Strip

by Thomas Perry

  The heavy steel hook on the end of the long cable stayed a bit behind the moving arm. When he stopped the dizzying lateral movement, the cable swung toward the men and the heavy hook swept into their midst. The five scattered, and the hook swung past them and clanged against a horizontal steel girder of the building a story above their heads. As the hook swung back, Carver turned the arm back a little to guide the hook into the gang of men a second time. It narrowly missed Voinovich, who flung himself to the side on the dirt and gravel.

  Carver felt the vibrations as bullets banged on the bottom of the steel cab. He could see the five men dancing from one side to another, trying to get a better shot at the glass windows.

  Carver glanced beyond them at the streets. By now, cops should be surrounding this area. He could see for many blocks, but there was not a single flashing light coming from any direction. Was everybody around here deaf? The past few minutes had sounded like a war. But this was a commercial neighborhood, and everyone nearby had probably gone home hours ago. Whatever Carver was going to do, he would have to do it alone.

  He looked below for the men, but they had scattered. His gaze settled on the two Hummers. He moved the trolley that held the hoist farther out on the crane’s arm, almost the full seventy-five yards, and turned the crane at the same time, so the hook on the end of the cable was in motion again. The men below seemed to understand the meaning of his movement immediately. They abandoned their hiding places, desperate to kill him before he could carry out his intention. They fired rapidly, and he could feel the vibration each time a bullet hit the cab’s steel shell. One shot hit a side window, and glass exploded into the cab.

  Carver brushed the glass off his lap, and then swung the big hook again. To his disappointment, it missed the back of the closest Hummer entirely. But before he could readjust the angle, the hook swung back, directly into the windshield of the Hummer parked in front of it. He could hear the bang of the impact and the crash of breaking glass as the hook burst through the windshield and buckled the roof. Carver swung the arm back and saw that the hook was caught on the vehicle. His movement dragged the front Hummer into the back Hummer, crumpling its hood and grille. He activated the winch and raised the front Hummer forty feet into the air, and then lowered it as quickly as he could onto the back Hummer. The hook came free, and the front Hummer rolled off onto its side.

  Two men ran toward the gate, sprinting as hard as they could while he moved the horizontal arm backward. As he prepared to swing the hook again, they toppled the barrel and rolled it away, shouldered open the gate, and ran outside and across the street to disappear between two buildings. A moment later, the other three made a dash for the wide-open gate. He tried to move the arm to swing the hook toward them, but by the time he got it moving, they were already across the street. He watched them from his height for a few seconds until they disappeared beyond a building.

  He knew a couple of them would be lying in wait for him across the street. The others would make their way around the block to surround the construction site. As soon as he came down from his crane, they’d kill him or try to take him alive and make him give up the money he didn’t have. They knew he couldn’t be armed if he was reduced to defending himself by swinging cars at them with a crane.

  Carver sat still in his crane, trying to spot the men moving to positions where they could fire through the chain-link fence into the lot. Then his eye caught a new brightness. From this height he recognized the blue and red flashing lights long before he could hear the sirens. There were two, four, six police cars now, coming fast along Beverly Boulevard. He saw two more appear on Bronson, trying to cut off an escape. He looked for the five men again. This time when he spotted them, they were blocks away, running hard.

  He opened the cab of the crane to step onto the first ladder. He looked back once, noticed the three nude pictures of Mitch’s wife taped to the inside of the cab, and hesitated. Tomorrow morning there would be people all over this cab—probably cops, supervisors, all kinds of people. He tore the photographs down, bent them into a little tent shape, set them on the floor, lit each of them with his lighter, and let them burn. Mitch would see the ashes and know what had happened to them. Then he hurried down the ladders to reach the ground before the cops arrived.

  He ran to the contractor’s trailer at the edge of the lot farthest from the gate. He picked up a plank and propped one end on the roof of the trailer and the other on the top of the chain-link fence, compressing the coiled razor wire. He climbed to the roof of the trailer, walked the length of the plank, and jumped to the sidewalk outside. In a few moments, he had dissolved into the night.

  2

  MANCO KAPAK AWOKE to the sound of the master bedroom door swinging inward. He tugged the sleeping mask up onto his forehead with his left hand, reached under his pillow with the right, grasped the .45 pistol, and held it under the covers, squinting against the morning sunlight as he prepared to fire through the blankets. He had been jumpy since the night a month ago when a man in a ski mask had stuck a gun in his face and robbed him.

  “It’s me, Mr. Kapak. It’s only me.” The male voice was soft and calm.

  It was Spence, Kapak’s driver and bodyguard. Kapak brought the pistol up and put it into the top drawer of the nightstand. “What do you want?”

  “It’s the police on the phone. They say they need to talk to you right now.”

  “Shit” Kapak sat up and yawned, then rose to his feet. He caught sight of himself in the mirror and once again felt the shock of seeing his naked body. His shoulders and upper arms were still hard and muscled, his forearms and thighs still had sinews like cables under the leathery skin, but over the years his torso had grown thick and soft, the belly rounded now like a pear, and the pectoral muscles loose like little breasts. His skin was gray-white like a dead man’s, except in the places where it was blotched and reddish from sleep.

