by Curt Weeden
“Doc,” I whispered, “we’ve got to distract the bastard.” I picked up two fistfuls of balls and jammed them into Doc’s hands “Follow my lead.”
I faked a move that made it look like I was going to sprint to the hotel entrance. Two more rounds shattered the Ford’s driver’s-side window. That’s when I roared, “Maurice, hold your fire. Don’t waste a shot until you see him.”
The footsteps stopped. I heard a shuffling sound, probably the Hispanic dodging behind one of the cars lined up on the deck.
Doc looked at me like I was insane. “Maurice isn’t here—he’s back at the Gateway,” he said softly.
“The asshole out there doesn’t know that.” I reached into the Ben Wa box and picked up the only ammunition we had at our disposal. “When I give you the word, throw as many of these as you can, then run like hell.”
Doc turned to his rear. Four Putt was writhing on the ground, both hands clamped on his left leg. “What about him?” Doc asked.
“Whoever’s out there isn’t after Four Putt. He’s after me.”
Doc put his mouth close to my ear. “Hold on. I think I can buy us a few seconds.” The professor glanced at the hotel entrance, which was two hundred unprotected feet away.
The heavy footsteps had come to an abrupt stop. The Hispanic was now probably no more than ten parked cars from us. “You better talk fast.”
“Our boy’s using a Beretta M9 pistol. I caught a glimpse.”
This would usually be the time to pause and marvel at Doc’s encyclopedic mind. Right now, I needed an explanation about why I should care what kind of firearm was aimed at me. “And how’s that supposed to help us?”
“The pistol has a fifteen-shot clip. He’s used thirteen and he’s fast on the trigger. Unless he’s changed the magazine—and I don’t think he has—there are two rounds left in the gun. Two more shots and he’ll have to reload. That’ll take a few seconds.”
Doc was brilliant but he was also a lousy gambler, and now he was placing a bet that could get both of us killed. Like it or not, though, my chips were lined up next to his. Time to role the dice.
I tossed a half dozen Ben Was at a Toyota Camry parked diagonally across from Four Putt’s Ford. “Maurice, pin him down! Pin him down,” I yelled.
The Hispanic took the bait. He stepped from behind a Chevy Suburban and fired twice at the Camry. And then a click.
Before the gunman’s empty magazine hit the parking deck floor, Doc and I stepped to the side of the Crown Victoria’s front door and pelted the Hispanic with metal buckshot. Instinctively, the man raised his right forearm to protect himself from the broadside attack. The loaded clip fell out of his hand.
Doc sprinted to the door that led to the hotel’s main reception area. I was heading in the same direction when I glanced back at the Hispanic. He was kneeling on the floor, one hand on his ammo clip and the other pressed against his right eye. One of our Ben Was had done some unexpected damage.
I could have easily made it to the Hyatt entrance. But I didn’t. The man who had tried to kill me twice was on the ground, and I had an opening. It was time to end this thing. Grabbing Twyla’s stripper pole, I charged the Hispanic as he pushed a fresh load into his Beretta. He hoisted the pistol, but his right eye was swollen shut, and he didn’t see the rod before it landed with a thwack on the bridge of his nose. The man fell back, a gusher of blood turning the lower half of his face red. The Beretta flew across the deck and came to a stop under a Cadillac Escalade.
I pulled the pole over my head and took aim. The next swing would be an ax-like blow across the man’s knees. I wanted him alive, incapacitated, and able to answer a lot of questions. The Hispanic was dazed but not disoriented enough to stay still as the pole began its downward arc. Instinctively, he rolled to one side and the rod hit nothing but concrete.
“Hijo de puta!” the man gurgled, blood pouring into his mouth. Defying the damage to his face, he scrambled to his feet and dodged behind a row of cars. I chased him as he raced through the gated parking deck entrance and headed toward a black sedan. Even with his injuries, the Hispanic was agile. He was twenty feet ahead of me when he reached the car and pulled open the front passenger-side door. I sent the pole flying, a gold javelin that speared the man’s ribcage just before the driver yanked him into the sedan. I recognized the man behind the wheel. It was the other Hispanic I had described to the FBI after the Orlando Airport catastrophe.
