Page 16 of The Children of Eve (Charlie Parker #22)

CHAPTER XVI

In a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, two men had just finished dinner, consuming between them a massive cowboy rib eye with pepper sauce and sides. They were now making a pair of brandies last while waiting for their arteries to recover. They had also drunk two glasses of red wine—less than they might have preferred because they had business to conduct the following day, business that involved some driving, thinking, and negotiating, all activities better undertaken with a clear head.

Aldo Bern was, at best, ambivalent about St. Louis and tried to give it as wide a berth as possible, which was easy when a man put his mind to it. On the other hand, he did like Olive + Oak out in Webster Groves, which meant the city and its environs had at least one redeeming feature. If his sixty-plus years on earth had given Bern any insights worth sharing—and the older he got, the more he had his doubts—among them was that it was a whole lot harder to maintain a halfway decent restaurant than people seemed to think, and really hard to operate a great one. After centuries of trying, a man was still more likely to be served an average meal than a good one. Bern didn’t know whether Olive + Oak qualified as a great restaurant in the minds of those who measured the distance between the silverware to make sure it lined up and dined with a notebook to hand, but by his standards, it was damn fine.

As for his companion, Bern figured that he’d probably enjoyed the experience as well, though with Devin it could be difficult to tell. Devin Vaughn went through life like someone had severed his smile muscles, and he kept compliments to a minimum, but it was widely accepted that he was more highbrow than the criminal norm. Devin counted as cultured not only in the circles in which he and Bern moved—where reading more than the sports pages and the funnies qualified you as an intellectual—but also in wider society. Devin had a library that was more than a shelf long, collected art that didn’t involve dogs playing poker, and always dressed as though he was either going to or coming from somewhere more formal. He kept his shoes shined, his clothes pressed, and had never been known to wear denim, or not since he’d passed thirty. In the past, those habits had led some less-enlightened associates to question his sexuality, but nobody did that anymore. The ones who used to had learned their lesson fast, and at Devin’s hands.

A young woman passed their table, tightly packaged and barely old enough to drink legally. Bern’s eyes flicked toward her: he was only human, even if he could have passed for her grandfather. Mercifully, Devin’s eyes didn’t stray from the table. Since the breakup of his marriage, he’d begun sleeping with girls who’d been born only this century, an indulgence Bern hoped he’d tire of before too long, since the next step was marrying one of them. In the eighties, Bern had spent a few years on the West Coast working under Devin’s father, God rest his soul, when they were both younger men on the make, and a ready supply of coke could gain a man entry to all the best parties. The experience had taught Bern never to be a user, only a seller, and that while sleeping with much younger women was nice work if you could get it, marrying them was no course of action for a sensible man, not unless he aspired to bleed himself dry with future alimony payments.

On a practical note, Bern had also learned that the first lesson in being a successful drug dealer was not to look, dress, or act like one. It was a lesson he had later drummed into Devin because, in his final years, Devin’s father, paralyzed and rendered mute by a stroke, wasn’t able to drum much of anything into his only son. Bern felt that Devin might have taken the lesson to extremes, given the cost of some of his suits, but he was forced to admit that the boy always looked classy. If you passed him on the street, you’d have taken him for an investment banker or a corporate lawyer, not the head of a criminal organization.

That was the other thing about Devin: He specialized. He ran coke, MDMA, heroin, fentanyl, and pot, the latter in both legal and illegal forms, and the quality always guaranteed, but that was it. No gambling, no whores, no protection rackets, and no construction scams. The money was laundered at a hefty premium, coming back so clean it gleamed, before being invested in legitimate businesses managed by individuals who, in most cases, had no idea that the parent firm—protected by subsidiaries, shelf companies, and enough layers of bankers, lawyers, and offshore addresses to confound God Himself—was founded on pot, pills, and powder, and their paychecks ultimately cleared thanks to the custom of addicts. It was Devin who had expanded the empire, and rarely did he put a foot wrong—until recently.

A series of calamitous occurrences, over only some of which Devin could have claimed control, had led to the present difficulties. It began with the seizure of a $10 million cocaine shipment from Mexico at a time when cash flow was already sluggish, followed by a disagreement between supplier and buyer over who was responsible for the failure of the shipment to reach its ultimate destination. It might just have been bad luck that customs agents had searched the container, but Devin was of the opinion that luck, bad or otherwise, had nothing to do with it, and someone on the Mexican side had tipped off the U.S. authorities. If it came from the cartel, then it had been authorized by Blas Urrea himself, though Bern had reserved judgment on that score until more information became available.

Then, while Bern’s investigation into the seizure was still ongoing, some new cryptocurrency had collapsed, and it turned out that Devin had bet, if not the entire house, then at least the first couple of floors on a different outcome. Bern didn’t know from cryptocurrency, but he could have told Devin that trusting millions to kids who did business in shorts and T-shirts, and who didn’t own a proper pair of shoes among them, was never going to end well. The people who advised Devin to invest, most of whom didn’t wear proper shoes either, had assured him that his investments would bounce back, but weren’t able to say when. Might be a year, could be two. Unfortunately, Devin didn’t have two years, or even one. Combined with the loss of the shipment—and the lingering aftereffects of COVID, which had royally fucked with both the legitimate and criminal sides of their operation—Devin probably had three to six months of wiggle room before the cracks began to show. Once that happened, the vultures wouldn’t just be circling, they’d be plucking eyes from heads. The situation wasn’t beyond retrieval, but it remained an existential threat. It was important that everybody stayed calm and didn’t do anything rash—which was when Devin, unbeknownst to Bern, had decided that rash was the way to go, and moved against Blas Urrea behind Bern’s back. Now they were in St. Louis, trying to cut a deal on fentanyl, because they needed an alternative source, and quickly.

