by Phoef Sutton
True, he didn’t know if Guzman would be there. Maybe he was driving down to San Diego and through Mexico. Maybe he was taking a flight to somewhere else. Hell, maybe he was taking a Greyhound bus to Canada. But it was something to do while the time ticked away. Something to do while he waited for the phone in his pocket to ring.
Rushing through the sliding doors, he threaded through the crowd, looking around for the security checkpoint. Upstairs. If Guzman was here, he’d undoubtedly already passed through it, into the impregnable security of the terminal. Only one way to get inside.
Rush waited an interminable six minutes in the ticket line, then rushed to the counter when the clerk gave him a bored nod. His turn.
“One ticket to Miami.”
“I’m afraid that flight is fully booked. Would you care to try standby?”
“Sure.”
Rush suffered as the clerk clicked an impossible pattern of numbers on her keyboard. Then she said, “I’m afraid standby is fully booked.”
“Can I have a ticket on the next flight?”
“To Miami?”
“To anywhere.”
She looked at him blankly. “Pardon?”
“Yes, to Miami.”
Another series of relentless clicks. “That flight doesn’t leave until 11:35 a.m. tomorrow.”
“That’s fine. I’ll curl up with a good book and wait.”
He had no intention of getting on the plane. He just wanted to get through the fucking security line. Ripping open the envelope he’d pulled from the glove compartment, he dumped out a wad of hundreds and bought the ticket.
Upstairs, the security line was mercifully short. He shifted from one foot to the other, the blood pounding in his head, as the old lady in front of him got a good feel-up from the TSA agent. Then he ripped off his shoes, dropped the cell phone in a tray, peeled off his jacket, and stepped into the X-ray booth, arms held above his head. The machine beeped.
Cursing under his breath, Rush submitted to a wanding and a pat down from an acne-scarred security guard. His wristwatch was the offending object. He stripped it off and went through the whole procedure again. This time he passed.
He snatched his possessions from the conveyor belt, stuffing the watch into his pocket, snatching up the envelope with the remaining hundreds, not caring who saw it. Just let someone try to mug me tonight, he thought.
Lastly, he plucked the cell phone from its little plastic tray. Just then, the phone rang. It was ten o’clock. Shit.
TWENTY
Tony Guzman waited in line to get on board Delta Flight 108 to Miami. His ticket said he was in boarding group four, which meant he’d be among the last people on board, so there’d be no room in the overhead compartments for his carry-on. He didn’t care. All he was carrying on was his passport and five thousand dollars taped to his chest. “Travel light and they can’t lose your luggage,” Walter Trask used to joke.
Wincing at the memory, Guzman thought again about Walter Trask and his death. It was so stupid, so senseless. So messy. He closed his eyes and tried to think of happier thoughts, but none came to him. He closed his eyes tighter and tried to figure out what the hell he’d do in Punta Cana when he finally got there. Apply for a job working security in one of the resorts? That was the first place Ivankov would look for him.
When he opened his eyes again, a very big man, panting like he’d run a marathon, was holding a cell phone in front of his face.
“Talk!” the big man demanded. It was Rush. Guzman had been found.
“I got nothing to say,” Guzman replied.
Rush shoved the phone closer to his mouth. “Talk!”
Realization dawned on Guzman’s face as he heard the all-too-familiar voice on the other end of the line. “Are you there, Tony?” Ivankov.
Guzman grabbed the phone. “I’m here.”
“Say something more—let me know it’s really you.”
Guzman gritted his teeth. “Sometime, when you least expect it, I’m going to stick a knife up your ass and watch you bleed out.”
Ivankov laughed. “That’s the Guzman I know. Is that Crush-man there?”
“Yes.”
“Let me talk to him.”
Guzman passed the phone back to Rush. “He wants to talk to you.”
Rush seized the phone. “Ivankov?”
“Very good on the first round, Mr. Crush. Ready for level two?”
