by Norman Green
She turned him around, put his back against the railing. He was still hard, but he stood still as she rode him. After a moment she grabbed a handful of his shirt, pushed him back until his upper body was out over the rail, in empty space above River Road. His feet came up as he struggled for balance, his pants inverted as his legs flew apart, she heard the tinkle of car keys and change from his pocket as it rained down on the street below.
“Yaahhhhh!” he bellowed, skewered on the twin spears of pain and pleasure. She held him there, slamming into him. “Aaaaaaghh! You’re killing me!” He flailed, finally grabbed a handful of her hair. “Goddammit!”
She shifted her grip from his shirt to his throat, squeezed until he let go of her hair and grabbed her wrists. “Please!” he rasped, when she gave him air. “Please! I have kids! I have . . . I got a wife . . .”
She came then, one long shivering burst, and then she pulled herself off him, dragged him back off the railing. Her dress fell back down around her thighs. She let him go, stepped back, looked at him standing there, quivering. “Crazy bitch,” he said, but there was still fear in his voice. “Don’t just leave me here. Finish me, at least. Finish me off.”
“Do it yourself,” she said, and she walked off into the darkness without looking back.
Nine
The sun burned through the dirty windows of the offices of Creative Data Recovery, Inc, casting a glare on the computer screen that made it hard to see. The kid working the computer didn’t seem to notice, though. He was one of the best hackers in the business, and Al had hired him to set up a pipeline into the Pennsylvania Transfer Corporation’s server. And half of what Caughlan wanted was right there, it was just a matter of looking for it. But Caughlan’s in the shipping business, Al thought, he’s worried about how much he’s paying for fuel, he’s worried about his accounts receivable, he’s trying to decide how many legs he’s gonna have to break to get his next labor agreement done, he doesn’t have time to pore through piles of paperwork.
Alessandra had the time. All you gotta do, she told herself, is ignore that pounding hangover, and quit replaying last night over and over again. He was a big boy, he walked into it with his eyes open. Pay attention to business.
Still . . .
Anyway, thank God for computers, because it meant she could sit in the relative safety of this office and sift through the documents generated by Caughlan’s freight company. And she could do it anonymously. She hadn’t told anyone about this, so whoever the turncoat at Penn Transfer was, they’d have no way of knowing what she was looking at.
It was a simple system, once you figured it out. Call up a shipping contract, it was tied to a customer number. The customer number was tied to a bill of lading, which was tied to a delivery confirmation, which was tied to an invoice, which was tied to an entry in Caughlan’s accounts receivable file. When a check covering the invoice came in, it was tagged to a specific invoice or group of invoices and dropped out of accounts receivable and into old business. Beautiful system.
Anyhow, that’s how the hacker explained it. “Look, babe, it’s simple. All of their customer numbers have six digits, okay? But every so often there’s one with seven. The seventh digit is always a zero, and that zero triggers a subroutine in their program that buries the transaction. So what happens is the bill of lading prints out, the driver gets his orders, but there’s no contract, no invoice, no tag to accounts receivable. After the bill of lading prints out, the file drops out of memory, so there’s no record of delivery, and there’s no address, not on the hard drive. There might be a paper copy of the original bill of lading sitting in a box somewhere, but there’s no real reason to dig through all the paper after the freight has been moved. Even if there’s some kinda audit, nobody’s gonna find this unless they know exactly what they’re looking for.”
Alessandra was more interested in the human side of the equation. “So if I understand this correctly, someone inside Penn Trans had to modify the program to set this up, am I right? And someone on the inside, probably the same person, is entering these seven-digit customer numbers to generate these phantom transactions.” And that’s how the morphine base moves out of Port Newark, onto Caughlan’s trucks, and off to the next stop in the chain, probably a lab or a warehouse.
“Not necessarily. Nobody capable of this kind of hack is going to sit in some shipping office. They could have done it remotely, the same way we’re doing this now.” The kid scowled. “These phantom shipments, do you know how valuable they are? Do you know what the actual freight is? Is it worth a lot of money?”
