by Trace Conger
"It's too much of a coincidence. Someone comes after you and then me? They have to be connected. I've talked to Porter, Messner, Sontag, and Gretchen. They each gave me a piece of the puzzle, and now you've given me the rest."
"If you've talked to Gretchen, then Victor knows every move you've made."
"What?"
"Gretchen is sleeping with him. Started seeing him after they picked up Joseph. Hell, maybe before they picked him up, I don't know."
I thought back to my conversation with Gretchen in the Palm Court and her invitation to go back to her room. There's a good chance I dodged a literal bullet by walking out of that restaurant when I did.
"When I saw her, she tried to convince me that you were behind the hit on me," I said.
"Now it's starting to make sense." He shook his head.
"How's that?"
"Maybe Victor didn't want you dead. Maybe he just used you to find me. Maybe he sends someone after you, someone he knows is going to fail. He knows you'd look into things and eventually follow the bread crumbs back here. Gretchen points you in my direction. You track me down, show up on my doorstep just in time for Victor's men to shotgun me in my safe house."
"That seems like a long shot. A lot would have to fall into place for that to happen."
"And yet, that's exactly what happened. Maybe Victor tricks you into finding me, they rub me out, and Victor get his promotion."
Nicky might be onto something, but that was a complicated plan, and complicated plans rarely work. There was too much that could go wrong, and I don't believe Victor could pull all those strings. Or maybe Nicky was right and I just didn't want to admit I'd been played.
"I'll get to the bottom of that later," I said. "Right now, I'm only concerned with getting you in front or Spiro and Napoli."
"I'll make you a deal. If you get me in front of that commission and they sign off on my father's plan to put me on top, then I'll take care of Victor and Eddie for you. I'll even let you watch."
I was thinking of what Nicky's retribution might look like when my phone rang. It was Lyle Messner.
"I set up the meeting," he said. "Tomorrow, ten a.m. The Gramercy Park Hotel. Room 722."
"Seven twenty-two. Got it. We'll be there."
I clicked off the phone and turned to Nicky. "Now we just have to lay low until tomorrow morning."
Nicky nodded and stared at me like he was trying to figure something out. "Why are you helping me?" he asked.
"I told you. Your father asked me to find you."
"I know that, but why are you doing it? You don't owe my father anything. And you hate me. So why do it?"
"I don't hate you, Nicky. I just didn't have any reason to like you."
"What's the difference?"
"Maybe there isn't one. When I first came here, you were on my short list of people I thought might want me dead. I'd planned to find you anyway. It didn't much matter that Joseph asked me to do it too."
He nodded again. "Well, thanks for what you did back there in Brookville. And for what you're doing now."
"You're welcome."
22
Wild Night at Hoster Hall
I had been asleep for a few hours when I awoke to the sound of screaming and gunfire. Nicky was already watching the video monitors mounted to the basement wall. Still as a statue.
"They're here," he said.
"Who?"
He pointed to the middle screen. "Eddie Nash and his men. They're here for us."
I looked at the screen to see a mob of customers running out the front door and a half dozen men firing toward the back of the club.
"They're here for us," he repeated.
He was babbling something about staying in Brookville as I snatched my .45 from the inside of my jacket and went for the stairs. I took them two at a time and threw my shoulder into the door, knocked it open and stumbled into the rear of the club behind the stage. My body had almost forgotten about the pounding it took at the hands of Brick's brother-in-law and Alfie’s men, but the collision with the door phoned in a reminder.
I emerged from behind the stage to find the bartender who had served me the root beer two days earlier firing a submachine gun toward the front of the club. He wasn't used to the weapon and was firing wildly, the recoil knocking him about. Zoe appeared from his side, fired off two shots from her own weapon and ducked behind the bartender, who ejected his spent magazine.
One of Nash's men rose from behind the front of the bar and I fired off six rounds, waiting two seconds between each to give the bartender enough time to reload. I scanned the front of the club but didn't see anyone else. Once the bartender was locked and loaded, Zoe slipped over to me and pushed me back behind the stage.
