Sacred

As we reached the patio, Angie held the door open for Trevor Stone and said, “Mr. Stone, you said you’d heard we had the two qualities you were looking for most.”

“Yes.”

“One was honesty. What’s the other?”

“I heard you were relentless,” he said as he stepped into his study. “Utterly relentless.”

3

“Fifty,” Angie said as we rode the subway from Wonderland Station toward downtown.

“I know,” I said.

“Fifty thousand bucks,” she said. “I thought twenty was insane enough, but now we’re carrying fifty thousand dollars, Patrick.”

I looked around the subway car at the mangy pair of winos about ten feet away, the huddled pack of gangbangers considering the emergency pull switch in the corner of the car, the lunatic with the buzz-cut blond hair and thousand-yard stare gripping the hand strap beside me.

“Say it a little louder, Ange. I’m not sure the G-boys down back heard you.”

“Whoops.” She leaned into me. “Fifty thousand dollars,” she whispered.

“Yes,” I whispered back as the train bucked around a curve with a metal screech and the fluorescents overhead sputtered off, then on, then off, then on again.

Lurch, or Julian Archerson as we’d come to know him, had been prepared to drive us all the way home, but once we hit the stand-still traffic on Route 1A, after sitting in an earlier automotive thicket on Route 129 for forty-five minutes, we had him drop us as close to a subway station as possible and walked to Wonderland Station.

So now we stood with the other sardines as the decrepit car heaved its way through the maze of tunnels and the lights went on and off and we carried fifty thousand of Trevor Stone’s dollars on our persons. Angie had the check for thirty thousand tucked in the inside pocket of her letterman’s jacket, and I had the twenty thousand in cash stuffed between my stomach and belt buckle.

“You’ll need cash if you’re going to start immediately,” Trevor Stone had said. “Spare no expense. This is just operating money. Call if you need more.”

“Operating” money. I had no idea if Desiree Stone was alive or not, but if she was, she’d have to have found a pretty remote section of Borneo or Tangier before I blew through fifty grand in order to find her.

“Jay Becker,” Angie said and whistled.

“Yeah,” I said. “No kidding.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“Six weeks ago or so,” I said and shrugged. “We don’t keep tabs on each other.”

“I haven’t seen him since the Big Dick awards.”

The lunatic on my right raised his eyebrows and looked at me.

I shrugged. “You can dress ’em up nice, you know? But you can’t take ’em out.”

He nodded, then went back to staring at his reflection in the dark subway window as if it pissed him off.

The Big Dick award was actually the Boston Investigators Association’s Gold Standard Award for Excellence in Detecting. But everyone I knew in the field called it the Big Dick award.

Jay Becker won the Big Dick this year as he had last year and back in ’89 as well, and for a while rumors abounded in the private detective community that he was going to open an office of his own, break away from Hamlyn and Kohl. I knew Jay well, though, and I wasn’t surprised when the rumors proved false.

It wasn’t that Jay would have starved on his own. On the contrary, he was easily the best-known PI in Boston. He was good-looking, smart as hell, and could have charged retainers in the mid five figures if he chose. Several of Hamlyn and Kohl’s wealthiest clients would have happily crossed the street if Jay had opened his doors there. The problem was, those clients could have offered Jay all the money in New England, and he still couldn’t have taken their cases. Every investigator who signed a contract with Hamlyn and Kohl also signed a promissory note to the effect that should the investigator leave Hamlyn and Kohl, he agreed to wait three years before accepting any case from a client with whom he’d worked at Hamlyn and Kohl. Three years in this business might as well be a decade.

So Hamlyn and Kohl had a pretty good hold on him. If any investigator was good enough and respected enough, however, to jump ship from Everett Hamlyn and Adam Kohl and make a profit, Jay Becker was. But Jay was also shitty with money, as bad as anyone I’ve ever known. As soon as he got it, he spent it—on clothes, cars, women, leather sectionals, what have you. Hamlyn and Kohl paid his overhead, paid for his office space, provided and protected his stock options, his 401(k), his portfolio of municipal funds. They daddied him, basically, and Jay Becker needed a daddy.

In Massachusetts, aspiring private investigators must perform twenty-five hundred hours of investigatory work with a licensed private investigator before getting their licenses themselves. Jay only had to do one thousand hours because of his FBI experience, and he did his with Everett Hamlyn. Angie did hers with me. I did mine with Jay Becker.

It was a recruiting technique of Hamlyn and Kohl to pick an aspiring private eye who they believed showed promise and provide that hungry wannabe with a seasoned investigator to show him the ropes, get him his twenty-five hundred hours, and, of course, open his eyes to the gilded world of Hamlyn and Kohl. Every one I know who got his license this way then went to work for Hamlyn and Kohl. Well, everyone except me.

Which didn’t sit well with Everett Hamlyn, Adam Kohl, or their attorneys. There were grumblings for a while there that usually reached me on cotton-bond stationery bearing the letterhead of Hamlyn and Kohl’s attorneys, or occasionally on the stationery of Hamlyn and Kohl themselves. But I’d never signed anything or given them even a verbal indication that I planned to join their firm, and when my own attorney, Cheswick Hartman, noted this on his stationery (which was a very attractive mauve linen bond), the grumbling ceased appearing in my mailbox. And somehow I built an agency whose success exceeded even my own expectations by working for a clientele that could rarely afford Hamlyn and Kohl.

But recently, shell-shocked I suppose by our exposure to the raging psychosis of Evandro Arujo, Gerry Glynn, and Alec Hardiman—an exposure that cost Angie’s ex-husband, Phil, his life—we’d closed the agency. We hadn’t been doing much of note since, unless you count talking in circles, watching old movies, and drinking too much as doing something.

I’m not sure how long it would have lasted—maybe another month, maybe until our livers divorced us by citing cruel and unusual punishment—but then Angie looked at Trevor Stone with a kinship she’d shown toward no one in three months and actually smiled without affectation, and I knew we’d take his case, even if he was so impolite as to kidnap and drug us. And the fifty grand, let’s admit it, went a long way toward helping us overlook Trevor’s initial bad form.