The Shadow Broker (Mr. Finn Book 1)

by Trace Conger

  “I thought I’d save him the trip and pick it up myself,” said Rollo. “Plus I have a little business to discuss.”

  “What kind of business is that?”

  “Our little lunch meeting the other day got me thinking. I really don’t know much about what you’re doing here, Bishop. I know that you’re running a little black market of sorts, but I don’t know the extent of your inventory, who you sell it to or where you get the information you’re selling. Before, I was happy just getting a bag of money from you every Friday, but then you offer to buy me out and I start thinking maybe there’s something I don’t know about. Maybe you’re doing better than you’re leading on.”

  Bishop started to speak, but Rollo cut him off.

  “You see, me ... I’m old school. I grew up in Over the Rhine, running numbers and pushing powder on the street corner. But all this technology shit. Stealing credit card numbers and peoples’ identities. That’s all new to me. But I see the potential, so if this is the new wave of what we’re peddling, so be it. But I’m a bit worried, Bishop. I think you’re not telling me something.”

  “Worried?” Bishop chuckled as he wiped his brow. “What do you have to be worried about, Rollo? Everything’s fine here. We’re making good money.”

  Rollo stood and walked to the bookcase adjacent to Bishop’s desk. “Yeah, I know about the scratch. That’s not what I’m worried about. Problem is, I’m feeling disconnected, that’s all.” He ran a thin index finger across the book spines until it found the side of a photo frame. He inched the frame until it teetered on the shelf’s edge, about to tumble to the floor. “What I’m saying is if something were to happen to you, I’d be up shit creek.”

  Bishop uncrossed his legs. “What do you mean, ‘happen to me’?”

  “Relax, Bishop, that’s not what I’m saying.” Rollo gave the photo frame a final push with his finger, sending it over the edge of the bookshelf. He caught it with his right hand and set it back in its place. “I’m just saying if I had to take things over sometime down the line, I’d have no idea where to start. I’d be in the dark. You been running this thing for over a year, and I don’t understand it no better than I did when you first contacted me.”

  Bishop was silent.

  “You know, I can tell you how much cocaine and meth we moved on the West side last month, and I can tell you how many guns we sold downtown last week. I even know how many cocks each of our whores sucked yesterday. But I can’t tell you shit about your network. That’s what worries me.”

  Bishop shifted in his seat. “You want some type of report or something? Like a business review? I can give you whatever you need.”

  “Here’s what I want,” Rollo walked over and leaned on Bishop’s desk, his elbows locked. “I’m bringing a man in. Hickman. You might know him. He’s gonna start overseeing things here. Think of him as a middleman between you and me. He’ll get me the information I need when I need it. That way, I know what the fuck is happening around here.”

  Bishop stood up. “Rollo, that’s not necessary, I can get—”

  “Sit down, Bishop,” said Rollo, his arms still locked on the desk.

  Bishop kept his eyes on Rollo as he reached back and fumbled for the chair’s arm. He found it, slid it forward and sat back down.

  “You don’t need to bring anyone in from the outside,” said Bishop. “I work much better when I have autonomy, when there’s no one looking over my shoulder. I know how to run this business. The numbers show that.”

  “Look, Bishop. The numbers are great and I know you’re the guy to run things. I’m not questioning that. Your cut won’t change. I just want to have a better understanding of how things operate. And Hickman isn’t an outside guy. He’s run my West-side operation for years. He’s real smart and he’s into computers and shit. Just like you.”

  “And you’ve already talked to him about this?” said Bishop.

  Rollo took his hands off the desk and stood up straight. “Yeah, it’s a done deal. He’s really excited to get to know you and learn everything about your business. He’ll be checking in with you next week, and you guys can work something out.”

  Rollo took a few steps toward the door and then turned back to Bishop. “Let me be clear on this. I want Hickman to know everything you know. Everything. Got it?”

  “I got it,” said Bishop.

  Rollo pointed to the leather duffle on the floor. “That mine?”

  “Yes,” said Bishop, handing the bag to Rollo.

