Danger-Close: A Jake Thunder Adventure (The Jake Thunder Adventures Book 1)

by Jon F. Merz

  "Off to some place good?"

  Darmov nodded. "I am the chief contributor to a number of charitable organizations across the state for abused children."

  "Abused children?"

  He nodded. "Yes. In the past few years, I've donated over three million dollars to various child care groups."

  He must have seen the bewildered look on my face because he smiled. "You find it strange?"

  I shrugged. "Well, given your businessÉyes, a little bit."

  "It's natural to be amazed at what I do." He brushed a piece of lint from his lapel. "Let me tell you a story, quickly. When I was a boy back in Russia, my parents died at a very young age. I was tossed about from orphanage to orphanage. Several times I was adopted. Each time, the people who adopted me were cruel sadists only interested in getting some cheap slave labor out of the kids they adopted."

  "Jeez."

  "When I was younger, I would run away from these families. I would make my way back to the orphanage and hope for a better life with the next family."

  "Did you find it?"

  "No." He frowned. "And I grew older and stronger, the families who hurt me paid for their transgressions. I eventually wound up in the army and finally found my place in life. But my childhood was hard. Very hard."

  "Sounds like it."

  "So, while I do trade in children, I also make sure that the people who adopt them are good parents. You might say I give the kids a guarantee of sorts."

  "What kind of guarantee?"

  "If I ever hear the children I sell are abused, the parents get a visit from Viktor." He frowned. "I do not tolerate child abuse in any form."

  I nodded. "Have you ever had to send Viktor out?"

  "A few times. Once to an abusive household in Michigan. And once when we discovered we'd inadvertently sold a child to a pedophile. Viktor made a special example out of him, didn't you, Viktor?"

  Viktor's teeth gleamed, as the smile exploded across his face like the memory was as fresh as yesterday. The thought of Viktor making anyone into a special example did wonders for my digestive process.

  I belched silently as the meatball sub slid further south. "Well, I guess I'll be getting back to work then."

  Darmov smiled and nodded at Viktor and Gregor. "We'll leave you to your work, Jake. Good luck."

  Brenda came in a minute later. "Not that I want to know," she said.

  "But you want to know."

  "Yeah."

  I shook my head. "Wish I could tell you."

  "A bullet comes flying in here yesterday, and now you're gonna clam up on me?"

  "It's got to be that way for a few more days. I promise I'll tell you everything once it's over."

  "This have anything to do with that leggy blonde who came in earlier this week?"

  "Might."

  "Figures." She shook her head. "You might have two bum legs, Jake, but your third more than makes up for their lack of activity."

  "It tries." I looked at her. "You okay? You look a little peaked. Everything all right?"

  "Me?" She let out a breath of air. "Oh yeah, I'm just fine. I just found out I'm pregnant."

  My face exploded into a giant smile. "Hey, wow, that's amazing. Congratulations."

  "Yeah."

  "You okay with it?"

  She shrugged. "I just found out, you know? And here I was just yesterday drinking my ass off because some sniper takes a shot at you. Hopefully, I didn't kill my baby."

  "Brenda, folks have been drinking during pregnancies for most of history. I'm sure yesterday won't hurt the kid. Just as long as you stop drinking now."

  "Just so long as you stop getting shot at."

  I nodded. "I'm working on that. You tell Henry?"

  "Not yet. Tonight probably."

  "He be okay with it?"

  "He's my husband. Sure as hell better be or I'll beat him senseless."

  "There ya go."

  "Jake, uhÉ"

  "Yeah?"

  "You got anything like a maternity leave plan?"

  I looked at her. "Brenda, you are without a doubt the most valuable employee I have."

  "I'm the only damned employee you have."

  "That's what makes you so valuable." I smiled. "Time comes, take as long as you need. I'll make do. Get a temp or something."

  "Temps suck."

  "Yeah. They do. But I'll get by. And when you're ready to come back, you'll still have a job here. No worries."

