by Tony Bulmer
‘You are kidding me Costello, all this running around, I could use a drink.’
‘If you want to chase that drink with breakfast in jail, then be my guest, because the way I read it, the gentlemen in the smart jackets are biding their time until the cops get here.’
Joe scowled, opened his mouth to argue, but stopped, his jaw hanging slack as Roxy Barrington emerged from an oak paneled door directly behind us. She looked immaculate in a little black dress, accessorized with a glittering array of diamond jewelry.
She broke a smile, followed quickly with a predatory look that glimmered brighter than fire. Stalking towards us, slowly, deliberately. She reached inside her handbag as though she was hunting for lipstick, or a lost cell phone.
‘Ms Barrington. How nice to see you,’ I said.
‘Mr. Costello, what a delight, and Mr. Russell too, I must admit it is a surprise to see you again.’
‘Laugh it up while you got chance sweetheart,’ snapped Joe.
Roxy Barrington tut-tutted. ‘You had your fun bad boy—hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, because as far as I am concerned the experience was distinctly underwhelming.’
Joe choked back an expletive.
But the Barrington girl continued apace, ‘You really must have a healthy constitution Mr. Russell, unnaturally healthy, but never mind that, you have brought the beautiful Miss Santos with you; so nice that you all could be with us, in this moment of triumph.’
‘How gracious of you Roxy,’ I said, without the slightest trace of the high-revving irony that was pounding through every vein in my body. ‘It is good to see that your father’s company has come so far. Perhaps you will join us for breakfast, after he rings the opening bell on the floor of the Stock Exchange this morning?’
Roxy Barrington gave me a barely concealed sneer. Up close her cloying perfume enveloped, wrapping my brain in its poisonous tendrils. ‘I do not know what you and your friends did to get in here Costello, but this is a private, members only Club… I think it is time that you left…all of you.’ As she said this, the white-gloved facilitators closed in around us, to assist our departure from the building.
Joe surged forwards.
I grabbed his arm. ‘Now is not the time,’ I said.
‘The hell it’s not, I’m gonna put the breaks on that little hussy right now.’
‘You heard yourself JR? ’said Inez, ‘You sound like an unreconstituted chauvinist.’
‘Yeah? Well maybe you would too, if that bitch on wheels had stabbed you in the neck with a syringe full of poison shit.’ hissed Joe.
Dead Famous 61
As dawn rose high over the Manhattan skyline, adrenaline powered my mind, forwards. We grabbed a yellow cab on the corner of 5th Avenue and headed downtown. As we approached Lower Manhattan, the police presence ramped up dramatically. Cruiser after cruiser blowing by—antsy cops with assault rifles and heavy gauge pump-action shotguns, standing alert at street-corner intersections and big business doorways.
‘They don’t like mad-dog bombers in this town,’ observed Joe.
‘Whoever planted the Hotel bomb, they meant us to find it,’ said Inez.
‘Ten pounds of C4 is some kind of diversion. If that little package had detonated, it would have caused a big, ugly mess that would have killed everyone in a hundred-yard radius and injured dozens more,’ said Joe. ‘You ask me, that’s just the kind of show the freaks who are after Barrington will pull at the opening bell this morning.’
‘Maybe Inez is right,’ I said, ‘every hit so far has involved sneak attacks, with military-grade weapons. Who ever is pulling these jobs likes anonymity.’
‘Well, they ain’t going to be able to pull that kind of hit on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange,’ growled Joe, ‘The PD in Gotham are badass. They get a scent of trouble, they will go heavy—that I can guarantee. And you just know that the Fed’s are going to be crawling all over this too. Those ugly looking freaks will be spoiling for a fight, especially after that business at the hotel. But that ain’t my worry. What I am concerned about, is the Barrington girl.
‘You should get over that JR,’ said Inez, ‘Throw that whole experience behind you, in the bad-relationship dumpster.’
‘Damned if I will, sweet cakes, besides, I ain’t the only one that poisonous little tramp has tried to murder; take that mouthpiece Weinman for example, the schmooze is creepier than a Halloween fun ride, but he didn’t deserve to get noosed, no way.’
