drive-through, and ordered a Whopper, fries, and coffee. When he paid the girl at the window, he kept his sunglasses on and the brim of his straw hat pulled low so she wouldn't see his face. He ate in the parking lot, lit a cigarette, and sipped his coffee while the light faded from the sky. Then he drove back to the motel.