  Rollo passed the bag to one of his men. “Thanks. We’ll let ourselves out.”

  Rollo and his men headed for the doorway. Bishop reached for one of his desk drawers, but pulled his hand back when Rollo stopped and turned around again.

  “I guess I should thank you for bringing all this to my attention,” said Rollo.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you hadn’t made that offer to buy me out the other day, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But we did have that conversation, and now we’re having this one.”

  “Right,” said Bishop.

  Rollo extended a hitchhiker’s thumb and motioned to the duffle bag in his man’s hand. “I’ll see your fat friend next week then. Same time as usual.”

  “Same time as usual,” said Bishop.

  Rollo winked at Bishop, and he and his men walked out into the hall. Bishop listened to the men’s footsteps as they made their way down the hardwood hallway and then down the stairs. He waited for the sound of the front door closing before picking up his phone.

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, FAT SAM walked through Bishop’s office doorway. “I got your message. What’s up?” he said setting two Styrofoam food containers on Bishop’s desk.

  “Rollo just left. He’s bringing in Hickman to keep an eye on us, to learn the business. And eventually take it over.”

  Fat Sam opened his breakfast. “He said that? That Hickman was taking over?”

  Bishop pushed his breakfast to the side of his desk. “Didn’t have to,” he said. “It was clear enough.”

  Fat Sam shoveled a heap of scrambled eggs into his mouth. “Hickman? The West-side guy?” he said. “That’s not good.”

  “Yeah, I know. We’re going to have to move faster than we thought. Let’s get everyone together and get to it.”

  “I’ll make the calls,” said Fat Sam between bites.

  “And we’re going to have to ramp up recruiting,” said Bishop. “Put on your human resources hat and get some new blood in here. I need someone good and reliable.”

  “There’s two guys in Lexington I know. Might be a good fit.”

  “Bring them in.”

  MY FATHER COULDN’T GET TO sleep the first night on the boat. I got up twice to piss and found him watching television on the couch. The first time it was a late-night talk show; the second time some infomercial about a hose that didn’t kink. I didn’t know if he was a night owl or if he needed time to adjust to sleeping on the water. Either way, he’d fallen asleep at some point and was still out cold on the couch when Fat Sam called me around 9:30 a.m. The note I left for Albert said I had to follow up on a case and would be back in a few hours, and to help himself to doughnuts and coffee. I added a big smiley face for emphasis.

  THERE WAS NO PARKING NEAR Bishop’s home, so I parked three blocks away. I shoveled three bucks in quarters into the parking meter, giving me half the afternoon. Bishop’s meeting shouldn’t take that long, but I didn’t want to risk getting a parking ticket. No need for some meter maid to log my license plate, complete with date and location, into a police database. Always better to be cautious, and for three bucks, caution was cheap that afternoon.

  I grabbed the purple Crown Royal bag of bitcoins and the accordion file folder and headed up Hatch Street on foot. Fat Sam stood at his usual post on Bishop’s balcony and waved as he saw me on the street. He stepped back into the house, opened the front door and escorted me to Bishop’s office.

  Bishop muted the local news broadcast t
hat played on the flat-screen television bolted to the wall. “How’d it go?” he said shaking my hand.

  “Peachy. I threw up afterward.” I gave Bishop the purple bag and the file.

  “It happens. First time’s always tough,” he said. “It gets easier. Promise.”

  I didn’t know if there would be a next time, but Bishop invited me back to his house for some reason, so for the moment I wasn’t ruling it out. Bishop dropped two ice cubes into a rocks glass and poured a glass of Dewar’s scotch. “Two fingers?”

  I thought about Albert sitting on my boat, probably now awake and eating doughnuts in the galley, the orange life vest cinched tight to his bony frame. “Make it three,” I said.

  He tipped the bottle again, poured and passed me the glass. Then he grabbed a brown paper grocery bag from his safe and handed it to me. It was heavy, and I positioned my left forearm underneath the bag, in case the bottom tore loose from the weight.

