Free Thick as Thieves by Peter Spiegelman Page A

tell their own stories. An agent gets an idea there’s something particular you want to hear, all he’ll do is sing it to you. He’ll have you chasing your tail right up your backside
. Still, he looked like a pirate.
    Tina is holding a flash drive and looking at him. “File’s on here,” she says.
    Carr closes the dossier and pockets the drive. “You have anything else for me?”
    “Anything like …?”
    “It’s been four months, for chrissakes.”
    “I told you, it’s slow going. We don’t have a lot of friends down there.”
    “So four months of digging and nothing to show?”
    Tina closes her magazine and places it on her lap. “Not exactly nothing,” she says.
    Carr draws a hand down his face. He is awake now, fully, for the first time today. “Exactly
what
, then?”
    “Not a hundred percent sure. A guy one of our few friends knows met another guy who pilots for a vineyard down there. He flies in and out of an airfield near Mendoza. His brother works part-time at the same field, doing maintenance on the prop planes. The rest of the time, the brother works at a private field northwest of town, a dirt strip on an
estancia.
”
    “Bertolli’s place.”
    Tina nods. “Works there on Tuesdays and Fridays. And word is he told his big brother that one Friday morning, four months back, before he could even get his truck parked, the foreman waved him off. Told him
hasta la vista
—go home, no work today. No explanation besides there was a party going on at the ranch that night, which seemed weird to the mechanic because he knew that Bertolli was away in Europe for two weeks. But the foreman gave him a day’s pay anyway, for doing nothing, so he didn’t ask questions. He did notice something as he was driving out the gate that morning, though: a truckload of men driving in.”
    “What men?”
    “He’d seen some of them around the ranch before, but they scared him and he always kept his distance. Bertolli’s hard boys. The mechanic tells his brother they looked like they were there to work.”
    Carr stands slowly and puts a hand on the back of the bench. “Which Friday morning was this?”
    “Four months back, the second Friday of the month. That makes it the morning of the twelfth.”
    After a while, Carr clears his throat. “That’s the morning of the day before,” he says.
    “Mr. Boyce says not to read too much into it.”
    Carr looks down at Tina, and at his own face, black in her black lenses. “It doesn’t take any reading,” he says quietly. “They knew he was coming. They were waiting for him.”

8
    At 9:35 a.m. Howard Bessemer will leave his blue, Bermuda-style cottage, turn right on Monterey Road, turn right again on North Ocean Boulevard, and drive south, past the Palm Beach Country Club, to the Barton Golf and Racquet Club, there to meet Daniel Brunt for a ten o’clock court. He will play no more than two sets of tennis with Brunt, and afterward drink no more than two iced teas, and then he will shower, dress, get in his car, and drive across the Royal Park Bridge for lunch in West Palm Beach. This is Howard Bessemer’s routine on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and this being 9:33 on a Tuesday, Carr knows that Bessemer will soon appear. Because if Carr, Latin Mike, Bobby, and Dennis have learned anything in the weeks they’ve been watching him, it is that Bessemer is a man of routines.
    Tuesdays and Thursdays: tennis and lunch. Mondays and Wednesdays: golf and cocktails. Friday mornings: sailing. Friday afternoons: more cocktails. And Friday nights straight through Sunday afternoons: high-stakes poker, cocaine, and whores—two, sometimes three, at a clip—all in a basement below a Brazilian restaurant, not far from the medical center. They can set their watches by Bessemer, and they love him for it.
    The garage door opens, and the blue BMW pulls out. Bessemer has the top down, and his thinning blond hair is a tattered pennant in the breeze. Right and right again, and Bobby waits