The Last Gig

by Norman Green

  The little raft, its job done, wound up slashed and buried in the mud behind a steel yard a quarter mile downriver. The empty plastic bottles went into a recycling container at a large grocery store warehouse across the street from the steel yard. The boots, poncho, knapsack, and the clothes she’d worn would be disposed of separately, later in the day.

  She changed her clothes in the back of the van, taking her time. She told herself that it was probably a mistake, but she wanted to watch it happen. When she was ready, she climbed back into the driver’s seat and fished out the breakfast she’d packed; coffee in a thermos, black and sweet, four PB&Js on dark bread. She was hungry enough for them to taste great. Caffeine, sugar, and fat, she thought. Got all your major food groups covered . . .

  The compound she’d poured into the fuel tanks would mix with the diesel oil. When it was exposed to the heat and pressure of a diesel engine, it would turn into a thick gum that would adhere to the cylinder walls of the engine, progressively building up and hardening until the pistons could no longer move, and then the enormous torque of the diesel would snap the connecting rod that held the piston to the crank and the engine would seize. Each engine would have to be completely torn down and rebuilt, and the fuel system on each truck would have to be disassembled, cleaned, and flushed. On one truck, it would be a costly and time-consuming affair. On a fleet, it was a disaster.

  There was a greasy spoon just down the hill on the side street where Alessandra was parked, it opened at four in the morning to serve the crews who would shortly be firing up their trucks and departing on their rounds. The first of the dark green behemoths rolled down the avenue about a half hour later. Al let it go by, counted six more before she pulled out to follow. The one she was behind made it all the way to Central Drive, about eight miles away, before it shuddered to a halt in the middle of the entrance ramp to the Major Deegan Expressway. The driver got out, waved his arms in frustration at the chorus of bleating car horns. There was nothing he could do but wait for the wrecker.

  Alessandra pictured the same scene, repeated in thirty-seven other locations around Westchester County. Thirty-eight bottles, that’s what she’d been able to carry in her knapsack. She felt a tiny spark of amusement. She pulled out around the garbage truck and headed back to Brooklyn.

  Ephiphanio Neves pointed the Town Car south on River Road, headed down the west bank of the Hudson River. Caughlan liked the way the kid drove. He was smooth, unhurried. Grown up, Caughlan thought. More mature than his years. Doesn’t drive with his glands. He hated the Town Car, though, thing was nothing more than a glorified taxi. Since the Bentley had been stolen, though, he needed a way to get around, and the Lincoln was going to have to do. He couldn’t bring himself to look at another Bent, not yet.

  That’s the way it goes, he told himself. You were stupid to take delivery of the Bent before they had all the alarms installed. And what irked him more than the loss of the car was the fact that someone had taken it right out of his garage. Some son of a bitch came on my turf, he thought, walked right up my driveway, came into my house . . . What a set of balls. When I find out who did it, he thought, I’m gonna put him into the trunk of that Bent and I’m gonna bury him in it . . .

  But you’ll still be riding around in this fucking Lincoln, looking at the back of Epiphanio Neves’s head. He leaned back in the seat, willing himself to relax. He wondered what had gotten into Tomasino. He’d gotten a call from Tomasino’s lawyer an hour earlier, requesting this meeting. Demanding it, actually. It was puzzling, because it was the wrong move, tactically. I’m the guy who needs Tomasino, Caughlan thought. I need him to get me a zoning variance on my warehouse property down in Edgewater. The guy should be playing hard to get. He should be avoiding me, hiding, hoping that time will rattle me and drive the price up. If I get fifteen million for this warehouse, I’ll go one and a half to Tomasino for making it happen. I’ll give him ten percent of the selling price, but no more.

  Edgewater, New Jersey, had been a dump back when he’d bought in, nothing more than a hardscrabble, blue-collar town stuck to a narrow strip of rocks and mud between the river and the cliffs on the Jersey side. River Road had been the single street in Edgewater back then, and traffic was so scarce the kids used to play stickball right in the middle of the street. The Jersey real estate boom had changed all that, though, and now there was hardly a square foot of dirt in Edgewater that didn’t have a shopping mall or upscale condominium on it. Caughlan’s empty truck terminal was one of the last undeveloped plots.

