Burke's Gamble

by William F. Brown

  When he got back on board a few minutes later, the big black man was sprawled on the bare-wood side bench in the small cabin, finishing his third beer. He looked around the dilapidated boat and asked, “This thing gonna make it? ’Cause ah cain’t swim so well.”

  “It’ll make it. It’s never sunk before,” the Dutchman answered as he struggled under the weight of two more concrete blocks, a gallon of bleach, and a long length of the heavy steel chain that he finally dumped on the deck near the drums.

  “Whadjou bring them for?” Corliss sat up and frowned.

  “Those two are big and fat,” Van Gries answered, breathing hard. “Sometimes a body can float back up after they’ve been in the water for a while, so I decided to add some more weight, just in case.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I guess I can see that.” Corliss leaned back on the bench and relaxed.

  Van Gries grabbed one of the beers that Corliss had brought up and headed for the wheelhouse. Soon, the boat’s two big diesel engines started up with a few coughs and a stutter. The Dutchman steered the boat through the twisting channels between the marshes, and headed toward the harbor entrance and the ocean beyond. With a quarter moon, the bright lights of Atlantic City, Brigantine, and the rest of the Jersey coast slowly faded away behind them.

  “None ’a dat GPS stuff, huh?” Corliss asked, looking around the spartan cockpit.

  “No, we navigate the old fashioned way, by eyeballs.” Twenty-five minutes later, Van Gries powered back and set the boat engines to idle. “We’re here,” he said as he walked back to the stern. “Let’s get this done, and get out of here.”

  “Dis boat’s a piece of crap, man,” Corliss said as he looked around and grabbed the first drum. “Ah didn’t even know Carbonari had it.”

  “It was his old man’s. He hates it.”

  “Why don’t he sell it, then?”

  “I have no idea. For some reason, he’d rather leave it over there and watch it rot.”

  They tipped the first barrel on edge and rolled it to the aft railing. Both men then bent down, one to each side, and tipped it forward to get a good grip. Looking Corliss in the eyes, Van Gries said, “All right, on three — one, two, three, lift!” With grunts and groans, they got the heavy barrel up far enough to tip it over the aft rail and topple it into the ocean. It made a big splash, floated for a moment or two as it filled with water, and promptly went to the bottom. “Good,” Van Gries puffed. “My worst fear was that it would just float there.”

  “What about them other blocks and that chain?” Corliss asked suspiciously.

  “Damn! I forgot. Ah, screw it! That first one went straight down, and I’m tired.”

  The second barrel was no easier, but they got it to the rail and over the side too. “Jeez, them boys is heavy,” Corliss said, as it also dropped over the stern and went straight down, too. Breathing heavily, the stocky black man leaned against the railing and watched a line of bubbles come back up to the surface from the drum. “Lookie that,” he laughed as he looked back over his shoulder at Van Gries. That was when he saw the Walther PPK in the Dutchman’s hand. He had taken off the silencer, but the barrel was pointed straight at him.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” Van Gries ordered.

  “Now, wait just a damn minute,” Corliss tried to bluster, until the .380 automatic barked, and a bullet dug a deep gouge along the side of Corliss’s head. “Ah!” he screamed, as the bullet knocked the fight right out of him.

  Van Gries quickly turned Corliss around, bent him over the stern rail, and snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists.

  “Damn, man,” Corliss groaned as he felt blood run down the side of his head. “Why’d you go and…” he asked as he turned his head and looked back again. Before he could finish, however, Van Gries had threaded the thick chain through the handcuffs, around his waist several times, and around his wrists. He then picked up one of the heavy concrete blocks and dropped it in the center of Corliss’s back. “Ah, man,” the black man groaned as he tried to straighten up, but Van Gries jammed the Walther in the back of his neck.

  “Come on, man,” Corliss pleaded as Van Gries quickly dropped a second concrete block on his back, ran the chain through its openings too, and back around his arms and wrists. Finally, he tied the ends off in a square knot. “Why you doin’ me like this?”

  “You are one heavy bugger, I’ll give you that,” Van Gries groaned as he bent over and wrapped his arms around Corliss’s knees, “but this is going to be pure pleasure.”

