The Clause (6 page)

Twelve

DCSNet 6000 Warrant Database

Transcript Cell Phone Track and Trace

Peerless IP Network / Redhook Translation

Target: Tito Raykovic

Date: Sunday, August 8, 2010

Time: 1405–1408 EDT

TITO: IDI?

IDI: YES, HOW ARE YOU, DEAR?

TITO: WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? MY GOD, I WAS WORRIED.

IDI: SPIKIC WANTED TO SEE ME.

TITO: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

IDI: OF COURSE, ABOUT THE ROBBERY.

TITO: FUCK A RODENT! WHAT DID YOU TELL HIM? WHY DID HE NOT ASK ME?

IDI: YOU HAVE PANTS FULL OF CRAP, TITO, YOUR COCK FOLDED IN TWO. IMAGINE IF YOU HAD SPOKEN WITH HIM? HE WOULD SEE YOUR PANIC AND ASSUME YOU ARE GUILTY.

TITO: IS IT WRONG TO WORRY? NO, IT IS RIGHT THAT I WORRY. GRAVEDIGGERS LICK SPIKIC’S TESTICLES. IF HE BLAMES US, HE WILL KILL US.

IDI: THANKS TO ME HE DOES NOT BLAME US.

TITO: HE DIDN’T TOUCH YOU, DID HE?

IDI: AND WHAT IF HE DID? WHAT WOULD YOU DO ABOUT IT?

TITO: TELL ME!

IDI: WHY SHOULD I TELL YOU ANYTHING, YOU FAT LITTLE LIZARD? WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WHILE I WAS PUTTING THINGS RIGHT WITH SPIKIC? CURLED UP IN A BOTTLE, I HAVE LITTLE DOUBT. YOU WERE THE ONE WHO HELD THEIR COCKS. YOU NEVER SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN IN BUSINESS WITH THESE CRIMINALS TO BEGIN WITH.

TITO: THAT CUNT DOESN’T HOLD WATER, YOU WANTON FEMALE DOG! WERE IT NOT FOR YOU AND YOUR FURS AND DIAMONDS, I WOULD NOT HAVE NEEDED THE MONEY THEY PAY. I AM A WEALTHY MAN WITH LARGE DEVELOPMENT DEALS, BUT YOU—A FARMER’S DAUGHTER—MAKE ME POOR WITH YOUR FANCY WAYS AND OPERATIONS TO MAKE YOURSELF A GODDESS. AND BY MY MOTHER’S CUNT THAT DOG LIVES BETTER THAN A SULTAN!

IDI: DO YOU NOT DROOL OVER MY BREASTS AND TAKE MY LIP ON THAT BUG’S COCK OF YOURS? I BEND OVER PLENTY FOR YOU.

TITO: WHAT I DID WAS A FAVOR FOR THEM AND FOR YOU AND FOR US. DON’T PUSH ME, IDI! EVEN I HAVE LIMITS.

IDI: YOU STILL HAVE NOT ANSWERED THE QUESTION. WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

TITO: DID YOU LET HIM FUCK YOU?

IDI: ANSWER THE QUESTION, BUG COCK!

TITO: I WOULD KILL YOU AND HIM!

IDI: [LAUGHTER]

TITO: HELLO? HELLO? WANTON FEMALE DOG!

*END*

Thirteen

Down the block was
a stationer that did passport photos. I did my best to slick my hair all the way back, got the photo, and dropped it back at Doc’s with the plump counter girl.

I made my way to Union Street and the door to Mr. Zim. There was a neon sign in the window:
Acupuncture—Cupping—Healing
. These Chinatown herbalists do their magic in normal retail shop space, and this one could easily have been a beauty shop or travel agency. Except there were acupuncture charts on the walls and dark shelves lined with jars full of dried roots, berries, twigs, and who knew what. In front was a counter stacked with bright Chinese boxes of elixirs and a mortar and pestle; in back was an examination table, a Chinese screen, and a rollaway instrument cart loaded with acupuncture needles, cups, and incense. The place smelled like tea and licorice.

Behind the counter was a chipper man with a wrinkled head, the kind that looked like a dried apple on a stick. Except it had black hair with white roots and matching wispy beard. Bad dye job. Vanity is boundless.

Mr. Zim removed his specs: “Huang called.” And then he peered over my shoulder at the shop window to make sure nobody had followed me. “For this service I charge a thousand.”

“A thousand?”

“What would cat doctor ask?” He wagged a finger at me. “Much more.”

“Can you help?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“If she not dead.”

“Bullet went through right here, came out the other side.” I pointed to my side. “Now it’s all blown up and yellow. She has a fever.”

