Madison's Avenue

by Mike Brogan

“Ugh!”

  They strolled down from the steep bluff, their feet sinking in the warm sand, to a nice spot near the south end of the bay. They spread out their beach towels, plopped down, and gazed out at the blue-green water rolling onto the white sand beach.

  “First the phone calls, then the water?” Kevin said.

  “Sounds like a plan.” She dialed her Boston flat and then her father’s apartment and picked up a some “sorry to hear about your father” messages. Next, she checked her office calls. None were urgent. And no more clients had fired the agency!

  “Really?” Kevin said on his phone. “When?” He listened for a few more moments and hung up.

  “That was Craig Borden. He just talked to his banking buddy in the Caymans. The money was wire-transferred out of Tradewinds Investments two hours ago.”

  “Transferred again?”

  “Yeah. To a bank in Curacao.”

  She shook her head in frustration. “They keep moving the money.”

  “So it’s harder to trace.”

  Madison wondered if she’d ever learn who was behind the money.

  “Did Craig find out anything about Karla Rasmussen’s husband?”

  “Fred Rasmussen was never seen or heard from after he disappeared that night in Manhattan eighteen years ago.”

  Another dead end, she thought. Maybe, another dead man.

  “Did you tell Craig about Bradford Tipleton’s death?”

  “Yes, and Craig promises he’ll be extra careful.”

  She nodded, but still worried about Craig, and Dean Dryden on his yacht, and her best friend Linda Langstrom at National Media. What if her assassin knew they were helping her? What if he’d already sent hitmen after them?

  “Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “Craig played tight end in college. The guy’s made of steel!”

  So are bullets, she thought.

  * * *

  Eugene P. Smith crouched behind the thick bushes on the bluff above Sand Bank Bay, focusing his powerful TC military binoculars on Madison and Kevin, the only two people on the mile-long beach.

  Smith reached over and patted the unconscious head of young Benny, the bound and gagged security guard. Poor Benny never saw the heavy blackjack that dropped him like a sack of cement.

  Smith worked his powerful binoculars up Madison McKean’s long shapely legs, then slowly up to her breasts which, he noted, filled her bikini top quite nicely. The woman oozed sexuality.

  And here, he could enjoy her oozing sexuality, since any DNA evidence would be destroyed in saline ocean water, where her body would be found. Once again, things had worked out to his advantage.

  Smith turned and looked at Nigel, the local thug he’d hired this morning. Nigel was six-six and weighed over three-hundred pounds, most of it in his chest and shoulders. His mud-hued face was dominated by an enormous, bulging brow that suggested excessive steroid use. Nigel’s Anglo, African and Caribbean-Indian genes had swirled together to create a towering, powerful, but decidedly dim-witted Neanderthal. He squinted at Madison through slity dark eyes that looked like hyphens.

  Smith watched her rub sunscreen lotion on her face, legs and shoulders.

  “Everything ready, Nigel?”

  Nigel looked down at the large black bag in his hands. “Uh-huh.”

  “She’s a pillar of pulchritude, n’est ce pas?”

  “Huh...?”

  “She’s beautiful, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Does she turn you on, Nigel?”

  Nigel grinned.

  “Like a closer look?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Forty One

  Harry Burkett felt good as he strolled along East Ninety-Third Street in his new Z-Coil tennis shoes. He liked how they made him three inches taller and how they gripped in the rain puddles. He also liked how the rain cleaned all the scum off the sidewalks. Too bad it didn’t clean off the human scum too, he thought, as he passed a teenager with zits, purple hair and several chrome rings drooping from her eyebrows and lips. She was moaning about someone stealing her coke, and she wasn’t talking cola.

  Burkett felt like dropping a few bunker-busters, big 4,600 pounders, up the street in Spanish Harlem, vaporizing all the putrid human waste - all the slimy junkies, pimps, hookers, dealers and payoff-grabbing cops. Vaporize the bastards!

  Now that’s ethnic cleansing, he thought.

