The truth, of course, was that they were real. The FBI had given them to him with his new identity. But he couldn't tell them who he really was. These guys might not be bikers, but they were obviously involved in organized crime. They would not take kindly to an informant who testified against his former gang and had close ties to the FBI.
While he was deliberating, one of the thugs whacked him in the back of the head with a beefy paw. He didn't say anything, but it was clear that he wouldn't be allowed any more time to stall the fat man. Slightly dazed from the blow, Ned answered. “I have a guy, he's from Thailand,” he said. “Used to make phone cards for me; then copies of credit cards.” There was some truth in that. He did know a guy from Thailand who made fake phone cards and credit cards. The Sons of Satan had made a lot of money with him.
The fat man smiled. “Good. I shall have to meet this master craftsman, this artist,” he said. “You will introduce me.”
Ned couldn't help sighing with relief. That slight clue that Ned might have a future outside of the room he was in led him to believe that he may just survive this meeting.
The fat man said something in Russian and the thug beside Ned stood him up again. He lifted Ned's sweatshirt and t-shirt over his head and said a single word to the fat man. When he was back in his chair, Ned felt the cold metal of the thin man's gun pressing into the back of his head.
“So, now, there remains a few awkward questions,” the fat man told Ned in a scolding voice. “The first, obviously, is who you really are.”
Cornered, Ned knew he had to come up with something quick. If these guys had been communicating with Chuck and Bob, they knew he was a biker. They had identified him as one by the tattoo his old boss had made him get. The gun at his head insisted he did not hesitate. Ned blurted out, “My name is Jared Macnair.”
He hadn't made it up. There really was a Jared Macnair. Ned had heard that he was a secretary of the Sons of Satan chapter in Yuma, Arizona, until he was caught stealing thirty-five thousand dollars in club funds. With a death sentence on his head, Macnair had gone into hiding. Nobody had seen or heard from him for at least a year.
The fat man grinned wryly. Then he nodded to the man behind Ned. The gun withdrew. The fat man took a cell phone out of his suit's breast pocket. He pressed two keys and waited. Finally, he said, “It's me.” Pause. “Give me details on a Jerry Macnair, a biker.” He looked at Ned during the long pause. Ned did not correct him. “Yes, okay, okay, okay . . . good . . . what does he look like?” The fat man nodded as he listened, and looked intently at Ned. “Yes, yes, blue eyes, dark hair, what? What is six-foot-two?” One of the thugs said something in Russian. Ned could make out something that sounded like “centimeter.” The fat man sized Ned up and asked the person he called about tattoos. Ned's entire body clenched. “Okay, okay, yes, yes, it's good, thank you.” Then he hung up. He said something to the grizzly bear-shaped man beside Ned. The man then took the handcuffs off. Ned had bet right. He knew they'd kill a rat, but they had no beef with an embezzler.
The fat man offered his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Macnair,” he said with a wide, satisfied grin. “I am Grigori.” Ned smiled weakly and shook his hand. The other men in the room laughed. “But I have more questions . . . why is my package open?”
Ned stammered. “I don't know Chuck and Bob that well . . . and I have some enemies . . .”
“Yes, I would say that you do.”
“. . . and I wanted to make sure I was carrying . . .”
“Money.”
“Yes, money. When I saw that it was money in the package, I realized it that it had to be a legitimate delivery.”
Grigori said something to the giggler, who Ned noticed had the envelope in his hands. He answered back quickly. Grigori laughed. “So this man, this Macnair, will steal lots of money from his brothers in Sons of Satan gang, but will not steal a penny from me,” he said. “He is very smart.”
Everyone in the room laughed, and Ned did his best to join in.
Grigori said something in Russian, and the big man put his wallet back in order and handed it to him, along with his cell phone, keys and cash. Grigori barked out something else and the brutish young man handed Ned fifteen hundred dollars. “Okay, Macnair, you have done your job; you go back now to those two Serbian idiots and tell them to be more careful next time,” Grigori said with what seemed like sincere warmth. “And if you are asked to make this trip again, the package is never opened . . . you got that?”
