Solid Gold

by Stephanie Andrews

  “Long story, been on a bit of a treasure hunt.” I looked around the large outer office. One of the standing lamps was knocked over, and all the magazines from the coffee table were strewn across the floor. There were bright yellow Nerf gun bullets everywhere. “What the heck happened here?”

  Mike looked embarrassed.

  “We do team building exercises on Friday afternoons. This one got a little out of hand.” He grimaced to assure me that he found Nerf products to be childish and unproductive.

  I glanced at the clock on the wall.

  “It’s almost seven o’clock, Mike, don’t you have a weekend planned?”

  “I’m leaving soon, Ms. McKay, just one last thing to take care of.” He rose from the desk and came out from behind it. “Let me show you into Mr. Martynek.”

  “Oh, don’t bother yourself,” I said, waving him away as I headed for the door to the inner office, but when I turned to look he was right beside me, towering.

  “I insist,” he said, very softly. He stepped in front of me, and I could see he was hiding something in his right hand, shielding it with his body. He moved to the left of the door, reached out with his left hand, and swung the door open so that he was now positioned behind it.

  I had only a split second to notice that Marty’s office was dark, when I was hit by three Nerf bullets, in rapid succession. Two in the chest and one in the forehead.

  “Jesus, Marty,” I hollered, dropping my bag in surprise.

  “Riley!” Marty stepped out of the darkness and into the reception area, a nerf rifle in his hands. “I’m so sorry, I thought you were...” He trailed off, then spun around but it was too late. Mike stepped out from behind the door and shot Marty point blank, the soft yellow bullet bouncing off his chest.

  “Ah, shit,” Marty sighed. “You win, Mike.”

  Mike grinned. “Yup, and now I think I’ll be heading home.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “This is your team-building exercise? The two of you trying to assassinate each other with toys?”

  “It wasn’t just the two of us,” Marty explained. “All twenty-four staff members started the day, two teams of twelve. Mike and I were the only two left. He had me trapped in the office.”

  “You’ve been doing this all day?”

  “Yes, and I’m starving. Let’s go to Francesca’s, I could eat a bucket of risotto.”

  “I’m heading out,” said Mike, grabbing an overcoat the size of a tent. He probably thought we were going on a date. We should tell him we’re cousins, or something.

  “Okay, Mike, nice job today,” Marty called as Mike closed the door behind him. “Is this about the FBI phone? I told you I couldn’t crack it. Not without leaving fingerprints I didn’t want to leave.”

  “No, it’s not.” I held my trash bag up. “I need help with this, and I’m afraid I’m in no state to eat out right now.”

  Marty seemed to notice my appearance for the first time. “Yeah, I guess not.”

  “I’ve been dumpster diving,” I explained.

  “Well, I’m not eating whatever’s in there.”

  “Ha ha. It’s shredded documents. I need you to scan them and then rebuild the originals.”

  He frowned at me, looking at the trash bag.

  “What are you talking about?” He sat down in Mike’s chair behind the desk.

  “Elena Ruiz, that lead you dug up. El and Ruby and I have been surveilling her all week. Home and office, and I definitely think you were right, she has a connection to Negron.”

  “And the bag?”

  “I haven’t been able to get into her office building during the day, there’s a ton of security.”

  “Which may be a sign you’re on the right track.”

  “Exactly.” I dropped the trash bag and began to pace. I often paced around when I was thinking. I don’t like sitting still for too long. “I’ve been watching her office from the roof of the building across the street. Today, an envelope was delivered to her around 5pm. She opened it, read the papers inside, shredded it. Then she hand wrote a note, sealed it in an envelope, and gave it back to the courier.”

  “And?”

  “And the courier wasn’t FedEx or UPS. He was wearing a business suit and he arrived in a limousine.”

  “Aha. But that doesn’t mean it’s Negron.”

