Verona

by Deaver, Jeffery

  Ki departed slowly.

  Yung turned back to the window. He watched three robins bathing in the dirt. He was curious. He didn’t think robins ganged. He couldn’t recall seeing two adults together like this, let alone three. Was this an omen? Yung believed in omens.

  But, if it were, was it favorable or not? That was always the question.

  And, of course, an omen could be both.

  What was favorable for one person might foretell tragedy for another.

  Three

  Thursday, July 7

  They sat on a bench overlooking the Potawami River.

  Loi Yung felt a sudden urge to kiss Andy Nagle and leaned in, aiming for the neck.

  Andy had fast reflexes; by the time she reached her target he’d turned his head, and lips met lips.

  They sat back on the green-painted bench, which, a small plaque reported, had been built by the Depression-era WPA, making it nearly a hundred years old. Apparently, Loi thought, they built things to last back then. Her father always complained about the shoddiness of modern manufacturing. Maybe, she thought cynically, the guns he bought for his murderous employees broke down more often nowadays.

  She’d dressed in clothes she hoped would get—and hold on to—Andy’s attention: a thin blue-and-white pin-striped blouse, silk, and close-fitting white jeans. On her feet were Jimmy Choo slingback flats in sparkling silver. She’d traded her blue-framed progressives for blue-framed sunglasses with, of course, blue lenses. The shade perfectly matched her toenail polish, though he couldn’t see that . . . yet.

  Andy was wearing his afternoon goin’-out clothes: faded blue jeans and a Mark Zuckerberg–gray T-shirt, tight across the chest and at the biceps. He looked great. Loi gazed over the dull-brown waterway. Here it approached picturesque. A serpentine landscaped park surrounded them on this shore, and across the slow-moving river were baseball and soccer fields, where teams were enjoying the beautiful day and temperate clime. There were sandboxes and playgrounds for the children. Joggers jogged. There were a dozen kites fluttering and arcing in the blue sky. Farther upstream, closer to the Panhandle, factories and warehouses lined the riverbanks. Those from the past hundred years were built of somber gray stone. Those dating to earlier eras were constructed of red brick, now sooted to brown.

  “This is crazy,” Loi said.

  “But what’s crazy, in the whole scheme of things, the universe, the cosmos?” Andy asked. His aftershave wafted past. A dry scent, like lime-laced gin.

  “My, how philosophical.”

  She squeezed his hand and felt a faint electric current zip to her chest when he reciprocated.

  He’d told her that when he’d first laid eyes on her, it was love at first sight.

  The same for her.

  “Oh!” Loi reared back, laughing, as a small fluffy dog, which had to have poodle in its 23andMe, bounded into her lap. She stroked the soft curls covering its enthusiastically bobbing head.

  “Sorry, sorry!” a dark-haired young woman called. She had one of those retractable leashes, and the dog had charged ahead before its mistress could reel in the ebullient creature. They petted the dog as the woman, dressed in shiny yellow workout clothes, took up leash slack and approached. “Oh, no, are you muddy?”

  “No worries,” Loi said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Her,” said the brunette. The fuzzy coat hid the indicia of gender. “Junebug.”

  “Oh, I love her,” Loi said.

  They made do-you-now-or-have-you-ever-had-a-dog conversation for a few minutes, then the woman and Junie or Buggie, whatever her nick was, were off for more exercise.

  “You told her you had dogs growing up,” Loi said to Andy. “What kind where they?”

  “Malinois. Guard dogs, like the Secret Service uses. They cost twenty-five thousand each. They didn’t have names like Rover and Lassie. They were Un and Deux. One and Two. French was the language they were trained to respond to—you know, ‘sit, stay, attack, release.’ On the theory that any intruders were probably not going to be Francophiles.” He took a deep breath. “Which brings me to something I have to say.”

  “I know who your father is. And I’ll bet you know mine.”

  Andy nodded. “He told me I couldn’t see you.”

  Loi recalled the confrontation she’d just had. Her father—in one of the business suits he always wore, every day of the week—was lecturing. “Same with me. I think he’s more upset that you’re Brendon Nagle’s son than that you’re not Chinese. And that’s saying something.”

