I let that pass. “And they were interested?”
“Not for themselves, but they got in touch with people who were. I guess that box of plutonium or whatever the hell it is, it’s something people have been looking for, for years.”
“Yeah. Only the safe was empty.”
His shook his head, eyes wild again. “Shooter, I checked that baby. I opened that safe and there it was, wrapped up in blankets just like when the heisters stuck it in there. Twenty years ago!”
“So you were double-crossed.”
“Not by the Saudis. You were there, Shooter. You saw how that went down. Somebody else got to that stash between the last time I checked it and when I opened up the safe for my buyers.”
“Who?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I didn’t advertise this thing. Only a handful of higher-ups in the mob knew about the atomic heist, and of course everybody but Orbach got killed when they kidnapped your Bettie.”
I leaned close. “They’re still looking for her, Bucky. Why?”
“Not for what was in that safe, Shooter! No way. But they could still be afraid of those files. Those floppy discs.”
“Why, after all this time?”
“Some guys Orbach implicated are still alive. That was one hell of an insurance policy, Shooter — names, dates, places. Man, even now, there’d be hell to pay with the coppers and the feds.”
I heard something behind me.
Davy Ross was peeking in.
He said to Bucky, “A public defender’s on the way, Mr. Mohler.”
“Thanks, Sergeant.” Bucky looked at me with eyes that were afraid to blink. “Are we cool, Shooter? Did I give you what you need?”
“I need one other thing.”
“What, Shooter?”
I leaned in and whispered; this was nothing Davy needed to hear.
“When this is over, assuming you don’t wind up in a federal pen somewhere, and you see me coming? I need you to go the other way as fast as your new kneecap will allow.”
He swallowed. “I’ve had better best friends.”
“No you haven’t. I saved your life six times today.”
He squinted at me. “Six?”
“Once in that cellar, and five times in this room when I talked myself out of killing you.”
Chapter Eleven
We were sitting at the kitchen table in number 820 on Kenneth Avenue in Sunset Lodge — my one-and-a-half story digs, where Bettie had moved in at Joe Pender’s suggestion and with Darris Kinder’s approval. Tacos was sleeping on a braided rug nearby, next to his dog dishes. The greyhound had made the next-door transition just fine, if his snoring was any indicator.
It was mid-evening and I had made the coffee and served up Bettie and Kinder their cups while I also served up the events of the day before, and the story that Bucky Mohler had told me. I didn’t dole it out — Bettie seemed able to take it all in as fast as it came. She sat with her hands cradling the coffee cup and the hazel eyes stared into nothing and everything.
“After I talked to Bucky,” I said, seated next to Bettie and across from Kinder, “I spent three long hours with the feds.”
“Which flavor?” Kinder asked.
“All 57 varieties — the top guy was Homeland Security, but FBI was part of it, another was NSA, and a character who just had to be CIA.”
Kinder shrugged. “This does have its foreign implications. What was their take on all this?”
“Their ‘take,’ ” I said with half a smile, “was that I had done more than enough, and they would take it from here.”
The captain/manager frowned. “Take what from where?”
“Every aspect of the affair relating to the ‘missing materiel’ — that’s they what called it. They didn’t confirm or deny the nuclear aspect.”
“Where does that leave us?”
But what Kinder meant was: where does that leave Bettie?
“It leaves us,” I said, “with a big old shoe to drop. A big very old shoe.”
Bettie had said nothing through my report. She hadn’t nodded or done anything to indicate these new facts jogged her memory further. Somehow I felt they had — somehow I felt that behind her pretty placid face the wheels were turning. Maybe even spinning.
“You mean the organized crime aspects,” Kinder said. “Garrison Properties and Romero Suede and ice cream trucks. You know, one of those trucks, specially rigged, looking innocent as hell, could have hauled that atomic cube down here.”
“If they did,” I said, “the feds consider that their business.” I sipped my own coffee and shrugged. “I gave them everything, Darris — Garrison and Suede and ice cream on a stick. They’re probably mounting an operation right now.”
