An Absence of Light (60 page)

He stopped beside the chair where he had been sitting and looked at Ledet and then at Neuman and Alice. Alice was petrified.

“Put something in her mouth,” Graver instructed, and Neuman reached down and picked up the hem of Alice’s shift and stuffed it into her mouth. This bared her legs and her lap, which was punctuated by the darker hair of the upper part of her pubic triangle.

Graver turned back to Ledet.

“We’ve all got choices here… except her,” Graver said. “We’re going to use her. Whatever happens to her is up to you and me.” He waited a moment Silence. This was all spur-of-the-moment ad-lib, and he suddenly had the feeling he had just made a terrible tactical error. “I know you’ve flown Colin Faeber to Kalatis’s place a number of times. I need to go there.”

Ledet stared up at Graver. He was scared, Graver could tell that, but Graver knew, too, that men who were afraid could also be very gutsy. Ledet was the kind of man who would call a bluff like this. After all, Graver had just handed him a nothing-to-lose deal. If Ledet was wrong it was the girl who would lose her life, not him. He could always talk, after he saw how serious they were.

“I need to know how to get to Kalatis’s place,” Graver said.

Ledet didn’t say anything. He just sat there. At that moment Graver knew he had screwed up. If he hadn’t been willing to pistol-whip one of them or both of them, then he should never have pretended he wasn’t a cop. If he had been from Ledet’s world, he would have already started with Ledet, and Ledet was now realizing that He knew the girl was not going to get shot Graver was furious at himself. He had pulled a rookie’s stunt, and it had cost him the small advantage that he had had.

Ledet was almost grinning at him now. He knew he was dealing with a law enforcement officer of some kind. Graver knew some men who wouldn’t have hesitated to beat that smirk off Ledet’s face, to pound a little doubt into him, but Graver had never operated that way. It just wasn’t in him.

The girl was crying, her body shaking with sobs, her mouth stuffed with her own dress, her eyebrows contorted, anguished, tears streaming down her face. Graver felt like a heel. The girl was the only one who had suffered here, and he hated himself for standing her up in front of a bogus firing squad. It had been an unnecessary cruelty, and he should have known better than to have subjected her to it.

Ledet looked over at her, and then looked back to Graver. He definitely knew that Graver was a cop. But Alice didn’t Between sobs she was trying to talk, yelling at the level of a high hum, a strident, muffled pleading.

Graver looked at her, and nodded for Neuman to remove the gag.

“I know, I know,” she blurted, coughing, mucous mixed with tears stringing from her nose. “Don’t kill me, God, no, I know, I know. I…” she gasped for breath and coughed.

Graver nodded for Neuman to remove her handcuffs, and then he looked at Ledet who was now watching Alice with a concerned frown.

Going into the nearest bedroom, Graver returned with a box of tissues which he gave to Alice who grabbed at them like a drowning woman. She blew her nose and wiped her face, blew her nose again, trying to get the best of her hysteria so she could prove that she was useful and didn’t deserve to be killed.

“What is it?” Graver asked. “You know what?”

Alice wiped tear-logged strands of hair out of her face and coughed some more.

“I know about flying,” she said, finally finding her voice. “I used to date a pilot…” she stopped in mid idea and looked at Ledet who was eagerly waiting to see what she was up to. “You
prick
,” she shrieked and spat at him, a mouthful that hit him squarely in the middle of his throat and slobbered down onto his bare chest.

“Hold it,” Neuman said from behind her, reaching out and grabbing her shoulders as he forced her back down on the sofa.

Alice was glaring at Ledet so fiercely Graver believed she would have shot him if she could have gotten her hands on his gun. As far as she was concerned she had just watched Ledet demonstrate that he was willing to give her up to be shot rather than tell this man what he wanted to know. Maybe this was going to work to Graver’s advantage after all.

“What is it?” Graver asked. “You’d better tell me what you know.”

“Alice! You stupid bitch,” Ledet croaked.

