Verona

by Deaver, Jeffery

  Blood and business had never been incompatible.

  The bulk of the remodeling work had been done, though a large drop cloth was spread over part of the floor, the electrical outlet plates needed to be screwed back in, and the wall where the police had removed his father’s safe needed replastering.

  Andy could look up and see wires and insulation and pipes through the drafty black L-shaped gap. New acoustical tiles were going up in place of the old yellowing ones.

  His phone hummed. No caller ID. It would probably be the automated phone calling system from the prison where his father, like Yung, was being held without bail. The male voice sternly gave a number of rules—no recording, no conferencing—and then asked if he wanted to accept the call. As with the others, Andy did not pick up.

  That’saboy . . .

  He eased back in the comfortable brown leather chair. Large windows looked out on a city park. He remembered, years ago, standing at this very sill and watching the snow. That visit was the first time his father had wanded him with a transmission-detection scanner. He was twelve.

  An incoming email triggered a vibration on his phone. It was from Detective White, reporting that the government auditors had been through his father’s company’s books, and forensic experts had examined the computers. They’d found that the man was hardly the rich mafioso he claimed to be. His illegal operations were just barely breaking even. Did Andy know of any other resources his father had?

  He replied that he was sorry but, no. His father never gave him access to the accounts on the illegal side of his business. Only the legitimate operations, the real estate. And that business, too, hadn’t been doing well. Andy concluded the email:

  Guess Dad was more bully and thug than savvy mobster. Wish I could help.

  He sent the missive on its way.

  The intercom box on the desk buzzed. Andy pressed a button. “Yes.”

  “It’s me.” The voice from downstairs was a whisper.

  Andy hit the door-unlock button. A few minutes later Jimmy Ebbitt walked quickly inside and swung the door shut behind him, breathless. Apparently he’d run up the stairs rather than wait for the elevator. Andy was struck by his change of appearance. He was more emaciated than ever and he sported a shaved head in place of the shaggy locks. He wore dark glasses, which he now took off.

  The skittish man looked around the office and walked to the window, peered out. He apparently saw nothing to trouble him, though that didn’t appear to balm his unease.

  “How’s your dad?”

  “I don’t know. We’re not in touch.”

  “No? Guess not. You got a right to be pissed, kid. But he wanted the best for you and your mom. Rest her soul.”

  If I hear that one more time, I’ll scream.

  The twitchy man twitched now, as he looked out another window. “And Max? I didn’t want to call, figured they were bugging his line. How’s he doing?”

  “He’s hanging in there.”

  Jimmy, who’d been living underground since the warehouse arrests, knew nothing of the takedown sting that Andy and Loi had orchestrated. He believed the abduction was really ordered by John Yung. And so he had no clue that Max had been part of it and was fine—aside from the sore muscles following his dive into Toucan Café’s sturdy outdoor furniture.

  His voice cracked. “I want you to know, Andy. At the warehouse? Those cops just showed up. They came out of nowhere. Fucking nowhere! I panicked. When I saw ’em, I got the hell away. I’m sorry.”

  “Nobody’s blaming you. What could you’ve done?”

  “That’s right. I couldn’t do nothing. I just . . . I just feel bad. I shoulda seen it coming.” Jimmy the contrite puppy whispered, “Andy, listen, I could use some help. The cops’re looking for me. Everywhere.”

  “Where’re you staying?”

  “This crappy place over on Taylor.” He swallowed and got to the words he’d undoubtedly rehearsed a hundred times. “I gotta get out of the country. I don’t know if there’s anything you can do, but your dad owed me for the last month. It was due the day he got busted.”

  “He paid you cash, I’m guessing.”

  “Yeah, ten thousand a month. I really need it. It’s not your problem, I know. But . . .”

  Andy rubbed his eyes. “Jimmy, I’ll tell you, the police took almost everything.” He paused and looked the man over. “If you had the money where would you go?”

  He brightened at this. “I was thinking the Bahamas. But they froze my bank account. I ate in a soup kitchen last night. It was really that. Soup, I mean. What they give you. It wasn’t bad. It was just, it was . . . soup.”

