“I’m fine, Mr. Manning.”
“Really?” says Edwin, feeling a slight buzz. “You look like shit.”
“Ha-ha. You should see the other guy,” Sally responds, wincing as he readjusts his arm sling.
With his thick bulk and his shaved head and the weird eyes, Sally has the look of a guy who can’t be stopped, but Edwin figures he got in trouble with the other big man, the former special agent, himself no slouch in the art of intimidation. It doesn’t matter how it really went down, Edwin finally has a plan, of sorts, and Sally Pop still figures into the mix.
“At most we’ve got forty-eight hours before the FBI steps on my neck,” Edwin reminds him. “So we need to roll as soon as we land. Thirty minutes to the condo, pick up a few things, another forty-five to the destination.”
“No problem,” says Sally.
“No problem?” Edwin responds, voice rising. “You think this is no problem?” His eyes well with tears as he indicates the red plastic cooler nestled under his seat.
“I mean, ah, no problem with transportation,” Sally says uneasily, trying not to glance at the cooler. “That other thing, Mr. Manning, I don’t know what to say.”
Edwin finishes his martini, good to the last drop. He’s not even slightly ashamed of the tears. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a good cry. He’s aware that the other associates, the new guys Sally Pop brought on board, already have a nickname for him. Weepy. Nice, but Edwin doesn’t care. They’re so far down the food chain he’s barely aware that they live, breathe or think. Nothing like thinking or higher reasoning, but they do have functioning nervous systems, brain stems and so on. Temporary employees. Disposable, if it comes to that. Their thoughts and opinions are of no import. At the moment his sole concern is his beautiful son, a young man worth ten thousand of the bent-nose rope-a-dopes who will be acting as Edwin’s personal security detail until he gets this all sorted out.
It’s a new thing, the need to surround himself with hired muscle. But he knows the mad bastard on the phone, the one who threatens to shake his world to pieces. Knows the man to be intelligent, unpredictable and highly dangerous. Capable, as he has demonstrated, of the most unimaginable acts, not the least of which sloshes in the red plastic cooler beneath his seat, in a solution of saline and chipped ice.
Flesh of his flesh.
Seth’s little finger, still wearing the ring Edwin gave him when he graduated from flight school. FedExed to him as promised in a cheery little ice pack. A well-known replantation surgeon has already examined the severed finger, pronounced it too damaged to reattach, even if Seth is located in the next few hours, but Edwin isn’t ready to give up on that. He’ll find a more daring surgeon. He’ll get Seth back, make him whole again, no matter what it takes. And then he will make sure that the man who damaged Seth will cease to exist.
Edwin Manning, a slightly built, intensely driven man who has never deliberately caused physical harm to another human being, now dreams of slowly immersing his adversary in a vat of bubbling acid.
Let the bastard suffer as I have suffered, he’s thinking, tears in his eyes. Let him sizzle.
2. The Twenty-four Hour Rule
When Kelly was eight years old, my mother got it in her head that we needed a vacation. Partly it was to celebrate Kelly having finished a successful course of chemo, partly because Mom thought we ought to do something as a family that didn’t involve hospitals. It was a two-part holiday extravaganza, financed entirely out of her personal savings. The first part was a four-day package tour of Disney World. Included, a perfectly nice motel in Orlando with shuttle service to the park, where Kelly, frankly, went totally bonkers. Loved it to pieces. The rides, the actors in the goofy costumes, the food—she even claimed to love waiting in line. It makes Space Mountain so much better, Mommy, having to wait! She was so happy to be alive and healthy, so glad to be doing things other kids did, that nothing could temper her joy, not even ninety minutes in a line of squirming brats. My own mother was so pleased that I’d catch her smiling and humming songs to herself. It was a rare event for Mom, to have everything work out as planned. So as far as the Garner clan is concerned, Disney World was the greatest family vacation of all time, a glorious childhood memory for Kelly, for all of us. And then it got even better, at least for me.
The second part of the trip, which Mom kept a big secret, was a three-night stay in South Beach, coinciding with Fashion Week. How she managed it I’ll never know, but she got us a room at a great little boutique hotel right there on Ocean Drive, in the heart of the Art Deco District, and tickets to one of the runway shows. On the short flight from Orlando to Miami she kept looking at me sideways, to see if I was loving the idea, and I kept bursting into tears and hugging her, and Kelly kept wanting to know why grown-ups cried when they were happy.
When I miss Mom the most, those are the days I want to experience all over again. The South Beach Caper, as she called it. How proud she was to have pulled it off! All her life she sacrificed for her child—me—and this was the payoff, those few precious hours when she could be mentor and mother and grandmother and confidante and best friend and tour guide. She especially loved the runway show, the exotic models strutting wild little dresses and fake furs that made them look like skinny éclairs on high heels. The designers orbiting the stage like nervous satellites, one of them literally tearing out tiny clumps of his bizarrely coiffed hair. Mom would have loved it if I was one of those designers—not the tearing-out-the-hair part, of course—and she’d done everything she could to give me the opportunity. Maybe I wanted it, too, at one time, in the excitement of first discovering I had some talent in that direction. But then Kelly had gotten sick and healing her became the center of my life, and when we came out the other side, all three of us, I was more than happy to earn a good living being my own boss, selling elaborate wedding gowns to people who have more money than sense.
Anyhow, that was my one and only visit to Miami until now, and stepping into the tropical sunlight without my mother and my daughter brings on a hollow pang of loneliness so overwhelming it hits my guts like a physical blow.
“You okay?” Shane wants to know.
“I’ll be fine. Let me sit for a minute.”
The big guy finds me a seat on the lower level, says he’ll keep me in sight while he arranges a car rental. Sure enough I can spot his head above the crowd, see him glancing back from the Hertz counter, signaling that it won’t take long.
Fern has left a number of messages on my cell, all of them variations on “hope you’re okay, call me soonest.” She answers on the first ring.
“Thank God!” she begins. “I was worried if the plane crashed.”
“The plane didn’t crash. I’m here, we made it, we’re renting a car. Any calls?”
“Any calls? Are you kidding? The phone hasn’t stopped ringing! Who is this Haley person? Seems kind of sweet but also seriously whacked. She actually started weeping when I said you were out of town for a few days. I’m telling people your great-aunt Hilda died. She was ninety-three, by the way, and a former Ziegfield girl. The one with the diamond-studded tiara and the peacock feathers. There are rumors she had a fling with Bugsy Siegel. Or was it Warren Beatty?”
“You made her up?”
“Background details are important, Jane. I have to believe in Aunt Hilda. Amazing woman. Too bad you were estranged for all these years.”
“Fern, I don’t know what to say.”
“Not to worry, I’m taking care of business. Mrs. Norbert was very nice, she said no problem, she’ll see you when you get back. Ditto the Spinellis. There was inquiry for an estimate, a ten-member wedding party in Bellport, they want you to coordinate the tuxedos with the gowns, whatever that means, but they’ll wait until next week. Let’s see, what else. Oh, Fred is filing the tax quarterlies, he said to let you know there were no surprises. And Alex McFairy suspects something is going on, but he didn’t push.”