The Deal (29 page)

“I know you,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

She moved closer until her lips lightly touched my ear.

“I said, I know you,” she whispered.

I cocked my head a bit to the side.

“What exactly is that supposed mean?”

She giggled.

“It means I’m onto you, Jonah Gray.”

I freaked and grabbed the back of her head like it was a grapefruit, forcing it in front of my face. Her ass knocked into the table, sending a few near-dead cocktails and beer bottles flying.

“What the fuck did you just say?” I asked through my teeth.

“Ow! You’re hurting me!”

My grip was tight. Shawna grabbed each of my arms with her hands and tried to pry away my fingers.

“You’re fucking hurting me!”

“Who do you fucking work for?” I continued as I suppressed the full scope of my anger.

“What are you crazy? Are you fucking crazy?”

The music was still pumping, but all eyes, from my table as well as others, were now on me. Instinct made me search immediately for the guy who originally had me suspicious. He was gone, and I couldn’t make sense of any of it. I pulled her head in even closer.

“How do you know who I am?”

“Take it easy, man,” Jake chimed in.

I never looked at him, even after hearing his voice. Then with unexpected force, Shawna managed to take a good swipe at my face as a last resort.

“Because I’ve read about you,” she shrieked.

“Read about me?”

“That’s right!” she yelled, catching me in the face the second time around and setting herself free.

Shawna shot backward and was now standing up. She was scared, embarrassed. She bent forward and at a loss for how to react, she attacked me with a few more girly swipes. I simply put my arms up to deflect her.

“What? Some dumb whore couldn’t possibly have read about you in Crains?”

I swallowed hard.

“It isn’t possible I’m putting myself through business school? How dare you, you fuck!”

I stood up. Before the bouncers could get involved, I bolted for the bathroom. Once inside I rinsed my face with cold water. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. Ashamed, scared of what I was becoming, I turned away.

Later, after getting home and sitting wide-eyed on my patio with Neo, I decided I was in desperate need of at least a couple hours of sleep. In order to slow down my mind, I drank three quick shots of tequila. The doors leading outside were left open for the spring breeze to dance in my bedroom. I fell asleep on my bed for what would turn out to be the only forty-five minutes of sleep that night. Neo slept on my chest.

During those forty-five minutes I had a dream. I’m not exactly sure where I was, but I was standing in front of a crowd of maybe thirty or forty people. No one was speaking. Everyone was looking intensely in my direction. And everyone, including myself, seemed to be wearing white.

I held a gun in my right hand and it was pointed at the side of my head. I pulled the trigger. A terrifying boom went blaring, tearing through the room, through my dream. My head snapped back awkwardly, like Kennedy’s. Strangely, I wasn’t dead. My head bounced right back into position. I was standing again, looking out into the same crowd. Only this time everyone was staring back with their own unique expression of terror. There was deep red blood splattered everywhere. No one was moving. I felt absolutely
nothing.

I pulled the trigger for a second time. Then I awoke. Sweating hard, I sat up. Neo growled showing his displeasure at being disturbed. The room was dark, the surroundings strangely unfamiliar. Forget turning back. I didn’t have time for looking back. All I could do, whether I liked it or not, was keep moving forward.

Chapter 31

On Friday morning, at five fifty, I was sitting in back of my father’s limo. Dressed sharp, as usual, for my day, I read the Post as Mattheau took me to Grand Central. As I started to flip through, an article on page five jumped off the page at me. It was another
follow-up about the egg heist.

My eyes began to speed ahead of my brain, devouring each word. The piece delved further into the life of Robie/Hart. He was from Syracuse, New York. His father, Nolan Hart, was a political science professor at Syracuse University. His mother, Lea, was a business administrator at nearby LeMoyne College. But from an early age Lawrence Hart was more interested in the arts and left central New York to pursue a degree in photography from Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Simple math, living in Manhattan plus no cash equals zero fun. So through his father’s political science contacts, he got a job working the phones at the U.S. mission to the United Nations on the East Side. Right from the start it worked out well. By Hart’s senior year he had spent so much time at the facility that he was helping out on weekends with security. After four years he knew all of the players, all the rules, all the drills. He knew what made our nation’s UN home turf tick and what made it cringe.