  Andy said, “Bahamas’re nice. I’ve been to the Atlantis.”

  Jimmy was frowning. “Oh, I don’t mean someplace fancy like that. A cheap motel is good, just until I can get on my feet again. Not even on the beach.”

  Andy shrugged. “I found a little cash in one of the file cabinets here. Cops missed it. A couple thousand. You want it, it’s yours.”

  Jimmy’s red eyes brightened. “Really? Oh, man, thanks.”

  Andy pointed across the office. “The one on the left, the end. Top drawer. It’s in an envelope.”

  “I can’t thank you enough, Andy.”

  The man strode eagerly across the room but stopped when Andy said, “Oh, Jimmy. I’ve got a question.”

  He turned.

  “Didn’t Yung come through with the ten he promised you?”

  “Yung? The ten?” he stammered.

  “What I’m asking, that’s right,” Andy said calmly. “The ten thousand.” When Jimmy, face glowing crimson, swallowing, said nothing, he continued, “What he was going to pay you for selling out my father.”

  Silence still, as Jimmy blinked. His right hand thumb and forefinger flicked compulsively together.

  “You approached Ki and told him you’d sell Yung my dad’s plans for the Panhandle, so he could buy up the properties first.”

  The skinny guy now managed to get a few whispered words out. “No, Andy, no. Ki’s lying. I swear. I’d never do that.”

  But he would, and he had.

  Because Ki, working with Loi and Andy by then, had dutifully reported to Andy and Loi Jimmy’s willingness to betray Brendon Nagle.

  The skinny man sputtered, “Really, it’s more complicated than that.”

  Really, it wasn’t.

  Andy took the silenced Sig Sauer automatic pistol from the desk drawer and shot Jimmy Ebbitt twice in the chest and then once in the head. He collapsed right in the middle of the drop cloth, which Max had placed there earlier in the day for this very purpose.

  Seven

  Monday, May 5

  Two Months before Donald Lark’s Funeral

  Andy and Loi were lying in bed at the Riverside Hotel.

  The promised “minute or two” had grown into an hour.

  Loi now whispered, “You said there was another piece you wanted to add.”

  “This is the part we don’t share with Detective White.”

  “I’m intrigued.”

  He kissed her forehead, rolled onto his back. “I have a confession.”

  She nodded and twined his chest hair once again. This was a habit he could get used to.

  “I’m guilty of armed robbery.”

  Loi lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t just let that one sit.”

  “My father’s real security conscious. I told you. But I could still figure out parts of his operation. Sometimes I’d follow a courier from his office—you know, on his way to make a money drop. Before he got there, I pulled on a ski mask, stuck a gun in his ribs and took the cash.” Andy shrugged. “A perfect crime. Nobody was going to the police. And my father was sure another crew had done it.”

  She slapped him lightly on the arm and grinned. “Shame on you!” Then she tenderly kissed the spot she’d whacked. “You needed the money?”

  “Needed? No. Wanted? Yes. To piss my father off.” He chuckled. “Anyway, who can’t use a half million in
unmarked bills?” Then he grew somber in voice and somber in spirit. “We’re doomed, you know.”

  “Romeo and Juliet.”

  “True, but I’m thinking something else: We’re doomed because we can’t lead normal lives. Any hope of that died years and years go.”

  “Normal life,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t know how . . . Can I confess something too?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “I’ve got a bad side to me.”

  “Makes you all the hotter.”

  She cuddled closer and gave a sound that resembled a purr. “Every once in a while, when I’m in the mood, I upload ransomware onto some company’s network. You know how that works?”

  Andy’d heard of the crime. “It encrypts their data, like payroll and accounting, intellectual property. If they pay into a crypto account, the hacker sends them the decryption key.”

  “That’s it. If you ask for under fifty thousand, it’s just the cost of doing business to most companies. They may report it but usually even that’s too much trouble. I have to say it was the only time I’ve really felt alive lately, squeezing some corporate idiots for money and watching my Bitcoin grow.”

