Chase Baker and the Dutch Diamonds
A Chase Baker Thriller No. 10
Vincent Zandri
Contents
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Chase Baker and the Dutch Diamonds
Untitled
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
Untitled
About the Author
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Chase Baker and the Dutch Diamonds
(A Chase Baker Thriller No. 10)
Vincent Zandri
“‘Don’t let Satan draw you too fast.”
—Depression-era gangster Dutch Schultz on his deathbed
1
“This is your fault, Edgerton.”
That’s me, laid out on my back on a railroad bed.
More specifically, my ankles and wrists have been duct-taped to both rails so that I am lying perpendicular to them, my head hanging over one rail, my feet hanging over the other.
Now, here’s the deal: I can live without my feet. But losing the head is obviously a different story altogether. And should I mention that the railroad bed in question is one that’s currently in use by Amtrak for their passenger train service that runs maybe six or seven times daily along the Hudson River line from Albany to New York City’s Pennsylvania Station and back again?
So, how did I get myself into this mess?
Let’s start with the guy I’m bitching about. A man by the name of Leslie Edgerton who, by the way, is also duct-taped to the rails right beside me. Leslie and I met at a bar last night inside a glitzy mid-town Manhattan hotel at a writer’s conference called SuspenseFest which was filled with anything but. Thus, our serendipitous communion in the bar.
When Edgerton, or shall I call him Edge, started talking like he’d known me his whole life about the hard time he did at Green Haven Maximum Security Prison for armed robbery, I couldn’t help but listen. When he started in on a story he heard while incarcerated there of a gold deposit supposedly buried in the sleepy little upstate town of Phoenicia by the 1930’s gangster Dutch Schultz, I began to listen so attentively I almost grabbed a bar napkin and started taking notes. When Edge downed a shot of Jack, slapped my back so hard my fillings came loose, and exclaimed, “What the hell are we doing hanging around a bunch of introverted writer geeks when we could be striking it rich or, at the very least, finding something interesting to write about!?” I felt that little whiskey-soaked devil inside me say, What the hell? Let’s do it.
Chase the spontaneous.
What happened next is a bit of a booze-soaked blur, but it goes something like this: We hailed a cab which, after stopping at a bodega for a six pack, dropped us in the middle of the tiny Catskill Mountain town an hour later for three hundred bucks. A fare the apparently royalty rich Edge gladly paid. But instead of jumping on the trail of Schultz’s gold, Edge decided the more prudent thing to do was grab a few more drinks in one of the local watering holes. Get the lay of the land so to speak, interview a few of the local yokels.
That decision led to our meeting a Russian fellow and his son, both of whom were dressed in silky, black Nike track suits and whose bellies (the father’s anyway) bulged far beyond what the Mexican sweatshop constructed elastic waistbands were meant to accommodate. In any case, Edge took a liking to them, and when he explained that we were two writers on the trail of Schultz’s lost treasure, they volunteered their services as guides.
“I am Sergey,” said Russian Senior. “My boy is Sergey, too.”
What all this meant was dropping another couple hundred a piece on the Sergeys, and piling into their black Lincoln Town Car. Only, instead of heading up into the mountains, we drove through the night while Edge spewed forth about how ol’ Dutch supposedly buried six million of his loot under a sycamore tree by the Esopus River. With legend having it that Dutch himself carved an X into said tree, Edge figured that finding the treasure would be a no brainer.
But that’s when the Sergey Senior snorted from behind the wheel, said, “The whole of Catskill is a tree preserve, just like Siberia, da? Like finding needle in smokestack.”
“Haystack,” Sergey Junior corrected from the shotgun seat. “It’s needle in a haystack, Pa.”
Swinging a beefy right hand with more speed and precision than Rocky Four’s Ivan Drago, Sergey Senior smacked his boy’s baby face.
“Ouch,” the boy groused. “Why’d you do that, Pa?”
“You don’t insult me in front of guests, da?” he said. “You need to treat me with respect.”
We kept driving, past the mountains and over the metal bridge under which spanned the wide Esopus River.
“Where the hell we going?” I asked, at one point.
“Good spot to look for loot,” said Sergey Senior. “Place nobody knows.”
Edge leaned into me. “Don’t piss them off. We might be onto something here. Russians are a tenacious bunch. Stood tough against the German Wehrmach
t at Stalingrad and Leningrad. Had to eat their own. Drink their own blood and pee. Tough situation. I make them criminals in all my books. But then you probably know that ‘cause you read all my shit, don’t you, Baker?”
