by Ken Brigham
It was so unexpected and happened so fast that Shane did not get a look at his abductors or anything specific about the unmarked dark green van with windows tinted opaque black. Just as he was preparing to turn into the alley from Church Street, the van stopped at the curb beside him, and someone took control of his chair from behind. A side door on the van opened, a ramp extended to the sidewalk. Shane was whisked into the dark rear compartment of the vehicle and immediately blindfolded, his wrists zip-tied together behind the back of his chair by whoever was behind him and he felt the unmistakable prick of a needle jabbed into the deltoid muscle of his right arm. The ramp was rapidly retracted, the door slid shut with a solid thud, and off they went, the van wending its way ever so carefully through the afternoon traffic, destination unknown and unknowable at least to Shane. As soon as they were moving, his newly acquired attendant reached into Shane’s shirt pocket and retrieved the cell phone. He handed it over to someone in the front of the van and shortly thereafter, Shane hear a soft clink as the phone hit the Church Street pavement, fixing his traceable location to a spot just short of Second Avenue, assuming the discarded phone stayed put.
Besides the obvious physical consequences, the bullet that lodged itself in Shane’s spinal cord also introduced him to a range of new emotional experiences. He often felt compromised. Sometimes he felt inadequate. But he rarely felt vulnerable. That is exactly what he felt as he sat suddenly blindfolded in the rear of a dark green van en route to God knows where unable to move his legs and rapidly losing his ability to think clearly.
Dr. Katya Karpov was not given to panic even in the most dire situations. She was a problem solver—define the problem, enumerate the possible solutions, and proceed with the best option. That rationality had served her well in many difficult professional and personal situations and she relied on it.
However, when she arrived home at almost eight o’clock, still pondering the ethical dilemma that genetic analysis had forced her to confront, looking forward to discussing that problem with Shane, and finding an eerily empty flat with no sign of her husband, she panicked. Not once in the years since Shane’s accident had she come home from work at around this time to an empty house. Shane was always there. She could, and did, count on that. She needed her husband’s physical presence in the evenings. She honestly believed that she could not, or would not, go on living without that.
Katya’s heart throbbed an ominous deafening rhythm, heaving her chest like a bellows. She couldn’t concentrate enough to think the situation through. Her right brain was screaming RED ALERT so loudly that the efforts of her left brain to recapture her attention and get on with doing something logical and productive about the situation were lost in the din. She sat down in the living room, held her head in her hands, and sobbed. Wracking sobs like she had never felt before.
After a time, the sobs began to ebb, and she started to gain some control of her thoughts. Maybe there was an explanation less dire than she feared. Maybe. She retrieved her phone and called Shane’s number but there was no answer. She wasn’t surprised. She left a message. She then called the Wall Street bar and got Pat Harmony on the phone. Harmony was no help. His information suggested to Katya that her fear of something bad might well be justified. Indeed, Shane had been there earlier but a couple of hours ago he got a phone call at the bar, a woman ‘s voice, and then left rather abruptly. It was odd. Pat Harmony didn’t recall Shane ever having gotten a call on the bar phone before. He always used his cell. The cell signal was good there. Harmony didn’t recognize the woman’s voice. Shane appeared to know who the caller was but he hadn’t mentioned that to Pat. Shane just ended the call, bid Pat ta-ta and off he went.
Hardy Seltzer was leaning over the bar at TAPS engaged in a serious conversation with Marge Bland about whether she was going to join him for a late dinner after her shift was done when his cell phone summoned him. He was surprised to see that the screen identified the caller as Katya Karpov. Why would Katya be calling him at this time of evening? In fact, why would Katya be calling him at all? This had to have something to do with Shane, something that wasn’t likely to be good news. Hadley interrupted his conversation with Marge at the risk of losing some of the progress that he felt he had made toward convincing her to grant him some of her time and attention away from the intrusive surroundings of TAPS, and answered the call. For some reason, of which he was unaware, Hadley chose not to reveal that he knew the identity of his caller.
“This is Hardy Seltzer,” he answered the call is his most professional voice.
