“Let me think about it,” I hedged.
We walked around the gym and talked about the Boca P.A.L. program. It sounded a lot like the Boston version, with emphasis on creating a bond between the youth of the community and the police in their neighborhood. He gave me a brochure. “We do good work, Eddie,” he said earnestly.
I nodded and glanced at my watch. Forty-five minutes had passed since I entered the gym. “I have to get going, Matt,” I apologized. “I’ve got an important appointment nearby.” I shook hands with Matt and Barry. I was about to leave when Tommy Bigelow returned on the run. Tommy’s face was red, and he was wide-eyed. He held up a stack of printed paper.
“Is that all about me?” I laughed nervously.
He nodded his head. “Me and the Professor found it,” he said proudly and started to read slowly, like an eight-year-old.
“‘Eddie Perlmutter, Massachusetts and New England Featherweight Golden Gloves Champion in 1959 and 1960, Massachusetts Middleweight Champ in 1961.’”
He looked up at me. “You moved up two weight divisions at sixteen years old. That’s unbelievable.”
“‘Held your own,’ you said,” Barry Anson chuckled and poked my shoulder.
“Get this, Matt,” Tommy said. “He had twenty-two wins, no losses, with nineteen stops. That’s incredible. Even Barney Ross lost four fights.”
“Barney Ross fought over eighty times as a professional,” I said. “I was an amateur. You can’t compare me to him, like you said.”
“I’m sorry I said that,” he apologized.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I’m impressed,” Matt McGrady said, patting my back. “That’s quite a record.”
“I got more impressive stuff here,” Tommy said.
“More impressive than an undefeated record?” Matt asked.
“Way more impressive, right, Professor?” Tommy said.
“Right,” the Professor answered. He took some of the papers from Tommy. “Listen to this,” the Professor began. “Eddie Perlmutter received two police department Medals of Honor, two medals for valor, three medals for merit, and a Mayor’s Commendation.”
“You were a super cop,” Matt said.
“It was a long time ago,” I said.
“Officer Matt, can I tell the other kids in the gym about Mr. Perlmutter?” Tommy asked.
“Call me Eddie,” I told him.
“Sure,” Matt said, and the kids were off and running.
“This is embarrassing,” I said.
“You should be very proud of your record, Eddie.”
“I can barely remember the things I did as a kid,” I said, checking my watch. “Hey, I gotta go.”
“Here’s my card, Eddie. Call me anytime.”
I thanked him and put his card in my shirt pocket. I started for the door.
“Hey Eddie,” Tommy called after me. “Wait up. The guys want to meet you.”
“I’ll be back,” I said, but I had no idea if I would keep that promise.
The lot next door was still empty when I returned to my car. The late afternoon light was dim, and soon it would be dark. I took a flashlight from my glove compartment and stumbled through the bushes into the adjacent lot. I couldn’t find a door on the back wall. It didn’t make sense. I had seen the three people come from the back of the building. I walked the perimeter looking for another point of entry. I found nothing until I got to the front. The lock on the front door facing Second Avenue was standard, and it was easy pickings for me. I opened the door slowly. No alarm. I stepped inside and locked the door behind me.
I was in a large open room with only a front counter separating me from what appeared to be the back wall of the building. A small bathroom was to my left, but the toilet and sink were gone. Trash and old mechanical parts littered the floor. I smelled mold in the damp air. I walked to the rear wall, turned my back to it, and surveyed the room. The building appeared smaller from the inside than it did from the outside. Why? I reviewed the facts.
A woman of about thirty-five or forty had disguised herself as a woman of seventy-five and passed a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill at a local supermarket. She got forty dollars change and a free bag of groceries. A small-time crime. The woman then went to the courtesy counter and cashed two checks. I assumed they were phony and made out for significant amounts. In each instance, the old-young woman had created a disturbance preceding her transactions. The distraction action was performed to call attention to her but not to her transaction.
Conclusion: She was a professional.
More facts: The woman had then driven a few miles to this building, entered, and exited it from the rear where there was no exit or entrance I could find. I broke into the building from the front and was now standing at the rear. The building looked smaller from the inside than it looked from the outside.