“No more games—”
“I’m texting you an address. Be there in twenty minutes, both of you, or I kill her. I’ll kill her the way Guzman said he was going to kill me. Sound like fun?”
At that, the call went dead.
Rush turned to Guzman. “You have to come with me.”
Guzman shook his head. “No.”
“They have her.”
Guzman looked stricken. “Tianna?”
“Amelia Trask.”
Guzman groaned. “That girl can take care of herself.”
“They’re going to kill her.”
“Let them. Let them kill that whole damn family. They’re crazy. All of them.”
The plane was boarding. Guzman moved toward the gate.
“You think Tianna is safe if you’re not with her?” Rush asked. “You’re wrong. Trust me—if they can’t find you, they’ll find her. They already got Gail.”
Guzman hesitated. “Is she…?”
“She’ll survive. I hope. They won’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to take them on.”
“Jesus, Crush.”
“We can do it together.”
Guzman gave it a long thought. “No, we can’t.”
Rush grabbed him with his big hand. Guzman was a big man. Rush was bigger.
“Guzman, listen to me. Whatever you did, it’s over. They will track you down. They will cut off your balls and make you watch while they carve up Tianna with a chainsaw. Your only hope is to take it to them. You know that.”
Guzman stood still for a moment, as if petrified by the image. Then all at once he was on the move, heading back down the terminal, fear replaced by, or at least disguised as, determination.
Rush had to run to keep up.
“What does Ivankov have against you, anyway?” he asked.
Guzman gave a mirthless laugh while he ran. “I introduced him to Stanley Trask.”
TWENTY-ONE
Victoria Donleavy left Kagan in the car with Stegner and took one more walk around the house. This was partially to check to see if they’d left the Trask place spic and span, but mostly so she didn’t have to listen to Stegner crow about how he’d “cracked the case.”
Stegner hadn’t cracked the case. The police didn’t think so. The FBI didn’t think so. Donleavy and Kagan didn’t think so. Hell, the gardener didn’t think so.
Nobody thought so.
Nobody except Stegner and Stanley Trask.
Donleavy found Trask in the gym. It looked like the sort of gym you’d find in a five-star hotel: weight equipment, an inversion table, an elliptical trainer, a number of treadmills, all lined up by a window overlooking the estate. Had the executives all worked out together here in the halcyon days of Trask’s empire? If they did, Donleavy would bet they’d always kept one eye on Trask and did one less repetition than he did. The alpha dog always had to be first.
Trask was on his back, bench-pressing what looked like two hundred pounds without breaking a sweat. Donleavy knew she was supposed to be impressed, but she just couldn’t muster it.
“Mr. Trask.”
“Just a sec.” Trask lifted the weight and set it in the uprights without asking for Donleavy to spot him. She knew she was supposed to be impressed with that, too. Maybe he wanted her to come on to him. Christ, she’d be glad to see the last of this guy.
“Yes?” Trask said, making a point of wiping himself down.
“I’ll be bidding you farewell, Mr. Trask.” Donleavy got formal at occasions like these.
“Oh. You did a good
job. I’ll be sure to recommend your firm to anyone who asks.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Trask.” Donleavy turned and walked toward the door. She stopped. “You know he didn’t do it, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“Steinkellner.”
“He confessed.”
“His confession was bullshit. And you know that.”
“Do I?”
“Why do you want us to leave, Mr. Trask?”
“I don’t need you anymore.”
“Is that because you don’t need protection? Or because you don’t want people around to see what you’re doing?”
Trask leveled one of his deadly stares at Donleavy. She knew the stare: the one that was guaranteed to scare the shit out of his underlings, to make hard-boiled executives shiver in their Gucci loafers. Hell, it had even scared her once or twice. But not anymore. Trask wasn’t her boss now. He was just a little man who probably mislabeled his weights to make himself seem stronger than he was.
“That will be all, Ms. Donleavy.”
“You can throw your life away, Mr. Trask. I really don’t mind. But what about your daughter? Don’t you care what happens to her?”