Al nodded. “Yeah.” She didn’t want to say more than that, and the kid probably didn’t want to know.
“Then it’s a good bet they won’t just generate the bill of lading and hope it gets where it’s supposed to go. Too many things could go wrong with that. They probably have an inside guy to babysit the transaction. Could be anybody in the place, could be one of the office girls who answer the phones—all she’d have to do is grab the bill of lading and walk it over to the right driver. If we’re talking a lot of money here, there’s no way they’d take the chance their merchandise could wind up sitting on a loading dock someplace. Know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.” Office girls, she thought, what are you, the Boy Wonder? Just then the pain in her head spiked. Leave it alone, she told herself. It means nothing. “Listen, can you make this thing send me a copy of the bill of lading the next time it sees one of these seven-digit customer numbers?”
The kid looked up at her. “You sure you want your e-mail address sitting on this server? They’d follow it right back to you, man. But I can get you what you want.” He turned back to his keyboard. “Take me a couple of hours to put it together. Okay, we’ll make the seventh digit of the customer number trigger two things: it’ll post a copy of the bill of lading on the Web, and it’ll activate a spam program. We’ll buy a list of, like, ten thousand addresses, and we’ll spam them all, including you, with what? Frederick’s of Hollywood? That sound okay?”
“Why not,” Al told him. She gave him Marty’s e-mail address.
“Okay. We better make it a hundred thousand addresses. So when you see the e-mail from Fred’s Poon and Titty Emporium, just go to this address I’ll give you, and you’ll see the bill of lading. Ought to give you the freight pickup and the destination. That work?”
“Beautiful thing,” Al said.
She was a compact woman, almost a head shorter than Al, but she had an undeniable presence, she took over the room when she walked through the door. Her fiery red hair was streaked with blond, her face movie-star perfect, her teeth porcelain white. She didn’t smile, though, when Al rose to shake her hand.
“Alessandra Martillo.”
“Thank you for coming, Alessandra.” Shine didn’t introduce herself. When you are the pop diva of the moment, Al thought, there’s really no need. They were in the sitting room of a suite at the Lucerne, an upscale Upper West Side Manhattan hotel. Shine glanced around the room. “Relax,” she said to Alessandra. “Have a seat. Can I get something sent up for you? You want a drink or something?”
“No, I’m fine,” Al told her. Irish, she thought. Shine still had a pretty good accent, it came through in her speech much stronger than in her singing. Al watched as Shine paced across the room, stopping to close the blinds, shutting out the million-dollar view of the Hudson River. She picked up the remote and clicked on the television.
“Background noise,” she said.
“You okay? You seem nervous.”
Shine shook her head. “Nah, I’m all right,” she said. “I just got a lot on my mind. Last week we caught one of my assistants photocopying some of my private papers. Legal shit, itineraries, scripts, contracts, stuff like that. I had to let her go. But now I can’t stop thinking about bugs and camcorders and all the people I thought were on my side. Especially when I wanna have a private conversation. Like now.”
“Your assistant. Who was she feeding stuff to?�
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“I think it was that son of a bitch, Benson.”
“Rod Benson? The guy from the SoCal Insider?”
Shine nodded. “He swears it wasn’t him, but that’s exactly how he operates. Look through your trash, pay off your driver, any slimy, scummy thing he can think of.”
“But you still talk to the guy.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know. Stupid, right? But it discourages the rest of them if they think they can’t get anything on me that Benson doesn’t already have. Look, I don’t like doing it, and I don’t like him, but it’s the cost of doing business.” She continued her circuit around the room. She stopped, picked up the house phone, stared at it, put it back down.
“You’re not gonna be able to talk in here, are you?”
Shine shook her head. “I’m about to ‘what-if’ myself right into the nut house.”
Al stood up. “Come with me,” she said.
Shine looked at her for a moment, then nodded. “All right,” she said.