“If so, I haven’t heard about it.”
“We’re just the small fry who handed them everything on a platter. But the contents of that old safe don’t concern me anymore.”
“What does?”
“That shoe. That old shoe.”
“That hasn’t dropped yet.”
“Right.”
Kinder’s eyes were slits. “And what shoe would that be, Jack?”
And Bettie spoke.
“The floppy discs,” she said.
We looked at her. She looked at me. Only the unblinking emptiness of the lovely eyes indicated she wasn’t seeing me. And yet she always saw me....
“I made copies of those discs for you, Jack,” she said calmly.
I sat forward. “Bennie Orbach’s insurance policy, you mean? Chapter and verse on the five New York crime families circa twenty years ago....”
She looked away from me, into the past. “Yes. I wasn’t just working for Credentials. I had a responsibility to the government, the federal government.”
The words were coming steadily but slowly. I tried to help: “You were an expert on computer viruses. You were one of a number of experts, peppered around the country at small computer outfits, helping out the government.”
Her eyes opened wider. “Yes. Trying to help avoid and contain near-catastrophic situations.”
The officialese mirrored the words of her boss at Credentials.
A funny little smile twisted her lush lips. “I remember, Jack, you used to say, ‘Cops hate coincidences.’ But it was a coincidence, Jack, a complete coincidence that that man Orbach chose Credentials to safeguard his data.”
“Do you remember what that data was, Bettie?”
“Just as you said — chapter and verse on the five New York crime families, with an emphasis on the branch he worked for. He pretended to be a writer, a journalist, this man... this Orbach. He claimed much of the material was speculative. And yet he left instructions for the files to go to specific parties in the event of his death by violence or otherwise suspicious circumstances.”
I moved my chair closer to hers and slipped an arm around her shoulder. “Do you remember, Bettie? Do you remember where the floppy discs are?”
“I do. Back in New York.”
They would be.
She was saying, “We’ll have to go there for them. I want to go, too, Jack. I don’t want you leaving me behind again — I don’t think I could stand it.”
“You’ll go. We’ll go.”
“As long... as long as we come back here. Because Sunset Lodge is our home.”
Kinder had been taking it all in. “Should we call ahead? To your pal Sgt. Ross, maybe? The phones are clean — I saw to it this place was swept for bugs just today.”
“No,” I said. “This doesn’t go anywhere past this table, okay, Darris? Nobody but Bettie, me and you need to know those discs still exist.”
I locked eyes with Darris, my expression telling him what my words couldn’t risk in front of Bettie: that if the bad guys knew those floppies were around, they’d be on us like fire ants at a picnic.
As I showed Kinder out, I told him to maintain the surveillance of the house, and he assured me he would.
The lights were mostly out — Bettie didn’t
need them and I liked the atmosphere. Anyway, we’d left some lights on next door, in Bettie’s place, to continue the illusion that she still lived there. So when Bettie led me across into the living room, I bumped into an end table. The blind girl was already more used to my place than I was.
We wound up on the sofa and I sat with my arm around her as she curled up beside and against me. In a sport shirt and slacks, I had to shift a bit to get comfortable because t... .45 was still in its holster on my hip, and would stay there for the foreseeable future. Bettie was in white jeans and a pink short-sleeve sweater, the day a little chilly, at least for Florida. The wind off the water was rattling the windows and you could almost remember it was fall in faraway places that weren’t drenched in year-round sunshine.
“Where in New York?” I asked her absently. “The discs, I mean. Back at Dr. Brice’s place?”
She shook her head. “No. I left them with you.”
I stiffened. “You what?”
“The floppies were in my antique desk, the one my grandmother left me. In our apartment, Jack.”
She’d had no close living relatives, and as a kid of twenty-one hadn’t left a will; the handful of personal items had gone to me, by default.
