Offside Trap Page 17

  “Do you mind if I get a scotch?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You’re welcome to one, of course.”

  “I don’t like cheap scotch.”

  “Thirty-year-old Islay single malt is not cheap.” He gave me a face like I just called his suit a polyester blend.

  “Fair enough. Where is it?”

  “On the bar over there.”

  I walked over to a crystal decanter and poured two shots of amber liquid into heavy crystal glasses. It smelled of burned oak and peat. I handed one to Millet, and I sat in the second wingback chair with the other. We were at an obtuse angle to each other so I had to push myself into one corner of the chair to face him. He didn’t care about facing me; he just sipped his scotch with two hands like he was drinking hot soup on a frigid day.

  “So tell me about you and Bruno Rinti.”

  “Who?”

  “If you’re going to be like that, I’ll have to throw this glass at your face.”

  He took a quick sideways glance. “That’s not the name of the person I know.”

  “Who do you know.”

  He sipped. “Gino was the gentleman I have dealt with.”

  “Gentleman?”

  “More or less.”

  “And what was your business with Gino Rinti?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “This is fine scotch, Mr. Millet. It would be such a waste to have to dump it on you.”

  “It’s Dr. Millet, but do what you must with your beverage. I cannot discuss confidential business dealings.”

  It would have been a waste. Good scotch is the product of the one thing no man can buy. Time. It would have left me with an empty feeling inside to have wasted even a single drop. So I gulped it down and threw the empty glass at Millet’s chair. It was good-quality lead crystal, heavy and dense. I was pleased to know that the university wasn’t paying for their administrators to drink ancient whiskey from cheap glassware. I aimed at the chair wing, behind Millet’s head. The crystal flew past Millet’s nose and hit the chair right on the wing and bounced back into the side of his head. I was glad to know I still had decent control. A direct crack in the head, even if I took the pace off, might have killed him, or least left a difficult-to-explain bruise. As it was, he recoiled against the opposite wing of his chair and spilled his scotch on his lovely beige trousers, as my glass bounced across an expensive-looking rug before spinning to rest under Millet’s hefty desk. He was more shocked than hurt. He screeched like he was auditioning for the Vienna boys’ choir but said nothing more. He checked the spot for blood, and not finding any, gave me a withered look, the sort a child might give in anticipation of the evil character coming on screen in a Disney movie.

  “What is Rinti doing?”

  “Building,” he yelped. “He’s a builder, he’s building.”

  “Building what?”

  “I told you but you didn’t listen. He’s going to build me the Caltech of the Southeast. A state-of-the-art research facility focusing on biotechnology, the physical sciences and engineering.” He was almost getting into sales pitch mode.

  “Why not be MIT?”

  “MIT? Ha! This is bigger than MIT.”

  The look on his face suggested he actually believed it.

  “You do realize that the Rintis have connections to organized crime.”

  “So says you. Every hard-working construction company suffers that label.”

  I stood and poured myself a fresh scotch. I left the thrown glass under the desk.

  “So all these facilities, these buildings of Rinti’s. I imagine they are going to take up a great deal of space.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Unless you’re planning on opening a campus in Port Saint Lucie, you don’t have the space.”

  He watched the remains of his scotch in his glass but said nothing.

  “Unless,” I added.

  Millet glanced at me. “What?”

  “That does seem to be an awful lot of space out there on those sporting fields.”

  “What is it you think you know, Mr. Jones?”

  “What I think I know I’ll keep to myself. It’s what I definitely know that concerns you. Shall we connect the dots? An athletic department who thinks you don’t like them, your professed distaste for funding non-academic ventures, a big chunk of land used for sports, your desire to build stuff on a big chunk of land, a developer with connections to get things pushed through before the media makes a big noise, and you. With your history of being second fiddle and your hard-on over your nemesis, one Remus Levensong, PhD.”

  “I am second fiddle to no one. Nor is my university.”

  “What I heard was, he got the funding, the publication, the prestige and the girl. Oh, and he’s now president in waiting of where? That’s right, MIT.”

  “You think that makes him so much better?” spat Millet.

  “On pretty much every measurable scale.”

  Millet’s face flushed crimson. I didn’t think it was the scotch.

  “There are people who follow a path trodden by others, and there are those who blaze a new path.” He looked away into middle distance, like the speech was more for his benefit than mine. “History remembers the pioneers.”

  “I’m sure the college’s student-athletes will remember you.”

  “Oh, will you get your head out of the sand? You’re fixated on athletics.”

  “You’ve never heard of healthy body, healthy mind.”

  “Please. We’re not talking about getting rid of the basketball gym or the pool. These are facilities that all students can use. But sports programs are just rah-rah activities to get the undergraduates all full of school pride. Grad students are too busy to care. They’ve got research to do and papers to write and panels to sit on. The government and corporations with the research funding don’t care about sports. Undergraduates are cash cows, Mr. Jones, nothing more. And sports are just an unnecessary marketing exercise to make them feel good about their choice of school. But within ten years the academic standard will be so high here that no undergraduate will have the time or inclination for your athletics programs.”

  “But MIT has athletics. So does Caltech.”