At this, Trask finally lost it. Years of being in control had sat comfortably on him, and the loss of it wrenched him, made him shout out, made his voice break like a teenager.
“Get out!” he croaked, tears forming in his eyes.
Donleavy had to look away. Would wonders never cease? She actually felt sorry for Stanley Trask.
TWENTY-TWO
Rush was barreling down La Tijera Boulevard and trying to read the text on his iPhone, but the GTO was bumping too much. He really needed to check the suspension. Rush handed the phone to Guzman.
“Can you read that?” he asked.
“854 North Almadero Street. You know where that is?”
Rush pulled a thick book out of the car door pocket and tossed it to Guzman. “Look it up.”
“You still have a Thomas Guide?” The Thomas Guide was the old map bible every driver had to have in Southern California, circa 1990. “What about GPS?”
“GPS knows where you are.”
“Still staying off the grid, Crush?”
“You’ll thank me later.”
Guzman flipped to the index and found the page with the street on it. “It’s near Olvera Street. Christ, we’ll never make it.”
“I know a few short cuts,” Rush said, taking a right on Angeles Vista. He checked the dashboard clock. It read 10:08. They had twelve minutes.
“Stanley Trask said you were drinking again.”
“Christ, all this is going on and you’re going to bust me about boozing?” Guzman asked.
“Bill Ingol said you were clean.”
“I lied to Bill.”
“You lied to your sponsor. Why the hell would you do that? What does that get you?”
“I lied to a lot of people.”
“Tianna?”
“If you can’t lie to your wife, who can you lie to?” Guzman said with a mirthless laugh.
“Why lie to anybody?”
“I’m not as simple as you are, Crush. Nobody is. People lie. They lie because they want somebody to believe they’re better than they really are. They lie because while they’re lying, they can believe it, too.”
“What started you drinking again?”
“Stanley Trask liked to drink when he talked. I liked it when he talked to me.”
“What did you two talk about? You killing his brother? And banging his daughter?” Rush tore through a red light on to Martin Luther King, squealing and swerving to avoid oncoming traffic. “Were you really screwing that kid?”
Guzman shifted uncomfortably. “Haven’t you ever done something you’re not proud of?”
“Yeah, but I’m not proud of it.”
“But I certainly didn’t talk about that with Stanley Trask.”
“What did you talk about?”
“I didn’t talk about anything. All I did was listen. That was all he wanted. That was all I wanted.” Guzman sighed. “I was in the house all the time, Crush. I heard everything. Information, it was just lying around.”
“Is that what this is about? Insider trading?”
“You just had to look at their faces and you knew when to buy, when to sell. It didn’t seem like anything wrong.”
The traffic came to a stop, and Rush slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse, and spun the wheel, cutting down to Broadway.
Guzman didn’t pay any attention. He was in confessional mode, letting it pour out of him, trying to make sense of it. “The Trasks didn’t mind. They’d been bleeding the company dry for years. They didn’t care if I fed a little from the trough. I think it made them feel big.”
“Bigger?”
“They couldn’t get big enough. At least not Stanley. But then it all started going to hell. All those people lost their life savings. And Walter, he started falling apart.”
“Developing a conscience?”
Guzman shrugged. “If you want.”
Rush gunned it down Washington. It was 10:18.
“He was ready to go to the SEC,” Guzman continued. “Confess everything. Take the noble way out. And everybody would get sucked down with him. Including me.”
Rush hit gridlock on Los Angeles Street. He swore and looked behind him. It was like a parking lot back there. He twisted the wheel and bumped up onto the sidewalk, scraping his fender on the concrete K-rail and flying over the curb onto Almadero.
“So that’s why you killed him,” Rush asked, “to stop him from going to the SEC?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Guzman said.
“Are you lying to me to make you feel better about yourself?”
Careening to a stop right in front of a dingy warehouse on Almadero Street, Rush checked the clock. 10:19. A minute to spare.
