Dark Men (9 page)

“The clock in my head was already ticking as I stood dumbfounded in that off-limits room, and it hit me that I didn’t know which fucking locker was Nash’s. What the hell was I thinking? Walking in here blind like this. I moved around the front room looking for a clue, but all the lockers were the same, just steel outsides, shiny and clean, no tape or nothing marking whose was which. Fuck me, my head was telling me to just bail out now, slip back outside and through the barrier before I catch a beat-down the likes from which men don’t come back normal, but my feet kept moving me on. I was between a rock and a bigger rock, I’ll tell you that.

“So my feet walk me into the back part of the room, and there it is, a mop set right up against one particular locker. Yack Attack, who had no reason to do me any favors other than knowing I’d owe him if I did in fact find myself riding high after this, played me an ace. I moved the mop out of the way and even though the locker was locked, I slipped it open as easy as eating cake. I had one set of skills coming into this place and this baby lock wasn’t going to stymie a man who knew his way around opening things up that needed opening.

“I get the locker unlocked and it makes more noise than I mean to make because I’m so fucking jumpy and my hands are a little sweat-soaked I have to admit, and I let the door slip and it bangs against the locker next to it. I hold my breath but no one comes a-calling, and I’m staring inside at his clothes, those same clothes I saw him come in with: a pair of khaki pants, neatly folded on a hanger, hanging next to a red striped oxford shirt and a blue blazer. Down in the bottom of the locker sit a pair of brown Cole Haan loafers. That’s it. That’s what I’ve risked my hide for . . . a set of clothes and nothing else.

“I fish through the pants pockets but they’re empty, then I try the blazer but nothing in the inside pocket and I swear this headache springs up on me all of a sudden like when you drink something cold too fast, and I realize that my body’s telling me emphatically and wholly that I’ve screwed the pooch and right then I notice some heavy coughing coming from outside the locker room door, like a fit, like Yack’s out there choking on his lunch and through the murk of this headache I somehow realize this is a signal, a warning, and I shut the locker and dive behind the little half wall divider that separates the front part of the room from the back and press myself up against it as I hear the door open and a guard whose voice I recognize as this black bull named Propes is saying ‘You okay, prisoner?’ to Yackey as he enters the room.

“I got a fifty-fifty shot, that’s all I got. Either his locker’s in the back part and he’s going to catch me there looking like a fish out of the tank or his locker is in the front part and I might, just might, be okay if I can keep my teeth from chattering. You know how many times your life comes down to such a clear-cut, fifty-fifty chance? Maybe five, ten times, and there it was: white marble and I’m okay, black marble and I’m gone, baby, gone.

“I hear Propes take five, six steps into the room and he’s close enough I can hear him breathing through his nose the way he does, and my heart’s beating now like a donkey kicking the inside of my chest, and the bull sniffles a few times and opens up a locker in the front room on the right, no more than twenty feet from where I’m hiding, holding my breath.

“I hear Yack say, ‘you okay, boss?’ and Propes says, ‘just forgot my damn Advil,’ and he must finally find the pills in whatever place he keeps ’em in his locker, because he closes the door and leaves without another word.

“Immediately, I’m back inside Nash’s locker and I got one more place to look before I break down and cry, and so I stick my hand deep inside his shoes, and I’ll be damned if I don’t hit paydirt. He’s got his wallet buried down in there and his keys and his sunglasses and some loose change, and I forget everything else and flip open the wallet. Forty seconds later, I’m out the door and Yack looks as sick with worry as I feel and another ten steps and he lets me out of the barrier and it is finished.”

Smoke looks up at me and he knows he has me. I’m a sucker for a good story, and most guys in the game know how to spin one. Archie was one of the best and Smoke must’ve picked up a thing or two sitting beside him. I don’t interrupt because I’m enjoying this tale and because I know he’s telling the truth.

“Next day, next
morning
even, Archibald Grant shows up in my cell as soon as the bars open and this is what he says to me. ‘Give me what you got.’ Not ‘did you get anything?’ not ‘tell me you didn’t blow this, Smoke,’ just ‘give me what you got.’ You see, he meant it when he said he believed in me. He knew I’d have something. He just knew it.

