Once Upon A Poet

by H S Peer

  The place started to fill up after ten. I talked with the crews I knew and met some people I didn’t. I drank more than I usually did and didn’t receive any unwanted visitors. I half expected Farrell to make an appearance, but she didn’t. I was disappointed but relieved at the same time. I stayed until closing and dropped the bank deposit off without incident at the night deposit.

  I did a quick drive-by of Demter’s Jewellery in the diamond district as I promised Marty I would. In an area so well patrolled the business had no steel shutters, only burglar bars on the windows. That was a problem. With shutters, no one can see inside so the beam of my flashlight wouldn’t be seen. On the other hand, you couldn’t see out either in case a blue and white arrived on the scene. In a situation like this I would have to use night-vision goggles. I hate them, they make me hot and sweaty, and I always worry about the battery supply. If, as Marty had said, he had the keys and the alarm codes, the job would be a piece of cake. In and out with me a lot richer. I still had another couple of days to check it out. That would involve a couple of nights of sitting in my car and drinking coffee while watching the comings and goings of the police. I didn’t look forward to that, but it was part of the job of a master criminal. Chances were I could get in and out without incident, but I didn’t leave anything to chance.

  I parked in my garage and headed home. I found her waiting in the entryway just outside my building. She was shivering in the near-30 degree temperature and looked miserable. Even shivering and miserable Farrell looked good enough to eat. I was unsure how to approach the situation, I’m not used to callers at my home. Where I live is a much-guarded secret. I approached.

  “I can find you too,” she said. Her teeth were chattering.

  “So you can.”

  I had the key in my hand, and we stood in silence for nearly a minute.

  “Aren’t you going to invite a girl in for a drink?” she asked.

  I was at a loss for words and only nodded. I had real reservations about inviting her in, the same reservations any sane person would have before inviting a vampire into their home. What was she here for? Was she going to pull a gun and fill me full of holes? I thought of the Browning Hi-Power in my shoulder holster. My coat was unbuttoned, it always was. I’d been through too much to make a mistake like that. Who was faster, I wondered, if that was why she was here. Did I really want to deal with a dead body in my home?

  I unlocked the deadbolts and ushered her inside. On the third floor, in my suite, I got a fire going in the fireplace and poured her a brandy. She sat in a wingback chair and sipped at it.

  “Sorry,” I said, “No Tullamore Dew.”

  “This will do nicely,” she said.

  I flipped on CNN, and we watched in silence for nearly twenty minutes. On a commercial break, she rose and pulled a slip of paper from the back pocket of her jeans. She was wearing a tight-fitting top, and when she stood I could see her navel. I longed to lick it but held my ground. She pushed the paper at me across the coffee table.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “What you wanted,” came the reply.

  I opened notepaper, folded once, and read. On it was the specs of an alarm. It was a Formosa, one of the best, silent, with cellular backup. The software was version six, the newest and best. To deactivate it you need a code and a key. This job would be a challenge, even for someone as great as me.

  “That’s quite an alarm,” I said.

  “But you can do it?”

  “There’s very little I can’t do,” I said.

  She rose from the chair and sat beside me on the couch. She was too close; I could feel heat as her hip met mine.

  “I really need this score,” she said.

  “Where’s you gunny tonight?” I asked.

  She put a hand on my left thigh.

  “I gave him the night off. I thought he might get in the way,” she whispered in my ear. I could feel her hot breath and something stirring deep inside me. No. I would steel myself against her advances; nothing good could come of this.

  “What do you say, Poet? Can we do business?” Her tongue snaked out of her mouth and trailed gently along my ear. Her fingertips ran up and down my thigh.

  “For 25?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she whispered, “25.” Her arms slipped around my waist.

  I tried to say something, but all I managed was a moan. Her hands had found my belt and went to work. It was all a put-on I knew. She was doing this to get what she wanted. At the moment I didn’t care. I date a bevy of beauties but this one, with the accent, was enough to push me over the edge.

  When the first kiss came, it was gentle with a hint of forcefulness. After exploring each other and losing our clothing on the couch, we retired to the bedroom. I won’t go into what followed. For what it was, mindless sex without a hint of emotion, it was satisfying. We pleasured each other for hours and showered together before she left at six am. I agreed to meet with her later that evening.

  With Farrell gone I turned to sleep. It was a long time in coming. I was sore in all the right places. A couple of good knocks of brandy did what they were supposed to, and I fell into a rumpled bed in a room that smelled of sex. The bed was still warm, and I could smell her scent on the pillow.

  I slept fitfully and didn’t dream of Amber for the first time in many nights.

  Chapter 26

  I went through my morning ritual of coffee and cigarettes that Friday afternoon, although a little later than usual. It was nearly 4 pm before I was fully functional again. I dressed and went to an electrical supply shop. Armed with the bulb, I’d found the day before I asked what it was used for. As expected the attendant told me it was used for theatrical lighting. Ah ha, I was right in the first place. What it meant I didn’t know. Someone had gone to a condemned building and used theatrical lighting. It wasn’t such a leap of faith that they were filming something there. Maybe there was a market for porn shot in desolate surroundings. I didn’t know.

