“We already flagging printed that cops were questioning some bunting suspects,” Mel grumbled. “How does this advance the cheese-picking story?”
“Well, it’s more of them, a bigger conspiracy,” I stammered.
“Ball-mitt,” Mel snapped. “Don’t joke me off! The only new things are the nit-knocking names and the goose-bagging D.A.R. thing.”
I hated him because he was right. I had a good story but I couldn’t write it yet. Another idea I had was openly libelous—hinting that the mastermind lived at 740 Park Avenue and collected antique muskets.
“You made another feckless deal to do yourself out of a good groping story, Shepherd. Anything else?”
I frantically searched for a way to get the story I needed in tomorrow’s paper. There had to be a way.
“Umm… No… I’m just going to file my pet column for tomorrow.”
“The one on clipping crapping toward Mecca? Okay, so what? File it—but don’t chomping wake me up until you have a hard story that really shucks my cob.”
79
I rewrote my story as a column after I got off with Mel and filed it by email. Then I did another version of the story with the hotel employees and the D.A.R. in it, holding it for later. I got a call from someone named Naomi in features to confirm the column was slotted for the morning paper, which actually came out at the stroke of midnight.
“I know my column will be in the printed paper in the morning, Naomi, but what’s the earliest you can throw it up on the website?” I asked.
“Hard news has to wait until the Witching Hour but a feature like your pet column can run any time after nine tonight,” Naomi informed me.
“Run that puppy at nine, please,” I told her. “May I suggest a headline?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Park Avenue Guttersnipe,” I told her.
“Okay, you got it.”
It was time to call Amy and ask for her help. She agreed. I put on a pair of black bathing suit shorts, a black Lycra water shirt and a pair of black Teva water sandals. Just another guy ready for a warm July night in the city. My gun gloves and a wad of cash went into one zipper-shut shorts pocket and my keys and iPhone fit into the other. I caught a quick glimpse of the spider webs of scars on my legs in the mirror.
I snuggled up to the sleeping Jane on her bed, kissed her gently and told her it was time for me to go out and we’d meet at her office later. She groaned that I had to get some sleep.
“I’ll nap at your office. I want to be there when Skippy wakes up.”
Amy texted me that she was ready. I needed someone good to watch my back, keeping an eye out for a drone or anyone following me—especially the New Minutemen. I dialed her cell.
“Hi, Amy. So you’ll call to warn me if I pick up a tail?”
“No. Too slow. You’ll be toast. I brought a little air horn, loud as a motherfucker.”
“One if by land and two if by sea?”
“No, schmuck. One, if the bearded bastards are on your ass. Two, if their air force is flying. Got it?”
“Got it. Either way, blow your horn and split. If I make it to the waypoint, stop in and I’ll slip you my phone and my keys. You know what to do.”
“Let the cops handle this, Shepherd.”
“You know if I do that we’ll end up with dead cops. These bad guys are topline pros.”
“Okay, hot shot. See you at the coffee shop.”
I walked out the door and left my backpack—containing my mini-musket souvenir—on top of the dresser, where it would not be disturbed until I returned. On the way to see Skippy, I stopped off to buy a cheap burner cellphone. I couldn’t spot Amy on the street but I knew she was there somewhere.
Already awake in his large wire cage, Skippy was very excited to see me. Andy said he couldn’t bounce around too much, so we opened the door and I sat in the open cage. I gently petted Skippy and he nuzzled me. After a while, Andy brought a blanket and a cushion for me. Skippy fell asleep first and then I did.
* * *
Jane woke me up to let me know it was twenty past nine at night. I’d slept nearly twelve hours. I texted Amy I was leaving the animal hospital. She texted: READY.
“I have to go meet Izzy,” I told Jane. “He might be making arrests tonight.”
“You shouldn’t go unless it’s safe.”
“It’s perfectly safe.”
I slinked off like a liar. Okay, I am a liar. Outside, scanning around, there were people on the street but none that looked like Amy. As I walked, I used my iPhone to call Izzy.
