"What?"
She held the key out and dropped it in my palm. "Something's on it."
It had a strange slipperiness to it and at the top of the groove was a fragment of wax.
"Been a long time since I saw this done."
"What's wrong?"
"Somebody made a wax impression of your key, doll."
"You're kidding! That went out with miniskirts."
"Well, like miniskirts, some of the old ways are the best ways." It was a single key on a rounded key ring with a white round tag that said OFFICE; to be sure, I held it against mine. Exact match. "Where's your regular bunch of keys?"
"I was too embarrassed to tell you—left them here at the office in the desk drawer, accidentally."
"Don't apologize, it's been hectic as hell."
She took the single little key back. "This is the spare I keep at home, Mike."
I grunted a laugh. "Well, your visitors didn't find the Goliath bone in your apartment last night, but they ran across something valuable. They're not dumb—they knew they could likely pick your lock open, but figured the office lock might be a different matter."
But the office showed no signs we'd had visitors.
Velda stood at her desk. "What do we do, Mike? Change the lock?"
"No! Hell, no. This is perfect."
She gawked at me. "Somebody having a key to our office is 'perfect'? I have no idea what you're up to."
"If you did, you'd be the boss." She smiled smugly. "Before long ... I will be."
The morning saw us dealing with another round of offers by phone, fax, and FedEx. Just before noon, Velda came in to ask if we were going out for lunch or if she should have something delivered, when the phone in my left-hand bottom desk drawer trilled.
Velda frowned. "That doesn't ring very often. Who has that number anyway, Mike?"
"Just some personal friends. I never give it out for business." I pulled out the drawer, lifted the false bottom and picked up the small cell phone and answered.
The rich, deep voice was instantly identifiable when it said, "Mike?"
"My man Bozo. What's happening?"
"I have that shooter for you, Mike."
"I didn't say grab the bastard, Bozo. I said watch his ass."
"Well, he and his ass was taking off, so I didn't think I had a choice."
"Got you. That was a good call. Now tell me he's alive."
"Oh, he's breathing. We made him talk some, but you'd better get here and listen up yourself."
"Keep him alive, you hear?"
"How alive?"
"Talking and thinking and scared alive, Bozo."
"You got it, man. You know where Lonnie Hartman's garage is?"
"Sure. But Lonnie's dead."
"Right. But some of the guys that worked for him, drivers, mechanics, they got a stake in this. They give me their garage to use plus their, uh..."
"Moral support?"
"Somethin' like that, Mike. Somethin' like that."
I flipped the cell phone shut, snugged it back in its hidey-hole, replaced the lid, and closed the drawer. When I looked up at Velda, she was hovering over the desk, her big brown eyes narrow and hard. "Am I in on this?"
I shook my head. "Bozo Jackson will have his buddies there, and I don't want those clean-cut African American youngsters distracted by you."
"Bullhockey. I'm just some old broad to them. You don't want my delicate sensibilities damaged."
"Hey, I know all about how delicate your sensibilities are. Thing is, these Muslim 'patriots' have funny ideas about women, and I don't want any kind of shame kicking in and muddying the waters."
Her hands were on her hips, Wonder Woman-style. "I wasn't going to strip him naked and sic the dogs on him so you could take snapshots!"
"That's a relief. Look, doll, you stay here."
"I know, I know, and hold down the fort."
"Exactly. And you can start by calling Pat to keep him on the alert. In fact, have him send a couple of his undercover guys to that area. Tell him to have 'em camp out in that Soul Kitchen Diner on Lenox. No white cops. Make sure they're black or Puerto Rican."
She smirked at me. "Like you wouldn't be the whitest ofay in Harlem?"
"Sugar, holding Bozo Jackson's hand, I am a brother of another color."
I parked alongside the ancient garage, pulling the car in behind Bozo's, and got out without bothering to lock it—if I had to get away fast, I didn't want to be slowed down. Anyway, a neckless pal of Bozo's in a black track jacket and sideways ball cap was stationed outside at the back door, and he would keep an eye out for me.
