The Warriors Series Boxset I

by Ty Patterson

  It was at the eleventh self-storage unit that they hit pay dirt.

  The locker was empty save for a few clothes and, beneath them, a thin notebook.

  Broker ruffled the pages and saw that only a few of them were filled. He went back to the first page and read.

  ‘If you’re reading this, then I am dead.’

  Chapter 32

  Broker finished reading in half an hour, breathed deeply, and passed it to Bwana and Roger. They read it in silence, and in silence they headed back to Marine Park.

  Shawn looked at them expectantly when they returned and smiled when Broker waved the notebook at him, the smile fading when the three of them didn’t say anything. ‘Nothing in there?’

  ‘Some clues. Will need some legwork.’

  Shawn looked at him for a long moment, looking past Broker’s game face and noncommittal answer, fearing the answer, not ready for it. He slid out of his chair and left the room. Lisa looked at them uncertainly and then, snatching Dino, ran after him.

  ‘Not good?’ Chloe asked them.

  Broker handed her the notebook wordlessly.

  Shattner’s journal started from his days in Iraq. He wrote about his wife, his kids, the journal sunny and cheerful, a lot of pages focusing on his ‘sprouts,’ and then he started writing about his marriage coming under strain, and the jottings became darker. ‘… marriage has become a black hole for my money. If only she worked.’

  There were several blank pages, and then one started with, ‘There were a million reasons not to go down that route, and I knew all of them. Giving my kids a good life outweighed them all. Keeping her quiet was worth it.’ He wrote about selling small arms that were on the verge of being deactivated, his way of rationalizing.

  The entries became swiftly written, the pen digging deep in the journal, words bottled in Shattner finding a release.

  The next entry was dog-eared, and the page was heavily smudged, as if Shattner had revisited it again and again.

  ‘He was an odd one. He never socialized with anyone, didn’t encourage conversation, never smiled… no one knew what he did and when asked, he said, “This and that.” Rumor was that he was Special Ops, working with the rebels, but no one ever knew for sure.’

  Next entry.

  ‘He caught me.’ The caught underlined. ‘–saw me stuffing my duffel. One moment I was alone in the store, the next moment he was there. He didn’t ask me what I was doing. He just flat out told me, with those dark eyes looking deep in me. I could see he didn’t buy my explanation. I told him why and am ashamed that I cried. He didn’t fucking react. I lost it and trained the gun in my hand on him. He didn’t move and didn’t react, just said, “Soldier, you’re in deep shit. Don’t dig yourself in deeper.” He walked away and before I could leave, the MPs came and arrested me.’

  The next entry was more than a month later.

  ‘He spoke for me at the trial. Said my circumstances should be taken into account, and the insignificant value and deactivated status of the arms should be considered. He has some juice because my pension is intact.’

  Another entry, three weeks later.

  ‘I am like cancer. No one approaches me or talks to me. I sleep alone. On the last day he came and gave me his number. I asked him why, and he just walked away.’

  Elaine Rocka was reading over Chloe’s shoulder, and she asked them, ‘Is that your friend?’

  They nodded, and silence fell again as the women resumed reading.

  The entries for the next few months were about his winning custody of the children – ‘They’re my everything and I’ll be theirs’ – and the challenge in finding a job.

  ‘Everything’s okay till I tell them I was court-martialed. Then the doors slam shut.’

  A couple of months later, drifting around the city.

  ‘Sold my first gun. Got it from a gangbanger, sold it to another. Food for a few weeks. Pension not enough. Lisa and Shawn need clothes, books, school money.’

  The entries became further spaced out and shorter, about reviving his arms-dealing contacts, time with the kids. The writing became terse, as if Shattner didn’t want the journal to question him. There was one page the two of them lingered long over.

  ‘Both of them are smart, maturing faster than normal kids. Don’t think they know, but the boy sometimes looks at me, and I hurt. Suicide? I can see why now, but not until they’ll be taken care of.’

  A couple of months later, just one line on the page.

  ‘Caught by the cops in a sting. Offered amnesty in return for being an informant in a gang. 5Clubs.’

  A few days later.

