Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

She hesitated for a moment, looking at my shoes. Then she said, “I will see if he is available.” The elevator was descending from up high. A glass-sided barrel with gold trim. “We will take the elevator in any case.”

The doors opened and we stepped aside to make room for an elderly couple. The guy was pushing a walking frame. His wife shifted patiently behind him. He looked pissed off. Once we got into the elevator and were moving, I turned back to the woman. “So what’s the point of the stop at Port Morris?”

She said, “It’s our home port. Some customers choose to board here. About a quarter of our guests. Port Morris is a popular destination for viewing the salmon creeks. We run excursions to see the humpback whales on the other side of Carolina Island.”

I said, “What’s special about the Emerald Allure?”

She smiled. “Where do I start? We have 3,000 miles of electrical cable. A 100 megawatt electrical grid, which is enough power for 100,000 homes. We consume around a million gallons of fresh water per day. We make most of that water ourselves, with both evaporators and reverse osmosis production. We have the largest hospital facilities of any cruise ship on the seven seas.”

“A lot of people get sick out here.”

“Guests find our hospital facilities reassuring. A sign of the times. We had the clinical deck refurbished last year.” She whispered. “It is possible that we will begin to offer elective procedures onboard, perhaps in a year or two.”

“Plastic surgery.”

“For example. But don’t limit your imagination, sir. We deal in dreams.”

The elevator stopped softly, no lurch. Only a purr from the brakes. The Hospitality Princess led me off the elevator and down an empty corridor. This time the interior cladding was oak or teak, lined with maritime brass trimmings. At the end of it was another lobby. The whole ship was some kind of a lobby. She indicated a sofa. “If you will just wait here for a moment, sir.”

I sat and waited. She disappeared into the offices beyond. The sofa was comfortable, fresh, maybe new. It felt good sitting there. Alongside me was another collection of potted palms, in varying heights and widths. A couple of minutes later the woman came back out. Behind the smiling Hospitality Princess was Walter M. Deckart, dressed in white with gold braiding at his shoulders. He looked uneasy. Smiling for the woman.

Deckart said, “I’ll take it from here, Emma. Thanks.”

Emma nodded curtly and grinned at me once more. “Thank you, sir. It was a pleasure speaking with you.”

Then she was gone and Deckart looked at me. He put a hand up to his mouth and coughed. Then he grumbled under his breath. “Where’d you steal the badge?”

Twenty-Three

I said nothing. We stood together on the soft carpet. The waiting area surrounding us like a soft shell.

Deckart said, “You lied to me. About working for Mister Lawrence.”

“I never said anything. It’s what you wanted to believe is all. Psychologists call that confirmation bias.”

He blinked slowly and passed fingers over his mustache. “Yeah. I wouldn’t know about any of that bullshit. Tell you what I do know, you got a beating coming for what happened yesterday. I was you, I’d leave town.”

I stepped into his personal space. I could see him resisting the urge to step back. I said, “Take me into your office, or whatever you’ve got. Or I could slap you around out here if you’d like that better.”

Deckart stood for a moment, weighing up his options. He turned and started walking back. I followed. We didn’t speak. I watched him walk. Deckart was a muscular man, stepping his bow legs wide to compensate for exaggerated quadriceps. Large airy offices were distributed either side of the corridor. Left side offices featured port holes punched into the walls, letting in soft ocean light. The right side offices had walls and extra lighting built into recessed grooves at the ceiling. Deckart entered a room on the left. He had a big mahogany desk with flat screens lined up in a row on one side. He pointed to a chair. “Sit.”

I sank into the chair, which looked and felt expensive. The handcuffs I had taken from the Port Morris Correctional Facility were hard steel rings bulging in my front pocket. Deckart pointed at the ceiling. The opaque dome of a surveillance camera was fixed in a corner. He said, “Twelve hundred plus cameras on this ship. You ever act in something, like a school play?”

“I don’t remember school. I’m not sure that I attended.”

“Me either, to tell the truth. But I learned to act after school. I’m acting now, and so are you. Everything that happens on this boat is for the cameras. Thousands of actors on board.”

“Audio?”

“No. But they’d be able to lip read if it ever got to that point.”

“I see you’ve put some thought into this.”

“Sure. It’s my job.”

“Where does the video feed to?”

He patted one of the screens lined up on the side of his desk. “Right here, buddy. Right in my office.”

I said, “Those people you were following and intimidating. They got killed.”

Deckart leaned back in his executive chair, spread his fingers and interlocked them behind his head. He leveled his eyes at me. “So that’s who you’re working for, those losers. No disrespect to the dead intended. They sure hired the wrong protection.” He shook his head. “First off, I twisted the guy’s goddamned finger after he came at me, not before. And that is it. I heard there was a murder at Beaver Falls, and I figured it was them, cause how many other people get killed out at Beaver Falls? But I had nothing to do with that.”

“I actually believe you, but I bet you know who did do it.”

“Nope. Fact is, I don’t.” He leaned forward and the chair came with him, delivering both thick forearms to the wood desk. “Really, I don’t.”

“Your client changed his mind and took