  Spence held the phone out and Kapak took it, then looked over his shoulder at the small shape under the covers on the other side of the bed. He saw long blond hair on the pillow, but her name didn’t come to mind. He stepped into the living room and closed the door to let her sleep.

  “This is Mr. Kapak.”

  “Good morning, sir. This is Lieutenant Nicholas Slosser, Los Angeles Police Department. We would like you to come in this morning to talk to us”

  “Where is ‘in,’ and what do we have to talk about?”

  “‘In’ is Parker Center, Room Five Thirty-two. We’re investigating an incident that took place last night on a construction site in Hollywood. Two vehicles registered to the Kapak Corporation were found wrecked there.”

  “Wrecked? Are you sure?”

  “We’ll talk about it. It’s seven now. Can you be here by nine? Or I can send a unit to pick you up.”

  “I can get there myself.”

  “See you then.”

  Kapak pressed the button to end the call, then punched in the cell phone number of Gerald Ospinsky. After a couple of seconds he said, “Gerald.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me. I just got a call from a Lieutenant Slosser at Parker Center. They want me to go in there at nine.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about a police lieutenant rousting me out of bed to go down and talk to him. It would seem to me that my lawyer would want to be there.”

  “Of course I do. I just meant … it doesn’t matter what I meant. I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you.”

  Kapak switched off the call and tossed the phone across the living room to Spence. “Did any of the guys call me before that cop?”

  “No”

  “Idiots” he said. “It’s stupid not to call me.” There was a mixture of resentment and amazement in his expression.

  Spence was aware that no answer was expected of him. He stood with the telephone in his hand and waited while Manco Kapak stepped to the large sliding-glass window that overlooked the sandstone path between Australian black
gum trees and sago palms and through a jungle of tropical plants.

  Kapak absently scratched his bulbous belly in front of the window. “I’ll get a shower in the guesthouse. Take the girl home, wherever that may be. Then come back and drive me downtown to Parker Center.”

  “Got it”

  Kapak opened the door, then walked naked down the path toward the guesthouse.

  As Spence went back into the bedroom, he glanced at his watch. It was already a minute or two after 7:00, and he would have to get the woman moving if he wanted to get Kapak to the police headquarters on time. He closed the bedroom door behind him and assessed the physical evidence to decide how to proceed. The girl’s clothes were draped with a reasonable attempt at keeping them unwrinkled on the couch at the foot of the bed, so he was fairly certain she had not been drunk. She had worn a nice summer dress and a pair of relatively tasteful strapped heels—nothing that would make her look like a weakened nocturnal creature trapped in the daylight. The bra and panties were of good quality, a matching set of Easter egg purple with a bit of lace.

  Spence cleared his throat and watched the woman stir, pulling the blanket up near her ears to preserve her unconsciousness. Spence walked to the bathroom, brought back a clean white Turkish bathrobe, and placed it at the foot of the bed where she would feel the weight of it on her feet. Then he walked along the wall beyond the foot of the bed, opening the curtains of the tall windows, pair by pair.

  He heard her groan.

  “Good morning, miss,” he said in a cheerful voice. “Good morning.”

  She began to sit up, revealing for a moment a pair of breasts that seemed to be unaugmented but above criticism to Spence’s eye, then realized she was not alone and pulled the covers to her neck.

  Spence said, “I’m afraid Mr. Kapak has been called away unexpectedly on important business. He asked me to give you his regrets and to take you home myself. There’s a robe at the foot of the bed, and the master bath is just behind you and to your right. When you’re ready, I’ll be in the kitchen at the far end of the house. Would you like coffee or tea this morning?”

  The girl took a moment to look around her in the glare of reflected sunlight as though she had no idea where she was, so Spence began to fear this might be some kind of ugly surprise, but she said, “Coffee, please” in clear, unaccented English. Spence was relieved. If she hadn’t spoken English, the rest of this would have been very difficult.

  Spence pivoted in place, went out, and closed the door. He walked the length of the house to the kitchen, and then entered the small office off the pantry and watched the row of high-definition color security monitors.

  When the young woman got out of the bed and put on the bathrobe, he could see she had a very fine body—cream with a blush here and there. She cinched the robe around her waist and explored the master suite a bit, opening dresser drawers and cabinets, not methodically like a burglar, but randomly, like a snooping child. Spence didn’t blame her. She was a pretty woman in her twenties who had just spent the night with a sixty-four-year-old gangster who was a fearsome sight naked—an old boar. She was probably searching for something—a bit of compensation, maybe even a souvenir to prove the story was true if she chose to tell it. Let her.

  He moved his attention to the cameras around the guesthouse. He could see a light on behind the smoked glass window of the bathroom, so Kapak must be in the shower out there.

  In a few minutes the girl appeared in the kitchen. Spence treated her like a starlet dropping in for an appearance at a charity event. “What would you like in your coffee, miss?”

  When he had given her the coffee and settled her on a seat at the granite counter to drink it, he said, “It’s already getting hot this morning. I’ll go bring the car around under the awning and get the air conditioning circulating.”