And, perhaps most important, he found himself extremely trusted.

So, after being unable to land steady work as a photographer, he stayed on at the mission full time. A few years later he was put in charge of the entire security department. The rest, as we all know, is history.

The limo stopped, but my eyes remained glued to the paper. The article’s closing fact, an afterthought used to solidify a potential insider’s involvement, was more than a little disconcerting. At the time of Danish Jubilee Egg’s theft the treasure was less than a month away from a trip to Washington, D.C. As a tribute to foreign relations, she was scheduled for display, indefinitely, in the rotunda of the U.S. Capital.

A knock on the window woke me. Like a deer surprised by headlights, my vision swung to the glass. It was Pangaea-Man. He must have recognized the limo from the day before. His face was right up close, his free hand covering the area between his eyes and the car as he attempted to keep the sun away and see through the dark tinted window.

My heart’s pace stepped up a notch. I felt warm. I reached inside my jacket pocket to make sure I had my gun, which I did. Pangaea-Man, standing there with three huge, black canvas army duffel bags next to him on the sidewalk, knocked on the window for a second time.

I closed the paper and threw it down next to me. Nervous, I opened the door. I quickly retook my seat. I watched as Pangaea-Man flung the three duffel bags into the car. Then he got in as well and slammed the door shut after him.

We were now facing each other. The stuffed bags were between us on the floor, crisscrossed like three clumsily piled body bags.

“Here’s your fucking money.”

I knocked on the divider three times for Mattheau. We started moving. I kept silent. I was doing everything to keep my demeanor in check. On the surface I was poised, cool. Underneath my thick skin I was trembling.

“Those things are heavy,” he went on. “Don’t you want to check them out?”

As I looked down at the bags, my peripheral vision caught Pangaea-Man reaching into his pants’ pocket. The next moment was one I have trouble describing. It’s almost as if my brain instantly vacated all thought. Everything went blank. I could no longer even hear aside from faraway sounds. It was as if I was under water.

I lunged at Pangaea-Man, startling both of us. By the time I reached him my gun was out in my extended nervous right hand. Using my left, I pushed him back into the seat by his throat, placing the point of the gun against the skin between his eyes. They crossed as he tried, in disbelief, to look at the revolver. He held his hands out to his sides, defenseless, as if subconsciously trying to show me there was nothing in them.

“What the fuck are you doing, man?”

“Whatcha got in your pocket?”

“I was reaching for a pack of smokes.”

I reached inside his right, front pants’ pocket with my left hand and pulled out a pack of Camels. I tossed them on the floor. It felt like something else was also in the same pocket, only deeper. I fished my left hand in one more time. This time, to my horror, I pulled out a NYPD police shield.

The hole that was becoming my life, slowly swallowing me, had opened its jaws even wider. I was free falling. There was no net. No escape.

“You’re a cop?” I asked.

No response.

I pushed the thin, one-centimeter-wide steel circle farther into his skin. I could see his molars clenching through his skin as he winced.

“Fuck!” I blurted out, stone-faced, to no one in particular. “Fuck!”

I had no idea what was going on. My mind broke into a mad dash. Questions about conspiracy, mortality, and murder—mine or someone else’s, I’m not sure — began buzzing around my now darkened mind like fireflies.

I took a deep breath in an attempt to harness my composure.

“What the fuck is going on?”

“Just relax, Jonah.”

“Don’t tell me to relax. Right now. All of it. Tell me everything.”

“It’s not going to work like that.”

“Oh is that so?” I asked, alluding to the gun by simply applying a little more pressure.

“It is, Jonah,” he responded. “It’s not going to go down like this.”

Suddenly, like I had reached into a hot oven forgetting a mitt, I felt scorched. Something about Pangaea-Man’s voice and demeanor were freaking me out. In the blink of an eye, he no longer sounded or seemed in any way like the hyper, unsure thief looking to shake me down. Now he was cool, trying to methodically garner control of the situation. The reason was an odd one, yet one I could easily identify and relate to. Exposing Pangaea-Man transformed him from hyper thief to a cop releasing a formidable concoction of instinct and training. Now I was in his boardroom.