  Neves eased the car up to the gate in the chain-link fence that surrounded the terminal. He got out and opened the gate. Caughlan, spotting Tomasino’s Mercedes already parked inside, got out behind him. “Wait here, Eppi,” he said. “Block the exit. Understand?”

  The kid nodded. “I stay right here.”

  Tomasino always traveled with a bodyguard, usually the same guy, some English dude. Sure enough, the feckin’ Brit got out of the Mercedes while Caughlan walked across the pavement toward the car. “Good morning,” he said.

  Caughlan nodded at him. “Where is he? Inside?”

  The guy shook his head. “Out back. Down by the river.” He paused, looked unsure of himself, just a bit. “He’s, ahh, he’s very worked up. I’ve never seen him this bad before.” He stared at Caughlan. It seemed out of character.

  Caughlan nodded again. Show any sign of weakness, he thought, whether it be simple ill health or mental instability or even just fear, and the jackals begin to wonder how vulnerable you are. Martillo had planted a seed of doubt in Caughlan’s mind, and now he wondered if Tomasino might be behind the drug shipments moving through Penn Trans. Anything is possible, he told himself, but he doubted it. Tomasino was generally too careful to get into something as risky as that. The feckin’ Brit was still looking at him, though. Caughlan made a mental note to have a private conversation with the guy. Be hard to deal with a Brit, but if he was ready to sell out Tomasino . . .

  Tomasino was standing at the embankment, up on a large piece of broken concrete, about four feet above the high-water line. The tide was out, which meant the place smelled even worse than usual. Tomasino didn’t seem to notice. Caughlan kicked at the rocks as he crossed the cracked pavement behind the trucking terminal. Tomasino, hearing the noise, jerked his head around. Caughlan could see the muscles working in Tomasino’s jaw. The man had never, in Caughlan’s memory, appeared to be what you would call contented, and on this day he looked about as pissed off as Caughlan had ever seen him. Tomasino turned toward Caughlan, thrust his jaw forward. “I wanna cut to the chase on this fuckin’ place,” he said. “I ain’t got time for the usual bullshit.”

  It made the hairs stand up on the back of Daniel Caughlan’s neck. This is the way you blow a lifetime of work, he thought. It hit him—Tomasino had to be in a jam. He must need money bad, Caughlan thought, but if a man got greedy here, let himself be overheard saying the wrong thing by a pair of electronic ears, he could find himself in a hole very quickly. A true conservative, Caughlan was suspicious of change. What Tomasino was calling “the usual bullshit” was there to protect both parties. Why is he going out on a limb, Caughlan wondered. And why should I? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He was relieved, though, in a way. If Tomasino was having money troubles, that pretty much ruled him out as far as the drug scheme was concerned. If he had been importing dope, his only money problem would be how to spend it without attracting undue attention from the IRS.

  “What?” Tomasino demanded, red-faced. “You think I’m wearing a fucking wire? Is that what you think? You want me to take off my fucking shirt? You want me to fucking strip? How long you and I known each other?”

  “I really don’t wanna see you naked, Jerry.”

  Tomasino jumped down off his rock. “Knock it the fuck off, will you? I got a straight business proposition for you, goddammit. Nothing fucking illegal about it. How about you shut the fuck up and listen?”

  Caughlan wa
sn’t sure how much he should take. What swayed him, though, was curiosity. He wanted to see what kind of trouble Tomasino was in. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “I know you wanna sell this place,” Tomasino said, his belligerence undiminished. “What do you got into this, like thirty grand?”

  “Bought it a long time ago,” Caughlan said.

  “My real estate guy ballparked it for me,” Tomasino said. “He thinks you could get maybe twenty million for it.”

  “You wanna buy it for twenty? Tell you what, because you and I are so close, I’ll give it to you for nineteen.”

  Tomasino ground his teeth. “No, I don’t wanna buy the fucking thing,” he said. He ain’t got the money, Caughlan thought. He must have gotten stung badly somehow. Caughlan felt his predatory instincts rising. “I’ll sell it for you,” Tomasino said. “You let me act as your agent, I’ll get you the permits and variances. I’ll even pay for ’em out of my end. You give me five percent of the gross selling price.”