The car sped off and I circled back to the wounded Four Putt Gonzales who was still on his back, clasping his bloodied leg. I unlatched my belt and turned it into a makeshift tourniquet just as Doc reappeared.
“Called 911,” the professor said.
Four Putt suddenly found his voice. “Oh, shit! Pick up them balls. Pick up them balls.”
“Worry about your leg, not your balls,” Doc suggested.
Four Putt’s eyes widened with panic. “Listen, this thing could ruin us. Ruin us. Don’t let the cops find no Ben Was. And get that other sex shit out of my car! The shooting’s gonna be some kid doin’ target practice with a stolen pistol.”
I could practically read Four Putt’s mind. The Hyatt was booked a year in advance for weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and Quinceañera fiestas. Bullets plus blood could equal cancellations. Enough of those and Four Putt would be doing the night shift at one of the rooms-by-the-hour, no-tell motels on Route 1.
“Go along with this, Bullet.” Four Putt insisted. “You and Manny Maglio stuck me with Twyla Tharp, for chrissakes. You owe me one.”
I told Doc to start collecting balls while I moved boxes of sex paraphernalia from Four Putt’s car to a nearby hotel van. As we worked, the wail of police sirens grew louder, gradually drowning out the Hyatt manager’s cries of pain. Or was it despair?
Chapter 14
High noon on a gloomy Sunday in New Brunswick. I was power walking my way along George Street trying to shake off the events of the past fourteen hours. Four Putt Gonzales was in Robert Wood Johnson Hospital nursing a nasty leg wound. The cops were running a trace on the Beretta they recovered from under the Escalade. Good luck. The pistol’s serial number had been filed off, and I remembered the Hispanic was wearing surgical gloves. Fingerprints were out of the question.
Four Putt was sticking with his story that last night’s incident was a byproduct of some juvenile delinquent whose vandalism got out of control. The police lightly grilled Doc and me about what happened. We crossed our fingers and played Four Putt’s song. What got a couple of detectives scratching their heads was the trail of blood that streaked the parking deck and front driveway of the hotel. The kid doing the shooting must have cut himself, Doc surmised. The detectives bought the improbable story mainly because—like Four Putt—they wanted to downplay the event. Anything other than an out-of-control adolescent fiddling with a handgun he just happened to have found might poison New Brunswick’s renaissance.
I was walking back to the Gateway when my cell rang.
“Mr. Bullock?”
I pulled up short.
“We need to talk,” Judith Russet said. “I’ll be in Princeton this afternoon. You’re only a short drive away so I suggest we meet. It’s important. Shall we say three o’clock?”
Being told where I should be and what time I should get there was getting aggravating. “Why?”
“It concerns the Book of Nathan.”
Russet knew the magic words. “All right,” I said. “Where will I find you?”
“Do you know the Nassau Club?”
I forced out a “no.” People from the Gateway—whether residents or staff—don’t do Princeton. Russet rattled off directions and added a postscript.
“Do not bring Professor Waters. It’s imperative you come alone.”
I headed back to the shelter, checking my watch. I had missed Abraham Arcontius’s twenty-four-hour deadline for scraping up information about the missing disk and/or about making plans to revisit Orlando. Arthur Silverstein’s aide-de-camp was surely working up a
list of ways to make my life miserable.
Yigal Rosenblatt was at the front door when I arrived at the Gateway. “I set it up,” was his greeting.
Once again, Yigal surprised me. Earlier in the day, I had asked him if any of his “connections” could arrange a jailhouse phone call with Miklos Zeusenoerdorf. The odds for coupling Zeus with a telephone were slim, yet Yigal had come through. There was a lot more to this perpetual motion machine than I first thought.
“When?”
“A half hour from now.” Yigal sounded pleased with himself, as well he should. Thirty minutes later, with Yigal and Maurice at my side, I placed the call to the Orange County Jail.
