The Peripheral

71

Pickett’s place, as much as she’d ever see of it, wasn’t what she’d imagined at all.

Reece had driven her past a white gatehouse with window slits, but hadn’t turned in. Further along, past a long stretch of white plastic fence, fabbed to look like somebody’s idea of Old Plantation, he’d turned in to a less-important-looking gate, already open, where two men in cammies and helmets were waiting, beside a golf cart. They both had rifles. Reece got out and talked to one of them, while the other one spoke to somebody else on his headset, none of them looking at her.

She’d given up trying to talk to Reece a few miles back. She’d seen it made his driving worse, and there was no point getting killed, out on some back-ass county road in the dark, even in a situation like this. They’d kept passing old wrecks, left there because the state, let alone the county, couldn’t afford to do anything about them. She’d wondered if people in those had been talking to somebody like Reece when the crash happened. Then she’d remembered swallowing the black pill in the Hefty snack bar, and wondered if it was doing what it was supposed to do. Reece didn’t know about that, but he’d put her phone in a Faraday pouch.

Then Reece came back to the Jeep, opened the door on her side, took a pair of wire clippers out of his side pocket, snipped through the zip tie that fastened her to the seat, and told her to get out.

He put his hand on her head when she did, the way you saw cops do in shows, and it made her think how he’d never touched her before, that she could remember, not even shaken hands, and she’d known him to speak to for about three years.

“You see Burton,” he said, “tell him wasn’t anything I could do.”

“I know there wasn’t,” she said, and it hurt her that it was true. That a man like Pickett, just by being what he was, could give Reece a choice of doing this or waiting for them to come and kill him.

He closed the Jeep’s door, handed the pouch with her phone in it to the man standing nearest, walked around the back, got in on the driver’s side, closed his door, pulled back out on the road, and drove away.

The man with her phone in the Faraday pouch snapped what she guessed was a dog’s training leash onto the zip tie that held the ones around her wrists together. The other man was watching the gate close itself. Then they brought her over to the golf cart, which said CORBELL PICKETT TESLA on the side. The man who held the leash sat beside her, in the back, and the other man drove, and neither one of them said a word, as they drove her to Pickett’s house, some back way, on single-lane gravel that hadn’t been properly graded.

The house had floodlights trained on it, bright as day and ugly as shit, though this was just the back of it. They’d painted everything white, she guessed to tie it together, but it didn’t. Looked like somebody had patched a factory, or maybe a car dealership, onto a McMansion, then stuck an Interstate chain restaurant and a couple of swimming pools on top of that. There were sheds scattered, beside the gravel and further back, and machinery too, under big tarps, and she wondered if he actually built drugs here. She’d figured he wouldn’t, but maybe he didn’t have to give a shit. But then maybe he didn’t actually live here.

The cart rolled up to a corrugated white door in the factory-looking part, stopped, and the man beside her gave the leash a little tug, so she got off. He watched her, but didn’t make eye contact. The other man touched something on his belt and the door clanked up. They led her into a big, mostly dark space, and then between rows of white plastic tanks taller than she was, like the ones for holding rainwater.

Came to a wall she guessed was the foundation of the original house, rough-cast concrete, with a door in it. Regular door from Hefty, but with an old-fashioned hasp bolted on it, a big rusty bolt stuck down through the U-shaped part. More tree fort than builder baron, but then she guessed he didn’t have to give a shit about that either. She waited, like she saw you did if somebody had you on a leash, while the other one pulled out the bolt, opened the door, and turned on too many lights all at once, hanging low from a rough concrete ceiling that was already none too high. They led her over to a table in the middle, the only furniture in the room aside from two chairs, one on either long side of it, like the ones in the Hefty snack bar. The table, bolted to the floor with galvanized L-brackets, had a stainless-steel top that had seen a lot of wear, like in a cafeteria kitchen. Some dents and dings there that she didn’t want to imagine how they’d been made, and someone had drilled a hole exactly in the center, put in a big screw eye, the kind you’d use to hang a porch swing. The man with the leash walked her around to the chair behind the table facing the door, pointed at it, and she sat down. Then he tugged her wrists over to the eye bolt, fastened Reece’s white zip ties to it with a much more serious-looking zip tie, this one in that official Homes blue, unclipped the leash, and they both just turned and walked out, leaving the lights on and closing the door behind them. She heard them drop the bolt into place.

“Fuck a duck,” she said, then realized she sounded five years old and was probably being recorded. She looked around for cams, didn’t see any. Probably there, though, because they didn’t cost anything, and maybe your prisoner would say or do something you’d like to know about. The lights were too bright, the kind of totally white LEDs that made your skin look really bad. She guessed she could stand up, but she might knock the chair over doing it, and then have nowhere to sit.

She heard the bolt come out of the hasp.

Corbell Pickett opened the door. He was wearing black wraparound sunglasses. Came over to the table, leaving the door open behind him. His watch looked like a clock out of an old airplane, but gold, on a leather strap.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“Ever dislocate your jaw?”

She looked up at him.

“I could do it for you,” he said, looking her in the eye, “if you don’t tell me more about your people in bullshit Colombia.”

She nodded, just a little.

“How much more do you know than you told me at the house?”

She was about to open her mouth but he raised his hand, the one with the big gold watch. She froze.

“Your Colombians,” he said, lowering his hand, “bullshit or not, aren’t necessarily the ones in this with the most money. Could be somebody else. Could be I’ve been talking with them. About you. All the lawyers in Miami don’t mean shit to them. I’d say you’re out of your depth, but that doesn’t do it justice.”

She waited for him to hit her.

“Don’t tell me any shell story.” His suntan looked weirder, under the light, than her skin did, but more even.

“They don’t tell us much.”

“People I’m talking to want me to kill you. Right now. They see proof you’re dead, they give me more money than you can imagine. So you aren’t just some random-ass poor, much as you look to me like one. What makes you that valuable?”

“I don’t have clue one, why anybody would give a shit about me. Or why Coldiron hooked up with us. If I did, I’d be telling you.” And then that crazy thing that had first come to her in Operation Northwind chimed in: “Where’d they say they’re from, these people of yours?”

“They don’t,” he said, pissed that it was true, then pissed at himself for answering the question.

“If I’m worth more dead than alive,” said the crazy thing, “how come I’m alive?”

“Difference between a cashed check and leverage,” he said. He leaned a little closer. “Aren’t stupid, are you?”

“Wilf Netherton,” she said, the crazy thing gone as suddenly as it had come. “At Coldiron. He’d want a chance to outbid them.”

Pickett smiled, maybe, just a tiny little change at the corners of his mouth. “We use your phone from here,” he said, stepping back, “they’ll know exactly where it is, where you are. We wait another few hours, till it gets somewhere else, we’ll patch a call through, you and I, to your Mr. Coldiron. Meantime, you sit here.”

“Any chance you could turn the lights down?”

“No,” he said, and she saw the micro-smile again, and then he turned and went back out, closing the door behind him.

She heard the bolt rattle.