Finders Keepers, page 8
“Bart, I’ve been busting a gut for three years to make the Village in the Sky happen. All of the horses are lined up at the starting gate, for God’s sake!”
“Yeah, all but one horse, Touma. The money-in-the-bank horse! Look, I want the goddamn thing to go through, too, but the terms of the project permit are—well, hell, you know what they are. A fifty-million-dollar bond, and deposit of one-hundred-and-fifty million in escrow, before, I repeat, before, you can break ground. When that happens, the permit is perfected, and the project is off and running. Your project, our project, big fella, Village in the Sky.”
When Touma’s wife had filed for divorce six years prior, money hadn’t been the real issue between them. The issue had been Maryanne’s freedom, as she put it—freedom to make a once-in-a-lifetime move way up the Honolulu society pecking order. So the fact that Maryanne had been having a fling with Bart, super-rich Bart, entitled and untouchable Bart, socially prominent and politically influential Bart, hadn’t been a surprise. She would go from being Wealthy Commoner Maryanne Allen to Entitled Princess Maryanne Singleton by exchanging Touma Allen’s money and status for Bartholomew Singleton II’s money and status, simple as that.
Touma had managed to keep this fabulous beachfront property in the great battle that had ensued after Maryanne moved out, no small feat.
She was now living in a much bigger castle with twice the property on the same beach, a mile up the road. He was happy to be rid of her, and he had tenaciously held on to his business ties with Bart.
“I told you, Bart. We were granted preliminary funding approval, then something happened with those idiots at Banc Schaffhausen. I’ve been calling like crazy, and every now and then, they answer the phone and cut me off with ‘Yes, yes, not to worry. Goodbye.’ That’s it, and no signed commitment. You’re the one who put me on to these guys, you know what they’re like.”
“I do know what they’re like,” said Bart. “But look, this is your deal, Touma, not mine. You need to focus, get them off the fence. Do you have any idea what’s gone sideways?”
Touma got up and walked toward the outdoor bar, trying to relax. “I don’t know what’s gone wrong,” he said. “I have another call into Dietrich now, and I’ll let you know when he gets back to me. If he gets back to me.”
Bart grunted. “Touma, does he know the project permit expires in ninety days if it’s not perfected?”
Touma put ice in a tumbler and poured himself a drink—just a little brandy to calm him down. “Yeah, he knows all of that, only he’s, you know, an uptight prick, chairman of an uptight Swiss bank, plays his cards close to his uptight chest. But yes, I told him. I couriered him a copy of the permit with the expiration date highlighted and with a damn post-it attached, for Christ’s sake. He knows that if we aren’t funded before the permit expires, Village in the Sky goes up in smoke.” Along with tens-of-millions Touma had already put in.
“So, what does he have to say to that?” Bart sounded as if he might be having a drink himself.
“Say—say? Nothing, other than prattle on in his condescending accented English. ‘Oh, you tropical islanders. You shouldn’t worry so much, just slow down. We’re working diligently at our end—and remember, we’re the investors here, and you’re the builder.’ What a prick! He treats me like I’m some stupid native carpenter, living in a jungle hut.”
Bart made a sound that Touma couldn’t interpret. “You might try reminding him that we have plenty of other developers here, with lots of their own money champing at the bit, waiting to pounce if their deal falls through.”
Touma sighed. “Yes, Bart. I’ll remind him. Again. Hell, look, Bart, can’t you do something, maybe to get us some breathing room here? Could you take a run at an extension with the city council? Wouldn’t they grant one? It sure would take the pressure off.”
Bart chuckled. “No way. Not a chance in hell that they would extend. A couple of our council buddies just hate your guts, Touma. As simple as that. They’ve been working overtime complaining about granting the permit to you in the first place, whispering stuff like proceeds of crime, illegal practices, spreading rumors about drug money—blah blah blah.”
Touma shook his head. He did what he could to not be hated, but some of the council members wouldn’t take bribes, as hard to understand as that was. Even subtle bribes, like a golf club membership worth a couple-hundred-thousand.
