Red Shirt

by A. J. Stewart

  I kept walking. The breeze was whipping down the freeway like it was a wind tunnel, and I shivered. And then I saw the town car. I had a mind to just wind up and go for the bleachers against the rear window, but I couldn’t be certain that someone—even the Pickering girls—weren’t back there. So I did the polite thing. I strode up to the passenger window and tapped on the glass. Using the tire iron.

  This time, the passenger jumped. They sure were a twitchy couple of operators. I smiled and showed him the tire iron, and he shook his head. I wasn’t clear on what he was objecting to—there were so many options—so I said, “We need to talk.” The guy shook his head again, so I shrugged.

  And then I swung.

  People who say cars aren’t safer than they used to be are lunatics. Take glass, for example. It’s designed to break into little pebbles rather than deadly shards, so you don’t get sliced into a thousand pieces in an accident, and you just have to vacuum the bits up after. It’s also incredibly strong. So strong that my tire iron bounced right off. I hadn’t swung as hard as I could—I hadn’t thought I’d need to—so I wound up for a second try.

  The passenger wound down the window a crack.

  “Are you crazy?” he asked. It felt rhetorical, so I didn’t answer.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “We need to talk.”

  He shook his head again so I raised the tire iron once more.

  “Open the back,” I said with my best Paul Newman grin.

  I heard a click and stood up straight. Every driver within a hundred yards was watching me. I looked like a road rage maniac. I didn’t care. They could call the cops if they wanted, but the only way the cops were getting there was if they sent in paratroopers.

  I slipped into the back of the town car. It wasn’t a town car. Not strictly speaking. Town Car was actually a model that had been released under the Lincoln brand, which itself was owned by Ford. Ford no longer produced the actual Lincoln Town Car, but that particular style of black luxury sedan, especially when chauffeur-driven, had become synonymous with the name, so every other manufacturer’s version of a similar car was generically referred to as a town car. This one was actually a Cadillac, and the inside was spacious and clean, and smelled like pine.

  “Guys,” I said. “I’m only going to ask once. Then I’m going to start wielding this here tire iron. Okay? So, where are the girls?”

  The driver gripped the wheel like we were about to take off, but the brake lights ahead told otherwise. The passenger turned to me.

  “Who are you?”

  “Don’t worry about who I am. Answer the question. Where are the girls?”

  “What girls?”

  “Wrong answer.”

  I swung the tire iron harder this time, and connected with the point, so the passenger side rear window smashed just like they said it would, into little glass pebbles. Most of the glass ended up in the emergency lane.

  “What the hell are you doing?” screamed the passenger. He was a thin guy, lots of stubble under his mustache, the kind that looks like it gets tended by a lawn mower. He had an accent but it wasn’t Russian. He didn’t remind me of Nurlan, and he didn’t remind me of Nurlan’s round henchman, either.

  “Who are you?”

  “Where are the girls?”

  “What girls? We don’t know any girls!”

  “Why were you watching Brett Pickering’s office?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know why you’ve been parked outside his office for the past few days? Really?” I brought the tire iron back for another swing.

  “Please, no! Don’t break the car. We were told to watch this place. Just to see if the man comes and goes. I don’t know why.”

  “Who told you to do that? Nurlan?”

  “Who?”

  “Nurlan? Or his guy, the round guy? What’s his name?”

  “Round guy? What?”

  “Who told you to follow Pickering?”

  “My boss.”

  “Right,” I said, folding my arms across my chest definitively. “Take me to your boss.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It was a great line, at least I thought so. Take me to your boss, like the catch phrase delivered before our hero of a phoenix rises from the ashes. At least that’s how it goes in the movies.

  Not so much for me.

  Not in rush hour traffic in downtown Stamford. Not two days before Thanksgiving. I made my demand and then sat there as the town car went absolutely nowhere. There was still honking from outside. I think some of the other drivers had seen the window smash out and they had thought I was killing the occupants or something. We moved along a bit at a time, drivers on the outside of us asking the driver of the town car if he was okay, if they needed the police.

  “No police,” he said through the open window.

  The other drivers couldn’t see me. I was behind the tinted rear glass, except on the emergency lane side, where the cold air was now blowing in.

  We took fifteen minutes to get past downtown Stamford, and then the traffic opened up the way it does, for about two hundred yards, just long enough to get excited that you were moving again, before stopping.

  The driver pulled off the Turnpike at the Glenbrook exit and then took Route 1, the old post road to Boston. It was slow and there were traffic lights—more often than seemed necessary—but we were moving. We drove through Noroton and then eventually reached the little town of Darien.

  There was nothing that separated Darien from any of the neighboring towns, since it was all one big unbroken Metroplex heading out of New York City, except for the fact that getting a Darien zip code saw your house price add an extra zero.

  The Boston Post Road became a lovely little main street with gorgeous boutiques and craft stores and furniture shops and places that sold all manner of unnecessary things for the home that already had everything. The buildings were a combination of new-build red bricks made to look old and older colonial buildings renovated to within an inch of utterly charming.

