The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Lisa Scottoline

  Truth be told, he really didn’t want to make the meet. He was setting Nico up, and when it went down, you wouldn’t have to be a particle physicist to read Tommy’s part in all of it. But he didn’t have a choice. The cops had him over a barrel, and who knew from the Russians? Maybe it was back to front, and Nico was the one setting Tommy up. Word on the street was already out about what had happened to Kaufman, turned skinside inside, his guts in his lap, and a Colombian necktie, his throat cut and his tongue hanging out underneath his jaw.

  A lesson for a fink. If you eat with the devil, use a long spoon.

  No help for it. Tommy pushed the plate of wings away uneaten and settled his tab. On the sidewalk outside, he called Beeks. They had forty-five minutes.

  “Is there enough time for you to make this happen?” Lydie asked.

  She was on an unsecured line to Felix Soto.

  Felix wasn’t happy talking on an open phone, but it was a calculated risk. Chances were nobody was intercepting their conversation, except for NSA, of course. “Satellite uplink,” he said.

  “Neither of these guys is going to be wearing a wire.”

  “Understood. All we need is a cell phone.”

  She gave him Beeks’s number. “They’ll be frisked when they go in,” she said, “and Guzenko’s security will disable the cells first thing. You’ll lose the signal.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Once we triangulate the meeting place, we can monitor the EM radiation. The other guys, cell or landline.”

  She knew Felix controlled the technology.

  “Any idea of the general neighborhood?” he asked.

  “Brighton Beach,” she told him.

  “So it’s not the actual handover.”

  “Guzenko doesn’t want to buy a pig in a poke.”

  “They bury their mistakes, the Georgians,” Felix said.

  Café Kavkaz was in the shadow of the elevated tracks, the Q line that took you to Coney Island a couple of stops down.

  The restaurant on the ground floor was long and low, with pressed-tin ceilings and old wooden paddle fans that stirred the air only slightly. The lighting was subdued but not dim. At the front, there were booths along one wall, the seats furnished in worn burgundy leather, and a bar along the other. Table seating was toward the back. There was a small stage and a three-piece balalaika band. The room’s acoustics were hard, and the noise level high, the place better than half full.

  Nico was waiting at the bar when Tommy and Beeks walked in. He waved them over. He was drinking Moskovskaya, straight up in a chilled glass, with lemon peel. He signaled the bartender for two more. Not that it would have been Tommy’s choice. His guts were churning with anxiety.

  They clicked rims.

  Nico knocked his drink back. “Check out those two cougars on the prowl,” he said, grinning, lifting his chin.

  Tommy glanced over his shoulder.

  DiMello and Kreuz looked the part, he thought, sharp pants suits, good haircuts, neither one of them a dog. Kreuz was teasing the bartender, talking the virtues of a flight of vodka, a tasting. DiMello was babbling away mindlessly on her cell.

  “We’re not here to talk pussy,” Beeks said.

  Nico shrugged. “They’ll still be here when we’re done, and maybe drunk enough by then to handle a twofer.”

  If you wanted your back broken and your limp dick handed to you, Tommy thought.

  The headwaiter came over. “Your table is ready,” he said.

  They followed him. He took them to a stairway next to the kitchen.

  “Private room,” Nico said.

  The headwaiter tipped his head. They went upstairs without him.

  The muscle was waiting for them on the second floor. They patted them down, as Lydie had predicted, and took their cell phones, Nico’s too. They shook out the batteries and handed them back. Nico suddenly seemed less confident about where this was all going. Tommy had no confidence at all.

  It was a long railroad corridor. There were in fact a couple of private dining rooms to either side, which they passed, but the office was at the very back of the building, and they went in.

  Bagratyön was waiting.

  It was very basic. A desk, a phone. No computer. Some old oak filing cabinets that might have dated back to the Truman administration. It wasn’t a command post. It was a trap.

  “Your buyer,” Bagratyön said. “Who is he?”

  “Six thousand,” Beeks told him. He put it on the table and stepped back.