  She smiled and let out another gulp of air. "I was worried Ð "

  "Don't be. This is the best news I've heard in a long time."

  "Thanks, Jake."

  I watched her go and smiled. Brenda was a good person. She'd make a great mother. Between the pregnancy thing and all this flirting with the wrong side of the law she was probably feeling pretty confused.

  Hell, it had me confused and I was right in the thick of it.

  Not only did I have everyone around me telling me to watch my back, but also I had the feeling one of the three of them wasn't being sincere about it.

  McCloskey I could trust implicitly. He'd never try to drop me. But the other two were suspect. Even as much as I didn't want to suspect Vanessa, I knew I had to.

  Darmov though, that guy was a real surprise. How he'd managed to rationalize kidnapping young babies and selling them to high bidders while simultaneously taking a huge three million dollar stand against child abuse, with the added Viktor incentive thrown in, was beyond me.

  And to think: I worked for the guy.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I didn't want to get Ned Thompson in trouble.

  That's what it came down to.

  For some reason, the guy's plight struck some weird chord with me. I don't know why, considering I'm about as far away from having my own children as I am walking the Great Wall of China.

  Maybe it's some deep paternal instinct. The guy and his wife just wanted a kid they could lavish affection on. They'd been stymied by the system. Desperate, they came running when I offered them a ready solution.

  Lunch was really giving me a fit. Something about the tomato sauce must have really not settled with my innards. And tossing Ned Thompson to the likes of Darmov didn't add to my buoyant mood.

  Besides, why give up Ned Thompson when I could get McCloskey involved instead?

  Brenda's research wasn't progressing that well, yet, so I called Ned Thompson and told him it would be a few more days until the baby was ready. We settled on a final price that included bogus papers and the like. He thanked me profusely and then hung up.

  And I felt like shit about it.

  I called up McCloskey.

  "Yeah?"

  "You go to Scampi's, don't bother with the meatball sub."

  "I had the chicken parm. Always better."

  I belched. "Darmov came to see me today."

  "I heard."

  "The wonder twins out by the bus stop?"

  "Yeah. Like that?"

  "Kind of obvious."

  "Fresh out of the academy. Can't be helped. They'll learn."

  "You put rookies on me?"

  "They need the training. Real life experience and what not."

  "Glad to see I still rate so well."

  "Darmov spot Ôem?"

  "Actually, he only tagged the cruiser."

  "He missed the rookies?" McCloskey whistled. "Amazing. He must be getting rusty."

  "Probably a bit. All this good Western living has a way of softening people up."

  "So, what'd he want?"

  "Offered me protection again."

  "You fend him off?"

  "Had to. I told him with the cops crawling all over me, it would only draw more attention down on him. He seemed to like that."

  "Check you out, Mr. Model Employee. Always looking out for your boss's best interests."

  "Might even get me a pay raise, huh?"

  "Least until he figures out you're setting him up for the big fall."

  "Speaking of which, I got details fo
r you about the meet."

  "You wanna bring me in first rather than the legit dude you hooked?"

  "Not so sure if he's gonna go through with it," I lied. "Seems to be getting cold feet about stepping over the law."

  "Knock me over with a feather," said McCloskey. "You might just be restoring my faith in humanity here."

  "Glad to help, Mr. Cynical."

  "Jake, you calling me cynical is like Nixon criticizing crooked politicians."

  "I'm working on my optimism. Didn't I tell you?"

  "You'd have to. There's no way I'd notice otherwise." McCloskey cleared his throat in my ear. "Okay, so we go in first. Where and when?"

  I gave him the details and there was a pause on the phone. "How's that location feel to you?"

  "It's the waterfront. Limited number of vantage points. Tough to set people up ahead of time. Darmov can walk in there, do the deal and get the hell out quickly. I think that's what he wants."

  "Gonna make it real hard for us to slip a team in there without them knowing about it."

