The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17

by Lisa Scottoline

  Kaufman had been turned inside out like a sock, skinned to the bone. At some point he’d lost control of his bladder and bowels, but his bowels had been left in a slippery heap between his knees. The EMTs were shoveling him off the pavement and into a body bag. Babs DiMello had talked to the crime scene techs and gotten no joy. They could give her a time frame, but that was about it.

  “No witnesses,” Phoebe Kreuz, the ATF agent, said.

  “Fat chance,” Babs told her.

  “We know this is related to the hijack.”

  Babs shrugged. “How not?” she asked. “Somebody’s cleaning up the loose ends.”

  “Guzenko?”

  “My guess. But here’s what you have to understand. The guy doesn’t sit on his hands. Even if he had nothing to do with the hijack, he’d circle the wagons. He doesn’t want it walked back to him. He eliminates the chain of evidence. Anything and everybody. Nuns, pregnant mothers, you name it.”

  “Collateral damage.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Who’s next on his list?”

  Babs glanced at the EMTs scooping Kaufman up. “If it were me they went to work on, I would have given up a name.”

  “Any name?”

  Babs was thinking Tommy Meadows.

  ***

  Tommy knew he was on the dime. He’d overplayed his hand with Kaufman, and if word got back to the Russians, they’d be paying Tommy a visit. Tommy didn’t welcome the attention. Last time around he’d managed to stay out of sight, but last time around he’d had a counterweight.

  What could he use this time?

  Don’t be half-assed, the cops had told him, meaning don’t be a wise guy who wasn’t wised up, like his brother Roy, but Guzenko was sucking all the air out of the room, and Tommy was fighting for breath. There had to be an angle he could play, or a stalking horse, somebody he could throw under the bus.

  He caught the train into midtown and went to talk to Nico Constantine. Nico was his wholesaler, the guy he’d gone to Maryland to buy guns for. Nico was down with the Westies, the Irish mob that operated out of Hell’s Kitchen and along the West Side waterfront, but he was equal opportunity. You could be a Mick or an Italian, a Latin gangbanger, a Vietnamese punk, or a Rasta. The only color that mattered to Nico was green.

  Tommy knew this was going to be delicate. Word had gotten around about the Kennedy heist, and there was heat from the feds, so he couldn’t come right out and ask. He had to churn the waters. Nico, like a shark, would sniff the bait.

  They met at a bar on Eleventh. Tommy stood the drinks, Stoli on the rocks for Nico, Jameson’s and a bump back for himself.

  Tommy eased into it. “I’ve got a buyer,” he said. He took a sip of his whiskey and chased it with a swallow of beer.

  “Provenance?” Nico asked. He meant, how did they happen on you?

  “Couple of guys I met upriver,” Tommy said. “Dirty white boys. Took a fall on a state beef, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer.”

  “Retards, in other words,” Nico said.

  “Smart guys don’t do hard time.”

  “Smart guys don’t get caught. Who are these morons to me?”

  “It’s a militia group in the Adirondacks.”

  “Oh, real morons. We talking Timothy McVeigh?”

  “I don’t think they’re looking to blow up buildings with fertilizer bombs. They want to stockpile guns and ammo, waiting on the end times, civil disorder.”

  Nico snorted. “End times,” he said. “Maybe it’ll clean up the gene pool, weed out some of those skinheads.”

  “Cash money, all the same,” Tommy said.

  “What do they want?” Nico asked him.

  “M4s, modified for full auto, 5.56 hardball, mil spec.”

  Nico shook his head. “The guns, not that easy, but ammo, I might have a source.”

  Tommy veered away. “Why are the guns so hard?”

  “Gimme a break,” Nico said. “Selective fire? Weapons like that don’t fall off a turnip truck.”

  “What’s your price point?”

  “What kind of quantity are we talking?”

  “Twenty thousand rounds.”

  “Let me do the math,” Nico said.

  “Turnaround time?” Tommy asked.

