Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers)

by William F. Brown

  “So it really was there?” he asked, holding out his hand.

  “Now?” she asked nervously. “You want to stop and look at this stuff now?”

  “Why not?” he asked as he looked casually around the crowded parking lot. “We’re as safe here as we’ll be anyplace else. So, relax.”

  “Relax? Greenway was there. That son-of-a-bitch! I ran down the fire stairs, flew through the door into the first floor corridor, and ran right into him. And I mean I ran right into him. I knocked him flat! Scalese was there too, back in the lobby, so I took off. God, I never thought my fat butt could run that fast,” she said, her voice animated and excited.

  “I thought you said they didn’t come in that early.”

  “They never do. Something must be going on, probably you. But I got him good!” she held up her right hand, extending her fingernails for him to see. “Right down his cheek, and then I decked him with my purse. Do you have any idea…” she began to say, and then stopped. “No, you couldn’t, and I must be crazy to be doing this, much less sitting here in a Bob Evans parking lot of all places, trying to act normal, as if nothing’s going on, as if nothing’s wrong,” she said, looking as if she was about to have a nervous breakdown then and there.

  “Linda, like I said, relax. Take a couple of deep breaths. Go ahead,” he told her. She looked across at him, reluctant at first, until she finally did — one, two, then a few more and she could feel the world around her begin to slow down. “I’m not going to let them get their hands on you ever again — Scalese or Greenway,” he tried to reassure her as he laid a reassuring hand on hers. “Trust me.”

  “Trust you? Bob, I haven’t trusted a guy since sixth grade.”

  “Good!” he laughed. “Keep telling yourself that, and you just might make it.

  She started to pull her hand away, but then stopped, looked across at him, and began to tremble. “Oh, hell!” she said. He held his arms out and finally, reluctantly, she fell against his chest. “Oh, hell,” she repeated and then lay there crying for a few minutes until it stopped and she slowly sat up. “Thank you,” she said in a barely audible whisper. “I needed that.”

  “You earned it. Now, when was the last time you ate anything?”

  “Eat? I don’t know, yesterday morning, I guess. But we don’t have time.”

  “Yes we do. Bring your stuff, we’re going inside.”

  “Bob, I couldn’t eat a thing, really.”

  “Stop arguing. It’s time to refuel. You’re not doing anybody any good in the condition you are in,” he said as he got out of the car and motioned for her to follow. She began to argue again, but then stopped, opened the car door, and did what he said. He led her back through the restaurant’s rear door to his original booth and made her sit. The waitress had not even cleared his dishes yet, but he caught her eye and motioned for her to come over again.

  “Sorry, but I thought you left,” she said, confused.

  “Nah, I’m back again for round two,” he smiled and turned to Linda. “What do you like? Eggs and ham? Oatmeal? Pancakes?”

  “God,” she said as she turned her face away and shook her head. “I was thinking more of a dry English muffin.”

  “Linda, we’re safe here, and you need to eat — no caffeine — but you need real food.”

  “Okay, okay, pancakes, then,” she bristled and told the waitress. “Some of those cinnamon chip ones you guys make. They’re my daughter’s favorite. Oh, my God, my daughter,” she said, as she ran her fingers through her hair and looked as if she was coming apart all over again. “What am I doing here, Bob?”

  “She’s fine,” he smiled at the waitress. “Borderline diabetic, you know. She gets this way when her blood sugar gets a little low. So bring her a large orange juice too, and bring me some more coffee, and another order of those biscuits and gravy.”

  The waitress gave them both an odd look. “Sure, orange juice, coffee, the biscuits and gravy, and the cinnamon pancakes,” she said, as she scurried away, looking concerned.

  “Relax, Linda. Your daughter’s safe and so are you. Besides, Scalese and Greenway are the ones with the big problem now.”

  “Big problem? They’ve got a big problem?”

  “Yeah, they’ve got me.”

  She stared at him for a moment in disbelief. “You really are nuts. Don’t you know who those guys are, what they do to people?”

