by Mike Nappa
He started hobbling down the hall. She passed him and hit the stairwell running. She was on the seventh floor already when she heard his voice shouting up to her.
“When this is over, are you free for lunch sometime?”
Trudi didn’t see security until the eighth floor. The woman tried to stop her, but Trudi just flashed Samuel’s badge and kept running. She did the same thing on the ninth and tenth floors, and on the eleventh floor she caught the last part of a walkie-talkie broadcast announcing her coming to the guards on the floors above. After that they all just stepped aside and watched her run past.
Even with her athletic conditioning, running up eighteen flights of stairs in a dinner dress and chunky-heeled boots took something of a toll. At the sixteenth floor, she finally stopped long enough to dump her shoes. Sorry Vince, she said as she dropped the boots on the stairs, but I can go faster barefoot. She kept running.
At the twentieth floor, she allowed herself to stop and catch her breath. She looked at the remote detonator.
Seven minutes left, she thought. Made it with time to spare. She felt mildly euphoric.
Then she noticed that the light at the end of the plastic box was still green.
Okay, she thought. I’ll keep going.
She stopped again at the twenty-second floor. The light still burned green.
“Stupid manufacturer,” she muttered breathlessly. “You and your ‘under-promise and over-deliver’ marketing strategy. You promised a two-hundred-foot range but delivered more just on principle. Whatever happened to shoddy American workmanship?”
She kept running.
By the time Trudi had reached the twenty-fourth floor, the timer read four minutes—and the light was still green, though now it flickered a bit from time to time.
She found no security guard on this floor and silently told herself not to panic. She dashed through the doorway into the hall and started hunting for roof access. At one point, a guest heard her and timidly opened the door of his room.
“Are you here to evacuate us?” he said.
“Stay in your room!” she commanded. He started to say something, then saw the countdown clock ticking on the remote in her hand. He slammed the door shut.
She raced to the end of the hall, searching. “Thank you, Jesus,” she exhaled. Her lungs were burning now, and she could feel heat in her thighs and calves, but she’d found it. She’d found the door to the roof.
It was locked.
The timer in her hands clicked to two minutes.
She stepped back and kicked at the heavy metal door with her bare heel. It didn’t budge. She took a running jump at the door, launching both bare feet into a spot just to the left of the handle. The door rattled in its hinges as she fell to the ground, but she still wasn’t strong enough to dislodge it.
Now what, God? she silently shouted to the heavens, feeling new bruises forming on her heels. Is this how it ends? Almost, but not enough?
“Here!” She heard a voice calling out behind her. “Come over here!”
She turned and saw the hotel guest who had asked to be evacuated. She was speechless.
“Hurry,” he said, “over here!”
He was standing in front of an alcove where the icemaker and a few soft drink vending machines were located. She stared at him.
“This is a dead spot on the floor,” he said. “No cell service in here. Maybe no radio frequency can get through here either? Maybe that’s what you need?”
She looked at the remote detonator and saw the light flicker back and forth, briefly, between green and red.
She got up and ran toward him.
“Go back to your room,” she commanded breathlessly.
He turned and rushed to his room, pausing to look back at her before he closed the door. Room 2421, she thought. If this works, I’ll have to remember to thank the guy in 2421.
She stepped into the alcove and saw the light flicker to red. She sighed, still breathing hard. Then it flickered back to green.
One minute left.
She started searching the room for just the right spot, holding the remote high first, then low, then next to the ice machine, then by the door. She finally found the spot she needed, wedged between the icemaker and one of the drink machines. If she crouched down on her haunches, with her back to the wall, the light turned red and stayed red. She held her position.
The timer hit twenty seconds. Then fifteen. At ten seconds she closed her eyes. If this didn’t work, she didn’t want to be the one who counted down to death. She waited what seemed like an eternity, and felt her heart leap. Surely that was long enough, she thought. Surely that was ten seconds. She opened her eyes and saw her heart had rushed the count. There were three seconds left.
Two seconds.