  Andy said, “They fucked us up, our dear fathers. But they taught us one thing.”

  Her beautiful face shone. “How not to run a crime syndicate.”

  “Exactly. If we had a crew, we’d do it right. You and me.”

  “Is that what the other piece is?” Loi asked.

  He nodded. Then he added, solemnly, “We do this, there’s no going back.”

  “There’s nothing to go back to. Our childhoods are scorched earth . . . So? Next steps.”

  “First is calling room service. I seem to work up an appetite around you.”

  The couple was back on the couch in front of the hotel room’s coffee table, with eggs and toast and champagne before them. Additional hotel stationery too.

  More ideas, some forming, some misting away.

  “I think I know how to recruit Max and Ki. We cut a deal with White for their immunity.”

  Loi considered this. “That’ll be the starting point. But the most important thing they’ll want is a job. If they agree to bring down their bosses, nobody’ll hire them.”

  “But we will. At double their salary. Max’ll go along. He’s taking care of two elderly parents, and his mother’s disabled. Ki?”

  Loi didn’t have to think long. “He’d love the chance to work with us. He’s been like a second father. The only reason he’s still with Father is to protect me from him. He once said if he ever whipped me again, it would be the last time. A job and immunity, he’ll be good.”

  “Okay. Ki and Max are on board . . . How’s this for a plan?” Andy explained he’d ask his father to hire him to oversee the books and the paperwork of his real estate company. He would only have access to the company’s legit operation, of course, but with Loi’s computer skills she could probably hack into the man’s secret files and find where he stashed his cash.

  When Detective White and the Organized Crime Task Force arrested Andy’s father, the cops would find some money, along with the drugs and weapons, but Andy and Loi would have already taken the bulk of the cash money and destroyed any digital trace of its existence.

  This stash would be their start-up capital—plus the money Andy has stolen from his father and Loi’s ransomware profits. They’d use it to create their own syndicate, based on a whole new business model.

  Their fathers’ problem was that they were stuck in the mentality of a gangster movie from the 1980s: Martin Scorsese crime, The Sopranos crime. Smuggling and selling drugs and guns, running whorehouses, human trafficking, demanding money from brick-and-mortar retailers for protection.

  Nagle and Yung didn’t realize that that approach was pathetically outdated.

  Trade unions? Robots ran most of the manufacturing and longshore and stevedore operations, and the new face of labor—the tech industry—was geographically dispersed and not unionized.

  Construction? Huge international companies were accountable to shareholders and kickbacks were easily detected.

  Graft at city hall? Too risky now that whistle-blowers got rich quick, and everybody with a camera phone and a blog was an investigative reporter, eager to out corruption.

  Protection of retail operations? You couldn’t shake down Walmart or Amazon, and a mom-and-pop store couldn’t afford to pay serious sums.

  Bookmaking and running numbers? You could gamble everywhere legally now.

  Drugs? Grass was becoming legalized, and demand for street heroin and coke was waning and prescription opioids were being more tightly controlled.

  Organized crime needed to wake up to the twenty-first century. Andy and Loi threw ideas back and forth for hours, and their syndicate took shape. They would sell forged prescriptions through the dark web. As for sex, no more massage parlors or houses of prostitution or trafficking in women and girls (the latter unacceptable to both of them, in any event); they’d use Eastern European servers to run porn chat and hookup websites, identify the married men and politicians, extort tens of thousands in exchange for not emailing wives or outing the men on social media. They would also sell some of the incriminating data to competitors and political opponents. And classic business protection? Ransomware, again.

  Then Andy fell silent.

  “What?” Loi asked, frowning. “Having second thoughts?”

  “No. But for this to work we’ll have to take it one step further.” His eyes were cool as he regarded her face. “It’ll have to get ugly.”

  “We’re the doomed lovers, Andy . . . Go on. As long as nobody innocent gets hurt.”

  He said, “Not innocent at all. Donald Lark.”

