But keep your eyes on the prize here, Vic. Be a businessman, not a sex fiend. His plan, formulated as he'd driven back to the lot, was simple. He had a dozen old clonephones—very hard to get these days because the manufacturers had gotten wise—and he was going to use them to call whoever and get the money from them.
Now he opened the floor door and climbed back down. The porcelain bathtub stood nearly full with the brown liquid, whatever was left of Richie's bones still dissolving away there. The odor was strong. He wondered how badly it bothered Jin Li. Well, she had other things to worry about. He'd loosened her up, and it was time to push things along. Jin Li lay curled in a ball on the mattress, the tape over her eyes. He'd put another piece of tape over her mouth.
What a nasty little room this is, Vic thought.
"Here's a bucket," he told her. "And a roll of paper. I want you to keep yourself clean."
He cut the tape holding her wrists together.
She pointed to the tape over her eyes, meaning that she wouldn't be able to see what she was doing.
This had to be some kind of trick. "You want me to take off the tape on your eyes?"
She nodded.
"That means you can see me. That might not be good for you."
She shrugged.
"You saw me before, however?"
She nodded.
"I'll think about it."
She shook her head. Combative.
He pressed the bucket and toilet paper into her hands. "I think you'll be able to figure out what to do."
She was silent. He leaned forward and ran his hand over her breasts. She jumped back in surprise and fear.
"You worried that I'll rape you?"
She didn't move. Not a muscle. But her breathing quickened. "Answer the question. Are you afraid I'll rape you?"
She nodded.
"Good. You should be afraid. It's a distinct possibility. I'm actively fantasizing about it. On the other hand, I need you to be mentally composed for my purposes."
She made no answer.
"Now, let's call your brother. You realize, of course, that no one, and I mean no one, has any idea that you are here or that this room exists." He watched her. He could see that behind the tape her forehead had lifted. She was crying—but making no sound.
He took the tape off her mouth in one rip. "Tell me the number."
She did.
"That's a weird freaky number."
"It's a global number," she said, coughing.
He dialed on the clonephone. A greeting came on, in Chinese. He didn't leave a message.
"He doesn't speak English," she said. "You need to speak in Chinese."
The language difference. You didn't think of that, Vic. You assume everyone speaks English. He could kick himself—or worse. But he was in it now. No aborting the mission. He redialed and handed the Chinese girl the phone.
"Tell him you are kidnapped and he needs to get his hands on five hundred thousand dollars by tomorrow morning at ten a.m."
When the message came on, Jin Li quickly said in Chinese, "Chen, I need help. I am a prisoner in some kind of sewage place in Brooklyn. The man's name is an English word for winner. I am in the place where the shit trucks are parked, I think. This guy wants a lot of money."
He snatched the phone away. "That's plenty enough." He tried calling back. No answer. "We're going to have to wait. Meanwhile we will explore other promising opportunities."
The Chinese girl fell back on the old mattress, dragged down there originally for sexual purposes. He and Violet, when they were seventeen, eighteen.
Yes, she was going to be very useful. He had by now emptied out all of the contents of the girl's purse and found, among other things, her business card. She was the vice president and manager, American operations, of some outfit called CorpServe. A big deal. Whoa! But more interesting was the call sheet that he'd found in her purse. It was on the stationery of a company called Good Pharma, which had headquarters in midtown Manhattan, close to where he'd waited for the car driven by the Mexican girls. Dated from the day before, the sheet had been generated by a specialized spreadsheet desktop application; at the top of the page was the recipient of the calls, one Thomas Reilly, and for him the secretary had typed in the name and a message; below it appeared the person's title, phone number, and identifying detail, such as the names of wife and children, and record of the last call made to or received from that person:
NAME: James Tonelli. Apologized for not calling sooner. Knows you wanted to speak to him urgently.
NAME: Ann Reilly [clearly the wife of Thomas Reilly]. Calling from her cell. Bill Martz called for you at home, please deal with him, she says.
NAME: William Martz, chairman and CEO of Martz New Century Partners Fund. Five calls. Tom, he is insistent you call him. He was making the call himself, not secretary. Frankly, he sounded sort of abusive.
NAME: Christopher Paley, in-house counsel, Good Pharma Corp. We have received an inquiry from the NYPD regarding the death of the two Mexican workers in our CorpServe cleaning service.
NAME: Ann Reilly. Martz again.
He was putting something together. The two Mexican girls had been employed by CorpServe, where this Jin Li also worked, as a boss of some sort. The two Mexican girls had serviced the Good Pharma offices. Jin Li had been in the Good Pharma offices yesterday. The Good Pharma big shot named Tom Reilly had been called by Tonelli and a guy named Martz. Maybe that was related, maybe not. All these folks, Vic knew, had access to a lot of money, and some of it was going to become his. He looked at Jin Li cowering. I'm going to turn this hot Chinese girl into a gas station on Flatbush Avenue, he told himself. He saw her watching him.
"Open your mouth," he said.
"Why?" she asked fearfully.
"Just open your mouth."