“The roof! What made you think of it?” The two of them climbed up the ladder at the top of the stairwell, stepped through a hatch, and out onto the black rubber surface.
“When I was thirteen,” Al told her, “there was this old factory building in Brownsville. I used to sneak in through the loading dock when nobody was watching and climb the stairs all the way up. They had a machine room up on top of the building—it was where the freight elevator motors and stuff were. The walls and the ceiling were all glass.” They walked across the roof, leaned on the parapet wall, looked south over the hazy Manhattan sky. “It stayed pretty warm in there, too, even in the winter. You could see all the way out to the East River bridges.” She could see them now, antiquated spidery creatures of stone and steel, way off in the distance.
“Your mom didn’t worry about you going places like that?”
Al turned and looked at Shine, remembered her mother’s gray and lifeless face pressed to the kitchen floor. “No,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“For me? Nothing.”
“What, then?”
Shine’s face went dark. “I wanna talk about Willy Caughlan.”
Willy again, Al thought. This kid’s name just keeps coming up . . . “Okay.”
“I know you’re working for his father.”
“Rod Benson tell you that?”
She nodded. “He gave me your phone number.”
“I should just post it on the Web somewhere.”
“You might as well. Listen, it’s none of my business what you’re doing for Willy’s dad, okay? But I’m here to tell you that Willy did not OD. He was not a user. He didn’t even drink beer, for crissake. Somebody killed him.”
“Someone held him down and shot him up?”
“Hey, I didn’t say I knew how they did it!” Shine flared in sudden anger. “But I swear to God, Willy did not knowingly put a drug into his body!” She turned away, heaved a deep breath, wiped at her face. “Someone killed him, I don’t care what anybody says.”
“You don’t know how they did it. Fair enough. Any idea why?”
Shine turned to face Al. Her hands were shaking. “No,” she said.
“You sure? You think it might have had something to do with that video the two of you made?”
“I don’t give a damn about that video, okay? And I don’t know if Willy kept a copy, either. But Willy was a good kid, and if I ever find out who killed him, I swear to God I’ll see them bleed for it.”
“Gotcha.” Al watched Shine’s face for a moment. “Did you talk to the police about this?”
“Yes. They weren’t interested.”
“And you can’t think of anybody who would want to hurt Willy? He didn’t have any enemies?”
Shine thought for a moment. “Willy didn’t have it like that,” she said. “He wasn’t a guy that you hated.” She glanced at Alessandra. “I don’t know anything about what you do. But to my mind, anybody who would kill another person has got to be pretty sick, and if you want to look for sick people, the industry is a pretty good place to start.”
“The music industry?”
“Yes.”
“Technically,” Al said, “I’m not really supposed to be looking into Willy Caughlan at all. I mean, I suppose I have a certain amount of leeway, but . . .”
“Quit,” Shine said. “Come and work for me. I can make it worth your while.”
“I can’t do that. Not in the middle of a job.”
Shine stared at the ground. “Willy was a good boy,” she said after a minute. “He never . . . He didn’t have anybody to stand up for him, he never had anybody to watch out for him.” She swallowed noisily. “I never thought I’d lose him so quick. We were just starting, he and I . . . Look, I understand if you don’t wanna, you know, drop everything and come do this for me. But can you—” She stopped, stared at Al. “Willy wasn’t like everybody else. He was good. Couldn’t you just . . .”
“I can’t promise you anything.”
“I’m not asking for promises. It’s just that Willy . . . he was . . .” Al watched as Shine’s face crumpled. Shine turned away, covered her face with her hands, and seemed to withdraw into herself, becoming smaller as her whole body began to shake. After a minute or two, she pulled herself together. She stood more erect, but didn’t turn to face Alessandra. “I tried to talk to his father, but he was too mad. He called me a drug addict and hung up on me. But once he’s in his right mind, wouldn’t he want to know what really happened to his own son?”
“You would think so,” Al said.