I entered into a small hallway between a few small glassed-in offices. Bozo, in his customary black leather topcoat, was talking tough to two guys half his age, wearing black-sleeved white-torso bomber jackets that said HARTMAN'S on the front. They had cut-to-the scalp hair to show off skull tattoos and their faces were blandly menacing, half-lidded eyes stopping just short of arrogant as Bozo chewed them out.
Finally, the two guys nodded, then noticed me. Bozo, right behind them, said, "That's Hammer. Now get back in there and behave yourselfs."
They moved down the corridor into darkness.
Bozo grinned at me. "They young, Mike. They get overenthused sometimes."
"They didn't kill the son of a bitch, did they?"
"No, no! It's cool. It's cool."
I held up my hand. "Bozo, you're on a pension, aren't you?"
His head bobbed. "Sure, did twenty-five on the job. Why?"
I gave the ex-cop a hard look. "Don't want you doing anything to lose those pension privileges, pal."
"Naw, don't worry—once a cop, always a cop. Just don't remind these young dudes that cop blood still runs in these veins."
"Gotcha," I told him, and followed him into the darkness.
But it wasn't all darkness. A light high up was on, sending a cone of yellowish illumination down onto the slightly absurd sight of the shooter seated in a decrepit old lounge chair, embedded in its worn creases so deep that even if his hands and ankles weren't duct-taped, he could hardly have gotten up and out without help.
He was small and dark and had a fastidiously trimmed devil's beard; he wore a red Chicago Bulls sweatshirt with its cartoon bull's head logo, black sweatpants and white Nikes. He squinted when he looked our way, but the light from the little office area was behind us and we were just shadows to him. Shadows.
Great big shadows.
Threatening shadows.
Nobody said a word. There was a snick and a practiced ear could tell a switchblade had come out to play and the guy in the overstuffed chair, already trembling, began to quiver.
My eyes were becoming adjusted to the gloom, and the face of the shooter took on more clarity. He hadn't been badly beaten, not yet. Bozo had held off anything but intimidation and some minor roughing up before I got there. I studied the prisoner carefully, trying to separate him from the other eight million New Yorkers, which was almost impossible until you saw the small tattoo on the back of his hand.
There are countless tattoo IDs, but this one was special—i t made him one of the Rada Rey, a lifetime group of hired killers who had once worked for Saddam Hussein.
I glanced at Bozo Jackson. He wiped a hand over his mouth, and the guy standing behind the prisoner in the chair suddenly whipped out a piece of duct tape and smeared it across the guy's kisser. What it implied was worth more than cutting his throat.
His eyes screamed.
Cords in his neck stood out like tensioned cables, his face went wet with sweat, his forehead a veiny bas-relief map of agony.
Something somewhere in the big room dripped, little boinks that punctuated the otherwise absolute quiet. Well, that and a dull humming coming from under the strip of duct tape. That was when the guy pissed his pants. The stench of urine was immediate and foul. Bozo nodded for the others to stay put and motioned me back into the cramped office corridor.
But the smell of the garage came with me.
After a few deep breaths, I said, "Do we know who he is, Bozo?"
"His papers said he was a Syrian national. He cleared customs okay, produced papers that stated he was a student assigned to NYU doing graduate work. He speaks three languages and is fluent in Arabic and English."
"How'd you get all that out of him? I don't see a mark on him. Did you hit him where it doesn't show, Bozo?"
"I didn't hit him at all. Those young dudes shook him like a rag doll some, but he ain't been hit, not once. First of all, the idiot had all kinds of papers on him. Second, a Russian hooker heard him talking on a cell phone in Arabic."
"She understands Arabic?"
"Enough to recognize it was Arabic. That's how I heard he was holed up back here in my cabbage patch."
I gave him an odd look and he added, "You do remember you told me to keep my eyes and ears open."
"Yeah, man. And I also remember, 'Once a cop, always a cop.'"