  Bagratyön ignored him. “That wasn’t what I asked,” he said to Nico.

  “Tommy’s never played me false,” Nico said, getting some balls, finally. “He comes to me with a deal, you can take it to the bank.”

  Tommy wasn’t sure he enjoyed the compliment. Bagratyön was leaning over the desk, his weight on his fists, but there was somebody else in the room, watching from the shadows. It had to be the Vor, the boss of thieves.

  “Nothing’s in the bank,” Bagratyön said.

  “The money’s right there,” Nico said.

  Bagratyön shook his head. “We put our trust in you, Nico,” he said, almost sadly, “but we punish betrayal.”

  “What’s going on?” Beeks asked. “Are we doing the deal or not?”

  “The answer is not,” Bagratyön said.

  “This isn’t right,” Beeks said, turning to Nico.

  “We’ll make it right,” Nico said.

  Tommy knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  Guzenko stepped forward, into the light. He gestured to the two bodyguards. “Take them outside and kill them,” he said.

  The SWAT unit went in front and back, on DiMello’s signal. Babs and Kreuz were already at the head of the stairs.

  There was a third bodyguard in the hallway, covering the door to the office. He barked something in Russian and drew his weapon.

  Kreuz dropped to a crouch and put him down, two center chest, one to the head, the Mozambique drill, so called, in case he was wearing body armor. The shots were incredibly loud in the enclosed space. Babs slipped past Kreuz and took up position on the far side of the door. Kreuz moved up. SWAT was crowding into the stairwell.

  “Federál’naya polítsiya,” Kreuz called, to be heard through the closed door. “Bez pomogí.”

  It figured the ATF agent would speak Russian, Babs thought. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it meant business.

  “Sdavat’sya,” a man’s voice called back from inside.

  Kreuz nodded to the lead SWAT uniform, who’d come up behind her, the rest of his team lining the corridor, weapons at the ready. He drove a kick at the lockset, putting his full weight behind it. The jamb splintered and the door sagged open. He ducked away, his M4 at battery, full auto, safety off. Kreuz and DiMello went in and immediately stepped back to either side of the door, so they were out of SWAT’s field of fire.

  There were seven guys in the room, six of them with their hands behind their heads. Even the consigliere, Bagratyön, was alarmed by the show of force. Only the one guy, standing a little to the left of the desk, seemed indifferent, his lizard’s eyes almost sleepy. Guzenko. Babs felt a chill.

  “Vnizú,” Agent Kreuz snapped at them. “Down,” she repeated in English.

  They all hit the deck. Again, except for Guzenko.

  “Sergeant,” she said, over her shoulder.

  SWAT used plastic flex cuffs on the three Georgians and the three Americans and got them to their feet.

  “Where is it?” Phoebe Kreuz asked Guzenko. “Gde est’?”

  “Yëb tvoyu mat’,” he told her.

  Babs had heard enough Russian to know what he’d said.

  “We’ve got you for trafficking,” Phoebe said. “You want to avoid the hard time and a trip back to Tbilisi, your choice.”

  He said the same thing again.

  “Man of few words,” Phoebe remarked to Babs.

  The others had been led out, and the room was empty now but for the three of them.
<
br />   “We’ve got Ludmilla,” Babs said to him. “And your tough guys will crack, they always do. You give us the cargo, you can plead down. It’s a one-time offer.”

  Guzenko didn’t answer her. He stepped over to the desk and began emptying his pockets.

  God save us from the hard guys, Babs thought. Usually they folded under pressure, to save their own skins, but Guzenko was immune to threat. She looked at Phoebe. Phoebe shrugged.

  Guzenko patted his jacket. He looked at what he’d laid out on the desk. He leaned down and slid open one of the drawers.

  “No,” Babs said sharply.

  He put his hand inside the desk drawer.

  Phoebe Kreuz shot him before he took it out. The .40 Smith caught him in the bridge of the nose. His head snapped back. The exit wound pasted brains and bone fragments to the wall, and Guzenko dropped like a wet bag of sand.