‘Hey, give it a rest you two, we are at the outer cordon,’ I snapped. The taxi pulled, into a police department chicane, designed to slow traffic, so spotters could vet the occupants of vehicles, and thwart fast moving suicide attacks.
The cab made a turn, and edged along Broad Street, to the entrance of the Stock Exchange. The Greek frontage with Corinthian top columns, swept higher than the Parthenon. Out front, a maze of bollards and security fencing, manned by armed police and Stock Exchange staffers, greeted our arrival.
We ran a gantlet, more testing than airport security, but with about the same level of charisma. I said, have a nice day to every single person I met, including a hard-bitten Panamanian-looking dude with a mop and bucket. The Panamanian’s rugged features twitched almost imperceptibly, everyone else gave me east coast inscrutable, like California-crazy was contagious or something.
Once through security, we were guided upstairs, to the executive floor. Giant pictures of big money Stock Exchange heroes, lined the walls. Our VIP pass got us breakfast, if we wanted it, but I was in no mood to eat. I took a rain check on the big feed, and grabbed a cup of coffee instead. Joe settled down to a large plate of everything he could pile on, whilst Inez had juice and a bagel.
I stood by the window, gazing out across the towering skyline. I watched the gathering clouds, sipping coffee, as the oppressive storm-front sky pressed in from the Atlantic.
Barrington arrived late, and in considerable style. A crowd of be suited flunkies and Stock Exchange staffers moved before him, in a surge of frenetic endeavor. Cameras flashed on auto-wind. A barrage of conflicting voices cut above it all. Barrington beamed triumphantly, his eyes masked by dark, wraparound sunglasses. A steely-faced executive with a pinched, white expression and a chalk-stripe suit heralded Barrington’s arrival, like a Las Vegas boxing promoter. Cameras strobed crazily. Shouted questions filled the air, and all the time, more people came crushing into the room. I saw Roxy Barrington. I saw Kid Dolla. I saw Inez, hemmed in by a crush of bodies. Joe, five paces to my left, was moving in close.
The pinch-faced suit, commanded attention, told us the ceremony was about to begin, and with that news, the Barrington party surged towards me, heading for the entrance to the Stock Exchange floor. As the group swept past, I moved close to Barrington. A Stock Exchange staffer tried to bar my way, but Barrington pushed him aside, ‘This way Costello, come see history in the making.’ He didn’t wait for a response. He strode by, followed by a throng of courtiers. As the crowd surged after him, I noticed Inez, closing fast on my flank. I caught her eye, and she nodded, like she was reading my mind. We funneled through gilt-edged doors and there, laid out before us, we saw the vast trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A hubbub ran through the room. A sea of faces turning towards us expectantly. Lights everywhere, and television cameras too. Our group stood above it all, like Roman emperors on a golden balcony. Opposite: a wall mounted computer countdown clock, running numbers that heralded the commencement of trading. I edged closer to Barrington. The clock flashed through the numbers with building speed. Time melting faster than a Black Friday share price.
Applause swept through the room. Building to a crescendo.
The opening bell sounded loud across the trading floor.
Palpable excitement, filling the room.
Then, something else. A building disturbance.
Shouts of outrage.
The crowd surging.
A body toppling over the edge of the on the packed balcony—then another—fa
lling down, to the hard, dark trading floor below. No time to hear the bone crushing impact.
Gasps, and screams, sounding out around the room.
Gunshots exploding rapid fire.
I reached instinctively for Barrington, but the crowd surged against us. My fingers closed on the fabric of his jacket, but a heavy impact wrenched him free of my grip, as panicking moneymen stampeded into us, scrambling for their lives.
A gun held high above the crowd, in a finely manicured hand.
More gunshots.
All around me, a seething mass of humanity, screaming, scrambling, falling to the floor, in deathly terror.
It was like this, the day they tried to kill the president. That was the last time I took a bullet on the job. But, the Barrington affair was more than a job now, it was a matter of personal vindication. Every instinct I had as a personal protection specialist told me this moment was coming. Now it was here, I had to channel the outcome. Control it. I sensed death so close I could taste the fear as the tendrils of fate lashed out around me.