“I got that,” Ned's voice cracked halfway through the sentence. The men in the room laughed.
“Here, Semyon will show you out.”
Semyon, the man Ned identified as the giggler, approached him and shook his hand. “This way,” he said, motioning over his right shoulder.
As they walked up the stairs together, Ned could hear the men in the basement talking and laughing. He looked at Semyon. He was maybe in his late twenties, thin and full of energy. Unlike the other guys in track suits, he had not shaved his head and his face was clean-shaven. He had a few tattoos and the same fondness for gold that the other men had, but clearly had not collected nearly as much. He was smiling at Ned, which made him think Semyon expected him to say something.
“Is this how you guys treat everybody who shows up at your door?” he asked.
Semyon cackled like a chimpanzee. “You can't be too careful,” he said. “We did not know you, you could be anyone . . . the Serbians . . . they are, like Grigori says, idiots. They could have sent DEA or even FBI without knowing it.”
Ned acknowledged his statement with a snort.
Semyon continued. “The Serbians thought you were a cop spying on them at first. Why else would a white American who is not stupid work in a mailroom?” He laughed again. “They told Grigori about you, he told them how to spot if you are cop or not, they saw your tattoo, told him about it, then he said he wanted to meet you.”
“And this is how he meets people?”
“Some, if he thinks he might want to work with them.”
“Oh, so I have a future with this company?”
“You're alive, aren't you?”
Chapter Two
Ned sat in the driver's seat of the Kia. He drew his hands over his hair a couple of times nervously, sighed and gave into an involuntary shudder. He remembered the man in the BMW. He turned to see if the car was occupied. Ned's eyes locked with his watcher's. Ned turned the key and felt a little bit calmer when he heard the engine spring to life. He pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the road. He felt like taking a different way back, but the whole area looked equally depressing and there was a strong chance he could accidentally wander into an even less pleasant neighborhood.
His thoughts flashed back to what had just happened. He had been afraid for his life, had had a gun pointed at the back of his brain, but somehow he felt good about the whole thing. Not only was fifteen hundred bucks a decent amount of money for a weekend car trip, but the fact that he had fooled the Russians gave him a shot of confidence he had not had since he had decided to turn informant. Maybe he wasn't going to spend the rest of his life in the mailroom after all.
He was thinking about how he could quit his job without Dave Hiltz, his FBI caseworker, going nuts, when he saw a car coming up fast behind him. At first it was maybe a half-mile away, but now it filled up his rearview mirror. It was so close behind that Ned could no longer see its headlights.
It looked like a low-rent gangster's car. It was a Mercedes C-class, maybe ten years old. It was painted a sort of burned-looking brown and all the chrome trim was gold-plated. The windows (even the windshield) were blacked-in, so Ned could not make out the driver's face, or even if there was more than one person in the car.
Ned knew he couldn't outrun his pursuer, but he had to try to get to a more populated area. He floored the Kia. With a reluctant and wheezy whoosh, the Kia took off. Ned was not surprised to see the Mercedes make up lost ground right away. Just as Ned passed through an intersection, he saw something that surprised him. Through the windshield of the Mercedes, he could see a flashing red light. As soon as he noticed it, he heard the siren.
Ned wasn't sure if it was a real cop or not. It certainly didn't look like a cop car, but he knew that cops used cars seized from drug dealers as camouflage. He pulled to the side of the road. The Mercedes pulled in behind him.
“Driver, please put your hands on the back of your head and exit the vehicle,” a loudspeaker-assisted voice ordered. Ned complied. “Keep facing forward!” the voice commanded.
Ned didn't look back. He heard the car door open and close and the steps of the officer as he approached him. “Do you know why I stopped you?”
“I went through a stop sign.”
“That's part of it.”
Ned didn't know what to say. He remained silent.
