by Wesley Cross
“No way.” Chuck took out his phone and started taking pictures. “Get a copy of the report from the lieutenant, then we’ll go.”
• • •
“What do you think this is all about?” asked Ryan as they headed back to the city. “Something else came up?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” said Chuck, steering through the traffic, merging onto Manhattan Bridge. “As you were talking to Sam, I placed a couple of calls and nobody seems to know anything. Nothing major at least. I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit.”
Chuck put on a siren first, but a few seconds later angrily flipped it off and eased his foot off the throttle. They rode the rest of the way in silence, the dark cloud of unspoken doubts hanging over them.
Captain Guy Brennan was waiting for them in his office, his face even redder than usual, angry red splotches spreading from his bald freckled scalp all the way to his thick neck.
“Sit down,” he said without looking up from his computer.
“Sir?” Chuck didn’t move from the door. “Why are we off the case?”
Captain finally looked up, his heavy jaws silently moving under the folds of flushed skin.
“There was a burglary in Chelsey last night. I want you to check that out. Details have been uploaded to your workstations.”
“What was taken?” Kowalsky asked calmly.
“About forty grand of jewelry and seven thousand in cash.”
“Anyone hurt?” Chuck thought he heard his partner quietly cursing under his breath.
“No, the place was empty. Any other questions, Detective?”
“Yes, Captain, just one.” Kowalsky walked over and put his hands on the captain’s desk, looking his boss in the eye. “What the fuck, Guy?”
“I warn you, Detective, before you say things that you can’t take back.” Brennan stood, his multiple chins turning scarlet.
“You heard me, Captain. I’ve known you for a long time, and this is the biggest bullshit I’ve ever heard you say. We have an assassination attempt, laser-guided bullets, and a slaughter house with six corpses in military fatigues, and you’re assigning me to a fucking burglary?”
“Detective Kowalsky, please place your badge and your service weapon on my desk. You’re suspended from active duty effective immediately until further notice.”
“If you say so.” Chuck slapped his badge and his gun on top of the pile of papers covering Brennan’s desk and took a step back. “I hope whatever you’re getting for this is worth it.” He turned on his heels and stormed out of the captain’s office.
“Wait up, Partner.” Ryan caught up with him as Chuck headed toward the elevator going down to the garage.
“I should probably turn in my badge, too.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Kowalsky pressed the button calling the elevator and turned to his partner. “I’m not walking away from this, not now, and you’ll be much better placed to help me if you’re still on the inside. Just lay low for the time being.”
“Whatever you need, Chuck, you know that.” Ryan patted Kowalsky’s back and started walking back to his desk.
Chuck got out of the elevator and walked back to the car, a swirl of emotions going through his head. His phone vibrated in his jacket pocket, breaking his chain of thought. He frowned, looking in puzzlement at the blocked number, trying to decide whether or not to take the call. Finally, he clicked the answer button.
“Hello.”
“I have the answers you’re looking for,” a rugged voice said, “but you’re going to have to help me first.”
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“Someone who wants to blow this rotten thing wide open. Just like you do.” The voice gave Chuck a Brooklyn address and hung up.
He stood in the parking lot for a few seconds, the phone in his hand, then got into his car. An unregistered black Chiappa Rhino 60DS revolver with flat cylinder migrated from the glove compartment to Chuck’s holster. He started the engine and slowly pulled out of the building.
As he made his way down to FDR Drive, Chuck considered his options. This very well could be a trap, and now as he was suspended, he couldn’t rely on calling in the cavalry in case things got hairy. Kowalsky got onto the freeway and stayed in the right lane, looking for the sign of the Brooklyn Bridge exit.
The views, that usually put him in a better mood, reminded him of what a privilege it was to serve this great city lost their magic. Today the grimy road, the gray skyscrapers on his right, and the frozen East River on the left looked like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie.
Chuck took the ramp and entered the bridge, wistfully looking at an ever-parked police patrol car. Backup would surely have made him feel safer, but after today’s events and his captain’s unexplainable behavior, he didn’t know who could be trusted.
He took Exit 20 toward Sixth Avenue off Belt Parkway and drove parallel to the elevated subway line. The address that the mysterious caller had given him was a small junkyard. Chuck parked next to a massive gray concrete column supporting the tracks about a block away from the property fenced off with a vicious looking barb wire. There was an old Honda Civic parked inside the driveway.
Chuck cracked the window open just wide enough to stick out a Steiner Commander Military Binoculars and focused it on the target. The place looked empty save for the small light in the trailer’s window in the farthest corner. He watched the junkyard and the street around it for over an hour, but there was nothing suspicious as far as he could tell. The barb wire made it impossible to enter the place from anywhere but the front door. There were only two options; either to go in or to turn around and forget the cryptic phone call altogether.
I guess there’s only one way to find out, he said out loud and got out of the car, taking the revolver out of its holster. He crossed the street under the heavy shadow of the elevated subway track and walked to the rusty old gate with a small side door in front. It wasn’t locked, and Chuck opened it, wincing as it made a loud squeaking noise. Nothing happened.
