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Authors: Harlan Coben

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Long Lost (Myron Bolitar) (24 page)

BOOK: Long Lost (Myron Bolitar)
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“Go to work,” Win said. “Ask no questions.”
Then he hung up. Sometimes Win really pisses me off.
My father ran down to a bagel store across the street because the hospital breakfast resembled something monkeys fling at you in a zoo. The doctor stopped by while he was gone and gave me a clean bill of health. Yes, I had indeed been shot. The bullet had passed through my right side, above the hip. But it had been properly treated.
“Would it have required a sixteen-day hospital stay?” I asked.
The doctor looked at me funny, at the fact that I had just sort of shown up at the hospital unconscious, a gunshot-wound victim, now mumbling about sixteen days—and I’m sure he was sizing me up for a psych visit.
“Hypothetically speaking,” I quickly added, remembering Win’s warning. Then I stopped asking questions and started nodding a lot.
Dad stayed with me through checkout. Esperanza had left my suit in the closet. I put it on and felt physically pretty good. I wanted to hire a taxi, but Dad insisted on driving. He used to be a great driver. In my childhood he would have that easy way about him on the road, whistling softly with the radio, steering with his wrists. Now the radio stayed off. He squinted at the road and hit the brake a lot more.
When we got to the Lock-Horne Building on Park Avenue—again Win’s full name is Windsor
Horne Lock
wood III, so you do the math—Dad said, “You want me to just drop you off?”
Sometimes my father leaves me awestruck. Fatherhood is about balance, but how can one man do it so well, so effortlessly? Throughout my life he pushed me to excel without ever crossing the line. He reveled in my accomplishments yet never made them seem to be all that important. He loved without condition, yet he still made me want to please him. He knew, like now, when to be there, and when it was time to back off.
“I’ll be okay.”
He nodded. I kissed the rough skin on his cheek again, noticing the sag now, and got out of the car. The elevator opens up directly into my office. Big Cyndi was at her desk, wearing something that looked like it’d been ripped off Bette Davis after shooting the climactic beach scene in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
There were pigtails in her hair. Big Cyndi is, well, big—as I said before, north of six five and three hundred pounds—everywhere. She has big hands and big feet and a big head. The furniture around her always looks like Toys “R” Us specials built for toddlers, an almost Alice-in-Wonderland effect where the room and all its belongings seem to shrink around her.
She rose when she saw me, nearly toppling her own desk, and exclaimed, “Mr. Bolitar!”
“Hey, Big Cyndi.”
She gets mad when I call her “Cyndi” or, uh, “Big.” She insists on formalities. I am Mr. Bolitar. She is Big Cyndi, which, by the way, is her real name. She had it legally changed more than a decade ago.
Big Cyndi crossed the room with an agility that belied the bulk. She wrapped me in an embrace that made me feel as if I’d been mummified in wet attic insulation. In a good way.
“Oh, Mr. Bolitar!”
She started sniffling, a sound that brought images of moose mating on the Discovery Channel.
“I’m fine, Big Cyndi.”
“But someone shot you!”
Her voice changed depending on her mood. When she first worked here, Big Cyndi didn’t talk, preferring to growl. Clients complained, but not to her face and usually anonymously. Right now Big Cyndi’s pitch was high and little-girlish, which frankly was a hell of a lot scarier than any growl.
“I shot him worse,” I said.
She let go of me and giggled, covering her mouth with a hand the approximate size of a truck tire. The giggling echoed through the room, and all over the tristate area, small children were reaching up and grabbing their mommies’ hands.
Esperanza came to the door. Back in the day, Esperanza and Big Cyndi had been tag-team wrestling partners for FLOW, the Fabulous Ladies of Wrestling. The federation had originally wanted to call themselves “Beautiful” instead of “Fabulous” but the network balked at the ensuing acronym.
Esperanza, with her dark skin and looks that could best be described—as they often were by the panting wrestling announcers—as “succulent,” played Little Pocahontas, the lithe beauty who was winning on skill before the bad guys would cheat and take advantage of her. Big Cyndi was her partner, Big Chief Mama, who rescued her so that they could, together and with the roar of the crowd, vanquish the scantily clad and implant-enhanced evildoers.
Entertaining stuff.
“We got work,” Esperanza said, “and lots of it.”
Our space was fairly small. We had this foyer and two offices, one for me, one for Esperanza. Esperanza had started here as my assistant or secretary or whatever the politically correct term for Girl Friday is. She’d gone to law school at night and taken over as a full partner right around the time I freaked out and ran away with Terese to that island.
“What did you tell the clients?” I asked.
“You were in a car accident overseas.”
I nodded. We headed into her office. The business was a bit in shambles after my most recent disappearance. There were calls to be made. I made them. We kept most of the clients, almost all, but there were a few who did not like the fact that they could not reach their agent for more than two weeks. I understood. This is a personal business. It involves a lot of hand-holding and ego stroking. Every client needs to feel as if they are the only one—part of the illusion. When you’re not there, even if the reasons are justified, the illusion vanishes.
I wanted to ask about Terese and Win and a million things, but I remembered the call from this morning. I worked. I just worked and I confess that it was therapeutic. I felt jittery and anxious for reasons I can’t quite explain. I even bit my nails, something I hadn’t done since I was in the fourth grade, and searched my body for scabs I could pick. Work somehow helped.