  The driver pulled in behind a low-rise building that had a French restaurant on the ground floor and offices above. We parked out the back in a small lot, and the driver got out and surveyed the damage to his car. He didn’t look happy, but then neither did I, and I was carrying a tire iron.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  I followed the two guys into the back of the building. There was beige lobby about the size of an on-deck circle, and an elevator. We took the elevator up one flight and I wondered why exactly it was there and why we bothered. It wasn’t exactly the Empire State Building.

  The offices were like hospital rooms, combinations of white, off-white and beige. The walls were shiny white panels that reflected my shoes underneath marbled windows, the kind through which you would know you were witnessing a murder but not be able to identify any of the culprits. The floors were marble and the place had a scent like it was the R&D department of Yankee Candle.

  The driver led us to a door overlooking the main street. He knocked, and there was a spoken word that I didn’t understand, and he opened the door. The second made to usher me in, but I wasn’t walking in before him, or anyone else that might bonk me on the head. This wasn’t my first rodeo.

  “You first, pal.”

  He shrugged and his jacket slipped down his shoulders some, like it was too big for him, and he stepped inside. I followed him.

  This must have been the operating room. The floors were beige and the walls were off-white, and there was a desk, the top of which was a kind of opaque white glass. There was a man behind the desk who didn’t fit the scene at all. He was a thin, pale man, with well-groomed gray hair and a nose too big for his face. He was wearing a black pinstripe suit, which in other circumstances would have made him look like either a banker or Hercule Poirot, but in this room made him look like a serial killer.

  “Michael?” he said to the driver. He said something more but I didn’t understand it
, although it seemed to have hard consonants not dissimilar to Arabic.

  The guy called Michael said something in return and then looked at me, standing there as I was with my tire iron still in my hand. It occurred to me, rather too late, that I may have brought a tire iron to a gun fight, now that I was off the street and on their turf.

  “Where are the girls?” I said.

  The man behind the desk frowned. “Girls.”

  “Yes, the girls. Where are they?”

  “You want girls?”

  Now it was my turn to frown. “No, I don’t want girls. I want the girls. The Pickering girls.”

  “Pickering girls?” he asked. He said something to Michael but Michael shrugged in return.

  “Brett Pickering’s girls,” I repeated.

  Now the guy behind the desk was catching on. His jaw dropped open a little and I saw some connection being made inside his well-coiffed head.

  “You work for Mr. Pickering?”

  “Who I work for isn’t important. What’s important is Mr. Pickering’s children. His daughters.”

  “What of his daughters?”

  “They’ve been kidnapped. Your people kidnapped them.”

  “My people?”

  The man stood quickly and spat rapid fire at Michael and then at the other guy. In turn each of them responded with their hands up, on the defensive.

  I suddenly had a very bad feeling. Perhaps it had been creeping up for a while, but either way, it was taking root now.

  “Who are you?” I asked the guy behind the desk.

  He looked at me and then at the tire iron, and then back at me.

  “I am Kalajian. Avag Kalajian. Who are you?”

  “My name is Jones,” I said. “I am working with a client of Mr. Pickering’s, to reclaim his investment.”

  “Reclaim? I knew it, I knew it had gone bad. Did he steal my money?”

  “Before I answer that, let me ask you a question. Did you kidnap his daughters?”

  “Are you crazy? Who does such a thing?”

  “Do you know Nurlan the Kazakh?”

  “Nurlan the Kazakh? What kind of a name is that?”

  “So you don’t know him?”

  “No.”

  “What do you do here, Mr. Kalajian?”

  “I am an investor. Mostly property investments. Some retail.”

  Suddenly I knew the name. I’d heard it, in passing, at Brett Pickering’s house. Kalajian had called Brett’s cell phone, asking about his investment.

  “You’re the Russian investor he was speaking to on the phone.”

  “I am not Russian,” he said like he had eaten a bad pickle.

  “You’re not?”

  “No. I am Armenian.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure?”

  I shrugged. The question had just popped out with the flow. I had to admit, it was a dumb thing to say. So Nurlan wasn’t a Russian and Kalajian wasn’t a Russian. I wondered how many other misdeeds Russians were on the hook for that they had nothing to do with. I mean, I knew they had a pretty nasty mafia, I’d heard the stories, and their oil monopolies and government were as crooked as they came. One minute everything belongs to the socialist state and the next minute half a dozen guys are rich enough to buy the moon because of their oil reserves. They weren’t angels, that was for damned sure. But I couldn’t help feel that Brett needed to broaden his cultural boundaries a tad. Fairfield County was starting to feel a wee bit insular for my tastes.

  “What did you invest in?” I asked him.

  “A shopping mall. But they poured the foundation a year ago. A year ago! And nothing is happening? I knew he had stolen my money.”

  “So what the hell were these guys doing?” I asked, pointing at the two skinny mustaches.

  “They were watching his place, to see if he would come, so I can come down and talk to him. He doesn’t return my calls.’

  I nodded to myself. Kalajian wasn’t my man. Nurlan had the Pickering girls and I was nowhere.