  He went out. The biggest step was already over—getting her up, showered, and from the bedroom to the kitchen with all her clothes properly on her and secured without incident. Getting her from the kitchen to the car would also be a big step, though. This one was sober, well-behaved, and apparently sane, so he sincerely felt kindly impulses toward her. She wasn’t trying to keep from leaving. She knew it was time, and that there was no sense in her teasing and wheedling anybody but the man who had brought her here.

  Spence returned with the car and made her take a second cup of coffee with her in a thermos mug. He sat her in the back seat and put the mug in the cup holder on the console so she could reach it. As he backed out of the long driveway, he said, “Now, miss. What’s your address?”

  “I’m Kira,” she said. “I live on Coldwater.”

  “North or south of the 101 freeway?”

  “Practically on it, but a little bit north. It’s a big apartment building.”

  “Okay,” said Spence. He pulled out of the driveway and headed for the freeway. It wouldn’t be too hard, he decided. He might be able to do it in twenty minutes if the traffic let him. Nothing about this one was hard. A certain percentage of Kapak’s women visitors were terrible. A lot of them had been nasty and crazy. Some had been drunk in that odd, unfortunate way that some women got drunk—they shouldn’t have been able to walk and talk, but they did.

  Others that Kapak had brought home with him had been hoping for some kind of bonanza and seemed to feel that leaving his house in the morning would be relinquishing their claim to the reward. When Spence had become insistent, a couple of them had even started hinting at the possibility of making claims that they had been raped. Spence had no illusions about Manco Kapak’s ethics, but he knew that Kapak was prone to erectile dysfunction, and that Kapak’s appetites didn’t include anything as strenuous as overpowering anybody. Each time the blackmail strategy came up, Spence had said, “Think about him. Do you really want to be the person he sees as capable of sending him to prison for the rest of his life?”

  He glanced at the girl in the rearview mirror. “Are you comfortable back there, miss?”

  “Kira. My name is Kira. I’m fine. Have you worked for him long?”

  “Nearly six years”

  “Is being a gangster exciting?”

  “Not for me.”

  “You’re too tough for that?”

  Spence chuckled. “I’m not tough at all. I’m not a gangster. I drive his car. I answer the phone. I make sure there are enough fresh vegetables and the garbage is taken out to the curb on Tuesday night.”

  “You don’t get to go to the clubs or anything?”

  “He doesn’t spend a lot of time in the clubs. They’re an investment. When he goes in, I usually stay with the car.”

  “Aren’t you interested in women?”

  “Sure. But there aren’t many women in a strip club, and the ones who are there are working.”

  “If there’s nothing fun about it, why do you work for him?”

  “Because he pays me a salary and health insurance and contributions to my 403b.”

  “I heard he got robbed.”

  “I heard that too. I wasn’t there.”

  “Doesn’t it scare you?”

  “You’re in a car with a man you never saw before, and it’s going over a mile a minute. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “Not really”

  “Then you understand. Anybody can get in an accident any time. Anybody can get robbed. Changing jobs doesn’t do anything.”

  “He’s different. He’s a rich old criminal. He’s a big target.”

  “Then why did you sleep with him?”

  “I was at Wash. It was kind of a slow night and I was just dancing with my friends. In comes Manco Kapak, and everybody in the place starts staring at him and telling each other who that is. He’s the guy who owns Wash and about three other clubs, and he’s this big, powerful guy with all these connections. After a few minutes he practically bumped into me in the crowd and asked me to sit with him and have a drink. It made my friends get all agitated and warn me not to go, and so I couldn’t resist.”

  “B
ut later on, you were disappointed?”

  “Well, you know. He’s got money and power and all that, but those things don’t come to bed with him. What’s there is a sixty-five-year-old fat guy with a hairy back and trouble getting hard. So I guess that’s what I get out of the experience. I learned that.”

  “I suppose that’s worth something,” Spence said.

  “Yeah. I suppose.”

  Manco Kapak stood in the shower in the guesthouse, feeling the jets of warm water scouring his body, then running down in soothing streams to his toes. He had mixed feelings about this shower. It was perfect in every way. It was much better than the ones in the various bathrooms in the main house, because he had decreed it. He had not merely bought this one when he bought the property. He had talked with the architect and the contractor during the building of the guesthouse and made sure they understood what he wanted. He had also made sure they understood that Kapak wanted what he wanted, not something they thought was similar to what he wanted. The more he enjoyed the beauty, tastefulness, strength, and even warmth of the shower, the more resentful he became that it was so much better than the ones he usually used. Was he supposed to walk all the way out here to the end of the path every time he took a shower, or stay in the main house and use inferior facilities? The whole idea made him furious. He was going to have to remodel the main house.

  His train of thought brought him to how much money it would cost, and how much money he had been losing lately. His mind struggled with the thought. He was beginning to feel the unfamiliar sensation that he wanted to go see the police as quickly as possible. They seemed to know what had happened last night, and he certainly didn’t. This morning he could hardly call any of the five men he had sent after Joe Carver. That police lieutenant might very well have forgotten to mention that his five men had found Carver and killed him or something.