“Remember, Maurice,” I said, “don’t spice up what Zeus is saying. Give it to us word for word. Understood?”
“Yes.”
I pushed the speakerphone button on the donated phone in my office. Zeus’s voice came through as a string of grunts and mumbles.
Maurice translated. “He’s been havin’ a lot of bad dreams. About God.”
“Listen, Zeus—” I shouted at the phone. It was wasted breath. Zeusenoerdorf kept on blathering.
“Says God thinks Zeus did take out the preacher,” said Maurice. The quasi admission of guilt stopped the translator in his tracks. He went from interpreting to castigating. “Ah, shit, Zeus. Why’d you do that for, man?”
Intervention time.
“Zeus, you didn’t kill Benjamin Kurios.” I screamed. “This whole God-in-your-dreams business is a figment of your imagination. You didn’t kill anyone. And remember this, if you’re convicted for what happened to Kurios, that means the real murderer goes free.”
Not once in the past had I told Zeus flat out that he was innocent. Actually, I still wasn’t fully convinced he was. But with only ten minutes of phone time left, I didn’t need Zeus beating himself up.
“He says, okay,” Maurice reported. “But he wants to know what a fig-a-ment is.”
I held back a scream. “Forget the figment. Right now, I need you to think back to the night Benjamin Kurios died. Do you remember seeing a computer disk?”
“What’s a computer disk, he wants to know,” Maurice translated.
“A disk, you know, like a DVD.” Watching movie rentals on a donated DVD was one of life’s highlights at the Gateway.
Maurice passed on Zeusenoerdorf’s answer. “He says, yeah.”
“You saw a disk?”
“No. He took the disk.”
“What?”
“He took what you said,” Maurice repeated.
I was stunned. “You took the disk?”
“Zeus says he thought it was a music CD,” Maurice explained. “Had a lot of words on it. One started with the letter N like on his Nelly album.”
Thanks to Zeus and a boom box, I had learned more than I ever wanted to know about Nelly, the rap artist who sang classics like “Ride Wit Me” and “Pimp Juice.” Leave it to Zeus to presume that any CD with an N on it had to be a hip-hop recording.
“What did you do with it?” I shouted at the phone.
Maurice’s translation followed a run of grunts. “He shoved it under a rock.”
I took a deep breath. “Let’s see if I have this right,” I said. “After a car sideswipes a van and after Benjamin Kurios ends up on the pavement and after two guys try to tear each other’s throats out, you find a CD and decide to hide it under a rock?”
Maurice replied, “He says that’s right.”
I closed my eyes. “Why didn’t you say something about this before?”
Maurice jerked his head at Yigal . “He told his lawyer, Figgy.”
“What?” I glared at Yigal who was doing a rain dance around the speakerphone.
“Very hard to understand,” Yigal said. “Couldn’t figure out what he was saying.”
Back to the phone. “Zeus, the cops went over the crime scene dozens of times. They would have found the CD even it were under a rock. Are you sure about this?”
A rattle of sounds. “He’s sure.”
It was possible. Granted, few humans would have given top priority to hiding a CD after stumbling across a man whose head had just been pulverized. But this was Zeus, whose neurotransmitters worked in mysterious ways. Maybe I was wrong about the crime-scene investigation. I remembered seeing a lot of rock and chunks of cement under or near the bridge overpass. Nothing weighing more than half a pound appeared to have been moved.
I strained to come up with the right question. “Did you see anybody take the CD? Did anybody even go near the rock where you hid the disk?”
A burst of sound followed. “He didn’t see nobody else. After he hid the disk, he went back to help the preacher.”
“How long before the cops showed up?”
“Probably ten minutes. But that’s a guess, he says.”
“Could someone have taken the disk from under the rock during those ten minutes?”
“He don’t know. He don’t think so.”
“What about the two college kids? Could they have walked off with the disk?”
Maurice listened to Zeus jabber for a few seconds. “He don’t think the boys got close enough to get the CD. But he’s not sure about that either.”
I was out of steam. “All right, Zeus. Anything else we should talk about?”