  “Sure I do, but they don’t know who I am, or what I can do to people when I want to,” he answered quietly. “Men like Scalese, Greenway, and Bentley are bullies. They think they’re the only tough guys out there, that they can do what they’ve always done and get away with it, and that they get to define the rules of engagement. It’s classic. Take me. They tower over me, see the name Toler TeleCom, and think I’m some kind of ‘telephone guy,’ who came in to install their phones. Right?” he asked and saw her trying not to smile. “They’re civilians. They have no concept of war and don’t know any better. Nobody here does, except for Ernie Travers. He was in the Army, and I think he understands.”

  At the front of the restaurant, he saw the waitress talking to a young man in a white shirt and tie, who also turned and looked back at them. He must be the manager, Burke thought, not wanting to create any more attention. Could they have gotten his face on TV this quickly? He doubted it. “So relax,” he told her, “everything’s under control.”

  “Under control, huh,” she said as she gave Bob a long, skeptical look in return, taking the time to study him for a moment. Who was he, she wondered, still trying to figure him out. The Army, she thought dismissively. He looked more like the Salvation Army. He was of average height and weight and looked to be in good shape, cute, but not exactly bulging with muscles. As she focused in and looked at him more closely, she saw a thin, jagged scar above his left eyebrow, two shorter ones on his right cheek and another on his chin. She had two older brothers and she could recognize a broken nose when she saw one, but what did that add up to? Maybe he was right. Maybe they were all underestimating him.

  That was when the waitress arrived with her breakfast and orange juice, giving them both a series of odd looks as she set the plates down.

  “I brought you some extra cinnamon chips,” the waitress said. “You looked like you could use ’em.”

  Linda smiled as she sniffed her platter, poured the rest of the cinnamon chips on top of the cinnamon pancakes, and dove in. She paused to drink half the orange juice, and then attacked the rest. “You were right,” she finally came up for air. “I can’t believe how hungry I am.”

  “Hey! I know these things.”

  As she chewed, she leaned forward and whispered. “All right you aren’t the ‘telephone guy.’ You were in the Army, but so was my brother. I think he said he drove a truck in Iraq. He came home with all sorts of “war stories,” but he doesn’t disappear into the night in a ski mask, unarmed, and come back carrying a bunch of guns and radios he took off a gang of thugs. Who are you? And don’t give me any of that, ‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you’ kind of stuff.”

  He smiled. “Nothing quite that dramatic. Let’s say I did a lot of different things in a lot of different places. I’ve dealt with guys a lot tougher than Tony Scalese and his pals, and I’m still walking around on the top of the grass, while most of them aren’t. So trust me, no one’s going to touch you again.”

  “That’s nice,” she looked across at him and smiled. “Maybe you even mean it; but why do you care? And not only about me, but about all this stuff.”

  He paused and thought it over for a minute. “I guess it started when I saw Greenway’s face when his fingers were wrapped around your friend Eleanor’s throat up on that roof. It was the sheer arrogance of it all. Then last night, they murdered that flight attendant, Sabrina Fowler, and put her body in my trunk…”

  “Murdered? In your…? What?” Linda exclaimed with a mouth full of pancake.

  “Yeah, I didn’t have a chance to tell you how I spent my night. You re
member the United Airlines flight attendant who was in the lobby with us? Well, I must have gotten too close and rubbed a raw nerve, or maybe it was payback for what I did at Eleanor’s, but they killed her and let Bentley arrange to find her body in the trunk of my car last night.”

  “Oh, my God! And you got away?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? Let’s say they made this thing real personal; and if they thought I was getting too close before, they haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “You, against them? I don’t think so, Bob,” she replied. She’d been around, and she thought she had a well-tuned “bullshit meter.” However, as she sat there studying his face, whether he was right, wrong, or totally nuts, she saw he meant every word of it. As improbable as that might sound, she began to believe him. “This has been a nightmare. I thought I would wake up, but it isn’t a dream is it? It’s real.”

