Cage's Crew

by Martin Archer

  “Sorry, not while I’m on the job. Maybe later when we know each other better.”

  I didn’t tell her that I don’t do sex when I’m working a job and then go to the other extreme and make up for lost time when I’m not. Pencie knows and thinks it means I’m saving it up for her. I’m not. I’ve always been that way ever since I got out of the military and into the game. No drinking or sex when I’m working. I’d nursed my first glass of wine at the steakhouse bar and made it right by slipping the bartender a twenty each time he gave me a club soda refill.

  Her real name, the woman told me, was Helen Napolitano. She wasn’t even married to Jack Douglass. They just pretended for the benefit of their neighbors and employees. So far as she knew she was still married to a Mob guy in Tucson by the name of Harry Napolitano who had disappeared five or six years ago. She’d been told she wasn’t likely to see Harry for a few years, if ever, and was sent from Tucson to move in with Jack Douglass and babysit his money-laundering wholesale jewelry operation.

  “I figured the recent deal in Chicago must have somehow gone wrong,” she said when she heard about the drug deal and the deaths.

  She said she had driven the diamonds to Chicago and given them to a guy but then, hours later, he’d surprised her by giving them back to her and telling her to drive them back to Phoenix. She didn’t know the guy except that he was from New York and must have been a friend of Jack’s boss since she’d seen them together in Tucson a couple of times. After she got back to Phoenix with the diamonds, Jack had been told to launder them by putting them into jewelry and selling them to one of Walmart’s jewelry buyers.

  It was also, she confided when I pressed her for all the details about why she drove the diamonds all the way to Chicago and then all the way back, supposed to draw out some guys who had killed one of his boss’s sons when he was doing a similar diamonds-for-drugs deal a couple of years ago. Holy shit. It was a set-up.

  She wasn’t, she said, supposed to know so much, but the guy she’d been “sort of seeing on the side once in a while” in Tucson before her husband disappeared was her husband’s boss, and he had bragged a lot when he was still trying to impress her. Among other things, he had let it drop that the "big boss" in New York to whom he reported was his uncle, Giuseppe Martini, aka Joseph Martin, a capo of the Bonnano family who ran an investment advisory company on Wall Street.

  It was the big boss's nephew, Roberto Martini, also known as Bobby Bucks, who represented the Bonanno family’s long-establish interests in Tucson. Bobby had been her husband’s boss and banging her on the side. It was Joseph Martin's son, I had killed a couple of years ago. It all began to make sense.

  “Bobby probably had my husband buried because he was afraid Harry would find out about us and kill him. Then the bastard found another girl and sent me to Jack.”

  The nephew in Tucson, she told me, was using the name of Robert Martin. He managed a branch office of his uncle’s investment advisory company. She described him in some detail right down to the color of the hair dye he used and a couple of intimately placed tattoos.

  Then Helen and I had quite a long talk about everything—her relationship with Jack Douglass, about the jewelry store and their travel plans and Robert Martin, how the diamonds were to be sold, and how she and Jack communicated with its two sales girls and the two jewelers who were putting the stones into settings so they could be wholesaled off to Walmart in time for the Christmas shopping season.

  Helen was very helpful once she accepted the idea she’d be in the Witness Protection Program—she told me about the jewelry store’s security system and gave me the security codes and her keys to the store and its safe “so I could get in and take pictures for evidence.” She even opened Jack’s computer so I could read his emails. I told her to leave it open so I could read more of them after we took a break.

  The good news was that we could get past the jewelry store’s security system and that the diamonds would be on the premises for several months until they were sold. It was also good news that Helen and Jack communicated with their employees by email when they were gone; the bad news was very bad—the diamonds and the stores other jewels were kept in a heavy duty Worldwide safe and it had an internal time lock such that it could be closed at any time but only opened between the hours of nine and four on business days.

