The Deal (30 page)

“Fuck,” he mumbled to himself.

His response seemed genuine.

“If you’re just some cop, where’d you come up with this kind of cash? Is it cop money?”

“Every drug dealer in Upper Manhattan and Queens are in business simply because we allow them to be. When I say jump they jump. They may cry foul, but believe me they’re happy to oblige when they think about the alternative.”

“What makes you so sure I have the egg anyway?”

“I know you have it.”

“How?” I pressed him.

Nothing.

“I said how?”

Still nothing. Gun in his face and he still wouldn’t answer. I moved toward him again. He just looked at me, with forced strength, in disbelief.

“I’ll ask you one more time, cop. What the fuck makes you so sure I have it?”

Nothing.

With every second that went by the situation’s seriousness elevated tenfold. I couldn’t help feeling nervous, but at the same time I couldn’t ignore the fact that my blood felt like it was beginning to boil.

It was crazy. Something started to take over. I want to say adrenaline, but it was something even stronger.

It was my father.

It was everything he had ever taught me about absolute power. Which now had me on the cusp of being terrified at the thought of not having it.

An incomprehensible reality washed over me. Only I couldn’t figure out at the time what that reality was. It had me paranoid. It also had me wide-eyed, resolute. It had me at the highest peak of focus I had ever been in my life.

I dropped the pistol’s aim to his groin. I had already crunched the guy’s nose and busted his finger. He may have been a cop, but he was smart enough to understand that cooperation was now his greatest ally. He squinted, then lost control of his eyeballs, which bounced between my face and what was going on down south. Almost immediately he relocked his vision with mine, his last defiant moment before officially realizing he had surrendered, before fully accepting he was overwhelmed.

Which made two of us.

The tension was so thick that for those few seconds the only thing I could hear was the limo’s air-conditioning system. His heart rate was accelerated and his nerves jangled uncontrollably. I could see it in his temples.

“Hold up your right hand,” I went on.

He raised his damaged hand and I went for it. He said nothing until my hand tightly wrapped around his fourth finger. I didn’t want to break another one, and I didn’t think I’d need to.

“All right! All right!” he blurted out.

My left hand stopped, but remained in position to continue if needed.

“All right!” he barked. “Fuck!”

“What makes you so sure—”

“All right already, man. Fuck. You’re completely crazy!”

“Explain. Now.”

His wall was coming down. I could see right through his eyes into the pulsating blood vessels swimming around his brain. He had clicked into damage-control mode. He was ready to talk, salvage what was left of his interest in all of it.

I slowly retook my seat.

“Ah—someone told me,” he said as I let go of his tortured hand.

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do we really have to go through this again?”

“I fucking swear,” he pushed out evenly. “I’m being straight with you. I got the tip anonymously.”

He gently rested his injured arm in his lap, accepting what had happened.

“How? Where? Was it a man or a woman?”

“Again, I don’t know. I’m guessing a guy.”

“You’re guessing?”

“It was a note. It was dropped off at the precinct.”

“What? It was—what kind of note?”

“What kind do you fucking think? It said you stole the antique egg that was all over the news. And that I had no connection to the person who sent the information.”

I sighed.

“You expect me to believe that shit? You just think I’m going to sit—”

“I’m telling you, man. I swear!” he pleaded, “Nothing more, nothing less.”

“All right, then where is the note?”

Ever so slightly he paused.

“The office. In my desk.”

I didn’t buy it. Precincts are busy, overcrowded. Cops are nosy. I pointed the gun at his balls again.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’m telling you—”

“Five—four—”

“I’m telling you!”

“Three—two—”

“My pants! The note’s in my pants!” he pushed out unable to take his eyes from the gun. “My other front pocket!”

He couldn’t take his eyes from the gun. He was freaked by how low it was pointed.

“Slowly—and I mean fucking slowly—take it out and throw it to me.”