  “Yes. Eleanor was a very brave woman to try to take them on alone, and so are you.”

  “Not me, her, and it cost her her life. That’s why I can’t let her down.”

  Bob took the manila envelope from her bag and placed it in his lap, where it was out of sight below the table. He opened the flap and poked around inside, pulling out each print out and report far enough to read their covers. “There’s a report here on foreign drug sales in India,” he said, “and several African countries, some lab test reports, some stuff from the CDC, and a lot of spreadsheets.”

  “Eleanor told me a few things about those foreign operations. The FDA requires that any pills that don’t pass their quality inspections be destroyed, but Greenway began repackaging them under another label and selling them overseas, mostly in Third World countries.”

  “He’s a real sweetheart isn’t he?”

  “Well, some of the problems with the pills — colors, lettering, that kind of thing — they were merely cosmetic. You might even give him the benefit of the doubt on those, but most of it was bad batches, spoiled lots, and screwed up ingredients that could make the medicines totally ineffective or harm people. That Third World production is a ‘charity’ thing. It gets hefty US Government grants, subsidies, and tax write-offs. Most of it is cost-plus, so Greenway told her to expense all sorts of other unrelated expenses to those jobs. I guess you can call it ‘quadruple-dipping.’ It was substandard production to begin with. Then, they charged costs from a lot of other operations to that account to pad the net. The rejected pills were supposed to be destroyed, but CHC used them to fill the contracts to Third World countries, and then sold the good stuff from the subsidized projects on the open market. They made millions and millions, and that’s only from the foreign drug production, which is only a small part of their total business.”

  He looked inside the manila envelope again. “Yeah, the rest looks like it’s along the same lines — lab reports, foreign market surveys, UN and CDC letters, things like that. But there’s a flash drive down at the bottom. You know anything about that?”

  Linda frowned. “Eleanor ran accounting. She could have copied some of the financial reports onto it.”

  He picked up the flash drive and read the label. “Thirty-two gigabytes? Linda, she could have downloaded their entire corporate database onto one of those. No wonder Greenway was after her.”

  “That might explain it,” Linda managed to say through a mouthful of gooey pancake. “Greenway and Scalese have been behaving strangely the last couple of weeks, very nervous, very short-tempered.”

  “I’ll bet they got a tip someone was talking to the Feds, so they went on a witch-hunt.”

  “Eleanor knew she was at the top of their list, and she was terrified about it, terrified they would figure out it was her. Then she got that subpoena, and she and Greenway argued about it for days. He didn’t want her to go, but even our lawyers told him there was no choice. That was when things got really ugly. Greenway’s a control freak and Scalese is even worse. There was no telling what Eleanor might say behind closed doors, and they don’t trust anyone.”

  “Sally Bats does, as long as he can see them from his office window.”

  “Sally Bats?” she looked puzzled and asked. “Who’s that?”

  “You don’t know who ‘Sally Bats’ is? Old Sal DiGrigoria?”

  “You mean Mister DiGrigoria?” she sounded surprised. “Tony brought him by last month. He’s a cute old man, very formal, very polite. He went around and introduced himself to everyone in the office, and I mean everyone. He shook hands and made little bows to all the women. Tony warned us to be sure to call him ‘Mister DiGrigoria,’ and nothing else.”

  “Not ‘Don Salvatore?’ You didn’t have to kiss his ring?” he asked. She paused in mid-fork, puzzled, so he explained, “Sally Bats is one of your ‘cute old guy’s’ nicknames. In his younger days, he used a Louisville Slugger to settle disagreements. Now that he’s the Mafia boss of the North Side, he lets his thugs like Tony Scalese do his ‘wet work.’ His office is up in Evanston. From his fourth floor window, he can keep an eye on people he doesn’t like or doesn’t trust. They’re about a half a mile out in the lake with their ankles chained to a couple of cinder blocks.” He shrugged. “Hey, I’m quoting The Chicago Tribune. That’s what they say.”

  “You’re scaring me, Bob.” She stopped eating and put the fork down.

