“We didn’t find their keys.”
I winked. “That’s because they’re still in the ignition.”
Barack and I piled into the speedboat without discussing it. In case things went wrong, the less Steve knew, the better. If things went wrong, they would go very wrong.
“You ever drive one of these things?” Barack asked, staring at the controls like Sarah Palin at a teleprompter.
I shot him a sly grin. “Actually, I have.”
Barack looked at me skeptically.
“I’m from Delaware,” I said, switching seats with Barack and priming the pump. “I know more about boats than Lawrence Welk knew about polka.” I turned the key and pushed the throttle into first gear.
“Sounds like the engine’s dead,” Barack said when nothing happened.
“It’s like a lawnmower,” I said, standing with one foot on the seat and another on the platform between me and the motor. I yanked the ripcord, then again, and again, until the motor sputtered to life.
I pulled the throttle into reverse and spun the wheel, backing us away from the tour boat. The rope dropped away. As soon as we were free, I laid into the throttle like it owed me money. The speedboat lurched forward, its nose poking up for a brief moment before settling back down. We were off.
“There aren’t any life jackets, Joe,” Barack hollered as the wind slapped us around.
“You only need a life jacket if you fall overboard,” I shouted. Besides, life jackets wouldn’t do us much good where we were going.
Not unless they were made of Kevlar.
51
When we were within a hundred yards of Caruso’s yacht, I killed the motor. Our momentum, coupled with the tide, carried us toward the boat under the cover of darkness. The clouds had moved on. The stars were out now, and the moon gave us just enough light to see what we were doing. Up close, the yacht was positively ginormous—a leviathan twice as long as the tour boat, and three stories tall. The name on the side read U.S.S. HOPE. At one time, it had been a tribute to Barack Obama. Now, it seemed like a kick in the shin.
Barack held out a hand to stop us from crashing into the hull, and I grabbed the ladder on the swim deck to keep us from drifting away.
“This is our Moby Dick,” I said.
“Call me Ishmael,” Barack said. “I hope you weren’t planning to harpoon Caruso’s boat.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Then: “Did you find a harpoon on board?”
He shook his head.
“If we were smart, we would have grabbed those semi-automatics.”
“So we could go out in a blaze of glory?” he said. “Use your head, Joe.”
I opened the storage hold on the speedboat. I was hoping they’d left a gun or two behind. Not to shoot, but to use as props. For a brief moment, I got excited—the hold was filled with bullets. I dug around, however, and found that was all that was in there. Ammunition for guns we didn’t have. I pulled out a sash-style belt of ammo.
Barack was still hanging onto the ladder as our boat bobbed up and down. “What are you going to do, wear that across your chest like Rambo?”
“Just listen. You take your shirt off and drape these over your pecs like you’re a Christmas tree and these are the lights. See?” I mimed decorating him with the ammo belt. “You stande behind me, like you’ve got me hostage. You’re a cobra. And you’ve caught yourself a mongoose. Once we’re on the yacht, we put the moves on ‘em. Good night, nurse!”
We sat in silence as he digested my plan.
“You know what happens when a cobra and a mongoose fight, Joe?”
“I’m not a zookeeper.”
“A mongoose can tear a cobra in half with one snap of its jaws, and a cobra can kill a mongoose with a single poisonous bite. In the wild, they avoid each other because they both know there’s a good chance neither of them walks away from the fight.”
“Where’d you learn all that? Harvard?”
“NatGeo,” he said.
“We’ve already dispatched two Crooks.”
“We had some help.”
“I had the situation under control,” I said. “Steve almost screwed it all up.”
Barack mmm-hmmmmm‘d.
“So you’re saying you want to be the mongoose.”
“Were you listening to me?” he said. “That’s—”
A loud thunderclap interrupted us. There was no lightning, though. And it sounded closer than any thunder I’d ever heard. The noise was either a car backfiring or a gunshot.
There weren’t any cars on Lake Michigan.