Encouraged, he slowly started walking toward the trailer in the back, gripping the gun with both hands. The snow under his boots made a crunching sound, making him cringe. Chuck looked around, trying to see in fading light where to step. There were stains on the snow. He bent down to see better, but even before his eyes could make out what he was looking at, he knew.
Blood.
There was a lot of it. The driver’s door of the Civic was covered with a generous smudge, and the splatter led all the way to the dirty white trailer. The polished golden knob on the trailer door somehow stayed clean, and it shone brightly in the evening sun. Chuck gripped the gun tighter and started climbing the small stairs. The knob turned without making a sound, and he slowly pushed the door with the barrel of the revolver.
”You’re making way too much noise, Mister Kowalsky,” said the familiar voice from a heap of bloody rags in a corner of an old sofa. Chuck saw the black stub of the silencer pointing directly at his face and froze in mid-step.
“I didn’t call you here to shoot you,” the man said, putting the gun down, “unless of course you’re going to stand there and keep that bloody door open.”
CHAPTER 17
“One more,” Jason called out. The bartender, a young bearded guy in his late twenties, poured him another scotch. Jason swirled the golden liquid in his glass, watching the specs of light reflected from the overhead lights blink in and out of existence, then downed the drink in one long gulp. It went down smoothly just like four drinks before it. That’s probably how the ocean feels when they drop depth charges into it, he thought, and giggled at the idea. The bartender gave him an odd look, but Jason ignored it. He knew he was drunk, but he wasn’t drunk enough. The pain in his chest, the empty void created there a few days ago, was impossible to fill with liquor but Jason did his best to try.
“Another one,” he called out again.
“I’m sorry, pal,” the bartender said, smiling at him, �
�but I think you’ve had enough.”
“I wish.” Jason stared back at him, annoyed, but didn’t argue. He paid the tab and went outside. After the darkness of the drinking den the sun was unbearably bright. Jason leaned on the wall for support and closed his eyes for a few seconds, letting the sun hit his face, breathing in the crisp winter air.
“Spare change?” he heard someone say. He opened his eyes and saw a thin, bent, homeless man in his late sixties expectantly looking at him.
“Sure.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out a bunch of twenty dollar bills. He looked at them for a couple of seconds trying to see if there were any singles, then just handed over the whole pile to the homeless person.
“It’s too much, brother,” said the old man, picking out a five dollar banknote from the pile and stuffing the rest back into Jason’s pocket. “God bless.” The man started walking away and waved goodbye as he did.
Jason watched the man slowly hobble away, peeled himself off the wall, and started walking. Max’s place was just a few blocks away. As he walked he saw a few teenagers turn a corner in front of him. Jason moved to the side of the street letting them pass, but just as he did, one of them, a short stocky kid with a pimply face, gave him a hard shove with his shoulder.
“Whoa,” the kid said, as Jason tumbled back and landed awkwardly on his ass. “This guy just tried to jump me.”
“What the hell,” was all Jason had time to say as the rest of the youths descended upon him. He was immediately overwhelmed by the flurry of punches and kicks, then something hard and sandy smashed into his face. He fell back, his head painfully striking the cold concrete of the sidewalk, and grunted as another kick landed on his groin. The beating finally stopped, and Jason felt rough hands searched his pockets, taking out his cash and the wallet.
After a few seconds, it was quiet again, and he slowly sat up and looked around. The assailants were gone, and the street was just as empty as it had been a few minutes ago, a bleak empty stretch of road, with cars parked on either side of it buried in the banks of dirty snow. He sat there for a while, the cold seeping from the rough surface of the sidewalk numbing his bruised body. His face stung, and when Jason cautiously touched it with his fingertips, the hand came away bloody. He picked himself up and started slowly walking again.
• • •
The screen was a flickering sea of red and green, stock symbols blinking in and out of existence. Making fortunes for some, ruining others. This morning, however, Max was interested only in one ticker; ASCP. It wasn’t a particularly volatile stock. For the last year it traded between $9.50 and $10.17. Today it was hovering just under ten dollars, which meant that if he wanted to buy the entire fifty million float of Asclepius Inc. shares, he would have to come up with half a billion dollars.
Max had always found the false simplicity of this math amusing. Take the share price of any company, multiply it by the number of issued shares, and there it was. The exact real time value of a giant company. All those inventories of raw materials, warehouses, assembly line robots, trucks, boxes, clipboards, and paperclips, neatly represented by one number, accurate to a penny. At least in theory, of course. Today this was the theory he was most interested in. If at ten dollars per share Asclepius was worth half a billion, then at twenty it would be worth a full billion. Or, and here Max found himself grinning, if the price of the stock dropped to as little as ten cents a share, one could buy the entire company for just five million dollars.
Max took a last look at the market screen and shut it down. Just staring at the stock price wasn’t going to change it. He picked up his rugged Nikon with telescopic lens and headed to the door. Some spying was in order.
