The Big Wheel

by Scott Archer Jones

  He watched her, first her breasts framed by her crossed arms, then her backside as she turned. “Yes. No more information sharing. In truth, I’ve been withholding information from LeFarge already.”

  She stopped and faced him, one hip cocked. “Have you withheld any information from me?”

  “Only the name of the street in Chinatown. It’s Kenmare.”

  She waved a hand. “Too late.”

  “Too late to tell you?”

  “No, too late to use, to catch Robko Zlata. Won’t they be on the run? Sibyl Boxwood will know by now the police are at her place.”

  She had knocked him for a loop… obvious when he thought about it, but he hadn’t seen it before. “Yes. Robko’s pattern is to run. We don’t know if Sibyl is attached enough to run with him. Or frightened enough. She doesn’t know LeFarge’s men will kill her.”

  She dropped both hands on the table and leaned towards him. “How will he escape?”

  “I bet he assumes the cops would use the usual law enforcement techniques—watch the terminals and stations, use the surveillance cameras on him. Just like TV. He won’t use an airport, at least not close by. Same for bus and train.” He watched her face—his involuntary glance flicked down at her breasts.

  She caught the glimpse, straightened back up, and turned from him. “Chancy. There are a lot of bus stations. He could pick a far-away one like Yonkers.”

  “Does it matter? We need to know where he’s running, not how he’s running.”

  She had doubt in her voice. “Nooo. That’s logical. But if he stole a car? We can track him through the police.”

  “Right, you’re right. How is important. The last time he ran on a motorcycle. He was prepared and went to ground quickly.”

  “Yes. The bike would work for the two of them, if they travel light.”

  “We’ve got no evidence he’s been back to his loft. Corporate Security has been watching it. They haven’t reported anything, right?”

  She paced back and forth again. “Uh-uh. Will Sibyl talk to the police?”

  He held both hands up. “She’s a high-priced call girl. She’d be reluctant to trust the police.”

  She said, “So they travel light, but where to? His home base is Polish Downtown in Chicago.”

  He nodded. “Maybe he’d go there. Any place closer?”

  “Like friends here in the City or in upstate New York? Maybe the Hamptons?” She flicked her eyes at him to check the reaction.

  He pursed his mouth. “Let’s check for his friends in his graduating class and the one before and after.”

  Her eyes opened wide; her mouth became a sharp straight line. “Sure, must be only a thousand people... and who knows, he could have made friends after high school.”

  “Charming optimism. What else did I miss?”

  Angie pivoted towards him and grinned. “Give the Chinatown connection to Garland.”

  “Hah! No, wait. That’s a good idea. No one here knows about the killings yet, so Kenmare Street will appear to be virgin intel. He’ll think I’m doing him a favor—letting him in on the win.”

  “So you go make Garland feel good, and I’ll start searching for Zlata’s friends. We’ll need help processing all those names.”

  He jumped up and came out from behind the conference table. “Is there someone here in Corporate you trust? O’Brien promised me any resource I asked for.”

  “A woman in Audit and a man in Insurance.”

  “Call them; clear it with their bosses.” She picked up the vidi. “Angie?”

  She glanced up with the first number already ringing and the iMob cradled against her ear.

  He tried for a disarming grin. “Thanks. You’re a natural at this.”

  Her lips clamped hard, thinned to a narrow line. “Don’t screw this up, Thomas.”

  In The Summer of My Life

  Chapter Nine: Leaves in the Strong Wind

  Robko and Sibyl paid a small fortune for the bike’s ten-day stay in the Cumberland parking garage, roaring up the ramp hundreds of dollars lighter. They caught the Holland Tunnel west into New Jersey and began their two-hundred-and-fifty mile trip. He stopped along the road at a big-box store to buy her clothes and a motorcycle helmet. They ate and got back onto the Interstate. By the time they crossed into Pennsylvania, Robko had lost himself in the day. He cruised along with the traffic as he enjoyed a bluebird he’d swallowed and its imprint on the summer day. Sibyl would be uncomfortable—sport bikes are not designed for passengers. The backpack they had purchased wouldn’t help as it lay heavy across her kidneys. She clung to him and leaned over his shoulder to see ahead.

