by Ty Patterson
‘For all those brains, you can be amazingly dumb. We knew all along about this place; we just didn’t know where it was.’
It was Broker’s turn to gape at them, his fog clearing as Roger explained, ‘Zeb told us about the company and the investment, that time in the Catskills when you guys were camping with the Balthazars. He also told us you had this stupid fear of this impacting us, so we decided to play you along.’
He hugged Broker. ‘We don’t do this for the money, bro. This doesn’t change anything.’
Behind him Chloe nodded vigorously. Roger was speaking for all of them.
‘Right, let’s see the toy I brought you here for.’ Broker returned to form. He reached to the top of a shelf and showed it to them. It had wings, wheels, and various attachments.
‘A drone, the latest in countersurveillance, has zoom video, all kinds of hearing gizmos that can hear a fly fart, and night vision. It can stay up for twelve hours, will self-destruct if tampered with, and noiseless from over ten feet away.’ He patted it proudly and gestured at five other drones on the shelf. ‘We’ve enough of them and can get more. The manufacturers also supply the NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency.’
Bwana inspected it, looking at the various attachments. ‘Will it carry weapons? Can it fire?’
‘Nope, too heavy, and remote warfare is not really what we guys are about.’
Kelleher’s residence was in a relatively quiet neighborhood nestled snugly in its walled oasis, many large residences in its vicinity. A section of the wall ran along the street, leafy trees bordering it on the inside, carefully pruned to remove any overhang. The wall curved inwards leading to black metal gates, ten feet tall, which opened to a driveway that joined the street.
Most of the house was shielded from the street except for a few high windows.
‘You’ve no other info on this residence? What kind of security? Dogs? Any idea about which businesses this chapter owns or runs? Bars, gas stations, anything?’ Bear stroked his beard as he looked at the neighborhood map.
‘If I had all those, you think I wouldn’t be sharing?’ Broker grumped. The chapter had little ‘leakage’ – information on its places of operation – which was a stark contrast to Hamm’s gang. The only alternative available to them was to track Kelleher’s movements, find a pattern, and then work out a takedown plan.
They needed to know which wheels he rode in.
A police cruiser whispered down the street at midnight, paused a moment outside the wall, and drove out slowly. If watchful eyes were around, they would’ve noticed a dark shape rising in the air, disappearing in the shadows of the trees.
That time of the night, the only alert eyes on the street were in the cruiser.
The cruiser crawled away, parking behind a DOT, Department of Transportation, truck that was parked a street away, in a perimeter of traffic cones. Roger hopped out of the cruiser and woke Broker in the truck, the warm smell of coffee enveloping him as the truck’s window lowered. The drone could be operated by two pilots, each able to pass control to the other, and Broker’s controls flickered to life as he took over. He’d connected the video and audio feeds to his laptop for detailed study.
The cruiser drove a block away and drew to a stop beside a Lincoln Town Car against which two figures were lounging, Tony and Eric. Roger and Bwana swapped vehicles with them and positioned themselves behind a row of parked cars, keeping the entrance to the street in view. At the far end, a similar-looking Town Car kept the exit in view, Bear and Chloe in it.
Broker did an initial pass of the grounds of the house, noting the armed guards with dogs patrolling the perimeter, swung the drone to the rear where the pool lay, its underwater lights splotches on the drone’s night vision, moved around the back, noting the garages, tennis courts, and then brought the drone to the front, to the large portico and tall wooden doors, not shut in the night.
He counted eight armed guards outside, four of them with dogs, and in the portico, three SUVs, the darkness hiding their make. He had seen a pickup truck in the rear standing alongside a tractor, both near a rear entrance, which he guessed was the service entrance and also a possible exit route for the gang boss.
He sent a text to Bwana and Roger, asking them to check the rear out, giving them directions to the exit.
