TWENTY-SIX

“I appreciate your doing this,” said Spencer. “I know it’s not part of your job.” This morning Morgan went to Alvin Cummings’s office, a squat single-story building out beyond the Lake Union locks near Shilshole on the Sound side of Seattle.

It looked like an insurance office, Venetian blinds with greasy dust on them, and dead flies on the windowsills.

Cummings himself had the looks of an F.B.I. agent, which he had been at one time, before he retired. He had done other things as well for the government, some of which Spencer knew about, and others he could only guess at. His hair was parted in the middle over silver-rimmed glasses, his body lean, flat stomach and butt so that if you saw him at a distance you might not know whether he was coming or going. He was from the old F.B.I., the Hoover days of male WASP agents in gray flannel suits. He still operated with a precision that was quasi-military even if a little worn.

“Listen, it’s no trouble,” said Cummings. “Besides, it didn’t take much time. You may be getting exactly what you’re paying for.” What Cummings meant was nothing. He had done a freebie for the lawyer who over the years had thrown him a lot of investigative business. Now Spencer had a personal problem and Cummings was eager to help. He handed Morgan a written report, which he’d kicked out of his computer’s printer twenty minutes earlier. It contained some information that was confidential, government records that Cummings had acquired from sources better left unidentified. For this reason he did not want to commit the report to a fax, and told Spencer he would have to read it and leave it in the office.

“That’s him. South Carolina,” said Spencer.

“Place called Coffin Point. According to the information, old family home,” said Cummings. “Records show it’s been in the family for some generations.”

“Country boy,” said Morgan.

“Except he went to school up north and out west. Degrees from Columbia and Stanford. Then he disappears for a while, back in the eighties.”

“There oughta be a credit report,” said Spencer.

“Sparse one. Shows income of a few hundred dollars a month. One loan, a car.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah. That’s what caused me to look. He was either on welfare during that period or something else.”

“What?”

Cummings handed Spencer another sheet of paper. “This is confidential. You’ve never seen it. Understand?”

It was printed on a form with a government department logo and headed “Department of Defense.”

“His father was deep in the military,” said Cummings. “Marines. The name Joe Jermaine is synonymous with the Corps. The kid traveled in dad’s footsteps. Did a stint as a training officer and then disappeared.”

“Where did he go?”

“Deep cover,” said Cummings. “Special unit. What they called a ‘River Rat.’ He commanded a small boat squadron, riverine vehicles to those in the know. These guys are the first to see action in a conflict. They work with Navy Seals, float up and down rivers in the tules and come ashore at night for reconnaissance. They spot targets for artillery and air sorties, then slither back in the water so you never know what hit you.”

“He did this?”

“Big time,” said Cummings.

“But he’s retired now?”

Cummings shrugged a shoulder. “If the records are to be believed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shadowy rumors,” said Cummings. “There was trouble, back a few years.” Cummings settled his butt onto the corner of his desk and talked while Morgan listened.

“Seems your guy Jermaine is the kind who dances to the tune of a different drummer. There had been some scrapes with higher authority along the way, some ruffled feathers, and then trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” said Morgan.

“One of the men in his squad died under questionable circumstances. There had been bad blood between the deceased and your guy. No charges were brought, but it seems to have put a crimp in his career. Jermaine was passed over for promotion. It was in a period of downsizing in the military and it was either up or out. He was forced into retirement. That’s what the papers show,” said Cummings.

“But?”

The P.I. rolled his eyes and made a face that could only be described as a question mark. “Here’s where it gets hazy. There’s nothing in writing, nothing anyone would send me, but there’s some icy rumors, that he’s done some private contracts.”

“What do you mean contracts?”

“I mean hired work for private parties, foreign governments. That from time to time he hires himself out.”

“To do what?”

“Whatever they’re paying for. You gotta understand, this guy is heavily trained.”

“No specifics on these jobs?” asked Morgan. He needed something concrete to take to Abby or she would never believe him.

“No specifics. It’s the kind of stuff you don’t put on a résumé.”

