Burke's Gamble

by William F. Brown

  “Don’t tell me, not the poker tables again?” he groaned.

  “At the time, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. We bought that new house, you know; and we had some money left over, $30,000, I guess. Since he was going on another deployment, Vinnie decided we deserved what he called an insane weekend.”

  “Insane? Figures.”

  “It was a spur of the moment thing. We flew up, got a room at the Bimini Bay Casino, and he hit the tables.”

  “How much?”

  “How much? Well, he started out winning, but by the end of the second day…”

  “His luck changed? That’s what casinos do, Patsy; they suck you in. How much?”

  There was a long pause before she answered. “Well, for starters, he lost the $30,000; but you know Vinnie. He wasn’t about to quit after that. We went up to the Gold Club office, where this cute little blonde with a big smile named Eva gave him another $50,000, after he signed a note and a bunch of papers, of course.”

  “Casinos are nothing if not accommodating.”

  “I told him not to take the money, but he wouldn’t listen. The more I argued, the angrier he got at me; so I finally shut up.”

  “I take it he lost that $50,000 too?”

  “Of course, but this time there was no cute blonde to go see. They cut him off, and two big gorillas took us by the arms and walked us down this long corridor to the business office — both of us — where we ended up in front of the desk of a man named Martijn Van Gries. He’s Dutch, I think, pleasant enough, but a real smart-ass. I wanted to cut our losses and leave right then. Hell, I wanted to leave after the first $30,000, but you know Vinnie. He talked Van Gries into giving him another $50,000, if you can believe it! Well, by the end of the third night…”

  “He’d lost that too?”

  “You got it. So we ended up back in the business office again with that Dutch jerk Van Gries. The bottom line is that he gave Vinnie ten days to come back and pay off the markers. If he didn’t, they’d go down to North Carolina and take the $100,000 out of our hides… his and mine.”

  “Well, I’m glad you called me.”

  “Vinnie didn’t want me to call anyone, especially you. He is so embarrassed that he made me promise, ‘Don’t call the major,’ he told me, over and over again. ‘You can call Ace, but don’t call the major!’ Anyway, he swore up and down that he’d learned his lesson.”

  “Vinnie?” Bob shook his head in dismay. “That’ll be the day.”

  “So, we flew back home, took out a loan from the credit union on the house, and came back up here yesterday with $100,000 in cash to pay them off. This time, I didn’t go to the business office with him. I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing that man again.”

  “A wise choice.”

  “Vinnie had an appointment with Van Gries, and he said he wanted to do it himself, so he took the cash and left. He said it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. However, when seven hours passed and he hadn’t returned…”

  “Don’t tell me,” Bob said in frustration. “He went back and doubled down?”

  “More or less. He went to four or five other casinos down on the Boardwalk, where the genius figured they wouldn’t know him, determined to win it back. And since he was using cash, at least in the beginning…”

  “He lost all of that money too?”

  “Worse. He lost that $100,000, plus another $100,000 he managed to talk those other casinos out of… and there were damages, too.”

  “$200,000?”

  “That isn’t even counting the $130,000 of our money he blew!”

  “What was he thinking?”

  “I don’t have a clue; you know him better than I do.”

  “I doubt it, but that’s why the guys call him ‘Double-Down’ Vinnie.”

  “And to top it all off, he got in a big fight at Caesars with some of their security people and the ones who went down from the Bimini Bay to pick him up. Anyway, I had given up and gone to bed. The first thing I knew about it was when two big gorillas came to the room, woke me up, and dragged me down to the Risk Management Office. I think that’s what they call Security now. Some big joke if you ask me! Anyway, Vinnie was there, and he looked like he’d been worked over pretty good. So did two of their Risk Management Associates.”

  “Knowing Vinnie, that comes as no surprise. Look, Patsy, I’ll call Van Gries first thing in the morning. I’m sure I can work something out…”

  “It was a different guy the second time. Van Gries was there, but so was a musclebound black psycho named Shaka Corliss.”

  “He must be their enforcer.”