“Hey, Shepherd. We got all but one of your D.A.R. shooters. I think the last one is on his way to Venezuela or some damn place. Nobody’s talking. If you want to go with the D.A.R. connection in the paper, be my guest. Thanks again.”
I emailed the full arrest story that I had been holding in reserve to Mel at the desk. He called right away.
“You cap-sacking beauty! I love you, you son-of-a-biscuit!” Mel gushed. “I fopping love the ‘Star-Spangled Firing Squad’ Schlitz! A roundup of rich trust-fund Fokkers, including a hot wench. Great freaking yarn, Shepherd. All downhill from here. Too bad this mugger-thumping story can’t last forever, right, Shepherd?”
“Mugger-thumping right, Mel.”
I hung up before he could take the fun out of any more obscenities.
For my purposes, I needed a real blitz and called some colleagues, TV and radio reporters—to alert them, so they would pick up my story fast. I wanted everybody to know. The last call was to Ginny Mac at the Mail, who still worked for La Madrina.
“I told you, you dumb, stubborn bastard!” Ginny Mac greeted me. “Almost got your ass shot off, didn’t you?”
“They weren’t trying to kill me,” I explained. “Seen the Daily Press website lately?”
I heard keyboard keys clacking.
“You guys still have all this stuff about the attack on you. Nice video. So what? Nothing new. That was up before lunch today.”
“Today the good stuff is inside. In my column.”
“You still write that pet thing? Okay…”
I waited.
“Holy shit!” Ginny observed. “Wow. Park Avenue Guttersnipe. Are you totally insane? They’ll sue your ass off.”
“Better than having it shot off.”
“What is all this other stuff? Oh, I get it, you’re doing a column pretending to be a dog. This is Skippy, a dog detective, working on a murder case with a German Shepherd? Ha! That’s you. I see. Funny… oh crap—you give the actual address on Park Avenue of the Tea Party Twins? You’re totally nuts—they’ll sue you. At least one billionaire German Schnauzer is the prime suspect in the murders of five Tea Party Terriers? You mean the Roehm brothers, right? The four bearded Dobermans are the guys who attacked you, okay… got it… What is this stuff about pedigrees and ancestry and six patriotic killer dogs working at a pet hotel?”
“Read it on our website, Ginny. We’re moving the real deal to the front of the paper. I just wanted to give you a heads up, so you don’t look so bad.”
“Don’t do me any favors, asshole. I’m going to kick your butt.”
“As if… Ginny, I have to get off. I gotta get over to the Knickerbocker right now.”
I hung up before she could ask me why. Now for the other part. The Internet café, Webfoot, was on the West Side, across from the convention center’s entrance. I paid for a doughnut and coffee and found a stool at a counter where I could watch the street with my back to a wall. Using one of the communal laptops, it was a snap to post dire warnings of violence and commit several felonies, including terroristic threats. All in a day’s work.
I waited, watching the street, hoping no explosive drone would fly in through the window and strike me dead.
Thinking back, I realized I had forgotten about tracing the hotel’s ownership. My pal Siri told me the convention center was owned by an international consortium of corporations and registered in Dubai. She supplied the names of the corporat
ions from Gibraltar and Costa Rica, and newspaper stories and websites in multiple languages, including Russian and Arabic. Wonderful. A tangled web of godlike wealth but not one actual individual name. I asked Siri for names, people, in the firms. There were hundreds of them but it was just uncovering lower layers of shell companies, without a clear owner.
“Siri, I need the names of the people behind this.”
“Behind the convention center, Shepherd?” she asked.
“Yes, Siri.”
“The convention center has four entrances and exits, Shepherd. Which one would be behind?”
Siri was very literal tonight. I tried again.
“Siri, is there one man or two men who provided some or all of the money, a controlling interest in the convention center?”