“What about the passport?” said Morgan.

“It’s an unusual name,” said Cummings. “I checked. Passport office has no record of one issued in the name of Kellen Raid.”

“So he made it himself,” said Morgan.

“Or had it done by somebody else,” said Cummings.

“Any record of whether it might have been used to enter or leave the country?”

Cummings shook his head. “But it’s the kind of thing you would do if you had a job outside the country and you didn’t want your own government to know you were there.”

Morgan thought for a long time, quietly in the chair, looking off into space.

Cummings got up and headed for the coffeepot, poured himself a cup. “How about you?”

Morgan shook his head.

“I haven’t asked you why you’re so interested in this guy,” said Cummings. “It’s none of my business, I suppose.”

Spencer offered him nothing by way of reply. He wasn’t about to tell Cummings about the book and Abby, or Jack Jermaine’s part in all of it. Cummings was a P.I. with a good sense of discretion. He could keep a secret. Still there was no need to tell him, and Spencer had no intention of doing so.

“Are you thinking that this guy has something to do with the Cella Largo?” asked Cummings.

Morgan looked at him, somewhat surprised. The thought had never entered his mind.

“It is his line of work,” said Cummings. “The kind of thing he would hire out for.”

“I suppose,” said Morgan.

“You sound almost disappointed.”

“No,” said Morgan.

“Do you know this guy?”

“We’ve met.”

“I understand,” said Cummings. “You sound like you like him.”

Cummings didn’t understand at all.

“It’s not that. Just keep it under your hat for a while. I’ll let you know if I need anything more.”

“Sure.”

Morgan got up, grabbed his briefcase, and handed the report back to Cummings.

“What do you want me to do with this?” asked the P.I.

Morgan thought for a moment. “Hang on to it.”

Cummings nodded. “Take care,” he said. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

“Jesus. They could have killed us. There were five of them. Did you count? Did you bother to count? I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t think what to use as a weapon. We should go to the police.” Abby was yammering in shock, breathless by the time they reached the sanctuary of Ricardi’s yacht.

They got to the cabin and closed the door behind them. Jack took her and held her for a moment while she hyperventilated.

“You’re alright. Relax. Take a deep breath. Good. Again.”

“Shouldn’t we go to the police?”

“Quit talking and breathe. We would spend the next week answering questions through an interpreter,” said Jack. They were in the master cabin below decks, all teak and mahogany, with a crew to man the boat and an Asian cabin boy.

Jack sat her on the bed and then poured a glass of whisky from the bar while he changed his shirt, which had been ripped in two places and had someone else’s blood all over the front of it. Abby was too shaken for alcohol, but Jack insisted. He poured her a shot of brandy and she sipped it.

The crew had just cast off and the yacht made its way slowly down the channel toward the open sea. Their problems, the dead body in the alley, were now behind them.

“Besides,” said Jack. “If we went to the police, they would want to know about this.” He flipped the semiautomatic pistol from his fanny pack onto the bed, where it bounced twice on the mattress and came to rest.

“They’re not the only ones with questions about that,” said Abby. “I can’t believe you carried that through airport security.”

“I didn’t,” said Jack.

The way he said it, Abby thought maybe he’d planted it on her. “Was that in my luggage?”

“I had it delivered. I wanted to see if it would work. It did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you needed a gun. Just suppose,” said Jack. “And you had to travel by commercial means. How would you do it?”

“It’s not something I stay up nights thinking about,” said Abby. “Most normal people don’t.”

“Most normal people don’t write the kind of material I do. If it isn’t authentic, if it doesn’t work, I don’t put it in my books,” he told her.

“Yeah, well, we know how successful that’s been.”

“So I thought about it.” He ignored her. “Do you have any idea how many packages are processed daily by private express delivery companies in the States?”

She shook her head.

“Millions,” said Jack. “Do you know how long it would take for them to X-ray the contents of every one of those packages?”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know. But I’m guessing it would take more than sixteen hours. And that’s the average time they have to deliver an overnight package to most places in the Western Hemisphere.”