“Maybe we should call for the check,” said Bern, raising a hand to their server as he spoke. “Devin, you hearing me?”

Devin’s eyes were glassy. If Bern didn’t know better, he’d have suspected Devin was dipping a wet finger in his own supply, or what was left of it.

Devin came back from wherever he’d been.

“What did you say?”

“That we should call it a night.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You feeling all right?”

Devin rubbed at the corners of his eyes.

“I haven’t been sleeping so well.”

“You have a lot on your mind.”

“Yeah,” said Devin. “That too.”

“Too? Is there something else I should know?”

“Just bad dreams.”

Bern wasn’t surprised. Bad fucking dreams? It was a wonder Devin was sleeping at all after what he’d done to Urrea, and with what he was keeping at home.

“Take a pill,” said Bern.

“I take any more pills, I’m going to rattle when I walk. They don’t stop me dreaming.”

Bern didn’t know what else to say. Well, he did, but Devin wouldn’t want to hear it, not again. What was done was done, and all they could hope was that Urrea didn’t find out Devin was responsible. If he did, Urrea would declare war, and that was a fight they’d lose, weakened as they were.

Bern placed his right hand on Devin’s arm.

“You’re like a son to me,” he said. “You understand that, right? I told your father I’d look out for you, always, and I’ve kept the promise as best I could.”

“I know that. No one could say different.”

“But I’m getting tired, Devin. It comes with age. I have pains in my joints and my guts hurt.”

“You didn’t tell me that before. They hurt, how? Did you see a doctor?”

Bern instantly regretted opening his mouth. He took his hand away, used it to wave for the check. Anything for the distraction.

“It’s stress, is all. I take Pepto-Bismol, it helps. What I’m saying is, I don’t have energy like before. Once we were in the black again, I was planning on easing out. I was just trying to find the right time to tell you. I’d still be around to offer counsel, but on a day-to-day basis, I’d be done. Now, with this Urrea thing, and you not being able to sleep without having nightmares—”

Despite himself, Bern was singing the same song again.

“Bad dreams,” Devin corrected him. “And they’ll pass.”

“Give back what you took. I’m asking you for the last time. You and the others, you leave them somewhere safe, we make a call. Urrea doesn’t ever have to know it was us.”

“I’ve told you before: They stay.”

Bern sat back. He was about to say “Then I can’t” when his cell phone rang. Bern checked the caller ID and felt life lining him up for another punch to the gut. The last time a call had come through from this number, it was to inform him that their shipment of cocaine was now in the hands of the U.S. government.

Bern put the phone to his ear and began thumbing bills from his money clip as the check arrived.

“Yeah,” he said to the caller. “I know who this is.”

Bern listened. He turned the check to its blank side and scribbled some notes.

“Okay. You tell her she needs to get him out, whatever it takes. Make sure she appreciates there will be consequences otherwise. Anything changes, you call me.”

He hung up. Devin was watching him.

“How bad?” Devin asked.

“Roland Bilas got picked up by customs at LAX. He was flying in from Mexico City with a handful of obscene statues and some old blankets in his suitcase.”

Devin closed his eyes. Bilas had been told—no, ordered —not to head back across the border for a while. He’d also been paid well for his part in the Urrea operation to ensure he had no cause for complaint. Devin wasn’t about to dismiss Bilas as greedy or stupid—the man had never struck him as either—but that wouldn’t stop him from having Bilas’s hands stomped to paste once he was out of custody.

“Has he lawyered up?” Devin asked.

“As soon as he was charged. I have the lawyer’s name.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Not that I remember, but someone will get in touch with her, tell her we have an interest.”

Bern didn’t think Bilas would hold up well under pressure. Bilas had never been arrested and would be scared even before hard-faced officials began talking about jail time, time that might go away if he was prepared to name names.

“He’ll know better than to give them anything,” said Devin.

“You think? Jesus, Devin, my granddaughter would have a better chance of holding up under questioning, and she’s six years old. We need to make sure Bilas isn’t kept anywhere worse than a holding room at the airport. God forbid they use the weekend to put him in lockup with a copy of the Prison Rape Elimination Act as a fiction option.”

It was all unraveling. This was the beginning of the next stage. Bern could feel it.

“Make sure the lawyer is aware that if Bilas talks, we’ll be the least of his problems,” said Devin. “No matter what protection he’s promised in return for testimony, Urrea’s people will find him. Silence is his best chance of staying alive.”

“It’s in hand.”

“I want you to call her, not anyone else. Fix it, Aldo.”

Bern headed for the door to make the call outside. Devin Vaughn remained seated. He still had a little brandy left in his glass, but Bern had barely touched his. Devin reached across and added Bern’s portion to his own because alcohol helped more than pills. The fucking child kept crying, that was the worst of it. The nightmares he could handle, but not the crying. Still, Devin wasn’t sorry for what he’d done.

Because the child was beautiful.