  “Well, if he is, it looked like he had a fresh bruise on his chin. Anyway, he was really rude and pushy, and he said Vinnie owes them $275,000. That’s for the markers at their casino, plus the others, the damages, the ‘vig,’ and for being a general pain in the ass.”

  “Well, I’d say they have a point.”

  “No question, and they also have us… but what’s the vig?”

  “The ‘vig’ is the vigorish. That’s the daily interest on the principal; but with them, it’s usually pretty steep, probably loan shark rates,” he answered. “But what did he damage?”

  “Two gambling tables and a bank of slot machines at Caesars, and the medical bills for four or five security people, two of whom he said Vinnie put in the hospital.”

  “That’s my boy, all right.”

  “Corliss said the tab is growing by $10,000 per day, and he wasn’t very pleasant about it. He says they want their money, all of it, in cash, or they’ll start breaking body parts.”

  “Well, I can’t blame him for that, but where are you?”

  “Back in our room at the Bimini Bay. I told Corliss I had to call some people to raise that kind of money. He gave me Vinnie’s cell phone and said that was a really good idea, if I wanted him back in one piece,” she sobbed. “I… I didn’t know who else to call, Bob.”

  “You did the right thing calling me, Patsy. Where’s Vinnie?”

  “Van Gries told me they locked him up in the basement storeroom, so Vinnie ‘won’t hurt himself anymore,’ he said. And Corliss said he’s staying there until I ‘come through’ with the money… that is, unless ‘a cute little thing’ like me wants to ‘work it off’ in one of their ‘escort services’ all winter… God, they scare me, Bob. I’m afraid they’re going to kill him, and they already told me what they’re going to do with me.”

  “None of that’s going to happen, Patsy. I’ll get with Van Gries and work something out. Don’t worry, they don’t want Vinnie or you; they want the money he owes.”

  “It’s $275,000, Bob! We don’t have that kind of money.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Patsy.”

  “I’m really sorry about all this, but…”

  “Look, I owe Vinnie, Ace, and all the other guys in the Unit a lot more than that — you, too. When Linda and I had our problem up here in Chicago, everyone came, no questions asked. I have the money, and it’s the least I can do. So try to get some sleep. I’ll call you when I know more.”

  Bob reached back, stretching as far as he could to hang up the phone, and then rolled back with every intention of going back to sleep. By the time he did, however, Linda had already scooched over and taken up half the area he vacated.

  “$275,000? Who we gonna kill this time?” she asked.

  “Probably Vinnie. And forget that ‘we’ stuff. I don’t want you involved this time.”

  “Patsy is. And it’s Atlantic City. How come she gets all the fun?”

  “I doubt she’s having any fun. Now go to sleep.”

  “Sure,” she said as she threw her leg across him.

  “Hey, you gonna leave me some room here?”

  “Not unless I have to,” she mumbled into his chest and pressed even closer.

  Bob was ten years older than Linda, but they had both been married before and were no longer kids. It had been so very different with his first wife, “the fier
ce and dreaded” Angie. While Linda was soft and cuddly, the late, great Angie Toler was nothing but sharp edges, hard muscles, and knees and elbows like ball-peen hammers. Her father gave them the family’s big English Tudor mansion on the lakeshore up in Winnetka, a white Cadillac Escalade, a Porsche, a Harley Davidson motorcycle, and three country club memberships. A spoiled brat? No doubt about it. After all, she was the one who talked Daddy into hiring Bob in the first place. She knew her father was looking for someone to succeed him and bypass her. When she and some of her friends met Bob and his friends on a long weekend in Hilton Head, it was “lust at first sight,” as they both admitted later. But the more she learned about this career Army officer, the more she saw him as the missing link in her master plan to block her father’s plan to freeze her out. Getting her father to hire him would be easy. Convincing Bob to get out of the Army would be the hard part.