  “Here’s your thirty grand for Banks.” He pointed to the purple bag on his desk. “Unless you want it in coins.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I like my money flat and green.” I sat on the couch and took another drink, listening to the ice cubes clink together. “I wasn’t expecting to kill anyone.”

  “How’d that happen?” said Fat Sam. “That’s usually Little Freddie’s gig.”

  “I didn’t expect Little Freddie to go all Eli Roth on the guy, so I decided to end it rather than watch him cut anything else off.”

  “I think Little Freddie is working out some issues,” said Bishop. “He should be here in a few minutes, and we can get started.”

  Fat Sam slapped me on the shoulder. “I bet Little Freddie didn’t vomit all over his shoes,” he said.

  “Nope,” I said. “Something tells me he’s a bit more comfortable with all this than I am.”

  Bishop poured himself a glass of Scotch, sat down at his desk and crossed his legs. “About that,” he said. “You did a bang-up job helping us get rid of our Silvio problem. You ready to step up your game and make some real money?”

  So far Bishop paid me fifty-five grand for finding Banks and putting him out of business. Fifty-five grand for less than a week’s work. That’s a little less than what I made all last year.

  I took another drink. “I’m willing to hear you out,” I said.

  LITTLE FREDDIE WALKED INTO BISHOP’S office about fifteen minutes later.

  “Parking is a goddamn nightmare around here,” he said. “Would have been here sooner, but I had to walk from a different area code.”

  “Small neighborhoods have their advantages, but parking isn’t one of them,” said Bishop. He stood up, pulled a white envelope out of a desk drawer and handed it to Fat Sam, who disappeared into the hall.

  He walked to the liquor cabinet and poured Little Freddie a glass of Scotch. “First, a little history lesson,” he said. “I came up with the idea for the Dark Brokerage more than a year ago. An anonymous information exchange. Fucking brilliant, if I do say so. Problem was, I needed an inventory and I didn’t have the connections to make that happen, so I approached a guy by the name of Rollo Watkins. He introduced me to several people who could help me get the things I’d need to get the website up and running. In return for establishing these relationships, I agreed to split the revenue with Rollo and his bosses—to the tune of one-third each. What I didn’t know at the time was how popular this shit would become and how much cash we’d actually generate.”

  Little Freddie sat in a chair across from me and sipped his drink. “How much are we talking?” he said.

  “As far as Rollo is concerned, we’re making one point three million per year, but that’s split three ways. Truth is, we’re tripling that.”

  “And Rollo has no idea of the real figures?” I said. “Why’s he in the dark?”

  “Rollo knows as much about technology as Sam knows about treadmills. Every week, I give him a spreadsheet with the numbers on it, a breakdown of business. I tell him it’s automatically generated by the site. It’s not. It’s all bullshit. Dog and pony. But he’s never asked questions. Every Friday, Sam delivers Rollo’s two-thirds of the revenue for the week. Rollo then distributes his boss’ one-third. I don’t deal with his boss directly. That’s the cash pipeline.

  “Considering that Rollo and his boss in Detroit do absolutely nothing to support my operation anymore, I wanted to cut them out. So a few days ago I approached Rollo and offered to buy him and his boss out of the operation.”

  Bishop sounded like every other businessman who got a taste of success and wanted to screw his business partners out of their share of the take.

  “Let me guess,” said Little Freddie. “That didn’t go well?”

  “He told me to go fuck myself.”

  Little Freddie smiled and took another drink. “So you want us to convince Rollo to reconsider your offer?” he said.

  “Hang on,” said Bishop. “It gets worse. Yesterday, Rollo told me he was bringing in one of his men to oversee things, a guy by the name of Hickman. Hickman runs Rollo’s West-side operation and is pretty ingrained into the organization.”

  It was clear what Bishop had stepped in. He’d cooked the books for the past year, and if this Hickman came in and started looking closer at the numbers, he’d find the real revenue and then Bishop would be a dead man. Bishop fucked up the minute he offered to buy out Rollo because no one ever buys someone out of a shit business. You buy the winner, not the loser. Bishop showed his hand when he made the offer, and now Rollo wondered how profitable Bishop’s operation really was.