  ‘Many discussions with cops. Detective Kirkus will be my contact. Met with him a few times and got my backstory from him. It’s not difficult to memorize; it’s not far from mine. Discussing ways to connect, phone numbers. Light appearing at end of tunnel.’

  The next entry didn’t have a date.

  ‘In now. Cruz and Diego scare me. Kirkus happy. Worried that other than assurances, nothing from the cops about amnesty. Deal done with the devil.’

  The last sentence was underlined twice.

  The entries, brief, came rapidly now.

  ‘Most valuable mechanic now. Kirkus not happy. Says repairing cars is worth jack shit to him. Can’t exactly tell Diego to involve me in gang. Kirkus evades when I ask him about amnesty or payment.’

  There were many one-line entries after that, mostly about Kirkus urging him to be more valuable to the gang.

  Then, four months later.

  ‘Shortage of drivers. Drove Diego and a gorilla, Rajek, to a small deal. Sat in car. Kirkus happy. Shawn is man of house, takes care of Lisa. My son has no childhood. Because of me.’

  He had recorded the time of the deal and drawn a crude map of the location. He’d also drawn a boy’s face next to Shawn’s name.

  Elaine Rocka sighed deeply, and Chloe started to close the book, but she urged her to go on.

  They flipped through the pages rapidly, stopping only where he went into some detail.

  ‘Drove to a hit. Diego killed a guy in front of me. Suspects me of being a snitch since I was very calm. Told the bastard to shoot me. I have nothing to lose anyway, but my kids. Kirkus found the body. Says story is gang warfare.’

  He had started recording deals by then, estimates of kilos, money and other parties involved, in small writing in the corners of the pages.

  ‘Kirkus happy with flow, finally. Says cops are busting some deals. Puts more pressure on me. Kirkus continues to evade amnesty question,’ went an entry.

  Bear had moved behind them and was reading over their shoulder, and noticed Rocka’s shudder at the next page.

  ‘Found a bug in my house. They suspect a snitch and obviously I’m the newest. Carrying my gun with me now.’

  The women didn’t notice Lisa and Shawn creeping in the room, Bwana and Roger shushing them and leading them out. They were reading about a deal in Gloucester City; Shattner hadn’t written much, but they could sense his fear and relief at living through it.

  The next entry was the last.

  ‘Garage closed. Diego’s asked me to meet him, not said why. My kids are safe with Elaine. Shawn will call Zeb if I don’t return. He may not remember me, but I don’t have anyone else. I don’t know anyone else I can turn to. I have failed all my life. I should see this one through.’

  They turned the pages, but there wasn’t anything else, but Bear stopped them and flipped back the last few pages.

  It was there at the bottom of the page, in very small writing.

  ‘Tried to be a good father. Failed. Forgive me Lisa, Shawn.’

  Chloe remained bowed for a long time as Rocka fingered the notebook, opening it, riffling the pages, as if it had more on Shattner. Bear looked around and outside, at the pool glistening in the silence, the distant sounds of the city creeping in on them, and back at the notebook.

  Elaine Rocka cleared her throat. ‘Now what?’

  Chloe lifted her he
ad then and looked at her, at the others, and that thing in them stirred and then leapt out and roared silently.

  Chapter 33

  ‘Kirkus died a couple of months back. Bad heart. Died at his desk. Good cop.’

  Deputy Commissioner Rolando looked down the long conference table at them. They were in an anonymous civic building, Rolando flanked by Pizaka and Chang, facing the five of them. Isakson was on the cops’ side of the table. He was present when the five of them arrived and said, ‘I was in the city on JTF business when Bruce updated me.

  ‘We had long wanted an inside man in the gang, and when we arrested Shattner, he fit the bill perfectly. A cover story wasn’t needed because he had it all. Criminal record, ex-army, willing to do anything – he didn’t bear a grudge against the army, but he put on a good act. We put him through several psych evaluations, and all came out good. High motivation levels, good liar.’

  Rolando smiled briefly. ‘Could handle stress and pressure, such stuff. It didn’t take us long to convince him.’ Rolando looked at them individually. Broker and he went back a long way, but this was the first time he was meeting all of them. He saw a compact, well-oiled machine.

