“You going to be the ghost with the most, huh? All right, son. Let’s ride.”
That night, Wesley was riding with us. He had once been the most feared assassin in the city. An artist of death. His reputation went all the way back, and not a word of it was a lie. Wesley was the ultimate contract man. The only way he ever interacted with the human race was to remove some of it.
Wesley didn’t make statements. He just made people dead. And he only did it for money. Nobody ever saw him; nobody ever wanted to. Everything was done over phones and dead-drops.
I’d known Wesley since we were little kids. Both State-raised, without parents we ever knew. Back then, I was always scared. I was incubated in terror, and it took only a glance, a gesture, or even a smell to open the floodgates inside me.
But nothing scared Wesley. Fear is a feeling. “I’m not a man,” he told me once. “I’m a bomb.”
When I was a young man, he was everything I ever wanted to be. Ice-cold, remorseless, never-miss efficient. You could kill Wesley—at least, that’s what some people thought—but you could never hurt him.
I finally found my family. The one I chose; the one that chose me. Wesley never looked for kin. Only for targets. No friends, no family, no home. And, finally, no reason to be here anymore.
The end kicked off when a Mafia don named Torenelli didn’t pay Wesley for some work. Bodies started dropping all over the city, all family men. Torenelli went into hiding. Wesley kept killing, sending the message. When that didn’t make the Mob give him up, Wesley decapitated Torenelli’s daughter, right in her own upscale co-op. Telling them he didn’t play by their Hollywood “code.” Rules and roles didn’t matter to a man who believed the difference between a priest and a pimp wasn’t what they sold, only what they charged.
Then Torenelli played his last card. An old viper named Julio I’d known since prison. Years before, Julio had hired me to do something about a freak who was sex-stalking his niece. That was a straightforward job, and I got it done easy enough. Julio said he had hired me, instead of using one of his own men, because he was Old School—you never mixed private business with family business. It had sounded right when he said it.
But when Julio hired me to meet Wesley, offer him whatever money the assassin wanted to call off the hit on Torenelli, I knew I was being middled. Just carrying the offer would be enough to convince Wesley I had gone over.
It didn’t happen like that. Julio thought Wesley and I were stalking each other, but what we were doing was making a trade.
After a while, they all got dead.
That should have ended it. But by then, Wesley’s hell-bound train had finally jumped the tracks. A decade before Columbine became an American nightmare, Wesley walked into a suburban high school with enough ordnance to take out every living creature in the place. After lobbing some grenades, then gunning down dozens of random victims, he released a deadly gas from the truck he had driven to the scene.
While the cops thought they were still negotiating with the maniac they had trapped inside, Wesley climbed to the roof of the high school. Before the police helicopters could even get off a shot, he held a bunch of dynamite sticks taped together over his head, like a psycho version of the Statue of Liberty, and blew himself into atoms.
We watched him go. Live on TV. It was on every channel, just like when they cover a war.
The package arrived a couple of weeks later: a nine-by-twelve flat envelope, thick with paper. His dark thumbprint was at the bottom of the last page.
That part of the package found its way to the cops. My inheritance from Wesley, a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, taking the weight for some of the things I’d done.
But there was another part to it, one the cops had never seen. A pocket-sized notebook, filled with Wesley’s precise printing. His accounts book.
Our kind don’t make out wills. But we do leave legacies.
We went over the plan as Clarence drove. At that hour, even the FDR wasn’t crowded; we were over the Willis Avenue Bridge and into the South Bronx badlands in minutes. The Plymouth blended right in.
My cell phone buzzed.
“What?” I answered.
“You tell me, sweetheart.” Michelle.
“Honey, have we got anybody out on the Rock, in the Women’s House?”
“I can find out. What’s up?”
“Wolfe’s been arrested. Just got arraigned. Judge put a half-million bail on her. She may be there for a while. I don’t want anything to—”
“Wolfe? They’ll probably build a throne for her, as many wife beaters as she’s put away.”
“Still . . .”