"Never really do leave the job, Mike." He reached behind his back and brought out an object he had under his belt and handed it to me.
I fingered the covering handkerchief back and there was the .22, a striking target gun with an angular wooden handle and a six-inch rifle-type barrel.
"For neutral bastards," I said, "the fucking Swiss can make a firearm."
"That they can, Mike. That they can."
It was loaded up with copper-tipped shells.
Bozo said, "They'll match up in the lab. Keep that baby covered—still has his prints on it."
"Sure you don't want to get back on the force again, Bozo?"
"Nope. I like it up here, doing odd jobs for solid citizens like Mike Hammer."
I told him I'd give the .22 and all the information to Pat, and he could take it from there.
Bozo bobbed his head back toward the garage. "How much heat shall we lay on this prick?"
"Nothing visible," I told him.
The ex-cop grinned. "Maybe he's a candidate for the ol' Scream Room."
"You stopped me cold with that one, pal. I'll bite—what's the Scream Room?"
"Just an old frozen-food box that's insulated with two-foot-thick walls. Hasn't been used for years—for its original purpose, that is. Which was to hold a dozen sides of beef, in the day."
Bozo started to smile when he saw me frown.
"Don't sweat it, Mike. We're civilized. Stick somebody in there, let him know what the place was a few years back, turn the unit on after we strap him to a chair, and suddenly our guest gets the idea. Like a great big refrigerator—remember the old gag, 'The little light, it stays on'? Well, there's only a little lightbulb in there, too, but it's enough so they can watch themselves turn blue."
Quietly I asked, "How many have you given the Scream-Room treatment to, Bozo?"
"Hardly nobody! One slimy child-fucker held out for almost ten minutes till the frost got his beard white. Talk about a bad case of the blue balls!"
"Damn."
"So?"
"Well..." I shrugged. "Okay, chill him down a little."
"Want to watch?"
I waved that off. "Just tell me about it."
"Cool."
"Yeah. Cool. Did you shake his room down, Bozo?"
"What for? If there's any cash, one of the gals in that mattress factory will get it, and you can bet he'll have nothing incriminatin' lying around. You have that .22, so what else could there be?"
"They all make mistakes, Bozo."
"This one made a hell of a mistake coming back here. He does a job, he shakes a tail feather out of town, then turns around and heads back for a couple more kills? What the hell's that about?"
I didn't have an answer.
But I mulled it on the way back to the office. Criminal actions don't follow set patterns. There is always an ultimate goal in mind for the offender. It could be revenge or personal power or a lusting after something the offender had always wanted—but by and large, the greatest goal is money. Cash or something equally as valuable. Power is one of those abstract goals. Sex comes into play, too, but that's power for a lot of guys, the twisted ones in particular.
What means everything to one can be as nothing to another. Sex or money or drugs and now the craziest abstract goal of all: the skeletal remains of an oversized soldier boy who got creamed by an Israelite punk who hadn't even been conscripted into the damn army.
Outside my office window, the rain had started. It trickled down the glass leaving paths through city dust. Manhattan lay under a gray blanket, the sidewalks a moving multicolor human caterpillar of umbrellas. Noise from the flow of taxicabs was almost a tired sound and you had to wonder why so many millions of people would jam themselves into a jungle of concrete and spinning wheels to do the same things they had done a thousand times before.
As usual, Velda could read my mind as she came into my inner sanctum, closing the door behind her and stopping to stand in front of my desk. "It's money, love. That's why they run the rat race. It's why we run it. We've all got to have it."
"Why?"
"Survival."
I made a face. "Lewis and Clark didn't need it when they explored the country in the old days."
"They had rifles and gunpowder," she reminded me, "to stave off the Indians' bows and arrows when the shiny beads and trinkets didn't play ... Speaking of which, a pair of explorers from the government are cooling their heels out there."
"Probably not Lewis and Clark."
She smirked. "Martin and Lewis is more like it."
Then she returned to the door, opened it wide, and said, "Come in, gentlemen."