“Yes,” Maurice said.
“What?”
Hesitation and then a short spurt of noise. “He wants to know if you really think he didn’t kill the preacher.”
“I think we’re going to find out who killed Benjamin Kurios,” I replied. It was a far less definitive statement than I had handed to Zeus earlier. In fact, the response was so slippery and lawyer-like that Yigal stopped his jiggling long enough to give me a look of admiration.
For a couple of reasons, I didn’t phone Abraham Arcontius to tell him about Zeus’s bombshell and offer up a mea culpa for missing his “deliver-or-else” deadline. First, I loathed the thought of having to deal with—never mind apologize to—the piece of scum. Second, I had a hard time thinking about Silverstein’s lieutenant when I was thirty minutes away from meeting a woman who probably could squash Arcontius like a cockroach.
My Buick started coughing as soon as it entered Princeton Borough. I reminded the car if it broke down in a town where the per capita income was higher than my Gateway annual budget, it was one phone call away from a donation to the National Kidney Foundation. The Buick straightened out and got me to where we needed to be: 6 Mercer Street, only a few clicks from the heart of Princeton Borough.
“You’re here to see—?” asked a man who sounded as stuffy as he looked.
“Judith Russet.”
“Ah, yes. Please wait in the reading room. I’ll notify Ms. Russet you’ve arrived.”
I parked myself in a leather chair and surveyed the six other men taking up space in a large corner room of the Nassau Club. The men were all old and in various stages of sleep. Two were snoring, one appeared dead. I had this creepy feeling the Grim Reaper was among the Nassau Club’s most frequent visitors.
“A lovely room, don’t you think?”
The voice came from behind me but I didn’t need a visual to know who had arrived.
“In fact, the whole house is exquisite. A physician named Samuel Miller lived here a long time ago. His residence became a private club back in 1889.”
“Interesting,” was my witty response.
“I’m not a member but one of Quia Vita’s donors is,” Judith Russet said. “He makes arrangements for me to use the club when I’m in Princeton.”
I got the message. Russet rubbed noses with people of influence. “Good to have friends in high places.”
“That’s something you should keep in mind. We have a private room downstairs. This way.”
We walked to the lower level of the Nassau Club and into a room barely large enough for a round table and four chairs.
“Let me get right to the point,” Russet said even before I was seated and the door soundly shu
t. “I’m going to give you some confidential information and then I’m going to offer you some advice. I hope you listen very carefully.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Before I start, you need to know your Friday night stunt was despicable. I just wanted to make that perfectly clear before anything else is said.”
“Go on.”
“There are two possibilities,” Russet continued. She had put herself in a chair cattycorner to mine so she was at my eye level. “Possibility number one is that you’re a crook—a purveyor of stolen goods. The second possibility is that you’re an ignorant fool.”
“I’m moved that you hold me in such high regard.”
“Regardless of which possibility happens to be correct, I want you to know where Quia Vita stands. Before I do that, let me make sure we’re both on the same page.”
Russet opened her purse, took out a sheet of paper, and slid it across the table. I read the sentences marked with a yellow highlighter:
We concur that the Book of Nathan and the Book of Jehu scrolls are authentic. Regrettably, only a small portion of the Book of Jehu can be salvaged, but the entire contents of the Book of Nathan are intact. In answer to your question about the accuracy of the translation regarding personhood—yes, we are positive the Aramaic to English conversion is correct. The Book of Nathan is clear about the definition of personhood.
I guessed what Russet was showing me was a passage from a message written by Henri Le Campion that Quia Vita had managed to intercept. It was becoming more and more obvious why the Book of Nathan was on the market for five million dollars.
“It may surprise you,” Russet said, “that we’ve known for years Henri Le Campion found the Nathan and Jehu scrolls in a cave seventy miles from Jerusalem.”
“It might surprise you that I’m not surprised.” Which was true. I didn’t know a lot about Quia Vita but had learned enough to know the organization had big money and a long reach. If Arthur Silverstein had good intelligence about the Book of Nathan, it was safe to assume Quia Vita had it also.