by Rob Byrnes
Chapter Three
Chase began his day early the next morning, leaving Grant embracing nothing but empty sheets while he went off to make an honest living. His job as assistant manager of the Groc-O-Rama in Elmhurst was soul-deadening and unfulfilling, but crime didn’t pay bi-weekly and it was nice to know that there’d be a paycheck—albeit a small one—when times were lean. Plus there were benefits, another thing his side job didn’t include.
Most people simply called it “The Gross,” but while the market certainly lived down to its nickname, Chase was a loyal employee and had tolerated it for almost two decades. By him, and pretty much only him, the ratty store was always referred to by its full name.
If Groc-O-Rama left a lot to be desired besides the paycheck, benefits, and frequent interaction with inspectors from the departments of Health and Consumer Affairs, it still held a sentimental appeal to Chase. It was there he’d met Grant all those years ago. It had been kismet: a magical moment. They had both planned to break into the safe on the very same night, and met for the first time in the dark bakery aisle outside the manager’s office. After the initial shock wore off, they’d teamed up, split five thousand dollars in loot, and been inseparable ever since.
Chase punched out eight hours later, collected Grant, and—just after nine o’clock that night—met Jamie in Manhattan at the entrance to an eight-story white-brick office building on Second Avenue in the low East Sixties a few blocks north of the Roosevelt Island tram station.
There was no guard on duty—it was the type of building where no guard had been hired to be on duty—so Jamie pushed the buzzer marked “U.S. Rep. Catherine C. Concannon District Office” a few times. They waited until the panel buzzed back at them, then pushed the front door open. On the other side of the door, the sparse lobby was adorned with utilitarian white-and-gray tile on the floor and a badly faded aqua paint job on the walls. Even Grant and Chase—longtime residents of a hardscrabble block on a rough edge of quickly gentrifying Jackson Heights—weren’t impressed.
But that was the deal on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There was a lot of wealth, but there was also a lot of ordinary. It was a hunting ground for social scavengers like Jamie Brock, and it definitely held a certain professional allure for people like Grant and Chase, especially when their favorite chop-shop was looking for a Mercedes. But a lot of the real estate was affordable. Despite the neighborhood’s reputation as home base for Old Money, the Upper East Side’s dirty secret was that Grant and Chase could have managed to scrape up the cash to live there if they had to. Fortunately for the residents who prized their cars, artwork, jewelry, electronics, furniture, and collectibles, they sort of liked Jackson Heights.
The elevator—barely big enough for the three of them and painted a faded aqua to match the lobby walls—slowly ascended to the fourth floor before it stopped, and they stood in silence for what seemed like hours but was more like seven seconds. When the door finally opened, a short, dark-haired man in his late thirties, wearing a blue pinstriped suit and red tie with gold eagles on it, stood in front of them, holding open a door off the hallway. He looked Grant and Chase over without bothering to hide his contempt and turned to Jamie.
“Inside.”
Jamie smiled. “Grant and Chase, this is—”
“Inside,” the man commanded again and walked into the office.
Grant hadn’t caught a good look at much more than the tie, but when the man walked away, he could see a large round bald circle on the back of his head. That, and he was—as they say—broad in the beam.
“Wunder,” Jamie whispered, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
“Figured that,” Grant whispered back, with no smile playing anywhere.
The door had almost closed behind Wunder before it occurred to them to follow, and Chase caught it moments before they were locked in the hall. They entered a large reception room, big enough to comfortably hold a dozen disgruntled constituents of U.S. Rep. Catherine C. Concannon, or more likely a comparable number of lobbyists.
Wunder kept walking, following a worn pattern on the cheap carpet, and they filed behind his broad beam through the shotgun layout of the suite of offices. He would flick a light switch, lead them into a room, lock the door behind them, and proceed to another room, where he’d repeat the process. The rooms themselves were basic—messy desks, battered filing cabinets, more than a few tiny American flags waving from decorative coffee cups—but that’s not what interested Grant.
He eyed the locks.