He obliged in what must have been about one-quarter speed, fluidly like a slo-mo instant replay of Randy Moss making a fingertip grab in the end zone. The piece of cream stationery, folded once in half, landed between us on top of one of the duffel bags. Gun still aimed, I leaned forward, grabbed it, and sat back again in my seat. Eyes still on Pangaea-Man, I held up the piece of paper using my left hand and put it in front of my face. The paper’s stock was thick, expensive. Once it was opened I shifted my eyes and scanned the words as quickly as I could. It read:

I have no connection to you. I have randomly chosen you to receive the following information. Danish Jubilee Egg was stolen by Jonah Gray of Park Avenue. He works at PCBL.

I threw my eyes back to Pangaea-Man. The confirmation that I had been set up, part of this theft from the beginning, caused a fright so hard to explain that I simply won’t even begin to try. The words continued to stab at me. I was even more confused. Something else was beating up my heart, like my ribs were using it as a punching bag. Something else had me on the brink of unraveling.

It was the note’s handwriting. I felt like I had seen it before.

“I told you, man. Straight to the fucking point.”

I moved my eyes back to the paper. I took another look at the writing, not the words but the penmanship. The subtleties, the spacing, I had seen it before. I knew I needed to shift my sight back to the cop, but I couldn’t. Then, in a crushing instant like a baseball bat to the back of the head, everything, not just on this day but every day preceding, felt wrong. Everything seemed like a twilight-zone kind of scam.

The handwriting on the paper was my father’s.

I forced my eyes back to Pangaea-Man.

“What the—”

My voice sounded nervous. I took a breath.

“What is this?” I asked.

“I just told you.”

“How do you...when did you get this?”

“The day before you spotted me in that bar downtown.”

Control.

I thought, what fucking control? Can there really be a way this is even feasible? My father? A man I’d trusted my entire life?

Could it?

I strained to keep it together even though I felt like a delicate tea cup dropped to a marble floor. Shattered.

Control.

What fucking control? I was dumbfounded.

“You know who sent it or something?”

Trained NYPD cop. He most likely had a gun on him and was just waiting for his chance, I reminded myself. I needed to regroup, but my mind started playing games. If it was my father, could he be conspiring with someone else? After all, he’s the one who made reference to Archmont. But what if it was a set-up? What if it was easy to use Sam as the scapegoat simply because he was an easy target? Or, I thought, how about Andreu? After all, Prevkos’ subsidiaries are all—or Angie? Or some combination of—How about my partners? They were the only ones I had told I was at the wedding. God damn, I thought, fuck Perry for all of her devil’s advocate shit all the time!

I didn’t want to believe my father could act like this toward me. What if his hunch about Archmont was nothing more than his usual good instincts? What if my father was the one being fucked with? What if we both were? I mean, who handwrites a note anonymously like this anyway? Aside from a—

I actually gulped in the middle of the thought.

— aside from a sixty-something-year-old real estate magnate with as little fear as he has computer skills?

Control.

Now more than ever.

Because this wasn’t forgetting to leave out dog food or arriving forty minutes late for a closing because of traffic. This was a fucking crisis.

I blew off his question and forged ahead.

“Let me make sure I understand something. You got this anonymous information and instead of telling your precinct or supervisor or whatever you decided to hijack the egg and turn it into some cash.”

“Something like that.”

“Who else are you working with?”

Silence. No response.

“Sam? Angie?”

Still nothing. Not just nothing, an empty nothing, a submissive nothing. Because the realization of what this all meant to both of us was, mildly put, sobering. We both knew too much. We both knew too little. Above all, we both understood the complications of the two of us exiting the limo alive. I had the gun pulled and a keen grasp on the fact that had we both gone our separate ways, me with the egg and no explanation for its theft, I’d eventually, most certainly, be screwed.

I had no idea what my next move was. Right arm still extended, pistol poised, I began to slide the small, sturdy slice of vellum paper into my rear pants’ pocket using my left hand. I kept my eyes on the cop, but I barely saw him. His face was nothing more than a bleary backdrop for the crisp image of the note that was still hovering in my mind.

