Chapter 20
TWENTY
Miller closed the Pelican Club alone.
It was something he'd negotiated when he first started using the place—a key to the back door, the right to stay after the staff locked up, in exchange for a case of Blanton's at Christmas, and the understanding that nobody asked what he did at the corner booth after hours.
He sat in the dark with a glass of bourbon and the remains of the evening's noise still ringing faintly in his ears.
The couple had left hours ago. The man—Cruz, Castano, whatever he was calling himself— had the look of someone running on instinct and not much else.
Capable, though. Miller had noticed the way he'd entered the room, the way his eyes had mapped every exit before he'd sat down.
The girl was harder to read. She'd been scared and hadn't been hiding it, which was either honesty or a very good performance. The ring on her finger was real gold, and the way she'd touched it when she thought no one was looking told him it meant something beyond the cover story.
He'd given them the stilt house on the west end.
It was a clean place, remote, paid up through the month under a name that connected to nothing.
In the morning, they'd come to the pier and he'd walk them through the next step—new documents, a vehicle swap, a boat ride south that stayed off every grid he knew about.
Three days from now, they'd be in Mexico, and a week after that, they'd be whoever he decided they were.
That was the plan. It was a good plan. He'd run it dozens of times with dozens of people, and the ones who listened were still alive and untraceable.
The phone rang at one-fifteen.
It wasn't the phone on the bar, or the burner he used for clients. It was the third phone, the one he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket, the one whose number existed in exactly three places in the world, none of them written down.
He looked at the screen for a long moment before answering.
“Colin,” said the voice on the other end. It was soft, and strangely high-pitched for a man.
“It's late,” Miller said.
“It is. I apologize for the hour.”
Miller took a sip of bourbon and said nothing, because the man on the other end of this phone did not call to chat, and the apology was not an apology. It was a courtesy extended to someone who was about to be told something he didn't want to hear.
“You have new clients,” the voice said. “A man and a woman. They arrived today.”
Miller set the glass down carefully. “I have a lot of clients.”
“Daniel Castano and Jessica Meeks. Ryan Inglis referred them.” A pause, just long enough to be deliberate. “I'm not guessing, Colin.”
The bourbon sat in Miller's stomach like something that had turned.
He'd known this call was possible, he’d known it the way you knew a car wreck might happen.
Abstractly, as a risk you'd accounted for without truly believing it would come.
In the two decades of running his operation, the phone had rung like this exactly twice.
Both times, he'd done what was asked. Both times, he'd told himself it was the cost of staying in business.
“What do you want?” Miller asked.
“Tomorrow morning. You have a meeting with them.”
“I might.”
“Don't waste my time, Colin.”
Miller closed his eyes.
“I want them alive,” the voice continued. “The woman especially.”
The silence that followed was worse than any threat.
It lasted three seconds, maybe four, and in it Miller heard everything that wasn't being said: the twenty-three years of clients whose names lived only in his memory, the network of contacts and safe houses and ghost identities that he'd built from nothing, the fact that all of it existed because men like the one on this phone allowed it to exist.
Miller opened his eyes and stared at the dark wood of the bar.
He thought about the girl touching her ring.
He thought about Castano's hand at the small of her back as they'd walked out, the unconscious protectiveness of it.
He thought about Ryan Inglis, who'd called in a favor for these two, and what it would mean when Inglis found out how that favor had been repaid.
“The pier,” Miller said. “Nine o'clock tomorrow.”
“Good. My people will handle the rest. You won't need to be present for what follows.”
“I don't want to be.”
“Of course not.” The voice softened further, almost sympathetic. “You'll be compensated, naturally. And your operation will continue without interference. You have my word on that.”
The word of a man whose name Miller had never been told, and whose face he had never seen.
“Are we clear?” the voice asked.
“We're clear.”
The line went dead.
Miller sat in the dark for a long time after that. The bourbon was still front of him, but he didn't touch it.
He thought about the third phone, and the two other times it had rung, and the two other people he'd handed over, and the way he'd told himself both times that survival wasn't the same thing as betrayal.
It was a distinction he'd gotten very good at maintaining.
It was the kind of distinction that let you sleep at night, right up until the morning you looked in the mirror and couldn't remember when you'd stopped being the man who helped people disappear and started being the man who made sure they didn't.
He put the phone back in his jacket and finished the bourbon. Then he rinsed the glass, locked the back door, and stepped out into the night.