“Hardy,” Katya said, “this is Katya.” The panic in her voice was thinly veiled but she sounded reasonable. “Have you heard from Shane this evening? When I arrived home at the usual time, he wasn’t here, and I’ve had no message from him. That is very unusual. It has never happened before. He doesn’t answer his cell.”
“Did you try Wall Street? I meant to drop by there and touch base with him this afternoon, but I never made it.”
“Pat Harmony says he was there but left a few hours ago after taking a call from an unidentified woman. Pat assumed that he was going home.”
It was all Katya could do to suppress the sobs that threatened to resurface from the place where they lurked just barely below the threshold of her control.
“I don’t need to tell you, Katya, that this is not good. He’s been after this notion that that artist was murdered, and I fear he may have awakened a monster. Those Fitzwallington paintings are attracting a lot of attention. Not all of it good. Has Shane discussed any of what he was up to with you?”
“Nothing specific,” Katya replied. “Some generalities. He certainly never mentioned any thought that he might be in danger of any kind. Of course, he might not tell me that. But I thought he was over the risky stuff. I desperately hoped that was the case.”
“My impression has been, although you certainly know the man much better than I do, that risk was not a concept that he paid much attention to. Eyes on the prize guy. Whatever it took to get there.”
“That’s probably true.”
“Tell you what, Katya,” Hardy said. “The last place he was seen was Wall Street, and he left there presumably to go to Printers Alley. For starters, I’ll go retrace that route and see if I can find out anything that will help us locate him. Maybe people who work along that route saw him or saw something unusual. Shane is well known in the area and easily identifiable. Hard to imagine that he could just disappear, and no one would notice. Meantime, you sit tight in case he shows up with an explanation or tries to contact you. Does that sound a reasonable place to start? We shouldn’t panic prematurely. If he doesn’t show up by tomorrow, I’ll talk to the chief and maybe contact a Tennessean reporter who I trust as well. Shane has a lot of admirers out there who would be delighted to help out if this turns out to be a full-fledged manhunt.”
“I’m pretty frantic, Hardy. I can’t imagine sitting alone in this house with no idea where Shane is for very long. Can you get started tonight?”
“Yes ma’am.” One could easily imagine the detective saluting. “I am on my way. Call me if you hear anything. I’ll do the same. Shane is a very resourceful man, Katya. I have a feeling that this will turn out okay.”
In fact, Hardy did not have anything close to a feeling that this would turn out okay. It smelled pretty foul.
“Sorry, Marge,” Hardy was truly sorry to miss the possibility of some quality time with Marge Bland, “but I’m going to have to take a rain check on plans for the evening. Don’t forget where we were, though. I’d hate to have to start over.”
Marge smiled. “You’re a piece of work, Hardy Seltzer,” she said.
Hardy settled into the familiar driver’s seat in his old faithful LTD, maneuvered the boat out of the TAPS parking lot, and lumbered down the First Avenue hill. He was headed directly to Sam’s Sushi.
Akanari Sato fell in love with American country music when he was twelve years old, living with his parents in Osaka. He somehow
got a guitar and taught himself the few essential chords. As he grew older, he went to work in a sushi bar and used virtually his entire salary to purchase country music CDs. He sat for hours playing the records, strumming his guitar and memorizing the words and tunes to what became a sizeable repertoire of the genre. He got pretty good according to his friends, and often performed at parties and even at a few local bars.
When he was nineteen, he made the leap. He liquidated his entire possessions, maxed out his credit cards, changed his name to Sam Sake, packed up his guitar, and bought a ticket to Nashville, hoping to realize his dream of becoming a successful country musician. He had the twangy accent pretty much down pat by imitating the recordings, and he imagined Nashville as the land of milk and honey for an aspiring country music star, even one so culturally remote from the music’s roots. He thought there might even be some appeal in the novelty of his situation.
All that was quite a few years ago now. Nashville did not deliver on Sam Sake’s dream, as it does not deliver on the vast majority of such dreams. But a recurring fringe benefit of the city’s mythical status as the mecca of country music is that the reputation brings some unexpected things to the city. Eventually being forced by the imperatives of human biology to face the fact that he was not going to be able to get himself fed, housed, and set on the road to fame by picking and grinning, Sam fell back on his skill as a sushi chef. With the help of a modest loan from a local bank, he opened Sam’s Sushi, a smallish restaurant at the corner of Church Street and Printers Alley that quickly became the place for sushi in Nashville. The restaurant’s popularity proved durable, and Sam Sake (nee Akanari Sato) continued to make a more than comfortable living. Recently he had been considering opening additional restaurants in the area, but he was still incubating that idea.
