Setup On Front Street

by Mike Dennis

  I left it, while leaving the safe open, as well.

  As we headed into the hallway, we were stopped cold by the sound of the front door opening. We ducked back into the bedroom.

  They talked in low tones as they entered the house. Whitney's voice sailed above the others. From what I could tell, they were all here. Whitney, the Russians, everybody.

  What the fuck is this? Why didn't Ryder bust them?

  More sweat dripped down my face. I ran my arm across it, wiping it with my sleeve.

  In a moment, their voices faded as they went into another room, probably the office.

  We crept into the hallway toward the front of the house. As we neared the dining room, we realized we couldn't go back through it to the kitchen door without being seen by everyone in the office.

  I thought about making a run for it, but it might well get us both shot in the back. Just a couple of low-class burglars who got what was coming to them. Whitney would probably get a medal.

  I whispered to Shimmy, "Let's take them now."

  He nodded, tightening his grip on his big weapon.

  Whitney was talking, but when I stepped into the room, all heads jerked around in my direction. Shimmy moved in behind me.

  I took a quick count.

  Straight ahead, Whitney sat at the power desk in the corner, BK in one of the big leather chairs in front and a little to the left of it, and an older guy wearing a sportcoat in the other chair. Standing behind the chairs way over to the left were my old pal Alexei from Norma's place, and Yuri Vasiliev, looking even colder than his photo. Milton and Bradley sat on the sofa on the right by the far wall.

  Everybody jerked around in our direction, stunned by the intrusion.

  Alexei's hand instinctively moved toward his waistband.

  "Don't even think about it, Alexei," I said, pointing the nine millimeter directly at his midsection.

  "Now, everybody put your hands where we can see them."

  Whitney stood up.

  "What the hell is this, Doyle? What are you after?"

  "Sit down!" I said. "BK. Get up and get all the guns in the room. Start with Alexei here."

  The older Russian spoke.

  "Wilson. Who is this...this thug?" he said in accented English.

  "You'll never get away with this, Doyle," Whitney said. "You're a fucking dead man."

  "You think about this," I told him. "You might get there before I do. BK, get moving!"

  BK got up from his chair, easing over to a spot behind Alexei, reaching under the front of the Russian's tropical shirt.

  "Slowly, BK," I warned him. "And use only your thumb and forefinger. Drop it on the floor."

  He pulled Alexei's heater out and let it drop.

  "Nice and easy. Kick it over to me," I said. He did, and then did the same with Yuri.

  "All right, BK. Now Milton and Bradley."

  He went over to the sofa. Bradley tried to stare me down.

  "Easy, Bradley. Don't get any big ideas."

  Once all the guns were in the center of the floor, I kicked them one by one underneath the big couch next to the end table that held the secret file cabinet.

  I turned to Whitney.

  "Now, Mr Whitney, somebody in this room is going to have to answer for Frankie Sullivan."

  I tossed a glance at Vasiliev. He caught it.

  "I want the full story of his killing. And you can start at the point where he gave you my money to, quote-unquote, invest."

  "You're out of your fucking mind, Doyle," he growled. "If you think for a minute that I —"

  I swung my right arm hard. The .22 in my hand caught BK flush in the face, sending his head snapping over the back of the chair. He yelped twice, a couple of high-pitched barks. A cut opened along his cheekbone, then blood flowed onto his nice linen shirt.

  "The next one breaks a few teeth, Mr Whitney. Now, how much do you care for your son's well-being?"

  "Doyle, you have no idea how dead you are!"

  "Tell me what I want to know!"

  "How about I tell you this? You and this street trash punk you brought with you can both go fuck yourselves!"

  I took another swipe at BK's face. I heard cracking.

  He howled again, then spit two teeth out, along with a good deal of his own blood.

  "See what he thinks of you, BK?" I said softly. "Think he gives a shit what happens to you?"

  I turned back to Whitney.

  "The next one's gonna be even worse. You want to tell me about Sullivan's murder now?"