  ‘Did you intend to grant him amnesty?’ Chloe asked pointedly and stared back at Pizaka challengingly as his shades trained on her.

  Rolando cleared his throat after a brief silence. ‘Ma’am…’

  ‘Chloe.’

  ‘Chloe, the way these things happen, we don’t grant amnesty outright to anyone under such circumstances. We see the quality of the juice they give us, and only then grant it. Shattner’s juice was A-grade, and we would have upheld our end of the arrangement.’

  ‘How does this work? I presume Kirkus ran him, but who else got his juice?’ Bear asked him.

  ‘Running a man deep inside is not like in the movies. There are no dead drops, no call signs, passwords… nothing of the sort. Some of that happens if we have a cop inside, but with a civilian, especially one who has a record, the protocol is decided by the detective and the insider.’

  Bear raised his eyebrows in astonishment. ‘So Shattner just called when the mood struck him? Called him on Kirkus’s line?’

  Rolando smiled thinly. ‘They had a secure protocol they followed. Calls at specific intervals, an untraceable number, safe words, danger words… but when a man is inside, his ability to communicate depends a lot on his circumstances.’

  Broker eyed the journal that was now in front of the Deputy Commissioner. Bwana and Roger had been against informing the cops about the journal, but Broker had convinced them finally. ‘After all, we are helping Isakson, and they just might know something about his whereabouts.

  ‘Who had access to his intel?’

  Chang stirred and fielded that question. ‘A secure network is established for those who need to know and it goes to all those. In this case, Kirkus’s reports went only to the boss.’ He nodded in Rolando’s direction.

  Isakson shook his head when the other side of the table looked at him. ‘First time I’m hearing of Shattner. Bruce kept the JTF informed, but didn’t tell us the source.’ The rebuke in his voice was loud.

  ‘I’m sure the FBI doesn’t tell us everything it knows, Deputy Director,’ Rolando retorted. Isakson acknowledged this silently. Rolando and he got on well and the two of them had reduced the inevitable turf wars to a minimum.

  Bwana brought the discussion back to Shattner. ‘So no one knows what happened to Shattner? Kirkus tell you anything? Surely some what-if scenarios were discussed with him.’

  ‘Kirkus told me he just dropped off the grid after the last bust. Didn’t respond to coded text messages, no calls, nothing. We had plans in place to extricate him and his kids if he was in danger, but that panic button never got pressed.’

  ‘He’s probably dead, isn’t he?’ Bear and Chloe spoke at the same time.

  ‘Yes. That’s a real possibility.’

  ‘Which means the gang knew he was a snitch… I wonder how they knew that?’ Roger mused.

  Rolando glanced at Chang and Pizaka. ‘We’ve started looking into that. It won’t be quick and neither will it be clean.

  ‘Did he tell you anything else? How the gang was organized, their bases, how they communicated… all that stuff? My informants give me that kind of juice.’ Broker addressed his question to the cops.

  Rolando shook his head. ‘We would have got to that, but all of us were under pressure to show results… and the focus was just on deals that we could bust.’

  Pizaka spoke for the first time. ‘Of course the gang could have offed him just because they suspected he was a snitch. They don’t exactly follow due process.’

  ‘Kirkus, what about him?’

  ‘We’ll start there obviously,’ Rolando said with distaste. A dirty cop who fed the gang was his worst nightmare come true, and he hoped Kirkus wasn’t that.

  ‘Waste of time,’ grumbled Bwana when they’d left the meeting.

  Broker shrugged. ‘We did what we had to and learnt that there was nothing to learn.’

  He smiled suddenly. ‘Think Rog and you can go ask this Cruz and Diego?’

  Cruz and Diego were no longer at the laundry.

  Bwana and Roger had been watching it for three days, and they saw a lot of bruisers, but not the two they were seeking. The laundry had a regular clientele, most of them office workers, but for its location, it could have been busier.

  Bwana yawned and worked the kinks out of his shoulders. ‘Those bruisers hanging about… if I was Office Man John Doe, I would stop coming to the laundry. Lots of other places in the city for laundry.’

