Dead Cat Bounce

by Norman Green

  Fat Tommy was sitting in a chair by the hotel room’s only window. “RadioShack, just like you wasa say,” he said. “Prepaid.”

  Harman nodded. “Good. I don’t know what kind of guy would kill a security guard just to make a point, but I don’t want him looking for me.” He punched numbers on the phone and held it to his ear. “Hi. Is this Valerie in I.T.? Hi, Val, my name is Purgatory. I’m calling you to let you know that one of your servers has been compromised. You can expect a black-hat assault through a back door. It might be under way already. I’m sorry? Oh. Well. Let’s just say I have a dispute with one of the parties involved. No, sorry, I’m not sure which server, but what I would do if I were you, I would examine all administrator traffic in the past, say, five days. Look for someone using a password that’s either dormant or not listed in your directory. Good-bye.” He ended the call.

  “You slam the back door shut?” Tommy said.

  “Well,” he said, “assuming Valerie’s half on the ball, and assuming your target didn’t already get in and get what he wanted, yeah, we slammed the door.”

  “Pretty smart,” Tommy said.

  “Hey, I’m just getting warmed up. What did you say this guy’s name is?”

  “Charles David Prior.” Tommy handed Harman a sheet of paper on which was written all that he knew about Prior. “Rich guy, lives in Jersey, lotta security.”

  “Alpine? Is that the name of the town he’s in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Gimme the Jersey phone book.” Tommy handed it across. “Alpine is up by the bridge, right? So that’s got to be Bergen County.” He opened to the blue pages, the ones that gave you government phone numbers. “Here it is,” he said. “Building department. Okay, here we go.” He placed another call.

  “Teresa? Hi, Teresa, how are you? This is Martin Wills, Twelfth District Court, Investigations. No, Teresa, don’t worry, you’re cool, but maybe you could bail me out. My boss is seriously steamed at me, and I don’t want to get canned. Yeah, aren’t they all? Like he never makes a mistake. Well, what happened, he’s doing a field inspection, but someone sent the wrong prints, and when they got here, I stuck them in the file without double-checking. No, it was totally my fault, if I had looked at them first, none of this would have happened. Anyhow, Ethelred the Unready is pitching a fit. What we’re looking at is a residence, in Alpine.” He read her Prior’s address. “There should be a set of plans for that residence in the permits section. Could you do me a giant favor and take a look? Oh, you got that on microfiche?” He paged through the phone book while he talked. “Wow, if you would fax that over to me, I might not have to look for a new job after all. Oh, Teresa, that’s great. Hey, wait, I’ve got a better idea. Fax it to the UPS store in Westwood, and I’ll call his majesty and tell him he can pick ’em up there. Teresa, you’re a lifesaver, I can’t tell you how much I owe you.” He gave her the number. “Great. Thanks again.”

  Fat Tommy was smiling. “I’ll send someone over….”

  “No need,” Harman said. “Hang on one second.” He went back to the phone book, then dialed again. “Hi. Is this the UPS store in Westwood? Yeah, hi, I’m Craig, in the Main Street store in Yonkers. I’ve got a customer standing here, and he’s about to blow a cork. He’s been waiting for a set of drawings of some sort, and he just called up his source to find out where they are, only to find out the guy faxed them to you guys by mistake. What? Oh, great. Hold on one sec.” He winked at Tommy. “Ah, sir? He says they’re just coming out of the machine now.” Tommy shook his head in admiration. “Listen,” Harman said. “Can you stick those back in the machine and forward them to us here? You’ve got the number, right? Thanks, man. Great.” He ended the call. “UPS store, Tommy, it’s a couple blocks down on Main. The plans to Prior’s house will be waiting for you.”

  “Damn,” Tommy said. “Hey, how come you wasa don’t con some messenger service to bring ’em over?”

  Harman grinned. “You want me to?”

  “No,” Tommy said. “I gonna go take a walk. You keep working on Prior. You wanna nice coffee?”

  “Sure,” Harman said. He went back to the phone book. “Okay, Social Security Administration,” he said. “They got an eight-hundred number, should be in here somewhere…”

  Stoney pulled up to the garage at the McMansion in Alpine. It was the middle of a quiet afternoon, and none of the neighbors had yet returned from the salt mines. A lawn-service guy working the yard next door fogged the air with blue two-cycle smoke and noise as he herded some lawn clippings out to the curb. He glanced up once as Stoney opened the garage door, then went back to his work. Stoney parked inside, shut the garage door behind him, and sat in his car, waiting. Twenty minutes later he heard the honk of Fat Tommy’s Mercedes, he opened the door again, and Tommy pulled inside.