  “No, but it’s something big, and secret,” I mused, looking down at the carpet. There were nerf bullets everywhere. “I need you to put the documents back together.”

  Marty looked at me strangely. “Why me?”

  “What do you mean, you’re the computer expert.”

  “You can’t use a computer for this.”

  I looked at him blankly. “You can’t?”

  Marty sighed and gave me that look that lets me know that I’m a complete idiot.

  “Well, crap. Guess we’ll have to do it the old fashioned way.”

  “We?”

  “Sure, I’ll buy the risotto.”

  “How do you know I don’t have a date? It’s Friday.”

  “I know you don’t. I’m having you surveilled by Park.”

  He perked up.

  “Will Park be there?”

  “Come and find out.”

  “Let me grab my coat.”

  Nine

  Hola. No estoy en casa ahora ...

  Beep.

  “Selena, it’s Riley. We’re getting together at my place on Roscoe tonight for some food and some detective work. You are welcome to join us.”

  Beep.

  Well, I tried.

  Ten

  “Wait,” said Park, laughing. “Mike won?”

  “Yep,” said Marty, grinning at her like a fool. “Of course, he has military training.”

  “Wait a minute,” interjected Ruby, pouring herself some more wine. “Why does he still work for you? I thought he was just protection from Salerno.”

  “He was, Auntie, but he’s a really good Admin. He was a clerk in the Army. The place is running like clockwork.”

  “But how does shooting toys at each other build teams?”

  “These programmers, Auntie, some of them are, like, thirty-five years old. They’ve been staring at computer screens for twenty years without looking up.”

  “Oh my God,” I gasped in mock horror. “Thirty-five years old!!”

  “Laugh all you want,” Marty shot back, “but you don’t make innovative games and apps by doing the same thing over and over again.”

  “Speaking of Selena,” said Park, “is she coming to help?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Crowds really aren’t her thing.”

  I stood up and began to clear the plates. I piled them all together and took them into the kitchen, returning with an Osco bag full of tape dispensers.

  “Okay,” I said, dumping the bag out on to the table, “party favors for everyone.” I went to the corner of the room and picked up the trash bag I had recovered from the recycling bin behind Elena Ruiz’s building. I broke it open and poured out the contents: a giant tangled ball of paper, made of eleven inch long strips, each about a quarter of an inch wide.

  “Oh fudge,” said Park, a look of dismay on her face.

  “C’mon,” I said cheerfully, “how hard can it be?”

  Marty raised one eyebrow at me, but Ruby just reached forward and pulled the ball of paper toward her.

  “Get to it,” she said commandingly. “Nobody gets dessert until we find it.”

  Nick, my mobster/art forger boyfriend, arrived a half hour later, and turned out to be far better at the reconstruction than any of us. Must be his keen eye and delicate hands, two of his best features in my opinion.

  We had barely managed to get all the pieces straightened out and face up before Nick got there. He took off his overcoat and cleaned the condensation off his glasses, looked down at the table without sitting, and said, “There’s a face.”

  I did a double take. “A face?”

  “Well, some
kind of image. About a fourth of the strips are darker, don’t have words on them. It’s a photo of something, I’m guessing a face. If it’s a full page, and it seems to be, that means you’ve only got three other pages to put together after the face. This shouldn’t take too long.”

  “Well heck,” said Ruby, getting up from the table. “Take my seat and get to it. I’ll go put the medovnik in the oven to warm up. Who wants ice cream with theirs?” Four hands shot up.

  “I think I figured out why we are having so much trouble,” said Park as Nick sat down and began picking out all of the strips that might be part of the photo.

  “Because it’s impossible?” asked Marty.

  “No, because it’s in Spanish.”

  I slapped my forehead. “Of course it’s in Spanish; how did we not think of that in the first place? I’ll call Selena again.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Park, “I can do it.”

  I stared at her. “You speak Spanish?”

  “Yeah, moderately.”

  “But you don’t speak Korean?”

  Park colored.