“Not good.” He shook his head, and wagged his finger again. “Wait. Few minutes.”

He went past the examination table and around the corner, out of sight.

I stepped out front, burned a Winston, and fished around my pockets for ten hundreds. When I was done Zim was at the counter with a box of slim glass vials, a jar of something slimy, and a bag of something crispy. His instructions were elaborate. The basics were to administer one vial an hour orally, put the slimy stuff on Trudy’s wound with a hot compress every two hours, and dampen and smolder the crunchy stuff and fan it over her frequently. I loaded it all into my saddle bag.

“And if she doesn’t improve?”

“Better get to hospital. Or cemetery.”

I tugged on my lower lip a moment. “Zim? If this doesn’t go well, it will have to be the cemetery. You have anything that could make it easier?”

He took off his specs again, and looked out the front windows. “Of course.”

“Quick and painless. And small.”

He eyed me very carefully. “This for her? Or you?”

I gulped, my eyes moist. “Does it matter?”

“Only to you.” He reached for a jar on a lower shelf, and from inside pulled two regulation-sized sticks of gum wrapped in yellow paper with red Chinese characters. “Chew, and go in peace. Forever.”

I dropped the thousand dollars on the counter and left.

Around the corner I dropped the crap Mr. Zim gave me in a dumpster.

Except the gum.

Fourteen

I had no intention
of going to Iceland, but it didn’t hurt to let Doc’s Hong Kong friends think I was. Yet why not Iceland? It wasn’t like Antwerp or London or Tokyo, where they would expect there to be a lot of connected goons, and it was the sort of place that would make a good jumping-off place to Europe and beyond. No doubt they would be flying people there to sandbag me when I came out of the airport. Just a few less to try to sandbag me in New York. Of course, as the mission proceeded, I would have to weigh my options and consider alternatives, but getting out of town for a while was a given. Australia might be far enough. I looked forward to drinking and sleeping on a long flight to the ends of the earth, a place where I could stand at the planet’s edge and stare into oblivion for a while catching fading glimpses of Trudy.

Bric-a-brac stores in Flushing have almost every known product to mankind, and much of it spills out the front onto sidewalk bins and hangs from the awnings. I ducked into one of these places and picked up an oversized belly bag, the kind tourists strap around their midsection. Another purchase was a bill pen, the kind you mark bills with to see if they’re real, and a large pack of Wrigley’s. I put the gum and pen into the belly bag and strapped it on. The saddle bag I strapped back onto the Nighthawk.

Tito’s watch said three thirty.

I fired up the bike and hit a gas station on College Point Boulevard before jumping on the Whitestone Expressway to the Van Wyck Expressway south. I snaked my way past Flushing Meadows Park in heavy traffic through the Grand Central Parkway interchange aimed at JFK, New York’s international airport. Sunday afternoon traffic was heavy with beachgoers, picnickers, weekenders headed home from the last of their weekend fun.

At a short-term parking garage, I motored to the corner highest and farthest from the entrance to the terminal, where there were a lot of tired people coming off their Sunday afternoon flights from summer vacations.

I parked the bike and grabbed the plastic socket wrench box with the Britany-Swindol assets. In the back stairwell I found a fire hose cubby built into the cinder brick wall. I opened the access door. There was an almost empty pint of vodka and some other litter that I cleared out so I could inspect the tag on the hose. The fire-deterrent system had been tested every six months for the last few years, and the most recent date was the end of June. The next inspection was four months off. The flat hose was folded accordion-style on an armature that swung out so that a fireman could easily unfurl the hose out of the cubby. I tucked the socket wrench box into the back of the cubby and swung the hose back into place, closing the door. The socket wrench box was blocked from view by the hose and couldn’t be seen through the cubby door’s glass. Unless some moron happened to mess with this fire hose box in the next twenty-eight hours, the Britany-Swindol sparks were safely stored at my escape point. Monday would bring mostly business travelers, and they hardly had time to explore the garage stairwells, especially the ones farthest from the terminal.

Back at the Nighthawk, I slid Mr. Zim’s fatal sticks of gum into the normal gum wrappers and then into the end of the Wrigley’s pack, marking their ends with my thumbnail. The two sticks of gum they replaced I put in my mouth and matched a Winston.