  “Stoney,” Fat Tommy said as he maneuvered himself out of the driver’s seat, “this is Jack Harman.”

  “Hello, Jack.” Stoney squinted at the guy. “I know you?”

  “No.” Harman shook his head. “I did something for Tommy about six years ago. I don’t know where you were.”

  “You remember the guy,” Tommy said, “had a home movie of me anna that nice lady lawyer from the Brooklyn D.A.’s office? Jack wasa break into the guy’s office, steal his camera, film, compute, file cabinet, steal everything.”

  Stoney remembered the story. It seemed like a lifetime ago. “Yeah. I’m a little foggy on the details. You took the whole file cabinet?”

  “Two of ’em,” Harman said. “Dude had an office in a converted warehouse building in Brooklyn, down in Fort Greene. I had two guys in a van parked in the alley behind the place, I lowered all his shit down the outside wall with a climbing rope. I even reset the alarm after I left, if I remember right.”

  “How’d you get the alarm code?”

  “Dude had this broad working in the office, she was temping from some big agency. Guy treated her like shit. I gave her five grand, she gave me the code, the layout, the guy’s schedule, the whole megilla.”

  “Ain’t it funny,” Stoney said. “You act like a dick, it’ll come back and bite you in the ass every time. I remember now.” Bagadonuts had been impressed with the man’s abilities to gather information on his targets ahead of time. “Come on into the house.”

  They stood around the island in the middle of the kitchen and drank tepid Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. “All right.” Harman glanced at Stoney. “Charles David Prior, whoever he really is, is gonna be a hard nut to crack. First of all, he’s something of a ‘flat-earther.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means he’s stuck in the past. He doesn’t have Internet access from his house, he doesn’t even have cable television. I can’t say for sure if he has a computer or not, but I’d guess probably not. No e-mail. That means there’s no way to hack him because there’s nothing to hack into. He doesn’t use phone accounts, either. The guy does business in person, face-to-face, in private. He gets a check, he puts the thing in his pocket, takes it to his bank. He’s got some investment stuff with a broker, I’ll get to that guy in a minute. Okay, Prior travels with security, sometimes one guy but usually two, and they don’t look like your average rent-a-cops, either. Rides in the back of a limo, unless he’s on his motorcycle, in which case they follow behind. And when he’s in public, he treats his guards like trained monkeys.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He doesn’t talk to them, he uses hand signals. He’ll move them around with gestures, you know, he’ll point at a guy, then point where he wants the guy to go. Very formal.”

  “Very strange.”

  “Well, yeah, the guy ain’t Mr. Warmth. What else? Ah, the dude is an adrenaline junkie. Likes to skydive, once a month or so he goes up to this place in Connecticut, hires out the plane and the pilot, him and his guards all jump. Or he’ll fly an ultralight, or go rock climbing, but whenever he does anything, he goes private. Hires the whole place, so it’s just him, the guards, and
maybe an instructor or two.”

  “He don’t like rubbing elbows with the great unwashed.”

  “Something like that. You could chalk it up to security, but you ask me, the guy’s a banana. Same thing when he goes to a store. He goes after hours, somewhere where they’ll open up just for him. What else do I know for sure? He vacations in Mexico, same place every year, private villa, very remote, on the coast of Baja. He belongs to some pistol club in Tenafly, couple towns south of here. Dude that works there told me Prior is the quickest shot he’s ever seen, on a combat range the guy is in a league all by himself. Now, when a gun nut tells you something like that, you gotta remember the guy probably spends hours and hours practicing this shit, so Prior must really be off the charts. And, oh yeah, I got prints of his house, if you’re thinking of going in. There was a panic room in the place when he bought it, but he had the fucking thing completely ripped out and replaced after he moved in.”

  “How’d you get all this stuff?”

  “People will usually talk to you if you use the right approach. The panic room, for example, the building permits were on file with the county. I got the name and phone number of the contractor who did the work, but I’d be very careful about approaching the guy. That’s the stuff I’m sure of, the rest is guesswork.”