“Touma, ninety days! Well, eighty-nine days now. That’s all the time you’ve got, old buddy. You know I’m behind you on this, but you’re the only person who can make it happen. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
“Yeah, sure. Fingers crossed.” Touma disconnected, then collapsed back in the strangely uncomfortable patio chair. For the first time, he noticed that the maid hadn’t put the cushions out today. Everything and everyone must be conspiring against him.
CHAPTER 11
First, Keanu did a couple of handoffs, just to show Paul how easy the transactions were: a little baggie with two pills, palmed in one hand, the money received in the other hand, and then—and only then—the baggie hand extended, palm down, and the goods placed in the buyer’s hand.
Each deal was done with as little eye contact as possible. Get the money, pass the goods, then slide on through the crowd. After a couple of these exchanges, Paul and Keanu moved away through the dark, music blasting and hot bodies swaying around them, over to the side of the throng. It was Paul’s first time at a rave—a Friday Night Rave, way at the far end of Polihale Beach, a bit of a walk away from the parking lot where the cops would have to leave their cars if they felt the urge to show up.
Standing shoulder to shoulder, Paul and Keanu looked at the tableau of beach fires burning, pools of light flickering, animated silhouettes moving, all under a heavy blanket of music, the booming bass relentless. Every now and then, the DJ on the stage would shout something over the sound system, and the mob would cheer.
Paul never liked crowds all that much. He was more of an introvert, not given to a lot of shouting. This scene made him nervous with all these crazy people, but the money—well, that would be good, great even, as long as he didn’t lose it or wasn’t robbed by one of these crazies.
“See, no problem.” Keanu had to shout in order to be heard. He leaned closer to Paul’s ear. “Just make sure that they’re giving you the right amount. Some of these jerks try to scam you. They wrap a five-dollar bill around three singles to make you think it’s twenty dollars.” He paused for a breath and leaned in again. “If they fuck with you, keep the stuff, walk away, don’t give them anything.”
“What about their money?” Paul shouted back.
“Drop the money they slipped you. Keep the packet. Move away. You don’t want an argument, no fuckin’ fights.”
Paul had another question he wished he’d asked before. “How do they know what I have and how much to pay?”
“The price for E is stable. Ten bucks a pill. If they don’t know, tell ‘em.”
“So all I’m selling is E?” The song changed, but the noise remained way too loud.
Keanu pulled Paul further away from the jumping, jerking, rotating bodies. “For now just E,” he said in a softer tone. Paul wiped Keanu’s hot breath from his ear with his hand. “We’ll see how you do, and maybe expand what you sell. Maybe some speed. But right now, get out there with the E and sell it. Mr. P. needs the money. I need off the hook.”
“What hook?”
“The hook that came with this packet Mr. P. gave us.” Far enough away from the crowd, the two were speaking in almost normal tones. “You need to sell it, and I need to give him the money. Then he gives us more, and you become part of my crew, and Mr. P. has a new runner.”
With a nod and a push from Keanu, Paul moved back into the crowd and was soon being approached by prospective clients. A couple of times he had to explain the price, and once a young girl tried to grab the E without paying.
When he jerked the baggie back, she shrieked, “Come on! Look, I’ll give you a blow job. How’s that?”
“God, no way!” He quickly walked off to another part of the beach, disappearing in a group of fire-lit dancers. He was sure he could feel Mr. P.’s hook.
“Are you the E guy?”
“Huh?”
“I said, are you the E guy? And if you’re a fucking cop, I’ll deny I asked, so—are you the E guy?”
Bare feet partially buried in the still-warm sand, white t-shirt, white sweatpants, and a white fedora tilted atop a head of straight, long black hair, she shifted from foot to foot to the booming bass, black eyes shining with the light of a nearby beach fire.
“Yes, or no?” She looked neither old nor young, but to his eighteen-year-old sensibilities, she was definitely pretty—very, very pretty.
He nodded and said, “Ah, yeah, that’s me.”
She smiled and said, “Three packs.”
“Sixty.”
“Naw, I’ll give you forty. You’re gouging me!”