She couldn’t look away.
One second.
The space between one second and zero on the timer seemed simultaneously to last forever and to take no time at all. She held her breath.
She strained her ears.
She heard nothing.
She felt nothing.
The remote stayed red. The timer had stopped. And there was no explosion.
She let her head drop and decided it was okay that she was crying all over her fancy red dress. Her fingers trembled, and her legs felt like they were cramping up, but she didn’t move. She stared at the little red light, and only one thought filled her mind.
Thank you, Jesus.
She kept saying it over and over. She couldn’t stop herself.
Thank you, Jesus.
Two Weeks Later . . .
46
Trudi
Atlanta, GA
West Midtown
Friday, April 28, 8:59 a.m.
Fourteen Days after Nevermore
Trudi sat at her desk in the Coffey & Hill Investigations office and checked the personal ads in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She smiled. Then she flipped the paper over to the front page and read the headline again.
Mayoral Candidate to Face Grand Jury
According to The Raven, Max Roman was lucky to be alive right now, but the way his past few weeks had gone, she was willing to bet he didn’t feel so lucky.
Mama Bliss had planned three assassinations of her enemy. She was the thorough type.
First, Andrew Carr was supposed to fire a bullet into Max’s skull. Pavlo Kostiuk had thwarted that attempt. During the chaos of the Kipo takeover of the Grand Ballroom, he’d come out from behind the black curtain and tried to get Max out through one of the back exits into the service corridor. Problem was, there was a Kipo guarding that door with a Taurus MT-9 G2 submachine gun. Apparently Kipo working undercover on the catering crew had secretly planted five of these submachine guns in the ballroom, one at every exit, hidden under tablecloths on bussing carts stationed by each door.
Trudi had to give the Ukrainian credit. He’d charged the Kipo at the back door, actually was able to take the Taurus gun from him. His mistake was that he’d stopped to use the gun, killing the Kipo he’d defeated. That was when Andrew Carr changed his target and shot Pavlo Kostiuk in the back of the neck instead of shooting Max Roman first. Pavlo went down firing, taking out Andrew Carr before he died.
When the shooting started, Max had run back into the ballroom, where he hid under a table until it was all over. It was cowardly, yes, but it also saved his life. If he’d made a break for the door, there was a second Kipo with a Taurus MT-9 aimed and ready to shoot. He would have been killed in a hail of automatic gunfire.
Max’s second assassination was supposed to be the bomb in Pavlo’s briefcase. That was Mama Bliss’s primary backup plan, just in case something happened to prevent Andrew Carr’s success. If not for The Raven stealing the remote detonator from her hotel room, that murder attempt would have worked. Trudi had had to stay crouched next to that ice machine on the twenty-fourth floor of the Ritz-Carlton for almost an hour before the police found her, and then it was another half hour until a bomb squad officer
had relieved her of the remote. It had taken almost four hours—well past midnight—for SWAT to regain control of the ballroom from the Kipo. Then it had been two more hours after that for the bomb squad to defuse the C4-filled briefcase. But it had been worth it. By the time Saturday morning arrived in force, the C4 hadn’t gone off, the Grand Ballroom of the Ritz was still intact, and the only casualties in the Kipo takeover had been one Kipo guard, Pavlo Kostiuk, and Andrew Carr.
The one thing she hadn’t been able to explain was the mystery man in Room 2421 of the hotel. As far as she was concerned, he was a hero. If he hadn’t helped her at the critical moment, Mama’s bomb would have gone off, killing hundreds of innocent people along with Max Roman. Trudi figured that man deserved some kind of recognition from the city, or at least a letter of commendation and thanks from the Ritz-Carlton.
She’d looked for him afterward, to thank him properly for his help, but he was nowhere to be seen. She’d made her obligatory report to the authorities, making mention of him specifically because she wanted his heroism documented in their investigation. Then, on the Monday after Nevermore, she’d checked with the hotel management to find out who he was.
“Which room, Ms. Coffey?” the manager on the telephone had said.