“Yeah, uh-huh, what's a nice boy like you doin' here?” The plainclothes cop made a sweeping gesture, as if to introduce Ned to the neighborhood.
“Just passing through.”
“Just passing though, eh? The problem with that, you see, is that I saw your car parked for almost an hour among all those Cadillacs and Lexuses over there.”
“I was asking directions.”
“Funny man,” the cop said. “This could have been so easy, but you just had to screw me around.” He placed a handcuff on one wrist and then the other. “Siddown here,” he said, dumping Ned on the curb. He was a big man, about forty-five years old with a bowling-pin physique in a cheap gray suit and a small, almost childish head. His skin was very dark and his hair extremely short. When he talked, Ned could see he had a big space between his two front teeth. “You mind if I search your car?”
Ned knew there wasn't anything incriminating in the Kia, but he didn't want to make it easier for the cop either. “I do mind.”
“Well, then, I'm just gonna have to impound it,” the cop said to him. “Uh-huh, gonna call a tow truck, have your shitbox taken to the pound, all at your expense, uh-huh. What do you say to that, funny man? Probably run you maybe eight hundred bucks.”
“Okay, okay, search the car.”
“Naw, don't feel like it anymore,” he said. “How about you just tell me what you were doing in that building and I'll see if I can just write you up a ticket?”
“All you got me for is going through a stop sign.”
“And wreckless driving and obstruction of official procedureâand if I think that's pot I smell on you, you could be in a whole lot more trouble, uh huh.”
“You haven't even read me my rights yet.”
“I'm pretty sure you've heard 'em before,” the cop said, leading him over to the Mercedes. “C'mon, into the car, we're going in.”
The cop showed him his badge and introduced himself as Detective Halliday, and asked Ned again what he was doing in the neighborhood, and why he had been in the building for almost an hour.
Ned smiled and stalled. He knew his Delaware plates made it unlikely that he would have just stumbled into this neighborhood. He planned on needing a story for moments like these. No point being a stranger in a strange land without a story. With the money the FBI had given him when he turned state's witness, he had bought himself a 1956 Indian motorcycle as something of a reward. He'd found getting his much-needed replacement parts to be tough (the motorcycle was more than fifty years old, after all). There was a dealer in Detroit and he realized he could tell the copsâor anyone else he'd need to convinceâthat he was looking for the dealer's shop.
Ned explained that he was there looking for parts. “They advertised on Craigslist that they had parts, and they're really rare,” he said. “But this represents a major investment for me, so I had to check them out before I bought anything.”
“And?”
“And they have some good stuff there, it's definitely Indian and from the era,” he said. “But nothing I need right away.”
The cop looked him up and down, obviously sizing him up and assessing him for signs of nervousness. “What if I told you those parts are probably stolen?”
Ned grinned. “I'd say I was surprised.”
“Yeah? Why's that?”
“Aren't stolen goods usually sold cheap?”
The cop snorted out a small laugh. “You come to a part of town that looks like this to a building that is not only not crumbling from disrepair but attracts an affluent clientele, and you don't even smell a rat? Listen, son, do yourself a big favor and stay away from here.”
“I will, I will. So I'm free to go?”
“Just as soon as I finish writing up your ticket . . . you don't think you can run stop signs and get away with it, do you? Things can't be that different in Delaware.”
Ned sighed. “No, sir, they are not.”
He took his ticket from Halliday and waited to be let out of the car. As he stood up, he caught the cop's eye again. “Seriously, I see your stupid face or your piece-of-shit car in this neighborhood again, I'll throw your ass in jail and then take my time figuring out what's going on with you.”
“I understand,” Ned said as he walked back to his car. After he got in, he made a big deal out of putting on his seatbelt, looking both ways and signaling as he took off. He saw Halliday get back in his car and turn the opposite way, back towards the clubhouse.
Ned took a right as the GPS instructed, and had barely straightened out when he heard his phone ring insistently. He looked at it. The display flashed “Unknown caller.” He answered.