  Four blocks later, he reached into his gray jogging suit and checked his .45 caliber SIG-Sauer. The gun felt as soothing as it did the day he yanked it from the severed hand of a Iraqi soldier whose torso lay twenty feet away. Just touching the gun brought back pleasant memories of the Gulf War.

  And soon, the gun would give him another pleasant memory, he thought, looking up at Linda Langstrom’s apartment building. He turned up the volume on his headphones linked to the hardline phone in her apartment. Last night, behind her building, he cut through the cheap fence, popped open the building’s old phone control box and tapped into her line.

  Seconds ago, Langstrom had answered the phone and her words were coming through like she was walking beside him.

  “I discovered where the consulting fee has been deposited all these years?” Langstrom said.

  “Where?” A young woman asked.

  “Offshore bank on the island of Macau. A numbered account with no name.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “A friend at CitiBank. She also discovered that two months ago the money was withdrawn from Macau and deposited in another offshore bank in the Caribbean.”

  “Which bank?”

  “Hang on ... here it is ... it’s down in Nevis ... the Caribe National Bank.”

  Burkett swallowed hard. Langstrom had just linked the consulting fee to the account at Caribe National!

  “That’s the bank where my father’s account was!”

  She’s talking to Madison!

  “The account was in my father’s name, but he did not deposit the money.”

  “Incredible.”

  “Yeah. Somehow we’ve got to find the name of the original depositor sixteen years ago.”

  “I’ll ask my friend at CitiBank to try and dig it out.”

  Very bad idea, Burkett thought.

  He began to walk faster, but then their voices grew faint. He remembered he had to stay within two hundred feet of the apartment. Turning quickly, he stumbled into a sidewalk hole and had to steady himself for a moment.

  Suddenly, his feet felt cold. He looked down and saw he was standing in icy, ankle-deep rainwater.

  “SHIT!” he yelled, stomping water from his brand new Z-Coils. Enraged, he walked back toward her apartment, squishing with each step.

  “There’s something else you should know, Linda.”

  “What?”

  “The Caribe National banker I talked to yesterday is dead!” Harry Burkett smiled. Eugene P. Smith strikes again!

  “Jesus, what happened?”

  “They suspect heart attack. But I think murder.”

  Langstrom breathed out. “Be careful down there!”

  “I will. You too, Linda.”

  When Langstrom hung up, Harry Burkett yanked out his cell phone and speed-dialed the Executive VP.

  “Now what?” she said, bitchy as usual.

  “Linda Langstrom over at National Media has linked the consulting fee to the account at Caribe National Bank, and she told Madison.”

  A long pause. “What else do they know?”

  “That’s all,” Burkett said. “But Langstrom plans to ask a friend at Citibank to try to uncover the name of the original depositor.”

  “A waste of time,” she said. “But Langstrom and Madison are asking too many questions about the account. I don’t want banking authorities placing a Suspicious Activity Report on it, or investigating it.”

  Me either, Burkett thought, since I’m the guy who posed as Mark McKean and deposited the money into the Caribe National.

  The EVP was silent for several momen
ts. “Langstrom’s a problem. You know what to do.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Destroy her hard drive, e-mail records, disks.”

  “Right.”

  “Take her jewelry and valuables.”

  “I’ll make it look like a robbery....”

  “... that went very bad,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “And wear gloves.”

  He hated when she told him how to do his work. “Yeah, OK.”

  “And what about Madison and Kevin?”

  “Eugene’s planning a beach party for them. Nice, huh?”

  Burkett heard a click. No goodbye. No “nice job Harry.” Just a click. What a bitch!

  On the other hand, she always gave clear orders. Not the ambiguous, chickenshit, cover-your-ass orders he got from his Army commanders: “Respond with appropriate and commensurate force.” For Burkett, there was only one appropriate response: blow ‘em away.

  Harry Burkett phoned his contact at National Media and explained what he wanted the man to do.

