The Stakes

by Ben Sanders

  He made another drink—soda only this time—and turned on the TV while he waited for her. It felt like the life: nothing on but a towel, windows with a river view, channel hopping, drink-in-hand, and Nina getting pretty.

  He flicked back and forth through news stations, half-expecting to see his own mug shot looking back. No Bobby, though. Middle East, Middle East, some kind of book-burning festival in Kansas. He brought up the TV’s YouTube app and searched “Tribeca Gardens.” There were about twenty clips of the hotel mayhem, but everything had been filmed from outside. He chose a clip at random, and watched twelve seconds’ worth of people running through stopped traffic. He sampled another, and waited through an eighteen-second-long shot of the hotel entrance, the sound of gunfire cutting off the satisfied hum of a pretzel cart. He searched “Tribeca Gardens lobby,” but the clips on offer all looked like shaky sidewalk junk. He exited YouTube and went back to channel hopping, heard “Canal Str—,” a blip of broken speech, as he surfed past CNN. He flipped back to catch the story, and shit—there’s the cop, Miles Keller. Security footage from the hotel lobby. Keller in action, with his gun up.

  He called, “Check this out,” and then turned in time to see her come out of the bedroom naked, walking past full-length windows and the bag of money on the table to stand next to him in front of the TV. He wondered if she’d show up online eventually, a nude parade caught by accident on camera. She’d have a million views in no time.

  “… want to speak with Keller in relation to a robbery-homicide last night in Kings Point. Three people are dead, and police say a large sum of cash was also taken…”

  Bobby said, “Funny they don’t say he’s NYPD.”

  Wanting to sound cool about it, but he knew murder and extortion got a whole lot easier when you’re dealing with a bent cop.

  Nina waited until the picture was in Kansas again—a bonfire close-up of books in flames—and then she kissed him on the cheek and headed back to the bedroom.

  THIRTY

  NEW YORK, NY

  Miles Keller

  He caught a J train east into Brooklyn and got off at Gates Avenue. The tracks were on a bridge above Broadway, stilted on columns painted lizard green. He took the stairs down to street level and waited at the light to cross. The train started off again, wind and squeal gathering to match the speed, and dog-eared posters on the ironwork ticked and flapped like some hysterical greeting all up and down the road.

  The shops were lighting up in the evening gloom. He stopped at a deli over on Ralph Avenue and bought coffee and a pastrami sub. He hadn’t eaten since that morning. He finished the sub on the sidewalk and drank the coffee as he walked west along Gates.

  Walter Stokes—his driver from last night, his would-be Covey accomplice—had a place just off Malcolm X Boulevard. The real estate was mainly brick apartments, but Stokes’s address was one of two clapboard places side by side on weedy lots—these skinny, two-story houses holding out against the four-story walk-ups.

  The neighbor’s place was white on the upper level and pink on the ground floor. A shirtless guy in his seventies wearing pink-daubed jeans was sitting on the porch, sipping from a takeout cup, and he raised it at Miles as he came past, as if pleased to see another man who drank his coffee out of Styrofoam.

  Stokes had a waist-high fence along the sidewalk with a gap where there should have been a gate. Miles walked into the yard and knocked at the front door, not actually sure yet what he’d do if Stokes opened up. Maybe talk his way inside if the man still seemed chummy. Or maybe let it open an inch, wait until he saw an eye above the chain, and then kick it open.

  But no one answered, and the curtains were all drawn. He saw the old boy watching from his front step, so Miles stepped across the little chain-link divide and walked over to him, trying to seem genial, just another guy enjoying his beverage.

  Miles said, “You seen Walter around?”

  The guy nodded past him at the little fence. “It’s not soundproof, you know. Could’ve asked from over there.”

  “Thought it’d seem more polite if I came over.”

  “No. Makes you seem more like police.”

  Miles looked down at his attire, like trying to spot the giveaway, and the guy shook his head and said, “I been stopped by those narc guys. They don’t look like police either. But you can still tell.”

