The Stakes

by Ben Sanders

  He didn’t visit again for a couple of years, but by that time he’d transitioned to an admin role, not just couriering for Charles, but chasing up his debts as well.

  Cody Brink was a guy who’d borrowed a quarter-million dollars, and then decided not to pay it back. He was shacked up in New York with an ex-wife turned current girlfriend. Charles flew Bobby over first class. The ex-wife/current girlfriend had a place on the Upper West Side, and he could still picture the drive in: her tidy brownstone on a rich-looking street, both sidewalks lined with oaks, sunlight through the leaves making shadows like jagged camouflage. He parked out front and watched them from the car awhile, getting glimpses as they passed the street-facing window, worried he’d need some clever ploy to get in. In the end, though, he just risked it and rang the bell, figuring you can get a long way by dressing sharp and not being edgy, and Cody’s woman let him straight in with a smile. Bobby told her he was here to collect two hundred fifty grand, and things turned frantic then: Cody went upstairs at a brisk walk that became a run when Bobby followed, chasing him at a sprint to the bedroom and catching him as Cody reached the bed. He had a Smith .38 under his pillow, lost his grip as Bobby shoved him out the bedroom window. The window overlooked the street, but there was a fire escape to catch him, and Cody lay there with his knees hooked on the glass-toothed sill and the rest of him draped on the iron platform.

  He didn’t even have the payment yet, but the view grabbed him: a frame of jagged glass and Cody limp and supine, trees along the moneyed street swaying, as if from the impact of the fall.

  It looked like success, an image that said, This is Your Town. The elation hit with such purity, the first thing he did was pick up the bedside phone, wanting to call home and tell someone he’d finally Made It. Then it was hard to know what happened next—whether the woman hitting him made him drop the handset, or if common sense got through in time to say you don’t dial home from a crime scene.

  He had that memory to go back to, and it improved with each visit, awkward edges disappearing and his words getting cleverer and more clipped. In his head, Cody didn’t reach the gun. In his head, Cody never looked like a threat. In his head, Bobby wasn’t shit-scared going into it. Now as he rode through Manhattan in the back of a rented car, Marko and Luka up front, he could go back and see himself standing at the broken window, flawless composure, smoothing his tie as he told Cody Brink he had three days to send the check.

  The light through his lids softened, and he opened his eyes to the gloom of the Midtown Tunnel, Marko watching him in the mirror as he drove.

  Bobby said, “I’m still here.”

  “Yeah, you don’t look like it.”

  “You haven’t seen someone with their eyes shut?”

  He didn’t get an answer. The car was a Mercedes sedan, an AMG model, V-8 engine that sounded like it ran on silk, black leather seats so smooth it was hard to stay upright. It had been waiting for them on the tarmac at Kennedy, courtesy of Billion Air.

  They came out of the depths of the river and into the steel lockjaw of Midtown traffic. With careful German inflection, the GPS woman told them to take a left on Third Avenue. Marko obeyed and then found Bobby in the mirror again, eyebrows raised as he said, “So what’s the going rate these days, if you save a lady’s life?”

  Bobby said, “Depends how good a job you do.”

  Marko turned his bottom lip out and nodded, and Luka said, “Say she’s going to be murdered on a boat, and you tidy it all up, bring her back with all her limbs still attached?”

  Bobby said, “I was well looked after, put it that way.”

  Very well looked after: a two-hundred-K involvement fee for his personal risk, fifty K on top of that for bringing Nina back unharmed, another fifty for impact and theater, making Lenny Burke and the boat disappear. Three hundred all up, but it wouldn’t insure against death threats. Three hundred grand couldn’t buy safety for long.

  Luka turned in his seat, gave him a hooked smile. “Hope the lady paid for your efforts, too. Imagine she’s got a bit to offer.”

  They both found that pretty funny.