  Then Burkett walked into a nearby alley and checked his SIG-Sauer.

  * * *

  After hanging up from Burkett, the EVP watched the heavyset mailroom employee deliver her mail, then limp away. She thought back to the short-leg limp of Merle Lee Jarvis, her second foster father, the most cruel and abusive man she’d ever known. Even now, her skin crawled at the memory of fat, sweaty Merle Lee pinning her to the cold, wet garage floor and raping her on her twelfth birthday.

  “I’m your birthday present!” he laughed. The pain had been excruciating and she knew she had to do something, or he would rape her every day. Then, like a miracle, she saw something beneath his workbench, a bright yellow box ... a box that might save her life.

  Three nights later, when Merle Lee shouted for her to make his nightly Jim Beam, she went to the kitchen, took the yellow box and prepared a very special Jim Beam. She handed him the drink and watched him raise the tall, iced tea glass to his mouth. He gulped down several greedy swallows and smacked his lips.

  As she turned to walk away, he grabbed her breast. “This feels good.”

  She pulled away from him. “Not as good as I’ll feel!”

  He stared back, obviously wondering what she meant. One second later, he knew. The potassium cyanide in the rat poison hit him like a line drive. His eyes shot open and he started breathing rapidly and gasping. He stared at her, his lips mouthing, “Help me....”

  She watched him slump to the floor and begin to convulse. She watched foamy saliva bubble from his lips. She watched his eyes jerk about. She watched Merle Lee Jarvis pass out and choke on his own vomit.

  She’d intended to teach Merle Lee a lesson, make him deathly sick so he’d never touch her again. But when his eyes went all glassy and rolled up, she realized she’d poured in too much rat poison.

  Too bad, she’d thought.

  On the other hand, rats deserved to die.

  Forty Two

  Madison filled her lungs with the fresh, tangy salt air sweeping off the bay, then breathed out slowly. She scooped up sand and let it trickle through her fingers.

  Everything seemed perfect. The sun was warm, the sky blue, and the breezes nice and cool, like the guy next to her. She looked over at Kevin all sprawled out and concluded he sprawled out about as well as a man could. His well-defined muscles glowed like buffed marble in the sun.

  She had to force herself to turn away.

  “Hey, Kevin...?”

  “Yep?” His eyes remained closed.

  “Should we open up a new branch office down here?”

  “Nope!”

  “Why?”

  “We should move the whole damn agency down here.”

  She smiled. “Why?”

  “I don’t know a client, or prospective client, who wouldn’t love to boondoggle down here for a weekend conference or meeting!”

  “Me either.”

  Some clients, she knew, chose their ad agency based on how close it was to good restaurants rather than how good the agency’s advertising was ... sort of like choosing your brain surgeon because his office is near The Four Seasons.

  Madison’s phone rang. Caller ID read Turner Advertising.

  She picked up. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Madison, it’s Alison Whitaker.”

  “Oh, Alison. Actually, I was about to call you.”

  “Why?”

  “I wondered if you learned anything more about who might have accused my father?”

  “No ... unfortunately nothing yet. But I did learn one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That asking questions about your father can be hazardous.”

  Madison gripped her cell phone tighter. “What happened?”

  “Some thug attacked me last night.”

  “My God, Alison, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. But as I was walking back from Lou’s Deli near my apartment, a large SUV – a Lincoln, I think – pulled up beside me. A big man in a dark raincoat jumped out and pushed me into an alley. He slapped me around a bit, then threw me against a fire escape where I picked up a one-inch gash behind my ear.”

  Madison felt like steel bands were tightening around her chest.

  “He grabbed me and said, ‘Stop asking questions about Mark McKean or you’ll wind up just like him.’ Then he got back in the SUV and drove off. That was it.”

  Madison swallowed a dry throat. “Alison, I’m so sorry. You should be home.”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. But I phoned to warn you. They may come after you when you get back to Manhattan.”

  They’re after me here, Madison thought, but decided not to alarm Alison further. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “Are you back in the office tomorrow?”