I checked Tito’s Patek Philippe. Four thirty. With any luck, the Serbs would be combing Long Beach Island looking for the beach house where they imagined me nursing Trudy. That would make New York and the Gold Coast safer for me. How long would they stay focused on that diversion before they turned elsewhere? Especially if Teddy, Steve, or Doc ratted me out? Doc was the loose cannon. What was to keep her from setting up the exchange with her Hong Kong friends and then handing me over to the Serbs? For all I knew, the Macau heist was sanctioned by the Hong Kong friends, an insurance rip-off. In a few hours I’d carefully take delivery of the paper and tickets, which, if a double cross didn’t come down then, would at least let Hong Kong think I was a hundred percent on board with their schemes.

Heading back north I exited the Van Wyck onto a business strip in a residential area where I thought I remembered a diner next door to a motel. I’d stayed at the motel once after an operation where I made the tactical error of letting an elevator camera take a picture of me. Part of why I don’t like leaving an operation by elevator. It wasn’t a very good picture, but to be safe I had to stay out of New Jersey for a week until they stopped running my picture on Channel 12.

My memory didn’t fail me. I parked at the diner and turned on Phone #2, which I’d used to call Teddy, Steve, and Doc. I walked across the street and dropped the phone into a trash can in front of the motel. Back in front of the diner I bought a newspaper from a metal box. Inside the diner I got myself a booth at the tinted window where I could keep an eye on the trash can over the top of my paper.

Coffee tasted like mud, and it was all I could do to swallow a burger deluxe worth of carbs and greasy protein. I didn’t care if I ever ate again, yet I needed the energy and I needed to stay awake. Other than a cola, cigarettes, and Wrigley’s, dinner was the first meal of the day.

The waitress had served me about a gallon of coffee over an hour and a half before a Chinese kid in a leather vest appeared in front of the motel smoking a cigarette. He stole long looks at the front of the motel while alternately checking his watch, and finally decided to go into the motel office. He came back out and went through the parking lot looking at license plates. The desk clerk had been no help in telling the kid which room I was in.

I went to the bathroom to get rid of some coffee. When I got back to my booth the kid had returned to the front of the motel and was standing next to the trash can, his cell phone to his ear. Phone tucked back into his shirt pocket, he faced the motel and waited.

His head snapped toward the trash can. They had called Phone #2 to see if I would pick up, to see if they could get an idea what room I was in, maybe to make me come out of my room, I had no idea. The kid soon had my phone in one hand and his in the other.

My waitress was relieved that I finally paid my check and that I actually tipped her well. I exited to the parking lot through a side entrance away from the motel.

Helmet under my arm, I turned the corner of the diner. The kid was ten feet ahead, walking around the diner, looking at the cars. And then he looked at me.

He tried ducking his head, reaching for his cell phone, pretending he hadn’t recognized me.

I called out to him. “Excuse me, pal, can you tell me how to get to the Whitestone Expressway?”

Indecision on the kid’s part caused him to hesitate, and that put me close to where he was standing. Close enough.

I pointed behind him. “Maybe your friend knows.”

He was just a kid after all.

My helmet caught him in the back of the head when I swung it, and his phone clattered across the macadam as he fell. I jogged over and plucked the phone from the ground, just as he was trying to stand. The second blow was to the side of his head. I threw his phone over a fence into a yard.

“Hey!” Two white older men with bellies and sport shirts approached. “What goes on?”

“Fucket.” I pointed at the ground where the kid lay squirming. “Kid tried to rip me off. Tried to hold me up.”

One said, “No shit?”

The other said, “It’s a Chink! I didn’t think they did that.”

“Can you guys watch him while I get a cop?”

They puffed their chests. Almost in unison they said, “We’re vets!”

“I’ll be right back.”

As the two duffers stood over the kid, I wheeled my bike out around the corner to the boulevard, fired her up, and found the Whitestone without any directions. I felt sorry for the kid. But he would have learned his lesson one way or the other, if not me, someone else, and it may have cost him his life instead of a swollen head and a reprimand.

Tito’s watch: six twenty.

The Whitestone Bridge’s span arced out before me, sun low on the left making long shadows of the cables. To my right and a mile away the Throgs Neck Bridge glistened with traffic, its span straddling the East River as it opened up into Long Island Sound and a clutter of sailboats.

Doc’s Hong Kong friends clearly had the ability to track my phone, just like the Kurac, and comparably devious. At least they were all about their own interests, and countered the Kurac interests. By sucker-punching their kid at the diner I’d just let Doc’s friends know that I was no dummy, so maybe later when I got the paper and the tickets they would play straight. That was a big maybe.

The Kurac would soon realize the beach house was a ruse and be back in play, and I’d have to do some fancy dancing to stay clear of them long enough to make the exchange with the Chinese at JFK the following night. Yet two adversaries with disparate interests could be useful.

With both off-balance, it was important to seek out weak spots and gain human intelligence if possible.