Flight Risk

by Kim Baldwin

  Blayne gave her worried friend a thumbs-up and headed toward the rear hallway. She edged slowly and quietly as far as Joyce’s open doorway and snuck a quick peek inside. A large travel poster hung under glass on the opposite wall, and the glass reflected the inside of the office like a mirror. Blayne could see Joyce faxing something, her back to the doorway.

  Taking advantage, she slipped past and continued on beyond the lounge and restrooms to the big steel door that led to the soda warehouse. After easing it open a few inches, she paused momentarily to listen and caught the faint sound of a radio playing. That was all. Perfect.

  A moment later, she was inside, heading for a vantage point she knew of, where she could see inside the glass walls of the office. She hurried toward it, keeping low and moving between the pallets. If anyone was about, she wanted to make sure they were occupied and wouldn’t notice her.

  The office walls didn’t extend as far as the high warehouse ceiling, so the sound of the radio got louder as she drew closer. She started hearing something else, too. Voices.

  *

  Fear unlike any he had ever known pulsed through Aldo Martinelli. Every nerve ending was jagged and raw. He wanted to run so bad. His eyes went left, then right. But before he could move, the bodyguard shifted to stand directly at his side, cutting off any hope of escape.

  He took a deep breath. Think. His mind raced. He had to offer an explanation. Any explanation. Anything to stall for time. Whatever excuse he could offer, he would offer. Because he knew as soon as he stopped talking, he was a dead man.

  “Okay. So…okay,” he stammered. “It’s like this. I have to charge more to cover some extra costs that came up unexpected.” It was not an acceptable explanation, but he wasn’t in the big leagues in thinking on his feet.

  “Since when do you make those decisions yourself?” Cinzano asked.

  “I didn’t think I needed to get it clear with you,” Aldo lied, glancing up at his boss. “I did it for us, for all of us. ”

  Cinzano smiled as though he believed it, even accepted it perhaps, and Aldo almost relaxed a little. A glimmer of hope skittered up his spine. Maybe, he thought. Maybe he doesn’t know how long it’s been going on.

  “The money isn’t in yet,” he said, looking away again. Perhaps his brother-in-law, might give him a pass, let him make amends, for the sake of family. “Of course, when it is, I’ll send a man right over.”

  The only sound for a long minute was the radio. Cinzano waited until Aldo looked at him before he spoke again. “So then how do you explain the new Jaguar?”

  Aldo began to hyperventilate. All hope was gone.

  “And I understand you are closing on some real estate in Florida,” Cinzano continued.

  Aldo tried to stand up but the bodyguard pushed him back down. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t swallow. He knew he was about to die. “Please, boss.” His voice broke. “Vittorio. Please. I did it for Marie. Give me another chance.” He hated sounding weak and pleading, but he’d do anything to stop what was coming.

  Cinzano held a gloved hand out towards his bodyguard, and the bodyguard reached under his jacket and handed a 9mm Glock to him. Cinzano placed the gun on the desk in front of Aldo, facing him.

  “God forgives. But I am not God. Do the honorable thing, Aldo.”

  *

  From twenty feet away, hidden behind a pallet, Blayne watched the unfolding drama through the office window, unable to move. Her heart pounded. Her body was energized and poised for flight. She wanted desperately to escape this madness but fear instinctively froze her into motionless silence so she wouldn’t draw attention to herself. Transfixed, her subconscious registering every detail of what she’d stumbled into, she watched.

  The fat man sitting behind the desk stared at the gun, then reached for it as though hypnotized. But his hand stopped short and he looked up. Blayne could just make out the words. “You know I can’t do this. Please. We’re family.”

  The man in the suit showed no emotion, but Blayne could have sworn there was a certain expectation in his eyes, when he looked from the fat guy to the gun, and then back again.

  Everything seemed surreal. She could not believe what she was seeing when the frightened guy behind the desk picked up the gun. He seemed to weigh it in his hand and study it, like he was also thinking about his choices. Everything about his body language said there was no way out. No more options.

  And nothing left to lose.

  He pointed the gun unsteadily at the guy in charge. “Just let me leave, boss. Let me go home. They were only a few feet apart, the width of the desk and a bit more.

  To Blayne’s astonishment the tall, elegantly dressed boss shook his head and took a step toward the desk, taunting his subordinate. Blayne automatically braced herself for an explosion as the fat guy pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  He rose, wide-eyed in shock. His lips started moving but no sound came out.

  The boss looked disgusted. Blayne thought she glimpsed a faint nod to the muscle-bound hulk she assumed must be his bodyguard, but nothing was said. Everything played out before she could really understand what was happening.

  The bodyguard moved faster than Blayne would have thought possible for such a big man. He pulled out a gun—it looked abnormally long because of the silencer on the end—put it against the fat guy’s head and fired, all in the space of a second or two. The only noise was a muffled pop as the bullet made a neat hole in the victim’s right temple, then blew out the left side of his head.

  Brain matter splattered against the glass and the dead man fell forward onto the desk. Blood poured out, soaking the neat piles of paperwork all around him.

  The bodyguard unscrewed the silencer and stuck it into his pocket, then slipped the murder weapon into a shoulder holster.

