by Tom Secret
With no word from Antwan, he’d asked Personnel to file a missing-persons report. Truth be told, for all his bluff and bluster, Randall was rather fond of the little parasite. At least, he was loyal. Snyderman was making a fuss, but he was using Antwan as cover for his own fear. Castro, on the other hand was acting like Antwan never existed. Dimitri was right; they were a waste of good air.
Maybe this was what a midlife crisis felt like, but these past few days had been so miserable he’d taken Dimitri up on his offer. Randall hadn’t told the others that Dimitri wanted to use the children as mules; arguing that they get transported across borders, sedated, snagged, and bagged, so why not fill them with packs of heroin? It had rendered Randall speechless when he first suggested it, and the more he’d considered it, the more brilliant it seemed, which was in stark contrast to the IRS, which was now a distraction.
Dimitri had agreed to meet one-on-one to flesh out the details of their new accord, but Randall knew the potential was limitless, and it made his heart flutter with excitement.
A crash sounded as the door flew open and slammed against the wall, making Randall jump in his seat and wince when he landed askew on the cushions. “Fuck me, haven’t you heard of knocking!”
Snyderman burst in with Castro in tow, pulling his standard-issue kitchen knife from inside his jacket, he slammed it on the polished glass desk. “Give us our money, Cilcifus, or by God, I’ll slit you from scrotum to gullet.”
Randal eased his weight onto the other buttock. “You know the difference between you and me, Snyderman?”
“We’re through talking, Cilcifus. Pay up now!”
“The difference is, you talk a good haircut, but you don’t cut much hair.”
“Slit the motherfucker, Charles!” Castro said.
“What’s up, Castro?” Randall smoothed his comb-over. “Don’t want to get your pretty manicure dirty?”
Snyderman grabbed the knife’s hilt and glanced toward the doorway as the new secretary appeared.
Randall threw his hands up. “Doesn’t anyone ever knock? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
Her eyes flashed between them as Snyderman slipped the knife behind his back.
“Sorry, Mr. Cilcifus, but that auction company is on the line again.”
“Tell them I’m not here.”
“I’ve told them three times today, but they said they’d sue you if, excuse me, if you don’t pony up for the auction.”
“They said that?”
“With a slew of expletives, sir.”
Randall glanced at Snyderman and Castro, then met her gaze. “Tell them if they do, I’ll investigate them for tax evasion.”
“I don’t want to speak to them again, Mr. Cilcifus. They’re very abusive, and this wasn’t part of my job description.”
“This is the IRS, young lady. We are the abuse, so tell them to back off, or consider yourself fired!”
The woman’s face blotched as she backed out the door. The clatter of high heels faded, then ceased, as the elevator chime announced her departure.
Snyderman put his ham fists on Randall’s desk and leaned toward him. “Is that why we haven’t been paid, Cilcifus, because you’ve spent it on an auction!”
Randall’s cheek twitched. “None of your damn business.”
Castro stepped forward. “Answer him, motherfucker!”
“Calm down, both of you, or I’ll set Mad Dog Michaels on you! Why do you think I have to put up with this shit from the auction company?” He looked at each of them. “You’ve got nothing, have you? Think about it. I couldn’t call Black to get transfers made, could I?”
“Why not?” Snyderman said.
“Because what I suspect Castro has conveniently neglected to mention, is that on top of the crap that’s been going on, he harassed Colby’s lieutenant, and Colby blew a fuse. I had to put him back in his box, so I told him we’ve got him on film at the warehouse. Now Colby has to get something on us to even the score, so he’s bound to have bugged our phones.”
Snyderman flashed Castro a stinging look. “So when are we getting paid?”
“I’ve got face time with Black tomorrow. I’ll get your money organized then. Satisfied?”
Castro brought his acne-scarred face forward. “It better be tomorrow, and it better include the extra twenty you promised me, bucko!”
“Castro, you call me that again, and I’ll take that knife and ram you with it.”
Snyderman eyed Castro. “What extra twenty?”