  "And there's the chance he's already got people working down with the fishermen."

  "Yeah." McCloskey was quiet and I knew he was busy dragging out a map of the area. "I can put someone on top of Black Falcon terminal. If the windage is okay, they can give us good cover fire if need be."

  "So, I can go ahead and call Darmov and tell him it's a go?"

  "Let me coordinate with the SWAT guys. Get clearance and all that shit. I need to get some cash from storage."

  "You mean evidence?"

  "Yeah, the narc dudes just bagged a big shipment coming in. Joint Fed thing."

  "And the Feds let you guys hold onto the money. Wow."

  "Yeah, we've come a long way, huh?"

  "Either that or Customs just doesn't know you guys the way the Bureau and DEA do."

  "Yeah, that's what I said, too. I call you back in a few hours."

  I hung up and swiveled around, watching the Centre Street afternoon dissolve into evening. The 39 Bus roared past spewing all sorts of lung-clogging pollutants. Still, it was better that we had buses than the old trolley cars they used to run. Damned things made it impossible to get past them on the street. Buses, at least, can pull over.

  Not that they usually do.

  A flock of school kids sauntered past outside the Foot Locker across the street, walking wounded from their first day back to school. I smiled, remembering how it felt when I'd walked these same streets as a school kid.

  Back then, I often wondered what my life would yield me.

  Took me a while to figure out that if I wanted anything out of my life, I had to make it happen myself.

  Jamaica Plain is one of those idyllic pieces of real estate that looks like it ought to be stuck out in the middle of Suburbia. Instead, it's a quick ten minutes from the center of Boston.

  Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the preeminent landscape architects of the twentieth century, helped make Jamaica Plain into some of the greenest land in town. On one side of Jamaica Plain, the 265-acre botanical park the Arnold Arboretum welcomed visitors from all over the world to walk its paths and breathe deep the rich oxygenated air or sniff the lilac bushes in early May.

  Jamaica Pond, a deep glacier pond fed by underwater tributaries, hems Jamaica Plain in on another side. When I was younger, my father used to tell me stories of how people would drive old cars into the pond to collect insurance money. That was before they built some fences around the place and that was back when dim-witted fools thought Jamaica Plain was a dangerous place.

  My way of thinking is this: any place can be dangerous. I've seen enough shit go down in white picket fence territory to know that just being in a certain part of the city doesn't necessarily mean you'll die.

  I knew this one guy who had a problem with blacks. Felt if he strayed into the Roxbury or Dorchester sections of Boston, they'd be carrying him out. His fear of the unknown, the fact he'd been raised in the sticks of Maine, and the fact that his entire family was racist, carried down into his genes.

  It was the only time in my life I've ever deliberately given someone an object lesson.

  I don't like racists.

  And in this day and age, there's no reason for it. You meet guys who've been in combat and the only thing they'll tell you, unless they're real degenerates, is that it only matters the guy next to you covers your ass when the shit hits the fan. The color of skin doesn't matter one damned bit.

  The object lesson for this pathetic soul involved a trip to the fourth grade class at the Hennigan School located in a predominately minority section of town.

  We arrived at nine o'clock.

  Prompt for the show and tell segment.

  And while the clown wasn't exactly compliant about coming along, jabbing him with the barrel of my pistol helped him see the only obvious choice.

  Personally, I would have rather beat the living shit out of him and then spit on him for harboring such antiquated beliefs. But people don't learn that way.

  So instead, I put him up in front of a class full of kids who proceeded to hammer him with questions about why he hated them, why he felt his race was better, and why he generally thought they were terrible people.

  And you know, there is nothing as terrifying as being unable to explain yourself to a bunch of intelligent ten year-olds who can pick apart any of the propaganda bullshit you've swallowed over the years.

  By the time we left the class, the racist had had his guts ripped out in front of the entire class, figuratively of course. Every one of the things he'd clung to over the years, every piece of supposed sacrosanct bullshit his racist family had forced him to swallow was torn apart.