  Bobby ignored it. The Daydream Nina had made it worth his trouble: there was a parallel reality where they’d stayed on that boat a little longer, and she hadn’t gone back to Charles. He’d run that through his head so often it was like bona fide memory. The problem now was that he didn’t know what he was doing: he didn’t know if he was here for Nina, or for Charles’s collection fee. Either one could make him veer off course for the better.

  He took out his phone and reopened the PDFs that Charles had sent him.

  The first pages were a rundown on Peter Berkhov, Russian, based out in Malibu mostly, but he had real-estate interests countrywide. He ran hookers and made pornography, employed guys who’d done time for all kinds of aggressive action.

  It was probably expensive intel. The photos were grainy covert shots: the guy crossing the street, squinting at the wind with his tie across his shoulder, through-the-window photos of him eating in a restaurant. There was background on a guy called Lee Feng as well, Chinese, operated out of New York—Chinatown, of course. He ran hard drugs, OxyContin, racketeering, protection …

  Bobby said, “So who’s this Feng guy? Does Charles think he’s trying for a takeover?”

  He thought they’d let the question pass, but then Marko said, “We’re not paid to listen.”

  “You still hear things, whether you want to or not.”

  Marko would’ve made a great New Yorker: he rode a cab’s rear fender for two blocks, forty miles an hour at a range of about ten inches, blasted his horn when the guy dared to slow down. Marko said, “You want to know what’s going on, you’re talking to the wrong people. We’re just the pickup guys.”

  “You’re not curious about the kind of circus you’re signing on for?”

  That amused him as well. Marko said, “We’ve done work in Ukraine—you think this is the circus, you never been shot at by a twelve-year-old with an RPG. Nothing in this town’s a circus.” He shrugged, ducked forward and looked at the cityscape, like assessing its potential for bad things. He said, “There’s Russians involved, fine. I don’t mind killing Russians. But I don’t give a fuck what their business is.”

  Bobby said, “So all he told you was your bonus?”

  Marko lifted his head, found his eyes in the mirror again. “We should’ve declined payment, really. Fly private, drive a brand-new Mercedes, might as well be a holiday.”

  “Better than standing around guarding the house though, right?”

  He shrugged. “We cover all sorts of stuff. We’ve done maritime security, body guarding, asset retrieval.”

  “Which is what?”

  Marko shrugged. “Normally child-related, international custody disputes. You take the pissed-off parent with you and go and bring the kid back.”

  “So is this asset retrieval or just an exercise in finding someone’s wife?”

  Marko shrugged. “One way or another, she’s going back to L.A. It’s easy when it’s not international—fly private, no one checks your luggage. Put them in a duffel bag and then let them out at the other end.” He smiled. “Easiest with women: they fold better.”

  They were trying to get a read on him, gauge his willingness to hurt her if it came to it. He thought of the payoff if he brought her back: a duffel full of currency courtesy of Charles, and a license to do anything. He held Marko’s eyes in the mirror and said, “I’ll take your word for it.”

  He hadn’t seen the apartment before, and he’d been expecting something SoHo-esque—painted brick with the fire escape hanging off the front—but Charles’s place was in a newish concrete high-rise off Eleventh Avenue, just south of the Hudson Street train yards. It looked very New Age and carbon-neutral. There was a coffee shop on the ground floor with a whole wall covered in some kind of creeper plant, benches along the windows lined with kids drinking green shit out of jars.

  Marko said, “You think he’d mind i
f we brought him back a couple of kids instead of his wife?”

  Luka said, “Yeah. Swap a forty for two twenties. I’d do it.”

  Marko had Charles’s access card. They drove into the parking garage, into cold shadow, waited as the lights came on in sequence. He found an empty slot near the back of the structure, and a minute later the three of them were in an elevator, clinic white, a speaker playing the sound of trickling water, and a German voice that sounded like the GPS telling them that the building was carbon neutral and had a five-star energy rating.