I turned her toward me. Looked right at her and she gazed at me with the empty hazel eyes. “Bettie... that desk is here. It’s upstairs, in the bedroom....”
Now she straightened. “Is... is that the desk in your bedroom?”
The way she near-echoed me might have been funny in other circumstances. Of course Bettie had got to know the lay of the land or anyway of the furniture in my place. But blind and slowly coming out of memory loss, she had no reason to recognize by touch a desk she hadn’t seen in twenty years, even if it was an 18th-century family heirloom.
Still, she was first off the sofa. She went unerringly across the room to the open staircase against the far wall that led up to the master bedroom. I followed. Something about the movement woke Tacos, whose big head craned up to comment by way of a yip.
“Stay,” I told him, and he settled back down on his braided rug.
In seconds we were up the stairs, onto the landing and into the bedroom.
I threw the overhead light switch, which also started the gentle whirl of the ceiling fan. Like the entire house, the place was under-furnished — just Bettie’s old four-poster bed, a nightstand, a chest of drawers and the vintage desk, all among the small load the movers had brought down from the big city.
I moved my swivel chair out of her way, and cleared the bottles off the ornate desk that I’d used for years as a liquor cabinet. Then her fingers began their work.
And those fingers had a memory of their own, finding at once a decorative panel whose fancy carvings disguised a hidden drawer. She had to tug on the chunk of wooden filigree that was a hidden handle a couple of times before it gratingly gave, and screeched open.
Inside was an age-discolored manila envelope, folded over.
She took it out and handed it to me. Within were two floppy discs, the larger size that you don’t see often anymore. My name was on the labels. And a word: IMPORTANT.
“All those years,” I said, my voice a bitter whisper.
“What, Jack?”
I hefted the lightweight envelope and said, “All those years, I had these things — right in my apartment.”
She was shaking her head, her lovely dark hair bouncing off her shoulders. “How could you have known? I didn’t exactly have time to send a message to you, and later when I could have... I couldn’t. Because I couldn’t remember my own identity, let alone the man I loved.”
I hugged her to me. “We need to get out of here right now, doll. We’ll grab Kinder and get to the nearest FBI office, and—”
That was when Tacos got back in the act.
Only it wasn’t a simple yip, but a yapping, echoing up from downstairs. The old racing hound was sounding an alarm.
T... .45 was already in my right hand when I got to the window by the bed and looked out and took in an unusual sight for after dark — an ice cream truck double-parked out front. And I hadn’t ordered anything sweet.
Simultaneously we said to each other, “We have company,” and there was no time to be impressed by how mutually on the same wavelength we were.
And Tacos was keeping at it, the barking vicious now, ringing off the walls and ceiling downstairs.
I swept Bettie along with me to the bedroom’s rear window and looked out across the back yard and between the two houses on our neighboring street, and got a view of another double-parked ice cream truck.
That was when the greyhound’s yapping broke off abruptly. The sudden silence sounded its own alarm, one even more troubling than the barking itself.
“Stay here,” I whispered.
She didn’t argue.
The master bedroom and a sewing room, on the other side of the stairwell, were the only rooms up here on this half a floor. From the landing, I could see nothing of the world below. I paused just long enough to listen for movement, didn’t hear any, then started down the stairs cautiously.
The stairs hugged the wall on one side, and were open onto the big living room on the other. Only two lights were on downstairs, a lamp by the sofa and a ceiling fixture over the kitchen table.
As I descended, I could see the fallen Tacos, sprawled on his braided rug, the side of his head matted with blood. He’d been struck a hard blow and he was unconscious but his bony ribcage was rising and falling. Otherwise the living room and the kitchen beyond it appeared empty.
My den was on the other side of the wall the stairs hugged, under the master bedroom. Beneath the staircase was a bathroom, and a hallway between it and the kitchen led to two guest bedrooms and the laundry room. If intruders were looking for us, they might assume the master bedroom would be downstairs. If they had, I could come up behind them and end this quickly.
