Trevor stroked the back of Jay’s neck with his palm. “So let’s talk truthfully, shall we?”
“He had me,” Jay told us. “And it wasn’t just the debt. I was shell-shocked when I realized that Adam, and maybe Everett, too, had actually betrayed me.”
“Did you talk to them?” Angie asked.
He nodded. “I called Everett and he confirmed it. He said he hadn’t known it himself. I mean, he’d known Kohl had a gambling problem, but he never thought he’d stoop to wiping out a fifty-three-year-old company in about seven weeks. Kohl had even pilfered the pension fund on Trevor Stone’s advice. Everett was devastated. You know his big thing about honor, Patrick.”
I nodded, remembering how Everett had spoken to Angie and me about honor in its twilight, about how hard it was to be an honorable man surrounded by dishonorable ones. How he’d stared at the view out his window as if it were the last time he’d ever see it.
“So,” Jay said, “I told Trevor Stone I’d do whatever he wanted. And he gave me two hundred and thirty thousand dollars to kill Jeff Price and Desiree.”
“I am more things than you could possibly fathom,” Trevor Stone told Jay that night. “I own trading corporations, shipping companies, more real estate than can be assessed in a day. I own judges, policemen, politicians, whole governments in some countries, and now I own you.” His hand tightened on Jay’s neck. “And if you betray me, I will reach across any oceans you try to put between us, and rip your jugular from your throat and cram it through the hole in your penis.”
So Jay went to Florida.
He had no idea what he’d do once he found Desiree or Jeff Price, only that he wouldn’t kill anyone in cold blood. He’d done that once for the feds in Mexico, and the memory of the look in the drug lord’s eyes just before Jay blew his heart all over his silk shirt had haunted him so completely, he quit the government a month later.
Lila had told him about a hotel in downtown Clearwater, the Ambassador, which Price had often raved about due to the vibrating beds and varied selection of porn movies available through the satellite TVs.
Jay thought it was a long shot, but then Price proved stupider than he’d thought when he walked out the front door two hours after Jay began staking the place out. Jay followed Price all day as he met with his buddies with the Thailand connections, got drunk in a bar in Largo, and took a hooker back to his room.
The next day, while Price was out, Jay broke into his room, but found no evidence of the money or Desiree.
One morning Jay watched Price leave the hotel and was about to give the room another toss when he got the feeling he was being watched.
He turned in his car seat and focused his binoculars, panned down the length of the street until he came face-to-face with another set of binoculars watching him from a car two blocks down.
“That’s how I met Desiree,” he told us. “Each of us watching the other through binoculars.”
He’d been wondering by this time if she’d ever really existed at all. He dreamed about her constantly, stared at her photographs for hours, believed he knew what she smelled like, how her laugh sounded, what her bare legs would feel like pressed against his own. And the more he built her up in his mind, the more she grew into something mythic—the tortured, poetic, tragic beauty who’d sat in Boston parks through the mists and rains of autumn, awaiting deliverance.
And then one day she was standing in front of him.
She didn’t drive away when he left his car to approach hers. She didn’t pretend it was all a misunderstanding. She watched him come with calm, steady eyes, and when he reached her car, she opened the door and stepped out.
“Are you from the police?” she said.
He shook his head, unable to speak.
She wore a faded T-shirt and jeans, both of which looked like they’d been slept in. Her feet were bare, her sandals on the floor mat of the car, and he found himself worrying that she might cut her feet on the glass or pebbles that littered the city street.
“Are you a private detective, perhaps?”
He nodded.
“A mute private detective?” she said with a small smile.
And he laughed.
22
“My father,” Desiree told Jay two days later, once they’d begun to trust each other, “owns people. That’s what he lives for. He owns businesses and homes and cars and whatever else you can think of, but what he really lives for is the owning of people.”
“I’m starting to figure that out,” Jay said.
“He owned my mother. Literally. She was from Guatemala originally. He went down there in the 1950s to oversee construction of a dam his company was financing, and he bought her from her parents for less than a hundred dollars American. She was fourteen years old.”
“Nice,” Jay said. “Real fucking nice.”
Desiree had holed up in an old fisherman’s shack on Longboat Key, which she’d rented at exorbitant rates, until she could figure out her options. Jay had been sleeping on the couch, and one night he woke to Desiree screaming from a nightmare, and they both left the house for the cool of the beach at three in the morning, both too rattled to sleep.
She wore only a sweatshirt he’d given her, a threadbare blue thing from his undergraduate days with LSU embossed on the front in white letters that had chipped and flaked over the years. She was broke, he’d discovered, afraid to use her credit cards on the chance her father would notice and send someone else to kill her. Jay sat beside her on the cool white sand as the surf roared white out of a wall of darkness, and he found himself staring at her hands clasped under her thighs, at the point where her toes disappeared in the white sand, at the glow from the moon as it threaded through the tangles in her hair.
And for the first time in his life, Jay Becker fell in love.
Desiree turned her head and met his eyes. “You won’t kill me?” she said.
“No. Not a chance.”
“And you don’t want my money?”
“You don’t have any,” Jay said, and they both laughed.
“Everyone I care about dies,” she said.
“I know,” Jay said. “You’ve had some shitty luck.”
She laughed, but it was bitter and fearful. “Or betrays me like Jeff Price.”
He touched her thigh just below the hem of the sweatshirt. He waited for her to remove his hand. And when she didn’t, he waited for her to close her own over it. He waited for the surf to tell him something, to suddenly know the right thing to say.