  “Okay,” I said quickly. “Sore subject, never mind. This is great. You and Nick keep at it, Marty and I will work on getting into Ruiz’s office, in case this doesn’t pan out.”

  “Yes,” said Marty with a grin. “Maybe I can just use my magic scanner and fax you inside.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  AN HOUR LATER, MARTY and I had devised an ingenious, improbable, and likely impossible plan for getting into Ruiz’s office building undiscovered. It involved magnets, suction cups, three different disguises, and a gallon container of peanut oil.

  “Forget it, Kay,” called Nick from the table. The dining room and the living room were all one big space, so I could see him and Park and Ruby hunched over the little strips of paper, and I could hear the incessant sound of scotch tape being pulled from dispensers.

  “No,” I exclaimed, “this will definitely work. I just have to figure out how to tie a Zeppelin Bend with one hand.” Marty and I were sitting in two of my mismatched chairs, sketching plans on the coffee table between us. There were crumbs from the cake everywhere.

  “No, I mean you’re not going to have to break in. Come here.”

  I walked up behind him and put my left hand lightly on the back of his neck, leaning over his shoulder to look at what he had done.

  The sheet in front of him was a full page black and white photo of a Latina woman, approximately twenty-five to thirty years old. She had long black hair and silver earrings with stones set into them. Probably onyx or turquoise, but it was hard to tell without color.

  “Quién es ese?”

  “I thought you didn’t speak Spanish!” said Park, peeling tape off her fingers.

  “That’s about it. A few phrases from my days on the beat.”

  “We don’t know who she is,” said Ruby. “There’s no name. On purpose. The photo was likely encrypted, but the morons printed it out.”

  “You don’t have to break in,” Nick explained, “because Ruiz is meeting this woman for some sort of pickup next week, and the rendezvous is not at her office, it’s someplace public.”

  “What’s being picked up?”

  “We don’t know,” said Ruby, “it’s not named. This guy is very careful. I doubt it’s weapons, though, because it specifies she should come alone. She wouldn’t be able to carry much.”

  “It’s heroin,” said Park. We all looked at her. She held up one of the taped together sheets of paper. “It says, ‘My friend is brining you a whole bag of bubble gum—chicle—the kind you like. There’s so much you’ll have to share with your friends in Lawndale.’ Chicle means bubble gum, but it’s also slang for heroin.”

  “That’s not very subtle,” I noted.

  “Doesn’t have to be subtle,” said Nick, “just plausibly deniable.”

  “Like Chicklets!” said Marty.

  I turned back to look at him. “What?”

  “Chicklets has the same root. I always wondered where the name came from.”

  “Excellent. Excellent input.”

  He shrugged.

  I turned back to the table. “Where’s the meeting?”

  “The marina next to Northerly Island.” said Nick.

  “You mean by Soldier Field?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I suppose that too.” Nick was not a huge football fan.

  I looked at the picture on the table.

  “Nicky, can you make me look like her?”

  He shrugged. “Pretty close, but Selena would be a much better fit.”

  “No, I don’t want her anywhere near this. Windsor was stupid, she almost got caught. If Negron realizes she’s anywhere near this, it puts her sister’s life in jeopardy.”

  “This could put your life in jeopardy,” he countered.

  “I know. We’re going to have to plan this carefully. How much time do we have?”

  “The meeting is next week,” said Park. “Christmas Eve.”

  Eleven

  So much for careful plans, I thought as I hugged myself for warmth against the wind whipping off the lake. Nothing had gone right. Nothing.

  First of all, no help from the Shelbys. Nick’s brother Don had something planned, and he needed his brother and all available helpers to pull it off. The two brothers were the great nephews of Elgort Shelby, the famed—but retired—head of one of Chicago’s most notorious organized crime families (not that he’d ever been convicted, or even arrested; he was a very careful man). These days, the Shelbys were mostly involved in financial services and other mostly legal ways of defrauding people. Nevertheless, a call from the Shelby family was one you couldn’t ignore, even if you were one of them. Especially if you were one of them.