Knowing the moment of death is coming, is very different from knowing how it will arrive, you can never presage that; such knowledge is divine. But as I coiled back through the surging crowd and finally pulled Sly Barrington away from the flying bullets I had a moment of intense clarity, a time in which every move came instinctual.
The crowd separated, and there she was, Roxy Barrington, holding a small black automatic, firing wildly now, as Inez struggled to gain control of the gun. The Barrington girl was fighting like crazy, clawing, biting, striking out, with hard athletic blows.
I moved forward quickly and without hesitation, catching Roxy Barrington in the neck, with a hard jab, the blow glanced off, in the fast moving struggle. Roxy Barrington turned to face me, with wild eyes and spat in my face.
‘The bastard killed my mother she hissed.’
The gun exploded loud.
I felt the hot, explosive rush of the muzzle flash.
I felt the concussive force, as a bullet hissed past my face.
In the first seconds a bullet hits you, the staggering enormity of the consequences is more than the human brain can deal with. I moved forwards anyway, snapped the Barrington girl into a merciless chokehold. In that moment, I realized I had my eyes closed against the horror. I forced them open. I saw Inez coiling back for a Karate punch. The impact was instantaneous. The Barrington girl’s head sprung back hard, and her body sagged. I held her tight in the chokehold, maybe longer than I needed to, before finally releasing her body slowly to the floor.
The whole world moved into slow motion.
An eternity of seconds dragged by, before I realized the bullets had missed me.
I staggered backwards, against the balcony’s edge. All around me chaos reigned, whilst above, steely banks of television cameras stared down unblinking into the heart of the wild terror.
Dead Famous 62
Everyone wants to know you when you are famous. It gets old and fast, especially when you are buying groceries, or waiting in line at the bank. Fortunately, my fifteen Warholian minutes as a media darling bounded away, as quickly as they arrived. That is the way it works in Los Angeles. Being famous is no big deal in the City of Angels. Most folks who live here are either on their way to fame, or recovering from the deleterious after effects—and if they aren’t famous themselves, they sure as hell know people who are, or have been, or will be.
Flying out of NYC, I felt as though we were taking the last chopper out of Saigon. They run a crazy-town back east, which is real entertaining if you like that kind of thing, but I am a blue skies guy, who likes to breath deep the sunshine.
In the vacuum emptiness that followed the Barrington affair, I went fishing with Joe in his boat the Naja. We always hit the ocean with our fishing rods after a job, but even as we fished the wild, deep waters, past the tip of San Clemente, feasting on sunshine, Albacore and the raw beat of the waves against the hull, there was little closure on the events that had lead up to the wild gunshots at the New York Stock Exchange.
Turns out Ramirez and Kozak got a kudos call for joining the dots between a Burbank car park shooting and the attack on Saquina Johnson’s funeral. They also found a stash of C4 and an RPG launcher, which had Commissioner Jardine in front of the cameras once again, in his smartest, most media friendly uniform. There was no word of Myron Chimola’s involvement, but when I heard mention of a gangster called the Bear, the puzzle pieces fitted together real quick.
As for Roxy Barrington, the girl was more lucid than she had ever been, like she had gotten some kind of peace in her life at last, but once the dominos began to topple at Casa Barrington, it wasn’t long before Jardine and the boys at LAPD had her lined up for the murder of Saquina Johnson’s girlfriend over at the Peninsula hotel and a whole host of other killings too. The ugly tabloids had a field day, focusing in tight on screwball mental heath issues, and a lesbian lust triangle, fueled by an endless diet of drugs and decadence. The media page fived the Hector Blandell killing, of course, but towing a middle-aged probation officer through the wheel arch of a truck isn’t sexy, whichever way you look at it. The whole ugly scene was enough to coagulate the blood of the most doting parent. Not that Sly Barrington was in a position to get coagulated about anything, the final round that his daughter fired, the one that nearly took the front of my face off, hit the big man square in the head. It didn’t kill him, but after three long weeks on a life support machine, the doctors gave his only living relative the option to pull the plug. A decision that made Kid Dolla not only the de facto head of the Barrington corporation, it also made him the most eligible twenty five year old on the planet.
