The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4)

by Gay Hendricks

  Talk about a loophole, and a business opportunity for the cyber-criminally inclined.

  Petar, upset, stubbed out one cigarette and lit another. “Now you see why I quit, Monkevic? At least when I drive taxi, every job I start, I know I can finish.”

  Thanks to a monster one-lane traffic jam, caused by an overturned truck full of Croatian goats headed for market, we entered the medieval town of Dubrovnik around 7 P.M., well past dusk. The city was set in a curved, rugged coastline like a gem in a jagged tiara. The Adriatic Sea was ink black, but in the morning it would be the purest shade of aquamarine.

  Petar found us a cheap hotel near the harbor area known as Gruz. “Holiday Hotel cousin,” he joked, but the shabby exterior, at least, was easier on the eye.

  Sasha and Audrey bent and stretched by the car, working out the kinks. I handed Sasha some cash. I’d replenished my supply from an ATM next to the marketplace fountain this morning.

  “I have money,” Sasha said stiffly.

  More like Audrey has money, I thought. What I said was: “Relax. This is to pay for me, okay? Go on inside and make sure they have rooms available. I need to square things up with Petar.” I’d actually paid him hours ago, but they didn’t know that.

  Audrey and Sasha disappeared inside. I turned to Petar.

  “I need a gun,” I said.

  CHAPTER 21

  My room was squeaky clean, and tiny. One small, firm bed; a wooden chair; and a bathroom the size of a broom closet. The Tibetan lama in me felt right at home. A special feature did give me pause—on top of the dresser was a rodent trap, along with instructions in three languages on how to set it. With harbors come rats. A small package of mini-marshmallows served as bait. I’d stayed in some pretty exotic places, but this was the first one that came with a mousetrap as an amenity.

  I lay down fully clothed. Next thing I knew, my phone was buzzing insistently.

  “I find gun,” Petar said. “Meet me outside in one hour.”

  I’d slept hard. I checked the time: 8:30.

  Rested, with teeth freshly brushed and hair damp from a hot shower, I left my little room with body and mind finally located in the same general region. Good thing, if I was about to become armed and dangerous.

  Sasha and Audrey’s room was next door. Sasha still had custody of the phone, and I asked to see it. I recognized the type from my police work with gangbangers. A throwaway; prepaid, disposable, and cheap.

  “No tracking device, at least,” I said.

  “You’re sure?” Sasha asked.

  “Positive. Have you decided which number we should call?”

  Sasha nodded. “Of the two that came up the most, only one is a Dubrovnik exchange.”

  “Good. Sasha, you’re the closest thing we have to a native. How do you feel about making the call?”

  He swallowed, glancing at Audrey. “Sure. But, you know, language may not be a problem. Most of these guys speak English as well as I do. But if you think it’s better, I mean, what do you think, Audrey?”

  Sasha was stalling, which told me he was too nervous to make the call, and too proud to admit it. I tried to address both issues.

  “Good point,” I said while reaching for the phone. “I’ll call. We’ll know right away if they speak English. If they don’t, you take over.”

  I speed-dialed the top contender and activated the speaker. We listened to three rings.

  “Yah.”

  Serbian, Croatian, Russian, take your pick.

  “Hello. I have the telephone that belonged to a man at the Sarajevo train station yesterday. Do you understand me?”

  Silence, then: “Yah. Yes.”

  “I need those two girls. How much?” If this operation was run on cyber-fuel, the middlemen didn’t see a lot of actual cash in their pockets. Or so I hoped.

  Sasha grabbed my wrist, his eyes wild. “What are you doing?” he mouthed.

  I shook off his hand. “How much?”

  “Twenty thousand. Euros.”

  Sasha and Mila gaped. I winked at them. “What’s your name?” I said.

  “What’s yours?”

  “George,” I lied.

  “Kurt,” he lied back.

  “Kurt, you’ve got a deal, but it will have to be in KMs. Where can we make the swap? I need a public place.”

  “Okay. Restaurant Dubravka, right by main entrance to Old Town.”

  “When?”

  “Eleven-thirty. Sharp. The restaurant closes at midnight. Once I’ve checked the money okay, my partner will release girls.”