  The dinner special at the Liar’s Breath was a roast turkey. Why the cook would cook a turkey on a Friday, I had no idea. I ate it just the same. As always the gravy was divine, and he’d used real cream in the mashed potatoes. Dinner isn’t a big deal at my bar, it’s not that kind of place. Usually, it’s chicken wings and draft. Turkey on a Friday? I shook my head. I took my third Scotch back to my office and opened the safe.

  I looked at the photos and deposit slip again hoping for inspiration. None was forthcoming. After half an hour of ruminating, I went back to my place at the bar. I asked Biscuit if Jimmy my bug guy had swept my office that day. Biscuit nodded and went back to polishing glasses.

  Farrell arrived around 11 pm, again all milk and honey. She rubbed up against me as she talked about banalities. After a drink, we retired to my office.

  “When do you want to do this?” I asked.

  “Sometime next week?”

  I nodded. “You have a shipper lined up?”

  “Yes, all the cars will be loaded into shipping containers and shipped the day we get them,” she said with that sweet voice.

  So that end was taken care of. The last thing I needed was for this thing to go wrong and a bunch of stolen cars to be sitting in a warehouse somewhere, ready for the cops to pounce on them.

  “What do we do next?” she asked.

  “I need to case the place before this goes any further? Care to pretend you’re my girlfriend tomorrow when I go car shopping?”

  “Sounds like fun,” she said and sipped her whiskey.

  “Good. Stop by here tomorrow around three, and we’ll go to... .?”

  “Manhattan Fine Cars,” she said.

  “Yes, and we’ll act like a couple looking for a new sports car. I assume that’s what you’re after.”

  “Yes,” she said, “Five Lotuses.”

  “A woman of infinite taste,” I said.

  Farrell smiled, and for a moment I was in love. If I hadn’t of seen the other side of her, I would have sold my so
ul to see that smile again. I don’t see a lot of women but the ones I do have a bloom on them. Sometimes I can’t explain, and sometimes it is something as simple as crimson painted toenails.

  “Be a good girl,’ I said, “And be on your way.”

  She didn’t hang around, she left after I’d given her permission. I guess there was to be no repeat of last night. She’d gotten what she’d wanted and used the sex as a tool. I was okay with that, I guess. We all use the tools at our disposal.

  I decided to call it an early night and headed home. Tonight no one was waiting for me. I was dejected for a moment. Inside I dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I washed down a couple of extra-strength Tylenol to help with the pain in my arm. The Maltese Falcon was on one of the movie stations. I smoked and got to thinking. I didn’t like the fact that the Greater Bank of New York was involved. That didn’t sit right with me.

  What I needed was to get inside the bank find some paperwork. That was an impossibility. Too much to lose to try that route. I bet Rainbow’s Mr. Smith had a safety deposit box there. I wanted a look inside. Like everything else, there was a back door to my problem. If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again. I could always get inside the bank, virtually.

  Chapter 27

  After I dressed and ate Saturday morning, I went to see Jimmy the Net. Some people thought he got his name by catching butterflies. Those in the know knew what he really did. I drove to the Bronx and pulled up outside a nondescript house. I knocked on the front door. It was Jimmy’s mother that answered. She looked like a woman that had an adult child living in her basement. Jimmy was thirty-something and made good money and could have afforded a tidy penthouse somewhere. Why he stayed at home, I will never know.

  You couldn’t see it from the street, but there was a fiber optic line running under the scraggly front lawn. In Jimmy’s business, you had to be as fast as you could. His mother didn’t recognize me, but she steered me to the basement. Jimmy sat before one of five computers typing away. The walls were paneled with pine, and cigarette smoke hung in the stale air. There was a ratty green carpet underfoot. A small bar sat at the end of the room. The only light came from the glow of the monitors. Jimmy had wild curly hair and a pale face now glowing blue from the computer monitors, giving him a cyanotic look.

  He hadn’t heard me coming down the stairs even though I had made enough noise to wake the dead. He tapped away at the keyboard. I cleared my throat. He jumped in his chair and swiveled around. He looked at me a moment before recognizing me.

  “Poet,” he said rising and offering his hand.

  We shook, and I asked how he had been.

  “It all the same to me,” he said.

  “I need some data,” I told him. That’s what he was good at, retrieving data of any type from computers.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “I need you to hack into the Greater New York bank.”

  He whistled.

  “Too hard for you?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I was stupid. “There’s almost nothing I can’t get into,” he said.

  That was true. He had hacked the FBI most wanted list website and filled it with photos of ex-presidents. He’d done something similar to the CIA’s public site as well. When I left the NYPD, it was Jimmy that erased my personnel and fingerprint file. I took care of the hard copies myself. It was Jimmy that had virtually erased my existence when I became Poet. There was no trace of me under my former name on any computer in the nation. The job had cost me big, but it had accomplished what I wanted. I became invisible.

  “Then what’s the problem?” I asked.

  “They are kind of our side of the street. I should probably talk t someone before I try something like that.”

