Thirty-seven

Dublin | June 6, 2005

BURKE RETRIEVED MIRANDA Renfro’s address from the town of Fallon’s website, which listed the property owners and the amounts of their assessments.

Miranda Renfro owned lot 7B, Echo Village, 3 Fred Brigham Road. With data from the same site, he tried calling her immediate neighbors to see if he could persuade one of them to bring her to the phone.

But no. Two of them thought he was a scam artist, the third didn’t speak English.

That night, he drank beer and sat in front of the box. He watched Man United play to a draw at Man City. Then the news, then a program about the Crusades.

He was still drinking too much and it worried him. But it didn’t stop him from grabbing another beer. He paced around the room, thinking about it, and finally, he made a decision. If the mountain wouldn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad would go to it. He sat down in front of the computer, and turned it back on. He typed “Travelocity” into the search bar.

As it turned out, making travel arrangements was easy. Explaining to Tommy wasn’t.

Burke was telling him about the trip when he realized how obsessive his quest for Wilson must seem. Belgrade was one thing, a little side trip to Slovenia, okay, maybe, but following a slender lead thousands of miles to Nevada? This was going too far – geographically, and in every other way.

He could read this in Tommy’s eyes, both skeptical and worried. “What you think you’re going t’find there?”

“Jack Wilson, if I’m lucky.”

“Nooooo,” Tommy said. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

“Maybe this Mandy woman will tell me where I can find him. And I can tell Kovalenko.”

“You think so, lad? If someone like you comes here looking, I’m going to tell them – oh, yeh, Michael’s over in Dublin, let me gi’ you his address?”

“Well –”

“And if you do find him, what you gonna do, hey? ‘Jack Wilson, come wi’ me to the FBI?’” The old man frowned. “And you think he’ll toddle along? This man is a criminal. No, it’s madness, Michael. If you’re doing this for the business, forget it. We wait, we take our chances wi’ the courts, I canna have you racing around the globe.”

Burke said he’d think about it. And he did. In fact, he slept on it.

And in the morning, he took a cab to the airport.