“I understand.” He stood there for a moment, then went out and closed the door. He walked slowly and deliberately to his car, got in, and drove. He put his Bluetooth earpiece in his ear and pressed his brother’s number on his phone.
“Yeah?”
“Jimmy. It’s me.”
“Not only did my phone already tell me that, but since you’re my brother, I might recognize your voice by now. Where you been?”
“Where you left me, using Sandy Belknap to get to Carver.”
“Did you?”
“He called. The son of a bitch called and told her we work for Kapak.”
“You didn’t deny it?”
“Of course I did. She found some problems with my ID, so here I am.”
“How did you leave it?”
“We left it that if she sees me again she’ll call the police or shoot me.”
“Sounds like the way you leave it with all your girlfriends. Did she mean it?”
“I’ve seen her cell phone, and I’ve seen her gun.”
“Are we getting any closer to Joe Carver?”
“She and I noised his name around town for a while, and it got his attention. He called her once, and he’ll call her again. She’s wonderful.”
“Can we put something on her phone to record it when he calls?”
“I’m planning to try, of course” He actually hadn’t thought about his next move yet. His rejection still stung too much. “What about you? Have you just been sitting on your ass waiting for your big brother to get to Carver?”
“Last night, Kapak had me and Voinovich put all the money from Siren, Temptress, and Wash in the safe at Siren and sit with it. Carver and that girl you met at the bank the other night robbed us.”
“You must be okay, since you’re talking to me. Is Voinovich?”
“Nobody’s hurt, but they hauled the safe away in that big-ass SUV Voinovich drives—that Sequoia. He’s kind of sensitive about it.”
“Jesus. Carver never sleeps. And that crazy girl, where did she come from? Did she fire any rounds?”
“She couldn’t wait. Right inside the storage area in the back of Siren—bam! Right through the roof, to show us she wasn’t shitting around. Every minute that woman was waving that big .45 around, I felt as likely to die as live. She gave me the impression that she actually wanted to kill us, but that Carver wouldn’t let her.”
“The whole thing gives me the creeps,” said Jerry. “How did they even get into the building?”
“The police are looking into that,” Jimmy said. “Look, I’ve got to get going on this other thing right now, so I’ll talk to you later.”
Jerry could tell that what Jimmy wasn’t telling was that it was Jimmy’s fault somehow. Jimmy had let them in, and it was probably something embarrassingly stupid. Jerry felt a wave of compassion for his brother. Having awakened naked and handcuffed, he understood, but compassion wasn’t the kind of emotion that lasted. “What other thing?”
“I don’t want to go into it on the phone. I’ll talk to you later.”
Jerry stared at his phone for a second, then put it in his pocket. He had a mission now. He drove to Sherman Oaks and stopped around the corner from the Eye Spy Shop, then walked the rest of the way. He knew that there must be cameras and things recording everything that went on at the store. If they had all that stuff, how could they resist using it?
Jerry stepped into the store, and he could see himself in the big monitor on the wall in high definition, stepping into the store. He surveyed the counters and shelves, which were full of gadgets that looked as though they were exhibits in a museum commemorating some repressive government that had fallen: buttonhole cameras that could peek out of a hat or coat or briefcase, microphones that could be inserted into telephones, others that could be plugged into electric outlets to transmit speech from rooms. There were video cameras disguised as clocks, radios, and audio speakers. There were lots of computer gear—keystroke counters, programs for collecting and reviewing instant messages.
He judged that the customers must be about evenly divided between parents who wanted to spy on their babysitters and nannies, and people who wanted to spy on their spouses. He found what he wanted right away. It was a radio transmitter hidden inside a surge suppressor. He had seen a power bar very much like it under the desk in Sandy Belknap’s apartment from his hiding place behind the sliding door in her closet. It had several things plugged into it: a laptop computer, a phone charger, a printer.
He bought the proper receiver and recorder too. The transmitter had a range of only three miles, but he could listen to the recorder by telephone. He took his purchases back to Sandy’s apartment building, and then drove in ever-widening circles until he found an apartment two blocks away. He found it in time to catch the building manager before he went off to work, and persuaded him to accept a deposit on the place and give him a key.
After another few minutes he called Sandy’s apartment. There was no answer, so he drove by and studied the windows and looked for her car. He parked, walked to the front door, pretended to knock with his left hand while he slipped a credit card into the crack between the door and the jamb and opened it. He set his surge suppressor beside Sandy’s and was pleased with the close resemblance as he plugged his into the outlet. He plugged her devices into his suppressor, making sure that they were in the same receptacles, took her surge suppressor with him, and left.
At his new apartment he set up his receiver and drove a few miles away to have lunch at a pancake house. In the lot he took out his telephone and called the receiver and listened. He heard a few sounds in her empty apartment, picked out the noise of a car going by outside, heard a siren. He hung up.
He had a late breakfast of pancakes with so much sweet syrup that it made his teeth feel as though they had a sticky film on them. It had been meant to be a consolation for losing Sandy, but it only accentuated the feeling that he had made another enormous mistake in a life that was full of them.
He went out to the car and called Voinovich’s cell phone. “It’s Jerry,” he said. “I heard you and my brother had a bad night.”
“They got my car, the safe, and maybe sixty thousand dollars in cash.”
“Jimmy told me. Sorry about your car. Let’s hope they’ll leave it someplace without doing any damage.”
“The cops got it back an hour ago, but they didn’t get Carver or the girl. The cops want me to come in and get it, but I’m not sure Carver didn’t leave our guns in it. I could go in and sign my name and have them push me into a cell. It happened to my cousin in Moscow years ago.”
“This isn’t Moscow. What I’d do is say they’re Carver’s guns.”
“They could have our prints on them.”
“Then think of a reason for that and have it ready in case you need it.”
“It doesn’t matter what you say if things are going against you. That’s how I ended up here, so many thousands of miles from home. I had a job unloading ships in Odessa at night—foreign ships. The owners seemed to understand that by losing a little cargo, they were gaining a lot of goodwill. But then, my bosses started having setbacks. There was a police captain who needed to be paid off, and he wanted more than there was. So my bosses were going to leave. They sent all their money ahead of them to New York to put it into an American bank. Then they flew in. But when they were going through customs, the older one, Anatoly, fell down with a heart attack and died on the spot. He was carrying all the paperwork for the money transfer, and so the American police started asking questions. Andrei, the other one, got deported. The money couldn’t be sent back with him.”