They didn’t look like they came with the office rental, and it seemed like Wunder was opening them with different keys. That was probably something he’d never need to know, but it was still good to know. And as a halfway decent lock man, he took a professional interest.
They went through the pattern of unlock-light-lock four times before reaching the last room. Grant noted the one door they’d bypassed, which had a classier brass knob and lock plate and a semicircular throw rug on the floor outside, and less wear to the carpet. He guessed it led to the congresswoman’s private office. He also guessed she didn’t spend too much time there. Again, it was probably something he didn’t need to know, but sizing these things up was part of his character. Sort of like how he couldn’t walk down a street without checking out which cars looked ready to steal, even if he wasn’t shopping for a car at the moment. Those habits just came with the vocation.
In any event, once the lights were on and they’d been ushered into that fourth and final room, it was clear this was definitely not the congresswoman’s office. It could have been a large closet if not for the small desk pushed into one corner, with four metal folding chairs arranged in front of it. Behind the desk was a decent-sized window that, the best Grant could tell in the darkness, seemed to overlook the windows across the alley and nothing else. Two walls were hidden behind floor-to-ceiling bookcases, with shelves bulging from heavy loads of law books, folders, and what looked to be lengthy computer printouts jammed haphazardly into whatever space they’d fit.
There was also a Derek Jeter bobblehead on one shelf, wobbling slightly in its plastic Yankees uniform from the movement in the room. Grant had no use for baseball, but—as a longtime resident of the Borough of Queens—still felt a vague sense of pride in the Mets. Meaning the bobblehead Yankee counted against this guy.
Wunder motioned for them to take seats. They did—although it was warm outside, the metal chairs were cold—and then he perched on the corner of the desk.
In the brief silence that ensued, Grant tried to figure out what tied Jamie to this guy. He didn’t know what Jamie liked in a man, but Wunder—barely five foot six, if that; balding; sort of intense—didn’t seem to fit the bill. Not on the surface, at least. Then again, Jamie was a scamming moth drawn to the flames of wealth and power, so who knew? Hadn’t he had a fling a few years earlier with a much older Russian billionaire who was also a mobster? Yeah, Grant thought he had heard that rumor, so anything was possible where Jamie Brock was concerned.
The silence ended when Jamie leaned forward on his chair. “So these are the guys I was telling you about.”
“I figured.” Wunder looked at Grant and Chase, frowned, and got down to business. He was no-nonsense; Grant appreciated that. “Here’s the deal.” Even though they were locked behind four doors, he dropped his voice to a near whisper. “First thing, you should know who I am.”
“I know,” said Jamie, and Wunder’s sneer erased any thought from Grant’s head that there might be something between the men.
The “shuddup” that Wunder and Grant said in unison also provided them with an instant bonding experience. That moment was fleeting; after the briefest of smiles, Wunder turned that sneer on Grant.
Wunder smoothed his lapels and gave Jamie one last sneer before turning his full attention to Grant and Chase. “The name is Kevin Wunder.” He tried to affect a tough-guy look, but it didn’t really work on his small, doughy frame, especially while wearing a red tie w
ith gold eagles on it. He pegged Grant as the leader, so he spoke mostly to him. “And you are?”
“Call me Grant. This here’s Chase.”
“Last names?”
“Doubt you’ll need to know ’em.”
Wunder’s lips pulled back, exposing a glimpse of perfect teeth which were a few shades too white, and he chuckled. It was too throaty and labored to be convincing. “Fair enough, and good to meet you. I’m serving two masters here. First, I’m here as Representative Concannon’s chief of staff—”
“You mean the congresswoman?” asked Grant.
Wunder’s smile was dim. “Representative, if you please. It’s the twenty-first century; we don’t use gender-specific terms like ‘congresswoman’ anymore.” He swallowed hard and tried to remember that some people evolved more slowly than others. “Anyway, I don’t know how much Jamie has told you—”
“Nothing useful. Just enough to get us here.”