Second conclusion: There was more to this place than met the eye. There was definitely a back entrance that I would eventually find, and there was another room behind the rear wall I was leaning on.
I thumped the painted wall with the flat of my hand. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the entire back wall was made of flimsy plasterboard. I stood away from the wall and kicked it hard with the toe of my right sneaker. My foot passed through the plaster easily. I continued kicking holes in the wall until I was able to remove the entire panel of plasterboard. There was a cinder-block wall on the other side of the plasterboard facade.
Conclusion: The plasterboard wall had been built to create the optical illusion that the entire building was one big room from the front door to the rear wall. The cinder-block wall had been built for security reasons.
I removed my Swiss army knife from my pocket, extracted the largest, strongest blade, and poked at the cement that joined the blocks together. It had the consistency of dry oatmeal. God bless mold, water leaks, and unqualified workmen. I chipped away at the four edges of one block. In only a few minutes, I was able to remove the entire block from the wall. I stuck my flashlight in the opening. I couldn’t see very much. I had to remove more blocks. Forty-five minutes later I was looking through a large hole into a room that looked like a medical lab.
My flashlight illuminated stainless-steel cooking pots, plastic beakers, and pipe neck tubing. I saw a hot plate and other heating devices on a table in the middle of the room. I worked the light around the room and saw computers, printers, metal cans, and stacked boxes. I aimed the beam at the various boxes and read the stenciled lettering: acetone, benzene, carbon tetrachloride, chloromice T, and high-performance erasers often used by counterfeiters. I stepped through the hole in the wall and entered the room.
I was familiar with the chemicals. They were used to produce ecstasy, the designer drug also known as the disco biscuit, hug drug, clarity, and white dove. Ecstasy was a derivative of MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine). One ecstasy pill cost about fifty cents to produce and command a forty-dollar price on the streets. The exact same chemicals used to make ecstasy could also be used with high-tech erasers to make ink disappear, as in counterfeiting.
Suddenly the invisible back door burst open and two handguns, designed to make me disappear, were pointed in my direction. Behind the guns were the men I had seen in the parking lot. Behind them was the “not so old” lady shopper. She didn’t have a gun pointed at me. The daggers from her eyes were enough to kill me.
Silent alarm, schmuck. I cursed myself. I was angry for being so careless, but I wasn’t afraid. I had been at the wrong end of a gun before. I noticed an open pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter on the table to my left, next to a can of acetone and a can of benzene. I had all the elements for fire.
“Who ze fahk are you?” the bigger of the two men growled at me in a strong Russian accent.
What could I possibly say that would make any difference? I said nothing.
“I said, who ze fahk are you?”
“I heard you the first time, Boris,” I said.
“How do you kno
w my name?”
Under different circumstances I would have thought that was very funny.
“Wait a minute,” the woman said, moving closer to me. “I know you.” She had a slight Russian accent I hadn’t noticed in the market.
“No, you don’t. A lot of people think I look like P. Diddy. That’s probably it.”
“No.” She studied my face. “No P. Diddy.” Then she remembered. “You’re the guy from Publix.”
“What guy from Publix?” the smaller man asked.
“He was behind me in the checkout line, Yuri.”
“Actually, I was in front of you first,” I said.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, ignoring my stupid banter.
“You dropped your All-Bran. I was trying to return it.”
“What do we do wiz theze guy?” Boris asked. “He’s seen everything.”
“Hey, no problem. All I saw was some counterfeiting stuff and the ecstasy lab.” I tried to make him feel better.
Boris pointed his gun at my head and cocked the hammer. “I keel you, asshole.”
I picked up the can of acetone from the table and held it in front of me. “If you shoot a bullet into this can you’re gonna keel everyone in this room, Khrushchev.”
“I’m not Khrushchev,” he said defensively.
The woman put a hand on Boris’s arm and had him lower the gun.
“What do you want, meester?”
“Call me Eddie,” I said.
“Okay, Eddie, what do you want?”
“Right now I’d settle for getting out of here alive.”
“You a cop?”