That was seeming like a reasonable assumption when a guy in a black stocking-mask and matching wardrobe popped up from where he’d been crouching behind the end table on the far side of the sofa, his form slightly blurred by the light of the lamp, and a silenced shot from a Glock snicked past my ear.
My shot was no snick but an explosion in the open room and then the intruder’s head exploded, too, but silently, except for the splat of bone and brain matter that traveled to a window to land and drip.
I spent maybe half a second wondering if the guy was alone but knowing that two ice cream trucks meant multiple salesmen of death, and another one leaned out from behind where the stove and countertop in the kitchen provided him a good position to crouch and shoot.
But before he could, I blasted twice, and one bullet caught his weapon — another silenced Glock — and the other took off some fingers and their little stumps were geysering and he was screaming and when pain and reflex brought him to his feet, my head shot put him out of his misery and brightened up the kitchen cabinets behind him with splashes of red.
When the third black stocking-masked house guest leapt from the doorway of my den, I ducked and two slugs from another noise-suppressed Glock dug holes in the wood, and I lost my balance and came bump-bump-bumping on my rump down the stairs, firing as did, taking out railing posts but not the intruder, who ducked back in my den, while I hit hard on the little landing, where the stairs took their small four-step jog into the living room.
I’d barely hit up against the railings, including several ... .45 had already splintered, when he popped back out and was below me a little and yet right on me, pointing that Glock up at me, but I kicked through the remaining railings and caught him on the chin and sent him back hard against the wall, his Glock popping out of his hand and flying somewhere.
He was helpless against the wall, trying to catch his breath, which was the perfect time to shoot the son of a bitch, but t... .45 jammed and then he had his damn breath and reached out and dragged me through the gaping teeth of the landing rails and onto the floor. I landed hard, onto splintered
wood, on my back, and he dropped down onto me, landing with his knee in my stomach and all of the air went out of me.
He spoke, but not to me: “Find her. Find the discs.”
Somebody said, “Right,” and I saw a fourth black-masked figure — where the hell had he come from? — go blurring past and on up the stairs. I tried to call out a warning to Bettie, but with my air gone, I had nothing....
The intruder moved the knee to my chest, pinning me there as I gasped for breath, trying to get the hell back in this game. We were in the narrow space at the entry of my den, between the stairway landing and the wall, near the front door.
“Bettie,” I said.
But it was barely a whisper.
The man on top of me yanked off his stocking mask. Maybe he was hot. Maybe he wanted to gloat.
For sure he was Romero Suede, a dark pockmarked grinning kid I’d busted more than once and who seemed more at home in this role than selling ice cream to kids and codgers.
“Not such hot shit now,” he laughed, “are you, Shooter?”
That was when the lights went out.
Every light in the house, and it startled the man with his knee on my chest, and gave me an edge. I knew this house in the dark, and Suede didn’t.
And while my chest was pinned, my arms weren’t, and my breath had returned, and I jabbed a short right into his groin, which got his attention. He reared back, letting up on me without meaning to, and I tossed him the hell off of me, and scooted out from under him, then headed up the stairs, toward Bettie and her intruder.
But I took something with me: a chunk of wooden railing with a jagged end. I held the thing in my fist, an eight-inch spear, and when Suede managed to get his bearings enough to come up the stairs after me, and grab onto the back of my shirt, I swung around and jabbed the spear hard, into his heart, like he was a vampire and I was Van Helsing.
He didn’t turn into a skeleton and smoke, but he did go away, falling backward and making lots of noise doing it, but not screaming, too dead for that.
And there was noise coming from the master bedroom, terrible noise, including breaking glass. I remembered those bottles and ghastly scenarios were playing out in my mind. I had no weapon now, not even a chunk of stair rail, and the last intruder no doubt had his own damn Glock, but somehow I had to stop him, if only to put myself between him and Bettie, and then I was in the room, ready for anything, except for one thing...
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