“Room 2421,” she’d said. “On the top floor.”
There had been a pause and the sounds of fingers tapping on a computer keyboard. “Last Friday night, you say? April 14?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Coffey, but there was no one staying in room 2421 on Friday, April 14. In fact, the entire twenty-fourth floor was empty on that day.”
“But I saw him. He was . . .” She’d stopped herself. She couldn’t remember what the man looked like, couldn’t even remember the color of his skin or the style of his hair. Too much drama going on for me to pay attention to details like that, she guessed. Or maybe I wasn’t supposed to remember what he looked like?
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” the manager had said.
“No, thank you.” She’d hung up and spent the rest of the day puzzling over the mystery, never reaching a satisfying conclusion. In the end, she decided just to be grateful, even if she didn’t understand it all.
The third assassination of Max Roman was of his reputation, and in this attempt Mama Bliss succeeded. Sometime on Friday afternoon she’d mailed an envelope to the chief of police at the Zone 6 police station in Atlanta. The envelope contained only a logbook, but that was enough. There were hundreds of entries in the book—meticulously kept records, names, even photographs, and notes about where to find hidden audio recordings, video, and more. Every new thing seemed to be more incriminating than the last. Taken together, they painted a detailed picture of a vast organized-crime operation with Maksym Romanenko at the head. There was evidence of gun smuggling, racketeering, sex trafficking, street gang terrorism, and much, much more—all of it with Max Roman’s fingerprints attached.
The police had taken Councilman Roman into custody within a week. He’d posted bail and then been stupid enough to try and flee the country. Samuel Hill had caught him on the tarmac of Dekalb-Peachtree Airport, trying to board a chartered flight to Germany. Now Max was where he belonged: in the United States Penitentiary, Atlanta, surrounded by unsympathetic guards and angry incarcerated Kipo gang members.
Trudi Coffey put away the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and tried to get to work. She had three cases that needed her attention today, though none of them were pressing. In the first folder on her desk, one of her regular customers, a woman in Chamblee, wanted a background check on a potential domestic employee, a maid or a cook or something. That wouldn’t take long. The second folder was a businessman at CNN who wanted a consultation on human resources law, which was boring but which also paid well. Corporate consultations were almost always good business for Coffey & Hill Investigations.
The third folder was most interesting. It contained a letter from a movie producer at 3Arts Entertainment in Los Angeles. They were in preproduction on a new gangster film about Irish mafia types, the letter said. They’d heard about Trudi’s involvement in taking down Max Roman’s Ukrainian gangsters and wondered if she might be interested in being one of the advisors for their movie. They were asking for three days of her time, somewhere near the beginning of production in October or November. They promised a reasonable fee, all expenses, and an “assistant producer” credit if she came to Boston, where they planned to film on location. She was curious about that possibility but wanted to do more background research on 3Arts Entertainment before making a commitment.
She was tempted to start on that third folder but opted to take them in order of Coffey & Hill priority instead. She fired up her web browser and started digging into the latest on human resources law and litigation. Still, her mind wandered.
Samuel had recovered reasonably well from his drug-induced experience at the fundraiser.
Well, his body had recovered, but his ego was still bruised by the fact that he’d been so easily knocked out of commission. It didn’t help his self-esteem that Trudi had avoided a similar fate because she didn’t drink that glass of wine. She’d been sure to needle him about that. Not a lot of needling, just enough so that he remembered he’d been bested by a woman, by his ex-wife.
They’d caught Stephen Gartrell in South Carolina. He was that football player she’d seen at The Raven’s apartment the first time she’d met the street magician.
Gartrell had slipped out of the state of Georgia without incident and probably would have made it all the way to Canada if he’d been more patient. Apparently he had something of a lead foot when driving, and he’d been clocked going eighty-five miles per hour in a sixty-miles-per-hour construction zone. When the highway patrol tried to pull him over, he’d panicked and tried to race away. The high-speed chase was over when the police punctured his tires with nails spread across Interstate 20, just west of Florence, South Carolina. He was now awaiting transfer back to Georgia to face trial as a Nevermore co-conspirator. Word from Samuel was that Gartrell had made a “business decision” and was cooperating with authorities in anticipation of a plea-bargain agreement.