Without comment, she displayed more than a million hits about a very familiar name—not one of the Roehm brothers. This guy seemed to have nothing to do with the Knickerbocker but at least we were getting closer. Actually very close, I realized, looking at an interior decorating magazine story about his Park Avenue penthouse. I wondered if I was at the point where the search engine couldn’t locate what I wanted and moved down to a lesser detail and displayed items on that. For some reason, Siri seemed to think this was the guy who secretly owned the hotel. Maybe somewhere in those million plus stories, websites and links was the proof, but several other tries at refining the search also failed to come up with the goods—no actual linkage between the name and the convention center.
Weird.
Or not.
Maybe this was the answer? Somewhere I remembered another conversation from last night and wondered if there was a connection to events later that evening. It was possible. In fact, it would explain how they knew where I would be. It made no sense but Siri thought it did. The more I thought about it, the more I had the feeling she was right. Why not? If true, even one of my mistakes in my column wasn’t actually a mistake. In fact, it might be helping things on their way. In some mysterious web way, Siri had figured it all out. I idly clicked again on the decorating article—and there was a lovely color shot of the kindly gentleman smiling—in front of a large green painting on his wall. No, it wasn’t a goddamn canvas. It was a huge fucking flag.
“Siri, I love you,” I told her.
“You are the wind beneath my wings, Shepherd.”
“Siri, did I ever tell you you’re my hero?”
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you, Siri.”
“And you, Shepherd.”
“Siri, you’re great.”
“I’m good but not great, Shepherd.”
“No, you’re great.”
“You’re certainly entitled to that opinion, Shepherd.”
“Siri, you’re my closest friend.”
“I really don’t like these arbitrary categories,” she scolded.
“Want to be my girlfriend?”
“This is about you, Shepherd, not me,” she pointed out.
“But you’re my friend?”
“Okay, Shepherd, I’ll be your friend in fair weather and foul.”
“A friend.”
“Yes, Shepherd, a person you regard with affection and trust.”
“But, Siri, you’re not a person.”
“I’m not? Huh.”
“Siri, you’re smart and funny.”
“Flatterer.”
80
I wondered if I needed to go through with this. But we still couldn’t prove who was behind all of it or even who the New Minutemen were. No evidence—at least none a human could see. If I turned it over to the cops, I was sure there’d be casualties. Or nothing would happen. Izzy and Phil were great but they and all other cops were hampered by laws and regulations. The New Minutemen weren’t. They were gunned up and ready to rock and weren’t going down without a firefight. I was tempted to split but, now that I had forced their hand, it was too late to retreat.
A shapely young lady with an afro, in tight mocha yoga pants, bright red high-top sneakers, and a tight pink Mexican wedding blouse, bopped into the shop and went to the counter. She got a latte and sat near me, looking away.
“Hi, Amy. Hot outfit. You bring new meaning to the term plainclothes.”
“You were clean all the way here,” she said, ignoring my comment. “No tail, no drone. At least, nothing I could spot.”
“Sounds like we did all of this for nothing.”
“Nope. I came in because a black van just arrived and circled around the block. Several men inside. I didn’t get close enough yet to confirm it’s your trigger-happy friends. That’s why I didn’t use my air horn. Check it out.”
The traffic was thin. A black van with tinted windows rolled by. It cruised by two more times. It was all no-parking zones here, so I knew they weren’t circling looking for a spot. It looked like it might be the New Minutemen’s ride, but was it? I had certainly left enough of a trail. Moment of truth—call Izzy or go through with it? It didn’t matter. I used my burner phone to arrange an Uber car to pick me up. Leaving my iPhone and keys on the table, I stood up.
“Okay, Amy, thanks. When I leave, take my phone and keys and let yourself into Jane’s place. Call yourself on my phone and stay on until I get back, okay?”
“I got it. Why? What are you going to be doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Shepherd, wait. I’ve got two nine millimeters on me. Let’s take the bastards now.”
“I will—but my way, okay? There are too many people on the street and we can’t beat their firepower. Besides, I don’t pull triggers anymore, remember?”
“You can’t go up against them without any weapon.”