  “The crime boss running the Panhandle. Nothing innocent about him.” She frowned. “I heard Father and Ki talking one time. Lark ordered a hit where the target’s whole family was killed, even the kids.”

  “If Max and Ki agree to sign on, the first step is, they’ll kill Lark. That puts the Panhandle in play.”

  “He’ll be hard to get to.”

  “Every Friday he takes a route to his summer place through this deserted area thirty miles out of town. Max and Ki can handle it. That’s what they’re good at. And they’ll plant stories Lark was killed by somebody out from New York, New Jersey.”

  “So, Lark’s dead,” she mused. “Our fathers’ll go to the funeral to telegraph they’re making a move on the territory. We’ll find a bar or restaurant near the funeral parlor, and it’ll look like you and I hooked up there.” She laughed. “Oh, that’ll drive them crazy.”

  “Our fathers’ll probably have Max and Ki interrogate the bartender—to see if it was a legitimate pickup or if either of us was fishing for information. Max and Ki’ll pretend to grill the guy, and they’ll come back to our fathers with the story that everything was legit. It was love at first sight.”

  Loi laughed and kissed his cheek. “My dad and yours’ll start spying on us, recording what we say.”

  “Your father’ll hope I spill something about mine. And vice versa.”

  “Oh, we can feed them all sorts of good stuff.”

  “We’ll stir the pot, get the rivalry going—that’ll make it easier to set up the kidnapping. They make mistakes, get arrested. We take the money and open up shop. What do you think?”

  She tapped her glass to his. Her long kiss was his answer. She asked, “Timetable?”

  “It’s May now. I’d say two months. July’ll be good. That’ll give you time to get into my father’s accounts and find his safe houses. It’ll take a while to convince White and the cops to help us and set up a deal for Ki and Max. And plan the kidnapping sting.”

  “So we have to be secret lovers until then?”

  “Afraid so. We can’t quote ‘meet’ until the funeral.”

  “Two whole months?” Loi pouted.

  And quite the luxurious and erotic pout it was.

  Eight

  Friday, July 15


  Present Day

  Andy Nagle unscrewed the silencer from the Sig Sauer. He slipped the gun and the hot accessory into his pocket. He glanced with no particular emotion at Jimmy’s collapsed body.

  Yes, he and Loi were planning a wholly up-to-date crime syndicate. Still, it was wise not to discard all aspects of the past—especially those that had proved reliable over the years: for instance, 9 mm slugs and cinder blocks to keep a body at the bottom of the deep.

  Footsteps in the corridor.

  “Hey.” Loi Yung walked into the office, glancing down at Jimmy’s corpse, untroubled at the sight. She examined the wall behind the corpse. “No blood on the walls.”

  “I aimed carefully. And used hollow points. Max’s on his way. He’s going to take out the trash.”

  “Ah.” She doffed her jacket and slung it over the back of a chair across from the desk. She kissed Andy then dug through her backpack. “How’s this?” She held up a sketch of the proposed logo for their company.

  R & J GLOBAL INTERCONNECTED SOLUTIONS, INC.

  A name that echoed their new approach to organized crime, as opposed to, say, the antiquated: “Transportation and Storage.”

  He said, “Nice typeface. Classy.”

  She said, “What if somebody asks who R and J are?”

  “We’ll tell them they’re our silent partners.” Andy’s phone chimed and he read a text. It was from Pete J, the late Donald Lark’s son. “He’s agreed to a sit-down.”

  Loi said, “Can’t wait to see his expression when we tell him he can keep on with business as usual.”

  She had come up with the idea, a good one. It would be best to make sure the Panhandle remained the hotbed of traditional organized-crime operations—to keep White and the other cops and law enforcement agencies diverted, unaware of the empire that Andy and she were building.

  Max appeared in the doorway. He nodded to the couple. He wasn’t smiling but then he never smiled. He walked to Jimmy’s body, studying it while pulling on blue latex gloves. The big man emptied the scrawny guy’s pockets and dropped everything in a plastic bag. He then began to wrap the body in the blood-spattered drop cloth.