  Chapter Four

  I probably should have let Helen start giving me a blow job before I killed her so she’d die happy, but I didn’t. She had seen my face and she knew that I was interested in the Martini family and the diamonds. Sooner or later, and probably sooner when she found out she wouldn’t be in Witness Protection, she or someone would put it together. She had to go and I wasn’t sure what would happen if I clipped her while she was sucking on my dick. So I just shot her in the head with her own pistol as she knelt down and began unzipping my pants. She was smiling as she unzipped me and never knew it was coming or felt a thing. Her living room was definitely going to need a new carpet.

  Jack stayed out late. Helen said he'd gone off to one of the local Indian casinos and how soon he’d be back would depend on how long it would take for him to lose all his money. Earlier I’d thought about coming back later to take care of them both at the same time. But finding them together seemed a bit chancy so I decided to do her and wait for Jack. I turned off all the lights and sat in the kitchen near where the door from the garage opened into the house.

  Either Jack took a lot of money to the casino or it was one of his luckier nights. I waited and waited in the darkness, leaving the kitchen only once and hurriedly to take a quick piss when I couldn’t hold it any longer. That’s when I discovered how hard it is for a man to unzip his fly wearing latex gloves. It was after two in the morning when I finally saw the lights of a car through the living room drapes as it pulled into the driveway. Almost immediately I heard the garage door go up.

  I was waiting for Jack when he came out of the garage and into the kitchen. He was tired and had obviously been drinking when he turned on the kitchen light and saw me standing there with my .38 revolver in one hand and his wife’s pink-handled .22 in the other. His eyes registered shock and surprise and he gave a little yelp when he saw me. Then resignation set in.

  “Hello Jack, how ya doin?” I asked.

  “There’s no need for the rough stuff. I’ll pay. I just need a little time, that’s all.”

  “That’s not why I’m here, Jack. Not at all.” That’s what I said as I motioned to him with my revolver and my head to sit it the chair at the kitchen table next to the one I was sitting in.

  “He won’t let me work it out, is that it?” he said heavily as he sat down with a grunt. “Well he’s got to because that’s the only way he’ll ever get his money.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Jack. I’m here so you can tell me all about the diamonds your wife brought back from Chicago last week. So sit there and talk to me until I know all about them.”

  “God, he can’t have those. They aren’t mine. They belong to someone else. They really do. They’d kill me, and you and Helen and everyone else if any of them went missing. You don’t understand who you’re dealing with; they’d really kill you.”

  “You mean Robert Martin? Or, should I say Roberto Martini?”

  “You know about him? You really know those guys? Well then, you know why you can’t have the diamonds.” He sounded greatly relieved.

  “Yeah, I do. So tell me, Jack, who told you to call Robbie Platts and set up the diamond job in Chicago last week?”

  “Martin did. He told me what to say. And it worked out—the New York guys got the product and we got our diamonds back. Better than what happened a couple of years ago, that’s for sure. Everybody’s happy. Right? Everybody’s happy?”

  “Not exactly, Jack. The guy who got the diamonds isn’t happy at all. Someone killed him and it was messy. So now my boss isn’t happy.”

  “But that has nothing to do with me. I’m innocent; I was just the little guy i
n the middle. All I did was make the calls Robert told me to make so he’d get the diamonds back after they were used to pay for some drugs. My wife drove all the way to Chicago to deliver them and then she brought them back. You can ask her, she’ll tell you I did exactly what Robert told me to do. I really did. She did too.”

  “I already asked her, Jack; I already asked her. You’ll be happy to know she confirmed everything you told me. By the way, you’re right-handed aren’t you?”

  When Jack nodded in agreement, I whipped his wife’s little pistol with the pink handles up against the right side of his head and shot him. I did it so fast he didn’t even have time to react except to start to jerk back a little.

  Afterwards, I put the little pistol into his right hand and pressed on his finger to shoot it again into a roll of kitchen towels I’d found under the sink. I did it so there would be some powder residue or whatever the hell it is that the police look for when they want to identify a shooter. Then I took a couple of more rounds out of her pistol to confuse things and dropped the damn thing on the kitchen floor where I thought it might fall if he’d shot himself after shooting her.