  “Yes, bright and early.”

  “Be careful,” Alison warned.

  “You, too.”

  Madison hung up, placed her cell phone under the thick beach towel, then filled Kevin in.

  He shook his head in disbelief. “Whoever the hell is behind this has their hired thugs everywhere.”

  “Except on this secluded beach, thank God.” She noticed they were still the only people in sight and was relieved that Benny and his handgun were watching over them from up on the bluff.

  Madison took another breath, laid back down and tried to calm herself. She closed her eyes and listened to the breezes hissing through the sea grass and the seagulls twittering overhead. She smelled the sweet fragrance of nearby flowers. And soon, she felt a cloud cast a shadow over her face ... but oddly, only her face.

  Opening her eyes, she saw the silhouette of a bearded man wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses standing directly over her. Beside him, stood a giant of a man, carrying a black bag.

  “Ultraviolet rays are harmful to your skin,” said the man with the hat.

  Madison’s heart stopped. The Tall Man.

  “So are bullets,” he added.

  Kevin started to sit up, but the giant’s shoe slammed him back down on the towel.

  She squinted at two gleaming handguns aimed at them.

  “Abandoning me in that ravine was rather rude,” the Tall Man said.

  “I sent an ambulance.”

  “And the cops.”

  Where are our knives? Madison wondered, then remembered they were in her beach bag six feet away. She looked up at the bluff, but didn’t see Benny. Turning back, her fingers nudged her cell phone beneath the folded beach towel. She felt the phone’s corners, located the 9 and 1 buttons and punched 9 1 1.

  “What do you want?” Kevin asked.

  “Blind obedience. Right, Nigel?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She thought she heard the 911 operator’s muffled voice through the towel as a large wave crashed ashore. Madison lifted the towel a bit and decided it was time to get loud.

  “Please don’t shoot us!” she shouted. “P
lease! I’m begging you – don’t shoot us!”

  Tall Man turned toward her. “Shoot you? You’re going to have an accident. And don’t bother shouting. Benny won’t hear you. He’s rather ... indisposed.”

  She prayed Benny was only indisposed.

  “How can we have an accident sunbathing on a quiet beach?”

  “Water sports accidents. They happen all the time, right Nigel?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “At Sand Bank Bay?” she said. A massive wave crashed ashore and she realized the operator couldn’t have heard “Sand Bank Bay.”

  “There are no water sports here at – ” Another wave smothered her words “Sand Bank Bay.”

  “Oh ... but there are about to be. Like snorkeling. A fun sport. Right, Nigel?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s why we bought you new snorkels. One hundred percent dry. Not a drop of water gets in.” He motioned with his gun for them to stand.

  Holding her towel in front of her, Madison slid the slim cell phone into her bikini brief. Fortunately, the brief had a short ruffled skirt that covered the phone’s slight bulge. She stood up.

  “I need my beach bag,” she said.

  “You need to WALK!” Tall Man said, pushing her forward.

  The two men nudged them down to the south end of the beach. There, the giant pulled two blue snorkels from his satchel.

  “Top of the line snorkels,” Tall Man said. “Look how easily the mouthpieces swivel.”

  Nigel took out two diving masks and began to adjust the straps.

  Tall Man unscrewed the top of an eyedropper-like bottle, then carefully deposited drops of a pale yellow liquid into the mouthpiece tube of each snorkel.

  “Epoxy,” Tall Man said. “Seals all that nasty seawater out.”

  “You mean it seals our death in,” Madison said.

  Tall Man’s lips bent in a smile.

  Perspiration blanketed Madison’s skin as she realized she was within seconds of dying on this beach. She had to keep the Tall Man talking. Maybe someone would walk onto the beach. Maybe the 911 operator had heard her.

  “What about Bradford Tipleton?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he feel pain?”

  “Poor Porky Pig. The man had an unfortunate mouth disease. He talked too much. Led to a fatal heart attack, I’m told.”