Gibson was all too familiar with the fantasies of money to come. When the Spectrum job had seemed assured, he’d daydreamed about everything he would buy. All the ways that life would be better for his daughter. So he understood the impulse, dangerous as it might be, but that didn’t mean that he wanted to listen to Swonger’s plans to trick out his Scion. Instead, Swonger surprised him.
“Already got the plot picked out.”
“Plot?”
“Only a hundred fifty acres, but good land. Me and Pops. Set things up right. Cattle. Sheep. Soybeans and corn. Sell to those locally sourced hipster restaurants. It’ll be pretty sweet.”
“A farm?” Gibson said. “Really?”
“Dog, that’s all I ever wanted. Been working with Pops since I don’t know when. Never had much use for school, but I can farm. Believe that. After Merrick, I’m gonna get my mom and pops away from the Birks. Do things right.”
Gibson studied him and tried to reconcile this with what he already knew about Swonger. Peer through the swirl of anger and see the pain that anger protected.
Swonger felt it. “You scheming on kissing me?”
Gibson shook his head to show that he didn’t mean any offense. He wanted to warn Swonger somehow but didn’t know what words could penetrate the ex-con’s hopefulness. Swonger had so much riding on Merrick, on his desire to avenge and simultaneously save his family. Gibson knew all about that fantasy as well. He realized something else that he should have seen sooner.
“How long?”
“How long what?”
“Until the Birks lose the farm.”
“Oh, that ‘how long.’ Couple months. Pops hasn’t even started looking for somewhere to live. Just keeps killing himself for the Birks. Like mending fences will make a difference. Man works so damn hard. Always has. But he doesn’t want to know nothing about the world. Just wants to farm. I remember when the judge talked Pops into investing. Pops had never invested in anything more than a savings account. What’s he know about hedge funds? Nothing. But here comes Judge Birk talking about me. About my future. How this was Pops’s chance to jump our family ahead. Pops trusted the judge. Even after Merrick got busted. Hell, he still does. I don’t. So here I am.”
“Listen, Swonger. Go easy, okay?”
“I’m easy, dog.”
“No, I just mean don’t get ahead of things. Maybe there’s money. Maybe there isn’t. But even if there is, it’s not going to be as much as you think.”
“How you figure that?”
“Like I told you, the Justice Department is really, really good at finding money. So whatever money Merrick managed to hide away, it was small enough to fall through the cracks. So go easy.”
Swonger considered this and shrugged. “Still more than I got now, dog. Know what I’m saying?”
Gibson knew that math all too well.
After dinner, Gibson tried and failed to catch the waitress’s eye, his hand poised optimistically above his head to signal for the check. A new guard came into the back room and squeezed himself into an empty booth. It was ungainly ballet, and Gibson’s hand dropped gently to the table as he watched the guard struggle vainly with the belt that pinned his paunch half in and half out of his pants. Failing to broker a truce, the guard glanced around surreptitiously before loosening his buckle several notches. That seemed to do it. Freed from the belt’s constraints, the guard nursed his beer and picked at a bowl of bar mix. Every few minutes, he looked over his shoulder as if expecting someone.
A smile crept over Gibson’s face. God, it was beautiful: middle aged, no wedding ring, a stain on his uniform that was at least a few days old. Impatient, lazy eyes. When he’d come in, none of the guards at the pool table had waved him over, and he hadn’t so much as glanced in their direction. Yeah, he’d do, all right. Gibson just needed an approach. While he mulled that over, the young female bartender who had twice now given him the stink eye—once in the hotel when he’d first arrived and again when he’d come into the bar—entered the back room, made a haphazard lap around the other tables, and sat down with his guard.
Well, isn’t that interesting?
Gibson couldn’t make out what they were discussing, but it wasn’t the casual chat between friends they wanted it to appear. Whatever their arrangement, she was in charge, even if the guard didn’t want to acknowledge it. Her graceful, intelligent hands conducted the conversation at her tempo. She thought with her mouth, chewing pensively on a corner of her lip; he imagined that she would smile beautifully—nimble and expressive, although something in her eyes told Gibson that smiles were few and far between. He thought he’d enjoy listening to her talk even if the same couldn’t be said for the guard. She had seen what Gibson had seen—the guard was weak, and she had exploited that weakness. But to what end?
He had the strangest feeling that he knew her from somewhere. Not just from the hotel this morning. From further back. But why would he know a West Virginia bartender? Maybe she’d been a Marine? He willed her to sweep her long brunette hair away from the side of her face so he could get a better look. Where did he know her from? Her features were hard to place too, and he could only guess at her ethnicity. Some Caucasian to be sure, but something else as well. East Asian perhaps?
A crazy thought occurred to him.
He took out his laptop and opened his research on Charles Merrick. He scrolled until he found a picture of Merrick with his family: ex-wife, Veronica, and daughter, Chelsea. It was an older picture, posed for an issue of Hamptons magazine—Chelsea Merrick’s sixteenth birthday looked like it had been quite an extravaganza, and the family smiled brilliantly. Just two years before the roof fell in on her father’s house of cards. His research into her whereabouts hadn’t gotten past Portland, where she’d more or less disappeared off the grid.
Couldn’t get much more off the grid than Niobe, West Virginia.
Chelsea Merrick would be what? Twenty-six now? Gibson glanced back and forth from the picture to the bartender across the room, trying to imagine the sixteen-year-old as a grown woman. In the picture, Chelsea Merrick was blonde like her father, hair piled in a chic swirl atop her head. Gibson didn’t know enough about women’s fashion to say for certain, but her flowing summer dress must’ve cost a small fortune and was a world away from the black sleeveless Joan Jett T-shirt and blue jeans that the bartender wore. Gibson shook it off—there was a passing similarity, but that was it. He’d started to close his laptop when the bartender leaned out of her seat to gaze through the doorway, checking on the bar up front. She gathered her hair up in one motion and tied it up in a ponytail. And like that, he saw her. Same jawline, same ears, and a small mole on her temple above her right eye.
Chelsea Merrick, in the flesh.
Bartending in a dive bar in Niobe, West Virginia.
He let that sink in. Bartender was a good cover, but what was she really doing here? Obviously, it had to do with her father. Was she Merrick’s liaison with the outside world? Who else could it be? Whom else would Merrick trust with his money? And they were using this guard as their courier? It made sense.
“What?” Swonger asked.
“What?”
“You’re smiling again. It’s weird.”
“I need you to do something in a minute.”