Me, I just took a trip down Washington Boulevard to the Cuban grill, on Venice Beach, had myself a plateful of back beans and plantains with rice. My Weimaraner Max sat at my feet, gnawing vigorously on a rawhide chewy toy. When the waiter arrived, he gave me a double take look.
‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ asked the waiter.
I touched the brim of my FBI cap and peered over my shades.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’
The End
ALSO BY TONY BULMER. THE SEX NET: A DANNY COSTELLO NOVEL
THE SEX NET 01
Nude and glistening, they had tied him to the bed with piano wire. A rubber ball gag strapped tight in his mouth. The killer had sliced him good, sternum to crotch, then pulled the body cavity wide: an intestinal theatre for all to see. The wound gaped cruel and ugly. A crime scene snapper in a white plastic hot-suit leaned in for a close up; his camera strobing on auto wind—flash, flash, flash, Ramirez winced, ‘Hey get that thing out of my face.’ The CSI flipped him a furrowed look and masticated gum. Again the flashgun fired, picking out the corpse on the grizzled bed, in high contrast. Ramirez queezed: thinking about the late lunch at Larry’s Taco Canyon, as he pondered the unzipped body cavity. He thought about the no good croaker his insurance had landed him with and the Peptic ulcer eating through his stomach wall. Sucking peppermint to ease the corpse stench, He watched the crime-scene crew crawling the room. An ugly mess, thought Ramirez, the last kind of thing you wanted to look at end of shift Friday, with the Dodgers facing a World Series home game.
‘Welcome to Bel-Air.’ A heavy set detective in a blue sports coat and stained chinos sidled up alongside Ramirez, slurping noisily at the dregs of a giant soda. Ramirez gave him a sideways glance. ‘What have we got Cullen?’
We got contact is what we got. The One-eighty-seven is Ronald Weismann, fifty-four, looks like he had a yen for the kinky stuff: bondage, butt-plugs and BDSM. We got a closet full of kinky costumes and a computer hard drive with pervo-smut like you wouldn’t believe. Plus, and you are gonna love this one; the dude is an E-date veteran.
Ramirez stared into the eviscerated body cavity, the shredded-beef burrito basket he’d eaten for lunch, playing flip-flop in his guts. He popped another Pepsid and shot Cullen a glance, ‘A connection?’
&nbs
p; Cullen slurped his beverage and belched noisily, ‘You ask me Weismann got wasted by the same degenerate who toasted the others.’
The others. Two dead in the space of a month with the same grizzly M.O. Ramirez massaged his stomach thoughtfully, with the heel of his hand, working on the pain that throbbed in waves. Wondering if this was how his pops had felt when he got gut shot in The Battle of Ong Thanh back in 67. He washed down the Pepsid with a gulp of tepid mineral water that tasted like melted plastic, the first waves of a migraine pulsing at his temples.
More flash gun bursts, picking out the dark shadows of antique furniture against flocked wallpaper. The room burning white, then black as the camera shuttered through the freeze-frame atrocity. Cullen shielded his eyes against the glare, nearly spilling his soda. The room throbbed, heavy with the stench of death. ‘Just like Malibu—Beverly Hills too,’ said Cullen, scratching at the seat of his pants. ‘You can see the similarities. This is one sick serial-killing puppy we are working with here.’
‘There is something more going on,’ said Ramirez matter of fact.
‘Yeah there’s something more, I crawled the freako’s office, took a look-see, at his PC—Home videos galore—just wait till you check them out, this freak filmed everything and I do mean everything. I flipped through his little library and there is some real triple X smut on there, chicks like you wouldn’t believe.’ Cullen paused, shooting Ramirez a sly glance.
Ramirez frowned, and massaged his stomach, with the back of his fist, ‘What is the matter with you Cullen, you permanently priapic or something?’
‘Just trying to brighten your day is all,’ said Cullen blankly. He took another gulp of soda, slurping it noisily to the finish. Thought about tossing it into the crime scene detritus, until he saw Ramirez giving him the eye.