“So?”

Jack picked the gun up off the bed. “So when it absolutely, positively has to be there the next day,” said Jack.

She looked at him dumbstruck. “You didn’t.”

Jack smiled and nodded his head, a proud beaming grin like some college jock who had just pulled off a panty raid. “I dropped it off when we left my house, remember? The piece was at Henry’s before we arrived in San Juan. It traveled through the night. We didn’t.”

Abby thought about it for a moment, all the boxes coming and going from Coffin Point. “And the one that was waiting for you when we got to your house?” said Abby.

“That was the return from Seattle.”

“You had the gun with you out there?”

“I try not to travel without it,” said Jack.

“In Chicago?”

“Especially in Chicago. That’s a dangerous city,” said Jack.

“We were there on business.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I just believe in thorough research,” he told her. “Now I know. The express companies don’t X-ray their packages.”

“There are other ways of doing research.”

“If I’d called and asked them the question, do you think they would have told me the truth? Not on your life. They would have hemmed and hawed and ultimately they would have lied. They don’t want to know what’s inside all those packages. But they’re not about to tell the public that.”

Abby wasn’t sure if he was crazy or merely possessed an eccentric sense of humor. It seemed the longer she stayed around Jack, the more impaired was her judgment. There was a kind of ether that surrounded him. Whether it was his looks or his childlike charm, Abby was losing her critical perspective.

He swept a hand through his dark hair that was now tousled from their street fight and examined his body in the mirror. “Think about it,” said Jack. “If you were accepting several million sealed containers from the great unwashed masses and giving them to your employees to deliver all over the world, would you really want to know what’s inside each one of them?”

“I never thought about it.” Abby studied him.

“I wouldn’t. I’d figure ignorance was bliss.”

“What about Customs?” said Abby.

“Ah.” Jack turned toward her with his index finger pointed up like she had stumbled on a subtlety. “Now that’s the interesting part. I figured to be safe I would only send to locations where there’s sufficient traffic to keep things humming. Good-sized cities with a lot of parcels coming in. And you always send it priority. Overnight express. That way the delivery companies are pushing Customs to rush things.”

Abby looked at him mystified. In his own inimitable fashion Jack had carefully thought it all through. And he was proud of himself, she thought, like a schoolboy who had just farted in class. Only in this case he had probably violated a dozen federal laws.

“They probably sniff for drugs,” he told her. “And X-ray a handful of the packages. Random selection,” said Jack. “So what are the chances?”

“You took a risk,” said Abby.

“Life’s full of risks. You cross the street . . .”

“I know,” said Abby. “You can get hit by a car.”

“I was gonna say you might get mugged.” He lifted one arm and looked at the backside under his elbow.

“That looks bad.” Abby observed a cut on the underside of his arm. It seemed that not all of the blood on his shirt belonged to other people. “Let me see what I can find.”

She went into the head, more of a master bathroom, paneled wood and beveled mirrors with gold fixtures. There was a full-sized roman tub on a platform behind saloon-type swinging doors.

She rummaged through some drawers until she found a roll of gauze and some tape. She grabbed a washcloth and wet it. By the time she came out Jack was bare to the waist, rippled abs and tanned. He was now dressed only in his running shorts and was checking an abrasion on his knee.

It was a hard body, rugged with a few scars on it. Abby remembered how it pressed up against her own that morning when they shot at targets near the marsh at Coffin Point. His touch that day lingered with her, hard body and soft hands and the deep whisper of his voice up close in her ear. Jack’s tones carried just a hint of slow Southern drawl, almost imperceptible unless you listened closely. It was an exotic cadence.

She remembered how his fingers closed around her own as she held the pistol, Jack steadying her. There was something about him. For all of the bluster and cynicism, there was an edge of softness under it all, a sort of schoolboy charm. It was in the twinkle of his eye, and the angle of his head when he smiled, and the flashing white of his teeth against the bronze tan.