  “On purpose, because I want you to understand who these people are.”

  “But I have a daughter, and I’m alone. That’s why I have to be done with all this, Bob, done with him, and done with CHC.”

  “That would be nice, but I’m not sure they’re done with you.”

  “But why?” She leaned forward and put her hand on his, pleading. “You have the envelope, the reports and that flash drive. Can’t you give it to police or the Feds?”

  “Absolutely, but to whom?” he replied. “I don’t trust any of them. Oh, I trust Ernie Travers, but I’m not so sure about anyone else above him in the Chicago Police Department. O’Malley? Who knows? Before I go talking to any of them, I want to know who CHC is paying off, whose names are in their books. To do that, I need a computer,” he said as he looked around the restaurant and then down at her plate. “If you’re finished, we should get out of here.”

  “Finished?” she said as she looked down and saw that her plate looked scrubbed clean. “Yeah, I guess I am,” she said with an embarrassed smile.

  “I don’t like the way that manager behind the cash register keeps looking at us.”

  “Too bad for him,” she smiled. “But you were right. I needed that.”

  “You were dehydrated, low blood sugar, and in need of some serious carb loadings. Add in no sleep, stress, getting yourself badly scared a couple of times, and…”

  “What? Are you a shrink now, or a doctor?”

  “No, I’m an old infantryman. They train us to spot all that stuff.”

  Now, she was really staring at him. “Bob, they were only cinnamon pancakes.”

  “I could say the same about the steak and eggs. Let’s get out of here.”

  “You mean, before I eat anything else and put on a quick five pounds? Good idea.”

  “Trust me, it won’t show.”

  “Well thank you,” she beamed. “I try — and I’ve reached the age when I really do have to try — but hanging around all day with six-year-old kids, middle-aged women who don’t care, and a bunch of thugs and perverts, it’s nice to get feedback from an actual adult male.”

  “You know I didn’t mean anything by that.”

  “No, you probably didn’t; but to be perfectly honest, Bob, I don’t care if you did. You seem like a nice guy, and I’m afraid I’ve reached that age too.”

  “I understand, and I guess I’ve reached that age too. After the last couple of days, we’re both emotional. It’s natural.”

  “Maybe, but after everything that’s happened the last couple of days, I’m finally beginning to understand you, a little anyway.” She started to say more, but then turned her face away in embarrassment. “Oh, let’s get ou
t of here before I say something stupid and really embarrass myself.”

  He smiled as he dropped another $20 on the table and they headed for the back door.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The skirmish in the alley in Arlington Heights, the resulting arrest warrants, and the manhunt for Bob were all that Angie Burke required to shift her corporate takeover machinery into high gear. With the help of a friendly circuit court judge, who was a former senior partner at Gordon and Kramer, she stormed through the front door of Toler TeleCom at 9:30 a.m. with a confident smile and a freshly signed court order in her hot little hand. In her wake followed four pinstriped, Gucci-shoed, briefcase-toting Associates from Gordon and Kramer and a half dozen beefy, uniformed, gun-toting, private security guards she had hired.

  Margie Thomas was Toler TeleCom’s receptionist and one of the first people Ed Toler hired when he opened the office. In addition to being his eyes and ears, Margie was the corporate “gatekeeper” and pit bull he placed in the lobby to screen phone calls and prevent unauthorized visitors and salespeople from bothering the company staff or himself. Over the years, there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen or done, including being tasked with the planning for Angie’s “surprise” fourteenth birthday party. Angie hated everything about it, and she and Margie hadn’t gotten along since. Angie screamed that the cake wasn’t big enough, that the hotel wasn’t elaborate enough, that the horse her father gave her wasn’t pretty enough, and finally, that the rock band was not nearly as “hot” as the one Jennifer Gollancz’s Dad got for her party the month before. For her part, Margie considered Angie a spoiled brat, and wasn’t afraid to let her, her father, or anyone else within earshot know. For the next decade, Angie missed no opportunity to pay her back.