Dark City (Repairman Jack - Early Years 02) (11 page)

As he was driving away from the lot he couldn’t help swinging onto Queens Boulevard and down to the last lot he and Cristin had visited. He stopped outside the showroom for another quick look at the ’63 Corvair and it looked even better. He didn’t go in because he wasn’t sure he could risk buying and registering it under his phony “Jeff Cusic” identity. He’d have to think on that.

He drove the New Yorker to the nearest supermarket and parked in an empty, out-of-the-way corner of the lot. He popped the locks and got to work.

That time back in November when he and Julio had followed Zalesky, the hijo de puta had put his old lady mark in the backseat. So Jack figured that was the place he wanted his mic.

He made a close inspection of the Chrysler’s rear cushions and found a spot in the folds, down near one of the seat-belt receptacles, where the tiny mic could pick up conversation but be damn near invisible unless you were looking for it. He then crawled into the trunk and discovered a place where he could tape the transmitter out of sight. Through trial and error, he found a spot that would allow him to push the mic between the rear cushions.

Yeah, he could bug Zalesky’s car—
if
the auto dealer hadn’t been exaggerating too much about the similarities between Dodge Dynasties and Chrysler New Yorkers. Otherwise he’d just wasted a perfectly good afternoon.

TUESDAY

1

“Watch for it,” Jack said as he crouched in Zalesky’s cramped trunk. “I’m pushing it through.”

The backseat’s padding muffled Julio’s reply from within the car. “Go-go-go! Let’s get this done, meng.”

Zalesky lived over an Italian bakery in a mixed commercial-residential neighborhood along Crosby Street in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. But he tended to park his car around the corner on Roberts Avenue. Jack and Julio had trained up from Manhattan and spotted him in The Main Event. They located his car, then waited until shortly after midnight when he left the bar and strolled back to his apartment.

Figuring he was in for the night, they made a beeline for the car where Jack picked the lock on the passenger door. Once inside, all he had to do was pull the trunk release lever and they were in business.

Turned out the used-car guy had been right on the money: the Dynasty and the New Yorker were like two peas from the same pod. Jack found the chosen spot for the mic in the rear cushions down near a seat-belt receptacle, and used an awl to poke a hole through the fabric and the padding behind it. He left the tool in the hole while Julio took his place and Jack went around to the trunk. They left the courtesy lights on—not only did they provide illumination in the interior and the trunk, but made Julio and him appear to have nothing to hide. Just two guys trying to fix something in their car.

“Okay. Here it comes.”

He had a length of monofilament fishing line tied to the mic. He wrapped the other end around the tip of a thick, heavy-duty flathead screwdriver and, using the awl as a guide, pushed it through the hole.

“Got it?”

“Yeah,” Julio said.

Jack withdrew the screwdriver, leaving the fishing line trailing through the hole.

“Okay, unwrap the string and pull the mic through—but slowly and
gently
.”

As Julio took up the slack from the other side, Jack guided the mic to the hole and pushed it through until he heard from Julio.

“Got it.”

He pushed it a little farther, then hurried around to the rear seat. He adjusted the position of the mic in the cushion folds by the receptacle. Damn, that looked good. As good as invisible. Now to make sure it still worked.

He hustled back to the trunk and turned on the transmitter. Then he used the duct tape he’d brought along to fix it high and out of sight under the rear window deck. He tucked the wire into the edges of the trunk space to hide it.

“Okay,” he told Julio. “Start talking—you know, normal conversation tones.”

Jack hopped out of the trunk and began walking away. As he moved he turned on the receiver and put its earpiece in his ear. Julio’s voice came through loud and clear. Half a block away he could still understand what he was saying.

He hurried back to the car.

“It’s working. Let’s get out of here.”

He took one last look in the trunk and saw no sign that anything had been tampered with. He sat in the rear seat and looked around. No sign of the mic.

My work here is done, he thought.

Now it became a simple matter of waiting and watching.

2

Stakeout duty.

Reggie shifted from one butt-buggering spot on the old Volvo’s passenger seat to another. This was cop stuff. Or private-dick stuff. He wasn’t either but he’d been stuck doing it for days.

