One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [48]
“I don’t know! Jesus, I’m supposed to be on spring break! If you don’t want to talk to the cops, fine, I won’t mention you. I’ll just say somebody yelled at the jerks and they panicked and ran away. You’ve done your good deed, you don’t have to worry about any police activity, since I’m sure that you’ve got an arrest record a mile long. In fact, I’m pretty sure I don’t want any police officer to think that you and I are somehow involved in something either.”
Is she drunk? I looked at her in amazement, then remembered that she hadn’t been around for the finale of the fighting. “It’s a little bit late for that. The two apes up top are dead. I killed them. I’m involved whether you like it or not, and I don’t like to be involved in something I have no control over. Tell me what’s going on.”
Jennifer looked at me, stunned. “You killed them? How? Why on earth would you do that—”
“Because the assholes that wanted to talk to you pulled a knife on me. It’s done, and now I’m involved in a mess I want no part of. Who’s your contact? Who sent those guys?”
Jennifer simply sat there.
I backed off. Scaring the shit out of her wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I leaned back, thinking about what I knew. My gut was suddenly saying she wasn’t lying. When I thought about it, I realized the woman who’d helped me tonight didn’t seem like the type involved in anything like drug smuggling. It just didn’t add up. Someone like that would have waited until I was unconscious, then picked my pocket. I stopped that line of thought. Don’t be fooled by the package. You don’t know her at all.
Either way, it wasn’t my problem. I needed to figure a way out of this mess and quit worrying about whether she was guilty. I went back to the deck, feeling the clock ticking rapidly. It was a miracle that nobody around the marina had heard the ruckus, but it was only a matter of time before someone wandered by. Thinking it through, I realized that it would be much, much better if I called the police, or if Jennifer did. Every second of delay was going to look suspicious.
I searched both bodies. The only things of value were a couple of wallets with driver’s licenses from New York and New Jersey and a couple of cell phones. I checked the contact list of both phones. They were empty, which indicated in and of itself that these guys had something to hide, although that was blatantly obvious at this point. I switched to the call history of the phones, hoping that these guys weren’t that diligent with their operational security. The shorter man—Anthony from his driver’s license—had no incoming calls, and about twenty calls to 1-900 numbers on the outgoing list, thus was little help. The taller man, or Edward, had two incoming calls, one from overseas by the look of the number. His outgoing-calls list only contained two numbers, one of them matching up to the overseas incoming number. I went back to Jennifer.
“Do you know the country code of Guatemala?”
“I think so. It’s either 520 or 502.”
“Well, one of the guys has an international phone number starting with 502, so he’s calling Guatemala. Does your uncle have a GSM phone that works outside the U.S.?”
“No. He always communicates over the Internet. Most of the places he goes don’t have cell phone service, so he doesn’t bother.”
I hit redial on the phone, wondering who was paying the bill for this call.
Jennifer stood up. “What are you doing? Who are you calling?”
“I don’t know who’s going to answer, but I’m getting my ass out of trouble with whoever is after you. You might want to do the same. I’ll pass the phone to you when I’m done.”
I stood waiting for the connection to be made. Finally, a man with a heavy Spanish accent answered in English. “So good of you to call. I assume that it’s done? Do you have some good news?”
“Uh, no. We don’t have the package. And the guy who owns this phone won’t be getting the package. He’s now out of the picture for the long term.”
I had no idea who this was, but there was a better-than-even chance that