  “Where will they be?”

  “Close by.”

  “How will I recognize you?”

  “I find you. I know what you look like.”

  Shit. Weasel face must have sent the photos off right before the fracas. That meant they’d seen Sasha as well. We’d have to adjust accordingly.

  I closed the phone. Sasha and Audrey exploded like a pair of weed-whackers.

  “Are you insane?” Audrey said.

  Sasha chimed in. “You’re going to buy them back? What is wrong with you?”

  “Calm down,” I said. “Do you have twenty thousand dollars?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Neither do I. Not in my pocket, anyway. Nobody’s going to be buying back anybody, okay?”

  I quickly sketched out my plan. They had to agree, because it was the only plan in play.

  “Get to work,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour.” Somehow, without knowing when exactly it had happened, I was in charge again. I liked the feeling a little too much.

  I found Petar waiting outside, and he drove me several miles out of town, to the Croatian version of a seedy bar, which was, in fact, a seedy bar. He’d somehow unearthed a broke individual with a beat-up .38 revolver and a handful of ammo. We found the owner of the weapon slumped over a beer in a booth. I deduced he was a sailor, due to his leathery lizard skin and rolling gait. He shuttled us to the alley behind the bar for a test run. Petar helped him lift the lid of a Dumpster, its insides putrid. I aimed the gun at an empty lard can. Petar lowered the lid to muffle the noise. The sailor covered his ears. I squeezed the trigger. Boom! Petar lifted the cover and all three of us peered inside. A satisfyingly large hole had killed the can dead. Even better, my hand and arm were still intact.

  “You want to try?” I asked Petar. My turn to man the Dumpster.

  Boom!

  We grinned at each other. Men and their guns.

  I closed the deal with 200 marks and a round of unpronounceable Croatian lager.

  I was now a full-scale felon in a foreign country. Since my arrival in Bosnia-Herzegovina I’d stolen one citizen’s phone and bought an illegal firearm off another. I was a one-man crime wave.

  I eyed Petar with affection. A one-man crime wave with an awesome accomplice.

  He dropped me back at my monastery-away-from-home with an hour to spare.

  “Thanks,” I said, leaning into his car. “Now go see your brother. And if I happen to wind up behind bars, bail me out.”

  “Good luck, Monkevic,” he answered, and disappeared into the night.

  Fifteen minutes later, Sasha, Audrey, and I were ready. We proceeded on foot, away from the harbor, toward Dubrovnik’s own exquisite Old Town. Even at this hour, the area thronged with people, most tourists, most in some state of intoxication. A trio of drunken men in red-and-white-checkered football jerseys stumbled by, singing a ragged chorus, barely upright.

  We crossed the busy thoroughfare toward one of the arched gateways into the pedestrian-only Old Town area. The restaurant was to our right. I heard music from an outside patio, a couple of classical guitars. We were still a half hour early, early enough to check out the restaurant gift shop. Instead, I showed them the public parking lot nearby.

  Belma had told Sasha the vehicle that kidnapped her was a dirty white van. We scanned the cars in the lot. No van, white or otherwise.

  Petar and I had scoped out the area earlier, and concluded this
was the only place that made sense for our boys to park their van.

  “Do you have my number programmed on your phone?”

  Sasha flashed the display. Up on the screen and ready.

  “So all you need to do is … ?” I asked.

  “Stay out of sight,” Audrey said, “and watch for a white van. Once we see it, we call you.”

  “That’s right. And what do you do after you call me?”

  Sasha said, “I keep hidden, while getting as close as possible to the van.”

  “I walk into the lot, acting as if I’m looking for my car,” Audrey said.

  “Don’t forget to hold out your hand as if you’re holding keys.”

  “Right. I move as near to the van as I can.”

  “And if either of you see the van start to pull away?”

  “We know what to do.” Sasha patted the bulging pockets of his windbreaker.

  I drew the .38 out of my pocket. “Just so you know, I have this. If I have to use it, disappear. Get as far away from me as you can, as fast as you can.”

  They nodded.

  “So, you’re both still okay with this?” I had been asking this question a lot today.