"You and Nicky have to get out of here," she said.
"Where's the rest of Nash's men?"
"Outside. Regrouping. We don't have a lot of time."
One of the front windows shattered and a flaming bottle smashed against the floor. A wall of flame erupted up to the ceiling and engulfed several nearby tables. A few seconds later, another flaming cocktail exploded inside the club, filling the front section with thick, black smoke and triggering the sprinkler system.
The bartender began firing again and Zoe grabbed my head and tilted my ear toward her mouth.
"Get Nicky. Take the tunnel behind the refrigerator." She was yelling, but I could barely hear her over the machine gun. "Take the white panel van to West Harlem Piers. Look for Virgil." She slammed a set of keys into my hand. "White panel van. West Harlem Piers. Virgil. Go!"
She pushed me toward the trapdoor, raised her weapon and started firing toward the front of the club.
When I reached the bottom of the steps, Nicky was still standing in front of the monitors, which were now completely blurred out thanks to the smoke. I pushed him away from the monitors, knocking him out of his trance.
"Come on, we're out."
I jumped over the kitchen counter and jerked the refrigerator out from the wall. A sharp pain lit up my side causing my jaw to go numb.
There, behind the refrigerator, was an old delivery tunnel, possibly from the days of prohibition. Nicky pushed past me and darted into the tunnel without hesitation. I followed behind, as he used the glow from his cell phone to light our way. A few minutes later, we reached a door at the other end of the tunnel. Opening it, we found ourselves in the back room of a hair salon. I unlocked the salon's back door, which led to a small parking lot. There, sitting next to a station wagon, was a white panel van.
"That's our ride," I said.
I unlocked the doors and we were on our way to West Harlem Piers. It was a little past midnight, and had it not been for our ten a.m. meeting at the Gramercy Park Hotel, I would have jettisoned Zoe's plan and put a few hundred miles between us and Manhattan. Instead, I took the Henry Hudson Parkway to the pier and waited.
A moment later, a security guard ten years past mandatory retirement age rapped a heavy black flashlight on the passenger window. Nicky cracked it.
"You Connor?"
"Who's asking?" I said.
"Virgil."
I nodded.
"Park over there and get out of the van," he said.
"You sure we can trust this guy?" asked Nicky.
"Don't have a lot of options at the moment."
"How do you think Nash found out we were at that club? One of your friend's men must have talked. How do you know this one won't rat us out too?"
"If Zoe wanted us dead, we wouldn't have made it out of that basement. She's solid. I trust her."
"Hope you're right."
I parked the van and we stepped out to find Virgil waving us over to an electric golf cart. He drove us down the pier until we reached a row of five industrial shipping containers. Virgil stopped the cart, shuffled over to one of the containers, unlocked and opened it, and waved us over.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," said Nicky.
"It'll only be for a few hours," I said. "Until
the heat passes."
He shot me a look but didn't respond.
We left the golf cart and approached the shipping container. There were six beds inside.
"Not The Plaza," said Nicky.
"It's made to keep you alive," said Virgil. "Not made for comfort." He held out a weathered hand. "Need your cell phones."
"Why?"
"Zoe said to collect 'em. Figures they're bugged." He waited with his hand out. "You'll get 'em back."
We handed over our phones and stepped inside the container.
"I'll open ya up in the morn'n. Get some sleep. Ain't nothing else to do in there."
"Except suffocate," said Nicky.
"Yeah, I guess that too."
Virgil struggled against the weight of the door, but he finally won out and closed us in. I listened as he slid the vertical metal rod into place and clamped the lock shut.
"How much air you figure we've got in here?"
"Try not to think about it," I said. "Get some sleep. We got a long day tomorrow."