  I took the kitchen towel roll with me when I left. I’d unroll it and take the bullet out before I get back to the resort hotel where I was staying and then dump them separately—if I ever get back to it. I didn’t have a clue as to where I was or how to get there.

  Before I left, I drew the blinds, made sure the house was locked up, and flushed the toilet three times. Then I used Jack’s cell phone to send an email to his employees.

  “Helen and I heading to Vegas and then to the diamond markets in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv on business. We’ll be gone a couple of weeks and out of touch. Keep working on the diamonds for Walmart.”

  I wiped the phone clean and closed the computer before I left.

  ******

  Finding some place in a strange city when you don’t want to leave a record of searching for it on a cell phone is no easy matter. It took me almost a goddamn hour to find the hotel where I was staying and I was so tired by the time I found it that I slept until almost noon, except for once in the middle of the night when I had to get up and stumble into the bathroom to pee.

  It was almost two in the afternoon before I finished eating cinnamon apple pancakes in the resort’s coffee shop and using a computer in its business center to look up the Tucson address of Bobby Martini’s financial services office. The pancakes were particularly good. The apples were in some kind of crispy sugary glaze, sort of like burnt cream.

  After thinking about Tucson and Robert Martin while I was eating my pancakes, I decided it would be best to commute back and forth from Phoenix until Robert Martin and his friends were no longer a threat. That way I wouldn’t leave any tracks in the Tucson area for the Martini family or anyone else to pick up.

  Always set up a job so it leaves everyone looking for you looking in the wrong place is my motto, and a damn good rule to live by.

  All those things were going through my mind as I was drinking from the continually refilled coffee cup the waitress put in front of me as soon I sat down for a late breakfast the next day. But then I got to thinking about the diamonds in the jewelry store safe and changed my mind. First things first. I needed a crew and it didn’t need to be very large; just Norm and a guy who was really good with heavy duty safes. And that meant making a couple of calls to Robbie on one of my prepaid burner cell phones from a location well away from the resort hotel where I was staying in Phoenix.

  Chapter Five

  “Yo, Robbie, Harry Samuels here. How ya doin, buddy? It’s been a while, eh?”

  “Hey, Harry, how are you? How did that oil field job work out in North Dakota? Everything good?”

  “Well, we’ve got to talk about that sometime, eh? But now I’ve got something else. Do you have any idea where Ralph Richards is these days?”

  Richards was long dead, of course, but Robbie knew exactly what it meant when I asked about him. It meant I needed a good safe man.

  “I’m not sure, Harry; I’m not sure. But I’ll call Dick’s wife and try to get a number for you. Where you hanging out these days?”

  “In Vancouver at my tavern, of course, same as always, eh,” I said with my best Canadian accent as I rattled off the number of my prepaid throw-away cell phone. It was a number that wouldn’t work unless he added two to the second and fifth numbers and one to the sixth. I didn’t have to give Robbie the area code; he’d use the one on his phone’s caller ID and call back exactly six hours and nineteen minutes later on a safe cell phone from someplace at least an hour’s drive from his pawn shop.

  I would be on my own safe phone and far away from my hotel when Robbie called back. “In Vancouver” referred to a job we’d been on together in Vancouver that had gone badly. It was our private code and would tell Robbie the job in Chicago had gone so badly that there would be no payday. I didn’t say anything else because I figured Robbie already knew about the hotel shootings. Something like that in the heart of the city’s “Gold Coast” shopping area on Michigan Avenue was bound to have made the local newspapers’ websites in a big way even though people were always getting shot in Chicago.

  “Hold on will ya, Harry, I gotta get a pencil and a piece of paper and write that down,” Robbie said; he would write the number I gave him on the palm of his hand. “Okay, I found one. Give me that number again, willya?”