  Miles said, “I’m one of those rare examples of someone who doesn’t look like a cop, and is also definitely not a cop.”

  The guy seemed skeptical about that.

  Miles said, “Have you seen him or not?”

  The guy shook his head. “Went to ask if I could use his ladder, but he didn’t answer.”

  “You find the ladder?”

  The guy nodded. “Had to leave it, though. Can’t take a man’s ladder without his okay.” Keeping eye contact as he said it, like checking Miles was on board with that philosophy.

  Miles said, “What makes me look like police?”

  “I don’t know.” The guy looked him up and down. “Everything.”

  Miles nodded. “Okay. I’m going in the house. Don’t call nine-one-one.”

  He left the guy thinking that over and walked back to Stokes’s place and around to the backyard. There were a couple of bleached and tattered lawn chairs, and the toppled metal skeleton of what had once been a shade umbrella. By the back door was a coal barbecue on a tripod standing on a patch of bare dirt, like a cutting-edge drone that had touched down by rocket power. He set his empty cup on the hot plate and stood at the back door, listening. No point knocking: if someone was going to let him in they would have done so already.

  He stepped back and took his gloves from his back pocket and pulled them on, and for a moment saw a house in Venice Beach, thirty years ago: Miles walking in to ask if they were going yet, and there were his parents and half a dozen others high on marijuana, lying around on sofas and studying the ceiling fan, the thing spinning so slow it might’ve been stoned as well. He remembered the soft ring of the wind chime on the porch, even though there was no wind, and then the door crashing open, Miles fleeing through an unfamiliar house as people chased him.

  Maybe if he’d stayed longer with that image it would’ve kept him in the yard: the thought of being the horror moment for some other little kid could’ve made him take a different course. But the more you have on the line, the more you’re trapped in a certain mind-set. Everything’s okay, and you just have to keep moving forward.

  His kick landed just below the handle, and he stepped into the house as the door flew open before him. Through unadjusted eyes, the kitchen gloom was full dark for a second. He paused, and then the twilight showed at the edges of the curtains—gray light—like the sun coming up on a dead planet, the first day postapocalypse. There was a doorway ahead of him, a hallway beyond, and a figure standing there—

  Miles ducked left, and the shotgun blast made a truck-wheel hole in the kitchen wall, a cloud of gypsum dust like talc, and wood chips flying everywhere. He turned to run, but a better instinct held him back: don’t get framed in that doorway. He ducked low beneath the damage, and then leapt upright as the figure and its shotgun rounded the corner, two muzzles right there, double zero, this welded infinity symbol right in his face.

  He swatted backhand as he rose and caught warm steel, yanked sideways and down as he grabbed for the stock, felt his glove slip on lacquered wood. He kept the muzzle pointed down, tried to yank the gun free with one hand, and the second blast was quieter under the ringing in his ears.

  The pellets blitzed the floor, and he felt wood chips hit his shins. He yanked the gun again, but the shooter was falling, screaming, and the gun was his.

  He stepped back and felt dizzy, veering so close to good-bye and then coming back again. He hit a light switch and saw debris everywhere: shredded wallpaper like the aftermath of some weird ceremony, a brutal union replete with confetti.

  The woman on the ground was fortyish and tall, six-two maybe, although it was
hard to tell with her lying fetal, holding a bloodied shoe. She was talking as well, but he had to kneel to hear her, his head full of high-pitched buzzing.

  She was loaded on something—not meth or she wouldn’t feel the pain—but her features were slack and her focus was miles away. He stayed out of the blood and tried to hear what she was saying, but she was forming sounds that made no sense, like her brain was running backward.

  He still had the shotgun, but he dropped it on the floor now both barrels were empty. He cupped the woman’s face. “Where’s Walter?”

  No answer—or nothing useful at least. She just rambled on seamlessly, like some kind of sleep talk that made perfect sense, deep inside her head.

  He didn’t have much time.

  He left her and moved to the front of the house. There were stairs by the entry leading to the first floor, and he had to breathe through his sleeve as he got halfway up.

