Caravan of Thieves by David Rich Read Free Book Online Page A

came along to the rapids near the river mouth, and it started bothering him what was on the other side and how if he were on the other side, his wife couldn’t get to him. So he explored on foot and he thought and he planned and he scouted. He realized that if he could float a boat down here from upriver, it would make the perfect getaway. The problem was that his wife kept a close watch on every penny he made. Every time I talked to him he turned the subject back to the boat. He just couldn’t get that vision out of his head, like we all get about a woman sometimes. And it happened at the time I was planning a business venture that could use his accounting skills and he could earn the side money he needed tofulfill his dream and buy a little peace.… Now I’ve been talking and those fish stopped being hungry.”
    He stopped. It was to check on me, I think. To see if I was going to play my part properly. If not, that meant I was too distracted. I said, “But how did you end up with it?”
    “He owed me a little money at the end of things and said I could use the boat whenever I wanted to until he paid me back. I was the only other person in the world who knew he owned it or where it was. His wife never knew this boat existed. When he came up here, he told her he was visiting clients or going to a convention or whatever excuse he could sell her at the time. Over the years, I found it a pretty good place to relax. And he came up less and less until he stopped coming at all. I had moved on and lost touch with Simon. I asked around and found out he got sent to prison at Lompoc, so the next time I was nearby I went over to visit him. Terrible sight he was, too. Skinnier than ever and hair cut short. He shook his head and I could see that he just hated himself. It seems buying the boat wasn’t the only way he tried to find peace. His other try was with another woman, and he married her, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to divorce the first one first, and it wasn’t long before both wives found out and it turned out he had married the same type twice. They got together on his finances and found that he had been working quite a few side ventures, some of which were profitable but on which he could not pay taxes because then his wives would have known about the money. Both wives had divorced him, of course, so he was really looking forward to the day he got out, and he made me swear to take good care of the boat until he could use it again.”
    “So you have it until he gets out?”
    “Poor Simon won’t be getting out. He had a heart attack a few months later and died. I didn’t think there was any need to go pointing out the boat to the ex-wives; they had pretty much bled him dry. And the government, hell…no offense.”
    People who just met Dan, people who didn’t know him, were really lucky because they could think they loved him when they heard him tell that story. For me, the part that stuck the most was the part he left out, the part of the conversation at Lompoc where Dan was checking to see if Simon had implicated him in any crimes.
    I knew it was my turn next. Dan would want to know the whole story, and I must have been brooding about how to go about it. We were silent. Then he said, “Do you think that means I stole this boat?” His tone was startling; he was sincere. I looked at him. His face had grown dark and his eyes were sharp and hard, as if he were staring but seeing things that weren’t there. The contrast with his face made his eyes seem like they were emitting light. “Do you?” I looked up at the sky to see if there were clouds making the light change, but, no, the sky was still blue.
    “No,” I said. “You didn’t steal it.”
    “I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone else and never will. I never had anything in this life that I didn’t steal. Never, nothing.”
    I laid out for him why I was there and how I got there: Shaw, Gladden, the whole thing, including the shooters