  He was a third generation Army brat. His father put in 30 years, retiring as an infantry colonel after three tours in Vietnam. His grandfather had been a hard-as-nails sergeant major, who rose through the ranks fighting Germans in WWII, and later in Korea. He grew up on a dozen Army bases around the world, followed by four years at that exclusive government school for wayward youth up the Hudson River Valley called West Point, where he instinctively gravitated to his family business, the infantry, spending fifteen years on the Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, Iraq, and Afghanistan carousel, serving in turn in the 82nd Airborne Division, the elite 75th Ranger Regiment, and the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment or Delta Force, as it is called in the movies, or simply “the Unit” by its members. In the end, while Bob still believed passionately in the men he fought with, he no longer believed in political wars run by idiots in Washington who knew nothing about those places, but who kept sending a long line of young men to die in them anyway.

  That was the weak moment when Ed Toler offered Bob a top job in his rapidly growing telecommunications company in Chicago. At the time, Bob thought the man was out of his mind. He knew next to nothing about business and even less about the high-tech, high-security telecommunications equipment that Toler TeleCom built on exclusive contracts for the Defense Department. Technically, Bob was a Signal Corps officer, which was the Army’s communication branch, but he had been “detailed” to the Infantry for most of his career. While the Signal Corps made a great cover story for a guy who never looked like Special Ops to begin with, all he knew about communications was what they taught him fifteen years before in the Signal Officer Basic Course. By the time he got out, that stuff was as obsolete as a flip phone. When Ed Toler made his offer, Bob politely but firmly turned him down. He had no intention of becoming one more “beltway bandit” lobbyist who sold his integrity back to an Army he had served so honorably and for so long. That was never going to happen. Slowly, however, Ed Toler convinced him that wasn’t what he wanted either; and in the end, the opportunity was far too good for Bob to let pass by.

  Ed later admitted that when Angie brought Bob home the first time and introduced him, he assumed this was one more of his daughter’s moronic jokes. Bob looked so very ordinary. He was on the short side, with a slight build and not exactly rippling with muscles like Angie’s usual gym-rat boyfriends. But a West Point career officer with short hair? Battle scars instead of tats? No nose ring or body piercings? A man who actually shook your hand, looked you in the eye, and said “sir.” Ed quickly glanced around, trying to find the hidden camera, but there wasn’t one.

  It was a closely guarded secret, but Ed’s health was failing. Not even Angie knew, but he was desperate to find someone who could take over the company when he was gone. To Ed, that was a sacred obligation that he owed to his employees. So instead of another bozo she could control, Angie had inadvertently brought Ed exactly what he had been looking for — a dynamic leader who commanded respect and knew how to manage people. Ed wasn’t stupid, though. He didn’t give Bob a desk next to his and introduce him as the boss’s new son-in-law. Instead, he started him at the bottom in customer service, manufacturing, installation, sales, distribution, and technical systems design.

  Unfortunately, the company would never be more than a big cookie jar to Angie, something she could dip her hands into any time she wanted; and something she could cash out to the highest bidder when Ed was finally gone. Fortunately, Ed understood her better than she knew, and crafted a diabolical succession plan that left controlling interest of the company to his new son-in-law, instead of his daughter. When she realized she stood no chance of controlling Bob or her father, that iced whatever was left between them. She would have the houses and expensive cars, including the big mansion, a minority stake in the company, and more than enough money to support her exorbitant lifestyle; but she would never get her hands on the cookie jar.

  Angie’s reaction was to act out with any tennis or golf pro she could get her hands on, but Bob wasn’t one to dwell on mistakes, or on people or things he couldn’t change. He threw himself into the job, and in less than a year, the dynamic Delta Force major had morphed into what was occasionally mistaken for the “telephone guy.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next morning, with the aftershocks of Patsy’s phone call still rattling around in his head, and the press of Linda’s body against his, he had been unable to go back to sleep. Dressed in his usual “business casual” outfit — blue jeans, a button-down white Oxford cloth shirt, tweed sports coat, and Asics running shoes — he was sitting at his desk in the President’s office at Toler TeleCom long before the sun came up. He was banging away on his computer when he heard Maryanne Simpson, his executive assistant, rattling around in the outer office. When she saw the lights on in his office, she stuck her head around the doorframe, looked at her watch, the steaming mug of coffee sitting on his desk, and gave him a puzzled frown.

  “What’s the matter, Stud, the honeymoon over already?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you here this early since Linda moved in.”