  Suddenly Andy gave a soft laugh.

  “What?”

  “You know who we are?”

  She lifted an inquiring, and carefully shaped, eyebrow.

  “We’re Romeo and Juliet.”

  “You’re right, we are.” A memory surfaced in Loi’s thoughts. “High school. I played Nurse. I would have been a better Juliet than Sally Brines but the school wasn’t ready for an Asian in the lead.” A thought occurred to her. She whispered, “Hey, you know one thing about the play?”

  He grimaced. “I know it didn’t end well.”

  Loi said gravely, “No. What I mean is Romeo and Juliet knew all kinds of shit was going to happen. They didn’t waste any time.” She pulled him to his feet. “Follow me.”

  “Hm. Nice place,” Andy was saying, looking over her apartment. “Course, how many times have you heard anybody walk into your digs and say, ‘Hm, crappy place.’”

  Loi loosed her sparkling laugh. She swapped sunglasses for her everyday pair.

  Nothing crappy here. A large open loft with fine hardwood floors and bare stone walls, on which hung American Primitive paintings. They seemed to be originals.

  He said, “I like the fish tank.”

  It was four feet long and filled with dots of tiny colorful creatures, meandering in three dimensions, and on the bottom rested several weird-looking fish with whiskers and ugly faces.

  Loi hung her jacket and walked into the open-plan kitchen. Andy followed.

  She explained that her father had arranged for this place for her. It was in the poshest—and safest—part of town, the North Riverfront. “The furniture isn’t so nice. Dad’s business is down.”

  “Mine’s is too. At least the part I’m working on, the B side.”

  “B side?” she asked.

  “The old records? Forty-fives?”

  “Oh, those things you see in movies?”

  “The flip side was B. It was a pretty good song. A was the hit.”

  “What’s your father’s B side?”

  “Real estate mostly. All legit.”

  She said, “My father doesn’t let me know anything about what he does. I’m a woman.” As they stood over the island Loi poured wine for them both. They tapped glasses. Loi’s voice sounded troubled, preoccupied, as she asked, “You ever been scared? Because of what your father did?”

  He told her about the OC Task Force raid and the search of his room, while he stood in the doorway, watching the cops upend drawer after drawer.

  She shook her head. “You were thirteen?”

  Andy nodded.

  She gave a sour laugh. “I was fourteen and I found a locker key—you know, like at train stations—in my tampon bag. My father’d put it there in case we were raided.”

  “What was in the locker?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Drugs, guns? My father also smuggles exotic animals into the country. Maybe it was a cobra. I grew up envying people in, you know, normal homes. Didn’t you?”

  “I used to. Yeah. Every day. But not anymore.”

  “No?”

  He kissed her hard. “Because then I wouldn’t’ve met you.”

  Her response was to nod toward a doorway. “The bedroom’s in there.”

  At eleven p.m. Brendon Nagle heard the buzzer of the intercom unit on his desk and, looking at the security-camera screen, saw Max standing outside, gazing up like a Rottie at its master.

  Nagle pushed a button, admit
ting him, and a few moments later he regarded another screen to see his minder outside his office door. The big man put his gun and cell phone into a box bolted to the wall and closed the lid.

  Nagle buzzed him into the office and Max walked through the scanning frame. It beeped. Max fished in his pocket and retrieved a digital recorder, handed it to Nagle; his boss pointed to the frame, sending his minder through it again. Now, no beep.

  The large room was in need of a fresh paint job and it featured a scuffed floor, yellowing ceiling tile. A battered desk held pads of paper and boxes of pens. There was a computer but it wasn’t capable of going online; it was for typing out information and examining spreadsheets only. (Bin Laden evaded capture for years thanks to recognizing the danger of those fucking magic boxes.) The windows were mirrored and faced a park, not another building where spies might lurk. Nagle sipped his Crown Royal and nodded his minder into a chair.