  His right hand slid down off the desktop, obviously toward the top drawer. He was trying to be cool about it, but you could spot it a mile away.

  "Hands on the desk!"

  He put his hands back, palms down on the desk.

  "Let's have it, Whitney. I'm running out of patience."

  "You know what you can do," he replied.

  I swung my arm up again, only this was the hand that held the big nine millimeter. BK saw serious damage coming.

  He shrieked, "No! No! I'll tell you! I'll tell you, Doyle!"

  My arm stopped.

  "Okay, let's have it."

  "Will!" his father shouted. "Keep your mouth shut!"

  BK hesitated, then looked back up at me. Through his bloody face, his eyes were desperate to talk. I knew he was going to tell it all.

  Before he started, I reached past him into the breast pocket of the older Russian's sportcoat. I pulled out his handkerchief and gave it to BK.

  "Here," I said. "Clean yourself up a little."

  He wiped his mouth as well as his open face wound. The pain jabbed through him, I could tell. He was near tears.

  "Goddammit!" Whitney roared. "Don't say anything!"

  "Sure, don't say anything," BK moaned.

  He tried to stop the blood draining from his big gashes. It flowed out anyway.

  Tears finally made their way out. They were tears of physical pain, of course, but they were mixed with tears of emotional hurt, too. I knew those very well.

  "You'd like that!" he cried. "I keep my mouth shut while they beat the shit out of me, maybe kill me! You don't care about that, though, do you! Who the hell am I, anyway? I'm only your son. Your fucking son!"

  He doubled over in agony. His sobbing was out of control.

  After a minute, he got himself back together, sort of.

  "All I wanted was to be mayor! That's all I ever fucking wanted. But you … you had to have … all this!" He spanned the room with his arm, including all the people in it.

  Whitney's head dropped a little. He knew what was coming.

  BK looked up at me through his tears.

  He said, "It … it goes back before Sullivan invested the money. A couple of years ago, not long after I was elected mayor, we did a sister-city exchange with this town —"

  "I know about that," I interrupted.

  "Well, what you probably didn't hear about was why we did it. It was so that the Russians could come and go from Key West without attracting any attention. Every time they showed up here, we just tied it to some made-up sister-city event."

  Whitney leaped out of his chair.

  "Will!" he bellowed. "Shut the fuck up!"

  Shimmy raised his sawed-off to eye level, aiming it right at the old man.

  "You shut the fuck up!" he cried. "And sit your fucking ass down! Or you won't have an ass to sit on!"

  "Anyway," BK continued, "we got the sister-city thing set up because they want to be fully operational here when Cuba opens up."

  He stopped and glanced around at the others in the room. The old man's gaze sliced through him. BK knew, he absolutely knew, that things would never be the same.

  Everything he'd wanted his whole life long, his name, his political career, everything, down the toilet.

  The loser's look drew down over his bloody face.

  "I know about the Cuba thing," I said. I pointed toward the older guy in the opposite chair. "Who's this?"

  He continued put
ting pressure on his bleeding wound with the Russian's handkerchief. The blood kept coming.

  "Mr Chernenko here is the organization's man in Moscow. His father was the Secretary General of the whole Soviet Union for about a year back around '84. Right before Gorbachev. He's using his political contacts to make sure the organization is welcome in Havana."

  "When Castro goes."

  "Right. Everything was coming together. It really was. Key West was going to be their American link to the new Cuba. Casinos, shipping, telephone service...shit, they're into all of that. And they want to control it all in Cuba."

  I didn't tell him that Mambo had other plans.

  Instead, I said, "So what's the connection between all that and Sullivan?"

  "The Russians wanted his building for a strip joint."

  "A strip joint?" I made like I didn't already know it.

  "Well, yeah. Sullivan agreed to go along with it at first. He was going to be the quote, owner, unquote. But not the real owner, if you know what I mean."

  He winced again at his pain as he brought the handkerchief back to his face.

  "A front."