  Babs went and looked in the desk drawer. There was no gun. He’d been reaching for a disposable cigarette lighter.

  Kreuz reholstered. She looked at the dead man on the floor and then into the drawer. “Oh,” she said. “My bad.”

  Bagratyön knew where the bodies were buried, literally. He gave up everything he could in hopes of a reduced sentence. There was the money-laundering trail, and Guzenko’s likely successor in the chain of command, a road map to the crew’s structure and operations, even the two Maras, Porfírio and Hernán, Kaufman’s killers, although they proved impossible to trace. And last but not least, a complete inventory of black-market goods.

  It was in a warehouse off the Shore Parkway, near a marina out by Floyd Bennett Field. They found the ammo and the rest of the stolen cargo from Holloman, along with laptops, digital LCD monitors, computer peripherals, unlicensed software, pirated DVDs, Rolex counterfeits, generic pharmaceuticals, power tools, auto parts, and fifty cases of fruit-flavored condoms.

  “It’s a good bust, DiMello,” the lieutenant told her.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “Too bad we couldn’t take Nico Constantine down with them.”

  “Fortunes of war, Lieutenant.”

  “There’ll be a next time. Guy like that, he’ll step on his dick, sooner or later.”

  “I’ll forward his case jacket to Manhattan Midtown.”

  “You square things with Tommy’s PO?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “That kid’s got nine lives,” the lieutenant said.

  The issue was, they couldn’t pop Nico without violating Tommy, so they had to maintain the fiction that Nico and Tommy, and Beeks, undercover, in character as the upstate buyer from some Aryan brotherhood, were side cards to the main event. They got a pass. There was no other way to play it.

  But it gave Babs a marker she could call in down the road. She had Tommy’s balls in her pocket, and he knew it.

  Not that he’s worried. One thing at a time, is how Tommy deals. He’s up in Riverdale again, visiting his grandmother. It’s a beautiful fall day, crisp and clear, with just enough breeze off the river that she needs a lap robe. He’s pushing her around the grounds in her wheelchair. The gravel on the path crunches underfoot. He’s telling her a story, full of gangsters and gunrunners. She doesn’t really follow it. Too complicated, too many foreign names, too many people she doesn’t know.

  She’s happy enough with the sound of his voice.

  CLARK HOWARD

  The Street Ends at the Cemetery

  FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  AS CORY EVANS WALKED toward his car in the staff parking lot of the state prison, he had to pass the visitors’ parking lot, and that was where the woman was sitting, on a cast-iron bench bolted to the ground, under a punch-press metal sign from the prison machine shop that read BUS STOP. It was cloudy and overcast, the first threatening sprinkles of rain beginning.

  Cory walked past her, giving her only a glance, but a glance was enough for his trained corrections-officer mind to snap a mental picture of her: short-cropped bleached blond hair, sharp facial features, shoulders slanted a little forward from years of poor posture, slim—a little underweight—wearing jeans that had been around, high-heeled boots scuffed at the toes. A dime-store girl. Dirt-poor southern, Mississippi, maybe Alabama. A girl who could use a real good makeover.

  Cory continued past her a dozen feet, then stopped. The sprinkles of rain were increasing.

  “Miss the bus?” he asked the woman.

  She nodded but did not look at him or speak.

  “Won’t be another one for an hour,” he said.

  She shrugged. The story of her life.

  “I can give you a lift into Sacramento,” he said.

  “You a guard?” she asked, looking at him for the first time. Her eyes were like tracer bullets.

  “I’m a corrections officer, yeah.”

  “Well, I’m a convict visitor,” she said evenly. “Prob’ly wouldn’t look too good, us driving off together, you think?”

  “I’m not asking you to go to a motel with me,” Cory responded, just as evenly. “Just offering you a lift into Sacramento.” Now it was he who shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”

  He walked on away. Before he got to his car, the rainfall became steady and she was walking beside him.

  On the drive in, windshield wipers slapping, she asked, “Don’t you want to know who I was visiting?”

  “What do you mean who?”