  Nico shrugged. “I need to call some people,” he said.

  “I need to get back to my guys with a ballpark.”

  “You need to give it a rest. We’re not selling Mary Kay.”

  Lydie had piggybacked an Internet server that hosted a regional company called Southwest Air Cargo, out of Albuquerque. They were a subsidiary of a larger international freight carrier headquartered in Toronto. Once she’d signed on and created a dummy account, it took her the better part of the day to walk it back to an outfit called CyberResources.com, but their website was firewalled. She e-mailed Felix Soto at NSA. He flagged her back inside the hour with surveillance logs on the target, its physical location, direct contact information for ATF’s New York office, and authorization for a FISA warrant.

  “Ten out of ten,” he added in a postscript. “How do I get you back?”

  I couldn’t afford the pay cut, she almost answered, but it wouldn’t have been the exact truth. What she’d surrender, if she went back to Fort Meade, was her independence. Lydie enjoyed having her autonomy. She relished the occasional compliment, but she didn’t miss being under NSA authority. Felix Soto was a better than decent boss. What got in the way was politics.

  She called ATF. They patched her through to a cell.

  “Kreuz.” The voice was a woman’s.

  Lydie hesitated.

  Agent Kreuz let her hang in the dead air.

  “I’ve got the Guzenko computer penetration,” Lydie said.

  “Your place or mine?”

  “Whichever works.”

  “Meet you at Brooklyn South,” the ATF agent said. She rang off.

  Not a lot of bedside manner, Lydie thought. She picked up her paperwork and downloaded the rest onto a flash drive. Push comes to shove, do a core dump. The habits of NSA culture.

  Bay Ridge, just off the expressway at Sixty-fifth. A neighborhood shopping plaza, shoe repair, manicures, a tanning salon, Chinese takeout, dry cleaning, a liquor store. Mom-and-pop, generic and modest. CyberResources was an end unit. Fax and copy services, computer repair, photo and graphics, web access. The ATF agent, Phoebe Kreuz, had the lead, with Babs and her team in support. They took it down at noon.

  There were three people working in the shop, one at the counter up front, for customer service, a tech at the back, trying to recover files from a damaged hard drive, and the boss, in her office. The first order of business was to deny them immediate telephone access, and the cops smothered them like a blanket, no cuffs, all courtesy, but patting them down and confiscating their cells. The woman who owned the business went through the usual boilerplate. Kreuz and DiMello ignored her.

  “This isn’t Russia,” the woman protested angrily.

  Lydie Temple was fascinated. She knew this to be her Little Ivan, not the avatar she’d imagined, a college dropout obsessed with video games, but a tough, middle-aged pro. Her dossier with Homeland Security identified her as Ludmilla Shevardnadze, a legal immigrant from Tbilisi, with an MBA and a second master’s in computer science. She was on the pad with Guzenko for five large a month. After her initial bluster, she folded almost immediately. She had experience of the security services in her home country, after all. They were the same the world over. You played ball or they dropped you down a well.

  “Who’s this guy Bagratyön?” Phoebe Kreuz asked DiMello.

  “Joe Bags, he’s Guzenko’s consigliere.”

  “I want witness protection,” Ludmilla said to them.

  “We’ll negotiate,” Kreuz told her. “You keep talking. The deal comes later.”

  “I’ll stop talking.”

  “No, you won’t. I can render you back to Georgia inside of seventy-two hours, without a hearing. Y
ou’re on a felony beef, toots. You think Guzenko can get to you here? You don’t figure he can get to you while you’re sunbathing by the Black Sea?”

  “Suka,” Ludmilla muttered. Bitch.

  “You got that right,” Phoebe said to her.

  Lydie was exploring the computer array.

  “What have we got?” Babs asked.

  “She left a big footprint,” Lydie said.

  “Can you break it down?”

  “Probably, given some time.”

  “We don’t have a window,” Kreuz said. “Where’s the cargo?”