  “What about the girls?” Sasha asked.

  “Right, of course. I’ll bring the girls back to your room. Just wait there until I show up.”

  “And if you don’t show up?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that, so I didn’t give one.

  I pocketed my gun, shouldered my backpack, and headed for the glow of the busy restaurant. Inside, a singer was crooning about his lady being a tramp.

  Surreal didn’t even come close.

  Open umbrellas protected the tables, from moonlight, I guess. Behind the restaurant, towering white fortress walls spotlit from below glowed with an unearthly light. Far below the patio terrace, the sea ebbed and flowed. The tables were full of late-night diners, except for one. This small corner table was occupied by a solitary man who was facing outward. A glass of beer sat untouched in front of him. One finger tapped along with the music. I checked my watch. He must have just gotten here. I caught his eye and nodded. The man whose name wasn’t Kurt nodded back. Shaved head. Heavy dark brows. Dead eyes.

  Neither of us was inclined to shake hands, and neither said a word. I gently set my backpack on the ground next to him and unzipped. Not-Kurt lifted it to his lap. He peered inside, scowling at the loose pile of money, mostly small bills, that lay across the top.

  My phone vibrated in my left-hand pocket, the one without the .38. The van had arrived.

  Not-Kurt shot me a look and reached deeper into the bag, and my fondest hope came to fulfillment. The mousetrap snapped. Not-Kurt howled. He extracted his hand and stared in disbelief at the dangling trap.

  Before he could shake off the shock, I pulled him upright and executed a standard police academy move, a grab-and-spin that pinned his arm behind his back. The mousetrap was still attached to his middle finger.

  “I have a gun,” I murmured in his ear, and shifted to grip his shoulder. His body felt odd, as stiff and thick as a board.

  Singing loudly, and off-key, I staggered us both out to the street. No one around us paid the slightest attention. We were just another couple of vacationing tourists who’d had a few too many.

  In case my companion thought I was bluffing, I pulled out my .38 and pressed the business end of the barrel into his side with my right hand, still guiding him with my left up the street and into the parking lot. I heard an engine fire up, but I couldn’t see from where.

  Where are you, white van?

  I heard tires squealing, at a distance.

  Was I too late?

  I urged my man toward the back of the dark lot, now shifting to use his body as a shield. He remained stone silent.

  A dirty white van, facing frontward, was wedged between two Mercedes-Benzes, about ten yards in front of me. A blinding pair of lights flashed, like a demon’s eyes, and the van lunged forward.

  Do it!

  Glass shattered as Sasha and Audrey pelted the windshield and side windows with their pocketed rocks.

  I dragged Not-Kurt directly in front of the van. When faced with a live barrier, nine times out of ten human instinct will cause the driver to slam on the brakes. The van lurched to a stop, kernels of glass crunching underneath its tires. The driver door opened and a body rolled out in a crouch and aimed a nasty-looking automatic right at us. Two facts registered: this man was a dead ringer for my old pal Detective Sully O’Sullivan, of the LAPD Sully and Mack team, and the automatic was a dead ringer for a Glock. I twisted Not-Kurt’s arm to propel him forward. The situation was looking more and more deadly.

  “Speak English?” I called out to the holder of the Glock.

  He nodded.

  “Good. How about, you just give me the girls and I give you your partner back?”

  “Fuck you,” he said, and fired a shot straight into his partner’s sternum. The impact knocked us both backward, me on the bottom. Not-Kurt was yelling up a storm, clearly also Not-Dead. Body armor, I thought. Shit. The worst he was going to get out of this was a sore chest. I had a lot more to lose.

  I glimpsed Sasha’s white face peering from the shadows, like a ghost.

  “Run!” I yelled.

  Trapped underneath Not-Kurt, my right hand fished around for the .38, which I’d dropped when we fell. My fingers found the handle, and I tried to unpin my arms to get off a shot.

  More brake squeals, these much closer.

  Not-Sully lifted his Glock and aimed, this time at my head. Not-Kurt shifted to one side. I weighed my options and concluded I had none, when a bulky mass galloped in from the right and tackled my would-be killer. The force of the horizontal takedown caused both men to slide partially under the van, headfirst.