  “No, no, nothing like that, Maryanne,” he laughed as he looked up at her. “Just trying to help an old army buddy with a problem.”

  “And you even made your own coffee? Sheesh, I didn’t know you knew how.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised to learn all the things I can do.”

  “A man of many parts.”

  “Unfortunately, most of them are getting old and creaky sitting behind this damned thing,” he said as he patted the desk. “I think I’ve put on five pounds since Ed died and I agreed to take this crazy job.”

  “Five pounds? Oh, give me a break! After what you used to do, it ought to be fifteen like the rest of us mere mortals.”

  “Tell me, how much cash do we have in the office right now — petty cash, purchasing? How much could you scrape together, if you had to?”

  She frowned. “Off the top of my head, I’d say the better part of $65,000, but let me check.” In less than five minutes, she was back at the door and told him, “I make it more like $75,000. Why?”

  “Let’s just say I need it, all of it and then some, to bail someone out. George Grierson, our attorney, usually gets in early doesn’t he?” Maryanne nodded, so Bob continued, “Give him a call and tell him I need another $200,000 in cash… No, he’d better make it $225,000. Have him call the bank. They’ll probably listen to him a lot faster than they’ll listen to me, but I need it pronto. I’m headed for the airport later this morning, so see if he can arrange for me to pick it up at the local branch on Mannheim Road by ten o’clock.”

  “$225,000?” she asked with a frown. “This isn’t another of your little… ‘adventures,’ is it? George’s gonna crap when I hit him with a number like that.”

  “He’s a lawyer. They teach them how to hold it in in law school.”

  “And you wouldn’t rather deal with him yourself?”

  “Nice try. That’s why I pay you the big bucks, Maryanne.”

  “If it involves lawyers, not nearly enough,” she grumbled.

  An old army buddy with a probl
em? Like that would be a first. Bob leaned back in his desk chair and found himself staring at the gallery of photographs and plaques that took up the far wall of his office. Most were standard company PR stuff that Ed put up when he sat behind the big desk. There were full-color shots of their biggest projects, of Ed shaking hands with customers, group shots of the key company staff, various shiny metallic plaques and awards that he and the company received over the years, and that kind of stuff. Almost lost in the sea of bright Kodachrome were two framed photographs on the far right edge of the pictorial array. Angie had hung them on the wall, not him, and she used those big drywall butterfly screws, so he couldn’t take them down without tearing the wall apart.

  Both scenes were beige on dull, dusty beige and showed Bob back in his Army days. The lower shot dated from the Second Gulf War. Like a posed class photograph, it showed a platoon of four dozen laughing, grinning American soldiers dressed in their field uniforms. They knelt and stood in four neat rows with their company pennant and regimental flag front and center. Behind it knelt a young, smiling Lieutenant Robert T. Burke and his platoon sergeants and squad leaders, backed by two M-113 Armored Personnel Carriers and an Abrams M1A1 Main Battle Tank, with its gun barrel pointed at the camera. Behind them lay an empty, rock-strewn desert that could have been on the moon or Mars, but it was Iraq.

  The second photograph looked to be an informal shot of eight heavily armed men set against a craggy, snowcapped mountain range. These were older men, not boys, and the only discernible uniform parts they wore were beige U.S. Army desert combat boots on their feet. They had thick, unkempt beards, shoulder-length hair, baggy civilian pants, shawls, and flat Afghan pakol hats. None of them wore nametags, insignias of rank, or unit patches. They didn’t need them. They knew exactly who they were. The guy near the center wore the same Afghan pakol hat, shaggy beard, and mustache as the others, but he didn’t seem to fit. At five foot eight inches tall and 150 pounds, he was by far the smallest in the group, looking like a supply clerk who gave the real soldiers a case of beer so he could get in their photograph and scarf some free drinks at the local VFW when he got back home. He leaned on a long-barreled Barrett M-107 sniper rifle that made him look even smaller. Still, if you leaned closer and studied those hard, black eyes, you would realize they belonged to Major Robert T. Burke, and that they were the eyes of a stone-cold killer.