I knew I needed to be wary. I also knew that if I had any chance of coming out of this situation unscathed, both literally and figuratively, I needed to immediately demonstrate my control.

“Tell you what, I’ll decide how it goes down. Now I’m not going to say it again. Tell me what —”

“I need you to put the gun down. I need you to relax.”

What I needed was to establish that I wasn’t going to be rolled over. I had a gun to the fucking guy’s head and he still wasn’t buying me. Therefore it didn’t take me long to understand that if nothing changed and that gun came down, I was in some unbelievable shit.

NYPD cop I reminded myself. Someone trained, when in danger, to pounce on the first sign of weakness. I wasn’t ready to kill anyone. But I knew I had to act like I was.

“Hold up your hand,” I said.

Nothing.

I couldn’t back down. I cracked the bridge of his nose with the butt of the gun. Before his head could even buckle to the side I caught it with my left hand, propped it back up against the seat and repositioned the gun between his eyes. Blood came streaming from a gash the gun left as well as Pangaea-Man’s right nostril.

“I said hold up your fucking hand! Now!”

I was losing it. I had found my way into some profound state of conscious lunacy, a place where I had become so committed to protecting myself I was ready to lay it all down. I could actually see the anger growing inside of him, but it was obvious his better sense was holding it back. It was also obvious he had been around the block enough times to understand you’d better listen to someone when they have a gun to your head, no matter how seasoned you are.

He reluctantly held up his right hand. Without moving my eyes from his I grabbed his right pinkie with my left hand.

“Last chance, cop. You ready to speak?”

Pangaea-Man said nothing. By doing so, by challenging the sincerity of my words, all he did was harden my mettle. He was probing for weakness where there simply couldn’t be any. I snapped his finger to the left like a twig. He couldn’t help but to scream as it stuck out perpendicular to his hand. I swallowed hard and dug the gun in even farther.

“I think it’s time to talk,” I seethed, starting to scare even myself. “You agree?”

“Fuck!!! Fuck—okay, okay. I’ll talk. I’ll fucking talk. Ah—”

I backed off. I took my original seat across the way, gun still pointed in his direction. He gingerly probed his broken hand with his free one. He looked at the finger, then back again at me.

“You’re either crazy or just rock fucking stupid assaulting a police officer like this,” he pushed out between gasps.

“Please. Listen to you. A bit delusional, aren’t we? You’re no cop, you’re a common fucking criminal running around and holding people up in public bathrooms.”

“You won’t be able—”

No weakness.

“Shut up and explain. I mean it. Enough bullshit. Start from the beginning. And do so understanding that you’ll be wishing for only another snapped finger if I feel like you’re trying to fuck with me.”

Pangaea-Man took a deep breath and thought for a quick moment. I had snapped his digit without a second’s hesitation and I now had a gun pointed straight at his face. He had no idea where he was going. He knew that he was all alone. He didn’t have the antique. He had just placed two million dollars in cash in my car. He didn’t have any of the power. I had Danish Jubilee Egg.

I had finally begun to demonstrate my control. I wasn’t surprised when he started to speak.

“Aren’t you concerned about the guys tailing us? Ah—”

He was having trouble sucking up the pinkie situation.

“I might have been if you hadn’t held me up, threatened my life and produced two million dollars in cash. New York’s finest my ass. You ever seen the movie Bad Lieutenant?”

The guy knew I had him. He left it alone.

“Who the fuck are you?” I continued.

The beach behind Archmont’s house popped into my head again. Mentally I was zoning in on the cops. There was nothing clear. They had been too far away and I didn’t have a very long look at them.

“Were you there that night?”

“Where?”

I stiffened my outstretched arm, which had started to relax.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. I’m serious�—”

“The Hamptons.”

He paused.

“What? Look, I’m telling you, I have no idea where you’re coming from with this. I’m telling you!”

He tended to his hand once again.