  They crossed a chunk of Pennsylvania and rolled back into New York. They dumped onto two lane roads. Four hours gave them Ithaca. The town opened up to them, first the reservoir to the left, next the view of two hills. He spun into downtown where he parked at the curb. She got off, stretched like an athlete, and sauntered into a café.

  He slumped on the bike, indolent from the drug that hugged him. Down the way, Ithaca fought to keep its downtown viable. The main street busied itself tarting up and glamorizing its shopping. On the side of one old building, two black men clambered around scaffolding, their goal to paint over some graffiti. He recognized the flowing shapes and the illegible cubist signature. The graffiti said, “I Rule.” Maybe this style was a break-away movement. Maybe it was the same guy on tour. He admired the idea—to “Rule,” but still….

  She sashayed from the café to the bike. Ten feet away, she pulled out her camera, planted her feet like a gunfighter, and took his photo.

  “Where do those photos go?”

  “In the Cloud, under a pseudonym.” She tapped the screen for the upload.

  He pointed. “Look, graff that quotes some classic. College towns are even more la-de-da than the City. It should be in Latin.” Something about the graff made him feel uneasy, or maybe the barbiturate winding down weighed on him.

  She said, “Like you know Latin.”

  “And you do? Don’t forget I’m a lapsed Catholic.”

  She made a poofing sound with her lips. “The people in the diner knew of a bed and breakfast up on South Hill. I called, and they’ve got a vacancy. I know the way, and they’re expecting us.” She cinched on her helmet and mounted up behind him. She slapped him on his helmet, rocking his head over. He pulled away from the curb, and slipped up the hill.

  Robko found the B&B. as far from his style as he could imagine. It nestled pink on the hillside, with colonial brick-a-brac worked in here and there. She held her arms out to embrace the view. “Look at this place!”

  “Yeah, look at it.”

  “Well, think of it this way. No one would ever search for the great Zlata in a pink house.”

  “I wonder what the bedroom is like?” He patted her butt.

  A stern woman with hair bunned up on a scrawny neck led them upstairs. She insisted on showing them each detail. “And here is your room, one of my favorites.” Two beautiful oak beds—two—as narrow as coffins and five-and-a-half feet long awaited. “The beds are two hundred years old. Some people complain about the length, but you two won’t have a problem. You have a sitting area.”

  At the end of the long room two doily-covered chairs crouched wing-to-wing with a butler’s table in front. “And there is a lovely balcony.” She opened two French doors to display a balcony stuck out by two feet, surrounded by a massive white railing. “Here is the bath,” she said, and announced, “The last visitor dyed in here… awful to clean up.”

  Sibyl’s mouth hung open. “Died?” She took a step back.

  “No, not ‘died’ dead but ‘dyed’ as in hair. It made a horrible mess.”

  “Oh. Well, that does make a difference.”

  “I’m sure.” The stern woman didn’t like being misunderstood.

  “It’s all so beautiful. I’m sure we’ll enjoy the room.”

  “Breakfast at seven sharp. The rules are on the butler’s table.”

&nb
sp; Sibyl conciliated the dragon. “We’ll read through them; I promise.”

  Robko grimaced at the beds, separated by two feet of dark flooring. Still, it would only be for a day or two. And it would keep Sibyl happy. In the morning, they would go down to the church, and he’d talk to Father Mirko.

  ***

  Angie got her assistants, and the conference room suddenly resembled a telemarketing call center. All four of the team had desk tablets, iMobs, and internal building phones in front of them. Each marched down their part of the high school list. Incessant voices filled the room—Thomas hid in the noise and activity. It helped him block out the images of blood and dead men. Even as he videoed and talked and called again, part of him thought about his prey, what Zlata was like, what he could be doing.