“BandX is playing this club tonight up in Boston,” Shine said. “You could go and talk to them. You could tell them you work for me—they’d kiss your ass, believe me. It would only take a day . . .”
The kid’s life ought to be worth a day, Al thought. “All right.”
Shine exhaled as though she’d been holding her breath during the entire conversation. “Thank you,” she said. “Let’s go back downstairs. I’ll have my assistant give you the club address and time and all that. My new assistant . . .” She still didn’t look at Al, she just walked over to the open roof hatch and climbed down.
“Goddammit, Al, how come you never answer your fuckin’ phone?” Stiles was definitely cranked.
“I don’t leave it on all the time. All you hadda do was leave a message.”
“Yeah, sure, and you’d ignore it until you felt good and ready to call me back. Dammit, Al, if you’re still working for me, you gotta stay in touch. I was about ready . . .”
“Relax, Marty. I been working here.”
“Oh really? Gimme what you got.”
Yeah, sure . . . “All right.” She told him how someone had hacked Penn Transfer’s computer to set up the dummy pickups. “So, theoretically, all we gotta do is wait until the next pickup, then follow the truck. That sounds like something in your department.”
“Oh, what is this? Now I’m working for you? You giving me orders now?”
“Okay, forget it, Marty, I’ll do everything.”
“All right, all right. Frederick’s of Hollywood. And all I gotta do is click on the link?”
“Yeah. If you have any problems with it, just give me a call. Oh, and one other thing.”
“What?”
“Someone had a go at Gearoid and me the other night.”
“Who? You and who?”
“Gearoid O’Hagan. He’s kinda like Caughlan’s boy Friday. He’s this Irish guy . . .”
“No shit. Really?”
“You wanna hear about this or not?”
“Go on, Jesus Christ, don’t be so goddamn touchy.”
Alessandra took a breath, counted to ten. “Okay. Three guys in a gypsy cab . . .” She told him about the assault and the aftermath.
“So you didn’t find out who they were working for?”
“No. What bothers me is that they were onto me so fast.”
“Yeah. Well, whoever’s behind this, they ain’t gonna give up now, so wa
tch your back. And next time, see if you can find out something useful, how about that?”
“Not my fault the cops showed up so quick.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound convinced. “I know some guys on the job in the Bronx. I’ll make a few calls. Maybe they’ll know who those guys were. Sounds like at least one of those mutts hadda go to the hospital. Plus, there’s gotta be an accident report.”
“While you’re getting police reports . . .”
“Yeah? Now what?”
“Why don’t you see what you can get me on Sean William Caughlan’s death?”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Okay, you’re wasting my time, how about that? And you’re gonna piss off my client. Leave it the fuck alone.”
“Tell you what. I want the tox reports on what they found in his blood. You get me what you can, we’ll sit down and look at it together. You still think there’s nothing there, I’ll drop it.”
He knows I’m lying, she thought, but she waited him out. “All right,” he finally said. “Just don’t bring it up with Mickey, all right? The guy feels bad enough about this as it is.”
“You think so? I’m not sure about that. Seems to me he just wants to turn the page and forget about Willy altogether.”
“Whatever. Don’t bring it up around Mickey.”
“All right.”
“What’s next?”
A club date in Boston, but Al was not about to tell him that. “I gotta take the afternoon off. My cousin up in Massachusetts just had a baby.”
“Jesus Christ, Martillo! You are unfuckingbelievable! Do you gotta go right now? The fuckin’ kid ain’t going anywhere, am I right? This isn’t the time . . .”
“Calm down. I’m just gonna drive up this afternoon, see the baby, drive right back. One day, what the hell’s the difference?”
“Goddammit, Martillo, last time you said you were taking a day off, you wound up staying in Puerto Rico for two fuckin’ weeks!”
“That was different. I’ll be back tomorrow, I promise.”
“I don’t know how anybody could be more annoying than my goddamn ex-wife, but you’re coming damn close, you know that?”