  Corliss screamed as Martijn raised his legs and then let the weight of the concrete blocks do the rest. They tipped the black man over the railing, dragged him down, head first, and flipped him onto his back even before he struck the water. For a fleeting second, Van Gries saw Corliss’s terrified eyes looking up at him before the two concrete blocks pulled him under. He went straight down, just as the two oil drums had done.

  Van Gries smiled and dusted off his hands, thinking he could not remember the last time he had enjoyed a late-night boat ride as much as this one. He reached in his belt, pulled out his Walther PPK again, and looked at it for a long, fond moment, before he wound up and threw it into the ocean. It was a lovely pistol, but he could always get another in Virginia or North Carolina for a few hundred dollars. He then threw the silencer as far as he could in the other direction. If the police ever found Shaka Corliss’s body, they would find his chrome-plated Remington .44 in his shoulder holster. That would close more than a few open murder cases. However, the cops would never catch Martijn Van Gries with any incriminating evidence on him.

  He rummaged around the boat until he found a coiled rubber hose in one of the storage lockers, connected it to the fresh water spigot near the stairs to the galley, and turned it on. This had been hot work, he concluded, as he put his head under the stream of water and luxuriated in it for a long moment. Cooled off, he hosed down the aft deck, grabbed an old brush from the galley, the gallon of bleach, and scrubbed away at the scrapes and smeared blood on the deck and aft railing until they looked like their grimy selves again. Only then did he pull out his cell phone and punch redial.

  Donatello quickly answered. “Is it done?” he asked.

  “Our problems sleep with the fishes.”

  “Stop with The Godfather crap, already! I hate that goddamned movie.”

  At the stroke of noon the next day, Bob Burke entered the small conference room in the Marriott Courtyard halfway between Fort Bragg and Fayetteville and hung a sign on the outside of the door, which read, “Private Meeting in Progress.” Several ten-foot-long tables had been arranged in a large square in the center of the room, with tablecloths, glasses, water pictures, pens, and pads of paper.

  “Master Sergeant Randall says I should begin promptly,” he said. “But before I do, slide all of those pads of paper down to Linda at the far end. No notes. No doodling. If you can’t remember what we decide to do, you shouldn’t be here to begin with.”

  Looking around at the faces, Bob quickly concluded this was the strangest operations meeting he had ever convened. There were three women, two of whom were formerly office clerks and receptionists and one tall, blonde female Air Force captain. The rest included a burly Chicago police detective captain, and six of the Army’s most highly-skilled and deadly Delta Force operatives — Ace, Koz, The Batman, Chester, Lonzo, and Bulldog. Two of the chairs at the table were still empty, waiting for the computer wizards from Chicago to arrive.

  “Let’s start with the obvious,” Bob said as he unrolled a 36-inch by 36-inch aerial photo that he had blown up and printed at Staples that morning. He laid it in the center of the table, allowing the others to lean forward and view it for a moment. “This is the Bimini Bay Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City and the surrounding parts of the town, including the Tuscany Towers and Siesta Cove. Linda, Patsy and I had an opportunity to check it out last week. Have any of you been up there before?” he asked as he looked around. Dorothy’s hand went up, but the others shoo
k their heads no. “Good. The rest of you can look at it with fresh eyes, and their video cameras won’t have seen you yet, either. Did you get a Gold Club card?” Bob turned and asked Dorothy.

  “Of course, but that was maybe five years ago,” she said as she shrank down in her seat, embarrassed.

  “Good. In the last year or so they’ve added facial recognition software to their system, but you were there before all that.”

  “In a casino?” Several of the men looked surprised. “Facial recognition?” Koz asked.

  “I doubt they use it on everyone, but the Bimini Bay and its two sister properties have some of the most sophisticated electronic and security systems in the business,” Bob said as he looked directly at Ace. “Taking down a complex like that is going to take more than a couple of guys with sniper rifles.”

  “And three women,” Linda interjected.

