Naked Greed (19 page)

“I guess he does.”

“Has he been harassing you?”

“I get a call from him about once a week, demanding money.”

“Did you give it to him?”

“I did not.”

“So you’re finally done with him?”

“Completely.”

“I’m glad.”

“So am I.”

“Are you feeling like a New Yorker yet?”

“A little. I’ve been working so hard that I haven’t gotten around much—just to the grocery and back, mostly.”

“You need to hire more help.”

“I’ve got a new woman starting next week.”

“How many does that make?”

“Three, plus me, and we’re all pilots.”

“That would make a good ad.”

“We’ve already booked a page in
Flying
and
AOPA Monthly
.”

“I’ll look for it.”

Stone’s cell rang. “Hello?”

“It’s Dino. Where are you?”

“Key West.”

“At the Marquesa?”

“Yep.”

“You bastard.”

“I invited you, but you were busy.”

“Don’t rub it in.”

“I like rubbing it in.”

“Go fuck yourself.” Dino hung up.

“That was Dino.”

“I figured,” she said. “How is he?”

“Busy.”

—

G
ene Ryan tossed his bags onto the bed in his new place. He looked around: seedy, but adequate. He had abandoned the house; everything he now owned was in the car. The motorcycle had been at the bottom of the East River since the day of the shooting.

This was all Barrington’s fault, he remembered. He was unemployed and had run through most of the five grand he’d been given by Jerry Brubeck. He had a few grand more saved up, but he needed to get some cash flowing before he got around to killing Barrington. He would plan it well next time, take no chances, give him two in the head, the way he’d been taught. But right now, he needed to get laid.

He left the apartment and went in search of a good neighborhood bar.

Stone was lying by the pool on Saturday morning, sunning himself after a good breakfast, when his cell rang.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, Stone, it’s Pepe Perado. How are you?”

“I’m very well, Pepe, and you?”

“Excited about coming back to New York. Are you in town?”

“No, I’m in Key West for the weekend. I’ll be back in New York Monday afternoon. When are you coming?”

“I’m arriving Monday at midday, and I need your advice: the Waldorf Towers are booked up next week. Can you recommend a good hotel convenient to the Upper East Side, where I’ll be apartment hunting?”

“Yes. Try the Lowell, on East Sixty-third Street, between Park and Madison. It’s small, elegant, and very comfortable. If they’re booked, try the Carlyle, on Madison at Seventy-sixth Street.”

“Got it. Can I buy you dinner Monday evening?”

“Of course. Come to my house for dinner, and I’ll book something, unless you have a favorite.”

“No, I’ll let you choose.”

“I’ll send my car for you at six-thirty. Let me know if you’re staying somewhere other than the Lowell.”

“Will do. See you Monday evening.” Pepe hung up.

So did Stone. “That was my newest client,” he said to Pat, who reposed next to him, her breasts bared. No one was complaining.

“What does he do?”

“He’s a brewer from San Antonio, and he’s expanding his business to New York. He recently bought a beverage distributor in Queens, and he’ll eventually open a brewery.”

“Do you have a lot of clients?”

“Woodman & Weld has hundreds. I have a few that I manage personally.”

“What are they?”

“Strategic Services, the Steele insurance group, the Arrington hotel group, and now Perado Brewing. I serve on the boards of the first three. Oh, and of course, there’s Pat Frank Aviation Services.”

“And you do all that by yourself?”

“No, I have a lot of support from Woodman & Weld. Joan and I do the rest.”

“I might steal Joan from you.”

“Good luck with that. You wouldn’t like what you’d have to pay her, and if you did lure her away, I’d have to shoot you.”

Pat laughed. “Okay, okay, but I’ve got a dozen and a half airplanes to run now, and I’m picking up new business by word of mouth. I’m going to need an office manager soon. I’ve been doing it myself.”

“I’ll ask Joan if she knows anybody. Does this person need aviation experience?”

“It couldn’t hurt, but not necessarily. It will be office work—bookkeeping, phones, mail, that sort of thing. I’ve already got one person doing flight planning, and soon I’ll need somebody else to help her.”

“Sounds like you’re going to need office space soon, too.”

“I’m going to try to keep it to the space I have downstairs in the house. Renting office space would be a huge step for me.”

“Have you got a new tenant for your newly vacated apartment upstairs?”

“Not yet. I’m going to have to put a realtor on that soon.”

“Or you could rent it to some of your staff and convert it to office space when you need to.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I don’t know, why didn’t you?”

—

F
rank Riggs was at his desk when the receptionist buzzed. “A Mr. Charles Carney to see you.”

Frank sighed. “Okay, send him in.”

Charlie rapped on the open door, and Frank waved him to a seat. “What’s up, Charlie?”

Charlie eased into the chair, looking pleased with himself. “I got another job for us,” he said.

“Listen, Charlie, you should take some time off—lie in the sun, charter a boat, relax.”

“Why do that when I can be making more money?”

“Look, you’re sitting on a pile of cash now, don’t get greedy. If you start a crime wave in South Florida, your chances of getting caught will go way up. You’ve already got three law enforcement agencies trying to get at you as it is.”

“Three? Who?”

“The local cops in the town where the bank is, the state police, and the FBI. It was a bank job, remember? That’s federal. Where are you living?”

“I’m in a nice motel a couple of miles from here.”

“You’d be smart to buy yourself a condo while the market is still favorable.”