I felt around for the bed and laid down. The inside of the container was so dark I couldn't tell if my eyes were closed or not. I thought about all the ways we could have been compromised. Messner didn't know we were staying at Zoe's place. Nicky was right; someone in Zoe's organization had to give us up. While I trusted Zoe, I couldn't say the same about anyone working for her. Victor Tan and Eddie Nash wanted Nicky dead, and they had the financial resources to buy anyone they wanted.
I hoped Virgil wasn't on that list.
The container door swung open at nine a.m. I was sitting on the bed with my .45 in my hand. Not that I could see to shoot anything, because the bright sun temporarily blinded me as it chased away the darkness inside the container.
When my vision returned, Zoe, Virgil, and a man I'd never seen before stood in front of me.
"I see you're still alive," I said. "Did you get Eddie Nash?"
"No. He torched my place and then disappeared. I've got eyes out for him. I'll get him."
"Sorry about your club."
"We'll settle up on that later," she said.
"How did they find us, Zoe? No one knew we were there."
"I don't know yet, but I'll get to the bottom of it."
"Cricket?"
"Got no reason to believe he's anything but loyal," she said. "Either of you make any cell phone calls from my place?"
Nicky climbed out of the bed next to mine, his hands rubbing his face.
"I didn't call anyone," I said, turning to Nicky. "You?"
"One or two."
"Who'd you call?" I said.
"I called Brick's cell phone. Wanted to see if he made it out of the ambush in Brookville."
"Who else?"
"Victor Tan. Told him I was going to put a bullet through his head."
"Jesus Christ."
"I didn't tell him where I was."
"Maybe he traced your incoming call," said Zoe. "I've got someone looking at both your phones. I'll let you know if we find anything."
"I need a—"
Zoe tossed a cell phone in my lap before I could finish my sentence.
"Make sure I get it back," she said. "Where are you going from here?"
"We've got a meeting to get to."
23
Hotel Illness
Zoe's driver dropped us off in front of the Gramercy Park Hotel on the corner of Lexington Avenue and East Twenty-First Street. If Victor was somehow tracking Nicky or me through our cell phones, his signal died when Zoe snatched our phones last night. He'd have no idea we were here, but I wasn't about to get lazy with Nicky. He was still my responsibility until he walked out of that hotel room as the head of the Sontag Clan.
I went through the front doors first, my hand gripping the .45 stashed in my jacket pocket. Nicky was a step behind me, walking close like a person waiting for someone to take a shot at them.
Even though Eddie Nash had been in Zoe's club last night during our brief firefight, I had no idea what he looked like. I asked Nicky to scrutinize everyone in the lobby. He'd recognized Victor Tan's men at the home in Brookville and could do it again. Nicky took his time, checking each face.
Once he was satisfied the lobby was clear, we moved across the black-and-white tile floor, passed the grand staircase and red-carpet waterfall, then reached the elevator bank. I pressed the call button and we waited, my hand still inside my pocket and Nicky still standing close. When the door opened, a man in a suit carrying a newspaper exited and we stepped in. I pressed the button for the seventh floor and we started upward.
The elevator dinged as we passed each floor, finally coming to a rest on seven. The door opened and I peered out. The floor was empty except for a maid's cart parked between guest rooms.
We stepped out into the hallway. A brass placard directed us to room 722. We moved down the hallway side by side. I spent most of the time looking behind me. We reached 722, but before knocking, I pressed my ear to the door. I could hear faint talking. Idle chatter, but nothing discernible.
I'm not an easy person to rattle. The US Army trained me how to stay calm in most situations, how to keep the blood pressure down, and the shakes away. When that shit creeps in, you start thinking funny, and that's when bad things happen. I'd been able to keep it together since arriving back in New York, but for some reason, standing in front of that solid black door made something click inside me. Doubt crept in, and I had the urge to run for the first time in a long while. I pushed it back down inside from wherever it came from and knocked on the door.
We waited. I glanced at Nicky, who appeared more relaxed than I'd seen him in the last twenty-four hours.
There were footsteps on the other side of the door. My muscles tightened and the .45 was heavier in my hand. It felt like I was carrying a boat anchor inside my jacket pocket.