  “Monkevic,” I heard from underneath. “You alive?”

  My energy surged, and I shoved and rolled out from under my adversary, pushing to my knees and aiming at the first promising target, Not-Sully’s leg, which was kicking at Petar’s leg. At least I hoped it was Petar’s leg. It was hard to tell what belonged to whom. A corner of my vision registered Not-Kurt running hard for the shadows. Good riddance, coward.

  I lowered my sight to just above a neon-orange Nike—no way would Petar be caught wearing a shoe that conspicuous or expensive—and shot its wearer, right in the ankle. Another howl.

  I ran to the van and jerked open the side door so violently it almost came off its hinges. Two pairs of dark eyes watched from the farthest corner. The blank and utter silence of their stare was worse than any tears.

  Audrey and Sasha ran up and jabbered to the huddled pair in Bosnian. Sasha said the name Belma several times, which finally did the trick. They crawled to the door. Sasha helped one girl down, and Audrey helped the other.

  “Go! Go!” I said.

  They pulled the girls close and hustled back toward the main boulevard, turning right toward the Old Town entrance.

  Not-Kurt was long gone. I aimed at Not-Sully’s other ankle, just in case, but he was moaning and not moving. Petar shimmied out from under the van, clutching the Glock like a trophy.

  That’s when we heard the sirens.

  Petar and I met eyes. We wiped off both guns and tossed them into the van, as if we’d rehearsed the move beforehand.

  “Get out of here,” I said, and he melted into the shadows, just as the first wailing policija car arrived. I raised my hands in surrender, counted breaths, and waited for my fate to unfold.

  Time spent in a Croatian jail cell offers a man a fine opportunity to contemplate the nature of many things. Sitting on the metal bench, squeezed between the red-and-white-checkered jerseys and sullen faces of three cellmates sweating off a very bad binge, I mostly contemplated the well-known fact that for alcoholics, one is too many, and one thousand is never enough. My buddies were so massively hungover that any sound caused a special kind of agony. I was content to stay silent, meditating on and off, and they were conten
t to slump where they were placed, exuding foul fumes.

  At some point a cart arrived on the other side of our cage. A guard thrust three tin pans of food through an opening. Two pieces of white bread each, and a pile of cold, gluey beans. I think. No side dish of whipped cream for this crowd. I wolfed mine down, and even eyed my companions’ meals.

  The Croatian cops had carted Not-Sully off to the hospital jail, and plunked me in a holding cell until they figured out what to do with me. I had no idea where anyone else was, or if anyone knew where I was. Apparently you don’t get that free phone call in Croatia. In any case, they’d confiscated my wallet, cash, business cards, backpack, cell phone, plus my belt and shoestrings, in case I went suicidal, though it was more likely I’d keel over from my cellmates’ toxic fumes than any self-inflicted harm.

  After my glop and bread, I closed my eyes again, and after a few false starts, settled into an awareness of my body. I let the clanging and shouting around me be what it was, and dropped into a deep state of gratitude. The girls were out of that terrifying van. I was content.

  Some time later, a jail official opened the cell door and pointed a silent finger at me, like an executioner. I was about to be either freed or hanged. He led me up the corridor, through two more heavy, double-locked doors, and out into the administration area, where a familiar figure slouched.

  “I bail you out,” Petar said, “just like you ask.”

  CHAPTER 22

  I slept for most of the drive back to Sarajevo.

  When Petar and I had stepped outside the police station, the sun was just up, and a slight breeze was blowing in off the sea. It tasted of salt and smelled of seaweed. I’d inhaled, and with the exhale, exhaustion descended like a dense blanket soaked in brine.

  Petar had put the four others on a train back to Sarajevo first thing, the moment he’d determined by lining a pocket or two that Not-Sully had flipped on Not-Kurt, and both were now in custody. Once you’re detained in Croatia, the police have 24 hours to either charge or release you. As for charging me, with no way to tie me to either gun, and helped by a little more “money under table,” they’d chosen to let me go. Petar had given them a heads-up regarding the mousetrap inn, and other potential leads, and promised to escort me out of Dubrovnik immediately.