Once again he found himself paired with Kris Szeto, Eastern Eurotrash from Romania or Yugoslavia or Bulgaria or one of those places. Wherever he came from, he had a thick accent of some sort and was heavy into black leather. His hair was as dark as his jacket, but shinier. Like vinyl. Reggie wondered if he dyed it. Maybe he rubbed some of that dye on his jaw, because he always looked like he needed a shave, even when he didn’t have any stubble.

At least he wasn’t a raghead. This watch duty was that Arab al-Thani’s idea; and Szeto’s boss, Drexler of the white suit, was going along with it. When Drexler said, “Jump,” Szeto said, “Which cliff?” Drexler had told Reggie to tag along. Reggie didn’t
have
to obey. Unlike Szeto, he wasn’t part of their mysterious organization, which wasn’t something you joined like the Elks or the Moose Lodge—you had to be
asked
. And nobody was asking Reggie.

But even though he wasn’t a member, he owed Drexler and his gang. He flexed his knees … yeah, he owed them that. After that son of a bitch Lonnie—not his real name, Reggie was sure—busted his kneecaps, Drexler arranged for an orthopedist to fix them. And the guy did a good job. They hurt most of the time, especially in this goddamn cold weather, but at least he could stand and walk on them.

Drexler kept him around, housing him in some big old building on the Lower East Side like some sort of pet, but Reggie didn’t mind. He didn’t have nothing else going at the moment. He figured he could pretty much count on some ongoing support because he was the only one alive who knew what Lonnie looked like. And, thanks to a little fiction Reggie had concocted, Drexler believed Lonnie was in on the ambush that had cost his organization three million simoleons.

Lonnie … Reggie was pretty sure he didn’t know shit about the hijackers, because he’d been just as scared and shocked as Reggie when the shooting started. He wouldn’t even have been there if Reggie hadn’t dragooned him into driving the second truck. But Drexler didn’t need to know any of that.

Through the weeks and months, Reggie had become interested in the Order. Its public face was some sort of social/business/political networking group, but Reggie had gathered that it went a hell of a lot deeper than that. First off, no one knew how old it was—or those who did weren’t talking. Reggie had gone so far as to visit the New York Public Library to look it up and had got nowhere. When he’d complained at the desk that they had almost no information on the Order, he’d been referred to the “restricted” section.

The old guy in charge of the restricted stacks said a few exposés of the Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order had been published over the years but the books tended to disappear from the shelves. The most recent,
Septimus Secrets
by an obscure scholar named Max Soltys, came out twenty years ago from a small press. It claimed that the Order stretched back to prehistory and throughout the ages had included many of history’s movers and shakers as members. Soltys died in a boating accident shortly after publication; the small press was bought out and soon went out of business. Copies of the book were no longer for sale anywhere. The last copy was stolen years ago from these restricted stacks.

Coincidence? Conspiracy? Reggie had no way of finding out. But he did know he wanted in.

So when Drexler told him to ride shotgun with Szeto while he watched for a certain Egyptian—some guy named Shalabi or Wasabi or Kemosabe or whatever—no way Reggie was going to say no. Trouble was, the raghead lived in someplace called Sea Gate on the ass end of Coney Island. A gated community, no less. And they were all sorts of serious about the gated bit. Szeto had tried to get in—“Just to look around, is so beautiful”—and the guard kicked his butt back outside the gate. They went looking for another way in but the entire end of the island was fenced off—the fence even ran down the beach, almost to the water. Sure, you could walk around the fence, but who wanted to do that? And you’d only get kicked out by the Sea Gate PD. Yeah, the dinky little place had its own police force.

That was the bad part about Sea Gate. The good part was how it was surrounded on three sides by water. So if you wanted to drive anywhere, you pretty much had to come down Neptune Avenue. Which was where they’d been sitting, just east of West 37th Street, spending their twelve-hour shifts drinking coffee, eating sandwiches, and starting up the car every so often so they wouldn’t freeze their asses off.

“So,” Reggie said after a sip of his third cup of bitter coffee, “let me ask you about this ‘Order’ of yours.”

