The Negotiator: A Novel of Suspense Page 2

  I slowly examined one stone after another. One man in the rear, belligerent with a shotgun, yelled out, “See? See? That’s good shit. It’s good shit, isn’t it?”

  Ramon snapped at him. “Shut up, Tomas. Let him work!”

  And work is what I did. I took my time with each stone, knowing that these four bozos were getting more and more excited, and more and more concerned. Excited at the payout they were thinking about getting, and concerned about me, I’m sure. For how could they trust me in reaching a fair price?

  Decent question, and my only answer is my reputation of service. I have a nice long record of providing fair and equitable negotiations among many different kinds of customers, and it’s that word of mouth that keeps additional business coming in. I know the minute I screw someone over, my phone calls and email messages will dry out.

  I looked once more at the rocks, put my tweezers and jeweler’s loupe away.

  “Be right back,” I said.

  “Hey!” Tomas yelled, standing up with his shotgun. “What bullshit is this? You tell us what it’s worth now! Don’t you fucking walk away from us.”

  I didn’t say a word, but Clarence said, “Appreciate your concern, amigo. But walking away is what we’re going to do.”

  Clarence has worked for me—or with me, depending on your point of view—for three years. He’s my factor, adviser, and extra firepower if the circumstances demand it. I hired him after a negotiation went sideways when the sale of eleven rare books got stuck in a rut. Clarence was a member of the first party, who wanted to sell the books, and during a quick break in the negotiations, in a barn outside of Albany, New York, he took me aside and said, “Word to the wise, my boss intends to kidnap you when this is done.”

  “Why?” I asked. “He doesn’t like my necktie?”

  “He doesn’t like anything,” Clarence said. “He wants me to kidnap you and torture you, so you’d give up where you stash your cash at your home. He’s not one for taking the long view, building a business relationship.”

  “Gee, thanks for the information. Not sure what to do with it, though.”

  Clarence looked over at his boss, a jumpy kid who dressed in all black, and whom I gathered had stolen the rare books from his grandfather, and he said, “Tell you what. I like your style, your approach. I’d like to work for you.”

  “I’ve always worked alone.”

  “That should change,” Clarence said. “Next time you might not meet up with someone as thoughtful as me.”

  “Good point,” I said. “Can I hire you now, or is there going to be a waiting period?”

  His boss yelled from across the room. “Hey! Clarence, get over here! Stop fucking around, okay?”

  Clarence said, “I can go with you now.”

  “That’d be great.”

  Clarence walked across the barn floor, took out his Beretta, put it to the side of the kid’s head, and served his termination notice. Because I was expecting it, I didn’t flinch much at the noise.

  Back to the second room, and after a single knock, we went in. “So?” the older man asked.

  “They have six stones, round brilliant,” I said. “Color G, very slightly included, four carats per, nice lot. I put a price on the whole haul of one hundred thousand dollars. With my fee, that’s a payout of one hundred five thousand.”

  The older man looked at the younger man, and said, “Well. I think I’d like to take a look at them myself.”

  “Clarence?”

  “On my way.”

  Clarence left and came back within a minute, accompanied by a glowering Tomas. At least Tomas had his weapon hidden.

  The older man examined the stones with his own tweezers and loupe, spreading them out on a briefcase cover balanced on his lap, and nodded. They went back into the black bag, were handed back to Clarence, who walked back outside with Tomas. The door shut with a gentle click.

  The younger man said, “Papa?”

  A weary shrug. “Oh, what are we, a charity?”

  “Not an answer,” I said. “One hundred five thousand dollars.”

  “No,” he said. “Eighty, perhaps eighty-five.”

  A knock at the door. Clarence came back in, sat down.

  I said, “Not going to happen. That’s a fair price and you know it. After I get paid, they’re getting one hundred thousand dollars, after doing their … work, which could have put any of them into prison if they had been caught for a very long time, indeed. After you clean and set those stones, you’ll do very well. It’s an equitable price.”