“I told him I had two things, actually. Nash’s address on Las Palmas Street and that he had two little blond girls named Kahla and Mitty, ages 10 and 8, and that’s all I could get. Archie smiled at me as big as Christmas and said ‘even better than I thought, Smoke. Even better than I thought.’

“I’ll tell you something, I don’t know how he used that information to get over on Nash, but we’ve both been in this business long enough to know that if you got someone’s address and you know his kids’ names and what they look like, well, shiiiiiit. It don’t take a mathematician to figure out what two plus two makes. Archie had that straight-shooting bull practically wiping his ass within a week. And Archie kept his word too . . . I didn’t so much as have a con look at me sideways the rest of my time in Federal.

“Archie gained his release six months before me and I thought maybe that’d be my ass, but his grip on L-Burg stayed tight even after he shook tailfeathers. And the day I walked out of that cinderblock, he had a bus ticket waiting for me. Said I’d be working for him from now on and not to worry about nothing else. He said I’d still be in the stealing business, but stealing the most important shit of all: information. And he was right.”

Smoke stands up and that finger comes up again. This time his lips quiver as he pierces me with his eyes. “That’s my story. So don’t sit here and tell me I had something to do with Archie getting kidnapped or that I might know who did it. Archibald Grant believed in me when no one else would. I’d give anything . . . check that, I’d give
everything
for him. You believe that, Columbus?”

I nod once. “I do.” I can see Risina nodding too out of the corner of my eye.

“All right, then. Good. We on the same page and let’s keep it that way.” He picks up his pack of cigarettes. “I gotta go light one.”

Smoke leaves the booth and heads to the front door.

Risina exhales as he rolls out of hearing range. “What do you think?”

“I think he gave it to us straight. What do
you
think?”

I can tell she’s pleased that I reciprocated by asking for her opinion. “I think he’s closer to Archie than you are, closer than I’ll ever be. I think he’s scared for his friend. I think he’d do anything to get him back. And I think he told us the truth.”

I nod my agreement, pay the check, and Risina and I head for the door. I’m going to do something when I go outside that I rarely do. I’m going to apologize. Apologize to Smoke for doubting him. I need him with me on this, pulling in the same direction as me, and I need him to trust my decision-making, my instincts, even though those same instincts wanted to finger him as an accomplice or worse. The only way to accomplish that is to say I’m sorry.

Smoke is standing right outside the front door, under the construction scaffolding, his cigarette down to the filter, staring blankly across the street. I hold the door open for Risina and start to follow her outside.

Smoke looks our way, drops his cigarette to stamp it out, and his eyes search mine for, I don’t know, understanding? Clarity? Acceptance?

I’ll never know because the scaffolding crashes down like an avalanche, collapsing on top of his head, and kills him instantly.

CHAPTER SIX

W
e’re in the kitchen, through it, heading out the back and I haven’t let go of Risina’s arm as I clench it in a vise grip. I only had a split second to react. I heard a sound like metal snapping and the whirr of a tension line releasing, all in the span of a crack of lightning, and as the scaffolding started to collapse, I shot my hand out, a miracle lunge, closed my fingers around Risina’s arm and jerked her back into the café only a second before she would have been crushed. I didn’t have time to warn Smoke, couldn’t have shouted if I’d wanted to. The only thing I had time to do was watch him take the brunt of it, five stories of structure raining down on top of him like a machine press.

Accidents don’t exist in this business.

Risina’s natural instinct was to look back as the realization of what happened hit her. She wanted to help, to see if anyone could be rescued, to see if anyone was hurt but alive, but she’s new to this world and I have to keep her moving, even if it means I bruise her arm because I will not let go.

Everyone hurries toward the front of the restaurant while we rush out the back.

“Wait, wait, wait,” she’s saying but I’m not waiting, not allowing her to break stride. A half block down the alley I finally loosen my grip and she practically falls over as she jerks her arm away.