  “I mean, like my husband, boyfriend, brother—”

  Cory threw her a quick glance. She had a little acne scar in front of her left ear. “Look,” he said, “even if you told me, I probably wouldn’t know who you were talking about. We’ve got fifteen hundred-plus cons in there. Unless who you were visiting happened to be on my block, in my tier, which is highly unlikely, I wouldn’t know him from Adam. You know who Adam was, right?”

  “Were you born rude?” she snapped. “Or did you have to study it?”

  At that point a cloak of silence dropped over the interior of Cory’s three-hole Buick, and they rode that way, the windshield wipers seeming to keep time with their heartbeats, the rain outside heavy enough now for Cory to turn on the car’s headlights. Sitting without even a glance at the other, neither spoke until they reached the city limits of Sacramento.

  “Where do you want me to drop you?” Cory asked, finally breaking the uncomfortable quiet.

  “The Greyhound depot’ll be fine,” she mumbled in reply.

  Cory exited the interstate and drove to Seventh and L Streets, where he swung around to the main entrance of the ugly, uninviting Greyhound depot and pulled over and stopped with the engine idling.

  “Listen, thanks for the lift,” she said, getting out, her tone mellower than before.

  “Don’t mention it,” Cory said, his own voice less disagreeable. “Have a nice trip home.”

  After she shut the passenger door and hurried toward the depot entrance, Cory drove away and made a U-turn into a parking space half a block down the street. He kept the engine running so the wiper blades would keep the windshield clear, but then the rain suddenly stopped completely and he shut the car down. From where he was parked, he had an unobstructed view of the bus depot entrance. He only had to wait five minutes before he saw the woman come back out of the door she had gone in, pause to glance around, then walk quickly away along L Street.

  Leaving his car, Cory followed her at a discreet distance for several blocks, to a Motel 7 on the edge of a seedy downtown district. She walked directly to a room on the lower of the two floors, unlocked it with a key from her jeans pocket, and went inside. It was Room 121.

  Cory returned to his car and drove to his own apartment, a little one-bedroom furnished place where he lived alone. He got a bottle of milk from his refrigerator and sat in an old club chair, drinking from the bottle and staring at the blank television screen for a long time, thinking about the woman. Later on, when he went to bed, he fell asleep thinking about her, wondering who she had been visiting, wondering even what her name was. He d
reamed about her.

  The next day, when Cory reported for his shift at the prison, the officer at the sign-in desk said, “You’re wanted in the deputy warden’s office.”

  Cory frowned. “When?”

  “Now.”

  Cory made his way back out of the incoming-staff corridor to the prison’s executive wing, where Deputy Warden Lewis Duffy had his office. He’d been seen, Cory thought. Seen picking up a convict visitor and driving away from the prison with her!

  Well, hell, that was all she wrote. As a corrections officer, he was all washed up.

  When Cory was shown into the deputy warden’s office, he found himself facing not only Deputy Warden Duffy but a man he had never seen before: a conservatively dressed man in a nondescript gray suit and an out-of-style wide necktie tied in a Windsor knot on a white shirt.

  “Evans,” the deputy warden said, “this is special agent Roger Hardesty of the FBI.” Cory nodded to Hardesty. “Sit down, Evans. We have a few questions for you. Did you pick up a woman in the visitors’ parking lot yesterday, after your shift, and drive away with her?”

  “Yessir, I did.”

  “Did you know the woman?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why did you drive away with her in your car?”

  “It was starting to rain. She’d missed the bus and there wasn’t another scheduled for an hour. There’s no shelter of any kind at that bus stop.” Cory shrugged. “I just offered her a ride.”

  “You’re aware, are you not, of our fraternization rules regarding inmate visitors?”

  “Yessir. But it wasn’t really fraternization, Warden. I just offered her a ride. Like I said, it was starting to rain—”

  “Did you exchange names with her?”

  “No, sir—”

  “Telephone numbers, addresses, personal information of any kind?”

  “No, sir. Nothing.

  “Where did you take the woman?”

  “To the Greyhound depot on L Street in Sacramento.”