‘Lucky for him you arrived.’ Jargo brought his face close to Gabriel’s. ‘This client list and some related files were on Evan’s computer. We saw it. We erased it. You’re telling me he didn’t know he had the files?’
‘I don’t know if he knew or not. I’m telling you what his mother knew. He… he doesn’t seem to know much.’
‘Does he know or not?’
‘I don’t… think so. He’s dumb as a stump.’
‘No, he’s not dumb.’ Jargo ran the tip of the blade along Gabriel’s chin. ‘I don’t believe you. Donna cleaned the files off her computer. She sent a backup to Evan’s computer. But she would need the files to convince Evan of the need for them to vanish. You don’t simply just go and run away from your life. So Evan must have seen the files. And taken the precaution of making a copy and hiding it.’
‘He doesn’t know.’
Jargo jabbed the knife into the bullet wound in Gabriel’s shoulder, and Gabriel’s eyes bugged, the veins popped on his neck. Jargo clamped a hand over Gabriel’s mouth, twisted the knife, let the scream run its course under his fingers, removed the knife, flicked away the blood.
‘Are you sure?’
‘He knows,’ Gabriel gasped. ‘He knows. I told him. Please. He knows your name. He knows his mother worked for you.’
‘He fought you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Beat you.’
‘He’s thirty years younger than me.’
‘Given your reversal of fortune,’ Jargo said, ‘I think you’d like for Evan to bring me down.’
Gabriel met Jargo’s stare. ‘You won’t live forever.’
‘True. Where were you supposed to meet Mitchell in Florida?’
‘Donna knew the location, I didn’t. He wasn’t expecting her. She was intercepting him on his way home.’
‘Where will Evan run? To the CIA?’
‘I warned him off the CIA. I didn’t want…’
Jargo stood. ‘Ego, ego, ego. You wanted the files for yourself. To bring me down. Humiliate the CIA. It would ruin them, you know. Revenge. See where it’s gotten you?’
‘I’ve kept my promise.’
‘Tell me. Do you often respond to any crank who contacts you to help you in your vendetta against the CIA? She must have offered you proof of her credentials. A taste for what was to come.’
Gabriel looked into Jargo’s face and said, ‘Smithson.’ Smiled as Jargo went pale. ‘I’ve told you everything I know.’
Jargo struggled to keep his emotions from surfacing on his face. My God, how much had Donna told this man? Jargo pretended as if the name Smithson meant nothing to him. ‘Evan left a large amount of cash behind in your son-in-law’s Suburban. But no IDs. Presumably you didn’t plan on the Cashers flying out of Florida under their own names. I need to know the identities on the documents you created for Evan.’
Gabriel closed his eyes. As though steeling himself for the answer.
Jargo sipped at the whiskey, leaned over close to Gabriel, and spat whiskey onto Gabriel’s facial gash.
Gabriel spat back.
Jargo wiped the string of saliva from his cheek with the back of his hand. ‘You’ll give me every name Evan’s got documentation for. And then we’ll go-’
Nowhere. Gabriel whipped his head downward and to the right. Jargo still held the long silver blade of the knife in his hand, and Gabriel pounded his throat onto the point with one breathless blow.
‘No!’ Jargo jerked away, letting go of the knife. It wedged in Gabriel’s neck. Gabriel collapsed to the floor, eyes clenched shut, and then his breath and his piss and his life unfolded out of him.
Jargo slid the knife free. He tested for a pulse; gone.
‘You can’t know. You can’t know.’ In a fury, he started kicking the body. The face. The jaw. Bone and teeth snapped under his heel. Blood splattered across the calfskin. His leg started to get tired, his pants were ruined, and the rage drained out of him and he collapsed to the soiled carpet. Smithson. How much had Donna told Gabriel or told her son?
‘Did you lie to me?’ Jargo asked Gabriel’s body. ‘Do you know our names?’ He couldn’t risk it. Not at all. He had to assume the worst. Evan knew.
He could never let his clients know they were in danger. That would start a panic. It would destroy his business, his credibility. His clients could never, ever know such a list existed. He had to bring Evan down now.
He cleaned the blood from the knife and called Carrie’s cell phone. ‘Get back here. We’re leaving for Houston. Immediately.’
No debate now. No discussion. Evan Casher was a dead man, and Jargo knew he had just the perfect bait to grace a trap.
SUNDAY MARCH 13
18
S unday morning, shortly after midnight, Evan finally let himself weep for his murdered mother.
Alone in the cheap Houston motel room, not far from the shadow of the old Astrodome and the distant hum of cars speeding along Loop 610, the lights off and the bed weathered with hourly use, he lay down, alone, and memories of his mother and his father flooded his mind. The tears came then, hot and harsh, and he curled into a ball and let them come.
He hated to cry. But the moorings of his life had been shorn away, and the grief throbbed in his chest like a physical pain. His mother had been gentle, wry, careful as a craftsman about her photos. Shy with strangers but expansive and talkative with him and his father. When he was little and would beg to sit in her darkroom and watch her work, she would stand over her photo-developing equipment, a lock of hair dangling in her face, singing little songs under her breath that she composed on the spot to keep him entertained. His father was quiet, too, a reader, a computer geek, a man of few words but when he spoke every word mattered. Always supportive, insightful, quick to hug, quick to gently discipline. Evan could not have asked for kinder and better parents. They were quiet and a little closemouthed, and now that quirk loomed large in his head. Because now it meant more than computerish solitude or artistic introversion. Was it a veil for what lay beyond, their secret world?
He’d believed he knew them. But the burden of a hidden life, lived just beyond his eyes, was unimaginable to him.
Because they didn’t want you hurt. Or because they didn’t trust you.
Ten minutes. Crying done. No more, he told himself. He was done with tears. He washed his face, wiping it dry with the paper-thin, worn towel.
Exhaustion staggered him. He had driven straight into San Antonio, changed the license plates off the stolen pickup, trading with a decrepit-looking station wagon in a neighborhood where it seemed less than likely the police would get a prompt phone call. He drove the speed limit on I-10, heading east, winding through the coastal flat-lands and into the humid sprawl of Houston. He only stopped for gas, eating Slim Jims and guzzling coffee, paying with cash when he had to refill the tank. He found a cheap motel – cheap in that the hookers shook their moneymakers a block away – and booked a room for the night. The clerk seemed to resent him – Evan supposed they didn’t get much demand for more than an hour or two in the room. Evan palmed the room key and drove the truck – too nice for the lot – past an old woman smoking cigarettes in a doorway, past two whores chatting and laughing in the parking lot. He locked the door behind him. There was no furniture other than the bed and a worn TV stand, bolted to the floor. The TV brought a fuzzy picture and offered only the local Houston channels.
All gone. The words spoken by one of the killers in the kitchen. The file they killed his mother for had been on his computer. Somehow.
Gabriel said she’d e-mailed the files. Assume it was true, since she’d sent him a large e-mail late the night before she called him. So she must have hidden a program inside the songs, tucking these hidden files on his laptop in a place he would never look. He wasn’t a computer geek, he didn’t explore the innards of his laptop, he didn’t browse through his library or preference files. But the data would be there, a backup for his mother or insurance for Gabriel, and Evan would have never thought twice about receiving a set of music files.