  He felt like a chaperone or something, standing there in black between them with his hands clasped as they checked their pistols. They had a Sig automatic each, and bags’ worth of heavier backup in the car. He didn’t know what he’d do if they found her—whether he’d let them take her at gunpoint, or intervene somehow. The moment would dictate it. There’d been no plan on the boat until they were on the water, and even then he stuck to this vague notion of zero bloodshed. Then Nina pulled his intentions out of shape, made shooting the fat man seem like the answer to everything.

  Charles’s place was on the eighteenth floor. They formed a little triangle at the apartment door, Bobby keeping back to watch the hallway, letting the other two go ahead of him. They stood with their guns held close and chest-high, Marko with the access card to the reader. The lock beeped, and it was frantic action as the pair of them rushed inside, guns snapping left and right for cover.

  Bobby let them get a few feet ahead and then followed. He saw the cameras immediately, one in each corner above the main window, but the alarm panel in the entry was blank. He walked through to the living area, listening to them swap stage whispers: “Clear!” as they checked the place room by room.

  There was a kitchen to his left, and a study and two more bedrooms over to his right. Nice place, but the view was the draw card: northwest across the train yard, the blue swath of the Hudson off to his left, and a dull gray rim of New Jersey out beyond the water, isolated high-rises like blips on a graph.

  They were still calling “Clear” to each other, taking it all very seriously. He put his back to the window and waited. The décor was the Stone standard: posters for shit movies, a framed Hollywood Reporter article from Charles’s pre-wheelchair days. The flagship piece was weirdo art: this quartet of Charles Stone headshots, each with wild colors and a different hairdo. It looked like some vain Warhol rip-off.

  “Well, I’d say she’s fucking split.”

  Bobby turned and saw Luka come out of a bedroom, tension gone, the gun hanging at his side. The guy paused and took in the room, the Stone Shrine in every shade of garish. He said, “Maybe she hasn’t even been here. Why wouldn’t she ditch his shitty pictures?”

  More to the point: if someone grabbed her, why was there no damage?

  Marko came out of another bedroom, running a hand through his hair. “Yeah, no sign of her.”

  Bobby didn’t answer. A litany of what-ifs hit him:

  What if she was running/what if she’d left at gunpoint/what if she was never here?

  He cruised the apartment. Luka took an armchair in the living room and stared at the view, gun in his lap and hands behind his head.

  Marko said, “You out of ideas already?”

  “No. I think we should call the old man and tell him his wife’s gone.”

  The kitchen was tidy. A couple of clean plates in the dishwasher, but they could’ve been there for months. The appliances were all cold. The coffee machine matched his one at home.

  He checked the bathroom, wanting a sign. He was getting brain-swamped. Theories competed with Nina flashes. He could see her in here, and that eighteen-story view made him think of his wife—Connie looking back as she dropped, placid and at peace.

  He didn’t want that now.

  He shut his eyes and brought back Nina. There she was steering the boat, hair straight out behind her and a faint smile that said, This is between you and me.

  He knew he could find her and fix everything.

  He checked the bedroom—nothing. Clean sheets, no perfume.

  There was a TV in the corner, and a photo of Charles getting some award. Where were the photos of her? He had his trophy shot in L.A.—that portrait Bobby saw—and that was all. Where were the photos of them?

  He checked a closet but found weapons instead: four shotguns upright, and a shelf of Sig pistols in foam recesses. Boxes of ammo on the floor. It all stank of gun oil.

  He walked back to the living room as Luka said, “We calling him or what?” He had his feet up on a stool, getting comfy. Marko seemed more alert, still with two hands on his gun. But they were both looking at Bobby, wanting his take on it.

  He stood at a window looking down at the train yard, the feeder tracks spread out like frayed rope, long silver carriages waiting in staggered rows. There was a weld spark down there too, a white star that came and went.

  Marko was pacing behind him. They’d geared up for a grab-and-go, and now they didn’t know how to play it.

  Bobby said, “Let’s fill in Mr. Stone.”

