It was barely noon by the time we all regrouped on the Francesca, but it felt like midnight after a weekend spent scaling mountains. As wired as my mind was after the morning’s action, my body clamored for a large meal and a long siesta.
Hollis had left the red and blue suitcases on the cabin floor. I unlocked both and flipped the lids open. All ten canvas sacks lay like crushed fruit within. I set one on the dining table and sat down to unzip it and remove the contents, placing them almost reverently in front of me.
“Aren’t they lovely?” said Hollis.
They really were. The gold bars looked like what treasure was supposed to look like. Each one had the heft that wealth should have.
“Do you suppose Fekkete found out what we did? Before they grabbed him?” Hollis said.
I glanced over at the O’Hassons. Mickey had collapsed on the settee, more asleep than awake. Cyndra sat on the floor next to him, head by his stomach, already out. Only a kid could sleep in that position, half on and half off the couch.
“You’ve got a lot of room for Fekkete in your head,” I said to Hollis.
He grimaced. “We set a man up to die. It sticks, somehow.”
“I don’t make it a habit.”
“Christ. No one’s saying that.”
“Fekkete was a marked man before I met him.” I nodded at the father and daughter across the cabin. “They got in the way. That was partly my fault. Without me helping him, Mick might never have gone near the safe.”
“I’ll drop the subject,” Hollis said.
Corcoran interrupted by coming in from outside. He slammed the sliding door, startling Cyndra into momentary wakefulness.
“There’s a guy can move some of the bars,” he said. “I didn’t say how many, he didn’t ask. We’ll get into details in person.”
“The gold’s probably clean, Jimmy,” Hollis said. “Market value.”
“Yeah, maybe. I like cash. Let the other guy worry about the damn provenance.” He looked at me. “What about you?”
I hadn’t reflected on much past surviving this morning’s exchange. Luce would have said that I’d been thinking tactically, not strategically. The kind of thinking that made planning my future an ongoing challenge. Maybe the money would last longer if I held on to some of the kilobars for the long term.
“Let’s hear what your fence offers,” I said. “Then I’ll decide.”
Corcoran shrugged. “I’m gonna set up a meet with him. Tomorrow, or the day after. Not to trade yet, just to talk numbers.”
I whistled through my teeth a little as I stood up. Every bruise from my fight with Rénald at the quarry was saluting smartly.
“If your extra berth’s open, I’m going to crash until sundown,” I said to Hollis.
“Be my guest. What about these?” He beamed at the suitcases like they were favored grandchildren.
I nodded at the cabin wall, where he’d recently held the smuggled bedposts. “You know where to hide stuff.”
“I suppose I do at that.” Hollis shook Cyndra gently by the shoulder. “Come on, love. Let’s put you and your dad below.”
The two of them got O’Hasson up and moving and made their careful way down the stairs.
I looked down at the small pyramid I’d made of the bars. About four hundred grand in one little pile. Despite my earlier determination to enjoy the day, my thoughts kept steering in dark directions. Was this just a hangover from the action? Dono was given to black moods after a score. Even, and maybe especially, if it had gone well. Because the fun part was over.
Fatigue, maybe. They taught us in the Army not to trust our emotions when the mission had ground us down to a nub. Use the higher intellect, and tell the reptile brain to go fuck itself with its tail.
Or maybe the fatigue was just an excuse and my mood was entirely appropriate. Sane, even. There was a whole lot of death surrounding the metal that glowed like a molten sun. The drugs that had been sold to buy it. April Slattery, murdered to find it. Fekkete, likely taking the first agonizing steps down his final path right now.
Dono would have told me to shrug those thoughts off. That all money had pain in its history somewhere, whether it came from a corporation’s dividends or from the sweat of manual labor. Believing anything else was an illusion.
I didn’t fully subscribe to that argument. But the gold bars seemed to hum their own tune. It wasn’t joyful.
I woke in the guest stateroom of the Francesca. On the opposite wall, the setting sun painted a skewed copy of the porthole’s oval shape. My watch alarm hadn’t gone off yet. Something else had roused me.
I got up and went to check on the O’Hassons. A note in Hollis’s crooked handwriting taped to my door said that he and Corcoran had gone out for provisions, and that he hoped to hell I was ready for some revelry.
Cyndra was asleep in the second stateroom. Mick sat in the main cabin, leaning sideways against the back of the settee. He still looked ready to keel over, skin hanging on his face like it threatened to slide off and fall onto the rug. A sour odor that went beyond unclean to something like decay came from him.
“Get any sleep?” I said.
He shook his head no.
“You were gone for a week.”
His eyes sharpened a fraction. “Seemed longer.”
“Did they keep you doped? I found a tranquilizer dart on the stairs in the building.”