Wunder chuckled; again, it was throaty and forced. “I assumed. Well, Representative Concannon is retiring at the end of her term, and her son-in-law is running to succeed her. Did Jamie tell you that?”
Grant nodded. “He tried.”
“Bringing me to the second reason I’m here: I’m also that son-in-law’s campaign manager.”
Chase said, “In other words, you’re neck-deep in whatever’s going on.”
“More than neck. Try ‘over my head.’ If we were just talking about my neck, I probably wouldn’t need you.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t seem so bad if you were taller,” said Jamie. “Then your head would be…” Grant thought it was supposed to be a joke, but maybe not. In any event, Jamie realized he’d gone too far and stopped talking, instead running one hand through his tousled hair. Grant tried not to notice.
Kevin Wunder cleared his throat, gave Jamie one more unappreciative sneer, and continued. “Here’s our problem. Representative Concannon’s son-in-law—our candidate for Congress—has gotten himself into a…well, into a compromising position.”
Grant was tempted to let Wunder drag it out just to watch for any slip he might be able to use later, but he was more eager to move on and get to work. “We know, Wunder. This Peebles guy got himself a girl on the side. He tweetered some, uh, twits he shouldn’t have. Now he’s being blackmailed and you want the picture back, right?”
Wunder wasn’t surprised Grant knew the basic story, figuring Jamie would have needed a hook to bring them in. He also wasn’t surprised Grant had mangled the terminology. In mere minutes together, it had been easy to peg him as a technophobe. “Yes, he’s been sexting.”
“Been what?”
“Sexting.”
Grant glanced at Derek Jeter on the bookshelf. He hated to admit he didn’t know something—let alone do that repeatedly—so it was best to do it to a bobblehead.
“I give. What’s sexting? Is that like twittering?”
Jamie was only too eager to answer, and Wunder was only too eager to let him answer. “That’s what we’ve been talking about! Sexting is texting plus sex. It’s when you take a naked picture of yourself with your camera phone and send it to someone.”
“I get that, but I thought you said this Peebles was twittering.”
“Tweeting. But text or tweet, it’s the same concept.”
“So you can use your phone or tweeter or whatever to take pictures of your junk and just send it out to…anyone with an Internet?”
The others nodded emphatically, ignoring Grant’s mangled concept of the Internet as an owned item.
Grant was having a hard time grasping the purpose of all this self-exposure. Since he’d spent his entire adult life off the grid, that wouldn’t surprise those who knew him. “People really do that?”
“Yeah!” Jamie was a bit too enthusiastic.
Chase leaned forward, talking to his partner but keeping one wary eye on Wunder. “Remember that Internet, uh, job we were pulling for a while?”
“The one with the provocative pictures?” He tried to keep it vague, because there was no reason for Wunder to know more than he had to.
“That’s the one. Well, a lot of those guys who sent us pictures were taking them with their camera phones. Get it now?”
“Huh.” Grant frowned. “This is just another reason for me to not like phones.” He looked Chase in the eye. “You text a lot. You ever do that sext thing?”
“Of course not,” said Chase as his ears slightly reddened.
Grant frowned. He didn’t miss a lot, and he had definitely not missed Chase’s red ears. “We’ll talk about that later.” Then he finally returned his attention to Wunder. “Okay, so this guy’s got some pictures out there you don’t want anyone to see.”
“Correct.”
“And you want us to get ’em back, because if anyone sees them, he’s not getting elected to Congress.”
“Correct.”
“Let me see the picture.”
A phone was produced from Wunder’s breast pocket. He punched a few buttons and handed it to Grant.
After he studied it for a few seconds—with Chase and Jamie looking over his shoulder—Grant finally said, “Yeah, that’s a penis, all right.”
“Sure is,” Chase agreed.
“A nice one, too,” said Jamie.
“Shuddup, Jamie.” Grant looked away from the genitalia on the phone’s screen. “But how are people gonna connect this penis to your candidate?”
Wunder took the phone, manipulated the screen, and handed it back. Now they could see the rest of the image…the part with a head.