“Six pills, sixty bucks—or nothin’.”
“Shit,” she said. She reached into a white fanny pack, pulled out some bills, folded them over, and extended her hand. He hadn’t noticed before, but her fingernails were painted black, matching her lipstick, which he also hadn’t noticed. He was down to his last three packets. He reached out his hand, palm down, and she brought her hand up beneath his, smaller than his, to make the exchange. Her hand felt warm, and he thought he felt her tickle his palm with her fingers as he released the stuff.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Why do you want to know?” he said, checking to make sure she’d given him the right amount—three twenties, and crisp.
“What’s your name?”
“Paul, Paul Pookalani.” He winced. He shouldn’t have told her his last name. He had to be more careful.
“Got a phone number?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. Keanu would probably kill him for being so loose-lipped. But maybe she would buy more from them—from him.
“Well, give it to me, in case I need something.”
He told her the number, and she typed it into her phone then she put it into her fanny pack, zipped it shut, and flashed a grin.
“See you around, Paul Pookalani, my new E guy!”
Adjusting the brim of her hat, she pivoted on one bare foot and walked toward a beach fire, disappearing into the mob. His heart was pounding. He was handling this. He was doing great.
Erebus flew into Seattle, rented a car, and drove through the rain—Seattle, after all—then checked into the W Hotel downtown. There, he holed up with a digital file, a collection of personal data, some legally obtained, most illegally obtained, regarding three of the main actors in the missing ten-million fiasco. The file had been prepared by a computer hacker, a dark-world contractor calling himself Bingwen, who supposedly lived in Shanghai, although these days geography was, well, relative.
In this way, Bingwen and Erebus were alike: secretive, suspicious, being nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
After completing each assignment, Bingwen would gift Erebus with a coded text, a kind of key. Bingwen communicated using a dark-web messaging application that allowed him to call you; but you couldn’t call him, at least not directly. Erebus could use the key to let Bingwen know he wanted to be contacted, if and only if he wanted to employ Bingwen again for hacking, or “special research,” as he called it.
Bingwen, or whatever his real name was, was dark-world famous, and in demand. As a result, he was very expensive, a master practitioner of covert digital alchemy.
Bingwen was fast, too. When Erebus had most recently sent Bingwen his trigger text, he received an encrypted internet audio call fifteen minutes later. Erebus had explained the assignment, was given a price, completed a money transfer, and two days later had received two-hundred pages of material, the result of a deep-dive invasion into the lives of Flash Finnegan Michael, Malcolm Forsyth Jr., and John Horan, including the names of all family members, associates, and friends.
Sitting in an oversized purple-velvet chair, Erebus read through the material and made handwritten notes in a Moleskin journal. Next, he consolidated the information into a surveillance plan, all elements diagrammed hierarchically. The final version was hand drawn using a Mont Blanc Meisterstück Platinum-Coated 149 Fountain Pen, his instrument of choice. Jet-black ink glided smoothly from the gold nib, forming carefully printed, painfully small letters, boxes drawn around each node, and lines connecting the nodes of the diagram, eventually leading to one center node, a double-lined rectangle labeled TARGETS.
Erebus needed to see the actors in person, see them in situ, where they lived, worked, and circulated around the city. This invasion was to be a careful, discreet, relatively soft process. He was under orders not to be seen or to make contact.
Learning where to reach out and find any one of the twenty-five or so people associated with the three cops would constitute success. That thought made him smile. He wondered what would happen if the cops knew what he knew. No matter. It also occurred to him that he’d never taken out a police chief before. Several cops, of course, but no chief of police. It would be a first, a notch on his belt, as practiced by the gunslingers in the old American West.
The next afternoon, Erebus sat tapping his fingers on the steering wheel of a rented white Chevrolet parked on the tree-lined street leading past the Woodhouse Academy campus, three miles north and east of downtown Seattle. Pippa Orsini’s Facebook pages had been a big help, as had been her email and instant messaging activity. That’s how he knew she would be leaving school today after volleyball practice. He also knew she would be driving a black BMW and its license plate number.
