24.
Jamal
Ray Spiegel didn’t waste a lot of time getting the hell out of the coffee shop once our little conversation was over. We watched him go, and I was left with that sinking feeling that not only had this not gone our way, but it had gone really, really the wrong way, the really, really not in our favor way—
“Yo,” Augustus said, nodding as Spiegel disappeared out the lobby door, “I think that went really well.”
I turned my head to look at him over the empty black, shiny tabletop between us. Spiegel had formed the third point of our little triangle, and now that he was gone, I felt like I was drowning in the black table area between my brother and I. “How … do you figure that?” I asked, sounding a little choked even to my own ears.
“We laid our thangs down with that dude,” Augustus said with limitless self-assurance that sprang from … hell, I had no idea where it sprang from. If I could have struck it with lightning like a tree right then, I would have, because it was the same crazy impatience that had caused me to almost get smushed by a thrown car only this morning. “He knows where we stand.”
“Yeah, that’s not good,” I said.
Augustus’s brow puckered as he looked at me. “How is that not good?”
“The dude who reports back to the people we’re trying to extract the truth from,” I said, spelling it out for him as my heart thudded in my ears like thunder, “now knows that we’re after them, and what for. Our element of surprise is gone.”
“Pffft,” Augustus dismissed me. “Our element of surprise was gone the moment Whitey McDudebro called us at our hotel and offered to meet us downstairs for a chat two seconds after we blew into town.” Augustus sat forward, and my growing horror was centered on the fact that not only did he think he’d done no wrong, but he was stubbornly refusing to consider he’d made even the slightest whoopsie by giving away … oh, I dunno … EVERYTHING.
“He had suspicions, then,” I said, trying to keep calm but mentally panicking. “Now he knows . Big difference.”
“Oh, yeah?” Augustus asked, settling back in his seat with a gleam of triumph in his eye. “And who’s he going to tell about that? And when do you reckon he’ll be talking to them about it?”
“Probably the people responsible, and right freaking now—” I started to say, then, whump , a thought occurred.
My brother was grinning. He actually beat me to this one—for once.
I lifted my phone and sparked against the connector. I’d pinged Ray Spiegel’s phone before to try and get a feeler for if he was down here, and that latent connection meant I could look for him as he moved from the wi-fi in the coffee shop to the 4G network just outside. It only took me a millisecond to catch up to his digital footprint and find—
Well, shit. Boy had pretty much no network security on his phone, which gave me an open pipeline right in. I caught him just as he was dialing somebody and could hear the digital call in my head, transported there by the little pulses of electricity, digital ones and zeroes that magically transmuted the spoken word through the air.
“Hey, it’s Ray,” Spiegel said. “I just got out of the meeting with them.”
The voice that answered him was calm, kinda old, too. “How did it go?”
Spiegel seemed like he was ready to chuckle. “They’re … stubborn. Changing their minds is not going to happen. They’re convinced you’ve got some magical evidence that will exonerate—well, you know.” A pause. “You, uh … don’t happen to have any magical evidence of that, do you?” He broke into a laugh.
“Surprisingly not,” the older man said. I was guessing it was Charles Custis, the patriarch of this little family affair. “Hard to come up with something that doesn’t exist.” Man, he was a casual liar. Good at it, too, and the smoothness of his voice helped. “What’s your gut on this? They’re going to hang around town for a while, being a nuisance?”
“Yep,” Spiegel said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they came to talk to you next. The younger one, Augustus … he has all the patience of a bull in a china shop. No subtlety. He’ll come right at you, because he thinks you’re a bad guy ,” and he made his voice all scare quotey for that one.
“I’m not sorry to disappoint him,” Custis said on the other end of the line, a little tense. “But I am sorry that he’s not going to just take our word for it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I figure we should talk about that,” Custis said. “Face to face. Meet me at the parking lot of that Walmart out in Arlington. One hour?”
“I’ve got a deadline later today,” Spiegel said, and he sounded like he was wheedling. “This is a non-story right now. I need something for publication.”
Custis didn’t even hesitate. “I have something you could write up. I’ll send it over. It’s pretty juicy, too—all the right whispers of scandal. It seems a certain freshman congresswoman from Colorado is having an affair with a more senior one from North Dakota. All on deep background, of course, but there are pictures. See you in an hour?”
“But you’re going to send this over first?” Spiegel asked.
“It’ll be in your inbox in moments,” Custis said. “Anything more sensitive—and there’s a little more—needs to be talked about face to face.”
“I’ll be there,” Spiegel said, and the hum of a car engine coming to life flared through his end of the speaker. “See you in an hour.”
“See you there,” Custis said, and hung up.
“… Earth to Jamal Coleman,” my brother was saying as I dropped out of the conversation. I was still sitting in the coffee shop, blinking out of the haze from my digital eavesdrop. It was tough to pay attention to what was going on around me while I was decoding that, mentally. “We going to go elsewhere to eat, or do I need to go get some biscotti to take the edge off the rumblings?” He rubbed his stomach.
“Yeah, we can …” I shook my head, trying to clear the digital fog. “I got a lead on something. We should go.”
Augustus stood. “Go? Go where?”
“There’s a meet,” I said, going meta-low with my voice. “One hour. One of the Custis family—the dad—promised Spiegel a scoop if he’d come meet and talk about us. I’m thinking we should be there for this one.”
“Ooh, I like the sound of this,” Augustus actually rubbed his palms together in anticipation. “Let’s bust some heads.”
I shook mine. “No busting heads. Spiegel just told Custis you’re going to come at them head on, and he’s right. We need to play this cool.”
“Pffft, shit,” Augustus said, dismissing me in one movement, “who needs subtle when long and strong gets right to the answer?”
I wanted to thud my head against the table until it popped open and my brains spilled out, freeing me of having to think about where he’d gotten that turn of phrase from, and what exactly he was fully suggesting by it. “Why do you always go dumb when you’re with me?”
My brother bristled. “Explain yourself.”
“You’re a college student, Augustus,” I said, locking eyes with him. “Your grades are solid. You’re not dumb, but anytime we get paired up, all the sudden your brains go out the window, and it’s like you’re all gonads, man. Wild animal shit. What’s up with that?”
“Because you bore the hell out of me,” Augustus said, looking just as pissed at me as I was at him. “You overthink everything. I’m all right with thinking, but you just—you don’t do anything, Jamal. You want to sit back and carefully consider the problem,” his voice got effete and mocking, “and poke at it from all angles, and think—think really hard—consider—maybe possibly someday think about doing something other than just thinking about it—”
“Don’t knock thinking it through,” I said snippily, “because it keeps you from getting wiped by a hurled car.”
“Man, whatever,” Augustus said, and it seemed to be his way of closing the topic of conversation as he stood. “Let’s go to this meet. Stop off at a Wawa on the way.”
“Fine,” I said, getting up. “But when this thing goes down, you got to promise me you’re not going to go charging in like a madman. These people aren’t stupid. We need to hang back, listen, gather—”
“Yeah, okay,” Augustus said, and off he went toward the door, just turning his back on me like I didn’t matter. I stared after him for a long second. The days of being together, being partnered? They were wearing on us both, I guess. It was like twenty-odd years of us being brothers was all coming to a head now. A loggerhead, at least. Twenty-plus years of differences, and now was the moment we started to really take that baggage and batter at each other with it.
Damn. Talk about timing.
But what other play did we have but to go on, in spite of it? I just shook my head again at our stupidity, and followed my brother out, on the way to this meeting between the bad guys.