The knob turned and the door opened slowly. A bald man wearing a black polo shirt underneath a light gray sport coat ushered us in.
In front of us were two chairs: one brown leather and the other red velvet. Between the chairs was a three-wheeled liquor cart with mirrored shelves. It was stocked with top-shelf bottles and crystal glasses. My hand was still in my pocket, and I waited for the man in the gray sport coat to pat me down, but he didn't.
"Mr. Spiro?" he said, looking toward the bedroom.
Alfred Spiro, boss of the Spiro Clan, walked out of the room. He looked to be pushing eighty. He was thin and frail, but looked the part in his three-piece, charcoal-gray suit with a red handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket. He shook Nicky's hand and took a seat on the leather chair. A moment later, Armand Napoli walked out of another bedroom. He was younger than Spiro by a good twenty years. He sported a crew cut and a thin neck. He nodded at me, shook Nicky's hand, and sat next to Spiro.
I'd never witnessed a mob initiation before, but I assumed it wasn't like the movies where someone slices their palm open and bleeds on a table in front of everyone before taking an oath of loyalty. That was for show. This was more transactional, an official passing of the torch from Joseph Sontag to his son. After this moment, the Spiro and Napoli clans would recognize Nicky as the sole leader of the Sontag Clan. And that meant everyone else in the Sontag organization would have to accept him too. Anyone trying to replace him with an unsanctioned hit would face the swift and violent fury of Spiro and Napoli. That's how they kept the peace—cooperation. No one wanted a war, because those are bloody and unprofitable.
After this meeting, Nicky would likely appoint an advisor, who would put the word out that Nicky was in charge. That proclamation would force Victor Tan, Eddie Nash, and anyone loyal to them to leave the city if they wanted to keep breathing. Nicky would go after them of course with the full resources of the Sontag organization. If they pulled in someone like Zoe and her Whisper Network, which they probably would, they'd remove Victor and Eddie from the gene pool within a week. Two weeks tops.
Spiro and Napoli motioned for Nicky to sit down. He did so, sitting
with his legs open wide and his palms on his knees.
"Shall we begin?" said Spiro.
With that, two men stepped out of the suite's third bedroom. I recognized one of them immediately: Victor Tan. I assumed the other man, a younger man in jeans and a zip-up black sweater, was Eddie Nash, Victor's triggerman. Before I realized what was happening, Nash raised a pistol from his side and fired three rounds into Nicky. Nicky and the chair he was sitting in tumbled to the ground. Nash raised the gun toward me and fired, but I dove through the open bedroom door on my right, pulling my .45 as I landed next to the bed. I fired two shots blindly into the suite's main room and the men scattered. Kicking the door closed, I locked it and jumped behind the bed. Someone tried the handle and I sent two more slugs through the door, about a foot above the crystal knob.
I didn't have much time. They'd be organizing on the other side. If I stayed in here, this was only going to end one way. That door would come down, probably blown off its hinges with a shotgun they had stashed in one of the other bedrooms. A second burst from the same shotgun would end me. I didn't plan on bleeding to death in a suite in the Gramercy Park Hotel, but that meant moving quickly. I fired two more shots through the door and rushed to open the bedroom window. Most hotels seal their windows shut to save on air conditioning costs. Lucky for me, the Gramercy didn’t care about their energy bills. If they had, I’d be looking for a way to smash through the window, but instead, I was looking seven stories down at a paved alley. It was narrow, and the area below was more suited for foot traffic than vehicle traffic. On the other side of the alley stood a luxury apartment building. I gauged the gap between the two buildings to be twelve to sixteen feet, which meant I was close enough to jump the gap and hit one of the balconies on the other side. I’m six-foot-one, so the length of my body alone would get me almost halfway across the alley. Factor in a solid boost off the concrete window ledge and I’d clear the distance. Hitting one of the balcony railings below was going to hurt like a bitch, but I’d take that pain over whatever awaited me if I stayed in this hotel room.