“We’re here,” Rush said.
“What do we do now?”
“Now we walk into a trap.”
TWENTY-THREE
The dilapidated warehouse loomed above them. It was the perfect place, Rush thought, for a gang hit. He got out of the car and Guzman followed. The elephant doors in the front of the warehouse were open just a crack. The darkness and silence from within hit Guzman like a sledgehammer after being tossed around in the GTO, so he hung back.
Rush walked around to the passenger door and rooted around under the seat. He came back with a Beretta and a Glock and offered them to Guzman. Guzman took the Beretta. Given a choice, Rush knew, he’d always pick the heavier gun.
“So how does Ivankov fit in to all this?” Rush asked.
“Stanley Trask found out I knew Ivankov. He thought it would be cool to know a gangster. You know, psychopaths like to hang together.”
“Do they?”
Guzman shrugged. “I don’t know. Actually, they didn’t like each other. I think they were too much alike. Except that Ivankov had a little bit more sympathy for people he whacked. Mostly the two of them just sat around measuring their dicks.”
“Literally?”
“One time, yeah. Stanley won. Man, was Tarzan pissed about that. In the end, though, they just talked shop.”
“And?”
“That’s it.”
Rush was about to ask how two middle-aged men sitting around talking about work could lead to two murders, an attempted murder, a bombed house, and a kidnapping when he was interrupted by a cell phone ringing.
Instinctively, Rush and Guzman checked their phones. The ringing wasn’t coming from them.
It was coming from inside the warehouse.
“Hit the lights,” Rush told Guzman, tossing him the keys. Guzman got into the car and switched on the headlights. The beams hit the elephant door enough to illuminate the shadows within and make them look, if anything, more ominous.
“Wait here,” Rush told Guzman as he walked toward the darkness and was engulfed by it.
Eyes adjusting to the blackness inside, Rush could make out onl
y a few cars parked in the vast expanse of dusty emptiness. A Cadillac. A Bonneville. A couple of Volvos.
The phone kept ringing with an annoying chirpy sound, like the factory default alert on a cheap cell phone. He couldn’t find the damn phone anywhere.
“We’re here!” Rush shouted, his voice echoing off the cement and bouncing back to him. “Damn it, we’re here! Where are you?”
The phone kept ringing. He’d run the gauntlet from LAX to here and made it in time—but it was all for nothing because he couldn’t find the goddamn phone.
Rush spun on his heels, calling out to Guzman, “Shut off the headlights.”
“What?”
“Shut them off!”
Guzman complied, and the garage plunged into darkness. Rush waited a moment. The phone rang again. And with it, a faint green light pulsed from underneath the Cadillac.
Rushing across the warehouse floor, Rush dove underneath the Caddie. The cell phone was there, secured with duct tape to the undercarriage. He ripped it free and answered it just as the last ring echoed through the warehouse. Then the words appeared on the screen: ONE MISSED CALL.
They were too late.
TWENTY-FOUR
Tarzan Ivankov hit the “end” button on his iPhone the second he heard Rush pick up on the other end. At least he assumed it was Rush. It might have been Guzman. It might have been some drunken homeless person who wandered into the warehouse and saw the phone blinking. It didn’t matter. He’d wait for the person to call back. Then he’d get things started.
Ivankov was a bear of a man—covered with a thick mat of hair from his toes to just below his startling blue eyes. His head was totally bald, a fact that used to irk him no end. In America, body hair was not in fashion, while head hair was considered the young man’s mark of virility. He could have waxed his body thoroughly and got himself a toupee. He’d considered it. Then he figured, fuck it. Let me be a bear, he thought. Let me be a gorilla. Let me be Tarzan of the Apes.
He put the phone in his pocket and flicked on the cattle prod that he carried like a walking stick. It was one of his trademarks. Along with his bald head and hairy body. It was all part of a carefully calculated attempt to give himself an image. A legend. A mystique.
