“I found these.” She handed him the folded pair of khakis and a T-shirt. “They were in one of the storage compartments. The pants will be too short, and they smell moldy.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re dry.” He peeled off Eddie’s LSU T-shirt and replaced it with one that had belonged to her father, then began unbuttoning the jeans.
She turned her back. “Are you hungry?”
“Yeah.”
She went back down the steps and flicked on the lantern only long enough to locate the food she’d set aside for him. By the time she returned to the wheelhouse, he had swapped out the pants. She set the foodstuffs on the console. “You forgot to get a can opener.”
“I got cans with pull tabs.”
“Not the pineapple. And of course, that’s what Emily wanted.”
“Sorry.”
“I found a can opener in a drawer under the stove. It’s rusty, so we may get lead poisoning, but she had her pineapple.”
Using his fingers, he ate his meal of canned breast meat chicken, pineapple slices, and saltine crackers. He washed it down with another bottle of water that Honor fetched from below. She’d also brought up a package of cookies to appease his noticeable sweet tooth.
He was sitting on the floor, his back propped against the console. She sat in her dad’s captain’s chair, which had suffered the ravages of the elements like everything on the boat.
The silence was broken only by the pelting rain and the crunch of cookies.
“It’s raining harder than ever,” she remarked.
“Um-huh.”
“At least the rain keeps the mosquitoes away.”
He scratched at a place on his forearm. “Not all of them.” He took another cookie from the package and bit off half.
“Will they find us?”
“Yes.” Noticing that his blunt answer had startled her, he said, “It’s only a matter of time, depending largely on when Hamilton kicks things into full gear. He probably has already.”
“If they find us—”
“When.”
“When they find us, will you…” She searched for the word.
“Go peacefully?”
She nodded.
“No, I won’t.”
“Why?”
“Like I told Hamilton, I’m not quitting until I get this son of a bitch.”
“The Bookkeeper.”
“It’s not just an assignment any longer. It’s one-on-one, him against me.”
“How did it work, exactly? The business between him and Marset?”
“Well, let’s see. Here’s a for-instance. Each time a truck passes from one state into another, it has to stop at a weigh station. Have you seen these arms that extend over the interstate near state lines?”
She shook her head. “I don’t routinely cross state lines, but in any case, no, I’ve never noticed.”
“Most people don’t. They look like streetlights. But they’re actually X-ray machines that scan trucks and cargo, and they’re constantly being monitored. Agents see a truck that looks suspicious, or that hasn’t stopped at the weigh station, it’s pulled over and searched.”
“Unless the person monitoring it is on the take and lets it pass.”
“Bingo. The Bookkeeper created a market out of doing just that. His business strategy was to corrupt the people enforcing the laws, effectively making the laws a joke. A human trafficker would pay for the protection and consider it a cost of doing business.”
“Sam Marset was a…?”
“Client. I believe one of the first, if not the first.”
“How did it come about?”
“Along with his honest business, Marset was doing a brisk trade in illegal goods. Since he was legit, no one suspected. Then Marset’s trucks started getting stopped often, his drivers hassled. The increased vigilance was enough to scare him. Above all, the elder of St. Boniface didn’t want to get caught. Enter The Bookkeeper with a solution to his problem.” Coburn grinned. “Thing was, The Bookkeeper had created the problem.”
“By orchestrating the searches.”
“And probably Marset knew it. But if The Bookkeeper could put a cog in his wheels, he could see to it that the cogs were removed. It was either pay The Bookkeeper for protection, or risk getting caught with a shipment of drugs. Life as he’d known it would be history.”
“Others would be forced to do the same.”
“And did. The Bookkeeper now has an expanded client base. Some are large commercial operations like Marset’s. Others are small-time independents. Men out of work due to the oil spill who have a pickup truck and kids to feed. They drive over to south Texas, pick up a couple hundred pounds of marijuana, drive it to New Orleans, their kids eat for another week.
“They’re breaking the law, but the bigger criminal is the individual who’s making it profitable for them to become felons. The smugglers run a much greater risk of being caught, and when they are, they can’t rat out the facilitator because they rarely know who it is. They only know their contact person, and that individual is low on the totem pole.”
“If Marset was such a good customer, why was he killed? You mentioned something to Hamilton about his whining.”
“Things rocked along okay for a time. Simpatico. Then The Bookkeeper started getting greedy, started increasing his commission for the services provided. Marset didn’t need a crystal ball to tell him that without a ceiling, the cost would keep going up, and soon a large slice of his overhead was going to be The Bookkeeper’s fee. But if he refused to pay it—”
“He’d get caught, exposed, and sent to prison.”
“Right. And The Bookkeeper could make it happen, because his tentacles reach into the entire justice system. So Marset, ever the diplomat, and a little naive as it turns out, proposed that they meet last Sunday night and settle on terms that both could live with.”
“You smelled a rat.”
“The Bookkeeper is the freaking Wizard of Oz. I couldn’t see him strolling into that warehouse, shaking hands, and negotiating.”
“Did Marset know his identity?”
“If he did, he died without telling. I’ve been through his files, read every scrap of paper I could get my hands on, including the one with your husband’s name on it.”
“Surely you don’t suspect Eddie of being The Bookkeeper.”
“No, The Bookkeeper is alive and well.”
“How do you think Eddie fit in?”
“You said he had moonlighted for Marset. Maybe he was in on the illegal side of his business. Or maybe he was a dirty cop on The Bookkeeper’s payroll. Maybe he was playing both ends against the middle, or holding out for a larger take. Maybe blackmail was his angle. I don’t know.”
She stared him down until, with a trace of reluctance, he added, “Or he was a cop trying to make a case against one or both. But crooked or straight, he would have tried to protect himself by collecting hard evidence that he could use for whatever his purpose was.”
Honor was steadfast in her confidence of Eddie’s integrity, but for the time being she let the matter drop. “Royale Trucking. Are all the employees crooked?”
“Not at all. Those six who died with Marset, yes. He had a separate set of books that only he and one other guy ever saw. People in the corporate office, even members of his own family, didn’t know about his sideline.”
“How could they not?”
He shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t look too deep. They didn’t want to. All they knew was that the business continued to do extremely well in a weak economy.”
“So they’ll be okay? Mrs. Marset?”
“In terms of prosecution, yes. Won’t be easy for her when the truth about her husband is exposed.”
Honor pulled her feet up to the edge of the seat, looped her arms around her legs, and propped her chin on her knees. Quietly she said, “They’ll kill you.”