She nodded grimly. “What are you proposing?”
“What do you think your father will do the day he gets out of prison?”
“Fly to a nonextradition country.”
“So do I. Want to stop him?”
More than anything in the world. Truth was, she didn’t give a damn about the money. She only wanted Charles Merrick to be penniless. The real kind of penniless. Destitute. It was a beautiful word. And she wanted Charles Merrick to know who had done it to him. She wanted him to know it was his own daughter. That she wanted more than anything. So if this guy was her best shot, then so be it.
“What’s my name?” she asked.
“Lea Regan, far as I know.”
“So what’s yours?”
He took out a wallet and handed over a driver’s license. It read “Robert Quine.”
“My name is Gibson Vaughn,” he said.
“Good to know you, Robert.”
They shook hands over the table.
“Glad we got that settled,” he said.
“So if Slaski’s phone’s worthless, how do we find out who Merrick’s been calling?”
“I’m working on a plan.”
“We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Give me until tomorrow morning.”
She looked at her phone. “It is tomorrow morning.”
“Pick me up at the hotel at nine.”
“That’s three hours from now.”
“Like you said, we don’t have a lot of time.”
With that, he slid out of the booth and nudged his partner awake. When they were gone, Margo came back and took his seat. She looked pensive, not an expression Lea was accustomed to seeing from her boss.
“We need to talk.”
Lea braced, expecting Margo to strong-arm her for a bigger cut. “What’s up?”
“So I was standing in front of some man’s house at four in the a.m. with a baseball bat and a ski mask. If those two hadn’t stopped us, I would have gone into that house with you. Thank God they did, you know? Sorry, Gilmore, but I’m out. Can’t do this. Maybe I hang on to the bar, maybe I don’t, but I’ll live with those odds. You know?”
Lea nodded. “Okay.”
“You shouldn’t either.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what all’s going on here. Don’t want know. But it’s not going to end well. You have to know that.”
Lea shrugged, too tired to have this conversation now when she’d been having it with herself for the last two years.
“Working for me can’t be so bad you have to get yourself killed, can it?”
Lea smiled at that. “Thanks, Margo. I mean it.”
Margo sat back and sighed. “Just lock up before you go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It took Gibson and Lea a couple of hours to walk the perimeter of the prison. They kept to the woods and out of sight; it was public land, so they weren’t breaking the law, but they dressed for a hike in case they were stopped. He used the bars on his phone to rough out a map of cell tower coverage around the prison. A signal meter would have provided a more accurate picture, but those cost three hundred dollars, and they needed to conserve Birk’s meager four-thousand-dollar bankroll.
For probably the twentieth time since yesterday, he looked at the voice mail from Nicole. He still hadn’t worked up the confidence to listen to it. Instead, he adjusted the cap on his head and scrambled up a berm to join Lea. It had been a long night, and they’d both spent the first half of the hike in a stupor, neither speaking more than necessary. Gibson was grateful that Swonger had been a no-show; he didn’t have the energy for his chatter this morning.
At the top of the berm, Lea stood staring at the prison through the trees.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
She hadn’t felt him standing there and flinched at the sound of his voice. She shot him a look like he’d caught her half-naked.
“I’m getting hungry,” she said. “Give me the map.”
She took over the mapping and jotted down his notes as he called them out to her. She also began peppering him with questions about his plan, which so far he had mostly deflected for the simple reason that he didn’t have a plan. No, that wasn’t entirely true; he had plenty of ideas, but none that didn’t cost a hell of a lot more than the limited cash they had on hand. Sooner or later, though, Lea would want answers that he didn’t have, and then she’d have no other option but to try her luck with Slaski in the hopes that Swonger was wrong about the SIM card.
It was past noon when they got back to her car. Gibson spread their map out on the hood and studied it. It confirmed what Parker had told them: cell coverage at the prison was thin at best. The nearest cell tower was off to the southwest, back toward Niobe, and the entire northern quadrant was one big dead zone. They’d stumbled across a clearing between the cell tower and the prison where he could set up shop and reasonably claim to be camping if discovered. It was perfect for what he had in mind. Unfortunately, what he had in mind required an exorbitantly expensive piece of hardware that wasn’t available for civilian use, even if he could afford it. Lea asked him about the plan again, but he put her off with some vague allusion to needing to mull things over.
“So you’ve got nothing. Do you?”
He squinted at her over the hood of the car and chuckled. “Not unless you’ve got a half a million socked away somewhere.”
“Are we partners, or was last night a con?”
“Partners,” he confirmed.
“Then don’t string me along.”
He really did like her.
They were halfway back to town before Lea spoke again. “You know my grandfather was a surgeon? Chief of staff at a hospital in Connecticut. My grandmother founded four separate charities. They passed within a year of each other.”
“Yeah, I read about them.”
“Didn’t have my parents’ resources, of course, but they were well off. Put money aside in a trust to pay for my education. We didn’t need it, but I was their only grandchild, and the gesture was important to them. I never really thanked them for it. I never thanked anyone for anything back then. Man, I wish I had.”
“You were a kid.”
“Yeah, well, anyway, they named my father the executor of the trust, and after the feds ceased everything, it was the only legit money left. He made this tearful plea. Swore he was the victim of a witch hunt, that he would be exonerated and everything would go back to the way it had been. But he needed the money. I loved him. I gave him my blessing. Felt proud to be able to help. Figured out later, he’d drained the trust weeks before he asked. It was all a lie.” She pulled into the hotel parking lot and put the car in park. “So, no, I don’t have a half million socked away anywhere.”
Swonger, sitting on top of a dumpster with a Red Bull, hopped down and met them at the car.
“Something’s up,” Swonger said.
“Something good or something bad?”
“Well, it ain’t Daytona. Them boys that booked the fifth floor? Got it on lockdown. Won’t let nobody up there. Lot more than four of them now too. Two of them outside the elevator. Another in the lobby. Got those earpiece deals so they can talk to each other.”
“Are they armed?”
“Oh, they strapped. Guarding somebody.”