She did.
"Wider, all the way."
She did.
"I'm taking the tape off." He reached forward and pulled it away in one quick motion. "There. Keep your eyes shut!"
"I am," she breathed fearfully.
"Stick your tongue out."
She didn't.
"Do it!" he yelled.
The sound of his voice scared her, making her blink. But she did as he had commanded, eyes closed, mouth wide open, tongue out.
"Move your tongue, like you're licking something."
She did, tears appearing from beneath her eyelashes.
"Good," Vic said. "Very, very good."
35
A man likes a drink at the end of the day. Especially me, thought Carlos Montoya as he passed through the strings of red beads in the entrance of his Queens bar. How many loads of laundry can you supervise before going mad? If the number was knowable, he'd nonetheless passed it a long time ago. He sat down at his regular table. I'm tired and fat, he thought, what else is new? The place seemed quiet, muted. Someone had turned off the music. Where were all the regulars, the Mexicans and Guatemalans and Ecuadorians who came here to spend a few of their hard-earned bucks and drink beer?
His waiter, Manny, eased up to him with a glass and bottle. "Hey, boss."
"The place is dead."
Manny jerked his head down the bar where an older man, lanky and quiet, sat. "Boss, you got a new friend."
The other man slid over a few chairs. He handed Carlos a card.
"Mr. Montoya," he said, "my name is Detective Peter Blake."
"Good evening, Officer."
"Let's get to it. I know you've had a hard day pretending to be an upstanding citizen. California Highway Patrol picked up two of your boys a few hours ago, snagged them on the bulletin we put out when they left the city so fast."
"They didn't do nothing."
"Then why did they run after I questioned them?"
"I told them to go have a great adventure. They're good clean young men, need to see this great country of ours."
Blake chewed on a swizzle straw, apparently reminding himself not to argue with such an erroneous representation of rea
lity. He's on duty, Carlos realized, can't drink.
"I can get those boys a much easier time of it," Blake said.
"If what?"
"If you tell me what's really going on."
"They didn't do anything. Why would they kill a couple of nice Mexican girls? It never makes sense."
"Actually, I'm starting to come around to that idea myself."
Carlos didn't like the cards he was holding. All cops lie, he reminded himself.
"Mr. Montoya," the detective continued, "I got a few old pals in the California immigration system. We can put those guys on ice in a detention center for six months easy and no judge is going to give us a problem. Or I could have them extradited back here and we could offer them a very interesting plea agreement in exchange for a complete description of the Mexican drug distribution channels in the great city of New York. If their information is good enough, helps snag some major players, we can even provide instant United States citizenship as further inducement to complete cooperation. Okay, Mr. Montoya? You don't have a lawyer and this conversation never happened, but you can see I'm not fucking around, right?"
Time to fold, he thought. This cop is hard core. "What I heard is that it was a guy who owns a sewage yard in Marine Park," he said.
"What?"
Carlos explained that his young "cousin" worked there and had seen some things that disturbed him. Sorry, there was no name. Anyway his "cousin" was back in Mexico now.
"Names, I need names," said Blake.
Carlos scratched his head. There was probably money in this somehow, but he didn't want it. You turn into a paid government snitch then go to prison and have everyone know that, then you end up with a sharpened toothbrush in your throat.
"The sewage guy's name is Victor. I spoke to him myself."
"You did?"
He sipped his cold beer. "Called him. Told him I knew. And he threatened to kill my family. I was thinking about what I was going to do to him for that, something he could never forget, you know what I mean?"
Blake touched his own nose with his forefinger. "Hey, Carlos, you gotta tell us these things, okay?"
"I had my utmost concerns, Officer."
Blake was getting up to leave. "I'm going to check this out right now, and if you're wrong, then—"
"Then God strike me down," Carlos interrupted, feeling relieved of his burden. "Because those beautiful girls are in heaven now, the special part, reserved just for Mexican angels."
36
What a rotten place to die. He'd let her open her eyes and so now she looked around at the small cement-walled room with no windows, perhaps fifteen feet on a side. Next to her was an old porcelain tub with some kind of strange piping going into it. But odder still was the thick brown mixture in the tub; that was what gave off that strong chemical odor, a bad smell that reminded her of the iron yard in Shanghai where she worked one summer in the office doing paperwork while boys just off the train from the countryside worked long hours stripping the paint from old sheet metal. A trickle of water dribbled from the tub hose and emptied into a floor drain. Above her was a solitary incandescent lightbulb, bright, too high to reach and turn off.
She was sitting on an old mattress, her legs still taped and roped at the ankles, as were her wrists again. A thick metal chain was looped tightly around her waist, secured with a lock, and the other end of the chain was locked to a steel ring set into the cement floor. There was enough slack in the chain that she could sit up on the mattress but not enough that she could stand.
This guy is going to rape and kill me, Jin Li thought. This is the kind of place that crazy men torture and slaughter women. There were plenty of these kinds of men in America, she knew, just as there were men like this in China.
