Weapons

by Matt Rogers

King said, ‘You ever met anyone that reminded you of me?’

  Blood dripped from Whelan’s chin into his lap, staining the wool.

  The man said, ‘Once.’

  ‘How’d that work out for you?’

  ‘Not well.’

  ‘I’m the same deal.’

  ‘I’ll say it again — what do you need?’

  ‘You’re a businessman, yes? You have a vested interest in doing what’s best in the long-term?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then you’re going to tell me exactly where that truckload of crates was going. The ones that came off the Hudson.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘If the next thing that comes out of your mouth isn’t what I want to hear, I’ll go find your sidearm and shove it up your ass.’

  Silence.

  ‘You think I’m lying?’

  ‘No,’ Whelan said. ‘I think you’re telling the truth.’

  ‘So where were the crates headed?’

  ‘East Harlem.’

  ‘Where precisely?’

  ‘There’s a trio of abandoned townhouses that got halfway through construction before the developer went tits up. They haven’t knocked them down yet, and they’re a fuckin’ haven for squatters. I was told to drop the truck there.’

  ‘By who?’

  ‘They kept themselves anonymous.’

  ‘Tommy…’

  ‘I’m telling the truth. I care more about my own life than protecting my clients. If I knew more about them, I’d fuckin’ tell you.’

  ‘They’re important enough to stay anonymous, and yet you outsourced the job to a half-rate thug like Gianni?’

  ‘He wasn’t half-rate,’ Whelan said. ‘You and your friend are fuckin’ killers. Cold hard killers. You could make a lot of cash in a business like this.’

  ‘We do fine for ourselves.’

  ‘Piggybacking off the hard work of people like me?’

  King almost laughed. But instead of taking the whole situation in jest, he got angry. He shoved Whelan back into the couch and pressed a palm against his throat and tightened his grip. Whelan gasped and wheezed and coughed and spluttered. King said, ‘Give me the address.’

  ‘O—okay,’ Whelan wheezed.

  King let go, and the old man bent over and vomited on the floor.

  King went over to the kitchen, fished a notepad and pen out of the drawers, and came back to the sofa.

  He dropped the notepad, followed by the pen, on Whelan’s head.

  Whelan scrawled an address in cursive on the lined paper, and King scrutinised it.

  As promised, it was in East Harlem.

  King crouched down. ‘If this is the wrong location, I’ll come back here and skin you alive.’

  ‘Please,’ Whelan said, coughing blood. ‘You have to believe me. If there’s nothing there … I don’t know — shit, man, it was just the place I was told to deliver the goods. I have no allegiance to the people who hired me. I don’t care what happens to them.’

  ‘How did you communicate with them?’

  ‘Burner phones.’

  ‘You still got the numbers?’

  ‘Yeah, but what good will that do?’

  King sighed. ‘You’re right. Well, I’m going to chase this up. In the meantime, you’ll probably quadruple your security here, or move to another location. It won’t matter. I’ll find you — I promise you that.’

  ‘I know you will.’

  ‘And I’ll bring Slater with me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And we’ll make your life a living hell.’

  ‘I know.’

  King looked down at the notepad and said, ‘You want to change that address to the right one?’

  ‘It is right. I swear.’

  ‘Okay, Tommy. Don’t make me come back.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  King left him there in a puddle of his own puke, and walked into the entranceway.

  He placed a hand on the door handle and froze.

  He heard something.

  On the other side of the door.

  The slightest twitch of movement.

  61

  The door flew open, and a body cascaded out into the communal corridor.

  It was an old man.

  So the shooter hesitated.

  Holy shit, the guy was probably thinking, that’s the boss.

  King followed Tommy Whelan out, hustling after the old mob boss, who he’d thrown double-handed out the door. It masked the clean shot the thug was looking for, and King only needed a second to capitalise. He hurled Whelan out of the way again, and came face-to-face with the fourth bodyguard — the one he’d initially missed. This guy was also dressed in a grey overcoat and a Brixton cap, and he had a 9mm in his hand, and he was searching for an opportunity to get a shot off.

  He didn’t find one.

  Because King was right there in his face, and he used the sudden explosion of activity to his advantage and shouldered the guy into the wall. And when King slammed a shoulder into someone, it half-crippled them, so when the guy bounced off the plaster and came right back in the other direction he was in no state to get off a decent shot.

  And at that point King was ready to pounce.

  So he did.

  He had his own gun in an appendix holster under his sweater, easily accessible, but he didn’t want to fire an unsuppressed shot in a residential complex — and truthfully he didn’t need to. He grabbed the guy’s head and crushed it between two hands and pinned it in place, then thundered an elbow into the side of his temple. He used the guy’s sudden lack of equilibrium to wrestle the 9mm out of his hand and throw it across the corridor, disarming him instantly.

  Then he punched him in the stomach, folding him over, which led straight to a knee to the forehead, which twisted his neck at an unnatural angle and planted him on the floor, dazed and confused. King then stepped back, lined up his aim, and booted the guy in the face.

  Lights out.