  I called Norm as soon as I hung up from talking to Robbie and invited him to check with his wife and call me back "if you can come over and play some golf for a few days.” Playing golf was our code for something important has come up. It would cause Norm to call me back from somewhere else on a very safe new phone.

  “Man, this is a great place,” I told him as we continued to talk. “A lot of people with money live here so the restaurants and stores are real nice. If you’re not doing much, why don’t you let your kids run things and come on over for a little golf? You’ve got to see this place, you really do. They’ve got some great golf courses down here despite the heat and they’re cheap this time of year because its summer and the tourists are gone. You should see them; you’ll love’em. Bring your clubs and gear; maybe this time you’ll win.”

  “You know, that’s a great idea. I’m ready to take a break. I’ll talk to my wife and let you know. What number can I reach you at these days?”

  The number I rattled off was pure garbage just like the one I’d given Robbie—unless Norm added two to the second and fifth numbers and one to the sixth.

  Three hours later, Norm and I had a long and serious talk about what we needed to do to protect ourselves and get “our diamonds.”

  ******

  My mention of golf was all it took to get Norm moving. He took off before dawn the next morning from his ranch’s dirt strip and reached one of the Phoenix area’s many airparks many hours later just as the sun was going down. He called me along the way to tell me where he’d be landing and approximately when. I was waiting as he taxied his plane up to the transit parking area.

  Norm was prepared. He’d brought his golf clubs and various other items he thought might be necessary, such as a police scanner and a couple of new and never fired .38 caliber revolvers that he assured me were untraceable. He also brought a couple of 12-gauge Browning shotguns with wooden plugs that could be removed to increase the number of shells they could hold beyond the legal hunting maximum of three. Norm was big on hunting.

  Being as he was so big on hunting, Norm also brought boxes of both birdshot and buckshot with him. The shotguns were brand new, still unassembled in their original cardboard boxes, and gift wrapped. He’d bought them a couple of years ago when a Walmart in northern Nebraska closed. The registration number showing on Norm’s old Piper Cherokee 235 with eighty-four gallon, long-range tanks was that of a similar plane without long-range tanks which had crashed near Ontario, California, many years earlier.

  I met Norm at the airfield and filled him in with what I’d learned a
s we drove into Phoenix. I told him everything except the fate of Jack Douglass and his wife. Norm didn’t ask, because he didn’t want to know, but he was in total agreement with what I suggested—that we should, first of all, put together a crew by adding a safe specialist and get “our diamonds” from the jewelry store; then, immediately after that, we should take steps to “modify the behavior” of the mobbed-up financial advisor in Tucson before he had a chance to find us and send a crew to whack us.

  Normally mild-mannered Norm was quite emphatic about what he had in mind.

  “I get a half a chance, Cage, I’m going to modify that bastard’s behavior with five rounds of buckshot.”

  ******

  Norm and I were quite busy on the three days following his arrival in Phoenix. The first thing we did after he landed was move to a much more appropriate motel in an older part of town, a motel without security cameras to record our comings and goings. Then we put on disguises and drove around in my clean Toyota SUV and bought no less than three cheap “burner” cars off of Craigslist, and had more keys made for them so we’d each have a key in addition to the “backup” key we’d leave on top of each car’s right front tire.

  We began using one of them, a grey Ford four-door, and parked the Toyota SUV and the other two burner cars, another Ford and a Datsun, in different parts of the Phoenix area so they’d be available “just in case.” All three of our new acquisitions were “burners” in the sense that we would use them on the operation and then leave them behind when we left. We always wore gloves when we were in them so they’d be found with no fingerprints. The Toyota SUV would be our “clean” escape car.

  Twice we drove one of our newly acquired burner cars past the Douglass jewelry store to take a look at it. What we didn’t do, because we didn’t have time, was drive down to Tucson to eyeball the Martinis’ financial office and drop off the second Ford to be our “just in case” car in Tucson. We’d do that later. Getting the diamonds out of the Douglass jewelry store came first.