“I’m on it, baby.”
Michelle rang off just as we found what we were looking for. Big Nate’s place was a freestanding cinder-block building with cross-barred windows—it looked like a small-town jailhouse sitting on a prairie. A faint dirty-yellow glow came through the glass. Red neon promised bail bonds in several languages.
We gave it one slow circuit before Clarence docked the Plymouth, backing it into getaway position.
“Everybody set?” I asked.
“You going heeled, mahn?” Clarence asked, patting his chest to the left of his heart, where his nine-millimeter always rested.
“No,” I said. “We’ll do it the way I laid it out.” I had a never-registered .357 Mag in a hidden compartment next to the Plymouth’s fuel cell, but I didn’t want to chance a pat-down at the door.
The Prof held up a small bundle, wrapped in an old army blanket. He didn’t have to say any more. When I first met him, he was on his last prison stretch, and part of his rep was as a master of the twelve-gauge sawed-off.
“All right,” I said. “One more time. Me and Max go in. I’m the front man for a sweatshop that just got raided. I’m looking for someone to write a lot of little bonds—get the workers out and gone before they say something stupid and put INS on alert. Max is with me, covering the tong’s end of the deal . . . if they even ask.
“If we come piling out the door, you know what to do. Keep it high, Prof. Soon as they hear your scattergun, they’ll probably get back inside. And, around here, nobody’s calling 911.”
“You drop the name, you gotta carry the game, son,” the Prof warned. He unwrapped the sawed-off and laid it on the seat next to him.
I rang the bell. Waited for whoever was running the security camera to buzz us in.
The place hadn’t changed. A pair of low-grade industrial desks, a wall of khaki file cabinets. A splattering of hand-lettered signs, all warnings of one kind or another.
There was a man at each desk. One was in a cheap brown suit jacket, sitting behind some kind of ledger. The other was in a black nylon windbreaker, feet on the desk, a copy of Soldier of Fortune open in front of him. I figured the suit for the money man, the windbreaker for a bounty hunter.
The bounty hunter looked barroom-tough. The money man looked weasel-dangerous.
Max moved so he was standing against the left-hand wall. I walked over to the money man.
“I want to see Nate,” I told him.
“There’s no Nate here, friend,” he said. “You want a bond, you came to the right place. Otherwise . . .”
“He’s here,” I said, letting my eyes drift over to the door against the back wall. The one that said “Men” on it, with a “Closed for Repairs” sign plastered across its face. “He doesn’t let anyone else drive his Rolls,” letting him know I’d seen the immaculate old Silver Cloud sitting out back.
“Give me a name,” the money man said, not blinking.
“Nate wouldn’t like that,” I said. “And he wouldn’t like you looking at me that close,” I said, turning to face the bounty hunter.
The bounty hunter gave it about a second’s thought, then he dropped his eyes.
“Just tell him someone’s out here asking for him,” I said, keeping my voice a monotone. “Don’t be thinking crazy, because I’m not. Everyone knows you don’t keep cash around here.”
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“I can’t do that,” the money man said.
I stepped close to the money man’s desk. “Then tell him this,” I said, very softly. “Tell him, if I wanted to do him, I wouldn’t let people see me, like I’m letting you, right now. I’d just turn this place into a barbecue pit, and pick him off when it got too hot for him inside.”
The money man looked everyplace but my eyes.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You tell Nate what I said, it won’t make him nervous: it’ll calm him down. He’ll know who I am then. We’re old pals. Tell the tough guy over there to go ahead and pull his piece, keep me covered, if it’ll make you feel better, okay?”
The money man slitted his eyes. I counted to six in my head. “Step back,” he said. “Just a few feet, all right? I need some privacy. This is a long-distance call.”
I did what he wanted. He picked up the receiver, covered the mouthpiece with his hand. I looked over at the bounty hunter. He was a real professional: too busy playing stare-down with me to notice Max closing the gap between them.
“Go on back,” the money man said.