“Huh. So that’s what it was. I was at the top of the stairs, and my arm hurt all of a sudden. Thought maybe I was having a heart attack or somethin’. Then I heard them coming and ran away.”
I thought of O’Hasson’s stiff jean jacket and the shirts underneath, needed to keep his thin body warm even in July. Those layers had probably spared him from taking a full dose from the dart.
“Felt like crap,” he said. “Everything after that is all mashed together in my head, what I can remember.”
“You torched the place. Nearly burned me down along with it.”
“God.”
O’Hasson was silent for a long moment. I thought maybe exhaustion had wiped his mind blank again. But when he spoke again, his voice had more strength.
“I was—I went crazy, I know,” he said. “For weeks before my parole, all the meds and surgeries and shit. First it was Gar talking to me about the idea. Then it was me talking to him. If I could just hold on until I got out, and find the safe.”
Slattery had set the hook deep into O’Hasson. The little thief sounded humiliated, remembering how he’d been suckered.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I am. I didn’t want nothing like this. All I could think about was what Cyn might be doing, every time I woke up.”
“Where did they keep you?” I said.
“Most of the time, just one room. Like a concrete shed. Outside, I think. Hot. There was a mattress and a hole in the floor like for an outhouse.” He made a disgusted face. “Reeked like rhino shit, especially during the hot part of the day.”
“Most of the time?”
“All of it, really. I had a scary-ass dream of being in a place with white tile and metal cabinets and shit like that. But it couldn’t have been for real. I was tripping on that trank dope, thinking I was back in the prison sickhouse.”
“You’re safe now.”
“I thought sure they were going to end me, every day. Instead of bringing me food, they’d just put a bullet in my head, or leave me without water.” He stared at me. “Why did they let me go?”
I told O’Hasson a short version of the long war between Fekkete and the Slatterys, and the obsessive Ingrid Ekby.
“She let you have the gold?” O’Hasson said, stunned. “Just for finding that asshole?”
“She’s nuts,” I said, “and rich enough to get away with it. Whatever revenge she’s after, money’s no object.”
O’Hasson thought about that. “Maybe not to her. Some of her boys asked me every day. What Gar had told me about the gold, how much he’d said would be in the safe, if there might be more gold somewheres-else. Those boys are in it for the profit.”
I remembered the hunter Marshall, ticked off that Ingrid was willing to use the gold as bait. Dissent in the ranks. I wondered if Boule had been the one keeping them in line, or if they were scared enough of Ingrid to stay obedient.
“If I hadn’t been so weak, they might have put it to me a lot harder,” O’Hasson continued. “Instead they said if I helped them find all the gold, they’d leave Cyndra out of it. I didn’t get it at first. Then he—explained it to me.” O’Hasson looked ready to vomit.
“Explained that they would hurt her.”
“Yeah,” he said, almost inaudibly.
Everybody knew O’Hasson’s weak spot was threatening his kid. The suits and ties didn’t make Ingrid’s men any less scummy than the Sledge City animals.
O’Hasson pointed a finger at me. “I knew you’d gotten away clean, Van. The shitheads never asked me about a partner. Never even occurred to them I might not have come alone to steal the gold. Morons.”
“We stepped into a snake pit,” I said. “Lucky for us that they were more interested in sinking their fangs into each other. Ingrid Ekby got what she was after. So did we. It’s over. Get some rest.”
“I can’t.” He waved an angry hand. “They’re still out there.”
Ingrid and her hunters had taken something from O’Hasson. Pride, I guessed. The belief that he could protect his daughter. And the men who did it were still walking free. Hell, they’d finally captured Fekkete. If we’d won, so had they.
“Forget them,” I said. “You and Cyndra are what counts.”
“Is Cyn okay?” he said. “After those sons of bitches chasing after her?”
“Your kid is tough as hell,” I said, “but she needs her dad. Ask her where she wants to live, and go there. Make something good out of it.”
He grinned softly. A hint of his old charm.
“Every day above ground is a good day,” he said, putting mocking quotes around it. “This prison doctor would say that to me. To keep up my spirits. You believe that? I got terminal cancer, I’m in max sec getting cavity searched every time they take me for a fucking X-ray, and he wants me to stay positive. It kinda worked. He was such an idiot, I laughed every time.”
He stood up to shuffle off to the lower cabins.
I foraged in Hollis’s cabinets, found coffee, found booze, decided I didn’t want either. Instead I went outside. The night was warm and promised to stay that way until long after darkness, even with the breeze picking up off the shore. I climbed the ladder to the flying bridge at the top of the boat. Hollis had the canvas roof folded down and the bridge was open to the sky. I sat behind the helm and watched the stars making their first hesitant gleams through the peach-colored ether.
Fine advice, Shaw, even if O’Hasson wasn’t willing to listen. Take the money and build yourself a regular life. Make a few good days.