  Max sat and Nagle lifted the digital recorder, examining the tiny box carefully. He scanned it with a separate instrument, checking for radio transmissions. The needle remained asleep. He looked, too, at a separate screen on his computer, on which other sensors around the room and in the building were sending reassurances that he wasn’t being monitored.

  Nagle asked, “Did Andrew pick up on the bug?”

  “No. I’m positive.”

  His boss snapped, “How can you be sure?”

  Max responded slowly: “He was talking in a certain way. Natural. If he or the girl had found it, either they’d shut up or start playacting. This is natural. Listen.” He took the recorder and pushed a button. Nagle heard the voice of a giddy woman, chatting about a dog. Max fast-forwarded, hit “Play.” From the recorder came a fast laugh, his son. Then Loi was asking:

  “What?”

  “You know who we are? . . . We’re Romeo and Juliet.”

  “You’re right, we are . . . High school. I played Nurse. I would have been a better Juliet than Sally Brines but the school wasn’t ready for an Asian in the lead. Hey, you know one thing about the play?”

  “I know it didn’t end well.”

  “No. What—”

  Max reached forward quickly and clicked the unit off. Nagle wondered why.

  “How’d you get the bug on him?”

  “The woman you heard? She’s the girlfriend of one of my guys. Cathy.”

  Spacey broad, she sounded like.

  “She’s got this little dog, jumps up and licks your face. She let it jump on them when they were in the park. While they were petting it, she dropped the bug into Andy’s backpack. Cute.”

  “What?”

  “The dog. It’s cute.”

  “Why do I give a fuck?”

  His plan was working out largely as he’d hoped. He’d thought of it almost the minute he’d identified the girl as Yung’s daughter. Their relationship, he’d realized, could be a golden opportunity. He’d known that whatever Andrew agreed to, he’d continue to see the girl on the sly, so he’d ordered Max to arrange to bug the two youngsters.

  “Where is he now?”

  “He left her apartment a half hour ago. Jimmy and me’ll monitor him and record everything when they’re together. We’re on his phone too.”

  Nagle was nodding at the recorder. “She say anything helpful to us?”

  “Bad news and good news.”

  Nagle zipped off a don’t-be-cute look.

  “Sorry, sir.” He withdrew a notebook and flipped through it. “She told Andy that her father’s real busy—buying up property around Henderson square. It started the day Lark died.”

  “Fuck.” The shabby park was the heart of the Panhandle. “That fast?” Nagle was stunned. “Six days?”

  “What she said,” Max replied as he began fast-forwarding through the recorder.

  So Yung was moving in already.

  Which is why that asshole detective, White, had busted their chops right after Lark’s funeral: he’d heard the rumors that some crew was moving into the Panhandle.

  Ah, the Camelot of the city. The Panhandle. The most desirous neighborhood in town.

  Damp gray or dusty gray, depending on the weather, the PH was a jumble of decrepit town houses, cinder-block apartments, dirty nail salons, bodegas with perpetually smeared storefront glass, paycheck loan advance shops, wig stores, bar upon shabby bar, restaurants a meal or two away from a health department closure.

  And desirous why?

  Because Nagle’s territory, south of the PH, and Yung’s, north, were suffering from the terminal illness of gentrificationitis.

  The two men made their living from crack houses, bordellos, the street sales of drugs, sidewalk hookers, the protection of mom-and-pop stores.

  But their turfs were getting cleaned up—professional couples moving in, developers suctioning up vacant lots and turning them into condos, police kicking out all the bad boys and girls.

  The Panhandle, though, the lovely PH, had nothing nice to boast of, and never would, given its proximity to the docks and mixed zoning, which meant daddy lawyer and mommy CPA were never going to move into a ’hood where you lived separated from Trader Joe’s by a leather-tanning factory or a tractor-trailer-repair shop, and where the homeless and the whores could look little Mason and Kelsey up and down as they waited timidly for their school bus.

  The PH was still populated with people who hung their hopes on numbers games, craved their heroin and crack and meth, and slaved away at day-labor jobs and in nail salons and restaurant kitchens awaiting the green cards their traffickers promised but would never deliver.

  Brendon Nagle needed the PH for his organization’s survival.

