Whiplash River by Lou Berney Page A

that faced the beach and the ocean beyond.
    The resort looked just like the glossy photo on the business card. Except—not exactly. Shake noticed, as he got closer, that the stucco was chipped and a lot of the roof tiles were missing or broken. The pool was empty. You could see the dry rusty tubes in the dolphin mouths, where the water used to flow. A flexible plastic drainage tube, a couple of feet in diameter, snaked from the roof of the main building down to the ground.
    There wasn’t anybody around. No guests, no staff. Shake asked himself if he was surprised by any of that. He wasn’t.
    He found Harrigan Quinn pacing the balcony of the main building, talking on his cell phone. He was wearing a peach-colored polo shirt and pressed khakis, deck shoes without socks. When he saw Shake down below, he didn’t seem surprised at all. He killed the call and spread his arms wide.
    â€œThere he is!” Quinn said.
    Here I am, Shake thought.

Chapter 14
    Q uinn explained to Shake that the resort was closed for renovations. Fertility tourism, you had to understand, was a top-shelf racket. You couldn’t cut corners. You had to pamper the gals. They’d expect the very best, from Italian tile to Frette linens to a special kind of toilet made only in Japan. The special toilet squirted warm water up your ass and then blew your ass dry.
    Shake let that pass. Quinn caught him thinking it, though. His eyes twinkled. “You think that’s what I’m doing, Shake? Blowing hot air up your ass?”
    â€œWhat happened?” Shake said, looking around, innocent. “The construction crew doing the renovations knock off early today?”
    â€œGo ahead and ask,” Quinn said. “I’ll tell you the truth. It used to be simple, before nine/eleven. You wanted to move your money from here to there, you moved your money from here to there. Now, though, Christ, the regulations and the government sniffing around. Whoever even heard of a forensic accountant, twenty years ago?”
    They were sitting in the resort’s outdoor café. Or what someday might be the resort’s outdoor café. Right now it was just a concrete slab and a couple of plastic beach chairs, with a big faded umbrella advertising a brand of Italian liqueur Shake had never heard of.
    â€œSo, yes, I’m experiencing a liquidity issue,” Quinn said. “I went deep on this place. I threw the bomb. Let me ask you a question, Shake. When you die, are you gonna look back and regret the things you did, or the things you didn’t do?”
    What Shake was starting to regret was this conversation. He was starting to think he should just take his chances at airport security in Belize City.
    An old Kriol man, older than Quinn, shuffled out of the main building and handed them two cans of lukewarm Coke. Then he shuffled away.
    â€œWho’s trying to kill you?” Shake said.
    Quinn leaned back and studied Shake. “I told you.”
    â€œThey’re trying to kill me now too.”
    â€œYou?”
    Shake told him about the restaurant blowing up, the girl with the freckles putting the gun on him.
    â€œBecause—what?” Quinn said. “What you did for me the other night?”
    Shake waited.
    â€œThe why doesn’t matter,” Quinn said. “Okay. I see your point.”
    â€œThe who matters. And no hot air up my ass.”
    Quinn drummed his fingers on the plastic arm of his beach chair.
    â€œI might have an idea, ” he said finally. “That’s all.”
    â€œLet’s hear it.”
    â€œBack in the eighties, this was after Nicaragua, after Berlin, I did some consulting work in Southeast Asia. I told you before, the kind of people hired me. The business of relationships? Bringing folks together? Well, Vietnam back then, you remember maybe, it was the Wild West. The Reds had gone free market, Saigon was a boomtown. And Cambodia, with the Khmer Rouge gone. It was