“I don’t think I should be looking at this. How old is this guy? Twelve?”
The politician heaved a sigh. “Twenty-seven. He only acts like he’s twelve sometimes.”
Grant thought about that. “If he’s dumb enough to do something like this, maybe he doesn’t even belong in Congress.”
Wunder cleared his throat. “I’m not going to argue that point with you, Mister…?”
“We’ll worry about my last name if I decide to take the job.”
“Okay, Grant.” Wunder’s head was throbbing slightly as he took the phone back and set it behind him on the desk. He wasn’t sure why this wasn’t going more smoothly. “Austin Peebles is a smart enough man. He’s very young—and therefore very impulsive—but he’s smart enough. Unfortunately, even smart people do stupid things every now and then. And this is one of those times.”
Grant understood. He’d had his own moments…especially whenever he took a job referred to him by Jamie Brock. “So who’s got the photos now?”
“The opposition.”
Grant’s brow furrowed. “Like…China?”
Wunder chuckled again. That fake chuckle was starting to annoy Grant. “This isn’t exactly an international incident. What happened is, Austin meant to send the picture to someone with whom he’d been having a flirtatious—but entirely platonic—online relationship, but accidentally sent it to the wrong person. He realized his mistake right away, but unfortunately not before an enemy—a political enemy—saved a copy. And now this woman”—he spat out the word—”is trying to use the photo to force Austin out of the race.”
Chase, who was feeling left out of the important parts of the conversation, put himself into it. “So we have to get the photo away from this woman. The opposition.”
“Correct. June Forteene.”
Grant was puzzled. “Wait, it’s September. You don’t want us to pull this job until next summer?”
“No, June Forteene is the woman who has the photo.”
“That can’t be a real name,” said Grant. He paused. “Can it?”
Wunder shook his head. “Her real name is Hillary Morris. She calls herself June Forteene. Named herself after Flag Day, obviously. She got no attention as Hillary Morris, but she gets tons of press, publicity, and speaking engagements as June Forteene, so now…she’s not Hillary Morris anymore. She’s become her blog.”
“Her what?” Grant asked. “Blog?”
Wunder looked at Chase, then Jamie. “Is your friend stuck in 1995?”
Chase cast an indulgent smile at Wunder. “He’s not really a computer guy. A blog is just a website, Grant. People have them to discuss food, travel, the media…whatever.”
“And politics,” added Wunder. “Lots and lots of politics. In this case, politics are her obsession. Specifically, jingoistic, flag-waving, right-wing politics. Hence, Hillary Morris’s pseudonym: June Forteene. Get it?”
Grant shrugged. “Okay. Keep talking.”
Wunder leaned back against the desk. “She hates Democrats, and she really hates the Concannon and Peebles families, and she especially hates Austin Peebles. I’m not sure there’s much more to say. I need you to get into June Forteene’s office, remove the photo of a certain penis from her computer, and…that’s that. Although…”
“What?” asked Chase, when the pause dragged on too long.
“I will need to insist that you bring the photo back to me.”
“What for?” asked Chase.
“Proof you actually got into her office and did what I’m paying you to do.” He tried to smile; it didn’t work. “If you don’t bring me back proof, then I only have your word to go by. And, no offense, but you’re professional criminals. I’m not sure how much I trust you.”
Grant smiled, which wasn’t really a reassuring look but was more reassuring than whatever had just flickered across Wunder’s face. “You’re a politician, Wunder. So how much should we trust you?”
“Touché, sir.” Kevin Wunder stood, but his diminutive stature gave him only a few inches of advantage over the criminals seated before him on metal folding chairs. “I guess this is one of those cases where we’ll have to operate on blind faith. I’ll have to trust you, and you’ll have to trust me.” He extended his hand to Grant. “Deal?”
Grant looked at the outstretched hand. Then at the wrist. Nice watch, he thought.
“Before we shake, we should discuss terms. This sounds like a twenty-thousand-dollar job.”
Wunder knit his brow and his extended hand slowly retracted to his side. “I was thinking more like five.”
