“He had escorts.”
“Yeah, that’s as good a word as any, though it’s got a couple different meanings. I had an escort the other night, called a number in the phone book. Two hundred and fifty bucks and she had one eye on her watch the whole time. Nice tits, I got to admit. That’s worth something, right?”
“Sure. Uh, his escorts—”
“Frick and Frack. I figure they’re just seeing him to his room, checking out the basic situation. But they don’t come back. No way anybody suckered them into thinking they won a cruise, so how do you figure that?”
Keller checked his watch. The escorts still had an hour before the scheduled departure time, but if they were still on the ship this late, they were probably there for the duration. The target’s minders, unable to dissuade him from the cruise, had simply booked a cabin for a pair of their own men. If a private citizen like Dot had been able to get Keller on the ship, why couldn’t the other side, with the full force of the law working for them, do as much themselves?
He asked Gallagher how he’d know them.
“You watch football? One’s built like a tight end, the other’s more of a running back. That give you a picture?”
“Sort of.”
“Just look for two guys in suits. Not gonna get many of those on a fuckin’ cruise, are you? And I know what you’re gonna say.”
“Oh?”
“‘Suppose they change their clothes?’ Which, granted, they might. So look for two guys who look like they’re wearing casual clothes for the first time in twenty years. Hey, you’ll spot ’em, Shean. They’ll stick out like a couple of thumbs.”
Twenty-Four
A little after six, while Keller and Julia were in the Club Lounge for the Bon Voyage cocktail party, the Carefree Nights set sail for the Bahamas. Members of the dining room staff passed trays of drinks, and Keller picked off a pair of margaritas. He barely touched his, and offered it to Julia when she’d finished her own, but one was all she wanted.
She fell into conversation with an older woman who turned out to be from Mobile, and the two of them got caught up in a spirited game of Who Do You Know? That left Keller and the woman’s husband to talk about sports or the stock market, say, but the fellow wasn’t much of a talker, and the set of his face and the way he walked suggested that he might be recovering from a stroke. He seemed content to listen to the two women, or not listen, and that was fine with Keller, who was too busy scanning the room to pay much attention to anything else.
He didn’t see Michael Anthony Carmody, whose photo was now in Keller’s back pocket. Nor did he see any men in suits, or indeed anyone built like a football player, whether a tight end or a running back. Aside from the ship’s staff, most of the people in the room looked as though they’d had their AARP cards long enough to forget where they’d put them. Carmody wouldn’t stand out in their company, but his entourage would.
“Like thumbs,” he said, not realizing he’d spoken out loud until Julia and her new friend shot him a glance. “Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking out loud.”
“Well, I’m not planning on thinking for the next seven nights,” said the woman from Mobile. “Out loud or otherwise. I do enough of that back home. All I plan on doing is drinking and eating and laying out in the sun.”
“And shopping,” her husband said, proving he could speak after all.
“Well, maybe a little bit of that,” she said. “Just to stay in practice.”
After the lifeboat drill, Keller found his way to where they posted the names and cabin assignments. There was no Carmody listed, and Keller wasn’t surprised. He figured it wouldn’t be the trickiest thing in the world to get yourself listed under an alias, as long as you carried legitimate ID. Wasn’t that what celebrities did? And didn’t the people trying to keep Carmody alive have more than enough clout for that?
He went all the way through the list, and all four Sun Deck cabins were occupied, and none of the names meant anything to him.
There was an elevator—with the median age of this crowd, there would really have to be—but Keller took the stairs to the Sun Deck. There was a pool, which surprised him; he somehow hadn’t imagined that you’d carry a pool of your own out into the middle of the ocean. Lounge chairs ranged around the pool, and there was what looked to be a health club, with a couple of treadmills and a Universal machine. And, toward the rear of the ship, he saw a little block of staterooms.
The stern, he thought. That was what they called the back end of the ship, and the front was the bow. And port and starboard were left and right.
Keller, wondering why you needed a whole new vocabulary the minute you left shore, felt the ship’s motion. He hadn’t really paid any attention to it until now. It didn’t bother him, not as much as the new names for left and right and front and back and up and down. Topside, he thought. Below. Jesus.
He wasn’t seasick, not at all, but all the same he found himself feeling a common bond with Gallagher.
At dinner, they shared a table with three other couples, and Keller didn’t find out much about any of them. The conversation was mostly of other ships and past cruises, and that left him and Julia without much to contribute. It also made their company hugely useful to the others, who were able to tell them which ships they should avoid, which ones they were sure to love, and no end of other tips that demanded little more from Keller than a thoughtful nod, or the observation that he’d certainly have to keep that in mind.
Keller didn’t see Carmody anywhere, or anybody who looked young enough to be his daughter, or to move Gallagher to cup his hands and say whatever it was he’d said. Va-va-voom?
Of course Carmody, like any of Carefree Night’s passengers, had the option of dining in his stateroom. And if his companion was indeed of the va-va-voom sort, and if this was a maiden voyage for the two of them, well, it stood to reason that the man might be reluctant to leave his cabin, at least for the first day or two. And there was also the chance that—
“Oh, my,” Julia murmured.
Keller looked up, and saw where she was looking, and noted that half the people in the dining room were looking in the same direction.
Va-va-voom!
“I didn’t know it would be like this,” Julia said.
“What? The ship? Our cabin?”
They were back in their cabin now, and free at last to talk about the strawberry blonde knockout who’d stopped all dining room conversation in its tracks.