  “Eighty-five. Go and tell them eighty-five.”

  I stood up. “Tell you what. I’m going to walk out with my associate here, poke my head into their room, and tell the crew in there that I’m done. Then you’re free to negotiate with the four of them, all of whom are heavily armed and aren’t in a happy mood. And while you try to negotiate with them, my friend and I will go out for some ice cream.”

  The younger man said, “Wait. Please.” He leaned over and there was a harsh exchange of whispers. I made a point of looking at my watch. Clarence looked bored. The younger man said, “Papa agrees, one hundred thousand dollars. Plus five thousand dollars for your view.”

  “I want to hear it from him. No offense, but that’s the agreement that was arranged for this meeting. I negotiate with him, and nobody else.”

  Another heavy, world-weary sigh, as he flipped up a few fingers. “One hundred thousand.”

  “Plus the five thousand.”

  A shrug. “I assumed that was understood.”

  A sharp look from me. “Please don’t assume anything on my behalf.”

  He looked away. His son looked frightened.

  Good.

  Back to the first room, and Clarence said, “Ice cream? Really?”

  “What, you don’t like ice cream?”

  “I do,” he said. “But that’s an after-dinner treat.”

  We both sat down in the room’s wooden chairs. “All right. Lunch, and then ice cream later.”

  He smiled. “Great.”

  Tomas yelled out, “Hey! Stop that yip-yap! What’s going on?”

  I nodded. “Good news. You four … gentlemen did quite well. Those diamonds are the real deal, they’re valuable, and the man next door wants to make an offer. One hundred thousand dollars.”

  Ramon didn’t say anything, but the other two guys in his entourage looked at each other with big smiles, but Tomas seemed to have seller’s remorse.

  “No!” he shouted. “That’s mentira! No! That’s too little!”

  Ramon yelled back. “Shut up, Tomas! Shut up!”

  I guess Tomas needed to work on his employee-management skills, because he came forward, slammed his hip into Ramon, and pointed his shotgun at me. “No! No way! Those rocks are worth a hell of a lot more! A hell of a lot more!”

  Clarence quietly said, “How are you doing?”

  “Oh, I’m good. You?”

  “Hanging in there,” Clarence said. “Just waiting on you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ramon said, “Tomas, be quiet!”

  Tomas waved the shotgun back and forth. “No, no, the stones are worth … two hundred thousand.” He grinned. “That’s right. Two hundred thousand dollars!” Then he looked at me again, pointed the shotgun at my head. “You go out there and you talk to that thief next door, and you tell him, two hundred thousand dollars. Not a fucking penny less!”

  Ramon caught my attention. “Well?” he asked.

  I said, “That’s a nonsense number, pulled out of your friend’s perky bottom. I’m not going to go out there and present such a number in an unprofessional manner. It has no basis in reality.”

  Tomas came closer, the barrel of the shotgun under my chin. He pushed up, trying to lift my chin. He might have even succeeded for a millimet
er or two. “No … this is reality … you go out there and say two hundred thousand, or I’ll take your head off and do the same to your slow friend. Then I’ll go out there and seal the deal myself, hombre.”

  Clarence sighed. “Dear me,” he said.

  I cleared my throat. “Hold on for a second. Ramon … if I may?”

  “Yes.” He looked frustrated, angry, and embarrassed—an unpleasant combination.

  “Ramon, when we made this arrangement, the agreement was with you, me, and the buyer. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes.”

  I held my hands up and open, in a very nonthreatening move. “Then let’s keep to the agreement. One hundred thousand dollars. That means twenty-five thousand dollars apiece, for you and your three companions, for what was probably just a couple hours of work. Am I right?”