  Stokes was on his back on the mattress in the master bedroom, sheets in a twist, and a syringe still spiked in the crook of his arm.

  Miles checked his pulse and got nothing. Stokes was dead cold. He’d been gone for maybe six hours. Miles hit the lights and saw the full squalor. Used needles, spare tourniquets, blackened spoons, cotton wool, plastic dime bags of heroin by the bed.

  Miles wondered how much he’d blown on the drugs. He could’ve set himself up for a while. He had the twenty thousand Miles gave him, plus whatever he got from the Covey place when he went back the second time. He’d probably pawned Mrs. Covey’s car this morning, and decided to treat himself.

  His ears were still ringing, but he could hear sirens now, thin and distant. He started down the stairs at a trot, but a thought caught him halfway down.

  He needed the gun: the pistol Stokes used in the Covey house.

  If the police found it, they could link Miles to the Covey robbery. It was circumstantial, but it put him in range of the crime. The pink-house neighbor could put him at the Stokes scene, and the Stokes scene contained the murder weapon.

  He took the stairs two at a time on the way back up, went into the bedroom, into the reek of piss and body odor. You couldn’t accuse Stokes of being fastidious, so wherever the gun was, it’d be somewhere stupid. He wouldn’t have been clever and ditched it.

  The foul air made him gag, and he used his sleeve as a mask, neared the bed with his arm bent across his mouth, like some vampire parody. The corpse was spread-eagled, the head tipped backward off the pillow and the mouth wide. Stokes seemed to be loving every moment.

  Miles ran a hand under the pillow and felt something metal, came out with a Colt 1911—the same one Stokes had pulled on him last night. It was cocked and locked. Stokes liked protection while he got a load on.

  He slipped the pistol in the back of his belt as he ran down the stairs, hand gliding the rail and his footwork a scurry. He swung a one-arm pivot around the end post and sprinted hard back along the hallway to the kitchen, seeing red and blue—maybe in his mind’s eye or his real eye.

  The woman was still on her side on the floor, but she’d let go of her ruined foot, and he could see her fussing with the shotgun. He heard it snap closed as he ran past her, and the shot took a bite out of the kitchen doorframe as he went out into the yard.

  The sirens were screaming, and when the second shot came, it was followed by a tinkle of falling glass, and he looked back to see a smashed kitchen window, and a ragged scrap of blind clawing for fresh air. Miles grabbed his cup off the barbecue and hopped the fence into the alley behind the walk-ups, and he didn’t stop running.

  THIRTY-ONE

  NEW YORK, NY

  Bobby Deen

  Nina said, “Could be a song, don’t you think? Raided the gun closet, headed down to Sheepshead Bay.”

  She tried it under her breath, a low note from the back of her throat. “Maybe ‘gun safe’ is better—raided the gun safe, going down to Sheepshead Bay. Yeah, there you go.”

  It was a gun closet in real life, of course. They’d taken a Sig each from Charles’s bedroom stash, and now they were heading south on Ocean Parkway in the stolen SUV. They were somewhere in Brooklyn, three lanes of traffic each way and low-rise commercial buildings on either side. It felt more like L.A. than New York—maybe Venice Boulevard, but with more trees and fewer gangbangers.

  Nina was driving with her phone in her lap, Google Maps showing her the route. She said, “So how does Charles pay? He write you a check, or is it just money in a bag?”

  Bobby said, “You wondering if you can afford to double-cross me?”

  Nina said, “Yeah. Whether I’d have to hollow out your head and wear it to the bank to get the money.”

  Bobby laughed. But it raised the issue of how he was getting back to California. He couldn’t catch a flight until he talked to the cops about the clusterfuck at the hotel. They’d have his prints on that gun he left behind, and they would’ve found a few in the Mercedes, too—whatever was left of it. So he either needed fake ID, or he was in for a sit-down with NYPD. He rubbed his face, ran his hands through his hair.

  “You still with me?”

  He looked over at her, and managed to push the thought aside.