When he traced Shane’s likely route home from Wall Street in his mind, Hardy Seltzer quickly realized that the only establishment along the route from which the ex-detective might have been observed was Sam’s Sushi. The place had a large picture window facing Church Street, and Hardy knew that Sam was a keen observer of the goings-on in the window. Sam binge-watched those goings-on like other people watched Netflix. Hardy had called on Sam for information in cases before, and Sam rarely disappointed him. As a source of visual information along that stretch of Church Street, the sushi master was almost as good as CCTV.
Shane would have had to pass right by Sam’s place. Sam knew Shane, knew the whole Shane Hadley story, and besides, Shane in his wheelchair was a readily recognizable figure easily distinguished among the cast of characters acting out the continual human drama in Sam’s window on that fraction of the world. Hardy stuck the blue light on the LTD’s roof and left the car at the curb on Church Street directly in front of Sam’s place.
“Ah, detective Hardy-san,” Sam said without looking up from the sushi order he was preparing. The –san honorific was pretty much the only remaining vestige of his native language, most of which was buried deep under multiple strata of Sam’s best approximation of Music City English laid down over the years; a cost of doing business. “Whatever is up?”
Seltzer had entered the shop, walked through the small dining area where all of the six tables were fully occupied and entered the kitchen area where he knew Sam would be. Sam still created all of the sushi himself but had hired some young people to serve the tables. Sam created the dishes and placed them in the large pass-through between kitchen and dining room that served the dual purpose of allowing Sam a clear view of the picture window fronting Church Street and provided a conduit for the sushi to be delivered to the orderer by the young servers. Sam also did a lot of takeout business, especially at lunchtime. Sam was a busy man.
“Evenin’, Sam,” Seltzer returned the greeting. “Looks like a busy night for sushi?”
“Every night busy night, Hardy-san. Good business. Not like country music star, but good business.”
“Take what they give you, my friend. Take what they give you,” Seltzer concluded the small talk and then continued. “Have you seen Shane Hadley pass by here this evening? Seems he left Wall Street some hours ago on his way home and never got there. He would have had to pass by your place. Did you see him or see anything unusual on the street tonight?”
“No detective Shane-san tonight, Hardy-san. Unusual. Lately, he passes by here most evenings around 6 or 7. No tonight. Not think much about it, but now you bring it up, seems unusual.”
Hmm, Hardy thought. Given Shane’s Holmesian obsession, he might think of this bit of information as the dog that didn’t bark. Hardy didn’t share his friend’s obsession but he had found sometimes that non-events, unexpected omissions, were important clues.
“Any unusual goings-on in your window on the world this evening?”
“Now you mention. Around 7:30, there was some little ruckus on the street but to the right of my window. Stage right,” Sam smiled. “Could not see what trouble was and busy with sushi, so didn’t investigate. Now I think, I could see the front part of dark green car just poking into my window for a minute and then gone away. Didn’t think much about it. Busy with sushi.”
“Keep thinking over the evening, Sam. If anything comes up, even if it doesn’t seem important, give me a call. You have my card?”
“Yes, yes, Hardy-san. Always keep card handy.”
“Mr. Detective,” a wiry man of indeterminate age with unkempt hair and a deeply pockmarked face leaned against the driver’s side door of Hardy’s car and called to Hardy as he exited Sam’s Sushi.
“What’s on your mind, professor?” Hardy answered, moving toward the car and reaching for the door handle.
The homeless man regularly haunted the area around The Alley. He was known as the professor for reasons that no one seemed to know anything about. The cops left him pretty much alone, although they all knew who he was. He was harmless as far as anyone knew. Hardy was in a hurry and wasn’t inclined to waste time chatting with the frequently garrulous professor.
“I think I know something that may interest you,” the man responded.
“And what would that be?”