52
Barack used his limber arms to hold the speedboat close as I stuck out a foot onto the ladder. The railing was cold and wet, and the metal slippery as an eel. Once I got a foothold, I was able to hoist myself up.
“Now, Joe, be careful—”
Before Barack could say any more, I was scaling the ladder. Three stories to the top. That was all. I didn’t look down, because to look down was to invite trouble. When I was a kid, I’d climbed a construction worker’s ladder in the freezing rain to the top of the skeleton of a new building six stories high—fifty or more feet in the air. Never once looked down. That was the key. I’d seen more than one of my classmates end up flat on their back or worse due to vertigo.
At the top of the ladder, I caught my breath. I looked left and right. The coast was clear. There was shouting coming from the bow—a man’s voice. Barking orders.
“You OK?” Barack asked from below.
I looked down. Instinct. He was right behind me. Our eyes met, and then the vertigo kicked in. The boat bobbed up and down. The roasted peanuts were swirling in my stomach, like a tornado building itself from the ground up.
I tumbled over the railing and landed on the deck, shoulder first. I rolled over onto my back. Barack quickly followed, taking the more standard tactic of climbing over the railing one leg at a time.
“I tied up the boat,” Barack said, kneeling beside me. “You don’t look so hot.”
He placed a hand on my chest. The stars were spinning above me. I had to get my bearings, and fast. It wouldn’t be long before we’d be discovered.
Breathe, he was saying. Nice, steady breaths…In, out…In, out…
I brushed his arm away. “We don’t have time for yoga.”
“It’s called mindful meditation. Being aware of your breathing is one of the easisest ways to clear your mind and be more present in your daily life. I can send you a link to the app I use—”
“Later,” I said. He helped me to my feet. The vertigo left as fast as it had come on. We crept low, under the cabin windows, toward the voice I’d heard. The voice that had gone silent.
I peeked around the cabin. In the moonlight, I could make out a couple of sun chairs. An end table. A few half-empty cocktail glasses. It was a lounge area. Deserted.
No, not quite.
There was a lifeless man in a checkered suit jacket, splayed out on his back.
Caruso.
Dark red soaked through his shirt near the collar. The spot was small as a dime, but that was all it took. I tried to look everywhere except for his eyes, but it was impossible to look away. They were open, staring straight up at the stars, unblinking. He was gazing into the infinite.
Barack knelt beside him. The president was known for keeping his emotions in check, but he was a human being. A human being whose friend had been taken from him by a single gunshot. I could feel the anger rising off him like heat. His bottom lip was trembling.
I felt a hard poke in my lower back. I didn’t have to turn around to know it was the barrel of a gun.
“Move,” a voice said. I glanced back to get a glimpse of my new friend. It was another young man, this one barrel-chested and wearing Crooks’ colors. It was like they rolled them off an assembly line.
He nudged me again, pushing me forward. I stumbled toward Barack, who caught me.
I had a sinking feeling in my gut. Somebody had wanted to get the two of us far
from the Secret Service. They knew the only way to do that was to trick us into thinking we’d come up with the idea ourselves. All they needed was to convince us that there was nobody we could trust in the city. That we had to do this alone.
Suddenly, it all came together in my head. Shaun had been abducted from the hospital by a big man. Barack and I had both assumed “big” as in “tall,” since there was no video to verify the man’s identity. What if the receptionist had meant “big” as in “the size of a refrigerator”?
Bento Box was waiting for us on the other side of the cabin. Despite the bandage wrapped around his head, Rahm’s fixer had a confident, self-satisfied look on his face. Another armed young man flanked him, decked out in silver and black.
“If you’re here for Caruso’s TED Talk, it’s been canceled,” Bento Box said. “Welcome to his DEAD Talk.”
53
The storage hold under the deck was filled with dozens of cardboard boxes. One was open. In the dim light, I could see an Uzi inside, an automatic weapon I’d only seen in movies. There were a few extra clips in the box. I already knew the rest of the boxes contained more exotic weaponry—I’d seen the manifest of missing guns. There were enough boxes here to fill a shipping container.