  The horror of the scene stripped away the caution that had paralyzed Blayne up to that moment and her instinct for self-preservation took over. She turned to flee, but the flash of movement betrayed her.

  “A woman! There!” a voice barked before she had traveled three steps.

  A gun fired.

  *

  “Jesus! Somebody’s shooting! Move! Move!” O’Rourke bellowed as he ripped off his earphones.

  “Call for backup,” Skip yelled, scrambling out the back of the surveillance truck.

  Trelaine got the vehicle started and stomped on the accelerator. Skip was already positioned outside the side fire exit when the van fishtailed on the ice in the parking lot in front of him. Dombrowski was advancing through the front door of the travel agency.

  Their surveillance map showed an internal access to the soda warehouse at the rear of the building. They had to take the risk that Cinzano would choose to escape via the parking lot rather than wait around for a shootout once the FBI presence was announced.

  Chapter Three

  The first shot had shattered the glass window of the office. The noise was jarring, deafening. The second bullet splintered the edge of the pallet just behind Blayne and sent a spray of wood skittering across the polished floor. Panic gripped her and her next step faltered badly. Jesus God. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. She started to fall, but caught herself just as the third bullet roared by right where her head would have been had she stayed on course. When the bullet buried itself in a pallet four feet away, an explosion of white powder dusted Blayne as she regained her footing and stumbled by.

  Her blood buzzed loud in her ears and her heart pounded against the walls of her chest, but she became aware that the running footsteps she could hear behind her were retreating, not advancing. The realization wasn’t enough to make her slow her steps, however. She didn’t dare believe that she was truly out of danger.

  She was nearly to the connecting door when it burst open with a crash and a massive brute of a man in a dark blue suit came rushing in, gun drawn. As soon as he spotted her, he pointed the gun at her head. She stopped in her tracks, light-headed with adrenalin
and certain her death was at hand. No wonder they weren’t chasing me. They knew he would get me. The man quickly scanned the area around them.

  It seemed to take forever for him to say the words that allowed her to breathe again. “FBI! Face down, on the ground!”

  “Yes, okay.” Relief poured through her as she dropped to her knees. “Two men are in here and they have guns,” she volunteered in a low voice as she got down on the ground. “They…they killed a man in the office.”

  “That’s enough. Quiet now,” Dombrowski said. “Hands behind your back.”

  She did as he ordered. The concrete was cold against her cheek as she lay flat and put her hands behind her back. When he started to put handcuffs on her, Blayne’s mind and gut recoiled at the prospect of being restrained. She was the victim here.

  “Hey! I saw it,” she informed him. “They tried to kill me. I wasn’t in on it.”

  “Quiet,” Dombrowski repeated, in a voice that demanded compliance. “Don’t move.” He fastened the cuffs and then headed toward the office, gun at the ready.

  Craning, Blayne saw the boss and his bodyguard nearly run headlong into another Italian who’d come running at the sound of shots. The three of them burst through the door to the parking lot and came to a dead halt.

  Almost immediately, Blayne heard someone shout, “FBI. Drop your weapons.” And from the silence that ensued she guessed the murderer and the man giving the orders had been arrested.

  As her adrenalin rush faded, she started to feel the cold permeate her body from the concrete beneath her, and took deep breaths, trying to clear her head and settle her nerves.

  It took a couple of minutes for her monstrous captor to return. “We got them,” he volunteered. He helped Blayne to her feet but kept the handcuffs on her.

  The connecting door to the agency opened and Joyce and Claudia came in, followed by another FBI agent with a walrus moustache like something from a wild west photo. Both women looked anxious and worried, but Claudia’s face visibly relaxed when she spotted Blayne. Joyce, however, looked beyond Blayne, toward the blood splattered office, her anxiety palpable.

  The agent with the moustache said, “I’m Special Agent Leslie Topping and my colleague is Special Agent Dombrowski. We are going to need statements from all of you.”

  “What the hell…” Claudia stared at the handcuffs clamping Blayne’s wrists. “What is this!”

  “Claud!” Blayne began. “There was…”

  Agent Topping cut them both off. “No talking.” He took Claudia by the elbow and led her away toward the office, along with Joyce.

  Blayne started to follow, but Agent Dombrowski held her back. “We don’t want anyone talking to each other just yet.” He let the others get well ahead before following with Blayne.

  Joyce let out a wail of anguish when she spotted the dead man slumped over his desk, through the glass shards that remained of the office window. As it became obvious that half of his head was gone, she gagged.

  “Who was this man to you?” Agent Topping kept one hand firmly around Joyce’s elbow to prevent her from going into the office.

  Joyce sobbed uncontrollably, near hysterics, paying no regard to the agent at all. Her thickly-applied mascara and eyeliner left ugly tracks down her cheeks, but she was, for the first time in the years Blayne had known her, totally unmindful of her appearance. “Oh God, Aldo,” she wailed, eyes fixed on the widening pool of blood around him. “What the hell did you do?”