  Incoming calls were the exception. They all jumped when Angie’s internal phone rang, and gawked as she answered. “It’s O’Brien’s PA. O’Brien wonders if you have a minute and can step in.”

  As Thomas strode down the hall, he rehearsed what he would say, what he would reveal, how he would spin it. He reached the suite, and the Personal Assistant showed him into the sanctum. Crisis had been replaced by a quiet center of executive power. Thomas peeked to the right and saw the vault now closed, sealed. He turned back to the seating area and found Garland slumped into the couch.

  Garland waved a hand at the rest of the leather expanse. “Make yourself comfortable, Thomas. O’Brien’s on the executive crapper. We’re lucky he didn’t invite us in.”

  Thomas nodded to the head of security. “Don.”

  “Vault’s back up and running. Some good news there, but I’ll leave it for the Boss to tell you.”

  “I imagine you’ve been making some changes?”

  “Closing the stable door after the horse? Yes. We found some traces of our thief in two wiring chases. Somehow he beat the motion detectors there. I had steel gratings installed on all of them with magnetic locks that can only be triggered from the security office. We found he’d been up on the roof, so we added some pressure switches there and on top of the elevators. We have interferometry scans in the elevator shafts, but turned them off years ago because of pigeons. Those flying rats gave us regular false alarms. Got a guy looking at alternatives.”

  “Maybe you could kill the pigeons.”

  Garland glared at Thomas. “That did occur to me, you know.”

  “Sorry, thinking out loud.” Things got quiet.

  “You know….” Garland stopped.

  “Yes?”

  Garland coughed into his hand. “When you showed up, I thought, great—here’s another one of the Governor’s prep-school types, seven foot tall and blond, come to tell the peasants how to do their jobs.”

  Thomas dropped his eyes. “Yes, well….”

  “But I got off on the wrong wavelength. I think you’re all right. You haven’t screwed with me, and you’ve been respectful to my people. You gave me the stuff on Chinatown. I don’t appreciate the competition part of all this, the way we’re matched up against each other, but that’s more O’Brien’s doing than yours.”

  “It occurred to me we’re both in the same business for the same guy. LeFarge, though….”

  Garland nodded, his eyebrows jumping upward towards his hairline. “Yeah, dangerous man. The two of us are trying to get the data back. He’s more interested in disappearing anyone who ever touched it.”

  “That’s the fundamental problem. LeFarge could bring all this down on our heads.”

  “Yeah. I don’t want my kids to visit their daddy in prison. You get any ideas on how to handle LeFarge, talk to me. Maybe I can help, or at least not get sandbagged.”

  Thomas said, “I will. I also want to ask a favor. Can your people provide me with a taser?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Thomas half-closed his eyes.

  “No, you’re right. I just offered my help. I’ll send one up. If you use it on LeFarge, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  O’Brien lumbered out of the wall on the left side of the suite, the concealed door sweeping shut behind him. “Tommy, glad you could step in.”

  “Of course, Dennis.”

  “What progress?” O’Brien looked ready to smile, or to crush Thomas.

  “Bad, since the killings.”

  “That’s not what I want to hear.”

  Thomas started again. “You know after I trailed Sibyl to Zlata and Zlata to Chinatown, we were in good shape. We could have staked out the neighborhood—Garland’s expertise. We informed Garland first thing in the morning. To help his people, we were working the digital trail, the rentals in the neighborhood.”

  O’Brien flipped his hand to the side, brushing away the explanation. “I know all that.”

  “The shooting in the Boxwood apartment means we start all over again. Both Garland and I agree that Zlata and the girl ran, once there were murders and an official police manhunt, or ex-wife hunt.”

  “Christ, finish the story! Do you have him?”

  “No. All we have is my hunch. He wouldn’t run far, and he’ll also stick to family and friends. We’re running down his old school classmates. Some should be out here on the East Coast, and we’ll check them first.”

  “And? What’s the problem?”