  Jimmy did a lot of work for the five families that ran the city. As time changes so does the crime. Instead of hijacking trucks and robbing banks, the mob had branched out into white-collar crime.

  “It’s worth a grand, “ I told him.

  “It’s not the money,” he told me, “It’s the principal. Why do you want in there anyhow?”

  “I’m working on something for a friend,” I said, “He’s in Rikers, and I’m trying to prove he didn’t do what the cops think he did. There’s a porn production company called Rainbow involved. They have accounts, I think, at the bank.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, still unsure.

  “Look, Jimmy,” I explained, “Two women are dead over this and I have to find out why.

  “How is that my problem?” he asked.

  He had a point; none of this was his problem. If I couldn’t get to him with the facts, maybe I could with greed. “I’ll go $2,500,” I said.

  He seemed to perk up a little bit at the sound of two-and-a-half grand.

  “No one will know you received this information from me?” he asked.

  “Cross my heart,” I replied. He laughed.

  “What do you want me to get?” he asked.

  “Any account information for Rainbow. You know, deposits, withdrawals, all of that. And I need a notation made on their computer file to get me access to their safety deposit box.

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “Unless you find something really juicy that you think would be helpful.”

  I gave him a grand to start work with. He told me there was another job before mine. On one of the monitors were photographs of HK MP5 submachine guns. I didn’t want to know anything else. I got back to the car and headed to the Liar’s Breath.

  I remembered something as I sat in my office thinking things over. There had been no camera equipment a Rainbow’s office. Where would that be? They couldn’t make films without cameras, and the office was too small to hold that type of equipment. It was probably in a warehouse somewhere, but to find out I needed a little phone ruse. As no one would be at Rainbow’s office on a Saturday, it would have to wait until Monday.

  Farrell arrived just after 3 pm dressed in a short skirt, knee-high black boots, and a tight white sheer blouse. I had dressed the way any wealthy man would dress on a Saturday, in khaki pants with a navy blue Polo shirt and a leather jacket. We exchanged greetings and headed to the dealership.

  A 12-foot high chain link fence surrounded the lot. Barbed wire crowned the top. On every other pole was a high-intensity spotlight facing in. They took security seriously here. I already knew that from reading the alarm specs Farrell had given me. We pulled in through an open gate and parked. Like a couple of shoppers, we started to walk around the lot and look into the cars. I didn’t take long for a salesman to find us, it never does.

  He had so much gel in his hair it looked like a helmet. With a fake plastic smile pasted on his face, he shook my hand.

  I was standing next to a Porsche 911 convertible.

  “Like it?” asked the salesman named Mark.

  “Yes. It looks like a nice ride.”

  He looked at my Saab, which I had had the garage wash before bringing it here. “Your wheels are in pretty good shape, how old is it.”

  “A year,” I replied.

  “We can give you an excellent trade-in,” he said.

  I nodded. The Porsche was white with a navy blue interior. There was no sticker in the window indicating how much it was worth. If you had to ask you couldn’t afford it.

  “How about a test drive?” asked Mark.

  “Sure,” I said, and he went to get the keys from the office, where I needed to be to have a look around. I’d make some pretext after the test drive of getting inside.

  I think my driving skills shocked Mark. I’d taken a course in aggressive driving and knew how to push the car to its limits. I took corners tight and too fast. Mark’s knuckles were white. I wanted to put the top down, but it was a little too cold for that. Back at the lot, Mark looked happy to get out of the car. He walked back to the office to return the keys and Farrell, and I followed.

  “What do you say?” he asked, “Should I draw up some paperwork and get
this deal rolling?”

  “Do you have any brochures?” I asked, “I’m looking at a bunch of different cars and would like some literature.”

  He nodded and disappeared. In the showroom was what Farrell was after; five brand new Lotuses shiny and slick. The one nearest to me was racing green and looked like it could maneuver a minefield without any trouble. I looked around the room. The alarm console was just inside the doors. The circular slot for the key was right beside it. There was a motion sensor mounted on one wall, and the windows were wired. I wondered if they let an attack dog patrol the yard at night.

  After seeing the alarm, I knew I could disarm it. It wouldn’t be easy, Formosa’s weren’t meant to be, but I could do it. The only hard part was getting it done in under a minute. That was how long I had before the alarm, even if it was silent, sounded. Farrell said she had keys. I wondered if she meant to the alarm too. That would make things infinitely more manageable.

  Mark returned bearing a thick folder with a photo of a speeding Porsche on the cover. I took it and thanked him. Maybe I would buy the car. Trade in the Saab on something better. Not now, maybe next spring.

  Farrell and I left. For as much help as she was, I could have left her at home. I saw what I needed and could be prepared for the eventualities. I would undoubtedly earn my $25,000 on this little adventure. I didn’t really want to work with Farrell or her crew of amateurs, but the money was too good to overlook. Money will be the death of me, as my mother always said.

  We left the dealership, and I dropped Farrell off at a subway stop before returning to the Liar’s Breath. It was shaping up to be a good night. The place was nearly full with dinnertime customers. I wasn’t surprised to see turkey as the special of the day. Damn that cook. I’d have to have Biscuit have a word with him.