Honor Among Thieves Read online

  T. Hamilton McKenzie spent most of the night trying to work out what the man with the quiet voice could possibly want. He had checked his bank statements. He only had about $230,000 in cash and securities, and the house was probably worth another quarter of a million once the mortgage had been paid off—and this certainly wasn’t a sellers’ market, so that might take months to realize. All together, he could just about scrape up half a million. He doubted if the bank would advance him another cent beyond that.

  Why had they selected him? There were countless fathers at Columbus School who were worth ten or twenty times what he was—Joe Ruggiero, who never stopped reminding everybody that he owned the biggest liquor chain in Columbus, must have been a millionaire several times over. For a moment, McKenzie wondered if he was dealing with a gang that had simply picked the wrong man, amateurs even. But he dismissed that idea when he considered the way they’d carried out the kidnap and the follow-up. No, he had to accept that he was dealing with professionals who knew exactly what they wanted.

  He slipped out of bed at a few minutes past six and, staring out of the window, discovered there was no sign of the morning sun. He tried to be as quiet as he could, although he knew that his motionless wife must surely be awake—she probably hadn’t slept a wink all night. He took a warm shower, shaved, and for reasons he couldn’t explain to himself, put on a brand-new shirt, the suit he only wore when he went to church and a flowered Liberty of London tie Sally had given him two Christmases before and that he had never had the courage to wear.

  He then went down to the kitchen and made coffee for his wife for the first time in fifteen years. He took the tray back to the bedroom where he found Joni sitting upright in her pink nightgown, rubbing her tired eyes.

  McKenzie sat on the end of the bed and they drank black coffee together in silence. During the previous eleven hours they had exhausted everything there was to say.

  He cleared the tray away and returned downstairs, taking as long as he could to wash and tidy up in the kitchen. The next sound he heard was the thud of the paper landing on the porch outside the front door.

  He dropped the dishcloth, rushed out to get his copy of the Dispatch and quickly checked the front page, wondering if the press could have somehow got hold of the story. Clinton dominated the headlines, with trouble in Iraq flaring up again. The President was promising to send in more troops to guard the Kuwaiti border if it proved necessary.

  “They should have finished off the job in the first place,” McKenzie muttered as he closed the front door. “Saddam is not a man who works by the book.”

  He tried to take in the details of the story but couldn’t concentrate on the words. He gathered from the editorial that the Dispatch thought Clinton was facing his first real crisis. The President doesn’t begin to know what a crisis is, thought T. Hamilton McKenzie. After all, his daughter had slept safely in the White House the previous night.

  He almost cheered when the clock in the hall eventually struck eight. Joni appeared at the bottom of the stairs, fully dressed. She checked his collar and brushed some dandruff off his shoulder, as if he were about to leave for a normal day’s work at the university. She didn’t comment on his choice of tie.

  “Come straight home,” she added, as she always did.

  “Of course I will,” he said, kissing his wife on the cheek and leaving without another word.

  As soon as the garage door swung up, he saw the flickering headlights and swore out loud. He must have forgotten to turn them off the previous night when he had been so cross with his daughter. This time he directed his anger at himself, and swore again.

  He climbed in behind the wheel, put the key in the ignition and prayed. He switched the lights off and, after a short pause, turned the key. First quickly, then slowly, he tried to coax the engine into action, but it barely clicked as he pumped the accelerator pedal up and down.

  “Not today!” he screamed, banging the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. He tried a couple more times and then jumped out and ran into the house. He didn’t take his thumb off the doorbell until Joni opened it with a questioning look on her face.

  “My battery’s dead, I need your car, quickly, quickly!”

  “It’s being serviced. You’ve been telling me for weeks to have it attended to.” T. Hamilton McKenzie didn’t wait to offer an opinion. He turned his back on his wife, ran down the drive into the road and began searching the tree-lined avenue for the familiar yellow color with a sign reading 444-4444 attached to the roof. But he realized there was a hundred-to-one chance of finding a cab driving around looking for a fare that early in the morning. All he could see was a bus heading towards him. He knew the stop was a hundred yards away, so he began running in the same direction as the bus. Although he was still a good twenty or thirty yards short of the stop when it passed him, the bus pulled in and waited.

  McKenzie climbed up the steps, panting. “Thank you,” he said. “Does this bus go to Olentangy River Road?”

  “Gets real close, man.”

  “Then let’s get going,” said T. Hamilton McKenzie. He checked his watch. It was 8:17. With a bit of luck he might still make the meeting on time. He began to look for a seat.

  “That’ll be a dollar,” said the driver, staring at his retreating back.

  T. Hamilton McKenzie rummaged in his Sunday suit.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “I’ve left—”

  “Don’t try that one, man,” said the driver. “No cash, no dash.” McKenzie turned to face him once again.

  “You don’t understand, I have an important appointment. A matter of life and death.”

  “So is keeping my job, man. I gotta stick by the book. If you can’t pay, you’ve gotta debus ’cause that’s what the regulations say.”

  “But—” spluttered McKenzie.

  “I’ll give you a dollar for that watch,” said a young man seated in the second row who’d been enjoying the confrontation.

  T. Hamilton McKenzie looked at the gold Rolex that had been presented to him for twenty-five years’ service to the Ohio State University Hospital. He whipped it off his wrist and handed it over to the young man.

  “It must be a matter of life and death,” said the young man as he exchanged the prize for a dollar. He slipped the watch onto his wrist. T. Hamilton McKenzie handed the dollar on to the driver.

  “You didn’t strike a good bargain there, man,” he said, shaking his head. “You could have had a week in a stretch limo for a Rolex.”

  “Come on, let’s get going!” shouted McKenzie.

  “It’s not me who’s been holding us up, man,” said the driver as he moved slowly away from the curb.

  T. Hamilton McKenzie sat in the front seat wishing it were he who was driving. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t there. He turned around and asked the youth, “What’s the time?” The young man looked proudly at his new acquisition, which he hadn’t taken his eyes off for one moment.

  “Twenty-six minutes after eight and twenty seconds.”

  McKenzie stared out of the window, willing the bus to go faster. It stopped seven times to drop off and pick up passengers before they finally reached the corner of Independence, by which time the driver feared the watch-less man was about to have a heart attack. As T. Hamilton McKenzie jumped off the steps of the bus, he heard the clock on the Town Hall strike 8:45.

  “Oh, God, let them still be there,” he said as he ran towards the Olentangy Inn, hoping no one would recognize him. He stopped running only when he had reached the path that led up to reception. He tried to compose himself, aware that he was badly out of breath and sweating from head to toe.

  He pushed through the swing door of the coffee shop and peered around the room, having no idea who or what he was looking for. He imagined that everyone was staring back at him.

  The coffee shop had about sixty café tables in twos and fours, and he guessed it was about half-full. Two of the corner tables were already taken, so McKenzie headed to the