  “It’s a list of nearly two thousand names for three classes, big school. So far we’ve got a hundred we can’t find and seven hundred that are still in Chicago. We’ll ignore Chicago for now. The missing hundred are more interesting because one or more of them could be in the same business as Zlata.”

  O’Brien inspected Thomas levelly during his explanation. “Eight hundred. That means twelve hundred to go. Plus the ones that are missing.”

  “We sorted those first eight hundred in twenty-four hours. The staffers have been killing themselves to deliver.” Thomas smiled his most confident smile. He knew his case sounded weak.

  “Get four more people on it. Get six. Use the room next door—it’s the conference room for the head of patent law, and I can make him book space downstairs.” He turned the spotlight on Corporate Security. “Don, what do you have?”

  Garland wrinkled his forehead. Things couldn’t be going all that well for him either. “Three things. We had a couple of potential locations for Zlata—Chinatown and a hotel where a snitch had seen him. We purchased the security footage at the Cumberland Hotel for the three days around the shootout. We identified Sibyl Boxwood as a passenger on a motorcycle in their garage about eleven a.m. on the third day. No positive i.d. on the driver since he wore a helmet, but you know it was him. For the murders in the Boxwood place, we’re monitoring the police and the condo. We have a man on site even though NYPD Forensics completed its work and sealed the apartment. We’re listening to police radio and watching the electronic desk blotter for arrests. As for the third thing, we’ve hired people in Chicago to keep Zlata’s family under surveillance. Nothing illegal, like I said.”

  O’Brien buried his right fist in his left palm with a thump. “I don’t give a hairy shit about legal, get me?”

  Garland shifted on the couch, silenced.

  “Well? What does all your legal activity mean?”

  “What surveillance shows is that Zlata’s apparently not in Chicago, at least not in his home neighborhood. The NYPD doesn’t know where Sibyl is. We don’t know where they zoomed off to after he left the Cumberland.”

  “And LeFarge? What does he know? They were his goddamn men!”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  Thomas confirmed the same news on his side with a shake of his head.

  O’Brien voiced a growl.

  Thomas asked, “Any change in how we should deal with LeFarge?”

  “No. Just keep me informed.”

  Thomas asked, “Garland said there was some good news?”

  “Yes,” said O’Brien. He waved his hand at the vault. “We have two of the memory devices back. One memflash cost me ten mill up front at an auction. In London, of all places. The other
we worked more as a business exchange.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I took your advice and set up a finance and legal response team. My General Counsel runs it. We got word on a politician in the state house who was twisting some arms up in Albany—the arms I twist. One of the twistees videoed me and asked for protection from this Senator.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Senator’s money comes from his wife, and that’s where the pressure points are. I made the creditors of one of his wife’s companies call in their loans. I bought out a couple of partners in another company. The Senator suddenly came across. But get this, the bastard wanted to recover his initial investment.” O’Brien bared his teeth.

  Obedient, the two employees chuckled. “Two down, nine to go,” said Garland. “Well, if that’s all, Governor, I’ve got to get back on it.” Garland and Thomas marched out together. Thomas knew next time they’d better have something to deliver.

  Chapter Ten: A Mark of Devotion in the Heart

  The sport bike swept them down the hill to Immaculate Conception. Their black-clad figures hugged the garish machine, a mélange of bright colors and sculpted fairings, through a community of porches, green grass, and cracked sidewalks under old, old trees. The bike leaned into time, cast an echo up against the middle-class houses, cut through another way of living. They parked up against the white stone of a Norman Gothic church, clambered down, and hauled off their helmets.

  “Are you sure?” asked Sibyl. “You said it’s been a long time.”

  “Mirko will remember. What he does with the memories—now that’ll be the interesting part.” The big black doors led them into the church. “Let’s find the office.”

  “Wait a sec. Look at that dust floating in the air.” She fished out her camera and photoed the nave illuminated by the stain glass behind and above the chancel.

  They wandered off to the right through a covered walkway into the converted residence next door. They found the parish priest’s office on the first floor. Robko knocked on the doorframe.