  And he looked pretty bad.

  The kids did a number on him, but then, that's what they were supposed to do.

  You want to be a racist? In my book, you'd better pack yourself off and go live on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. The world's got enough problems without having to listen to stupid beliefs based on the color of someone's skin.

  But that's just my opinion.

  Call me out on it sometime. We'll debate.

  I sighed, replaying the memory. I never found out if the object lesson had worked on the guy.

  A white man killed him the next week.

  In the parking lot.

  In the whitest part of Suburbia.

  Right where he felt safe.

  Surrounded by his "own kind."

  Sometimes, the ironic sense of justice the universe has really makes me smile.

  I snapped back as the phone rang.

  "Yeah?"

  "Jake?"

  "Hi, Vanessa."

  "Is it safe yet?"

  "Not yet."

  "When?"

  "Soon. Maybe."

  "I need to see you."

  "I know. Soon."

  "Are you still in danger?"

  "Well, if you mean has anyone taken a shot at me today, the answer is no. But then again, the evening's just begunÉ"

  "Don't joke like that."

  "Humor's how I ease the nagging sense that someone wants me dead."

  "I could stop by."

  "Not a good idea."

  "Why not?"

  "I'm on my way out soon."

  "Can I come with you?"

  "No."

  She sighed. "Just thought I'd try."

  "I appreciate that, Vanessa. Few more days, this'll all be over."

  "Okay."

  "Bye."

  "Bye."

  I hung up and leaned back again. For two nights of passion, Vanessa was becoming awfully clingy. Almost like she was my girlfriend or something.

  I grinned.

  Maybe I was better in the sack than I thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I could think of any number of places better suited to doing a child swap than the Waterfront. For some reason, known only to him, Darmov seemed to be sticking very close to his home turf. Maybe he had a submarine or some yacht moored in the harbor
he could escape to if things went south.

  Despite recent attempts to modernize Boston's waterfront, the place remains largely a crappy piece of real estate. Oh sure, they built a brand new high rise hotel across the street from the World Trade Center a few years back that charges hundreds of bucks a night. And yes – now they're trying to infuse some green spaces down there to give it more of a friendly feel.

  But all that is just cosmetic. To change Boston's waterfront, you have to start at the roots and work up.

  And at its roots, the area remains the stomping ground of a tightly knit group, mostly men, who ply their trades in fish and freight, sometimes both. Up far earlier than anyone else, they're at sea for days, hauling up fish that comes back, gets unloaded or flash frozen and shipped off to Boston restaurants and beyond. Some of their fish flies around the world.

  It's tough work that produces tough people. You shake hands with a guy who hauls nets in for a living and you'll know it by the firm gnarled hand that feels like sharkskin rubbed the wrong way.

  Some of them drink a lot. And the bars and pubs that dot the area are tiny shacks that reek of bourbon and whiskey and cheap domestic beer. The rubber matting on the floors makes it easier to spray clean. And it feels better hitting your head off of rubber than off of wood or cement.

  Fights, when they happen, tend to be contained. Cops aren't usually involved. The people sort themselves out and keep going.

  But it's not the kind of perseverance that necessarily means success will eventually find them.

  It's just that keeping going is the only thing some of them know. And they'll keep going until they die. When they do, there might be a quick toast or even a round of drinks bought. For a few years, some of the locals might tell some stories about the person, but by and large that will be it. The memory of who they were will fade, along with what they did.

  It's not a very comfortable existence.

  The people who work the docks tend to be a lot of whites from South Boston, some Irish, some Polish, and a few Italians sprinkled here and there. There are some Haitians from Roxbury and some Latinos from Dorchester. A few Portuguese moved up from New Bedford or came down from Gloucester a few years back and stayed.

  Everyone knows each other. Even if they don't all get along.

  So cops stand out.