  “All right. Go ahead and guess,” Stoney said.

  Harman nodded. “My opinion, Prior is suffering from Howard Hughes syndrome.”

  “Got long fingernails?”

  Harman shrugged. “In a manner of speaking. The guy’s got nobody close enough to him to tell him when he’s getting weird, or when he’s full of it. The dude is too isolated, he’s self-referential. If he’s thinking something, if he’s into something, it must be right, because there’s no one else whose opinion means anything to him. So the longer he stays locked away from the world, the stranger he becomes. He’s got nothing to measure himself against, nothing to conform to. That’s one thing. Here’s another: his cover story is that he’s a European businessman, but I didn’t see any evidence of him ever going to Europe, or even calling overseas on the phone. My best guess, this guy’s ex-military. He’s paranoid as hell, he’s sitting up there in that house just waiting for someone like you or me to climb through his bedroom window, and when you do, he’s gonna put a hole in your skull and you’ll wind up buried in those woods down behind his house. I don’t have a clue who he really is or how he got his money. And what’s really interesting is the stuff you can’t find on him.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as his Social Security number, for one thing. Usually getting that is a snap, you can buy it off the Web for ten bucks or you can scam it out of the local office, if you know the right lingo, but I couldn’t come up with his no matter what I did. He doesn’t have any personal history, either, just the same two lines he feeds anyone who asks.”

  “European businessman.”

  “Yeah, basically. No family, no wife, no ex-wives, no girlfriends, nothing like that. I don’t know where he goes to get laid, that’s not the kind of thing people will talk about on the telephone. Now. Burglar’s instinct? This is not the kind of man who keeps serious money in a bank, he won’t trust the banker much farther than he trusts anyone else. You can bet your house he’s got his assets close at hand, probably in that panic room, and he’ll have it in something liquid and easy to transport. Stamps, fine art, gems, whatever, but nothing heavy and nothing that won’t fit in the back of a van. And he has a van, incidentally, a white cargo van, it’s registered to the security outfit he uses but they keep it in his garage. Add it all up. This guy’s in terrific shape, he likes firepower, and he’s dialed in, man, he’s forted up, and he’ll cap anybody who comes over the wall after him. My personal opinion, I would take a pass, at least for now. Give the guy another year or two, I’m guessing the guy will deteriorate over time, mentally, and when he gets warped enough, he’ll be easier to handle. But right now? Forget it.”

  “You think we gonna take a big chance,” Tommy said.

  Harman shrugged. “Plenty of softer targets.”

  “Maybe.” Stoney looked at Fat Tommy. “I can’t forget it. I have a personal interest in Charles David Prior.”

  “I kinda figured that,” Harman said. “Listen, you just wanna wax the guy, probably easier to take him out than to rob him.”

  “That don’ makea no sense,” Tommy said. “In case you got a problem with a rich man, it’s only right you should take his money first. It’sa the civilized way. Then you step on him. In case you decide to do him,” he asked, looking at Harman, “what’s your approach?”

  “I ain’t like you guys,” Harman said. “I’m just a burglar, and a retired one, at that. But I would chart his movements for a week or so. Then I’d pick a time when I knew he was gonna be out of his house, and then I would do what I do.” He looked from Stoney to Fat Tommy. “I’m assuming you want more than that.”

  “I do,” Stoney said. “I want his ass.”

  “Well, then, his broker is the obvious approach. The guy has an office in Haworth, about ten minutes from here. Dude used to be a broker, but he lost his license, now he calls himself a ‘professional finance counselor.’ Something like that. Prior goes down to see him twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, seven in the morning, like clockwork.”

  “Every week?” Tommy asked.

  “Absolutely. The guy’s like a machine.”

  “Why did the broker lose his tag?” Stoney said.

  “Money laundering.”

  “So his broker is a crook.”

  “Ain’t they all? The guy is a capitalist, that’s for sure. Dude’s an addict, too, for whatever that’s worth. Kid that cleans his office told me the dude is up to a bottle of JD and a half a gram of blow a night.”

  “Goddam,” Tommy said. “How come Prior gonna use a guy like that?”