Bento Box led us through the storage area to a closet, where, gagged and handcuffed to an exposed pipe, sat Shaun Denton. His lips were cracked, bleeding. There was a hospital bracelet on his wrist.
“Why keep him like this?” I asked.
“He’s a bargaining chip. I was hoping we could all come to some sort of deal. Would you rather I tossed him overboard with his wheelchair?”
“I’d rather see him in the hospital,” I said.
“Why do you guys care about this kid? His own family wouldn’t care if he went on a permanent vacation,” Bento Box said. “His aunt’s too strung out half the time to know where he’s at, and the rest of the time she’s working for eight bucks an hour to keep the lights on. Did she go see him in the hospital?”
I didn’t say anything. Shaun’s eyes fluttered open and closed. He was still partially sedated.
“You’re beginning to see how things are, Joe,” the fixer said. “This isn’t Delaware. This isn’t some peace-and-love hippie commune where the only currency is maple syrup.”
“You’re thinking of Vermont.”
“Which one is Delaware?”
“The First State,” I said, puffing my chest up. “Our number one export is dairy milk.”
“Since we’re talking trivia, tell me something: Why didn’t you tell me your boy here was part of the Rising Stars program? When I asked how you knew him, you acted like you’d forgotten how to speak English all of a sudden.”
Barack was being suspiciously quiet. I hoped that he was trying to calculate a way out of our predicament, and not simply trying to bottle up his anger. If he went supernova, would I be able to contain him?
“Shaun’s a victim in all of this,” I said. “Let him go, and then we can talk.”
Bento Box wagged a finger at us. “Shaun’s been a bad, bad boy. He knew how lax security was around the freight yard. Tell me: Where do you think the Red Door gets all those donations from?”
“The community,” I said. I couldn’t look at Shaun, because I knew where this was going.
“And where does the community get box after box of canned goods and electronics and whatever else falls out of a jimmied shipping container? Thou shalt not steal from thy neighbor doesn’t apply when it’s from a boxcar passing through your town, apparently. Pastor Brown knows all the shipments are insured, so who’s he hurting? His boys know how to work crowbars.”
Barack’s expression was pained. Was he realizing how few options we had, or was the fixer getting to him? Shaun looked away when I finally looked his way.
I didn’t need Shaun to confirm that what Bento Box was saying was true. I could see how the burglary had gone down now. Shaun had helped his fellow juvenile ex-cons plot the heist. How many times they’d pulled similar jobs was anyone’s guess. This time, they’d broken into two containers before hitting the jackpot. In the third container they found the weapons.
“Stealing canned goods and electronics was one thing. But the kids, including Shaun, knew Pastor Brown wouldn’t approve of them taking those guns. Couldn’t tell him. They also knew they needed to stash the guns somewhere until the heat blew over. Couldn’t hide them in a storage unit or in some homeboy’s pad. Somebody would talk. Somebody would rip them off.”
“So they went to Caruso.”
Bento Box patted a support beam. “They saw the yacht as a floating stash house. Even if someone found out the guns were here, who would dare rip off an OG like Caruso? They fed him some BS about the church doing a charity drive, one of those gun buyback programs. He wasn’t an idiot, of course. Saw right through it. But he also thought that if the guns were on his boat, then they weren’t in the community. He knew the kids were looking for some way to unload the guns, but it was going to take weeks. Months. I suppose he planned to reason with them when the time came. Unfortunately for him, his time came first.”
I’d known it from the moment I’d seen his body on the deck. That didn’t make it any less painful to hear.
Caruso was innocent.
54
I felt like I’d been hit by an elevated train. Barack had a similarly shocked look on his face.
Bento Box laughed. “Don’t look so surprised.”
“He was at the freight yard this morning,” I said, as if that could justify how wrong we’d been.