“No.” I wasn’t actually lying.
“What are you?”
“I’m an unemployed golf course ranger.”
Boris had heard enough. “Yuri, go take the fahkin’ can from zees idjut and knock heem on heez ass. Then we’ll take heem for a nice long ride to nowhere.”
Yuri stuck his gun in his pants and lumbered toward me. He looked at me like I was his next meal. But I had the acetone and the Zippo lighter on my side. I quickly unscrewed the cap of the acetone, and I doused Yuri with the highly flammable liquid. He stopped.
“What zee fahk?” Yuri pawed at his face. “Zat burns.”
I held up the Zippo lighter.
“No, don’t do zat!” Boris exclaimed.
I smiled at him and flicked the flint. Nothing! Flick! Flick! Nothing. Flick! Flick! Flick! “Fahk,” I said.
Yuri laughed and lumbered closer to me. “Now I’m gonna fahk you up,” he forecasted.
Faster and faster, I kept trying. Flick! Flick! Flick . . . YOU FAHK! FLICK! FLICK! FLAME! FINALLY!
Yuri stopped laughing and lumbering. “Fahk,” he said, understating his problem.
I tossed the Zippo into the puddle of acetone at Yuri’s feet. Poof! Whoosh! LIFTOFF! The world’s largest Molotov cocktail was running in circles. “Boris! I’m on fire! Help me!” He ran toward his two comrades, who backed away from him.
“Get the fahk away from me,” Boris shouted at Yuri, avoiding the human torch. “Lay on the fahking floor.” Yuri went down. Boris went for a fire extinguisher in the corner. He wasn’t pointing his gun at me anymore, so I rushed past the woman. I wasn’t worried about her. She was small and skinny.
I had made a bad decision. The small-caliber bullet hit me on the top of my right shoulder. The gun blast hurt my ears more than the bullet hurt my shoulder.
A fahking twenty-two, I said to myself and looked toward the woman, who continued to point her Saturday night special at me. She was astonished I was still standing, and when I started to move toward her, she panicked and fired a shot above my head. I was on her before she could get off another shot. I grabbed the wrist of her gun hand and twisted sharply. She screamed and dropped the gun to the floor.
“You bastard,” she shouted into my face. I smelled cigarettes and vodka. I used a short, sharp, backhanded karate punch to the left side of her jaw to knock her out. She slumped, and I caught her under the arms before she could fall to the floor.
I wasn’t being chivalrous. I needed a shield. I turned in the direction of the borscht brothers, placing Natasha, or whatever the fahk her name was, in the line of fire.
Is Yuri burning? I asked myself.
Actually, Yuri was only smoldering, and Boris was able to turn his attention to me. He dropped the extinguisher and picked up his Glock nine millimeter. If he shot me with that gun I was going down for the count. Boris was confused when he saw me hiding behind my female shield. “Natasha, wake up,” he called to her. I shuffled toward Boris, keeping Natasha in front of me at all times. When he leaned one way to get a shot at me, I turned with him, keeping Natasha in the bull’s-eye position.
“You coward,” he tried. “Hiding behind a woman.”
“Yeah, and you’re hiding behind a Glock. You put down your gun, and we’ll go at it man to man.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t give a shit what you believe. That’s my best offer.”
He squatted on his haunches and put the Glock on the floor. “There, I put it down. Now let her go.”
I was sure he had a backup piece tucked in his belt behind his back, but I really didn’t care.
“Okay tough guy, now back away from the gun.”
Boris took a couple of steps back with his hands on his hips. He was making his move for the backup piece. I shoved the unconscious Natasha toward him forcefully. He didn’t move to catch her, and she fell hard on her face. I figured her nose broke in the process.
Boris didn’t even give her a look. Russian chivalry was apparently dead. Boris was reaching behind his back when he noticed that I was holding Natasha’s twenty-two in my hand.
“Now where did this come from?” I asked.
“Fahk your twenty-two,” he laughed, making me wonder what cannon he had hidden behind his back.