Szeto wasn’t much of a talker. They’d tried listening to music but Szeto couldn’t stand the stuff on the radio, and the tape he’d played for Reggie had sounded like heavy machinery with bad gears. Reggie had lasted half a song before threatening to throw it out the window. They’d settled on silence but it was getting to Reggie.

Szeto stiffened at the question. “Order? What is Order?”

“The Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order.”

He did a slow turn toward Reggie. “How you know about this?”

“Your boss, Drexler. He’s got me staying in this old place downtown and it’s got this big seal inside, and under it is ‘
Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order.
’ I never heard of it before.”

He neglected to mention trying to delve into the group’s history.

“Is group that helps members make, you know, connections. Business, government, that sort of thing.”

“Yeah? What business are you interested in?”

“Me? I am security.”

“Really? Why does a fraternity need security?”

“Are rules.”

“And you make sure people follow the rules?”

Szeto nodded. “Someone must. Rules are necessary. But if no one enforce rules, what good are rules?”

Well, he had a point. But Reggie realized he had learned exactly zilch from the guy. He was about to press him when he spotted a black Mercedes sedan come through the Sea Gate gate and roll their way along Neptune. They’d been told to watch for just that kind of car.

“Hey, ain’t that him?”

He grabbed the clipboard from between them and found the license plate number. Yep. It matched.

“Is him,” Szeto said.

Without needing to be told, he was already turning the ignition key. The guy driving the Mercedes matched the description of Mustafa Shalabi. Well, as best Reggie could tell. They all looked alike to him.

Drexler and al-Thani wanted to be notified immediately if he was headed for the airport. Reggie had practically memorized the New York City map while killing time waiting for Shalabi to show, and now, as they followed, he realized Shalabi was cruising past the connection to the Belt Parkway that would have taken him to JFK. Looked like he had a local destination.

Shalabi stayed on Neptune Avenue all the way east through Coney Island and into Brighton Beach where half the signs were in Russian. He parked on the street; Reggie and Szeto stopped half a block past him and watched as he entered a door under a sign that read
Odessa Travel Agency
.

“Okay. This is interesting.”

Al-Thani and Drexler had said they didn’t want Shalabi leaving the country, at least not until they had a chance to talk to him. Reggie hadn’t a clue what they wanted from the raghead, and didn’t really care. But if he was hitting a travel agency, that could mean he’d soon be hitting an airport.

Twenty minutes later he was back out the door and heading for his car. They followed it back to the Sea Gate entrance.

“We must call,” Szeto said.

“First let’s find out when he’s leaving.”

“How to do that?”

“We ask at the travel agency.”

“What if they do not tell?”

Reggie smacked a fist into a palm. “I’m sure we can persuade them.”

Szeto grinned. “Is good plan. I like you, Reggie.”

Wish I could say the same about you, Reggie thought.

They drove back. At first the woman at Odessa Travel refused to give them any information. That lasted about twenty seconds—right up until Reggie walked behind the counter and gave her shoulder a painful squeeze.

“When and where—
now!
”

She winced and said, “Tomorrow! Lufthansa to Frankfurt!”

Reggie looked at Szeto. “Where’s Frankfurt?”

Szeto gave him a you-must-be-kidding look. “Germany.”

The woman said, “From there he goes to Kabul.”

Where the fuck was Kabul? He looked at Szeto again.

“Afghanistan,” he said.

“Don’t gimme that pissant look. You come from over there. If I said ‘Topeka,’ you wouldn’t have a fucking idea where—”

“Kansas.”

Shit.

“Well, give yourself a fucking geography merit badge.” Reggie released the woman’s shoulder and grabbed the handset off the desk phone. “You don’t mind if I make a call, do you, sweetie? Don’t worry. It’s local.” She shook her head. “Good.”

He pulled the number from a pocket and punched it in. He recognized al-Thani’s voice on the other end.

“He’s getting ready to move. Heading to Frankfurt tomorrow, then to Kabul.” Reggie made it sound as if he knew exactly where those places were.

“Good work. Keep watch in case he moves early. We will contact you.”

“How?”

They didn’t have a car phone.

“We will join you after dark.”

And then he hung up.