Viktor Kostiuk, on the other hand, had vanished. Like a ghost, he’d evaporated into thin air.
On April 14, an airline passenger with the name “V. Kostiuk” had booked seven different international flights, at seven different times, going to places as distant as Beijing, China, or Kiev in the Ukraine, and as near as Havana, Cuba.
Someone had boarded each flight and filled each V. Kostiuk seat, but airport surveillance never showed a clear image of any of those people, nor could they prove that any of the seven was the real Viktor. Theories abounded, but Trudi’s best guess was that all seven were decoys meant to distract the authorities while the crafty Mr. Kostiuk slipped away by other means. At this point, the chances of ever finding him were slim to none.
Darrent Hayes, Mama Bliss’s number-one manager at the Secret Stash, had likewise disappeared.
According to Samuel, he’d taken a vacation cruise to the Bahamas one week before the Nevermore date. He’d emptied his cabin at the Nassau port on April 13, told the captain he’d decided to stay for a while, and slipped away before anyone suspected him of anything. The Bahamian government was cooperating with American authorities in trying to track him down, but again, Trudi suspected he was long gone, probably off to South America or some subtropical climate. She’d been allowed to see his pre-planned itinerary and recognized several similarities with the one she and Samuel had been given for their Hawaiian vacation temptation.
After talking it over, she and her ex-husband had reached the conclusion that Darrent was probably the one who’d FedExed the Hawaii vacation tickets to Coffey & Hill Investigations. “I think maybe Mama Bliss was trying to protect you,” Samuel had said, “and me too. I think she wanted to get us out of harm’s way.” It made sense, even if the evidence was circumstantial.
Mama Bliss, ah, poor
Mama Bliss.
According to The Raven, Mama was driven by guilt over the untimely passing of her grandson. She’d made a list of six people that she felt were responsible for his death during a robbery gone wrong—and had included herself on that list.
Four of the people on Mama’s list had already died under suspicious circumstances. One, a gang member, was killed in a drive-by shooting on his way to meet his parole officer. Another Kipo was killed in a prison fight. The police officer who had shot Davis Monroe during the robbery had died in a freak fishing accident less than a year after he’d retired from the force. In an ironic twist, the mall security guard who’d called 911 during Davis’s robbery was killed in an armed robbery at a McDonald’s in the Old Fourth Ward. He had just been made part-owner in the franchise restaurant and was starting a new life outside the security industry.
Other than Mama Bliss, Max Roman was the last person alive on her list, and apparently the one she held as most responsible for her grandson’s death. After seeing glimpses of Roman’s alleged involvement in the Kipo gang structure, Trudi could see why Mama felt that way.
Paramedics had said Bliss Monroe was already dead when they arrived on scene, victim of fatal diabetic shock. Her insulin pump had either malfunctioned or, as The Raven claimed, been mis-set to deliver an overdose of insulin into her already fragile system. She couldn’t have lasted long. Trudi hoped that she’d been able to find peace at the end but had to live with the fact that she’d never know for sure.
The Raven, Tyson Elvis Miller, was in a bit of hot water in the immediate aftermath of Nevermore. Police held him as a “person of interest” for a while and considered pressing charges against him as a co-conspirator in the terrorist plot. He did, after all, have connections to Max Roman and to all three of the other Nevermore conspirators. Finally, though—and largely because of Samuel Hill’s persistence—his status was changed to “material witness” and he was allowed to go free. It also helped that he turned over an audio recording of the other conspirators going through the planned timeline of events during the early evening of April 14. He wasn’t allowed to keep the first-edition copy of the New York Evening Mirror magazine from January 1845, even though he protested loudly that Mama Bliss had “given” it to him as a present. It was now safely stored back at the Secret Stash while he made a legal claim to it as his property.
