Ben stared at his culler. “You’re awful well-informed, Ellis. But don’t tell me. You were reading up on investment commodities for—”
“For retirement. Yes, Ben. As a hedge against hard times.” Knocker Ellis replied evenly, but the warning for Ben not to dig further was plain.
“Seeing as how you’re on a roll, care to hazard a guess about the value of a Troy ounce of gold, say, at the close of yesterday’s market?”
Ellis scratched his head. “Don’t know. If I had to guess—”
Ben crossed his arms. “Oh, please do.”
“It’d come in round seventeen hundred thirty-two spondulicks, U.S. Been rising quick of late, though not as quick as silver or palladium. Still, it’s a decent hedge when the stock market’s soft and shot through with cowards and cheats. China and India are the big gold markets, but for jewelry mostly. Since it takes a few years to bring new gold mines in, demand is going to outpace supply for a while before there’s price stabilization, let alone a downward correction. But don’t quote me.”
Ben picked up the gold bar and spoke quietly. “This little thing is worth six hundred ninety-three thousand dollars?”
Knocker Ellis smiled. “Give or take. And you think there’s a few more bars still down there?”
“Yes, I’d say quite a few. What’s going on here, Ellis? Every word you say has a half-dozen more behind it. Care to enlighten me?”
Ellis’s turn to look toward the horizon. “I’d say we have problems. And with all due respect, we have a dead man, too.”
“He’ll keep.”
Ellis’s eyebrows twitched up a millimeter in what was for him a display of profound surprise. “Could get in some deep trouble if we keep quiet, Ben. Fines. Take your license away. The law says—”
Ben’s voice was firm. His eyes, clear. “The law is not aboard right now. I’m suspending oyster season early this year.”
Ellis looked back at the bar of gold and smiled just a little. “Aye-aye, Captain Blackshaw.”
Ben was sure Knocker Ellis knew much more than he was saying. At the moment, his culler’s sudden loquacity was the least of today’s surprises. Ben felt completely surrounded by secrets the way the bay’s water could press in cold and hard on all sides. Go too deep, and it would crush the life out of a man.
CHAPTER 5
The old, isolated frame house outside St. Mary’s City, Maryland was dark as a pharaoh’s tomb. Clouds kept any moonlight from the windows. Power to the lone floodlight mounted in the old oak tree outside was cut at the breaker box. Chalk was in his element on this kind of sortie. He hated time with the Senator. She was an old dog with no new tricks. Where surgical applications of mayhem invigorated Chalk, making nice with the Senator from Wisconsin cost him a little piece of his dark soul every time. Even so, business was business. He put the afternoon’s flight behind him.
Of course, Tom Chase, Chalk’s runaway mule, had not seen fit to check in at six o’clock. Time for waiting was over. The time to act had come.
Chalk positioned his agents inside and around the house. Like an infestation of spiders poised in an attic for the arrival of a single fly, they were waiting for a woman named Nelly Vickers.
Tom Chase had squired Miss Vickers to the Right Way Moving & Storage holiday party the year before. Though she had not exactly Xeroxed her ass on the company copier, she was tipsy, bubbly, and Chalk had noted her. He chatted her up and filed a few particulars away. Tom Chase was still new to the company then. Still a closed book. Nelly, a toned fox in her forties, had known little enough about her date. Like Maynard Chalk, she had only recently met him.
Tonight, Chalk leveraged some research time from a gaggle of intel geeks based in Quantico. They tracked Vickers to her house in this desolate wood. At the moment she had the unfortunate distinction of being Chalk’s only lead. His only peep-hole into a personal life Chase had completely sequestered from work. Perhaps she had gotten to know Chase a little better since the party. Perhaps Chalk could help her remember something if she were stone cold sober, stripped, and zip-tied to the metal legs of her Formica kitchen table. Worth a shot, right?
Chalk reclined on a butt-sprung BarcaLounger in the sepulchral living room. When he put on his night vision goggles he would have a clear view of the front door. Deep tire ruts, and women’s size seven shoeprints in the dirt outside told him this was the way she would enter. Not through the side door to the kitchen.
He swirled a tumbler filled with Balblair 38-year-old scotch poured from his own flask. He sipped, and flicked his tongue around, bathing it in far off Highland honey. When this was all over, he might crack open that bottle of The Macallan 60-Year-Old he was saving for special. He did not give a damn for its deco Lalique bottle, or its twenty-thousand-dollar sticker. After handling this disaster, he would need something that truly announced recompense in a sweet smoky liquid language he and very few others spoke.
His Glock 21 lay on a side table, a round in the chamber. There might be a small oil stain from the pistol on her copy of Chesapeake Bay Magazine. That did not matter. Her subscription was about to be cancelled.
In the dark, Chalk contemplated the chain of stupidities that had brought him to this house. He was just as upset with his newer man, Bill Slagget, as he was with his tried-and-true lieutenant, Simon Clynch. Both henchmen crouched behind furniture nearby. What the hell was a hench, anyway? Regardless, Chalk hoped they were uncomfortable. Charlie-horsed. Mostly, Chalk was furious with himself. He should never have trusted Tom Chase with such an important courier job alone.
In his heart, Chalk knew this crisis was his own fault. It might put an end to everything, including his life, even if Senator Morgan was not already gunning for him.
For this job, Simon Clynch should have worked with Tom Chase. That had not come about as planned. Clynch fell deathly ill from food poisoning contracted at a usually safe sushi joint they liked off DuPont Circle in D.C. Clynch bitched that at the peak of the illness, he could shit through the eye of a needle at fifty paces. Likewise, Bill Slagget was pinned down on the porcelain with talking-gun squirts during the critical time when this mission came in to Right Way.
Chalk had weathered the bacteria with some nausea but no loosening of his cast-iron gut. He could have sortied with Tom Chase personally, and should have. Against his better judgment he had chosen not to. He’d stayed home. It had been Chalk’s birthday after all. He preferred to spend that special evening according to custom. With his favorite prostitute, Phoebe DeLyte.
When he thought of his odd relationships with Senator Lily Morgan and Phoebe DeLyte, Chalk felt a little like Robin Hood; robbing the bitch to give to the whore. This year as ever, Phoebe had earned her money, delivered like Venus herself, happily banging Chalk into a drooling catatonic state by morning. Now Chalk was paying for this lapse of judgment. Christ on a stick! Perhaps he would crucify Tom Chase when they caught up to him.
Dar Gavin, one of Chalk’s men posted at the mouth of Vickers’s long lane, gave Chalk the heads-up through a radio earpiece. “’98 Grand Cherokee. Red. Plates match. Female driver. Flying solo.”
Chalk replied into his TASC II headset. “Received.”
He quaffed the last of the scotch, put up the flask, and levered the BarcaLounger upright. Then he donned his Generation Six night vision goggles. The world went from shadow to glinting hues of tourmaline. He holstered his pistol. Patted his barn coat’s pockets. Pruning shears: in place. Pliers. Butane lighter. Three retractable box cutters. Dental floss to stem arterial bleeds. The items were all there where he stowed them on such occasions. He called these things his manicure kit. He snaked the fingers of his right hand through the rings of a well-worn set of brass knuckles. He was more than ready for the interview. He was eager. Time’s a-wasting.