  King went straight across the corridor and collected the 9mm, then used it to pistol-whip Whelan on the bridge of his nose. The old man went to howl, but King clamped a hand down over his mouth and threw him back into his own apartment.

  King loomed over him.

  ‘Okay,’ Whelan said. ‘Okay, okay…’

  ‘Okay what?’

  ‘I’ll give you the right address.’

  King seethed with rage. ‘You clearly don’t understand how serious I am about needing to fix this.’

  ‘I don’t know what I was doing, man,’ Whelan said. ‘I needed to move some cargo. They wouldn’t even tell me what it was. They just wanted local experts to handle it when it came off the Hudson.’

  ‘You sure did a good job of that.’

  ‘No thanks to you.’

  ‘Write down the correct address.’

  Whelan complied. Maybe because King hadn’t hit him again. He was bleeding from the nose and underneath the chin, and he knew how bad King could make him hurt. So he crab-crawled over to the notepad that King had dropped in the hallway, and scribbled a new address underneath. A drop of blood ran off the tip of his nose and splashed the paper.

  King picked up the notepad, then took the Glock out of his appendix holster and pointed it at the old man’s face. ‘Thanks, Tommy.’

  The face turned ghost-white.

  ‘I’m not lying this time!’ Whelan said. ‘I gave you what you needed!’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Then what the fuck is this?’

  ‘Do you think I’m some sort of moral hero?’ King said.

  ‘I thought that’s exactly what you were,’ Whelan said. ‘You and your friend. Vigilantes protecting the city, or whatever you’re fuckin’ calling it.’

  ‘You ruin thousands of lives with what you call “unions.” You extort small businesses and workers for all the spare pennies they have, and you call it protection. You run guns through the city. You arm whoever needs arming. You bring heroin and crack up fr
om Mexico and break it down into the cheapest, most toxic shit you can feasibly get away with, then you lace it with fentanyl and sell it to the poor and the homeless and the addicted so they can OD in peace. And then, to make sure you keep your business interests in all these areas viable, you pay off cops and government workers and federal agents so you can gun down whoever you need to gun down to stay on top. You’re probably responsible for twenty percent of the murders in New York City.’

  Whelan sat there in silence.

  King said, ‘You really think I’d know all that and leave you alive to carry on getting away with it?’

  ‘I think that—’

  But King didn’t care what Whelan thought.

  He shot him through the forehead, as he’d done to hundreds in the past.

  And he didn’t feel bad about it.

  Despite his stature as one of the toughest, meanest, most ruthless sons-of-bitches on the East Coast, Tommy Whelan died like the rest of them.

  Quickly.

  King tucked the Glock into its holster, and put the bloody notepad in his coat pocket, and left the scene immediately.

  62

  True to Whelan’s description, there were three townhouses.

  King hovered on the other side of the road, deep in the shadows of a trash-ridden alley, and scrutinised their design.

  They were luxury developments, four storeys each, all modern glass and steel and brick in a haphazard amalgamation of something that was these days considered “stylish.” King figured they would have gone for many millions each if they’d been completed. But they were surrounded by the old ochre residential complexes native to East Harlem, and their modernity didn’t gel with the rest of the street. Not to mention the fact that they were crushed up against each other due to a lack of available land. There was no room between each building — not even a claustrophobic side passage.

  And they were definitely half-finished.

  Most of the exteriors had been completed, but King could see through the windows, and the interior of each building was nothing but an empty shell. There were exposed beams and tufts of insulation hanging from the ceilings. The perimeter fence — wire, see-through — ran around the entire four-building complex, and construction tape hung in loose tattered threads. But what stopped scavengers from ransacking the valuable materials was the security system still in place around the entire thing. There were CCTV cameras and visible alarms above the doors and giant warning signs plastered everywhere.

  King knew it was all a front. If the developers had gone bankrupt, they weren’t checking the tapes. The cameras probably weren’t even on. But it deterred looters, so they stayed up as the developers scrambled to come up with a solution to their financial woes.

  Until then, it would prove effective as a temporary, discreet meeting place.

  Or something worse…

  King remembered the claymores, and the guns, and the black boxes.

  Like someone was gearing up to defend a fortress.

  Is this where it’s all happening?

  A nondescript group of rundown buildings in East Harlem?

  Is this where they’ll bring the U.S. economy to its knees?

  He’d spent close to an hour scouting the surrounding streets, looking for potential vantage points to set up a sniper, but he’d come away confident. And, frankly, he wasn’t prepared to waste another second. He knew the beatings he’d dished out would catch up to him eventually through muscle fatigue and exhaustion. Besides, he was still hurting from the brawl the night before in his penthouse. Everything ached, but he was used to that. At the end of this, he’d sleep for two days straight, then get to work healing up with the same ferocity that he approached everything else with.

  For now, he would fight.

  So he was about to step out of the shadows and cross the street when his phone buzzed in his pocket.

  He pulled it out.

  Violetta.

  He answered.

  ‘Got an update for me?’ he said.

  ‘Plenty. Where are you?’