  A mosquito of paranoia buzzed. He asked pointedly, “Why didn’t you know about Yung? Buying up that property?”

  “Must’ve gone through middlemen or something. Lawyers, you know.”

  “Middlemen.” Nagle scoffed and offered a searing glare to remind Max he was paid for information as well as for his skill with a gun and knife. “Well, give me the good fucking news you mentioned.”

  Max found the part of the recording he’d been looking for. Loi’s low, sensuous voice began to flow from the recorder.

  “So, we have a place on the lake, Lake Mason. You know it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe we could go up there.”

  “We could fish, hike, put up preserves.”

  “If that’s what you really want to do, Andy . . .”

  “Or, I guess we could think of something else to occupy our time.”

  Nagle felt Max’s eyes on him. He didn’t look back.

  “This weekend?”

  “No, Father’s going to be there then. Some secret-meeting bullshit. Just him and Ki and two men from LA. All really secret. We could go on Monday.”

  “Monday it is. Can we skinny-dip in the—”

  Max shut off the recorder. “I found Yung’s address up there. And checked out the plat and deed records, Google-earthed it. Good elevations and lots of trees for cover. A shooter could get close as thirty yards and not be seen. No perimeter fence.”

  Nagle said, “Minimum security, just Yung and three others? Yeah. Good. Find some shooters.” His voice grew stern. “Make sure they’re good. When you aim for Yung, you can’t miss.”

  “I’ll do it tonight.”

  “Don’t fuck up, Max.”

  “No, sir.” He reached for the recorder.

  “Leave it.”

  “Yessir.”

  Max plodded out, the floorboards creaking underfoot.

  Nagle waited until he was gone before pulling on a headset and plugging the jack into the little digital recorder. He scrolled to where Max had shut the device off so abruptly, presumably to keep him from hearing what happened next, and hit “Play.”

  “I grew up envying people in, you know, normal homes. Didn’t you?”

  “I used to. Yeah. Every day. But not anymore.”

  “No?”

  “Because then I wouldn’t’ve met you.”
<
br />   “The bedroom’s in there.”

  Nagle heard rustling and whispers.

  He turned the volume up, closed his eyes and sat back in his chair.

  At nearly midnight, John Yung ran his finger around the rim of his glass—it was filled with root beer, his favorite beverage. He had never tasted alcohol. He watched Ki hunch forward over the desk and point his mobile toward his boss like a Ouija board platen.

  They were in the office of his company, Yung Eastern Imports, surrounded by samples of the many types of junk he bought and sold as a cover operation, products ranging from lobster-claw grippers on sticks to solar-powered driveway lights. Nothing cost much more than $19.95 retail.

  From the Motorola cell phone came the sound of voices. His daughter’s and that of Brendon Nagle’s son.

  “I grew up envying people in, you know, normal homes. Didn’t you?”

  “I used to. Yeah. Every day. But not anymore.”

  “No?”

  “Because then I wouldn’t’ve met you.”

  Ki shut the recording off. The apartment that John Yung had acquired for his daughter in a posh section of town boasted many fine qualities: a nice view of the river, two spacious bedrooms, a Jacuzzi, a high-tech kitchen . . . and a dozen hardwired—that is, unscannable—listening devices hidden throughout. No video cameras, of course. Yung wanted to hear everything his temperamental and disrespectful daughter and her guests said, but would never, ever have thought of witnessing her in any stage of undress.

  All conversations were recorded by Ki and could be played back on the quiet man’s phone.

  “Is there more? Is it useful?” He sipped the soft drink. The spicy flavor was seductive.

  “I’ll give you a summary. The boy said his father wants to start buying up properties in the Panhandle. Beginning immediately.”

  Yung clenched his fist and relaxed it.

  “And I’m afraid Loi told him a few things she shouldn’t have. About the meeting you have at the lake house. With those fellows from LA.”

  “She did that?” Yung exhaled long, controlling his temper.

  Ki nodded. “There’s something else, sir.”

  The tone suggested he was hesitant to share troubling news.

  “And that is what?”