We kept driving until after maybe forty-five minutes when we reached the Hudson River and the rail-bed that ran along its banks. That’s when the Russians pulled their guns on us, robbed us of our wallets and cash, and then for “sheets and geegles” as Sergey Senior so eloquently put it, decided to attach us to the train tracks just in time for the seven AM southbound express from Albany to New York.
“Damsels in distress, just like in your Bullwinkle cartoon from the 1960s, yes?” said Sergey Senior, thinning salt and pepper hair slicked back on his scalp, vodka gut hanging low, cigarette dangling from between his lips. “I’m Boris Badenov, and my boy here is Natasha Fatale.”
“Why do I have to be the girl, Pa?” the kid said in his matching track suit, thick black hair, and mildly bulbous stomach making him appear every bit the decades younger version of his father.
“Because I said so, da,” the old man said. “Natasha is one hot leetle beetch. That is what you are. Hot leetle beetch.”
Clearly, the future did not look all too bright for Edge and me.
Which brings us back to the here and now.
But as the morning sun grows hotter and hotter, turning a routine hangover into something obscene, I shift my head to avoid being blinded by the searing laser-bright rays and instead eye the man who talked me into this mess.
Leslie Edgerton . . . Self-proclaimed bad ass noir novelist and hard-boiled ex-con tough guy. He stands maybe five ten, and sports a good-sized beer gut under his black Mysterious Bookshop T-shirt, of which the chest pocket is stuffed with his seemingly never-ending pack of Marlboro Reds.
“Any ideas, asshole?” I say, while the Russians stand off to the side, staring at their smartphones, waiting for the sounds of an oncoming train, signaling that . . . their personal sicko show . . . is about to begin.
Edge turns to me, his left facial cheek resting on the steel rail.
“Why you mad at me?” he asks. “I didn’t drag you here. You were all over the idea.” He laughs like something’s funny, the skin on his shaved scalp furrowing. “Or was that the booze talking little fan-boy Baker?”
Okay, maybe Edge is like twenty years older than me, and maybe I’ve been reading his books for a long time like any other fan, but I’m no little boy. I’m a writer too. But as a sandhog and . . . how does one say it? . . . obtainer of rare and very expensive antiquities, I’ve developed a gut for recognizing a dangerous situation for what it is. And right now, what we have is one dangerous serious-as-a-coronary situation.
“Okay, let’s not argue,” I say, pulling on my taped wrists and ankles, my black T-shirt, worn bush jacket, and Levi jeans already soaked in sweat from the brilliant sun and the oncoming summer heat. “Let’s just figure a way out of this shit.”
Then, from out of the distance, a faint, nearly indiscernible whistle. Something so subtle, only a dog might hear it. But due to our rather delicate situation, and my . . . let’s call them . . . enhanced senses, I’m able to make it out.
“Edge,” I say, under my breath, “you hear that?”
“Here what?”
“That whistle. It’s a freakin’ train whistle.”
He goes quiet while his ears prick up.
“Holy fuck all,” he says. “It is a train whistle. We gotta get out of this somehow, Baker.”
“You figure that one up all on your own?” I jabbed. “How exactly do you propose we do that?”
“We throw ourselves on the mercy of these assholes,” he says. “Watch this.” He shifts his focus onto the Russians as best he can from his hopeless horizontal position. “Please, please, don’t let us die!” The big tough hard-boiled writer is suddenly reduced to tears and screams.
Sergey Senior and Sergey Junior turn to us. Senior cups his hand around his right ear lobe. His face suddenly beams with a smile.
“The train is coming, da?” Then to his son, “Sergey, the train comes, and the treasure hunting boys here lose their heads.”
“And feet,” Sergey Junior points out.
The train whistles are now not only audible, but I’m beginning to feel a vibration in the metal tracks.
“Please, man,” Edge cries, “you gotta free us. This is inhumane.”
“Stalingrad,” Sergey Senior says. “Now that was inhumane. Just ask my dead grandmother.”
“What the fuck we gonna do, Edge?” I say, my voice so tense the words feel like they’re shredding the skin on the back of my throat.
“I’m working on it,” he whispers, while the whistles grow louder, the vibrations more intense. Lifting his head from off the rail. “Listen, Sergey, buddy,” he adds, “at least give me one more smoke. Just one more cigarette for the road, so to speak.”
“That’s it?” I say. “That’s your plan? One last cigarette?”
“Better than nothing,” Edge says. “More than you got, Baker.”
Sergey Senior laughs. “What do you think, Son? Give old man one last smoke?”
