“Daddy, I’m sorry, I definitely texted you!” Abby said.
“Oh, when I was in the archives I put my phone on Do Not Disturb mode. Must have missed it. It’s no big deal. Anyway, I get to have another great dinner at the Galvins’.”
“Abby,” Celina said, “you know Esteban will take you home. Your father shouldn’t have to come all the way out here to pick you up.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “I was in the area anyway.” Before she could ask why, he said, “Is Tom still at work?”
“He has a client dinner in town. Oh, what kind of hostess am I? You are a big wine drinker, yes? Consuelo? ¿Podría obtener una buena botella de vino tinto para el caballero?”
“I’m fine. I don’t have wine every night.”
A few minutes later, he asked to use their bathroom.
He hadn’t seen one off the kitchen, but there were a lot of rooms and a lot of doors and it was always possible a bathroom adjoined the kitchen. But he didn’t think so. “It’s just out there down the hall, on the right.” Celina waved at the corridor along which Galvin had taken him to his home office. “Oh, let me show you. People get lost sometimes. It’s very confusing, this crazy house.”
“Not at all,” he said firmly. He got up and pulled out his iPhone. “If I get lost, I’ll call for directions.”
The half bath was only twenty or thirty feet down the hall. Its door wasn’t visible from the end of the farm table, where everyone had been sitting. He passed it, went a little farther down the hall and then took a right. Another fifty feet or so and he’d reached Tom Galvin’s study.
The door was open.
The lights were off. The waning sun cast an amber light. Dust motes hung in the air.
The medal sat in its case near the edge of Galvin’s desk, the side that faced visitors. Danny wondered how many people came to visit him here. And who. Was it here that he did his cartel business?
If he did any.
He entered the room, braced for the spotlights overhead to go on, activated by motion. But it didn’t. The room remained shadowed. He didn’t want to risk putting the lights on.
He took out his iPhone, set the flash function on the camera to ON, and snapped a few quick pictures of Galvin’s desk and the area around it. With each shutter sound, a pale light danced and blinked.
Galvin’s medal was smaller than he remembered. He hoped the decoy in his pocket, the one he was supposed to swap it for, was the right size.
His heartbeat sounded thunderously loud.
He reached out a hand and grasped the edge of the medal with trembling fingers. It was cold, and thicker than he’d expected.
It wouldn’t come out of its case.
The blood rushed in his ears, so loud now that he could hear nothing else. Just the whoosh of blood and the rapid, accelerating tattoo of his heart. His fingers closed around the medal and grabbed it and tried to turn it, tried to pry it loose, but it was seated firmly. Too firmly. Was it somehow cemented down, not meant to be removed?
He felt a cold, unpleasant prickling at the back of his neck.
It came loose. Finally, it came out. The medal was thick and heavy and cold. He slipped it into the right breast pocket of his suit jacket.
From his left pocket he took the replacement, warm from his body heat, and noticeably lighter than the original.
The tremor in his fingers had become even more obvious.
Please, God, he thought, let it be the right size.
He placed it over the round inset in the red velvet and saw that it was a fraction of an inch too big.
It didn’t fit in the case.
His heart raced wildly. He felt nauseated.
Now what? Give up? Put the original back in the case and tell the DEA agents they’d screwed up the measurements?
When would he ever have a chance like this again?
With both thumbs he pressed down hard on the fake medal, tried to seat it into the round inset, which refused to yield. He pushed harder-was he wrecking the delicate electronics of the listening device?-until it went down all the way, right into the inset, mashing it slightly.
But it was seated snugly. The red velvet around it puckered downward slightly, like the lines around an old man’s mouth.
The medal was slightly turned. The D in the Roman numerals at the medal’s outer edge, MDCCCLXIII, should have been centered on the midline, but it was off slightly so that the third C was at the centerpoint.
But he didn’t dare take it out and reposition it. There wasn’t time-with every second the chances that someone would catch him in here increased-and taking it out and mashing it down one more time might mangle the red velvet noticeably.
Then he realized that he hadn’t paid any attention to how the medal had been placed in there originally. Maybe it was turned one way or another. He had no recollection.
But would Galvin notice a tiny detail like that? It seemed unlikely.
He let out a long, silent breath. Backed away from the desk.
And heard the familiar raspy voice.
“Can you believe Grill 23 was closed tonight?” said Tom Galvin.
21
Danny felt his entire body jolt. He let out an involuntary cry, a sort of strangled yip.
Galvin laughed. “Didn’t mean to startle you like that.”
“Hey. You had-I thought you had a dinner with a client.”
“The guy had his heart set on Grill 23-some friend of his said they serve the best steak in Boston-and I kept telling him, you know, Abe & Louie’s, you can’t go wrong there, I like their steaks even better, and you can’t go wrong with Capital Grille, either. But no, he says his wife won’t let him do red meat more than once a month, and he’s not wasting his monthly allotment on any steak except Grill 23’s. So we had a drink and rescheduled.”
“Well, since you’ve caught me skulking around your office, I might as well come out and ask.”
“Ask…?” In the gloom, Galvin’s eyes were inscrutable.
“I wanted to surprise you. Those amazing cigars-what are they called again? I wanted to get you a box of them. Least I could do to thank you.”
Galvin switched the overhead lights on and took a few steps into the room. He gave a small, crooked smile. “They haven’t moved.” He gave a casual wave toward the overstuffed leather chairs in front of his desk. Danny glanced. On the end table next to one of them was the black lacquer box, COHIBA BEHIKE in gold letters on its lid. The gold glittered in the overhead spotlight. “I appreciate the thought, but you don’t really want to spend half the money I lent you on cigars, now do you? That box cost close to twenty thousand bucks, Danny boy. It was a gift-I wouldn’t spend that kind of money on cigars. Come on.”
“O-o-oh, I see. No, I don’t think so.” He chuckled.
“Appreciate the thought, though. I hope you’re staying for dinner.”
Danny couldn’t decide if he was pleased or dismayed at how smoothly he’d just lied. Maybe both.
But that strange feeling was quickly overwhelmed by a low hum of anxiety. He was certain Galvin knew he was lying.
22
“You left the lights on,” Abby said.
As he put the key in the lock, he noticed the spill of light under his apartment door.
Then he remembered. Yesterday, Lucy had offered to pick up sushi for the three of them-California roll and such for Abby, no raw fish-for dinner tonight.
“Oh, shit.”
Lucy was on her laptop at the dining table. Arrayed around her were clear plastic trays with decorative green plastic blades of grass and rows of sliced sushi rolls. The remains of a glass of white wine.
“I’m guessing you guys already ate.”
“I screwed up. My bad, Lucy. I’m sorry.”