  Marko didn’t answer, but in the reflection on the glass, Bobby saw him put a phone to his ear and get back to his pacing. The room was so quiet he could hear the ringtone.

  He closed his eyes and tried to see what happened. It was too clean. She must have just walked out. If it was kidnap there’d be camera footage, surely.

  Behind him Marko said, “Yeah, we’re in.” Then: “No sign.”

  Bobby opened his eyes and saw his wife falling. He looked away from the drop and saw a sign in a window: APARTMENTS FROM $8 MILLION.

  He put his back to the glass. There was a desk with a compact printer against the window by the kitchen. He wandered over.

  Marko said, “Yeah, we don’t know. I’m just filling you in.”

  He pushed the stool aside and rolled open a drawer. Nothing helpful: flyers for Broadway shows, catalogues with high-end homeware. Half a dozen restaurant menus. He thumbed through paper in the printer tray, saw blocks of red text, and a big header block screaming FUCKTHEPD.COM.

  He scanned the pages. It was dialogue printed off a forum, some kind of cop-hate website. Maybe she was anti-law.

  He riffled paper, saw Queens/shooting/homicide/Force Investigation/Miles Keller—

  What?

  He flipped back a page. Yeah, there it is. Miles fucking Keller.

  He read it again in full.

  @Fluke150: FID admin says robbery Det Miles Keller did the Jack Deen shooting.

  Lower down:

  @blueh8er: Keller has no priors but DA want him bad. The prick should burn.

  Bobby dropped the paper.

  It must be Nina’s. She heard about Cousin Jack being clipped and ran some background.

  Or was there some other connection?

  He looked back at the other two, saw Marko listening to his phone—taking instructions, or waiting out a diatribe.

  He scanned the pages again, wanting to know what she knew, and then his phone hummed in his pocket.

  Incoming call.

  He checked the screen, but didn’t recognize the number. He answered anyway. Standing in the apartment, a Nina-rich environment, Miles Keller’s name right there on paper, everything felt relevant, part of the mystery.

  He put the phone to his ear, and Nina said, “Pretend it’s your mother, and then go outside to the balcony.”

  He didn’t move, but her voice changed gravity for a moment. The world dipped and leveled out. He didn’t dare look back. He swallowed to stop his voice from catching, heard blood pound in his ears as he said, “Hey, sweetheart.”

  Then he opened the slider and stepped out onto the balcony, felt the breeze tug him and heard the traffic over on Eleventh Avenue, horn noise just a thin call for help.

  She said, “Smooth. I didn’t know if I could trust you to act natural, and then I remembered you’re the King of Cool.”

  He liked that. Maybe she had a Daydream Bobby—a match for his Daydream
Nina. Maybe she had her own parallel reality, where she hadn’t gone back to Charles.

  She said, “Face the view. Marko can lip-read.”

  “How do you know where I am?”

  Nina said, “The cameras still work, the feed’s just been rerouted. I’m looking at it right now.”

  He said, “What happened?”

  She hesitated, and he knew he’d get something plain and unrevealing. She said, “I didn’t want to stay there, so I left.”

  Making it sound that innocent and simple, you’d think she never put a foot wrong.

  Bobby said, “What do you know about Keller?”

  She took her time with that as well, and he could hear the blood in his ears. He watched the sidewalk and saw his wife falling. He closed his eyes and in the dark Nina said, “I’m sorry about Jack. I heard what happened.”

  He saw her tied up in the boat’s forward cabin, asking him if she could drive, Lenny Burke facedown and sinking—

  He folded his arms and leaned on the rail, repeated his question: “What do you know about Keller?”

  She said, “I can’t tell you just yet. Are you supposed to rescue me or just take me home?”

  Bobby said, “I’ve been trying to work that out.”

  “Mmm. Well, I’m glad you’re open to possibilities. I wondered who Charles would send, and I’m glad you drew the short straw.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You helped me once, you’ll help me again. Why make the first time a waste of effort? Plus I can make it worth your while.”