“I know where his goddamned navigational maps are, by God,” she announced triumphantly. “You want to know where the son of a bitch flies, look on his maps. I found them this morning while he was sleeping.” She looked at Ledet “I’ve been around the block a few times, mister.” She was furious. “When you went to get that coke last night I followed you into that other guy’s room. You was so whiskey-whipped you didn’t know shit from Shinola. I just stood in the door naked as a jaybird and watched you. Took you forever. Saw you take out the coke, a couple of guns”—she cut her eyes at Graver then—”I saw it all. Ammo”—eyes back to Ledet—”porno tapes.”

“These guys are goddamn
cops,”
Ledet yelled. “Nobody was going to shoot you, dammit! Stupid bitch! Dammit!”

She frowned at Graver, then at Ledet, then back at Graver. “That right?”

“Sort of,” Graver said. He came over and stood squarely in front of her. “Let me tell you something. If what you say is true, this guy is going to prison, and he won’t be coming out again until he’s old enough to collect his social security—if ever. If you take sides with him, you’ll go down with him.”

“What do you mean, go down with him? All I did was snort some of this asshole’s coke and screw him. What do you mean ‘go down with him’?”

“If you know about ongoing criminal activities and conceal it, you’re an accessory,” Graver said, not putting too fine a point on it.

She looked at Ledet. “I knew you were an asshole the second you walked into that bar, mister. I couldn’t of had a better day in my life than the one I’d of had if I’d just walked out of that bar right then.”

Wiping her nose one more time, she got up from the sofa, gave a tug to the hem of her shift and walked past Ledet, throwing a look at him that told him she was going to burn his ass.

The maps, the cocaine, and the guns were all in a window seat in what must have been Redden’s bedroom. But the compartment was architecturally disguised to look as though it was part of a cantilevered bay window rather than what it was, a compartment large enough for two men to crawl into.

There was about half a kilo of recreational cocaine stored in a clear plastic container, three Uzi’s, a Sig-Sauer like Graver’s, a couple of Smith & Wesson M13’s, and a Colt Delta. Ordnance for each was stacked neatly in separate wooden crates with the tops off. There was a stack of hard-core porn films as Alice had said—and there was a satchel.

Graver picked up the satchel and opened the leather straps. Folded in neat, nine-by-twelve squares were flight maps. There was a red, rubber-stamped rectangle on the front with a place for a date. The date, written in ballpoint pen, was the next day.

Connie’s condominium was on a short, quiet street not far from Greenway Plaza, one of the city’s eight “business centers,” clusters of glass and steel architecture that punched up out of the heavily forested landscape that comprised the seven thousand five hundred square miles of metropolitan Houston.

It was not a large complex, only five units arranged around a regular pentagonal courtyard enclosed by high, rusty brick walls covered in Virginia creeper and English ivy, a barrier from the noise of the streets. There was only a single entrance from the apex of the pentagon, through a single-lane drive that circled a central garden plot of decorative plantings at the hub of which bloomed an enormous mimosa with shimmering pink blossoms. Each residence had a garage that was entered off the circular drive, though each garage was situated so that its entrance was not visible from the circular drive itself.

In many ways it was a good location to stake out. One entrance from the front. None from the back. But on the other hand it was a hell of a challenge because the architect had gone to a lot of trouble to guard the entrance of each building from its neighbors, privacy being a highly touted “amenity” of this particular complex. Access from the garage to the front door was from inside the garage so that once you entered and lowered the garage door behind you by remote control you were secure. The public entrance to the front door was through a walled courtyard with a wrought-iron gate that had an electronic lock that could be unlocked only with the resident’s key or from inside the residence.

The problem was positioning. There could be no surveillance from a car. They needed access to one of the other condos, preferably an adjacent one. Using Arnette’s computerized crisscross directory, Dani, with Arnette looking over her shoulder, called each of the adjacent units. The first one answered and Dani asked for a fictitious name and then apologized for the wrong number. The second one had a recording saying they couldn’t come to the telephone right now, leave a message. Dani tapped into the computer for the resident’s occupation. Lawrence Micheson, sales representative for Tectronics Aluminum Fabrications. She called the employer and asked to speak to Mr. Micheson. She was transferred to his secretary who said he was in Phoenix on business and wouldn’t be back until Saturday, could she take a message. No, thank you. Dani tapped into one of the credit bureaus and learned that Mr. Micheson was not married. Odds were: the place was empty.