  There was urgency in her tone. She was stressed.

  He said, ‘Out the front of the location Tommy Whelan gave me. I was about to move in. It’s probably nothing, though. If I had to guess, this was the collection point for—’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she snapped. ‘Are you in East Harlem?’

  ‘Yes. How did you—’

  ‘You need to move in, right now.’

  ‘Why? If you’ve got information, I need it.’

  ‘Will Kettler was spotted in East Harlem on one of the CCTV feeds about an hour ago.’

  ‘Who the hell is Will Kettler?’

  ‘The founder of Geosphere.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Right… and we found out what the black box was.’

  King held his breath.

  She said, ‘It’s really bad, Jason. It’s some sort of encryption device, and it’s of a quality we’ve never seen before in civilian hands. We think it’s Russian technology, so it makes sense that it’s being used by the Chinese. With that much processing power, they could have done whatever the hell they wanted with the market from the safety of their own homes, and no-one would have known who started it, or when.’

  ‘So they were planning to do it in secrecy,’ King said. ‘Doesn’t that explain why they left their families?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if they had to follow through with this despite the lack of encryption, then running away to a tropical island with brand new identities would be preferable to having their families slaughtered alongside them for disobedience.’

  ‘Or staying here, and getting found out.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Violetta said. ‘It feels like they’re ten steps ahead.’

  ‘They didn’t get the tech they needed. Or the guns. Or the claymores. That’s what they were using as a backup plan, so on the off-chance they were found out they could slaughter anyone that came across them until their Chinese contacts could whisk them out of the country.’

  ‘You think that would have worked?’

  ‘I think they did exactly what three idiotic Wall Street power players would do in a situation like this.’

  ‘So get in there and find out.’

  ‘Call me if you need me.’

  ‘Be safe. I’ve got a feeling this is the beginning.’

  ‘Let’s hope not.’

  King ended the call and slid the phone back into his pocket. He’d shed the overcoat and the cap, and was wearing the same cashmere sweater and dress slacks, and now he picked up a couple of supplies off the alley floor he’d secured on his preliminary sweep.

  Namely, a Bluetooth earpiece and a clipboard, and a badge he’d had custom-printed at a small shop in East Harlem. It read, Michael.

  He made sure the Glock in his appendix holster wasn’t showing underneath the sweater, then adjusted his shirt collar and whistled a tune under his breath as he sauntered out of the laneway.

  There was no activity in the windows, or he would have waited. Save for a state-of-the-art hidden security system the occupants had installed on their own, there were no eyes on him. He crossed the busy street, approached the fence, and arched his eyebrows in surprise — a performance for anyone who might be watching. Then he shook his head, as if flabbergasted that this hadn’t been included in the job description. He set his clipboard down, placed both hands on the iron bars separating two sections of the fence, and heaved them apart.

  Then he wiped his brow for exaggerated effect — exactly like an office worker unaccustomed to the difficulties of manual labour — and walked right up to the middle townhouse.

  Taking a wild speculative guess.

  He rapped on the door over and over again, and at the top of his lungs shouted, ‘Excuse me! Hello! Is anyone in there? You are politely being asked to leave! Excuse me! I have been informed by the council that there are uninvited visitors dwelling in this residence. I must
assure you that this building is still the property of J.C. Randwick Developments and you must—’

  The door flew open in his face, and a gun barrel came out of the darkness and skewered into his forehead.

  A low voice said, ‘Get inside right now, you piece of shit.’

  63

  Holy shit, I got it right.

  King turned on the waterworks, generating crocodile tears out of thin air. He’d had a pistol shoved in his face before. He couldn’t remember a year that had passed since he was eighteen years old where that hadn’t been a regular occurrence. So his heart rate barely rose as the cold metal touched his skin, but that wasn’t how a real estate agent would react.

  So he bawled his eyes out.

  A hand reached out over the threshold and snatched his collar and dragged him inside.

  He stumbled in through the door, and it slammed shut behind him immediately.

  He couldn’t see much through his tears, but that was necessary for the role. If they frisk-searched him, it’d be over. They’d find the Glock, and that would be that. He could sense serious friction all around him — there was movement everywhere.

  But he sure as hell wasn’t getting anywhere by kicking in the front door and fighting an entire army at once, so deception was his best bet.

  Hands were on his sweater and throwing him to the floor, and before he knew it he was spread-eagled on his back on the cool tile. When he opened his eyes and looked through the tears he saw a large cavernous space comprising most of the ground floor. The lights weren’t working, because the building wasn’t finished, so the shadows were long and deep and the only illumination came from the street outside. Everything was cast in muted shades of blue.

  There were eight silhouettes standing over him.

  He couldn’t let his act slip. The next few seconds were paramount — they’d dictate how the rest of the altercation played out. Someone stomped down on his stomach, and he exaggerated his reaction. He moaned and curled into a ball and coughed and gasped, and silently thanked his lucky stars that the boot had come down a few inches away from his appendix holster.

  If they discovered the Glock, then there’d be a problem.