“Who?” Lea asked.
“Dunno. Came in through the loading dock. Never saw ’em. But they heavy. That the Sherman they rolled up in.” He pointed to a massive black SUV with Texas plates.
Subtle.
“What are we gonna do?” Swonger asked.
“Take a shower to start.”
“Y’all are pretty ripe,” Swonger agreed.
They agreed to meet in Gibson’s room in an hour.
Jimmy Temple stood behind the front desk and welcomed Gibson back to the hotel, but his smile was forced and thin. Gone was the twinkle in his eyes, which darted to Gibson’s left. Gibson followed them to an intense Hispanic-looking man with a prominent jaw that lent him a near-permanent scowl. He wore his hair long on top, short on the sides, and slicked back in a gleaming black crest. The crease in the leg of his suit was freshly ironed, and his shoes glistened with a military attention to detail. Gibson recognized him from the Toproll last night. The man sat reading a newspaper. He closed it crisply and studied Gibson, who was glad to be dressed like a tourist back from a hike—even he wouldn’t take himself seriously. At the elevator, Gibson glanced back. The man had moved to the front desk, where he paged through the guest registry while Jimmy Temple stood by silently with a look of embarrassment. It appeared to Gibson that the Wolstenholme Hotel might be under new management.
Up in his room, Gibson opened his laptop and used his cellular modem to log into Marco Polo, one of dozens of black-market sites that had sprung up in the void left by the Silk Road bust. Powered by Bitcoin and masked by Tor encryption, it offered anything and everything for sale: drugs, weapons, stolen credit cards. It was here that he’d purchased his Robert Quine IDs, but the tech he was after represented another order of magnitude entirely. But what other options did he have? So far, inspiration wasn’t returning his calls. He left encrypted messages with the handful of vendors who might traffic in such high-end equipment and logged off feeling discouraged.
He took a long shower and contemplated the degree of competition they faced for Merrick’s money. For most of the players, the general plan would be to take Merrick after he was released from prison. Which made it all the more important that Gibson beat them to the money and leave them to fight over Merrick. Which brought him back to the Stingray. He just couldn’t think of another way to intercept Merrick’s calls to his partner on the outside.
A knock came at the door. Gibson wrapped himself in a towel, let Swonger in, and went back to the bathroom. In the mirror, Gibson trimmed up his beard and cleaned away the stubble. When he was done, he spread his wet beard between his fingers and examined the scar on his neck. He hoped with time that it would fade, but beneath his fingers it remained livid: an ugly reminder of how close he’d come to following in his father’s footsteps. He didn’t care for the beard, but he needed to get used to it, because he still wasn’t ready to bare his scars with anything resembling pride.
He heard the television in the next room. He dressed and found Swonger sprawled out on the bed, head propped on some pillows, surfing channels too quickly to see what was on.
“Get off my bed.”
“What for? Maids are gonna change the sheets.”
“Just get off.”
Swonger thought about it, and then, with dramatic slowness, stood up and flopped down in a chair. Everything with him was a test of wills. It was the only way Swonger knew to navigate the world. Gibson understood where it came from—this inability to back down from any challenge, no matter how inconsequential—but it meant Gibson had to keep his thumb on him. If he let Swonger lie on his bed now, the ex-con would be that much harder to control when it counted. Such were the inconsequential details of manhood’s pecking order.
Gibson laid out a new set of rules for them. “From here on out, we don’t know each other. That means we eat separately. We stagger coming and going, never at the same time. Don’t acknowledge me in public. We communicate by text only, except when we’re sure we’re in private. We meet here every morning. Go over things.”
“That’s cool. Very Sun Tzu.”
“Sun Tzu?”
“What? I can read. Art of War only like sixty pages, dog. Old-timer in stir gave me his copy for a pack of Marlboros. ‘Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.’ Sun Tzu’s the man.”
Not for the first time, Gibson was taken aback at Swonger’s more insightful moments. Another knock came at the door, and Gibson let Lea into the room. Her hair, still wet, was tied back in a hurried ponytail.
“So what do you have?” she asked.
Gibson laid out his plan. Lea and Swonger listened in rapt silence up until Gibson got to the sticking point.
“What the hell’s a Stingray?” Swonger asked.
Gibson explained how it worked.
“Whoa, that even legal?”
“Not for civilian purchase. Government use only.”
“And we need this thing?” Lea said.
Gibson nodded. “It’s the only way, but there’s no way we’re getting ahold of one.” He gave them the price tag.
Swonger whistled. “Dog, you don’t think small.”
“It would have been ideal, but there’s just no way. We’re just going to have to go back to Lea’s plan. Figure out a way to take the SIM card off Merrick without him knowing. Maybe Parker could—”
“I’m telling you, ain’t no way that’s gonna work,” Swonger interrupted. “Merrick will keep it close. Probably sewn into the hem of his blues so if he gets searched, he can snap it in half just as a precaution. Easier to get another one down the road. All this time and Merrick never been caught with it on him? Then he real careful.”
“I agree with Gavin,” Lea said. “There has to be another way.”
Gavin? Gibson braced for the inevitable tirade from Swonger about his name, but none came. Instead, Swonger seemed pleased to have his opinion taken seriously.
“The only other way’s the Stingray,” said Gibson.
Swonger asked if he was absolutely sure the Stingray would work.
“Yeah. I’d need to make some modifications, but it’d work.”
“Let me make a call,” Swonger said. “Maybe I know a guy.”
“Who?”
“My boy Truck.”
“Truck?”
“Truck Noble.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Seemed Truck Noble ran a crew out of Virginia Beach and wasn’t much for crossing state lines without good reason—the best coming in stacks of green. Unfortunately, cash was in short supply, and Truck Noble wasn’t interested in any kind of layaway plan. Appeals to his friendship with Swonger didn’t do much to move the needle either. Still, Swonger swore he could convince Noble to meet them.
“I just need a little more time. Truck and me, we go back.”
“Not far enough,” Gibson observed.
“Hey, how about you go to hell?”