  “I’m sorry Mr. Kalajian. My mistake. I need to find the girls.”

  “You are serious? Somebody actually kidnapped his children?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe this world anymore. In the old days, someone takes your money, you don’t do business again with him, maybe you spread his name around the golf club or the church, let it be known he can’t be trusted. But a man’s children?”

  “Yeah, I know. Look, I gotta go.”

  Michael said something in Armenian and Mr. Kalajian looked at me. “He said you owe him for the window in his car.”

  “Tell him to bill Brett Pickering.”

  “He will not pay.”

  I got that. Apparently Mr. Kalajian didn’t do irony.

  “Sorry dude, I gotta find these kids, before it’s too late.”

  Michael said something more and Mr. Kalajian responded.

  “I have a daughter,” Michael said to me. “I take you.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  I turned to the door. Mr. Kalajian called after me.

  “If you get your client’s money, maybe you get mine, too,” he said. “I give you ten percent.”

  I stopped at the door. I didn’t want his ten percent. I did want him to get his money back though.

  “And I pay for Michael’s window,” he said.

  “You got a deal, Mr. Kalajian. I’ll get your money.”

  I ran out the door into the sterile hallway, wondering if I could really find the Pickering girls, and wondering if I could get anyone their money back. But most of all fearing that I was writing a lot of blank checks.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The trip back to Stamford wasn’t fast, but it was quicker than the trip out. We got back to my car on the side of the Turnpike just as a tow truck was hooking up to the front of the Chevy Blah. Michael told me not to worry. He said he knew the guy. He got out of the town car and walked up to the guy and they spoke, and then Michael came back and leaned in through where the rear window was supposed to be.

  “Fifty bucks,” he said.

  I wasn’t in any kind of bargaining position, so I handed him the cash and he took it back to the guy, who dropped the car to the ground with a thud, packed up his chains and took off.

  I said thanks to Michael and he grunted like he didn’t think I meant it, and I got in my car and drove away. I got straight off the freeway and drove up through Stamford, and cut across on Rock Spring Road to Hope Street and up to Springdale.

  I crossed the tracks as I had done once before. Evening had descended and most of the warehouses looked closed for the holiday. Lights were doused except those kept on for security, so it was hard to tell one warehouse from another. I eventually found the right one. I got out and tested the door. It was locked up tight, and I saw no light coming from within through the high windows. I shivered, and not just because it was getting colder by the minute. I was running out of ideas.

  I got back into the car. I was hanging onto the hope that Nurlan was making a point to put fear into Brett Pickering. I was hoping that he wouldn’t take it further than it needed to go. But I had one faint hope left, and I was doing no good to anyone, sitting in a dark lot on the wrong side of the tracks in Stamford, so I got going.

  I was in New Canaan in ten minutes. The Taurus was there. The front light was on as if they expected visitors, which I suppose they did. I strode up the steps and this time I used the doorbell. Brett answered.

  “Do you have them?”

  I shook my head. “Afraid not.”

  “Right, that’s it, I’m calling the police. Should have done that immediately.”

  I closed the door as Brett turned and stormed down the hallway. I followed. Ellen was standing in between the great room and the kitchen, the middle of nowhere, caught between wanting to know who was at the door and not wanting to hear what they said.

  “Where are they?” she asked. She hadn’t been crying but she was losing it, that
much I could tell. Her hair was messing itself, as if having some physiological response to the stress.

  “Wait,” I said to Brett. “Let’s look at the options.”

  “There are no options,” he said. “This is my fault and I should have called the cops as soon as I got home. But I wanted to believe you could get me out of this. But you can’t. I’ve got to fix it.”

  “You’ll go to jail. You know that.”

  “Jail time for my daughters’ lives? That’s not even a choice.”

  Brett looked at Ellen as if to ask her opinion, and she gave it with a shallow nod. He picked up his cell phone from the kitchen counter and made to punch in the number.

  “Do I call the local station, or 911?”

  “911,” said Ellen. “This qualifies as an emergency.”

  He nodded and tapped in the numbers.

  Then there was a heavy thud on the front door. Three hard knocks. In my experience there are only three types of people who knock on a door when they could use a doorbell: Door-to-door salesmen, who don’t trust doorbells to not video them these days; bad guys, intent on doing harm; and cops. The first group tended to work daylight hours only. The second and third groups could arrive any time, and they generally weren’t bearing good news.

  “Let me get it,” I said.

  Brett watched me open-mouthed, his finger hovering over the screen to make the call to 911. I strode down the hallway to the front door and opened it.

  Two girls stood before me. One early teens, the other a couple years younger. I think they called them tweens, but I wasn’t sure. They both looked at me with a mix of hope and confusion, like they were sure it was the right door, but it was the wrong face.

  “Mommy and Daddy are in the back,” I said, standing aside so they felt safe to come in. They took the first couple steps tentatively, and then once across the threshold, they ran. I heard the exclamations from their parents as they got to the great room, the howls that sounded like a mix of joy and disbelief, as if such ordeals couldn’t end so easily.