  Nico thumped the canister on the table. Olive drab. It weighed sixty pounds. One thousand rounds of 5.56, full metal jacket.

  “Three hundred dollars,” he said. “Round numbers, if we’re talking twenty boxes, six thousand.”

  Tommy looked at Beeks.

  Beeks had gone white sidewall. He didn’t have jailhouse tats, but he looked like a high school hockey coach from Saranac Lake, which fit the profile.

  “Earnest money,” Tommy said.

  Beeks counted it out, uncomfortably, which fit the profile, too. He was supposed to be a rube in the big town.

  “When do we do this?” Tommy asked.

  “Tonight,” Nico said.

  “Your call,” Tommy said.

  Beeks had his cell phone out.

  “Put that away,” Nico said.

  Beeks looked at him, surprised, but he folded it closed.

  “No surprises,” Nico said to Tommy.

  “Six K, Tommy gets ten percent,” Beeks told DiMello.

  Babs nodded. It would be marked money, of course, and Nico wasn’t going to have it for long, but they needed the full amount to make the buy or there’d be no case. “Can we shake it out of 100 Centre?” she asked the lieutenant.

  Shorthand for Police Plaza, NYPD headquarters. “It’s worth a shot,” the lieutenant said.

  Babs figured the odds were good they’d get it. If they could break the Kennedy heist, there’d be plenty of credit to go around, and everybody involved would be rolling in clover.

  “You run the numbers?” the lieutenant asked.

  Lydie Temple had downloaded the image from Beeks’s cell. There was a control code stamped on the ammo box, and she compared it to the manifest from Holloman AFB. She got a match. Nico was fencing military supplies.

  “Twenty ammo canisters out of five hundred,” the lieutenant said. “Who’s bidding on the rest?”

  Babs looked at Phoebe Kreuz. “ATF in Phoenix thinks it’s going to be sold to the Mexican cartels,” she said. “That’s an educated guess.”

  “I’m not saying Jerry Chapin’s wrong,” Phoebe said, “but if the cartels were the end buyer, it would be a done deal.”

  “I see where you’re going,” Babs said. “Nico Constantine’s not a big enough player to swing a million-dollar sale.”

  “If he can lay his hands on it and piece out a part of the shipment, then it’s still in New York.”

  “We have surveillance on Nico?” the lieutenant asked.

  “We do,” Phoebe said, meaning ATF.

  “Either he picks up the munitions or, more likely, arranges a physical meet, because he can’t front the money, he needs his buyer there,” the lieutenant said. “So a warehouse, a pallet on the back of a truck, whatever. He has to make contact.”

  “Nice to get a photo op with Guzenko,” Babs said.

  “They won’t meet face-to-face, not until the buy, if then,” Phoebe said. “It’ll be the other guy, Guzenko’s bagman.”

  “Can you monitor his phone calls?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Nico? Not if he’s using a throwaway cell.”

  Lydie Temple cleared her throat.

  “Ma’am?” the lieutenant asked her.

  “I know somebody who might help,” she said.

  “And who would that be?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” she told him.

  The lieutenant raised his eyebrows.

  “Is this the same source that gave us Ludmilla Shevardnadze and the computer shop?” Phoebe Kreuz asked.

  Lydie nodded.

  “I’d trust it,” Phoebe told the lieutenant.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, people. We’ve got what’s-her-butt, so we know how they hacked into the shippers’ websites, and she’ll roll over on Guzenko to avoid deportation. We’ve also got Nico Constantine, who’s ready to sell us stolen goods. What we’re missing is a direct connection between Guzenko and the contraband. Let’s find it.”

  They broke up to work the phones.

  Nico called at seven. Tommy was at a bar off Ocean Parkway, watching a rerun of Highlander on cable, playing with a plate of Buffalo wings and nursing a beer. Nico gave him a location, a time, and very specific instructions. Then he hung up. The chicken wings had gotten cold and gummy. Tommy didn’t have much appetite. His stomach was sour.

  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 vod
ka, 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.”