  “Hard to say,” Harman said. “Prior may not know much about dope, he might be so focused on himself, you know, if he isn’t into something, it doesn’t exist, not for him. And the broker still keeps his act together at work. Never takes a day off, doesn’t start doing anything until the closing bell. Then he’s off to the races. Your only worry, given Prior’s paranoid nature, is that he might be using this broker as a sort of canary in the mine shaft. You know what I’m saying? Give yourself an obvious flaw, then watch to see who tries to use it.”

  “You might be giving the guy too much credit,” Stoney said. “Hard to imagine the son of a bitch doing a background check on everyone he does business with. He might just be more comfortable doing business with someone who’s a crook. You think the broker will work with us?”

  “You kidding?” Harman said. “The guy’s a cokehead, he’ll work with anyone for the right price. But if you guys are thinking of running a game on Prior, you really gotta find out who he is, first. Otherwise, you’ll never know for sure what you’re dealing with. Poker’s only a good game when you know what cards the other guy is holding. And from here on in, you’re probably gonna have to find somebody smarter than me to get your information from. I think I already got everything I know how to get.”

  “You did great,” Stoney said. “I appreciate it. I haven’t talked this over with Tommy yet, so I don’t know how he feels about all this. We’re gonna figure out something in the next day or two. You interested?”

  “Depends on what you come up with,” Harman said. “I’m retired. I’m just helping out an old friend, so far. I can’t take another fall.”

  “Neither can I,” Stoney told him. “Nobody planning to go to jail. Tommy tells me you’re just in town for a few days.”

  Harman nodded. “Visiting my sister. They’ve got her locked up in Downstate Medical. It’s kind of tough for me to get in to see her.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Harman sighed. “Family stuff, you know how it is. There are a couple of old warrants out on me, and if my father knew I was here, I’d be wearing bracelets before the day was out.”

&nbs
p; “Nobody can do you like your family,” Stoney said. “I’m thinking this will only take a few more days.”

  “I just have to stay out of the line of fire.”

  Stoney glanced at Fat Tommy, who nodded. “Tell you what,” he said. “Before we move, we’ll lay it all out, and then you can decide how you feel about it.”

  “Fair enough,” Harman said.

  Tuco wanted to hate the car, but it was impossible. Sure, the thing was a rolling cliché, it seemed that every second teenager in the wealthy Jersey burbs was driving one, maybe it was the upwardly mobile yuppie vehicle of choice, and yeah, you could buy two perfectly serviceable Hondas for less money, but still, the three-series BMW that Stoney had rented for him was beautiful, it was fast, and it seemed almost telepathically in tune to his intentions. He pointed it north on Route 17, sliding effortlessly through the throng of soccer moms driving elephantine SUVs. The dark blue Corolla he was tailing, six cars ahead, put its turn signal on and shouldered its way into the lane for the next exit, and Tuco followed suit behind it.

  He had picked up the two girls at their high school. The school itself looked nothing like the ones Tuco had sporadically attended in Brooklyn. The place was a modern red-brick building that stood back from the street behind a wide spread of green lawn. From his spot under a tree on the far edge of the students’ parking lot, Tuco could see the athletic fields out behind the place, where a bunch of kids in football uniforms ran up and down a practice field. Yellow buses were parked in a long half circle along the driveway out front. A flag flapped in the stiff breeze, and a bunch of flowers planted in a bed by the street out front nodded their heads to the cars passing by. God, he thought, what a fucking place. It didn’t look anything like the five-story blockhouse he remembered on Pennsylvania Avenue, surrounded by chain-link fences, with razor wire on the roof to keep the kids from throwing one another off.

  He kept his eye on the blue Corolla. Stoney had pointed it out to him before he’d gone on his way. The kids came flooding out at the appointed time of their release, streaming past in groups, some headed for the parking lot, some for the buses, and more than a few straggling away on foot. There were none that looked like Tuco, they were predominantly white, with a smattering of Asians. But it wasn’t Tuco’s skin color or his economic status that separated his world from theirs, he knew that. If they had given you a free pass to this place, he told himself, it wouldn’t have made any difference. You still couldn’t cut it. The familiar bitterness rose up in his throat, and he fought to choke it back down, to keep from hating these children of privilege, these lucky souls trooping past on their way back to houses on quiet streets, off to their appointed and preordained futures on Wall Street, or wherever the hell else they might be going. So they caught a few more breaks than you did, he told himself. So what?