While she was attracted, Abby was scared. Of what, she wasn’t quite sure. To this point, Jack had been every inch the gentleman. He had never hit on her. In this moment, as they looked at one another, it was as if he was waiting for her to give him some signal, to say “yes.”

Abby started to clean the wound on his arm. In a flash, the moment passed.

“Since we’re sharing such intimacies, when are you going to tell me about the outline for the sequel?” said Jack.

“When it’s time.”

“When will that be?”

“When I decide.”

“How far along is it?”

“It’s coming.”

“When will it be finished?”

“When it’s done.” Abby looked at him, a kind of motherly expression of exasperation.

“It’s what I like about you,” said Jack. “Your candor and openness.”

“Then why do you ask?”

“Because we both know they’re gonna press me on it.”

“Who?”

“Carla and Bertoli. When I get to New York. They’re gonna want to know how it’s coming.”

“They don’t own the rights.”

“They have an option.”

“Tell ’em it’s going well,” said Abby.

“They may want a little more than that.”

“Tell them it’s going very well.” She smiled and Jack laughed.

“I’m sure Carla will accept that.”

“Take my word. The sequel is not a subject you want to get into,” said Abby.

“Why not?”

“For the same reason delivery companies don’t look inside their packages.” She offered a sly grin. “I’m sure you can hold them off. Besides, if we were to tell them anything, they’d only want to know more. Then they’d insist on plotting the story, probably over dinner. By the time you finish dessert, they’ll change the title three times, invent four new characters, and suggest that you include a dinner fork in the plot because they already have a nice drawing of one for the cover art. And when they’re finished they’ll claim they have proprietary rights on the book because they’ve contributed to it.”

“Whatever you want. It’s your story,” said Jack.

“Don’t tell them that.”

“I forgot. It’s my story.”

“And that’s exactly what you should tell them. And nothing more.”

Owens and Bertoli weren’t the only ones Abby didn’t trust. The less Jack knew about the sequel, the better. It was one of those pressure points of control she could use if he became difficult.

“So what do you suggest for small talk?” said Jack.

“Tell them you knifed a guy in an alley in San Juan. That should get things going.”

“It was an accident.”

“Right,” said Abby. “This Puerto Rican just fell on his own sword. Bertoli should understand that, the corporate jungle being what it is.”

“Ow.” Jack flinched and pulled his arm away. “What are you doing?”

“Cleaning the wound.”

“Yeah, but you’re enjoying yourself a little too much,” said Jack. As he said it, he lifted his forearm to check the wound. As he did, he peeked at her from underneath, their faces less than a foot apart.

Abby’s was a smile. “If you don’t like it, you should stay out of street fights.”

“Like I had a choice.” His words were slow as their eyes met.

“You could have given them what they wanted,” said Abby.

“As I recall they wanted you.”

There was something in her look at this moment that told Jack it had suddenly dawned on Abby. He had saved her life.

“I suppose I should thank you.” His gaze was on her lips, moist and parted as she uttered the words. Their thoughts converged like psychic energy, the snap of electricity spanning the distance.

“It was nothing. Besides, they wanted my watch.” Their eyes locked. Somewhere in the ionized atmosphere Abby’s eyes said yes. Their lips met.

He settled back onto the bed and tugged her by the arms down on top of him. The running shorts rode high on his thighs exposing flesh and a tan line.

Her head went on his chest to the side, her eyes cast down. “They got you there, too,” she said. She touched him on the thigh, a wound high on the outside.

His fingers covered hers, tugging, pulling her hand to the center of his body, to his stomach that quivered with the touch of her fingernails, to the band of his shorts.

“That’s an old one,” said Jack. He shifted, lifted his knee until it wedged between her thighs lifting her at the vortex. With his hand he tilted her chin until their lips met, gently nibbling.

“Old one.” Abby repeated his words in an erotic daze.

“Hmm. Diving accident.” Teeth closing gently on her lips, his tongue touched the tip of her own, his words the last intelligible sound as they descended into sensuous seas, the gentle motion of the ship, silk sheets, and satin comforters.