I turned to Max, barked something in quasi-Chinese. Even after all those years at Mama’s, I didn’t understand one word of the Cantonese and Mandarin she spoke interchangeably, but I could imitate the sounds enough to fool anyone who didn’t speak either one. It helped that Max nodded, like he was acknowledging what I said.
“I told him to wait out here for me,” I said to the money man. “He doesn’t speak English.”
The money man didn’t say anything. Max slid along the wall, just a few inches, to improve his angle of attack if the bounty hunter decided to role-play.
I walked over to the men’s room, tapped lightly. Heard a seriously solid deadbolt snap open. Turned the knob, and walked inside.
Big Nate was behind a flimsy little wood desk . . . and a transparent wall of Lexan thick enough to bounce a bullet, even at that close range.
“Come closer,” he said, speaking into a microphone he held in one tiny hand. “Talk into the speaker.”
I moved forward slowly, sat down on a chrome barstool with a cracked red leather top. That brought my mouth level with the speaking grid.
Nate was looking down at me. Behind his desk was a raised platform. It compensated for his four-and-a-half-foot height, the same way the specially built-up pedals on his Rolls let him drive.
“I need a bond,” I said. “A big one.”
“Never mind that,” he said, his frail voice amplified into resonant strength by the microphone he was holding. “You said something outside, to my man. Can you back it up?”
“Lucien Lagrande,” I said, pulling the name from my ghost brother’s accounts book. “You want more?”
The silence between us was thicker than the Lexan. But, from the moment I’d said that name, Big Nate knew he was done. Wesley had started his walk.
“You’re not saying you’re . . . ?”
“I’m his brother,” I said. The blood-truth.
Even as I said those words, I remembered the “home” they’d sent me to when I was an orphaned kid. What they did to me there. And what Wesley had whispered to me one night when we were together in the institution: “They’re easier when they’re sleeping,” the baby monster told me. “Fire works.”
It was all down in Wesley’s accounts book. Big Nate had been a visionary. Between the Jakes running ganja, the DRs moving powder, bikers cranking crystal, college kids selling Q, and everyone else slinging rock, money was stacking all over the city. The Italians had a hundred different laundries, but even if they had been willing to take in outsiders, nobody trusted a “family” that didn’t trust its own relatives.
That had become Nate’s real business, setting up custom-tailored laundries. Had them everywhere, and kept all the records in his head. His stock in trade was honesty. You gave Nate a hundred K cash, you got back whatever percentage he promised . . . and a string of receipts that would give a CPA an orgasm.
One night, a man named Lucien Lagrande came to visit Big Nate. Lagrande told him he knew the bail bonds weren’t the little man’s real business.
“You sitting on gold with this bail-bond front,” Lagrande had told him. “But that all finished now. You being . . . encompassed.”
Big Nate had laughed at him. Which Lagrande expected. Then he dropped the hammer. Big Nate had a piece of a Vegas casino. A little piece, but in his own name. If that came to light, Big Nate would lose both licenses—it’s illegal for a bondsman to have a piece of a casino, in either direction.
Big Nate felt his heart stop. “Actually fucking stop,” is what he told people, later.
“You got a week,” Lagrande told him. “Then you turn it over, or I turn you over. That simple, my man. Don’t worry, now. You get a taste. You keep on getting a taste. Once you encompassed, you part of my operation. A partner, even.
“You don’t play, you lose it all. Everyone scramble for pieces. I get some, but not all, I know that. This way, you go with me, I get the pie, sure, but you get to keep a nice fat slice.”
Lagrande lived in a three-story frame house in Brooklyn. It stood alone on a large vacant lot, the last in a row of condemned-then-razed derelict buildings. Word was, the whole thing was slated to become what the Mayor called an “oasis of greenery.”
The place was a fortress, surrounded by iron fencing, patrolled by dogs, lit by klieg lights at night, and occupied by no less than a dozen of Lagrande’s heavily armed crew. Nobody could get within a hundred yards without being spotted.
It was broad daylight when the house exploded into flames. Lagrande didn’t even make it to the fence before a sniper picked him off.
