“Would you care for a drink before you kill me?” Wells asked.
“No thanks. But feel free to finish yours.”
Wells sat up on the sofa and downed his drink. “Do you mind if I have one more for the long journey ahead?” he said, getting up and going to the bar.
“You’re taking this rather calmly,” Segura said.
“Geraldo, it’s not like I didn’t expect you. Even so, I’m rather in awe of how you slipped in the way you did.”
“It helps to have a history. I’ll leave these here for Carlotta.” He dropped her key ring on the desk. “So tell me something: if you knew I was coming, why didn’t you get out of the country? You have a plane. You have money. You could have gone anywhere.”
“I didn’t want to go anywhere,” Wells said, pouring from a bottle of Balvenie thirty-year single malt. “New York is my home. My work is here. My charity is here. My whole life is here. I decided I’d wait for you to show up and try to do what I do best.”
“And what’s that?”
“Negotiate.”
Segura laughed. “You mean beg for mercy like Nathan did.”
“Give me a little credit, will you? I’m not begging. I’m trying to increase the value of my life.”
“It’s like old times, Princeton. You’ve totally lost me.”
“Right now I’m worth nothing to you. You kill me, and I’m dead. End of story. But what if I said I’d give you a hundred dollars not to kill me? Now I’m no longer worth nothing. Now it’s going to cost you a hundred bucks to kill me.”
Segura laughed. “And worth every penny. Pour me a little of that Scotch, will you?”
Wells took a clean rocks glass from the bar, added three fingers of the single malt, and handed it to Segura.
“You trying to get me drunk, mate?”
“I don’t think that would help my case. Now, where were we?”
“It was costing me a hundred dollars to whack you, and I happily paid the price.”
“Now what if I said a million dollars? You’d probably still kill me, but you’d walk out of the room knowing that revenge cost you a million dollars. You see where I’m going with this?”
“You’re very good at these high-finance shenanigans, aren’t you? So now you’re going to try to come up with a number that would make me think, I can’t kill the fucker. It’s going to cost me a fortune.”
“That’s the plan,” Wells said. “It’s a gentleman’s game. Very civilized. All I have to do is make me worth so much money alive that you realize you can’t afford to kill me.”
“You took twenty years of my life,” Segura said. “Do you think I can put a price on that?”
“I think you already have, Geraldo. That’s why you’re here. Del, Arnie, and Nathan all paid for what we did to you. If you kill me, you’ll have exacted revenge. But what about justice? Shouldn’t one of us compensate you for your twenty years of pain and suffering? Shouldn’t one of us pay for the forty or fifty years you have left ahead of you? I’m the only one with those kinds of resources. That’s why I’m still alive, and you’re here drinking my single malt.”
Segura grinned. “You’re right. In the beginning, I wanted to mow down the four of you with an AK-47. But as I got closer to freedom, I realized that while four dead former friends would make me feel good for a few brief moments, three dead and a shitload of money would keep me happy forever.”
“Hallelujah,” Wells said, tossing down half of his drink. “So tell me the number you have in your head, and we can both get a second chance at life.”
“Five million dollars—”
“Done,” Wells said quickly.
“A year,” Segura said. “Five million dollars for every year I spent in that rat-infested shithole wearing leg-irons and shackles in the stupefying heat, choking on the stench from the communal latrine, while you got fatter and richer, never once lifting a finger to rescue me from the hell you subjected me to.”
“A hundred million dollars,” Wells said, making it sound partly like a statement, partly like a question.
“Take it or leave it.”
“Clearly you’re very good at these high-finance shenanigans yourself,” Wells said. “I’ll take it.”
“You can wire it to my offshore account. I’ll give you the number.”
Wells sat down at his computer and began to type. “One question,” he said. “How do I know you won’t wait for me to wire the money and then kill me?”
“You took my youth, my dream years, but my honor is still intact. If I take your blood money, I swear on the graves of my parents that I won’t kill you. Not now. Not ever. And once I walk out that door, you’ll never see me or hear from me again.”
Wells nodded and went back to typing. Segura walked to the bar and was about to pour himself another drink when the doorbell rang.
The video camera at the front door flashed a picture of the visitors on Wells’s screen.
“It’s those two goddamn detectives,” he said. “What should I do?”
Segura removed a gun from his waistband. “Take off your clothes. All of them.”