  A pause in the action. The other two men came closer from their sitting positions on the two beds. Tomas’s breathing had quickened. I looked straight at Ramon. “You and these three other men will receive the payout, in less than ten minutes. Cash money, untraceable, right in your hands. But it’s up to you how many associates are eligible for a payday. You’re the man in charge. El jefe. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Ramon’s eyes flashed. He understood. He yelled something quickly in Spanish. The other two men jumped Tomas, dragged him back, tugged the shotgun out of his hands. They threw him on the near bed. Ramon went to the television, turned it up louder. The two men had Tomas stretched out on the bed, a pillow on his head. Ramon went over, pushed the muzzle end of his pistol against the pillow, shot twice. Tomas’s legs quivered, and the other two men stepped away.

  Ramon turned to me. “The terms are acceptable. I agree.”

  Two

  Out in the parking lot, Clarence and I met up with the younger bearded man, who opened up the trunk of a black Audi 6000. Inside was a black satchel. He unzipped it and reached inside, taking out a couple of bundles of cash, which he put into his pants pocket. Clarence went forward, counted the banded packs of one-hundred-dollar bills that remained in the satchel, removed five of them and put three in my hand, and kept two for himself. We both slipped our bundles into our coat pockets.

  The younger man said, “Did I hear two gunshots back then?”

  “Must have been the television,” I said.

  Ramon was watching us from the open door of his room. Clarence went over with the athletic bag, Ramon passed over the bag of diamonds, and Clarence then came back, put the bag into the young man’s hand. The bag went into another pants pocket.

  Exchange complete.

  The younger man said, “Look … ask you question?”

  I said, “No.”

  The younger man’s face flushed, and then he scampered back to the motel room. Clarence raised a bushy eyebrow. “That was cold.”

  “That’s what’s to be expected. Hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  “How about Billingsgate?”

  “Why not?”

  Then Clarence and I went our separate ways. He went to a black Lincoln Navigator with Massachusetts license plates, and I took my black Lexus with Maine license plates, and off we went.

  We met up about thirty minutes later in the remote New Hampshire town of East Kingston. The town has some light industry, a golf course, farms, and a rabbit-breeding facility. Billingsgate was a restaurant made from a converted cider mill, and the owner thought its name was something British and veddy upper class. In actuality, the name comes from an area in London known for its sale of fish, and the cry of the fishmongers was so foul and nasty that the term “Billingsgate” was used for offensive or obscene language. But there was nothing foul with this building. Lots of old stone and exposed beams and a fast-moving stream in the rear that helped propel a water wheel back in the day.

  The owner was a nice cheery guy with a premature receding black hairline that made his exposed forehead look like a shiny bowling ball, and I never bothered to correct his misunderstanding of his restaurant’s name. Life was too short and why shatter the poor guy’s illusions? Clarence and I took a corner booth where we could sit with our backs against the wall and examine both the menus and the front door.

  I went with a lobster and scallop dish, while Clarence took the good ol’ Amurrican route of steak and baked potato. While we ate, we never once talked business. I stuck to the weather, politics, and my new favorite show on PBS examining the history of the Bible. Clarence talked about his ex-wife and his sons, the Little League players—who were being honored at an awards banquet next week—and how spoiled his boys were, for each year they expected a Red Sox team that would make the playoffs.

  “My dad,” Clarence pointed out, “died a month after the Sox nailed their first World Series in nearly a hundred years, and he was the happiest I’d ever seen him. Ever since the Impossible Dream of ’67, he always prayed for next year. Today’s fans … don’t get me fucking started.”

  During our first post-work meal nearly three years ago, Clarence had gently and insistently pressed me on my background, where I had been born and raised, what my career choices had been, and other life-bonding information like that. I kept on deflecting his questions, like an ace hockey goalie playing against a grade schooler on ice for only the second time in his or her life. But he hadn’t given up the pokes and probes. Finally I had excused myself and gone to use the restroom, and from there I departed—after picking his pocket and sticking him with the bill.

  He never asked me a personal question again.

  When we were finished and got to the cups of coffee stage, I asked him if he was up for some ice cream, and he shook his head. “Nope. My gullet is full.”

