“What do you do now?”
“I started getting into chakra cleansing,” he said. “Girl I was dating was a big advocate, but that didn’t do the trick, either. She was very spiritual about it, always telling me to surrender to the release, but I just couldn’t get into that. I feel like my chakra is pretty healthy.”
“That’s what you’re known for,” I said. “That and bad checks.”
“This was supposed to be my day off,” Barry said. “And here I am, sitting next to Mr. Marked for Death.”
“Think how I feel,” I said.
Barry hadn’t actually looked at me yet. Or if he had, I couldn’t tell since he was still wearing his sunglasses. Maybe he was waiting for a break in the action.
“Have to say,” he said, “I was little surprised to hear from you. Today of all days.”
“Yeah?”
“Word is you got a bullet to the dome this afternoon, actually.”
“That was someone else,” I said.
“What happened to your forehead?”
“Christopher Bonaventura punched it,” I said.
“You wake up in the morning and this stuff just happens, or is there an order to it?”
“Depends what morning it is,” I said.
“Maybe you just live in a bad neighborhood.”
“No,” I said, “the guy who was shot in front of my place was probably taken out by a sniper, so they could have been in another neighborhood completely. I suppose they could have been in a high-rise a half a mile away.” I pointed at the towering buildings across the street from the park. “Like one of those.”
“Comforting,” Barry said.
“Any other words being thrown out about me?”
“Only that since you got back into town, the number of professional killers enjoying the sun and beaches has increased tenfold. I’m thinking of starting a side business selling maps to your place.”
“Yeah,” I said, “about that. You got anything on an ex-Marine named Alex Kyle doing business out here?”
“Big guy?”
“Big enough.”
“Rolls with ten guys who look just like him?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Barry pulled off his sunglasses and rubbed them on his shirt. Held them up. Looked through them. Put ’em right back on. “Lot of fake passports in town this week,” Barry said, like I hadn’t asked him about Alex Kyle. “Lots of people asking for private protection. Big money getting tossed around. Heard there was a guy trying to move yellow cake who was staying at a condo, taking meetings on his deck, like it was nothing. Another guy supposedly was trying to move weapons-grade plutonium. FBI picked him up eating sushi next to Bono.”
One of the trapeze artists failed to catch his partner, and the partner-a young Asian woman who looked to weigh less than a hundred pounds-sailed into the netting below, eliciting a collective moan from the crowd. She popped back up quickly, but looked dazed and somewhat unbalanced.
“You think that hurts?” Barry said.
“Any time you fall from the sky onto the ground,” I said, “it hurts.”
“You ever jump out of a plane?”
“A few times,” I said.
“That seems relaxing,” he said.
“Not if the people on the ground are shooting at you,” I said.
“Can’t control that,” Barry said. He reached into his cooler and pulled out a bottle of beer and handed it to me, took another one out for himself. He looked at me then and clanked his bottle into mine in a toast. “To life, then,” he said, and then drank from his bottle slowly, like he was thinking about something particularly vexing.
“Something on your mind, Barry?”
“This Alex Kyle,” Barry said, “he’s not a nice person.”
I thought about it. “No. Probably not.”
“Wasn’t really a question,” Barry said. “Just an observation.” He broke off a piece of fried plantain from his plate and chewed on it carefully. “Anyway,” he said, “now that you’re alive again, I’m just saying you should look into ways to spend your free time that are less hazardous to your health. You never hear about anyone getting gunned down while building model planes in their garage.”
He had a point, though if I took to building model planes in my garage, I might be inclined to gun myself down.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“Last favor I did for you? The IRS audited my nana the next day. That’s not right.”
“Nana good with keeping receipts?”
“She’s been dead for fifteen years,” Barry said.
“Tell me you’re not cashing your grandmother’s social security checks,” I said.
“You watch the news? It’s important to tighten up where you can. Besides, it helps to have an extra social security number or two for a rainy day, like if some ex-spy puts your business in peril and you need to relocate and start all over.”
“You help me here,” I said, “I’ll owe you.”
“You already owe me,” he said.
I looked around. “Dinner with Fiona,” I said. I paused. Waited for a sign. Like a shank to the neck. When none came, I continued with “My treat.”
“She’s not a nice person, either,” Barry said.
“No,” I said, “she’s not.”
“That’s kind of hot, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
Barry chewed on another bit of plantain. “This one of those ‘or people will die’ things?”
“Yeah,” I said. I showed him the paperwork on the credit transfer to Myanmar. “You ever do any business with this bank?”
Barry visibly recoiled in his chair, enough so that he had to grab his plate before it tipped off his lap. “Myanmar is off-limits,” he said.
“How can an entire country be off-limits?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe I’m just averse to having the government disappear me. Or being called a terrorist and shipped to some torture chamber on a boat. Or having everyone I know murdered in the night by people like yourself. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said.
“Or your friend Mr. Kyle.”
“Have you talked to him, Barry?”
“He paid me a visit.”
“What was he looking for?”
“You,” he said.
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth,” Barry said. “That the last time we did business my nana got audited. Told him I was out of the Michael Westen business until Nana’s IRS problems disappeared.”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
“Consider it the advantage of working with local businesses,” he said.
“I still need a favor,” I said.
“I still get dinner with Fiona?”
Even though I couldn’t see Fi, her presence, at least mentally, was weighing on me. I tweaked the offer accordingly. “I can guarantee that you will eat in the same room with her,” I said. “Everything else is up to chance.”
“All a man can ask,” he said.
“How much time would you need to get a hold of a couple hundred credit card numbers?”
“How much are you willing to pay?”
“Whatever it takes to get your nana’s legal issues resolved,” I said. “And I’ll pay double if you can get them from Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia-any place with a lot of banks and a lot of regulations.”
“How long would you need them for?”
“About ten minutes,” I said.
“I wasn’t planning on working tonight,” Barry said. “But I guess I could make a couple calls.”
I handed him the bank information again, and this time he took it. “I want you to flood this account with transactions,” I said. “Charges. Cash advances. It doesn’t matter. But max every single card. I want an international banking incident.”
Barry shook his head. “You got maybe fifteen minutes before the banks on both ends freeze all the transactions,” Barry said. “That bank in Myanmar? It doesn’t matter if it’s run by Al Qaeda or the CIA, the computers will still autolock the account, thinking it’s being cracked. You’ll never see a single cent.”
“That’s the idea,” I said. If my hunch was correct, whoever operated the bank account Dinino was transferring money into would be expecting far more money after Gennaro lost. Bonaventura probably wasn’t the only one taking action. But that would be difficult to achieve if their bank account was being investigated by every major credit fraud agency in the world. And if the U.S. government and its allies were monitoring it for money going to terrorists, it would take about thirty seconds for that account to get flagged by the kinds of people who you do not want flagging your accounts. The kinds of people who don’t mind coming across enemy lines to make sure you understand that your banking interests are very, very interesting indeed. By flooding it ten minutes before the race, it ensured me a window of time to confirm Maria and Liz were safe. Once the people who operated it found out Dinino wasn’t going to be able to make due, there was going to be… issues.