‘The house seems to have twenty people in all, including Kelleher, a girlfriend – who seems to be seminude most of the time – house staff, and then the hitters. Ten of them, eight of whom patrol outside in the night, one acting as driver, and at any time there are three Porsche Cayennes that they use to ferry Kelleher to wherever he has to go to get his gang business done.’
Broker was reading from his notes in the late evening the next day as he grouped with the four of them, Tony and Eric relieving him on the drone, which was back in his truck.
They had spent the whole day monitoring the residence, Broker using the thick foliage of the trees as cover for the drone, Tony relieving him in spells while he rested.
Bear picked up the thread, ‘Kelleher went to a strip club at noon, an hour away, spent three hours and then returned and has been holed up in his house ever since. He took the three rides, him in the middle, and had six thugs with him in total.’ Chloe and he had followed the cavalcade once they’d exited the residence.
‘The interesting thing is he doesn’t use the phone much… he has incoming calls, but very few outgoing ones, and when he does, it’s all in monosyllables and one-liners. This is one paranoid SOB. They must have learnt something from Cruz and Hamm,’ Broker commented, stifling a yawn.
‘Let’s do this for two more days,’ Roger suggested. ‘Can your guys get us spare wheels? We don’t want to be having the same rides for three days.’
‘Do bears shit?’ Broker snorted. ‘He’s already got spares lined up.’
At the end of the third day, they had a few more variables in the picture; Kelleher spent a few hours at a small warehouse the second day, and on the third he went back to the strip joint. He randomly selected a Porsche to seat himself in each day, sometimes the lead vehicle, sometimes the rear, no particular pattern to his choosing. He was away from his residence for four hours a day, but those four hours began anytime from noon to mid-afternoon.
‘Those places are where he does business? A warehouse could be a neat cover for his drug distribution,’ Chloe thought aloud.
Bear rejected the idea. ‘Too obvious. Most likely the gang owns those joints, and he goes there to meet people or to put the fear of the gang in them.’
‘Right, question time,’ Broker announced. ‘Take him down at the residence or at one of those joints? Why not the street?’
They debated the options, keeping in mind that there would be non-principals about at all the locations and the size of the force at the other locations was an unknown.
Bwana gazed at an out-of-state Subaru passing them, the blonde in it giving him a second glance.
‘We don’t do the takedown,’ he said, staring at the Subaru’s plates.
They stared at him as if he’d sprouted wings and horns.
‘The Russians will do it for us.’
Chapter 42
Broker looked at him, dust particles bouncing off his dark skin, catching the sunlight, haloing him. He considered Bwana’s suggestion. Good idea. Why didn’t I think of it?
He mock-frowned at Bwana. ‘We thought you wanted to take them out yourself, grind them into fine powder, and blow that powder away. You sure you aren’t growing soft? How can we make it attractive to Oborski, though? While he disposed of Cruz for us, this will be like outright gang war, and while he’s not averse to it, he will need a sweetener.’
Chloe remembered the decoy cruiser they’d used. ‘If we tell him the cops will stand back? I guess they regard him as the lesser of the two evils?’
He acknowledged her with a salute. ‘What I was thinking. Of course, we will have to put it in a different way to the cops. The Russian mob is still a gang they have to go afte
r. Let me make some calls. While the Commissioner has given us a free hand, I am sure he wants us to be as subtle as possible and not create mayhem and bloodbath on the streets.’
Getting the Russians to play a hand turned out to be easier than they thought.
Oborski met Broker and Bear in a car wash that wasn’t washing cars. It was thick with hard-eyed men with bulges under their shirts and jackets, who stared long at the two of them before a person called out from the office, allowing the two to progress.
Oborski was holding court in the shabby office, the gang boss relaxing in it as if it was the Great Kremlin Palace in Moscow, the Oriental girl incongruous in the surroundings, serving them tea. If you are surrounded by ex-Spetsnaz hard men, you can treat any place as a palace, Bear thought.
Oborski regarded them coolly over his cup, smiling sardonically. ‘You want us to do your dirty work, da?’