The police later figured that the shots must have come from a certain rooftop, more than a quarter-mile from the scene. Seven shots. Three into Lagrande, the other four into the men who had run out the front door with him.
“We know this much,” the press conference cop told his audience. “The recovered slugs were all fired from the same weapon. It’s as if whoever was shooting put one into each of them to bring them down, then scanned the field to make sure which one was Lagrande, before he finished him off with those head shots. As impossible as that sounds . . .” he finished, lamely.
That was a lot of years ago. But crime time runs different than citizen time. For permanent outsiders like us, time only matters when you’re doing it.
“I’m not a blackmailer,” I said to Big Nate. “And I didn’t come here to make threats. That name I said, it was just to prove in, okay? So you know where I’ve been, and what I know.”
And what I can do, I said in my mind, vibrating the unspoken words out to him.
The little man looked at the ceiling, as if he was considering a proposal. Then he picked up the microphone and whispered what everyone is too terrified to ask out loud. “Is Wesl—? Is he really . . . ?”
“Nobody knows,” I told him. A face-down hole card. The whisper-stream had it that Wesley was a falcon on my glove. Nobody knew for sure, and nobody liked the odds.
I watched his eyes. Stayed gentle inside myself, showing him respect by acting like I believed he was actually considering calling my bet.
“How big a number I need to write?” he finally said, tossing in his hand.
“ That’s a huge-ass bond,” the Prof said on the drive back. “Sure hope that fucking dwarf don’t think he too big to drop the vig.” The Prof was a couple of inches taller than Big Nate, on a good day.
“I ran it all down for him,” I said. “He knows Wolfe’s not going to jump. And she’s got a nice house, out in Forest Hills Gardens; cover him for more than the nut, it came to that.”
“So we don’t have to put up the fifty large?”
“Not a dime.”
“Honeyboy, listen to me for a minute. You wearing a murder face now. Not like you mad, like you . . . the way Wesley looked all the time. Got those straight-line lips and glass-cutter eyes, you hear what I’m saying?”
“I
don’t care—”
“Right. Know you don’t. Know you won’t. Only thing is, you know how people get when you scare them deep enough. They’ll tell you anything you want to hear.”
“Meaning, you don’t think Nate’s actually going to write the bond?”
“He’s either going to write it, or he’s going to run, son. Get down, go to ground, not be around. Not until this one’s all done.”
“If he—”
“Yo! Ice up, youngblood! What’s wrong with you? The little midget pulls a burn, he gets to learn. But that’s down the line, another time. What we’re here for is to get your girl the door. Say I’m on time with all that rhyme.”
“You’re right, Prof,” I assured him.
I didn’t want to take a chance on calling Davidson at his home. I had the number, but it was almost five in the morning by then, and I didn’t want to spook his kids—that kind of move could cost me some ground. Figured he wouldn’t have his cell turned on, either, so I called his office number and spoke into the tape.
“Go spring her; it’s covered. Surety is Korlok Bonding Company, in the Bronx.” I gave him the rest of the particulars, including the phone number and who to ask for.
“What’s next, mahn?” Clarence asked as I got back into the Plymouth.
“We have to wait a few hours,” I told him, signing the same message to Max. “Make sure Wolfe gets bailed, first. I have to find out some stuff. Figure, another twenty-four hours, we know exactly what we have to do. I’ll leave word at—”
Max tapped my chest. Shook his head “no” at me. Made the sign of a man eating with chopsticks.
“All right,” I told them all. “Mama’s at five this afternoon. Tell Michelle, too, okay?”
“ She came back, boss,” Gateman greeted me as I walked in the door of the flophouse.
“How long ago?”
“Around midnight. Had the Rottweiler with her again, too. Plus a guy. He’s been up before, last year. I remember him. Big guy. Looks like a farm boy, but he’s no Hoosier, I could tell.”
Mick, I thought. Good. If he was with Pepper, he wasn’t prowling the city, looking for someone to hurt.
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