• • •
The headquarters of Blackwater Research Group was located in the heart of the financial district, right across the street from Trinity Church. It was a busy spot all year, tourists flocking in from across the globe. They would come here to gaze at the New York Stock Exchange, to touch the bronze balls of the famous Charging Bull, and roam the streets around Wall Street. Most would hope to catch a glimpse of the famous inhabitants of Wall Street, the handsome men and women in ultra-expensive business suits. Of course, what’d they find was quite different from their expectations. They’d find the bull cordoned off by the police to keep graffiti artists at bay, the Exchange barricaded against possible terrorist threats, and instead of handsome faces in expensive suits fit for a TV show, they’d see the tired faces of the Wall Street hopefuls in cheap business attire standing in long lines for halal food trucks and hot dog stands during their non-existent lunch breaks.
Max hated the tourist crowds as much as any New Yorker but their presence made him and his telescopic lenses almost invisible.
He found a spot in front of Trinity Church between a picture dealer and a shoe shine guy and leaned against the black iron fence separating the church grounds from the sidewalk. It was almost noon, and Max expected someone from the “Blackwater” offices to come out for fresh air eventually.
The infamous research company and its flamboyant head trader Owen Perkins made hundreds of millions over the past ten years in a controversial but lucrative scheme. Their analysts looked for companies that traded in the open market and appeared to be legitimate on the surface. In reality they were scams and Ponzi schemes with overinflated balance sheets and non-existent revenues.
Once Blackwater identified a company they believed to be a fraud, they would issue a publicly available report while simultaneously shorting the company’s stock with the hope of buying it back at a significant discount once the public had a chance to digest Blackwater’s research report lambasting the company as a fraud. Out of the thirty-seven companies Blackwater Research targeted in the last ten years, only one was still around, a rare miss in the otherwise impeccable list of indictments, bankruptcies, and in some cases jail sentences.
People started getting out of the Blackwater office building, and Max perked up. From his position he could see the security gate in the building’s lobby with a magnetic reader. Security was tight. Every time somebody wanted to go in or out of the building he had to wave his access card in front of the reading device, then the guard would check the picture on the ID against the building’s database.
Max started taking pictures. The angle wasn’t ideal, but he didn’t need a perfect shot. With enough photographs he was confident he’d be able to create a composite later that looked good enough to pass the brief scrutiny by the guard. After snapping a couple of dozen pictures he felt that he had enough data.
Now for the fun part, he mused to himself, putting the camera away. He watched one of the Blackwater employees, a man with a build similar to his own, put an ID in his left coat pocket and walk south on Broadway. Max crossed the street and started following the man weaving through the crowd of tourists. He caught up with him, pulled a small black device out of his pocket, and hid it in his right hand. As the employee stopped at an intersection checking for cars, Max clumsily bumped into him, placing his right hand with a little gadget in it against the man’s coat pocket as if for support.
“Pardon,” he said in French, then awkwardly smiled and corrected himself in English with a thick French accent. “Sorry. Not paying attention.”
“No worries,” the man said politely, and smiled back, then continued to walk.
Max crossed the street again and casually walked down to the subway station at the corner of Broadway and Rector Street. He took the stairs to the subway platform and only then allowed a quick glance at the little device in his right hand. The little LED light was emitting the steady green. Max smiled and put the device away, climbed the stairs to the street level, and walked across the street again. He went down to the northbound subway platform and sat on a bench to wait for the train. Now he could go home.
When he entered the apartment it was dark, the blinds shut on every window, a lonely light above the island in the kitchen throwing long shadows onto the floor. Max squinted trying to get
his eyes adjusted after the bright afternoon sun.
“Jason?” he called out, but heard no answer. He looked around and grabbed a shoehorn off the hook on a wall, a long heavy piece of steel with a lion head on its handle. Kicking off his shoes, he started to slowly walk toward the kitchen, gripping the shoehorn like a hammer. As he got closer, narrowing his eyes against a bright spotlight, he saw something on the floor, sticking out from behind the kitchen island. Max rushed in, shoehorn raised and ready to strike, and froze in his tracks, staring in disbelief at the streaks of blood on his expensive white Italian marble floor. There in the middle of his posh kitchen Jason Hunt was lying in the heap of dirty clothes, his swollen face covered in blood.
CHAPTER 18
Alexander Engel looked up from the morning paper and glanced out of the tinted window as the limousine slowed to a crawl in front of the iron gates. A few seconds later the gates smoothly swung open and the car drove onto the circular gravel road leading around a fountain, switched off at this time of the year, to the front of the estate. They parked just outside the front steps of the massive house and the chauffeur got out. He walked around the sleek car, opened the passenger door, and briskly walked back to the driver seat. Alexander remained seated, his eyes scanning the newspaper, ignoring the cold air flooding the car. A few seconds later a tall gray-haired man walked down the steps of the porch, got into the car, and closed the door behind him.
“Good morning, Alex,” he said in a deep baritone, his handsome face forming a well-rehearsed smile. “Dropping by on your way to work?“
“Good morning, Senator,” Engel said, putting the paper down. “How’s the campaign going?”
“It’s going quite well, thanks to some of my staunch supporters. But what happened to the Relentless? I’m rather surprised to see you out of your beloved chopper.”
“I’m glad you have such a loyal following,” said Alexander, pushing a small button on the divider between the front seats and the back. A thick one-way privacy guard slowly rose and slid in place with a quiet click, separating them from the driver.