“It may also be his weak point,” said Gurney. “It could be our way in.”
“Getting in is difficult. Getting close to him is more difficult. Getting close with a weapon is impossible. There are guards. There are metal detectors. There are the snakes. So many snakes. It is not an ordinary house.”
“So, it would seem that we need to get an invitation.”
“Easy for me. Not so easy for you.”
Gurney got up from his armchair and began pacing around the room, in the hope that the movement might give rise to ideas that wouldn’t have occurred to him sitting in one spot.
After circling the room several times, Gurney stopped in a far corner, then turned to Valdez. “Suppose you wanted to kill me . . . and make my body disappear. Is that something he’d be willing to help you with?”
Valdez looked up from the fire.
“Possibly. But it’s hard to deceive him. Many people have died trying. He enjoys killing people who have lied to him.”
“It sounds like disabling his defenses will be like defusing a bomb.”
“A bomb with many triggers.”
“So,” said Gurney, beginning again his slow pacing around the room, “we have to construct a lie that he’d be eager to believe.”
AN HOUR LATER, they had agreed on the details of that lie, on a dark favor Valdez would ask for, and on a final risky stratagem that would neutralize the man toward whom Valdez appeared to bear an implacable hatred.
He stood in front of the fireplace, a few feet from Gurney, his phone in his hand.
“I must prepare you for something you may find disturbing. In this phone call, I will be the person I once was, the person he wants me to be again. You understand?”
“I think so.”
“You will naturally hear only my part of the conversation, but I will try to say enough so that it will make sense to you.” With a tiny tic at the corner of his eye—the only hint of anxiety Gurney could see—Valdez entered a number and waited.
“Yes,” he said a few seconds later. “It’s Ivan.”
Interesting, thought Gurney, wondering exactly when the young man had dropped the “v” and turned the Russian name into a British one.
“That’s right,” said Valdez into the phone. “I need to talk to him.”
He waited. At least two minutes passed before he spoke again.
“Yes, it’s me. I’ve got a situation here. An ex-cop, David Gurney, has been poking around the Slade-Lerman case. He’s come to see me a few times. His story at first was that he thought Slade was innocent and was trying to exonerate him. He asked me for some money for expenses. Okay, I thought, I’ll give him a couple of grand, see what he can find out. He comes back a week or two later, says he needs five grand. I’m thinking this is bullshit. But I’m curious where he’s going with this, so I give him the five, let him think I’m easy. Week later he comes to me again, says there may be a problem. Says he’s finding out things that could incriminate me for the murder of Lerman. He says that would also finger me for framing Slade, which is fucking insane. Makes me think my life would be simpler if I never met Ziko Slade. No matter. Water under the fucking bridge. Anyway, after Slade hangs himself, Gurney comes to me and says he found out I’ll be picking up nine mil from Slade’s estate, and that’s going to point the finger at me for sure, but he can make that go away, and all he needs is a hundred grand. But I can see in his fucking eyes that the hundred grand would just be the first bite.”
Valdez was silent for nearly a minute, the phone pressed to his ear, his dark eyes gleaming in the firelight.
When he spoke again, it was with a harsh dismissiveness. “No, no, no, it’s not all about the money. Listen to me. I don’t care about chasing money, I don’t care about spending money, I don’t care about how much money I have. But someone tries to pick my pocket, I’ll cut his fucking hand off. Fucker thinks he can sucker me out of a hundred grand with some shit about protecting me from a frame job? That’s one fucking serious mistake.”
He was silent for maybe half a minute, listening intently to the voice on the phone, before responding in a less excited but no less menacing tone.
“You ask what’s my bottom line? Simple. This fucking Gurney is not what he seems to be. He’s no boy-scout detective. He’s a goddamn leech, trying to take what’s mine. So, I figure his time is up.”
Ten seconds of listening.
“Yeah, of course I can handle it.”
Another ten seconds of listening.
“I got no problem taking care of it personally. In fact, I insist on it. My finger on the trigger. No other fucking way.”
Five seconds of listening.
“What I was hoping was maybe, as a favor, you could help with the disposal.”
The phone conversation went on for several more minutes. Gurney gathered from Valdez’s side of it that the “disposal” was not only agreed to but that the arrangement would proceed that very night. Valdez would ensure that Gurney would be present at the lodge. Two cars would be sent, one to transport Gurney as a prisoner and one for Valdez.
At the end of the call, Valdez expressed his gratitude for the favor in the tone a humble priest might use to address the pope.
“I HOPE YOU didn’t overdo it,” Gurney said later as they sat by the fireplace, reviewing the situation and preparing for what was to come.
“Overdoing it is not a problem. He regards such behavior as a sign of fear and respect—acknowledgments of his power. He is God. We are his subjects.”
“As his son, you must be a bit more than that.”
“True. My special role is to be an extension of him. I am supposed to be his hand. The hand of God, with no will of my own. The greatest sin is to forget that he is God and that I am just his hand. Or perhaps just the finger on the trigger.”
“Listening to what you said on the phone, I got the impression you were insisting on being the one with the right to kill me.”
“It sounds like a contradiction, but I know how he hears things. He would hear what I said not as a challenge to his power but as an acceptance of my responsibility to deal with someone who has become a threat. My willingness to do what he would wish me to do. You must trust my perception of this.”
Gurney’s uneasiness was steadily rising—not only because of the increasing role of “trust” in the anticipated events, but because of the impression created by Valdez’s persona in the conversation with his father. The possibility that this was the real Valdez was frightening.
“I’m thinking,” said Gurney, “that it would make sense to arrange for some law-enforcement backup around his house in the event that we have to hit the bailout button.”
“It’s not a good idea. He has many police contacts who would inform him the instant any such request was made. It would abort our only chance to get near him. It would also motivate him to deal with you himself, which would put you at much greater risk. We have only one path forward.”
That led to a long silence and the most difficult decision Gurney had ever wrestled with—to back out now and hope that a better plan would occur to him, or to take a leap in the dark and trust this man on the basis of little more than Emma’s assurance that he was trustworthy.
The decisive moment arrived a little after ten o’clock that night, as two vehicles were making their way up the long driveway to the lodge.
“Okay,” said Gurney, taking a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”