  "That's right. He was well-liked around town and everybody knew him, so if he switched from Irish pub to strip club, people might think he'd lost a little common sense, but that'd be it. No one would really ask any serious questions."

  "Like they might if a bunch of Russians suddenly and visibly took it over."

  BK nodded. As he did, a steady flow of blood dripped all over his shirt and beyond, to the arm of Whitney's expensive leather chair.

  "Plus," he said, "Sullivan was leaning on us to help him get started with another Irish pub in Havana when the tourists started pouring in."

  "And let me guess," I said. "The Russians didn't like that at all."

  "Not at all."

  He glared at Chernenko, then at Vasiliev.

  Whitney almost jumped up from his chair again, but I quick-flicked my gun at him to settle him back down.

  At that moment, I heard a few horns honking outside. It seemed like an intrusion into our private moment. They sounded like they were close to the house. I prayed nothing had happened to Doc, but the honking wouldn't stop.

  BK said, "We just needed him to front the strip club, nothing more."

  "What about the investment money?"

  "We knew his lease was coming up for renewal this year. We did the investment thing two years ago to reel him in. Right about that time, the building came up for sale, so we bought it for good measure. To have something extra to hold over his head in case he got cold feet when the time came."

  "And when the time came, he backed off and you took his money."

  "Well, hey, I didn't take it …"

  "No," I said, glimpsing Whitney. "I know who took it. And I also know who's got it."

  "Anyway," BK went on, "when Sullivan found out his money was gone, he went crazy. He said he wasn't going to let us take over his lease, that he was going to renew it as the Irish bar. I tried to talk some sense into him."

  "You tried talking some sense into Sullivan?"

  "I tried to tell him that he could make twice as much money with the Russians as he was making by himself, but he wasn't having any of it. Even my father here tried talking to him. He told my father if they tried any funny business, that he knew people in New Orleans that could take care of anyone who fucked with him. He said he wasn't afraid of us, or the Russians, or anybody."

  I held back a little chuckle.

  That was Sully, all right, and it got his ass killed.

  I said, "And I came along right when you needed a patsy. It couldn't've been better timing. Like it was tailor-made."

  "Right. Ex-con just out of prison, comes back for his share of the dough, kills his partner over it, goes right back inside. That was the plan. Even when you were out here to the house the first time."

  Whoa, what was this?

  "That was part of the setup?" I asked, not hiding my surprise.

  "It was. My father got you out here just so he could tell you you'd never see your money unless Norma went back to the Fun House. Of course, he knew you wouldn't let her do that, and that you'd give him shit about it. He also knew you couldn't get the money, anyway. And Sullivan, by that time, was already a dead man, he just didn't know it. So when he was killed, you'd naturally think my father had it done to keep you from getting your money. You'd have no reason to think otherwise."

  He soaked up more of his blood with the handkerchief. What the handkerchief missed went straight to the widening splotch on the chair.

  "And so … everybody lives happily ever after," I said. "Everybody but Sully."

  I looked over at Vasiliev.

  "How about it, Yuri? You think you're gonna live happily ever after?"

  The horns outside were now honking furiously. Everyone in the room was distracted by the long, loud bleats.

  Amid the racket, BK lurched toward me.

  "Don Roy!" he cried as he moved with his arms outstretched. "You've gotta believe me! I had nothing to do with Sullivan's death. These fucking Russians —"

  Now that he was on his feet, he'd gotten between me and Vasiliev, right where I didn't want him, and Vasiliev took advantage of it.

  He quickly reached under his shirt in his rear waistband as BK approached me. I caught the sudden move.

  "BK!" I shouted. "Get down!"

  I yanked at one of his hands, trying to jerk him to one side.

  In one swift, catlike move, Vasiliev pulled a backup revolver and began firing. BK was hit from behind with the first shot and went down. The second caught me mid-thigh, pushing me back against the wall.

  With BK out of the line of fire, I shot back several times, hitting Vasiliev in his side and his shoulder, spinning him around, then down to the floor. The revolver flew from his hand.