“What’re you doing?” she shouts. Her Italian accent kicks in when she’s angry. “We have to see if—”

“We have to get out of here.”

“But what if we can—”

“He’s dead, Risina. I saw the structure come down on top of him.”

“But how . . . how did it . . . ?”

“I don’t know, but we need to keep moving—”

“It was an accident . . . we have to—”

“Listen to me! I told you when we started you have to follow my lead, and that’s what I’m telling you now. We have to keep moving—”

“I’m not going to leave until—”

“That was no accident!” I say through clenched teeth.

My words hit her like an uppercut. Her whole face changes as the anger peels away. Her feet start up again and I don’t need to grab her arm to lead the way. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it was supposed to come down on
us
.”

We spill out of the alley onto Division Street and join a crowd that drifts out of a bar, then change our pace to match the jostling pedestrians, to get lost in them, and she doesn’t say another word though I can see her face pulled tight in my periphery.

I don’t think we’re being followed.

Archibald Grant’s office is deserted, but it won’t be for long. Two forces are at play against us: word travels fast in this business, and power vacuums fill quickly. Some time in the next twenty-four hours, someone is going to find out Smoke died outside that Gold Coast restaurant. Without him around, a few of Archie’s men are going to swoop in here like vultures and clean this place out, take the chairs, take the desks, take anything of value they can get their hands on and sell the lot to the highest bidder. The furniture isn’t where they’ll land the real money, though. Someone who guarded Archie or one of his bagmen will know the value in the files, the contracts, the information. A rival fence will pay handsomely for access to Archie’s work, and some underling will soon attempt to provide it.

“So why are we here now?” Risina asks. “You want the files for yourself?”

“Not the files. File.”

“I don’t understand . . .”

I’m already ripping through the cabinets, looking for the stack Smoke slid over to me when we were trying to find an anomaly in the contracts over the last couple of years.

I had found an anomaly all right, but I didn’t realize it at the time.

Accidents don’t exist in this business.

“Help me find a file with the name ‘Hepper’ at the top. First name was something like ‘Jan’ or ‘Janet.’”

We start pulling stacks out of the cabinet and blitz through them. I’m only looking at the names on the first page, the names of the targets. If it’s not a match, I toss it to the floor and pick up the next.

None of the names in the initial stack look familiar, must not be ones I fished through the other day. I grab another batch and start flipping pages when Risina pipes up, “Ann Hoeppner?”

“That’s it!” I say, more excitement in my voice than I meant. She hands the dossier over and I open the cover. “Yeah, this is the one.”

Risina blows a stray hair out of her face and places her hands on her hips. “Can you please tell me what this is about?”

I hold up the file. “Accidents don’t exist in this business,” I tell her. And in a few minutes, to prove my point, I’m going to set this office on fire.

In the contract business, hit men employ various methods to kill marks. There are guys who specialize in long-range sniper rifles, guys who work in close with handguns or knives, guys who ply their trade with car bombs or poison or good old-fashioned ropes around the throat. There are experienced vendetta killers who’ll carve up the target or take a piece of the body to bring back to the client, but Archie stayed away from that type of play. Vendetta killers leave an unseemly mess. Mafias like to contract these kinds of hits, but mafias have long memories and hold grudges. Archie knew it’s best not to step into that particular sandbox unless you’re prepared to get dirty.

But Ann Hoeppner’s killer utilized a different method.

Ann was a thirty-eight-year-old college English professor in Columbus, Ohio. She wasn’t married, had no kids, and lived alone just off the Ohio State campus. Normally, college professors don’t make a lot of money, don’t have fancy cars or houses, but Ann had a bank account that would make most Wall Street brokers buckle at the knees. Her grandfather had been a scientist and inventor whose most famous creation was the self-starter for automobile engines. When he retired, he held one-hundred-and-forty-three patents, owned two companies, and was one of the richest men in the Northeast. Ann gave her high school valedictorian speech in a crowded auditorium at the age of eighteen. She told her grandfather’s life story to a bored audience, the exception being the ninety-four-year-old subject of the speech, who watched with moist eyes and rapt attention. He died seven days later.