  Dombrowski steered Blayne away from the others, putting a row of pallets between them as he hustled her past and toward the door at the rear. It did not escape her notice that although she was handcuffed, the agent was treating her with kid gloves, his grip on her arm surprisingly tender, like a father walking his daughter down the aisle.

  They were nearly to the door when she began to hear sirens, lots of sirens, still distant. Dombrowski pushed open the steel door and let Blayne precede him through it.

  She was startled to see him just outside. The tall Italian boss turned at the sound of the door, and a sadistic smile spread across his face as he looked Blayne in the eyes. He was in handcuffs and another agent was standing close by talking to someone on his cell phone, but Blayne still felt incredibly threatened. She leaned thankfully into the solid wall of Agent Dombrowski as he walked her past the cold-blooded killer.

  Just as they drew level, the mobster said so quietly that she barely heard it, “Blayne Keller, right?”

  The menace on his face sent a chill through Blayne. She knew that look. It was exactly the look she’d seen a moment before he killed the man in the office. It conveyed an unmistakable a message. You are going to die.

  *

  More than four hours later, the shock and fear generated by the day’s events began to give way to annoyance and frustration as Blayne repeated for at least the twentieth time every detail she could recall of what she had witnessed. She was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. She had cooperated fully, answered all of their questions more than once, and was anxious to get out of the police interview room and go home.

  The feds had kept the witnesses and wiseguys apart for the few minutes it took for the cavalry to arrive. Several squad cars, crime scene techs and the medical examiner van all converged on the soda warehouse within a half-hour of the shooting. After a short and slightly heated exchange between the feds and local cops, Blayne had been loaded into one squad car, Claudia and Joyce into another, and the mobsters into two more. They were all driven to the First Division Headquarters of the Chicago P.D. on South Michigan Avenue.

  There Blayne was patted down by a female police officer and placed in a windowless room on a miserably uncomfortable wooden chair. Two police detectives came in, though one did all the talking, and she began to repeat her story over several cups of some of the worst coffee she had ever had.

  At long last the detectives announced they were done questioning her for the moment, but before she could relax, they were replaced by Agents Topping and Dombrowski, who asked her to start all over again.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she complained, letting her irritation show. “I’ve done nothing but go over and over this for hours. Look, I’m doing my bit. I’m being the good citizen, but this is getting ridiculous.”

  “The C.P.D. has jurisdiction over the homicide,” Dombrowski explained. “We’re handling other aspects of the case. We need you to go through it all again.”

  And so she did, and she found that in the repeated telling of the details of the murder, she became, each time, a bit more inured to the horrific event. She even began to let go of some of the trepidation she had been feeling since the man involved had said her name. He was in custody, after all, she kept telling herself.

  But once the agents were satisfied with her account of the murder, they began questioning her about other matters entirely, things the Chicago cops had not. It was only then that she began to get a clear picture of what had really had transpired that day, and how much danger she was now in.

  First they asked her about what she knew of the soda warehouse, its employees and customers, and about Joyce’s involvement with the dead man. Then they asked her whether she had ever noticed anything unusual or strange about Aldo Martinelli or the people who worked for him, and she told them that he had referred a lot of men to the agency for travel arrangements.

  “There is one guy,” Blayne volunteered, “who comes in every couple of weeks to pick up tickets he orders online. What’s odd is that although the destination is always the same—Miami—the tickets are never in the same name twice. And he always pays in cash.”

  The two agents glanced at each other and Blayne had a strange sense of foreboding at the pleased look that passed between them.

  “We’re going to show you some pictures,” Topping said. “Have you pick out anyone who looks familiar. You know, someone who may have come in to the agency, or perhaps somebody you saw in the parking lot.”

  “First let’s get
you something to eat,” Dombrowski offered. “And we’ll try to find a place to continue this where you’ll be more comfortable.”

  Blayne’s heart sank at the news, for it sounded as though she might be tied up here for several more hours of questioning. But at least it was the first time since she’d been brought in that anyone seemed concerned about how she was faring through all of this. “A double cheeseburger and fries,” she called out as Dombrowski headed for the door. “And a large coffee. That stuff you’ve got here is undrinkable.”

  They got her what she ordered and they found an unused conference room where she could relax on a couch while she looked over the thick books of photographs. During the next two hours, she picked out the Miami ticket client and a handful of other men Aldo had referred to the Balmy Breezes.

  The next book they gave her had a photo of the man who’d ordered his bodyguard to shoot Joyce’s boyfriend. It was not a mug shot, like most of the others, but a slightly grainy photo that had been taken with a telephoto lens. In it, he was dressed very much like he’d been dressed today, in a tailored suit and expensive overcoat.

  “That’s him.” She didn’t touch the photo itself. “The man from today. The one who seemed to be in control of what was going on.” This was greeted with a long pause. “Who is he? And how did he know who I am?”

  She’d asked these questions several times already, of the cops and the agents both, always getting the same response—that she was there to answer questions, not ask them.

  But this time, the agents exchanged a look of tacit agreement and Dombrowski said, “His name is Vittorio Cinzano. He is a big man in organized crime here. An underboss.”

  “Organized crime? You mean the mafia?” Blayne felt so clammy she knew she’d gone white at the news.