‘Just helping you get an edge, my boy,’ Broker replied in his plumiest accent. He, too, could posture.
‘Maybe we don’t need your help, tovarich,’ the Russian replied. They had been planning an attack on 5Clubs once Cruz had been eliminated, and Broker’s idea neatly fit in their plans, but he had to play hard to get. A gang boss wasn’t a yes-man.
They danced around for another hour before agreeing on a plan, Oborski shrugging when Broker warned him about innocents and collateral damage.
Oborski had wanted to mount an attack on the residence when Broker had shared the surveillance video with him, but Broker had dissuaded him from that. The girlfriend and house staff had no role to play and didn’t need to be endangered. Similarly the strip joint and the warehouse had been ruled out, at which Oborski had flung his hands up theatrically. ‘You want us to lift him in the air?’
‘Something like that.’
Broker nearly missed Kelleher’s departure from his residence the day of the takedown, his attention momentarily distracted by a young shapely woman – That must be New York’s Finest Bottom, he thought – walking past his window, and it was the growling of the engines on his laptop that brought his attention back.
Kelleher boarded the first Porsche and the other two swung behind him, scattering leaves and birds as they roared down the driveway, down the street, to the warehouse.
Behind them a tan Camry and a black Ford slipped in their wake and maintained a steady unobtrusive distance. A couple of lights later, four identical pickup trucks barreled past them, one split and cut in ahead of the lead Porsche, one slipped to their left, another to their right, in the neighboring lanes, and the last one slipped behind them.
Two other trucks slipped behind the ones on the left and the right, completing the box.
The trucks kept pace with the gang’s vehicles, refusing to give way despite their repeated honking, staying in their lane, making other traffic bend around the mobile trap.
Lights came and went, and at one of them, a hood jumped out from the second Porsche, ran to the pickup nearest to him, slammed his hand against the raised window, and ran back when the lights changed. The pickup’s dark window hadn’t lowered.
At the next signal, a couple of hoods ran out and banged on the windows of the trucks in vain. The drivers of the trucks wore shades, scarves masking their lower faces, and stared straight ahead, ignoring the rage and fear beside them.
Two miles down, a Ford Mustang came roaring up, bristling with hoods, and fell behind the last pickup, and just as a head nosed out a window, three other trucks boxed it in from the side and behind.
By now traffic was giving them a wide berth, the Camry and Ford the only vehicles sticking to their tail, the only direction for the box to move, straight ahead.
Bwana smiled, a feral baring of teeth. ‘Spetsnaz, huh? No wonder. How do you think this will end?’
Roger yawned mightily as he steadied the wheel. Action that didn’t involve them bored him. ‘Dark street or empty street, gun battle, the Porsches turned to broken glass.’
They followed a few more miles, saw that the box held despite various attempts to break it by the hitters, and when they reached the outskirts of an industrial area, they peeled off.
‘Never to see them again,’ came Chloe’s voice over their satellite phones.
‘Gang warfare,’ screamed various headlines the next day as Broker consumed the daily papers with great relish. Bwana looked at him and the silent TV running in the background. ‘You ever thought of negotiating a deal with these vultures? We’re helping them sell. Feels like we oughta take a percentage of that.’
Broker hushed him up and read aloud, ‘Anonymous sources say 5Clubs are holding something of value, which has caused the recent attacks on them.’
‘Job done.’ He smiled.
Exactly a week later, the message was acknowledged.
The next day, they were in Southport, Chloe guiding them to the site of her rescue past the abandoned buildings that even time had neglected. She pointed out where they’d been held captive, the locations of the hoods, and described the shoot-out and rescue.
They walked to the side of the building. Bwana ran his eyes down its length and up its height, saw the barrel still on its side, lifted it easily and set it upright, away from the force of the wind. Roger and he walked to the back of the building and surveyed it.
‘Time me,’ Bwana said and ran down the back of the site, around its far end, and then down the front to the main entrance, joining them from the other side.