  Roger didn’t reply, just nodded, and they lapsed back to silence. On the fourth day, they were joined by Broker. ‘Making sure you aren’t sleeping on the job,’ was his comment, and he got flipped the bird by Bwana.

  The laundry was in a long chain of stores, convenience stores, take-aways, exotic foods, salons, all of them busy but for the laundry. A week went by, and as the smell of a Chinese take-away filled the car, Roger broached it. ‘Doubt those guys are here. We’ve been watching 24/7, and we’ve seen all the gangbangers in the world but them!’

  ‘Mmm.’ Broker was thinking furiously. Soon after their meeting the cops, Cruz and Diego stopped using the laundry as their base. It was entirely possible that they had stopped using it long before, but Broker hated coincidences.

  He looked at the Cyrillic lettering on a grocery store, its red-lighted signage casting a glow in the night sky. ‘Let’s do this another way,’ he said.

  It took a couple of days to set up, two days when Chloe and Bear, itching for action, suggested hitting another 5Clubs business. Broker considered it; on the one hand, it would maintain the pressure on the gang who would be hurting now; on the other, a lull could relax their vigilance. ‘Let’s go with this first and see what comes of it.’

  They met at a midtown hotel, its glass-fronted façade giving an air of respectability to the person they were meeting. That person had bought out all the rooms on the seventeenth floor and had his people stationed in the lobby, fire escapes and the service entrances. His people wore loose-fitting suits, looking like poorly dressed brawlers and bouncers, the bulges under their suits plain to see, but then they didn’t care if they blended in or not. Each floor had four elevators, but that day only one stopped on the seventeenth.

  The four of them, Chloe staying back with Rocka and the kids, stepped out of the elevator and were accosted by six brawlers, three behind them, three in front. There were two more men at either end of the corridor, Uzis slung casually across their shoulders. Bwana and Bear were big, but each one of these men had at least a couple of inches and ten pounds on them. The bruisers in the front of them silently frisked them and led them down the corridor to a suite at the far end.

  One of the Uzi-wearing gunmen knocked on the suite and, after precisely six minutes, swung it open and ushered them in.

  The suite had a huge living room with floor-to-ceiling glass windows through
which they could make out the spire of the Empire State Building. They didn’t have much time to dwell on the view because two more large men appeared and frisked them again silently and took away their phones.

  Broker made himself comfortable on a sofa while the others ranged around the room, Bwana positioning himself next to one of the brawlers.

  An Oriental girl came from an inner room carrying pots of tea, and went about making tea for them without asking their preference. He didn’t get to where he was by asking people politely, thought Broker.

  Vasily Oborski made them wait for another half hour before making his entry. Dressed in a tan suit, his middle-aged but very fit form, thick brown hair and a lightly wrinkled face could have easily graced a men’s fashion magazine. The head of the Russian mob in the city seated himself opposite Broker and helped himself to a scone as the girl rushed to pour tea for him.

  He regarded Broker over the rim of his cup, the wreaths of steam giving his face an otherworldly look. ‘Long time, Broker,’ he greeted him mildly.

  Oborski had never been known to raise his voice.

  His father had been sent to a Siberian prison for crimes against the state, leaving six-year-old Vasily to fend for a sick mother and four-year-old sister, in the bitter cold of Kodinsk.

  Five years on, the mother had passed away, and the sister had died in a brutal attack by a rapist. Vasily, mature and tough beyond his years, had spent three months hunting the rapist down and one cold morning had left his insides steaming in the snow. Vasily fled Kodinsk when the rapist’s friends turned the heat on him and, after a tortuous journey by cart, farm tractor and truck, reached Moscow.

  The journey expanded Vasily’s mind, and while Moscow was three thousand miles from Kodinsk, it was nowhere far enough for him. He roamed the city for a week and finally stowed away in a freight vessel to New York. The city got a new immigrant that year, a battle-hardened criminal, young in years and hardened by the Russian cold. Ten years later he was a gang leader and, thirty years later, was heading the city’s Russian mafia.