  “An historical aberration, sir. If they had it to do over, I’m sure they wouldn’t. But as you point out, it’s a luxury I cannot afford.”

  “I don’t see why it’s such a financial drain.”

  “You don’t get it at all, do you? It’s not money—it’s space. We need the space for more research facilities. The sports fields and associated ramshackle offices are on that space.”

  “So why not build somewhere else?”

  “You can’t be a hub of academic and research excellence if your constituent parts are diversified far and wide. Name a great university that doesn’t have its core on one unified campus. There aren’t any. A campus needs that academic buzz, the free expression of ideas. Departments need to cross-pollinate. A singular campus is what makes a great university great.”

  “So you brought in an athletic director who would be easy to move on when the time came.”

  He shook his head. “I misjudged Ms. Rose. I thought she’d see a Division II school as a stepping stone to somewhere better. That she’d be keen to move on. But she actually gives a damn. All this team first, go Panthers malarkey. She believes it.”

  “So was Jake Turner’s overdose a convenient accident that you could pin on the athletics department, or did you make it happen?”

  “Make it happen? What are you talking about? I had nothing to do with that.”

  “So it’s a coincidence that Jake did an internship with Rinti Developments this summer gone.”

  I watched his face, but he gave nothing away. Maybe he couldn’t go any pinker. He rubbed his trimmed gray beard with his hand. I couldn’t say what that meant one way or the other. He may just have been a beard rubber.

  “I didn’t know that,” he said. “But
I don’t see its relevance.”

  “You don’t? Let’s try two birds, one stone. You have an athletic department you want gone. And a top student-athlete who happens to work for your secret development partner, alongside the nephew of a state senator who happens to be in a position to fast-track your project. What if Jake Turner heard something that he shouldn’t have, something that could kill the project? Silencing his big mouth and laying the blame for his overdose on Kimberly Rose’s athletic department would be a neat little tie-up. Don’t you think?”

  More beard rubbing. I was coming to the conclusion it was a nervous tick and Dr. Millet was feeling uncomfortable.

  “I had nothing to do with Jake Turner’s death. And any attempt by you to imply such, against me or this university, will cost you dearly.”

  “That a threat, Mr. Millet?”

  “A promise. And it’s Dr. Millet.” His face was purple, and I was sure the tips of his gray beard were going pink with anger. Perhaps it was the light. I finished my drink and put the glass in the middle of Millet’s desk.

  “Thanks for the drink.”

  He flicked his eyes at me but said nothing. I made to leave, and then stopped.

  “Do you know State Attorney Eric Edwards?” I said, in violation of Eric’s direction to not use his name.

  “No.” He frowned.

  “You will.” I grinned and strode out of his office.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  BY THE TIME I got back to West Palm Beach the sun had fallen behind Lake Okeechobee. I parked in the lot beside my building. The courthouse quadrant was a patchwork of old buildings of character and new buildings like ours with the charm of hospital bed sheets, interspersed with parking lots and vacant plots. I saw the light on up in my office. Lizzy hard at work. I glanced at my watch and figured it would be fifty-fifty whether Ron had left for Longboard Kelly’s. As I looked up from my timepiece I saw two big guys step out from the shadows and amble toward me. They weren’t looking for a car. Guys looking for a car do just that. They look around, or if they spot their car, they chat, or look where they’re walking, or fumble for keys. These guys didn’t take their eyes off me. Their hands were by their sides, but not relaxed. I stopped and let them come to me. I was no sprinter, but both these guys carried a lot more weight than I did, so if it came to a footrace to my office, I wanted the run to be longer rather than shorter.

  They looked like nightclub bouncers. But they weren’t from around here. Even in the yellow lights of the lot, they looked pale. Both had shaved heads, but not recently. One was my height and lean, the other a couple inches shorter and turning to flab. The smaller guy looked like one of those guys. The ones that act like little yap dogs, all bark and anger and bravado, to compensate for something they thought they didn’t have. The taller guy looked calmer, and walked with a rounded hip movement that I’d seen before but he probably didn’t even know he had. The tall one spoke.

  “You Miami Jones?” he said in a voice like something off Masterpiece Theater.

  “Where you from?” I said.

  “Miami.”

  “No, I mean originally.”

  “England. So are you Jones?”

  “It’s him,” said the stocky one in a similar accent. “Vat’s his car.” He nodded at the Mustang. I was reminded again that a red Mustang might not be the best choice of vehicle for someone in my line of work.

  The tall one spoke again. “You have something what belongs to us.”

  I shook my head. “We won independence fair and square. Kicked your limey butts good and proper, if elementary school memory serves me.”

  “I’m talking about the Maxx.”

  I said nothing. The big guy glared at me. The stocky guy pulsed like a pit bull on a chain.

  “Our drugs, right? We want ’em back.”

  “You work for Pistachio?”

  “Mr. Pistachio to you.”

  “Seriously? Mr. Pistachio?” I shook my head. “The police searched my car and found nothing. You wanna look too?”

  “We know you removed them. Now we want them. And we want you to stop sniffing around about the kid. That’s done. Leave it.”

  “Kid’s dead. It’s not done. Not by a long shot.”