  “Then we’ll take care of it next time.”

  He wiped his face with a crisp white napkin. “Anything in the pipeline?”

  “Not as of yet,” I said. “But in a retrenching economy like this one, you can bet something will come up soon enough.”

  An attractive young waitress came by, all smiles, and dropped off the check. I picked it up and without using our new gains of one-hundred-dollar bills, I paid in cash with my daily supply, left a hefty tip, and then we headed out. A cheery wave and he went off to Massachusetts, and I stayed in New Hampshire and headed north, making sure to stay off the toll roads, with their cameras and monitors and snoopy State Police troopers in parked cruisers.

  Outside of Manchester, the state’s largest city, I pulled into a Super Wal-Mart, stepped out, and went over to a five-year-old dull green Honda Pilot. I got into that vehicle and really started to go home. That Wal-Mart has its own surveillance cameras, but they didn’t cover the far end of the lot, which I used from time to time as my own personal staging area. Neither the Lexus nor the Pilot have one of those GPS systems, and I’ve made sure the little black boxes in the engines that measure speed, distance traveled, mileage, and other interesting bits of information have been disabled.

  I live in what’s cheerfully called a bedroom community outside of Manchester, a sweet town called Litchfield that I had chosen carefully. It’s close enough to the highways and the airport out of Manchester for easy travel, and it still has a small-town feel that meant it stayed out of the news most times. Plus it had one heck of a volunteer fire department, which made for a comfortable sleep at night.

  It was nearing dusk as I made my way down Route 3 and then took a right into a neighborhood called Merrimack Banks. It’s built near the Merrimack River, and I like it because the homes aren’t McMansions and the lots aren’t huge. Some time ago, in puzzling through where I wanted to live as I embarked on my new career, I thought that the clichéd stereotype of the master criminal living in a penthouse apartment or a remote, secluded Fortress of Solitude—complete with guard dogs, lights, a high fence, and command-detonation mines—wasn’t going to work. For one thing, penthouse apartments are pricey, indeed, and are subject to a lot of cu
riosity from your downstairs neighbors. Plus, being high up in a penthouse, you were trapped even before anybody took violent notice of you.

  So, why not the aforementioned remote compound? That wasn’t wise, either, for setting up such a place was like setting off fireworks every Saturday night, begging somebody out there to pay attention. Building such a large, guarded compound in a rural area meant lots of tongues wagging, and texts being exchanged among the curious. Plus, being a one-man show—this was before I met Clarence—it would mean a lot of angst and anxiety over safety: if you’re on a remote hundred-acre strip of land, accessible by a mile-long dirt driveway, then the bad guys could come in with an M252 81mm mortar system and reduce hearth and home to broken rubble and burning beams with no one noticing.

  Not that I believe there are a horde of bad guys out there in the shadows, gunning for me, but I always try to act accordingly.

  I pulled into the driveway of my home, a quiet-looking country house, stained dark brown, with a two-car garage and farmer’s porch. My neighbors were across the street and in homes adjacent to me, about a hundred feet or so in either direction. Enough space for privacy, but close enough so that if a black-clad platoon of Jihadi warriors decided to trot down the road and into my driveway, some of my neighbors would take notice and call the cops.

  I got out and left the Pilot in the driveway, walked over to my mailbox and pulled out that day’s thin offering—a bunch of fliers and two preapproved credit card applications—and then I went to the porch steps. Some low shrubbery separated me on the left from the Smith family, a young couple with two girls—ages six and four—and a yellow German Shepherd that was friendly enough, but had a cold spot in her eyes that said clearly that if you did any harm to the two young girls, her teeth would instantly sink into your throat.

  To the right was Clem Houston, a retired American Airlines pilot who was a nice guy to chat with—especially if you wanted to kill an hour discussing the sorry state of politics—and he was in his front yard, trimming some juniper bushes. I gave him a wave, got up on the porch, unlocked the very pricey and secure lock to the front door, and walked in.