Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(36)
I get there with the coffee and set Gwen’s down in front of her, and I see the hard shimmer in her eyes. I’m familiar with that look, and the unyielding set of her chin. They’re staring at each other without speaking, and I slip into the chair to make it a triangle and say, “So I see we’re getting along.”
“Oh yeah,” Mike says to me in an offhand kind of way that I know from experience means nothing in particular. “Ms. Proctor here was just telling me in detail why I don’t know how to handle her ex-husband. So you go on, ma’am, and tell me all about how to do my damn job.”
I can’t tell if Mike’s actually mad, or just pretending to be. Mike has made an art form out of separating how he looks from what’s inside; back in the war zone, he was able to smile like a son of a bitch and drink all night with the guys, and then tell me as we were staggering home that he’d spent the whole night wanting to scream and rip his eyeballs out. I was never able to hide it that well.
“Let’s not,” I say, then take a too-fast, too-big swig of boiling-hot coffee. My tongue stings and goes mercifully numb. “You got info for us about this warehouse address?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You want to tell me how the hell Ballantine Rivard figures into it?”
“Wait,” Gwen says. “You mean the Ballantine Rivard?”
Mike gives me a questioning look. “You got that video for me?”
“Yep. But I wouldn’t watch it here,” I tell him. Mike is wondering what I’ve told her. I confessed going through the recording on the drive over, and we’ve gotten that inevitable argument out of the way. She’s made it clear she’s not happy with my choice to take that on for her, but she understands why I did it. “She knows I watched it.”
“Uh-huh.” Mike taps on his phone for a few seconds, then turns it outward to show a photo of an old white man, hair wispy around his skull, black-rimmed glasses framing watery brown eyes. He has a face like a basset hound, but somehow it manages to convey cleverness, too. Maybe it’s the focus in the eyes on whomever, out of frame, he’s addressing. He’s wearing a dark-blue silk suit and tie. Hand-tailored, probably. He looks perfectly stylish despite being in a motorized wheelchair. “Ever seen him in person?” he asks her, and she immediately shakes her head.
“I only know the name. I don’t exactly shop at Rivard Luxe.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t, unless you were a one percenter who thought Neiman Marcus was too down-market,” Mike says. “It’s a department store for people with so much cash they use it for carpet. Upside to only selling to the stupidly rich: they never stop buying, no matter how much everybody else starves. Rivard turned a few million into about ten billion in ten years. He’s worth upward of forty billion now.”
“And the man who died in that video probably worked for him,” I say. “Or at least, he said he did. Rivard makes sense both as a blackmail target and as somebody with the resources to try to fight back on his own terms.”
“And . . . we think those people in the video torturing him are from Absalom. Right?”
“No idea,” Mike says, “since I haven’t seen the damn thing yet.” He holds out his hand. I unzip my backpack and hand it over. Gwen’s eyes narrow, and I see her biting back an impulse to say something cutting to me. I’m sure it’ll come later. We’ll have a good argument about how I don’t have any right to protect her, and she’ll be correct. But Gwen doesn’t need my permission, and I don’t need hers, and sooner or later she’ll protect me, too. She already has, more than once.
The USB drive disappears like a magician’s assistant with a quick, fluid motion of Mike’s hand. Now you see it, now you don’t. I’m glad I made a copy and put it up in cloud storage. Just in case. “And the documents?” he asks. Gwen’s turn; she hands them over in a manila folder. He seems satisfied with that, though he gives the rest of the papers a good going-over, too, once he puts on a pair of evidence gloves. The paper with the warehouse address is on top, and he nods. “Okay, then. Let’s drink up and do this thing.”
My coffee is still too hot to give it another attempt, and Gwen doesn’t seem to want hers at all. Pity, but I dump both cups on the way out the door. Mike follows us, and I frown back at him. “You’re not taking your own car?”
“Nope,” he says. “My official car has monitoring.” And, I realize, he doesn’t want it showing up on any routine GPS checks the FBI might do. He crams himself into our backseat, which isn’t easy to do with those long legs, but then again, he must manage it in airplanes, and the FBI damn sure doesn’t pay for business class. While I’m getting the car started, he takes out his phone and powers it off. “You should shut both of yours off, too,” he tells us. “Trust me.”
I hand mine to Gwen, and she takes care of both. Lustig gives me quiet, terse directions as we glide through Atlanta; we leave the gridlock of downtown and head out into a less affluent part of town. It turns industrial, and then it turns into rusted, mostly abandoned structures that look ready to fall down in another stiff wind. The few people I see are homeless, or hopeless. A group of sullen young men in what passes for Atlanta winter wear sit on a corner and watches us drive by with impassive interest. The gang signs are everywhere.