“Yeah, I guess. How much would that cost me?”

“At least two, three hundred thousand. You can spend a lot more, of course. My point is, you’ve got to establish yourself as a solid citizen, somebody no one would ever suspect of doing bank jobs. Might be a good idea to buy a small business, use it as a cover.”

“Good idea.”

“And stop doing jobs for a while—let things cool off. If the cops think there’s somebody new in town, knocking off this and that, pretty soon they’ll have a task force hunting you. You know how burglars work?”

“I was never a burglar.”

“They case a place, do it, then wait for the owner to replace all his goods, then they do it again.”

“You mean I should do the same bank again?”

“Why not? Give it three, six months, let things return to normal, then repeat. They’re not going to have any more security than they had before. They’ve already got cameras, alarms, an armed guard. What else are they going to add?”

“I see your point.”

“I hope you see my point about letting things cool—you’ll stay out of the joint that way.”

“I hate to pass up the one I’ve got in mind.”

“It’ll still be there a few months from now.”

“You want to hear about the job I have in mind?”

Frank shrugged. “I’ll pay a finder’s fee or a percentage.”

Charlie began to explain, and Frank thought it wasn’t half bad. “Let me talk it over with my partner, and I’ll let you know. In the meantime, take a vacation. You ever been down to the Keys?”

“No, but I hear it’s nice.”

“It’s better than that. Take a drive. I’ll be in touch.”

“You’re right, Frank, I’ll take your advice.” Charlie shook his hand and left.

Frank began to think about Charlie’s job; it had possibilities, he thought.

Gene Ryan woke on Saturday morning, his mouth dry, his head hurting and very fuzzy around the edges. It took him a minute to realize that it was his cell phone that had awakened him. “Hello?” Ryan croaked.

“Hey, Gene, it’s Al. How you doin’?”

“What time is it?”

“Hey, as bad as that, is it? It’s after nine—
AM
.”

“Shit.”

“Listen, I need to talk to you about something. Meet me at that diner down the block from you in an hour. I’ll buy you brunch.”

“What’s this about?”

“Work.” Al hung up.

—

A
n hour and fifteen minutes later, Ryan shuffled into the diner and located Al in a corner booth. “Coffee,” he said to the passing waitress, then joined Al.

“This better be good,” Ryan said as he slid into the booth. “Getting me up at the crack of dawn.”

Al laughed at that. They ordered breakfast and chatted idly. When the food was set on the table, Al got down to business.

“I got something sweet.”

“How sweet?”

“Maybe a hundred and a half—you and me take eighty percent.”

“Who gets the other twenty?”

“My cousin Vinny, like the movie.”

“What’s the job?”

“A poker game, a fat one. I’ve been playing in it for three weeks. Sometimes there’s two hundred grand changing hands.”

“Tell me more.”

“It’s in a pretty good motel on 17 North. The room is on the ground floor with two doors. The back one leads to the alley where they pick up the garbage. Six guys, all of them businessmen, no wise guys.”

“Go on.”

“I’m at the table, you and Vinny come in the two doors, you’ve got that sawed-off shotgun of yours. That will scare the shit out of everybody.”

“Are you carrying?”

“Nope, I’m a victim. You make everybody empty their pockets onto the table, then take the table blanket, cards, money, and all, and beat it out the back door, where Vinny has a car stashed. We meet at your place, as soon as I can get out, and divvy the money.”

“How do I know Vinny can handle this?”

“Because I say so. He’s a cool kid—it’s not his first job.”

“Are you the newest guy in the game?”

“There’s one newer by a week.”

“How’ve you been doing?”

“I’m up a couple grand for the three weeks. One of the players brought in a pro dealer, who, turns out, is a mechanic. I figure tonight I’ll win pretty big, and next week, they’ll lower the boom on me. Except you and me and Vinny will already have lowered the boom on them.”

“Okay, I’m in. When?”

“Tonight.”

“That’s not much time for planning.”

“The planning is all done. You just heard my plan.” Al looked toward the door. “Here comes Vinny.”

Vinny was lean and obscenely barbered, with a fashionable two days of stubble. He didn’t say much.

“I told him the plan,” Al said.

“I like the plan,” Ryan said, “but Vinny has got to understand: nobody gets hurt. No shooting, no blows to the head. This is an illegal game, so nobody is calling the cops—unless somebody gets hurt, then we’re in the shit.”

“Got it,” Vinny said. It was the first time he had spoken.

—

R
yan went back to his apartment, got a duffel off the top shelf of his closet, and dumped the shotgun onto the bed. It was an old-fashioned, open-hammer scattergun with the barrel sawed off to about four inches. Vinny had fired it into a target: from ten feet it had a pattern the size of a basketball.

He cleaned the weapon, dropped a couple of double-ought shells into it, and closed it. It couldn’t fire until he pulled back the hammers.

—

A
l dropped off Vinny at his mother’s house. “You okay with Gene?” he asked the young man.

“No problem, I guess.”

“You guess? What does that mean?”

“Nothin’.”

“You do understand why nobody gets hurt?”

“Yeah, nobody gets hurt, nobody calls the cops. But, Al . . .”

“Yeah?”

“What if somebody’s packin’?”

“Don’t worry about it. Nobody in this crowd packs.”

“If you say so,” Vinny replied. “But if somebody draws, we’re in a whole new poker game.”