“I ain’t old yet,” Edge points out. “I’m mature.”
“Okay,” the kid says.
Sergey Junior steps over to Edge, pulls the writer’s cigarettes and lighter out of his chest pocket. But instead of lighting one up for him, the kid places the cigarettes and lighter into Edge’s right hand.
“Go ahead,” the kid says with a snort, “knock yourself out.”
The vibrations are shooting through my back, arms, and legs. Through the back of my skull.
The two Russians are laughing. They go back to staring into their smartphones. Meanwhile, I smell something burning. When I look over my shoulder at Edge, I see he’s managed to produce a flame with the Bic lighter. He’s burning a hole through the tape. He yanks his right hand free, then leaning up, peels away the tape around his ankles. Finally, he pulls his left hand free.
The Russians turn, spot what’s going on, and go after him. But Edge manages to catch the boy with a swift left hook square in the face. The kid’s nose pops like water balloon full of arterial blood. He drops his gun, and Edge quickly retrieves it.
“Just try it, Sergey,” he barks, pointing the hand cannon at the father. “What I want from you right now, is our wallets and our cash back.”
What were train whistles is now replaced with the rumbling noise of a train engine bearing down on me. The thing can’t be more than a mile or two away.
“Edge!” I scream. “For Christ’s sakes. You gotta cut me lose.”
“We’ll see one another again, da?” says Sergey Senior with an angry as all hell smile, while he reaches into his pockets with both hands, pulls out the wallets and the cash, tosses it all at Edge’s feet. Working up a big fat loogy, he spits it defiantly onto the ground before he and his bloody nosed son run off into the woods. That’s when a very pissed off Edge tosses the gun at them.
The rails are trembling, the back of my neck bouncing off the hot steel. In a matter of a minute, that won’t be a problem anymore since my head will no longer be attached to my neck.
“Can you maybe hurry a little, Edge?” I press.
“Hold your horses, Baker,” he says, retrieving the wallets and the money, stuffing them in his pockets. “I’m not as young as I used to be I don’t move so fast.”
Standing in the center of the tracks, he takes a knee — slowly, painfully. Even with the sound of the locomotive barreling down on me, I can make out the snap, crackle, and pop in his knee joint. He brings the lighter to the duct tape that attaches my right wrist to the steel rail, thumbs the flame. The flame begins to cook the tape. At the same time, it cooks my flesh.
“Christ, Edge!” I scream, thrusting my chest forward. “You trying to torture me?”
“Oops,” he says. “Sorry, Baker.”
Redirecting the flame, he concentrates it on the tape and not my flesh.
Then, the sound of a train whistle, loud and in our faces. A quick glance over my left shoulder proves the train is barreling down on me. It’s maybe three hundred yards away and doing what seems like fifty or sixty miles-per-hour and it must weigh hundreds of tons and it must be pulling thousands of tons. No way it will stop on a dime. Not with that kind of forward momentum behind it.
“Edge, hurry now, fucking hurry!”
He frees my hand. Turning he goes for the ankles. Yanking my feet back, the tape snaps in half. That leaves my left wrist.
The engine is one hundred yards away and closing. The rails raising trembling, bending, hefting. The whistle blaring, brakes screeching, the train slowing but still coming at me, its forward momentum impossible to stop behind all that weight.
My wrist is still bound to the rail. But Edge is frozen in time, standing stone stiff on the opposite side of the tracks.
“We’re not gonna make it!” he screams.
But I know the truth: He’s scared shitless.
“Throw me the lighter,” I insist. Glancing over my shoulder. The engine is one hundred thirty yards away and closing. “Throw it!”
I can’t even hear my own voice it’s so entirely drowned out by the calamity of the engine, the whistle, the brakes.
He tosses the lighter. It all happens in slow motion. Just like it would in a movie. Edge tossing the lighter, the red translucent Bic lighter arcing into the sky, turning end over end, the bright morning sunshine reflecting off its shiny aluminum head, the lighter’s decent as it comes closer and closer, my free hand held out for it like a baseball player attempting to field the most important popup of his life.
The lighter lands in the palm of my hand . . .
. . . but slips out, falling to the gravel in between the tracks.
That’s when time stops. The train whistle silences, the engine quiets, the train tracks cease moving. All I can make out is a buzz in my brain and Edgerton’s round face painted with a horrified wide-eyed expression that screams, “Fuck no!”
Chase Baker and the Dutch Diamonds: A Chase Baker Thriller Book 10 Page 1
