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“I’m very sorry about your friend,” I said.
Brian sighed. “Yes,” he said.
I stared at him expectantly, but he said no more, and I was miffed enough to feel that I shouldn’t have to drag it out of him, so I was silent, too. We drove still farther south, almost all the way down to Homestead. Then Brian turned off U.S. 1 and headed west, inland, turning several times. We straightened out at last on a long stretch of badly maintained pavement that led due west. The sun was going down, and it shone directly in my eyes, so I turned sideways and looked out the window. There wasn’t a lot to see in this old residential area. The houses gradually got older and smaller and farther apart, and then finally they disappeared altogether and we were driving along a dirt road through a landscape of scrub, canals, and saw grass. We had come to the very edge of the Everglades. I looked at Brian, hoping he might be ready to explain all, but he looked straight ahead at the road and the setting sun.
After another ten minutes of awkward silence, Brian finally turned off the dusty road and drove us through a gate in an old and sagging chain-link fence. The gate itself hung forlornly from one rusty hinge. There was an ancient faded sign on it, but I couldn’t see what it said.
A hundred yards or so past the gate we came to the lip of a large old quarry filled with milky water, and Brian put the van into park. He turned the engine off, and we continued our silence for a moment. The engine ticked a few times as it cooled, and not too far away an entire symphonic chorus of insects began their evening concert.
And then Brian shook his head, took a deep breath, and turned to me.
“And now, brother,” he said, in a dead and very serious voice, “I’m afraid I have to tell you that you have placed us both in grave danger.” He leaned closer. “I need to know who you told about your hotel room.”
TEN
For just a moment, I could do nothing but stare at Brian and blink my eyes. I seemed to be doing that a lot lately. Was it a sign that I was really losing it, sliding off the edge into permanent stupidity? Or was it merely an indication that I had never been quite as clever as I’d thought I was?
In any case, I stared, and I blinked. Brian’s question caught me completely off guard; Who had I told? It was an absurd question on so many levels that I didn’t know where to start. I had already concluded that someone had traced Brian, not me, because of his credit card. That seemed so obvious to me that it didn’t even bear mention—how could he fail to figure that out? On top of that, Octavio was his friend, not mine, so his death meant nothing to me—it was clearly aimed at Brian.
But most basic of all, there was absolutely nobody left for me to tell, not about hotel rooms or anything else. Aside from Brian himself, nobody would talk to me.
After a long pause that was just right for conveying dramatically my sense of dumbfounded surprise at his question, I finally managed to yank my powers of speech out of the ditch and back onto the conversational highway. “Brian,” I said, “did you truly think somebody killed Octavio to get at me?”
Almost as if he was working hard to make me feel better, Brian responded with a gratifying gape-and-blink of his own. I thought it lasted much longer than mine had, but it may be that such things seem longer to watch than to perform. But I gave him all the time he needed, and he finally closed his jaw and slumped over just a little. “I did,” he said. “I actually thought that. Silly me.” He looked at me and shook his head. “I seem to be doing some very stupid things lately.”
“There’s a lot of that going around,” I said.
“But then how did they find me so quickly?” he said, with truly puzzled dismay.
It began to occur to me that, in spite of his many other fine qualities, Brian was not quite as adept as I was at life in the cyberworld. “It’s just a guess,” I said. “But I think they traced your credit card.”
He looked at me with such blank astonishment that I revised my opinion: Brian didn’t have a clue about life in the cyberworld. “Can they really do that?” he said. “That card was clean—I’ve had it for only a few weeks.”
“Throw it away,” I said. “Put it in the quarry here, with Octavio and—Oh. Are we putting them in the quarry? I just assumed—”
“We are,” Brian said. “The water has a very high lime content. Nothing left in a couple of months.” I didn’t ask him how he knew that—but I did file it away for future reference. Assuming I actually had a future, which seemed to be somewhat in doubt at the moment. Brian frowned, and looked very puzzled. “But seriously, I thought a credit card was…well, you know. Do
n’t the banks guard the data pretty carefully?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “It would take me almost a full ten minutes to hack in and trace somebody.”
“Oh, dear,” he said, and he shook his head again, very slowly. “I can see that there are some rather glaring holes in my education.” He leaned back in the seat and furrowed his brow, looking like he was trying to remember if he’d done anything else that might come back and bite him. “Perhaps I spent too much time learning to get rid of bodies, and not enough on the more pedestrian side of things.”
“So it seems,” I said. “Let me suggest that for the time being, cash is probably safest? Um—you do have plenty of cash, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, not a problem,” he said absently, apparently still cataloging the sins of his recent past.
“Perhaps this would be a good time to tell me where it came from,” I said. “And who is trying to kill you to get it back. Did you take their drugs, too? Or just the money?”
Brian jerked upright and looked at me, and then nodded. “Sometimes I forget that you’re a trained investigator,” he said. “Of course you would figure that out.”
“Elementary, dear brother,” I said.
“I’m not sure how much to tell you,” he said slowly, obviously stalling while he thought about it.
“Tell me enough to keep me alive,” I said.
“Yes. That much, at least.” He inhaled deeply, then blew the breath out again noisily. “Well,” he said. “As you have guessed, I took a little jaunt into the drug trade. Nothing really out of the way, just a new venue for my well-practiced talents.” He smiled modestly. “But at a much higher pay grade.”
