The Tailor's Razor

7. Intimidation is the Key to Success

Thursday afternoon
On the filthy boulevard of Calle 50, Area Bancaria, Panama City

Madison thought her stomach might have been riding a trapeze. She'd felt sick all week since her mother, tear-stained, told her what happened to her father. The assurance that they wouldn't have to identify his burst skull was small consolation beside the vast shadow that was creeping into the pit of her life. If truth be told she'd been ignoring Will's advice, trying to numb the pain that was quickly defining her passage through the day. She thought his counsel made sense, to accept the grief and devour it before it devoured her, but it was easier to just swallow all the agony dripping from her heart and throat.

It was a strange little revelation on behalf of the Australian, however, that sent her mind reeling after a distraction: turning up the day after Billy had been shot Will gave her the number for a bank account in Panama. Yes, it was the assassin's account, and that was a useful enough bread crumb, but it was not that per se that horrified her. Her family effectively owned the HMRT Group; a semi-legal entity constructed in the eighties to help them dodge tax.

That was so much more than coincidence. She had to admit, though, that it made finding the details of the account wonderfully easy; she knew a few top-end employees. In fact one of the financial managers was an old flame of hers who'd been offered the position simply so he'd stop pursuing her. Apparently her father thought a boy whose family hadn't been in New York for two hundred years wasn't good enough for his daughter but perfectly fine for an upper-management position in his shell company. Of course, they'd been friends since middle school, and a bit of a dork, but utterly harmless. It was just his ambition that she underestimated, but then again what was love compared to three hundred grand a year in sunny Panama? She still didn't know whether to blame her father or Reggie.

To lean on him would be child's play: he'd spill confidential information without too much hassle.

But that in itself seemed too easy. Was this a trap too? She watched Will play with his dog and her brother on the lawn. She barely knew the man. He could be lodged as firmly in this spider web as anyone else, ushering her into the fangs of the same black widow that had caught her father.

With the dangling, twisting feeling in her gut she'd flown out to Panama, booking a convoluted and torturous series of transfers and layovers to arrive on the isthmus. Catching a taxi out from the airport her suspicion kept bubbling to the surface and it preyed on the back of her neck. She thought an open window might offer a bit of reprieve but she'd caught the wet season right on its dawn: the air was boiling, thick with humidity. Indeed, passing over the magnificent Corredor Sur which swung out over the open waters of the bay she watched black clouds growing fat over the ocean.

They were quickly back on terra firma, peeling away from the sea breeze and into the dank air of the city. It was a strange place, with an impressive skyline of shining towers that looked as progressive as Hong Kong or any other metropolis on the Pacific Rim. But the tangled powerlines and discarded rubbish bags made it look like slums dressed up as paradise. There was a Hooters on the corner with barefoot boys playing soccer in the carpark. It was all very second-hand, fake like rotten saccharine.

"Treinta dolares," the taxi driver pulled up in front of HMRT.

"Uh... three dollars?" Madison pulled out a few green Washingtons.

"No," he shook his head, flashing full hands at her, "Trienta."

"Oh! Thirty?"

"Sí! Sí, gracias niña," he smiled his dirty ivories at the girl as she paid and left the cab. Slapping the steering wheel he took off down the filthy boulevard of Calle 50, thunder following a flash over the bay.