When I had a break, I did some Web searches for “Terese Collins” and “Rick Collins” and “Karen Tower.” First I did all three names. Nothing came up. Then I tried Terese alone. Very little, all of it old from her days at CNN. Someone still kept a Web site about “Terese the AnchorBabe,” complete with images, mostly head shots and video grabs from news shows, but it hadn’t been updated in three years.
Then I tried Google Newsing Rick and Karen.
I’d expected to find little, maybe an obituary, but that wasn’t the case. There was plenty, albeit most of it from papers in the United Kingdom. The news somehow shocked me and yet it all made bizarre sense:
REPORTER AND WIFE MURDERED BY TERRORISTS
Cell Broken Up, Killed in Wild Shoot-out
I started reading. Esperanza came to my door. “Myron?”
I held up a finger asking for a moment.
She came around my desk and saw what I was doing. She sighed and sat.
“You knew about this?” I asked.
“Of course.”
According to the articles, “special forces working on international terrorism” engaged and “eliminated” legendary terrorist Mohammad Matar, aka “Doctor Death.” Mohammad Matar had been born in Egypt but raised in the finest schools in Europe, including Spain (thus the name, combining the Islamic first name with a last name that meant “death” in Spanish), and was indeed a medical doctor who’d done his training in the United States. The special forces also killed at least three other men in his cell—two in London, one in Paris.
There was a photograph of Matar. It was the same mug shot that Berleand had sent me. I looked at the man I had, to use the journalistic term, eliminated.
The articles further noted that news producer Rick Collins had gotten close to the cell, trying to infiltrate and expose it, when his identity was breached. Matar and his “henchmen” murdered Collins in Paris. Matar slipped through a French dragnet (though apparently one of his men was killed in it), made his way to London and tried to clean up all evidence of his cell and his “fiendish terrorist plot” by killing Rick Collins’s longtime production partner Mario Contuzzi and Collins’s wife, Karen Tower. It was there, in the home Collins and Tower shared, that Mohammad Matar and two members of his cell met their demise.
I looked up at Esperanza. “Terrorists?”
She nodded.
“So that explains why Interpol freaked out when we showed them the picture.”
“Yes.”
“So where’s Terese?”
“No one knows.”
I sat back, tried to process that. “It says government agents killed the terrorists.”
“Yep.”
“Except they didn’t.”
“True. You did.”
“And Win.”
“Right.”
“But they left our names out of it.”
“Yes.”
I thought about the sixteen days, about Terese, about the blood tests, about the blond girl. “What the hell is going on?”
“Don’t know about the details,” she said. “Didn’t really care.”
“Why not?”
Esperanza shook her head. “You can be such a dope sometimes.”
I waited.
“You were shot. Win saw that. And for more than two weeks we had absolutely no idea where you were—if you were alive or dead or anything.”
I couldn’t help it. I grinned.
“Stop grinning like an idiot.”
“You were worried about me.”
“I was worried about my business interest.”
“You like me.”
“You’re a pain in the ass.”
“I still don’t get it,” I said, and the grin slid off my face. “How can I not remember where I was?”
“Just let it go. . . .”
My hands started shaking. I looked down at them, tried to make them stop. They wouldn’t. Esperanza was looking too.
“You tell me,” she said. “What do you remember?”
My leg started twitching. I felt something catch in my chest. Panic began to set in.
“You okay?”
“I could use some water,” I said.
She hurried out and came back with a cup. I drank it slowly, almost afraid I would choke. I looked at my hands. The quake. I couldn’t make it stop. What the hell was wrong with me?
“Myron?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “So what now?”
“We have clients who need our help.”
I looked at her.
She sighed. “We thought you might need time.”
“For?”
“To recover.”
“From what? I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you look great. That shake is a terrific addition. And don’t get me started on your new facial tic.
Très
sexy.”
“I don’t need time, Esperanza.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Terese is missing.”
“Or dead.”
“You trying to shock me?”
She shrugged.
“And if she’s dead, I still need to find her daughter.”
“Not in your condition.”
“Yeah, Esperanza, in my condition.”
She said nothing.
“What is it?”
“I don’t think you’re ready.”
“Not your call.”
She thought about that. “I guess not.”
“So?”
“So I have some stuff on the doctor Collins saw about Huntington’s disease and that angel charity.”
“Like?”
“It can wait. If you’re really serious about this, if you’re really ready, you need to call this number on this phone.”
She handed me a cell phone and left the room, closing the door behind her. I stared at the phone number. Unfamiliar, but I wouldn’t have expected anything else. I put in the digits and pressed Send.
Two rings later, I heard a familiar voice say, “Welcome back from the dead, my friend. Let’s meet in person at a secret locale. We have much to discuss, I’m afraid.”
It was Berleand.
25
 
 
 
BERLEAND’S “secret locale” was an address in the Bronx.
The street was a pit, the location a dive. I checked the address again, but there was no mistake. It was a strip joint called, according to the sign, UPSCALE PLEASURES, though to my eye the establishment appeared to be neither. A smaller sign written in neon script noted that it was a CLASSY GENTLEMEN’S LOUNGE. The term “classy” here is not so much an oxymoron as an irrelevance. “Classy strip club” is a bit like saying “good toupee.” It might be good, it might be bad—it’s still a toupee.
The room was dark and windowless so that noontime, which was when I arrived, looked the same as midnight.
A large black man with a shaved head asked, “May I help you?”
BOOK: Long Lost (Myron Bolitar)
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