  My conversation with Nick had not gone well. My downstairs neighbor and landlady, Mrs. Right, could probably hear us through the floor.

  “So, you can come by and visit when, when Don says it’s okay?”

  “That’s not fair, Kay.”

  “What am I, your part time girlfriend?”

  That made Nick fight back. “Yes, you are. Every time I try to make you more than that, I get rebuffed.” He crossed his arms. “You want to be family without being part of the family. That’s not fair. You’re essentially asking Uncle Elgort to work for you.”

  “I...”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve got nothing. I thought Elgort and I were pursuing the same goals. Cleaning up Chicago.”

  “You are,” said Nick, his voice softening, “but it isn’t your place to tell him how to do that. No offense, Kay, but you’re an amateur, and Elgort has been doing this for sixty years. It’s not your place to know what his grand plan is. Hell, it’s not even my place to know that. But if he says I need to be someplace for a job on Christmas Eve, I need to be there.”

  I looked up into his brown eyes. “Is that forever?”

  “No. I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “I don’t want to work for Uncle Elgort.”

  “I can’t not work for him. At least not yet.”

  It went on like that for a while. What I lacked in logic, I made up for in foot stomping and glaring. In the end, Nick said, “Call me if it’s an emergency,” and left.

  I stood in the freezing cold on Christmas Eve, playing that conversation over and over in my head. I felt pulled in too many directions. I had only just discovered this new side of myself. I was a free spirit, I worked in the shadows, I drank lots of coffee and slept in. Elgort Shelby, regardless of his retirement status, was organized crime, and that was not what I was interested in becoming. I was disorganized crime at worst, honorable vigilante at my best. I wanted to keep my independence.

  Which is why I had been keeping Nick at arm’s length as well. He had asked me to move in a couple times, but I didn’t see the rush. I was still learning who I was as a person, this new me. I wasn’t quite ready to be part of a family, certainly not part of a family that comes with so many str
ings attached.

  I heard a roar from the stadium and broke out of my reverie. That was the second complication with our plan: There was a Bears game going on at Soldier Field. It had begun at 1 p.m., and the Ruiz rendezvous was scheduled for 2 p.m., about five minutes from now. The game meant more traffic, more police, more people wandering around. It was going to be harder to spot our target.

  Because yes, problem three, we didn’t have eyes on either of our targets. I had reached out to Valerie Archer, a friend of ours who was the Vice President of one of the largest telecom companies in the country, to see if she could put a trace on Ruiz’s phone. No luck, her security was too good. And the mystery woman, we knew nothing about her. Where would they approach from? Who would arrive first? It was a crap shoot. All we knew was they were meeting somewhere nearby where I now stood. It could be the planetarium, it could be the Gold Star Memorial, it could be the Pavilion. We needed about twenty people to do this right, and we had four, including me.

  Marty was in his new SUV in the parking lot, probably eating his third or fourth taco from Del Campos. He was piloting a drone, fitted with a very good camera, slowly circling the area to spot Ruiz or Negron’s woman.

  “I see someone who might be the mystery woman,” he said into my ear.

  I leapt to attention. “Where?”

  “Near the Borovsky statue. She was sitting on a bench but just jumped up.”

  “That’s me, you moron!” I looked around until I spotted the drone over near the planetarium. I gave it the finger.

  “Sorry! Good to know the disguise works!”

  I could hear Park giggle over my earpiece.

  “El, keep your mic off unless you are speaking,” I cautioned her.

  “Sorry. Out.”

  Park, against my better judgement, was riding my little motorcycle around the area, a red Honda Grom. I say against my better judgement because I loved that bike like most people love their pet labradoodle. Her job was to instantly move to intercept the mystery woman once she was spotted. Zipping around on Gromet was the best way to make that happen.