Randall looked from Snyderman to Castro and smiled. “I promised you fifteen.”
“Oswald?” Snyderman said.
“Don’t turn this around, Cilcifus; you’re the one ripping us off. I swear, Charles, he offered me twenty to grab Fairweather’s kids.”
“I offered you fifteen to grab the kids and persuade Snyderman to go along with you.” Randall was enjoying himself.
Snyderman plucked his knife from Randall’s desk and pointed it at Castro. “I asked you what was in it for us, and you said it was ‘penance.’ ‘To keep the peace,’ you said.”
“I-”
“Penance, Oswald! I trusted you, and you betrayed me.”
“All right now, ladies, that’s enough. Castro, it was fifteen, but I’ll make it twenty only because you’ll split it with Snyderman. Agreed?” Randall looked at each of them and smiled to himself as they both appeared to relax. “Tomorrow’s Saturday, and it takes two days to get money here from the Caymans, so you’ll get yours by Wednesday, okay?”
“We’d better, or I’ll be calling the Westside gang.” Snyderman slid the knife back into his jacket.
“Humph! Dimitri was right.”
“What was that? Have you been talking to the buyer behind our backs?”
“I was thinking out loud, Snyderman.” Maybe he’d get Dimitri to fit these losers with some concrete boots. “You won’t need to call anyone, but since you mentioned the Westside gang, did Piest send Michaels the twenty-six?”
Snyderman nodded. “With fifteen more tonight.”
“Good. Then we only need another eleven, and Christmas will come early.” For me.
51. DAMIAN BLACK
Friday, 5:48 p.m.
Damian Black strode through the heated underground parking lot beneath Banque Juliette. His tailor-made suit weighed ounces and looked a million dollars, the handmade calfskin shoes from Paris fit like velvet gloves, and the metal heel inserts sounded a whip crack with every step, warning bystanders he was not to be trifled with.
He smiled to himself as his lustrous black Rolls Royce Dawn came into view. A press of the alarm fob triggered a piercing bleep from the car which reverberated off the columns and into the concrete depths, illuminated for an instant by the double flash of the hazard lights.
Opening the driver’s door, he tossed his tan satchel onto the backseat and hung his silk jacket. Checking his reflection in the tinted rear window, he smoothed his shock of gray hair. Not bad for sixty-three, except perhaps a little too bushy on the eyebrows and too ruddy in the cheeks, thanks to years of business lunches.
He poured himself into the tangerine Connolly leather seat, pulled the bullet-proof door closed with a reassuring thud, and hit the lock, sighing as the stress faded and his senses soaked in the silence and scent of soft leather. This was his Zen moment at the end of each day.
The console illuminated the cabin like a flight deck; he pressed start, and the twin turbo V-12 purred to life, then whisked him past the other cars and glided up the exit ramp. Rain lashed the Rolls’s lacquered paintwork as it pulled onto Main Street, with its plague of psycho bike couriers and brain-dead jaywalkers. He abhorred winter; nothing but cold, dark, miserable weather for months ahead.
The soft ring of his cell phone came through the car speakers.
“Answer,” he instructed the phone.
“This is Damian Black.”
“Black, it’s Michaels…”
Damian hesitated. “Why are you calling me?”
“Never call me again. Goodbye.”
“Wait! Don’t hang up; it’s Walton. We need to talk. I’ll meet you at your house.”
“We don’t meet. Ever!” Damian hit the ‘end call’ button and switched off the phone.
A vagrant brandishing a filthy rag approached the side of the car. “No, no!” Damian waved his hand to shoo him away, but the man leaned on the hood and smeared the windshield between the wiper swipes.
Damian hit the horn and jolted the car forward to dislodge him as the traffic flow resumed, allowing the natural order to return, with his royal self in a Rolls Royce, and a member of the great unwashed flipping the finger at him in the rearview mirror.
Still, he wondered whether the vagrant was the happier man. Everyone knew Damian was a financial success, with an armored luxury car to keep the world out, but what else? For two-thirds of his life, he’d lived a lie, married to Samantha, whom he never loved while having an affair with Celia, whom he'd have died for.