This was day one of what he presumed would be a three- or four-day crawl through the rain in and around Seattle. He would shadow Pippa Orsini just long enough to build a picture of her habits, hangouts, and her day-to-day life.
Pippa was Flash Finnegan Michael’s daughter. Flash had fallen off the map six months earlier. If Erebus needed to find her father for some reason, he wanted to make sure he could get hold of the daughter. Leverage. This game was all about leverage—and force.
Woodhouse was an exclusive private high school for rich kids in Seattle, buried in a wealthy residential neighborhood that meandered along the western shore of Lake Washington. The black BMW pulled out of the parking lot, heading south on Lake Washington Boulevard. Erebus followed.
During the following week, Erebus put eyes on all of the key players, except for Flash Finnegan, of course, and Celest Forsyth, Police Chief Malcolm Forsyth’s current wife, who was in Bali at a weeklong batik workshop. But he knew where she lived, where all three of her children lived, where her housekeeper lived, and where her psychiatrist’s office was.
Finally, most of the nodes on the hand-drawn diagrams were checked off. The next day, he left the W Hotel, its edgy modern vibe, and headed out to the Olympic Peninsula, where no W Hotel could survive. Forks, Washington was the last confirmed Flash Michael sighting before he had disappeared.
Erebus drove down Interstate 5 and turned right to Highway 8, out onto the Olympic Peninsula. He mentally reviewed his research. Sifting through his observations was an excellent way to deal with the boredom of driving through a dark rainforest punctuated by odd, depressing, moss-covered towns that were littered along the remote highway.
The biggest surprise had been that John Horan lived a strangely modest, mostly nondescript life. He certainly didn’t live like someone who’d hijacked millions of dollars, as Erebus had been led to believe he had. It was widely held among the concerned parties that Horan, Finnegan, and perhaps Forsyth were behind the stolen ten-million. But Horan lived a boring, ordered, low-key life as a divorced, forty-something bachelor.
Horan’s home was in a high-rise apartment within walking distance of police headquarters. He did drive a new Audi—had apparently paid cash for it—but dressed, off-duty, like a Seattle tree hugger. He belonged to a hiking club and a book club, and always drank at the same downtown watering hole near his apartment. Horan didn’t have a Facebook page, had no LinkedIn presence, no Amazon Prime account, no dating service, nor had Bingwen found any personal internet presence other than a Gmail account. Horan even did his banking in person.
Erebus shook his head. Nature abhors a vacuum. Horan must have more to him, but where was it? What was it? And what was he hiding? Other than then millions of dollars.
Horan was an enigma. Erebus recognized the MO, having spent years developing cover for his criminal profession. Erebus’s approach was to live in plain sight, a regular person who traveled a lot, someone who rented his flat, bought his groceries with several credit cards, and even paid taxes. This fictitious person currently lived in Nice and had for the past four years. He loved Nice, a warm town with great food, lots of Russians, and plenty of tourists and seasonal residents—a perfect place to hide in plain sight.
The final unchecked item on Erebus’s surveillance plan read “Finnegan in Forks, Subaru.” He knew Finnegan’s 1994 Subaru Outback had been sold via Craigslist to a Forks resident, a retired postal worker. Erebus had the new owner’s name and address and visited him. The transaction had been in cash. Finnegan had given the man a handwritten receipt, signed off on the car registration, handed over the keys, and then literally turned and walked away, refusing a ride, walking toward town carrying a black duffel bag on his back.
The ex-postman knew nothing about Finnegan, didn’t want to know anything about Finnegan, and seemed a little pissed off that this foreign-sounding stranger was interrupting a fishing program on television at three in the afternoon.
For Erebus, the obvious question was: Why Forks? Other than being remote. But was there another reason? More to the point, where the hell did Finnegan go after selling the car? Forks was in the middle of nowhere. Continuing north on Highway 101, the next stop was a place called Port Angeles, an old mill town with a dying fishing fleet. Going from Forks to Port Angeles was leaving nowhere, going nowhere.