  He said, “He pays the old-fashioned way: money in a bag.”

  “Unmarked, and nonsequential, and all that kind of thing?”

  Bobby smiled. “Just good, honest Stone Studios profit.”

  She said, “So it’s just a matter of collecting everyone’s bag of money.” She changed lanes and said, “Kill Keller and take his, fly back to L.A. and take a little more off Charles.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be flying anywhere.”

  Nina said, “Cold hard cash is the great enabler. You know how much an Idaho driver’s license costs?”

  Bobby shook his head.

  Nina said, “Neither do I. But I bet it’s way less than what we’ve got in that suitcase.”

  He made himself watch the road. There was a temptation to fixate on Nina, revel in the fact that she could shape the whole world.

  She said, “I guess what we have to do is iron out the rules of collateral.”

  She looked across at him, but he waited for her to take it further. The car in front braked and Nina slowed without looking, keeping the trailing distance perfect.

  She said, “Are you going to lose any sleep if we have to kill the gas-mask girl too?”

  Well, he probably would lose sleep, actually. He had a kind of No Innocents rule. Guys he got sent after were in The Life: you signed up for it knowing things didn’t always go your way. And normally it was straightforward, more or less. People skipped payments, or they had something big owing, or they made a move on someone they should have left alone. So you gave them what was coming. But he wasn’t sure he could put his hand on a stack of Bibles and say the girl was covered by the rules.

  So he said, “I’ll defer to your judgment.”

  Nina smiled and said, “That’s nice to hear.”

  Bobby said, “You not used to being in charge?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m always in charge.” She looked at him, head dipped toward her shoulder, like telling him a secret. “I’m just not used to people figuring it out.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  NEW YORK, NY

  Wynn Stanton

  He toured the downstairs while the girl got ready. He’d asked about her medication, and all she told him was, “steroids and oxygen.” He could hear her in the bathroom upstairs, taking things out of the medicine cabinet. She’d only been in a couple of weeks, but it sounded like she’d taken over the place.

  He called, “Not that it’s my business or anything, but, you know … Are you going to get sicker…?”

  He let it trail off at the end, hoping she’d come in with an answer straightaway, but she didn’t. And then with the pause, it made it seem like a real shitty thing to ask.

  He said, “Sorry, just trying to, you know … But you don’t have to talk about it, obviously.”

  He heard the ca
binet door scrape closed, very slow, like she was coming up with something to tell him. She said, “I have stage-one emphysema, which is the mild kind. It might stay as stage one for years, or it might get worse. You never know what the actual prognosis is.”

  He liked what Keller had done to the place. The kitchen had been extended out the back, and he’d put some folding doors in on one side with a little deck that wrapped around the back of the house. You could see him living a different life, really: all the photos he had up in the corridor, he was like some thwarted family man. Miles and his brother from years ago, the wife who’d actually left him. There’d be another Miles out there somewhere—a parallel Miles in a parallel reality—where everything had turned out fine. A house full of kids, and a nice legal cop pension, full of retirement loot.

  He called, “So what about the oxygen tank and stuff? Is that easy to get hold of?”

  She said, “I don’t know. Probably not. But people get scripts on the quiet for all kinds of things.”

  Jesus—glad it wasn’t him going off the grid with the girl in tow. You’d spend your time trying to chase down medication. He really needed to take a shit as well. There was a bathroom along the hallway, and he opened the door and worked the angles for a moment, seeing if he could get everything done and keep talking to the girl at the same time.

  But her voice was louder now, closer to the stairs, and he didn’t want her coming down and catching him halfway through a big job.

  She said, “The oxygen’s actually optional. I just have it for the fashion value.”

  He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not.

  Lucy said, “They’ve done studies, it doesn’t really affect mortality, but it affects quality of life. Obviously you have to tow a tank around, but you don’t get as tired.”

  Stanton said, “Yeah, I had an aunt had emphysema, she lived for ages, didn’t seem to bother her.” That wasn’t true—he never had any aunts—but there was nothing wrong with a lie in the name of reassurance.