They looked at the stopwatch in Roger’s hand, and Chloe nodded. ‘Feels right, but he didn’t come round this end. He fired from the rear, then from the entrance, and then just vanished.’
She led them to brown stains inside the building. ‘I noticed these when they brought us in, didn’t pay much attention to it. Other matters were uppermost in my mind,’ she said drily.
‘Could be Shattner’s,’ Roger said. ‘No way to tell, not without a forensic test. Diego told us this was their trading hub and also killing ground, so wouldn’t be surprised if there were many such stains on the site.’
They walked to the waterfront and looked over the vast expanse of the Delaware River, hues of blue and green in the water, the entire area deserted but for them.
‘Ideal spot for crime. Nothing happens here, no one comes here, except for joggers and the odd dog walker,’ Broker commented as they looked around. He sighed. ‘The bastards said they had weighed down his body and dumped it in the middle of the river, by boat. The river is about thirty feet deep, and nothing much would be left by now.’
Broker had asked the Commissioner to recover the body so that Shattner could be buried properly and more importantly with honor. Forzini had said he would burn the lines to his counterparts in New Jersey and get it done, but burning wires still took time, and bureaucratic red tape burnt slower.
It was dark when Bwana slipped out of their house, walked a couple of blocks, and as he was flagging a cab, he felt another presence by his shoulder. Roger.
‘You didn’t think I would let you have all the fun alone, did you?’ The Texan’s smile lit the night as he caught Bwana’s answering grin.
Snarky had passed one last message to Broker before he had left the city to inflict his singing on another unaware town. Brownsville Autos was back in gang business, on a smaller scale, and the hood that had taken Cruz’s place was a dirty piece of shit – Snarky’s words – called Rajek.
Bwana and Roger had no specific plan in mind other than checking out the garage, but if they met any gangbangers, they would be welcomed with relish. A cab and a subway ride brought them three blocks away from the garage, and by the time they reached it, it was past bedtime for most residents of the city.
Gangbangers weren’t like most ordinary residents, and the garage had lights burning, and they could see shadows crossing the lighted windows.
Bwana positioned himself beneath a streetlight outside the exit of the garage, leaned against an abandoned car, and waited. The wait went to midnight – for some reason gangbangers preferr
ed the dark hours – when the garage turned dark, engines fired, and the first of three vehicles nosed out of the exit.
The first vehicle’s beams illuminated Bwana for a few seconds as it roared away; then the second one bathed him in its lights and drew away. The third one slowed and stopped, leaving its lights on Bwana. A head cranked out of the passenger window, beetled brows furrowed in disbelief as the man took in the sight of Bwana standing nonchalantly in the light. The head disappeared. Bwana couldn’t see against the light but could imagine excited chatter, heated swearing, and heads popped out again, doors opened, and four men spilled out wielding M4s.
Bwana raised his arms, prompting yells, the barrels turning toward him, and then the first crack sounded, and the gangbanger with the leveled rifle fell. The second crack took out the one on the passenger side, the cracks rolling and blending into one another, and from behind the vehicle, a louder report sounded, the rear window disappearing in spidery pieces, another roar put down the driver, and silence fell. Bwana looked at the fallen coldly, knowing the damage armor-piercing bullets did. Ten seconds too quick, should’ve burned you bastards with a flame thrower first, he thought.
He drifted back in the shadow, joined Roger on the other side of the street, and they walked away without a second glance. They heard the approaching sound of rapid footsteps behind them, and they still didn’t turn. From the tread and timing, they knew who it was.
Bear came abreast of them. ‘You bastards. You could’ve told me what you’d planned before slipping away.’ He grinned and took out his gun. ‘First time I’ve fired this, though I had heard about it. Nice weapon.’ He handed the Grach back to Bwana and noticed the one in Roger’s hand. ‘You no longer a Kimber man now?’
Roger snorted. ‘These pieces of shit are good for about a hundred rounds or so before they become useless pieces of steel. Russian-made stuff, what can you expect?’