  The shorter guy took a pace toward me. We were striking distance apart. He had a round, bloated face and bad teeth, and puffy boxer’s eyes.

  “Just give us the drugs, you maggot,” he snarled.

  “I don’t have them.”

  “Where are they?” said the taller guy.

  “Somewhere in the sewer system below the university campus.”

  The tall guy tensed his jaw. “Bad for you, mate.”

  I leaned back on my left foot and put my hands in my pockets, and thought of the late, great Lenny Cox. Lenny had gotten me into the business, had been my mentor and had taught me more than a thing or two. One of Lenny’s favorite sayings was go hard or go home. He applied it loosely and liberally to life. Drinking, dancing, fighting, loving. When confronted by the likes of the two knuckle monkeys before me he would have said: don’t start fights. Fights aren’t groovy. But when you know for sure the other guy is going to hit you, don’t wait around for him to do it. Get your licks in first. And go hard or go home.

  What Lenny didn’t teach me was about injuries. When you play pro sports, even college sports, you see more injuries than most people have vodka tonics. And I noticed the walk on the tall guy straight away. Given his accent I was guessing a soccer injury, the way those guys slide into tackles, cleats up. But people also do their anterior cruciate ligament slipping in the bath. This guy had done his and done it bad. He had been through physical therapy and had regained the strength in the knee, but not in his mind. He favored the leg, so slightly he probably didn’t even notice, but it caused him to rotate his hurt side in an unnatural fashion, which put stress on the opposite hip. I bet he went to bed nights with an aching hip and blamed his shoes. The sum of it all was that he stood at the ready with his weight on his good leg. The other leg was on the ground and made him feel balanced, but it may as well have been tucked up like a flamingo.

  I took my hand from my pocket, my keys balled up inside my fist, with a house key protruding through between my index and middle fingers. The stocky guy was closer so he was first. His boxing background might have given him some skills, but he wasn’t going to get to use them, because his boxing had also left the flesh above his eyes puffy and soft. I hit him with a glancing blow, not trying to knock him down but rather run my house key across his brow like a fillet knife. The skin above his left eye burst like a bloody piñata. It was dirty pool, but I wasn’t trying to become an Eagle Scout. As the blood splattered into his eye, I pivoted and cracked my heel into the inside of the tall guy’s good knee. The knee gave a sickening pop as the cap slipped out of place and his leg twisted and buckled. He thudded to the tarmac, gripping his knee and screaming. ACL injuries on both knees was really going to put a crimp in his gymnastics career.

  I spun back to the other guy who had one hand trying to stop the geyser coming from his eyebrow. He came at me with one eye and one arm. The one arm swung like a Louisville Slugger, but I easily stepped out the way, because the one eye meant his depth perception was completely messed up. As his momentum took his club of an arm away from me, I strode forward and put a punter’s special into his crotch. It wasn’t full-blooded. That might have broken my toes. But it dropped him to his knees, where I kicked my heel into his nose. This had no effect on his face as his nose was nothing more than folds of skin and pliable cartilage. It did, however, knock him backwards onto the black asphalt, where his head released a dull crack and he unfolded like a tent, unconscious. The blood was pushing its way through me at close to two hundred BPM, and I felt light-headed, so I took a few long, deep breaths. Then I put my shoe into the shoulder of the tall guy, who lay writhing in pain.

  “You’re a dead man,” he cried.

  “Tell Pistachio I think he’s nuts, and I’m coming to crack hi
m.” I pushed the guy away and marched toward my car, thinking that I really did have a future in the corny but pithy retort department.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  MY FINGERTIPS WERE shooting little bolts of lightning by the time I reached Longboard’s. My heart rate had dropped to close to normal, but there was still plenty of adrenaline coursing around my system and I was as jittery as all hell. I strode into the courtyard and straight to the bar. Muriel frowned as she watched me come in.

  “You look like hell,” she said. She looked the same as always. A little more tanned than natural, tank top, explosion of cleavage.

  “I was going for that.”

  “You look like you’ve been in a fight or had incredible sex.”

  “What do you think?”

  “The look on your face says, if it was sex it was with a guy, so I’ll go with a fight.”

  “I look that bad? They didn’t actually get a hand on me.”

  “It’s not that. You just look, I don’t know, feral,” she said, smiling like it was a compliment. She grabbed a shot glass, poured a generous tequila, and slammed it down in front of me with a lime wedge.

  “For medicinal purposes,” she said. “Now quick, before Mick sees. You know how he feels about freebies.” She looked over her shoulder to see if her boss was around.

  “Something about hell and a chilly cold front.” I slammed the tequila back. It was rotten. The lime took nasty to a new level, but the net effect was calming as the alcohol went to work on the adrenaline.

  “You wanna talk about it?” she said, wiping the bar.

  “You being a barkeep?”

  “You being a smart guy?”

  I put my hand up to apologize. She poured a beer and put it on a paper map.

  “That one’s on your tab.”

  I smiled. “Thanks.”

  “So what’s the other guy look like?” she said.

  “Guys, plural. And they’re not going to be happy. I got the jump on them this time. Doesn’t usually happen twice.”

  “They know you come here?”