I decided not to wait to find out. I fired three shots into his right knee. His laughter changed to screams. Personally I found his laughing more annoying. He went down on his back then rolled onto his side clutching his wounded knee. While he was writhing in pain, I picked up the Glock he had placed on the floor in front of him, and I pulled the other nine millimeter from its hiding place in the back of his pants. “You’re lucky you didn’t shoot yourself in the ass, Yuri.”
“I’m Boris.” He grimaced in pain.
“I’m Eddie. How you doin’?”
I felt dizzy and leaned against the wall for balance. I looked at my wounded shoulder. It didn’t hurt much, but blood was pouring out of the wound. I put a hand over the hole in my shoulder. I knew I couldn’t last long bleeding this fast. I removed my cell phone from my pants pocket and the business card from my shirt pocket. I punched in one of the phone numbers on the card.
“Officer McGrady,” he answered.
“Matt,” I said weakly. “Eddie Perlmutter.”
“Hey, Eddie, I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon. What’s up?”
“My number.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I just got shot, and I think I’m bleeding to death.”
“Holy shit, where are you?”
“Next door.”
“In the vacuum cleaner place?”
“No,” I gasped. I was having trouble staying awake. “Listen, Matt, walk outside the gym. Okay.”
“Okay.” I heard him running. “I’m outside, Eddie.”
“See the building in the next lot?”
“Through the trees?”
“Yeah. Go through the bushes to the back of that building. The back door is open, but I don’t want you to come in. I’ll come out.” I could hear him running again.
“Why can’t I come in?”
“I made a citizen’s arrest,” I said. “We don’t want to give them an illegal search and seizure claim. Call for backup, Matt. Tell them to come with a warrant for this place.”
“But they shot you.” Matt was breathing hard. �
��I can enter.”
“Probably,” I said. “Just don’t take the chance.”
Moments later Matt was at the back door.
“Oh, man,” he exclaimed as he surveyed the scene.
Yuri was groaning from his burns, Boris was rocking back and forth holding his shattered knee. Natasha was still unconscious.
“Don’t come in,” I told him. “Make the call, Matt.” I slumped against the wall.
Matt called for backup and warrants. Then he called the gym and Barry arrived in a couple of minutes carrying towels. Matt pressed a towel hard against my wound.
“Who are these people?” Barry asked.
“The guy I set on fire is Yuri. The guy I shot in the knee over there is Boris. The woman I knocked out is Natasha.”
“What’s going on here?” Matt asked.
“It’s a regular party house,” I said. “They print their own money then cook up some ecstasy to celebrate hitting the counterfeit lottery.”
“You’re kidding,” Barry said.
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” I asked, and then I passed out.
I floated on the edge of consciousness. I had no idea what time it was, what day it was, or where I was. I remembered being shot by a woman named Natasha. I had intravenous tubes in my arms, an oxygen tube in my nose, and a catheter in Mr. Johnson. I guessed I was in a hospital. Nurses were constantly taking my vital signs. A gorgeous brown-skinned nurse, who reminded me of Halle Berry, floated above me, and I told her I loved her. When I had to pee, I peed but I didn’t know how I did it or where it went. Mr. Johnson didn’t say a word. I think he was in shock.
The next time I opened my eyes I was able to keep them open, but my vision was blurred. Through eyeballs that seemed like they were coated with Vaseline I noticed a window and thought I could see the darkness of night outside. I saw the foggy image of two men at the foot of my bed looking down at me. One of them was talking in a deep voice, but I was having trouble hearing him. I thought I heard, “You pay. You die.” This got my attention, but I wasn’t sure if he was saying “You buy” or “You die.” Maybe he was saying both. The man next to the talking head smiled and said nothing. The words “You die!” became clearer and more insistent. Who were these men who kept promising me I was going to pay and die? Plenty of criminals wanted to kill me when I was in my prime in Boston. But I was in Boca, and I was retired. Who would want me dead in Boca? Maybe Yuri, Boris, or Natasha would like to kill me, but they couldn’t be in my room. Yuri was a smoldering ember, and Boris had three bullets in his right knee. There was no way either could be standing at the foot of my bed now, unless I had been in a coma for months.
Boca Knights Page 10