It was decided that Remberto would go in. Murray would stay outside the complex on a side street that had a clear view of the entrance and let him know when someone was approaching the entrance gates.

The afternoon was still and sweltering, and by the time Remberto walked inside the complex his shirt was beginning to stick to him. That was the thing about Houston, moving here was like having never left Bolivia. The heat and humidity was just like working the Beni River jungles. But of course there had never been air conditioners in the valley of the Beni River. Remberto loved refrigerated air. It made him smile.

While Remberto and Murray were crossing the city, Dani had gone ahead and called the other two condos in the complex. The residents were not home at either of them. So of the five residences, the only ones that were occupied were Connie’s, where Faeber was waiting, and the one on the other side, the one immediately to the right as you entered the compound. Knowing this, Remberto did not have to worry about someone seeing him from behind or across the way. There had not been enough time to determine if there was an alarm system, and even if they had known that there was one, there had not been enough time to bring the electronic equipment to manipulate it or to contact their stringer at whichever security company had installed the system.

So, it was back to the jungle. Remberto was going to have to find a place outside in Micheson’s courtyard where he could watch Connie’s front door without Faeber being able to see him from inside the condo. It was just going to be a matter of scouting it out to see what vantage point best served the purpose.

Locating the right vantage point turned out to be easier than he had expected, though using it was going to be a tedious proposition. The brick wall separating Connie’s front courtyard from Micheson’s was ten inches wide. The design for the brick of which it was made called for a random placement of bricks to stick out several inches from the face of the wall creating a relatively accessible means of ascent The garages of the two condos backed up to each other having a common wall while the wall of the garages facing the entrances formed the front wall of the courtyard. Just inside Connie’s entrance court, in the corner created by the garage wall and the wall dividing the two properties, grew a healthy and shaggy Mexican fan palm, its large and verdant fronds just high enough to reach over the top of the wall.

Remberto used the jutting bricks to climb the wall and found a place to sit atop the wall leaning his back against the garage wall and under its eave. The fronds of the fan palm completely obscured him from the courtyard and from the windows on the front of Connie’s condo. He called Murray.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m in place, on top of the wall in her front courtyard.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah, really. Listen, it’s quiet here. If someone’s coming just buzz me twice.”

“Will do.”

Remberto settled in to wait He was fully aware that he might be there for hours, in fact, he expected to be. He also expected to be uncomfortable. And he was. Both courtyards were lush with vegetation which meant the humidity there was at the top end of the scale; and he felt every percentage point. The sun was just a little past meridian which meant the eave of the garage provided a ribbon of shade for the back of his head, but the ribbon was shrinking by the minute. Pretty soon he would be in full sun for an hour or so until the fan palm began to block it The steam rose out of the courtyards, and colonies of gnats moved in small congregations like clouds from palms to oleanders to azaleas to plumerias and eventually to Remberto whose sweat-drenched clothes attracted them like bees to nectar. That was okay. Remberto had lived with gnats before. Sweat poured from his hairline and ran down the back of his neck, behind his ears, down his forehead and into his eyes. That was okay. He had lived with sweat before.

But the brick wall was something else. Remberto’s butt was wider than ten inches, and after an hour he thought his spine was going to lock up on him. After an hour and a half he was beginning to get worried about what he was going to do. This was not something he thought he could endure for five or six hours. Instead of keeping his legs and feet together, pulled up in front of him, he shifted and dropped one on either side of the wall. That was a great relief—for about eight minutes—then the ridges of the bricks began to cut into his inner thighs, and he felt like his tailbone had no flesh at all between it and the bricks.

Then the handset buzzed twice.

Remberto froze and listened carefully. The signal meant only that a car was entering the compound. It could go to any residence, and he strained to try to determine which. Within a minute he heard the soft wheezing of an idling car pull into the concrete drive in front of Micheson’s garage to his left It idled for a moment and then stopped.