From their first fateful meeting, he knew Celia was his soul mate, but in the glory days of youth, she was footloose and fancy-free, dating other men with abandon, and, like a fool, he responded in kind and found Samantha an easy mark. As it transpired, he was the mark, but the horse had shot its bolt and Samantha fell pregnant. Several weeks later, Celia announced she too was expecting a child.
His choice should have been simple, but Samantha proved to be an evil oppressor even then, threatening rape charges if he refused to take her to the altar. He could have had her buried at sea, but her parents were politically connected and would have destroyed his career.
Wedding Samantha seemed the only option, but it sealed his fate. A month later, Celia married Marcus. When reality dawned that they had acted in haste, Damian and Celia began their affair, and for thirty-three years, Samantha bled him, while he begged Celia to leave her despoiler. Then seven years ago, on a glorious day, Celia consented.
Samantha took the news like a redneck warlord and stormed around the house with a twelve-gauge, blasting their priceless antiques to smithereens, while Damian hunkered in his study, pistol at the ready. But the diabolist had more sinister plans.
A week later, Celia dropped the bombshell that Marcus had refused to grant her a divorce, and Damian’s world came crashing down.
Meanwhile, Samantha hired the best private investigators and lawyers in the state, who dug so much dirt, they could have nailed him to the cross and convinced the judge that Samantha was Mother Teresa; so what choice did he have?
Damian had taken Celia to lunch at the Plantation Gardens to break the news, and there they sat, eating their salads in silence on the terrace, while the pink flamingos stalked fish in the lake. He thought she had taken it well as they hugged and kissed in the parking lot, for the last time. But then Celia went home and took one of Marcus’s pistols, put the barrel in her mouth, and blew her brains across his sitting-room wall.
At the entrance to the estate, the security guard remained inside his hut to shelter from the downpour, so, Damian acknowledged the man’s wave with a perfunctory nod, then returned to his thoughts as he traveled the final quarter mile within the sprawling enclave. The seven years since Celia’s suicide had been a living hell, and while Samantha enjoyed the fruits of his labors, he had spent an hour and a half driving what should have taken forty minutes, and his blood pressure was now in the red zone.
Damian pulled to a halt outside the twelve-foot gates into his private gardens as the clock clicked seven-thirty. He pressed the buzzer, but nothing happened, so he tried again. Damn it! He thumbed it one last time, and the gates sprang to life, opened halfway and juddered, then gave a mechanical wail, and ground to a halt. He thumbed the close button. They groaned and juddered again, swung inward a few inches, and stopped.
There was no alternative; even with the wipers on full it was impossible to see through the deluge, so, he clambered from the Rolls, shivered as the freezing droplets soaked his hair and shirt, reached the front of the car, and stared at the chunk of rock embedded in the gravel.
The bush to his right rustled, and a drenched black cat bolted past the dazzling headlights and disappeared into the hedgerow.
“Holy cow!” He needed to calm down before he had another heart attack. The gate groaned and slid off the rock as he hit 'close' on the remote. Heaving the offending article into the hedge, he slid into the driver’s seat with a shiver.
He pulled forward along the avenue of century-old poplars that should have been illuminated, courtesy of Samantha’s overpriced landscape artiste, but instead, was cloaked in menacing darkness, pierced by the arc of the Rolls’s headlamps.
Damian pulled up in front of the house, shut off the engine, grabbed his jacket and satchel, and crunched up the path to the front door. Fumbling with the keys, he dropped the bunch and crouched to feel for them on the wet gravel.
The alarm beeped furiously as he opened the door; the darkness of the hallway broken only by the tiny green pulsating dot on the control panel. He hit the light icon—nothing happened. But why had the gates worked? He called up the alarm and punched in the code.
The bleeping stopped, his body went rigid, and everything turned black.
52. NO COPYCATS
Friday, 6:15 p.m.
From his desk in the middle of the precinct’s bullpen, Donatello watched his team members drift into the meeting room for the Friday night debrief.