  “I’m not taking less than fifteen,” Caughlan said. “That’s seven hundred and fifty grand to you.”

  “My guy says twenty million,” Tomasino said. “I got confidence in him. But there’s two things.”

  Here it comes, Caughlan thought.

  “I need five hundred thou up front.”

  Caughlan thought about that. “What’s the other thing?” he said.

  Tomasino twisted his face into a grimace, reached into a pants pocket, pulled out a white card, and handed it to Caughlan. It was a business card from a bar in Fort Lee, the next town north. Caughlan turned it over. On the back was written the name Alessandra Martillo.

  “That’s my price,” Tomasino said.

  Caughlan stared at the card. He had been fully prepared to pay Tomasino ten percent of his selling price in return for the zoning variance his buyer would need to put up another giant condo. Say he’s right, Caughlan thought. Say it goes for twenty. Tomasino’s end would have been two, but he wouldn’t have seen the money until the deal was done, maybe not until the building was up. Optimistically, call it about a year from now, maybe eighteen months. So he’s trading me two million bucks, payable a year down the road, for a half million right now plus Alessandra Martillo’s head. And no matter the selling price, if I pay him a half million up front, that’s all he’ll ever see, and he knows it. The question is, is Martillo worth a million and a half, minus a year’s interest on the up-front money? He had warned her, hadn’t he? It wasn’t his fault the guy was so pissed off. And then he wondered why Tomasino needed his help nailing her. He looked up from the card. “Normally,” he said, “this is the sort of thing you would handle by yourself.” He let it hang there, watched Tomasino squirm. This guy’s so worked up, he thought, he’s practically shitting his pants.

  “Look,” Tomasino said, his voice rising. “This deal is good for today only. You hear me? I want this off my desk. Today.”

  Tomasino knew him well enough to be sure that Caughlan was not going to say no to a million and a half discount. “All right,” Caughlan said. “Have your lawyer draw up a contract. I’ll get the money ready.”

  “Fine,” Tomasino spat. “What about the other?”

  Caughlan stared down at the card. “I’ll set her up,” he said. “But you’re gonna have to do the actual work yourself.” I’m not killing anybody for this guy, he thought.

  “You’re goddamn right,” Tomasino said. “You’re goddamn right I’ll do it myself.” He brushed past Caughlan without another word, stomped off to his car. Caughlan followed at a slower pace, the card still in his hand.

  They were headed back up River Road when it came over the news radio station he listened to. “Ex-cop shot in Orangeburg, New York,” the radio said. “Martin Stiles, a twenty-year veteran of the NYPD, is in critical condition at Valley Hospital in . . .”

  “Epiphanio, pull over.” Two more sentences and they were done with it, had already moved on with traffic and weather. “Turn it off,” he said. He was still sitting there thinking it over when his phone rang. It was Martillo.

  “We gotta meet,” she told him.

  His paranoia got to him for a moment, but he decided to ignore it. “All right,” he said. They agreed on a location. “I can be there in about an hour,” he told her. He looked at his driver, then opened his door and climbed out, motioned Neves to do likewise. Epiphanio got out, stood looking up at him. Caughlan reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of bills, counted off five hundred bucks, handed it to his driver. “Go home,” he said, “and stay there. Don’t answer the phone. Anybody asks you where I am, you don’t know shit. Don’t move until you hear from me.”

  “Si, Señor,” Epiphanio said. “No habla Ingles.”

  “Good boy,” Caughlan said. “You’re gonna have to take the bus.”

  “Is he dead, then?” Caughlan stared across the white plastic table at Alessandra Martillo. He was irritated, but more at himself than her. It was easy to be mad at her on the phone, but almost impossible now that he was in her presence. They were at the food court on the third floor of the giant Palisades Center Mall in Nyack, New York. Martillo wore a short black dress, her long black hair was loose, held back out of her face by the shades she had perched on top of her head.

  “Marty’s in the ICU,” she said, glancing at him, then looking back out at the people flooding past.