  “Three or a hundred and three, it's a fortress. But we aren't after the buildings, we have three targets: Donatello Carbonari, Martijn Van Gries, and Shaka Corliss. They’re the ones responsible for Vinnie. I’m not counting the two blond Hulk security guards who work for Corliss, but if they get dented and their paint scraped a bit, that’s just fine. They’re too dumb to know any better, but getting our hands on those other three will take some serious stealth and guile.”

  “By the way,” Ernie spoke up, “I had a phone call this morning from a friend in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. They’ve filed more charges on Corliss and his two beefy pals yesterday, and two of their deputies arrived in Atlantic City to take them into custody this morning. They went around with two local deputies from Atlantic County, but they couldn’t find them at the casinos or in their apartments. The casino says they were terminated but their cars are still parked at Bimini Bay and their stuff is still in their apartments. So who knows?”

  “Terminated?” Linda chuckled.

  “Even the Atlantic County deputies thought that was funny, almost as funny as two Chicago cops trying to serve papers on Mafia gunmen in New Jersey.”

  “Maybe.” Ernie shrugged. “But Corliss and the other two aren’t Sicilian. Neither is Van Gries. That makes them throw-aways, whether they know it or not.”

  “Look,” The Batman asked, “if they’ve already started ‘disappearing’ their own people, why can’t we just grab Carbonari and Van Gries and do them a favor? We’ve done a few of those ‘black hood’ rendition snatches, back in the day.”

  “That’s always an option,” Bob quickly agreed. “But remember who they are and where they are. There’s a lot of human and electronic security around those buildings, and snatching one of them without setting it off would be hard. We’d need to grab all three of them at the same time. That would be even more difficult, and we’d only get one try. If it ends up an open battle with Carbonari, that’ll bring in the Philly mob, and then the Genoveses and the Luccheses from New York City. That’s a war we can’t win.”

  “No shooting?” Ace bristled. “What do you need us for?”

  “I never said there might not be shooting, but we have to be careful. There are way too many civilians running around the casinos and the parking garages, who would be in the line of fire. But if I come across someone in serious need of shooting, I know I can always call on you and your Barrett to punch big holes in them. How’s that sound?” Bob asked.

  “Maybe that won’t be necessary,” Ernie offered. “Maybe we can get someone else to do the heavy lifting for us.”

  “You mean his underworld pals in New York?” Dorothy asked.

  “Exactly,” Bob answered. “But to pull that off, we’ll need to get into their computers and security systems — no noise, no footprints, and no one even knowing we were there.”

  “What fun would that be?” The Batman countered.

  The hallway door opened and two very young men stuck their heads inside the meeting room. Tentative and uncertain, they looked at the bearded, long-haired men sitting around the table and began to back away, until they saw Linda and Patsy and finally smiled.

  “Are those the bus boys?” Koz asked. “We could use more coffee.”

  “Ignore him. Come on in, guys.” Linda hurried to the door, threw her arms around them and pulled them into the room like a Den Mother with two new Cub Scouts.

  “We’ve been looking in every room,” the taller of the two apologized. He was rail thin and looked to be about fifteen years old. The other one was short, thicker, and looked like his younger brother. He wore glasses with heavy black frames and a thick glob of white adhesive tape holding the nose bridge together. They threw their overnight bags in the corner, grabbed their laptop computers, and took their seats.

  “Must be Navy.” Bulldog looked them over and sighed.

  “Nah, the Coast Guard,” Chester corrected him.

  “You two behave!” Linda chided them. “This is Jimmy Barker and Ronald Talmadge from our Tech Department at Toler TeleCom back in Schaumburg.”

  “Civilians. Even worse,” The Batman added.

  Linda gave him her evil eye, and continued anyway. “Jimmy, Ronald, you know Bob and Patsy, and I might introduce you to the others later… or not.”

  The two Geeks glanced nervously at the hard faces around the table as they opened their laptops. “I didn’t know you sold us to the pirates, Mrs. B.,” Jimmy said. His chair happened to be across from Patsy’s, and Bob saw her look up at him and smile.