Kennedy arrived first with his sinewy frame clad in high-tech fabric covered with reflective strips, ready to hit the road home when the briefing finished. Everything about him was long, from his chin to his legs, to the distances he ran every day.
Sanjit and Lance came in yakking, as different as chalk and cheese. Even in the stuffy office, Sanjit had dressed for snow, with his beard spilling down a heavy sweater, while Lance, in his slick red and yellow leathers and ever-present matching crash helmet, could have come straight out of a poster for motorcycle wear.
Crane slipped into the glass-walled room, bobbed his head in greeting, and resumed reading his cell phone.
They were good people; the best, in fact, and Donatello would miss them if Captain Colby got his way.
Carlson sauntered in with hands in his pockets, wearing a scowl that matched his creased suit. He had always been Colby’s blunt instrument, and with Colby’s renewed mission to bury Donatello, Carlson would be at the front of the line, holding the shovel.
Inspector Wilkes might have thrown Donatello a lifeline, but it was frayed, and he was swimming solo in a riptide. Somehow, he needed to rally the troops while avoiding a head-on collision with Carlson, and under the circumstances, that was a tough ask.
He scanned around for earth tremors signaling the captain’s impending arrival, but everyone appeared calm, for now.
Grabbing the envelope off his desk, he walked across the bullpen to the meeting room. “Where’s Ray Ray?”
“Collecting the kids,” Kennedy said. “Sitter didn’t show.”
Donatello closed the door and lowered the blinds inside the glass. “Okay, guys,” he said. “It’s been a crazy week, so let’s try to unpack it, starting with the bus collision. Kennedy, you’re up.”
“Stark’s back in intensive care. He came out of his coma and screamed till his vocal cords tore, so they re-induced, but the doc says his organs are fried.”
Donatello took a deep breath. “That’s not good. Okay, my turn. The mayor’s niece, just ID’d Stark as her ex-brother-in-law; she said they occasionally spoke, that he’d never met the children and could think of no reason he’d do this, except she mentioned he was sick.”
Kennedy was now fidgeting from something he called ‘runner’s shakes,’ so Donatello gave him a nod.
“I spoke to Stark’s sister. Apparently, their parents burned alive in a house fire twenty years ago, and her brother blamed himself; tried drowning the guilt in booze until he developed cirrhosis of the liver and needed regular dialysis,
ever since. She said because of their rare blood type, the parents had been potential donors, but with them gone, there was little hope of him finding one.”
“Who’s got the history on the bus driver?”
“Ooh, that’s me.” Crane slipped his cell phone into his pocket. “He’d just finished dropping local Methodists home from Sunday service.”
Donatello frowned. “He’s a churchgoer?”
“Community service.”
“Lieutenant!” Carlson crossed his arms and puffed his chest. “With all due respect, Captain Colby made it clear we already have the perpetrator, and the bus driver isn’t a suspect here.”
“Thank you, Carlson. We’re aware of his orders, and no-one is suggesting the driver was doing anything wrong, so go on, Crane. What’d he do?”
“Eight years in Fulton for armed robbery and aggravated assault. Served eighteen months, turned state’s, and they moved him here under witness protection. This was his first straight gig.”
“Jeez!” Donatello shook his head. “You couldn’t make it up! Okay, as Carlson just reminded us, we’ve got what appears to be a triple homicide, with an abduction thrown in for good measure, which the captain wants wrapping up; except there’s a complication.” Donatello glanced at Carlson as he let the words sink in and the men exchanged glances.
“What complication?” Carlson clenched his jaw.
“Glad you asked. The knife Stark used to kill the nanny is the same one used to slice Walton open.”
“That’s impossible! There are two knives in evidence.”
Donatello smiled. “Thank you for pointing that out. Please tell us your crack theory on why two identical kitchen knives, from two unrelated murders, would turn up within a week?”
“I’m not interested in theories, Lieutenant. Just facts. And the fact is, the captain made it clear the mayor’s niece and her family need closure.”