“Caruso gave your boy Shaun a ride to work. Probably lecturing him the whole time, too.” He ran his fingers over the Uzi like he was petting like a cat. “Trying to get him to do the right thing. What he didn’t know was that Shaun had already tried to ‘do the right thing.’”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I do,” Barack said, breaking his long silence. “He’d gone to the police. He’d turned on his crew, because of what happened to his mother.”
The fixer’s eyebrows went up. “Winner winner, chicken dinner. Shaun talked to a neighborhood cop he knew through the Red Door. The cop must have been all reassuring, telling him nobody would ever know who had reported the heist, blah blah blah.”
“Liar,” Shaun mumbled. “He was a liar.”
The cop wrote up his report so that it looked like the kid was fingering the Crooks, Bento Box explained. The cop was a member of the Red Door and didn’t want to make trouble for Pastor Brown. The report may have been marked CONFIDENTIAL, but nothing stays confidential in this town. The cop knew that much. He was thinking ahead, trying to work the angles. Trying to see how he could cut himself a piece of the pie. “Someone inside the department tipped me off to the report. You don’t win the lottery without paying taxes, so when I went to collect from the Crooks, imagine their surprise. The cop broke down in my hands pretty fast and admitted what was what.”
I watched Bento Box crack his knuckles. “And the gang member who shot Shaun, Kendrick. The one who was killed in the car accident…”
“I wasn’t the only one who’d got hold of the cop’s informant report. Somebody must have slipped the Crooks a copy. As the saying goes, snitches get stitches. Especially lying snitches. That’s also why they lent me a few boys to help out with this operation.”
There was another reason they were helping, I realized. Caruso was a former Crook. The gang couldn’t stand that he’d made it out, that he’d made something of himself. He might have been respected in the old neighborhood, but that didn’t mean the Crooks wouldn’t take him out if given the chance.
I could see where Benny Polaski was going with this. He kept his hands clean. It was almost certain that one of the Crooks had put the bullet in Caruso’s chest. The fixer had kidnapped Shaun, but that was only because Kendrick had so thoroughly bungled his assassination attempt—first, he’d let Shaun live, and second, he’d been spooked away from the hospital by our presence in the parking gara
ge. By then, Barack and I were involved. Shaun had more value alive than dead.
A bargaining chip. My stomach turned at the thought. What’s more, Bento Box knew he could demand almost anything from us in exchange for Shaun. He had us over a barrel.
The second foot soldier, who’d stayed behind on the deck, burst into the room, rifle slung over his shoulder.
“There’s a boat,” he said.
Bento Box turned to him. “And?”
“A Coast Guard boat.”
Bento Box narrowed his eyes at us. This wasn’t part of his plan. I believed he had his own contacts within the police department that he’d trusted to steer law enforcement away from Caruso’s yacht. The Feds were out of his price range, apparently.
“Did you do something stupid?” he spat at us.
I hadn’t called the Coast Guard. Neither had Barack. Maybe Steve had, though the timing was off.
“Let me go up and talk to them,” I said.
“You’re crazy,” Bento Box said. Barack also shot me a worried look. Whatever plan he’d been trying to cook up had obviously been blown to holy heck by the arrival of the Coast Guard.
“I don’t want to see anyone else get hurt,” I said. “I’ll go up and let whoever’s in the boat know it’s all a misunderstanding. They’re here for us, not for you. Not for your guns. I tell them everything’s jolly as a green giant. You let us take Shaun. We never speak about any of this ever again. Nobody goes to jail. Nobody dies.”
The gun-toting Crooks were watching Bento Box with anticipation, waiting for orders. They were young and dumb, fueled by lethal cocktails of testosterone and adrenaline. Their boss had more self-control. He knew that if a firefight broke out, the safest place to be wasn’t on a boat carrying half a ton of live ammunition.
“Take him upstairs,” he ordered, and then turned to me. “Get rid of the Feds. Not a word about the guns. When you return, then we’ll start bargaining. I’m going to stay down here with your friends. An insurance policy.”
Hope Rides Again Page 18