Their eyes did a quick visual check before they stepped across the doorsill. I got out of my chair, looked at both their ID folders to satisfy their legal minds.
The two young men were in their early thirties, black-suited, white-shirted, nearly identical raincoats draped over their arms; their leather ID folders said they represented the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One of them was white, with one of those short butch haircuts that tries to disguise the onset of baldness; he introduced himself as Jerome Wilson and his ID agreed. The other might have been Latino, but my first hunch played off when he introduced himself as James Jabara.
"You share a name with a Korean War hero," I said to Jabara.
He smiled, surprised. "Yes. Not all Italian Americans are in the Mafia, Mr. Hammer, and not all Arab Americans are terrorists."
"No. And they aren't all Muslim, either. First ones here were Christians, right? From Syria?"
Leland said, "You know your history, Mr. Hammer."
"Lately I've taken up a certain interest. In history. By the way, I'm an Irish cop, but you'll be glad to know the Irish are a diverse bunch that includes lawyers, bankers, doctors, engineers, bricklayers, farmers, and also probably a drunk or two. Now tell me what Uncle Sam wants to know."
My light tone didn't set them off. Velda stopped by my desk where she activated a small control box, flipping toggle switches until all but two of the red lights were lit, then pulled up a chair and sat just to one side of our guests, smiling graciously, her hands toying with a pad and pen.
I said, "I hope you don't mind our office formalities, but we like to keep an accurate record of conversations, especially when we're dealing with Washington, D.C."
Jerome Wilson kept a straight face as he said, "We're out of the New York office."
"Same peas, different pod," I said cheerfully. "I spoke to your brothers at Homeland Security not long ago. Now, what can I do for you?"
After what you might call a pregnant pause, Jerome Wilson put on a stern countenance and said, "We understand you have in your possession a certain article—"
This time there was an edge to my voice. "Cut the crap and call it the Goliath bone, like the papers and TV, why don't you? Is that where you heard about it, or do you have other sources?"
Jabara sat up. "We have been instructed to—"
"Guys, let's cool the officialese. First, I'm not your ordinary citizen. I'm in the same business you
are, only one hell of a lot longer. I respect the government and all that jazz, but your agencies have as many boneheads as we have here on Broadway, and we have our share. What is it you want?"
They shared a look of consternation. Then Wilson said, "To be brief, the government would like to have possession of the ... artifact."
I shrugged. "And what are they offering?"
Jabara said, "We're not authorized to offer anything. There may be considerations—tax benefits, for example—but we are in no position to compete with offers from the private sector or, for that matter, foreign governments."
I grinned. "The United States government with its trillions can't compete with what these rogue states have in their coffers?"
Wilson said, "It's not that, Mr. Hammer. We can't dignify the wild assertions that this bone is authentic. The extreme reactions of certain groups, including but not limited to al-Qaeda, to this representing a fallen hero of the Islamic world—not to mention certain Israelis proclaiming it a talisman of an ancient victory..."
"Go ahead. Mention it."
Jabara sat forward again. "Mr. Hammer, what we would like to do is defuse this situation before it sparks even more extreme hostilities."
"I can point you to a certain vacant lot in Manhattan that says things already got hostile a while ago."
"We have had requests—nothing formal, but through diplomatic channels—from fifteen of the twenty-two Arab states requesting that the Goliath bone be turned over to them. Asking the U.S. government to intercede."
"Is that what you're going to do? Intercede?"
"If the bone were displayed in, say, the Smithsonian, amid a certain fanfare and also a context designed to cool down the factions—authorities from the world of academia who can debunk the Goliath aspect of—"
"That can't be definitively debunked any more than it can be definitely proved. Doesn't the FBI know you can't prove a negative?"
Wilson's expression was damn near pleading. "Mr. Hammer, if we could just appeal to your patriotism—"
"Knock it off. I fought a war that used up my patriotism. Get real."
[Mike Hammer 14] - The Goliath Bone Page 16