  “So you’re asking us to delete Rollo and Hickman from the org chart,” said Little Freddie.

  “Right, but it’s not as simple as that. It has to be a coordinated hit. Both of them at the same time. Take one out and the other goes into lockdown, and then we’ll never get to them and the entire thing falls apart.”

  “Can we hit them together?” asked Little Freddie.

  “No. As far as I can tell, they’re rarely in the same place. I don’t have much access to either one of them, so we’re going to have to get creative.”

  Bishop hadn’t addressed Rollo’s boss, whomever that was. If he were also getting a third of Bishop’s take, he’d have to go too.

  “What about Rollo’s boss?” asked Little Freddie. He was smarter than I thought.

  “This website is small coin compared to everything else Rollo and Hickman are doing,” said Bishop. “We take them both out, and it’ll disrupt the entire organization. Anyone above Rollo will be so concerned about getting their own network back up and running again that we’ll have plenty of time to pick up stakes and get out of town before the smoke clears.”

  The approach was solid. Take out the leadership, and Bishop would be free and clear. His operation was small enough to vanish before Rollo’s bosses caught on. They’d be in complete disarray after Rollo and Hickman punched out, and their first instinct would be to hit back at Rollo’s competition. Bishop would be long gone before they even knew what had happened.

  Bishop headed back to the liquor cabinet and topped off his glass. Then, he refilled Little Freddie’s glass and motioned to me, but I waved him off. I wanted a clear head when we went over the details. Bishop sat back down at his desk and leaned forward on his forearms. “Let me be crystal clear,” he said. “I need to know now whether you’re in or not. There’s no turning back after this.” He turned to me. “Mr. Finn, I know you didn’t sign up for this, but you’ve proven yourself capable and we could use you. But I want you to know that once you go down this road, you’ll be in as deep as the rest of us.”

  “What’s the fee?” said Little Freddie.

  “Fifty grand each,” said Bishop. “Assuming you do it right.”

  Little Freddie swallowed his drink in one gulp. “That’s the only way I know how to do it,” he said. “I’m in.”

  Bishop and Little Freddie turned to me. I never considered myself a bona fide criminal. I’d done a few quest
ionable things, but this was the first time I had signed on to kill someone. I’d popped Banks, but that was never the original plan, so I discounted that one. It was more out of pity. Little Freddie was going to kill him anyway. I just expedited the process. But this was the real deal. No turning back.

  For me, this was all about the money. I lost my livelihood when I lost my license, and there was no telling when I’d ever get the chance at coin like this again. Bishop was on the hook, and I needed to get all the money out of him that I could because it might be awhile before I’d see another paycheck. When people hire a PI, they want a licensed professional, which I can no longer say I am. Instead, I have to work for people like Bishop, and people like Bishop don’t come my way too often. Maybe once or twice a year. I had to take the chance when I got it.

  I didn’t have a problem taking out Rollo or Hickman. They were both pieces of shit and fifty grand. Plus, the other fifty-five grand Bishop had already thrown at me would go a long way to setting up me and my new roommate. It would also let me coast until I found another client, which could be awhile. I could set some aside to pay out Becca’s God academy. Except for the part about killing another human being, I didn’t see a downside.

  “I’m in,” I said. “Let’s talk details.”

  BISHOP WAS CONFIDENT THAT ROLLO knew of Little Freddie. He wasn’t sure if Rollo could identify him in person, but Little Freddie had a reputation that spread across Southern Ohio as someone you didn’t want to cross. That meant Bishop couldn’t risk sending Little Freddie into Rollo’s office building. But he could send me.

  Fat Sam had a scheduled drop at Rollo’s office every Friday at noon, and that presented the best opportunity to get close to Rollo. The plan was to send me instead of Fat Sam, to say I’m new to the organization and taking over bagman responsibilities. Getting face to face was easy, but the real question was how to take Rollo out.

  Fat Sam explained the drop process. He took the elevator up to the fourth floor and entered a lobby, where Rollo’s security team frisked him and searched the bag. From there, they escorted him down a hall and into Rollo’s office.