  “I know Linda briefed you on the problem we are trying to solve. With your tech and computer backgrounds, particularly the tricks you picked up from Charlie, I want to turn you two loose on Van Gries’s accounting and security systems. At the end of the day, your mission is to get into his financial system and find his books, the real ones. Got that?”

  The two Geeks looked at each other. “Our mission?” Ronald nudged Jimmy and giggled. “Just like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.”

  “Yeah, and your ass will self-destruct if you screw it up.” Ace gave him his fiercest scowl.

  “Don’t worry, Mister B.,” Jimmy quickly replied, not the least bit intimidated. “Ronald and I are a one-stop shop. There isn’t much we can’t crack.”

  “Yeah,” Ronald giggled. “But no sweat. We already went online and peeked under that casino’s hood. That guy Carbonari was Yale undergrad and Stanford for his MBA. Pretty smart, in a business kinda way. But his tech guy, Van Gries was MIT, middle of his class at best,” he said with a dismissive sneer. “No contest.”

  Bob looked down the table at them, puzzled.

  “We’re both Berkeley,” Jimmy explained nonchalantly. “We ate those MIT derbs for breakfast in all the software competitions. Trust me, we’ll scorch his butt so bad, he’ll have to dunk it in the Charles River to cool off.”

  “Tell you what,” Bob told him. “You do that, and I’ll owe you guys, big time.”

  They glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes. “Owe? Big time?” Jimmy smiled like the Cheshire Cat. “Well, if that’s the case, before we really start bustin’ on ’em, Ronald and I could both use some upgraded battle hardware, some new weapons.”

  “I thought Charlie just got you new laptops?” Bob looked at Linda, confused.

  Ronald shrugged and leaned forward. “Here’s the thing, Mister B. There’s new, and then again, there’s bigger, faster, warp speed, seriously new.”

  “Yeah.” Jimmy patted at his laptop. “Charlie got us these boogers like, six months ago, and that’s Stone Age now. If you want us to really kick butt…”

  “Enough. Don’t tell me, tell Linda. She’ll run you over to Charlotte, or you can get an express order online. Whatever you need, get it done, because we need to get into Carbonari’s books — not the ones he shows the State gambling and tax people, or the IRS, or even his partners in New York, but the real cash flow before he skims off the top. That’s what will put him in jail, or get him whacked by his fellow hoods.”

  “Speaking of which,” Ernie jumped in, “I spoke to my New Jersey Sta
te Police pal, Carmine Bonafacio. In fact, I have him on hold on my cell phone. Instead of repeating what he said, I’d like to put him on speaker and you can hear it for yourself.” Ernie pushed the speaker button. “Inspector, tell my friends what you told me.”

  “The Carbonaris aren’t one of the front-line families on the east coast, but they go back two or three generations in Atlantic City and to Philly and New York before that. Those casinos spin off a lot of cash, but it’s mostly Lucchese and Genovese money. That’s a dangerous crowd to work for. While Donatello might look like a Mafia big shot to us dummies, he’s bought and paid for by the New York City families, like his father.”

  “Carmine, this is Ernie’s pal Bob. How do you think Carbonari’s doing?”

  “The hotel and casino business is bad everywhere, but especially in Atlantic City — recession, Indian casinos, cheap flights to Las Vegas, and a ton of online gaming, you name it. Nobody knows what his real numbers are, and whenever he talks to the press, he keeps saying everything’s great, but he’s gotta be stretched thin.”

  “I read a lot of the newspaper stories on him and I saw his quotes,” Bob said. “Isn’t it a little strange for one of those guys to talk to reporters to begin with?”

  “One of those guys? You mean Italian? Or New Jersey?” Carmine laughed.

  “I mean the mob.”

  “Yeah, it’s more than strange. I know the bosses in New York don’t like it, but that’s Donnie — he hates that name, by the way — and he’s the goose who lays their golden eggs.”

  “With half a dozen casinos in town closed, how’s he have any eggs at all?” Ernie asked. “You told me he has a big ‘nut’ he owes the Genoveses and Luccheses every month.”

  “That’s the question. They put up with all his ‘Prince Donnie’ crap, but our New York contacts say the goose better not run out of golden eggs or he’s going to be cooked.”