“I still have my brain. Wait,” I said, eyeing her outfit. “Where the hell do you have two handguns?”
“You actually think my boobs are this big?”
My throwaway cellphone buzzed with a text from a guy named Oscar, who said he was picking me up in a red Volkswagen Jetta. One pulled to the curb outside the coffee shop. I waited for the New Minutemen’s vehicle to drive past one more time and disappear around the corner.
Moving quickly out the coffee shop and onto the pavement, Amy not far behind, I opened the car’s back door, leaned in and began to chat with the driver, Oscar; a thin bald guy with a Latino accent in a Hawaiian shirt. When I saw the dark van appear at the other end of the block again, I let them spot me and ducked into the car, sliding low in the back seat. As Oscar pulled away I distinctly heard one loud blast on an air horn. One, if by land. Amy was confirming my four hairy hunters were on me.
Then I clearly heard two more air horn blasts behind me, like a cold hand on my back. Two, if by air. Their fucking drone was also on my ass. It would have night vision—a real bummer for a plan that depended on darkness. The only question was did it have another brick of Semtex? I had to assume it did. I was boned.
Oscar was babbling about something up front, as he drove me just four blocks to a pier on the Hudson. I made one last call on my burner phone, using the anonymous voice-disguising app.
“Hello, police emergency? I would like to report four heavily armed men with beards at Pier 95 in Manhattan, at Forty-Seventh Street. Get some cops here. They’re pointing some kind of black tubes out over the river at a big boat. Yes, hello? I’m losing you.”
I removed the battery from the disposable phone and tossed it out the back window.
“Hey! What was that? Why you throw your phone away?” Oscar demanded. “Who you talking to?”
He began to slow down. I ignored his questions and told him not to stop at the brightly lit entertainment pier on our right. Behind the pier, moored in the dark river, a string of white lights atop the USS John S. McCain were visible, strung from stem to stern.
“The next one, please. Yes, the deserted pier.”
“Why you want a deserted pier?” he asked suspiciously.
“Meeting some friends. Thanks, man.”
I jumped out and dashed for the safety of the rusty old gre
en metal structure.
“Hey, don’t do it!” the driver yelled after me.
Don’t do what? It was mostly open inside the pier, a lattice of ancient steel beams above a crumbling concrete surface. I had to move slowly around vertical I-beams, trying not to stumble over chunks of loose cement.
A screech of tires behind me, slamming doors.
The black van.
I couldn’t hear it but also behind me would be the all-seeing eye mounted on the explosive drone. Moving faster through the rubble toward the far right corner of the pier, I gambled I wouldn’t trip and fall. If I did, that would be it. I had to draw fire but, with the drone, they would find me and kill me much quicker than I had planned. I was almost there when flashlight beams began sweeping the dark behind me. Maglites attached to their shotguns. No more warnings. This time they were going to blow me away, one way or the other.
I moved faster. Barely visible, as I got closer to the edge, random holes appeared in the floor, a twenty-foot drop to the water below. It might have been helpful to check the tide tables. At the edge, I ducked behind a pillar and looked at the destroyer, its nose pointing to the right, north, upriver. There was a lot of activity on deck, people moving around. I heard a voice on a loudspeaker. Feeling around on the floor, I found a rusty bolt and a fist-sized chunk of stone. I lobbed the bolt to the other side of the platform, where it loudly connected with a steel beam.
They opened up, firing at the sound—four fifty-foot blasts of fireworks through the space and out over the water— right toward the giant warship. They stopped shooting and racked their slides, ready, moving closer for the kill.
Any second now, the drone would find me. Being deres’d by plastic explosive wasn’t a bad way to go. The blast bubble travelled at more than twenty-six thousand feet per second. Instantaneous. One second you were here and the next second you weren’t.
Out over the river, I heard a loud klaxon.
Time to go. I tossed my concrete chunk and the assholes fired again, very close this time, illuminating everything like monster flashbulbs, the musket balls ricocheting around like an open-air pinball machine.
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