She was hungry but, more important, suffered a terrible thirst, perhaps because of the chemical fumes. She needed more water, but the man had climbed up the stairs to go do something, leaving the ceiling hatch open. He was taller than Ray but older and not as fit. Yet she feared him, not just because of what he had already done to her but because he radiated a malevolent potency. He was studying her closely, she knew, like a safecracker trying to figure out the combination, and she had certainly not forgotten his hands on—and inside—her body while in the van. If he did that then, what would he eventually do in the safety and obscurity of this windowless cement room? She could see he was thinking about it. Sort of tasting the idea in his head, his mouth already filled with saliva.
Victor had left the hatch open but he knew she wasn't going anywhere. He needed to concentrate now and dialed the number for Tom Reilly's wife's cell phone.
It picked up. "Is this Mrs. Reilly?"
"Yes. Who is this?"
"I'm looking for your husband."
"This is not his number."
"I understand that," he said evenly.
"Who is this?"
"Someone who needs to reach your husband."
"I don't speak to people who don't tell me their name." She hung up.
Victor waited a minute. Then he dialed using another clonephone.
"Hello?" came the cautious voice.
"Mrs. Reilly, give me your husband's number."
"He's in a business meeting tonight."
"I don't care."
"He cares." She hung up again.
He called back on the first phone.
"Listen," she said, "I'm calling the police."
"I wouldn't," said Vic. "That's not a good idea, under the circumstances."
There was a pause as if she was considering something.
"Who shall I say is calling?" she asked, her voice laced with sarcasm.
"Tell him the following words."
"Words?"
"Yes. Here they are. Write them down. The first word is 'CorpServe.' C-O-R-P-S-E-R-V-E. The second word is 'Mexicans.' As in Mexico, the country. Mexicans. The third word is 'dead.' Tell him those three words. He will be eager to speak with me then. I will call you back in three minutes." Vic hung up. This, he told himself, was going to be good.
We are way outside the paradigm now, Ann thought. She looked at the phone in her hand. She'd written the three words on the front of a patient's file.
"Yeah," came Tom's voice when she called. "Ann?"
"Got a strange call, Tom."
"Strange how?"
"From a man who wants to talk to you. Wouldn't give me his name. He told me three words to say to you."
"What?"
"What's going on, Tom? I'm beginning to feel—"
"Tell me the words, Ann, and we'll fucking worry about your feelings another time!"
She hadn't heard that tone in years. "The words are 'CorpServe,' 'Mexicans,' like the country, and the last word is 'dead.' "
"Okay."
"Okay? Dead Mexicans is an okay thing?" she cried.
"Yes. What next?"
"He wants your number, Tom." Her voice rose in anxiousness. "He's about to call back."
"Give it to him," answered Tom. "I think I know who this is." The timing could not be worse. The fellow named Elliot had started some of his preliminary buying of Good Pharma stock, tightening up the loose supply of shares that were available right now, but they weren't getting any movement upward in the price because Mr. Chen refused to talk. Tom watched Martz looking at him from across the rooftop, then back at Elliot. This crazy attempt to lift Good Pharma's stock price wasn't going to work. He saw that now, as plainly as he could see the red and green lights on the top of the Empire State Building, once and now again the tallest structure in New York City.
Vic dialed back using a different clonephone.
"This is his number," said his wife, repeating it. "He's there right now."
"Thank you for your assistance," said Vic.
"Fuck you, asshole." The phone went dead.
He dialed Tom Reilly.
"Yeah, James?"
"What?" said Vic, wondering if he sounded like James Tonelli, one of the names on the list.
; "Why the fuck you calling my wife's cell phone number? How'd you get it?"
Gotta move fast here, thought Vic.
"James, this is Tom Reilly asking you a question. Talk, man."
"Mexicans," said Vic.
"I know. I heard. Again, why you calling my wife, James?"
"This isn't James, Tom."
A pause. "Who is this?"
"This is someone who knows what you told James Tonelli to do."
"I didn't tell him anything to do."
"Bullshit you didn't. You told him to kill some CorpServe workers."
"Who is this?"
"I want money, Tom. Real money. I know what you do, I know where your wife is."
"Listen—"
"No, you listen. I'll be calling back in one minute. Think about how much it would cost to pay me or how much it would cost you personally if I told people what you told James Tonelli to do."
He waited three minutes. Then called back.
"Two million, Tom. I want that in cash by the end of the day tomorrow." He hung up.
Tom examined his phone. He knew that Martz was wondering why he was taking a personal call at a time like this. But he had to play ball with this other guy. If he didn't, then—well, then he's sitting in court listening to James Tonelli, witness for the state after copping to a reduced charge, saying how Tom had ordered the cold-blooded murder of two Mexican girls. By then he would have lost his job, his wife, his whole world. He could get hold of $2 million easily enough; that was a quick call to his private banker. Maybe I should stall the guy, Tom thought. But he remembered that the guy had Ann's cell number, which she generally didn't give out. It was used for emergencies at the office only. And for talking with Tom. If this guy had her number, then maybe he knew where they lived.
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