  He still wanted to be pissed off, but he couldn’t do it. What is it? he asked himself. What is it about this woman? It wasn’t just her looks, he knew plenty of women who had looks to die for, but none of them got to him the way she did. “You in disguise here?”

  She smiled, looked down at herself, crossed her long brown legs. “Tomasino’s goons are looking for a gym rat,” she told him. “They aren’t looking for a girl like me.”

  “Everybody is looking for a girl like you.”

  She snorted. “That hasn’t been my experience.”

  Get to it, he told himself. “So what is it you’ve come to tell me?”

  She stared at him. “It’s Tomasino,” she said.

  He stared back. “Can you prove it?”

  She shrugged. “I’m no lawyer. But ever since I started working for you, Tomasino has been trying to get me. Those three guys in the Bronx, I’m betting they were his. Then the crew of phony Brooklyn Union Gas hardhats showed up outside my apartment building. I know they were his, because I mousetrapped one of them, and he told me he was working for Tomasino. Said Tomasino was trying to scare me off. He also told me that Tomasino was doing this as a favor to someone, and Tomasino strikes me as a guy who does favors for nobody, not unless there’s something in it for him.”

  “How do you know this guy was telling you the truth?”

  “He was up on the roof of my building, and I was just about to throw him off,” she said. “The man actually peed his pants, okay? So I don’t think he had the presence of mind to make up a good story.”

  “Son of a bitch. All right. Is that all you’ve got?”

  “No. Tomasino has a warehouse in Norwood, New Jersey. About twenty minutes’ drive from here. He had four plastic drums of opium base in that warehouse.”

  Caughlan felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “Are you sure of this?”

  “Positive. I was inside that warehouse, and I left that shit spread out all over the floor. I called the cops after I left. I haven’t heard anything about it on the news, but I drove past there on the way up, and there’s a cruiser parked out front, and they got crime-scene tape all over the joint.”

  “How do you know the warehouse is his?”

  “His driver told me. Gave me Tomasino’s name. I didn’t prompt him.”

  He could feel a fluttering sensation in his chest, like his heart was struggling to restart itself. “All right,” he said, after a minute. “All right then, it’s Tomasino.” His stomach churned. The timing on this couldn’t be worse, he thought. But then, you don’t have to get the guy today. You can cut him his check, then press him o
n the zoning variances. After that, you got all the time in the world . . .

  “There’s one more thing,” Martillo said.

  Caughlan, his head swimming, fought hard to concentrate. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Who’s the Benedict Arnold? Who is Tomasino’s inside guy?”

  “Well, first,” she said, “here’s how they were doing it.” Caughlan tried to pay attention while she talked about software and bills of lading. He wasn’t sure he gave a shit about the nuts and bolts of it.

  “Cut to the chase,” he said.

  “I think I know who it was,” she told him, “but I need to be sure. We need to be sure.”

  He could feel the acid from his stomach, right up in the back of his throat. Again, he struggled to concentrate on what she was saying, his attention compromised by the thought of his zoning variances, and fifteen million dollars slipping through his fingers. Maybe twenty . . . He listened to her proposition. She was right, her scheme would probably tell them what they needed to know. It involved some risk to her, though, and in her place he would have used a safer location and a more direct approach. Go along with it, he told himself. Cooperate, at least for the time being, until you can figure out a way to get what you want first. Revenge could wait until he had his money.

  He waited until she was done. “Take me through it again,” he said. “Step by step.”

  She didn’t bother to call Tomasino, but it only took him a couple hours to get to her. The cell phone she had taken off Malik, back in the warehouse, warbled, and she answered it. It was a strange male voice, but she had no doubt who was pulling the strings. “Enough,” the voice said. “We’re prepared to give you the Englishman. We require a face-to-face meeting. There’s an empty warehouse in Jersey City . . .”

  “No good,” she said. “I’m not letting you set me up. You’ll hear back from me later, I’ll give you the address. You can meet me at midnight tonight. Get us into the spirit of the thing.” There was the sound of a hand over the receiver, muffled voices in the background, then the voice came back.