“It might be something valuable to you,” the professor said, an obvious reference to his desire for compensation.
Hardy produced a twenty and said, “OK, what have you got.”
“Thank you, sir,” the professor said. “You are most generous. It’s about your friend in the wheelchair. Earlier tonight, I was just hanging around here and saw him wheeling down Church Street toward The Alley, just like most nights. But it looked like someone behind him grabbed his wheelchair and wheeled him into a big van that had stopped at the curb and put down a ramp from the side door. It all happened fast. They pulled the ramp back inside, the door slammed shut, and the van took off. I couldn’t tell if your friend resisted or anything, but it seemed strange to me. It all happened so fast.”
Twenty dollars well-spent, Hardy thought.
“Can you describe the van?”
“Big, dark green, dark windows all around.”
“Anything else about it?”
“Oh,” the professor rummaged through the pocket of his frayed tie-dyed vest, producing a scrap of paper. “I almost forgot. I took down the license number.” He handed the scrap of paper to Hardy. “Something seemed wrong about the whole thing, so I wrote down the license number. Will that be of any help to you?”
“Maybe,” Hardy replied. “But good work anyway. Thank you, professor. Thank you very much.”
Hardy got into the car and made four calls. The first was to check out the license number, which turned out to belong to a rental. No surprise there. The second call was to the private cell phone of Tennessean reporter Harvey Green. Hardy usually avoided reporters as much as possible, but Green had proven helpful on occasion. His stories were as accurate as you could hope for in a newspaper and Hardy didn’t mind the implicit inside track for possible scoops if Green was willing to do him an occasional favor. Hardy knew this call was terribly premature, but he
was willing to take the risk without clearing it with anybody. If there was any chance to locate Shane quickly, Hardy would gladly take the blame for trying anything he could think of even if his efforts failed. It was still early enough that a short piece should make it into the morning edition of the paper. And Hardy was betting that even a hopelessly incomplete piece would alert a lot of people to be on the lookout for anything suspicious that might be relevant and that they would notify the police. The third call was to Assistant Chief Carl Goetz, his immediate supervisor. He reported the possible kidnapping of Shane Hadley, gave the AC the license number and listened to his immediate response. He did not tell his boss that he had planted the newspaper story; that may have been unwise. Call number four was to Katya Karpov. She hadn’t heard anything. Hardy related everything he had found out and promised to follow up aggressively in the morning. Katya didn’t sound so good.
Shane Hadley sat blindfolded, hands bound, in the back of a van heading somewhere unknown, tended to by an unidentifiable person who refused to speak. He couldn’t make any sense of the situation. It was all a dream, he thought, although he had never been a dreamer. It wasn’t a dream, but it didn’t feel like reality either. Shane couldn’t get the experience organized in his head. Something was wrong with his brain. The circuits weren’t firing normally. The unusual feeling of vulnerability was rapidly taking over his consciousness, crowding out the confidence that he depended on, and that generally served him well. He didn’t like that.
What Shane did not know, what neither of the two other persons in the dark green van knew, was that they were in the process of acting out a serious miscalculation.
Chapter 21
The New York money guys were extremely anxious to close the deal on the Fitzwallington paintings, get them committed exclusively to Galleria Salinas and then get the actual paintings, the product, stashed in the New York gallery and its overflow storage facility, depending on the volume. The Morticia Dragon Lady, Mildred Roth, made it plain in a conversation with Bruce Therault that the money guys were very unhappy having to deal with the yokels in Nashville and couldn’t imagine why it should take so long. That’s why they sent Mace Ricci as an advance man to nail down the commitment from the daughter. And maybe he had done that. But things were still moving too slowly and so they insisted that Therault, the presumed brains of the operation, go down there to help sort things out. And, beginning to feel desperate, they summoned some serious muscle from their Chicago connections in the person of Damian Saturn to join the other two in Nashville with the firm and non-negotiable charge of getting the job done. Whatever it took! And soon! None of the three was particularly happy with the thinly veiled threat, but they felt the pressure. And they all knew the kind of pressure the New York money guys were capable of exerting should they choose to. They were too aware of the potential unpleasant consequences of the Wrath of Roth.