  At the same moment, Alexei had drawn his spare piece, too, from an ankle rig, but Shimmy unleashed his twelve-gauge at Alexei's gut. It nearly tore him in half as he was sent hurtling backward into the wall. Some of Whitney's plaques cascaded to the floor.

  A panicked Chernenko sprang out of his chair with a gun he'd gotten from God knows where. I turned my two pistols on him, both blazing, sending him down.

  Shimmy had zeroed in on Milton and Bradley. Milton froze in fear, terror all over his face, but Bradley dove toward the floor by the couch and retrieved one of the guns I'd kicked under there. Shimmy fired twice at his lunging figure, hitting him once in the ankle. Bone and blood spattered from his wound, staining the base of the couch's buttery leather.

  From under the couch, he retrieved an automatic, pulling it up with both hands. He got off two quick rounds, one of them hitting Shimmy around the collarbone. The sawed-off fell to the floor as the shot flung him backward out of the office doorway.

  I fired both of my automatics a bunch of times at Bradley, hitting him with almost every shot. He collapsed into a pool of his own blood, most of it flowing from two head wounds.

  Sharp movement on my left grabbed the corner of my eye.

  I wheeled around on one leg as best I could, seeing Vasiliev with blood pouring out of his side, crawling to where his spare piece had fallen.

  He reached out for it.

  "Don't try it, Yuri!"

  He picked up the gun with an unsteady hand, then rapidly raised it into firing position. I squeezed the trigger on the .22 and it just clicked.

  Empty.

  In an eyeblink, I did the same with the nine and caught him in the stomach with my last two shots. He fell backwards, his face stiffened by death.

  My attention turned to the big desk. Whitney had reached inside his drawer and now held a revolver in his hand. With a firm grip, he took aim at me. I dropped to the floor the instant before he fired, landing on my wounded leg, nearly passing out from the sharp volts of pain.

  From my prone position near the doorway to the office, I grabbed Shimmy's shotgun as Whitney aimed again. I had to get the shot off. Otherwise, I was
a sitting duck.

  This time, before I could shoot, a loud report came from the doorway behind me, just in time, right over my head. I saw Whitney stumbling back into his chair as a little red blotch appeared on his upper chest.

  I looked up.

  Ryder stood in the doorway, a smoking automatic in his hand.

  "Where the hell were you?" I asked as I threw the shotgun aside.

  I struggled to my feet.

  "The plane arrived a couple of minutes early and they were gone by the time I got there."

  Fucking government, I thought. Can't ever get it together.

  Looking around, I could see BK groaning on the floor. He'd taken one in the shoulder blade, but it didn't look serious. Shimmy was still writhing in pain in the hallway, badly hit.

  As I helped him up, I turned back to Milton, still paralyzed on the other side of the bloody office.

  "You say whatever you want to the cops, Milton. Just leave me and Shimmy out of it. Got me?"

  He nodded, still in shock.

  "If the cops even think I was here tonight," I said, "you will have a very short life expectancy. I promise you that."

  I looked back at Ryder.

  "Get out of here," he said to me. "I'll take care of all this."

  "Thanks," I said. "Safe's in the bedroom closet. It's open."

  I grabbed the satchel. Shimmy and I limped out the door, bleeding and leaning on each other as best we could. I then saw what all the commotion outside was about.

  Ryder had pulled his car into roadblock position in the street, right behind where Doc sat in the parked Buick. The partygoers' cars were jammed up behind it, wall-to-wall honking horns and cursing drivers.

  Even though I hurt like hell, I had to laugh.

  Doc pulled the big deuce up directly in front of the house. We tumbled inside.

  As he took off, he told us that with all the racket going on back there over Ryder's car, you couldn't really hear any of the shots from in the house. The ruckus was still going on as we sped off unnoticed into the night.

  Shimmy was bleeding pretty badly. He let loose with a few tortured wails.

  I told him, "Take it easy, bubba. We're gonna get us both fixed up right now."