As the sheet began to make its way through the thin slit in the suit’s fabric, it got stuck. I dropped my eyes for the most split of seconds, but just as I did I was thrown back into the moment through an array of loud car horns. The limo swerved left then jutted right hard, tires screeching. As my free hand fought for balance, every muscle I have clenched up when we nicked the curb.

I inadvertently squeezed the trigger.

Chapter 32

Following a tumultuous three or four seconds Mattheau smoothly corralled the vehicle. My ears were ringing. Pangaea-Man, lifeless, was slumped back awkwardly on the rear seat bank, leaning slightly to the left. His arms were down at his sides, mangled finger no longer an issue. His left eye was gone. In its place was a hole from the bullet that went clean through his head and out through the small rear window, which didn’t shatter since it was tempered glass. A narrow stream of blood flowed down his left cheek onto his shirt. The eye that remained intact was still open, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular. The extended gun was still smoking.

I froze. My mouth fell open. My breathing became ragged.

“Holy fucking shit,” I whispered to myself.

Slowly I sank backward into my seat. I rested my arms at my sides, mirroring Pangaea-Man. Completely shell shocked, my gaze fixated, I tried to process what had just happened. What was yet to happen.

“Oh my fucking Lord,” I squeezed out, still whispering.

In the midst of my ensuing perplexity, a question that was startling in its own right firmly took hold.

Had I really just done that?

Another humbling concept, query staggered me.

How many lives had I really just ended?

Feelings of loss, adrenaline, guilt, and relief became so tangible I could almost taste them in my mouth. I had not intended to pull that trigger.

Thought fragments, scattered around my brain like puzzle pieces, slowly began to slide into place. I was driving around New York City in the back of a limo with two million dollars in cash from God knows where, a freshly killed New York City cop, and the gun that executed him covered with my prints. The magnitude of the situation firmly took hold.

I shook my head and forced myself to focus. My eyes squinted. I let out a slow, slightly choppy breath.

“Fuck,” I said, sharply, this time a notch above a whisper.

I clenched my upper and lower molars so tight, as Pangaea-Man had only minutes earlier, that I could feel my flexing jawbones trying to blast through my cheeks’ skin. In a flash, reality torched me like a campfire flame catching a marshmallow. I didn’t have time to panic. I wouldn’t have any more opportunities to correct wrong decision
s.

My hands still shaking, I put the gun back in my inside jacket pocket, never taking my eyes away from the dead man. Mattheau and I didn’t exactly have a signal for what had happened. With as much poise as possible under the circumstances, I reached my left hand up behind me and started knocking on the divider. To my surprise Mattheau didn’t lower it. I knocked some more. Nothing.

I would have yelled his name, but the rear of the vehicle when sealed off was nearly soundproof.

“What the fuck?” I mumbled to myself.

I reached for the passenger control button. The barrier slowly descended. As it did, I felt the car slowing down. I peeked through the divider. Just as my eyes crossed the threshold, Mattheau’s hand clamped around my neck from out of nowhere like a bear trap.

“What are you doing?” I pushed out through gasps.

Mattheau was low in the seat. I remember being shocked that such a mild-mannered gentleman in such an odd position could garner such a stranglehold. His hell-bent expression both surprised and scared me.

“Jonah!” Mattheau exclaimed as he let go, his gaze bouncing back to the road in front of him. “Jonah, I’m so sorry! I—”

“Don’t slow down,” I continued, rubbing my neck. “Keep going.”

“I thought...I heard a...I expected the other guy to come through here.”

“Just keep going.”

Mattheau, relieved that it wasn’t me who had been shot, picked up the pace.

“Jonah, are you all right?”

He jerked his head right again to check on me. When he did he found me still staring at him in wonderment.

“I’m fine.”

I quickly turned around and took another look at Pangaea-Man then the duffel bags. I dipped my chin and looked down at the seat under me before returning my attention forward to Mattheau. His eyes were shifting back and forth between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. He was trying to get a glimpse of what had happened behind me.

“I’m all right. Head back to the brownstone,” I instructed him.

I hit the button and the divider went back up.