Private Heat (32 page)

Carter cast her a laser stare.

Alyson went on. “I'm satisfied that Mr. Craig and Mr. Hardin acted lawfully. They surrendered these records as soon as they became aware of the nature of the documents.”

“I'm not sure that you are going to be allowed to make that determination,” said Carter.

“I assure you,” said Khideshland, “this matter is entirely in my hands. You seemed satisfied with my authority when you asked me to come over here today.”

“We have to see about the boys,” said Wendy. She had already gathered her purse and stood up.

“Should I go on?” asked Alyson.

“You may soon wish you had said nothing,” said Carter. “Nothing is going to happen until it has been investigated by proper authorities. And by that I mean the Justice Department and not a couple of cheesy hustlers and an ambulance chaser.”

Finney dropped his valise and started around Carter's desk. His blank
face radiated heat. Carter fled toward the door. Finney kicked Carter's chair out of the way and rounded the desk. Marshal Johnson stepped up to block Finney.

“Mr. Finney,” Johnson drawled down at Pete, “perhaps this is a good time to just take judicial notice, if you get my drift.”

Wendy grabbed my jacket, pulling me toward the door. “Wendy, we're going,” I said. “They aren't looking for the boys. They probably won't approach the house unless they see Karen.”

“You had better hope,” said Wendy.

“You have to take Pete back to his office,” I said. “Ron and I will see to Chuck and Paulie.”

“Start going!” Wendy yelled.

Finney said nothing to the marshal and walked stiffly over to recover the luggage he used as a briefcase. Ron rolled up his cables and put them in his coat pocket. I picked up the monitor from Carter's desk and jangled out the keys to Ron's truck.

“I want the videotape and pictures left here,” said Carter.

“Not happening,” said Finney. “The IRS is welcome to the records but you've already denied that you have jurisdiction.”

“Marshal, seize the evidence!” said Carter.

Ron punched the tape out of the player and put it in his pocket. The marshal took the monitor out of my hand, picked up the tape player, and started for the door. The IRS lawyer fired up her cell phone.

“Where the hell do you think you're going with my equipment?” said Ron.

“Come with me,” said the marshal, nonchalant, “and get the door, will you?”

Ron gaped at the marshal like he'd just stepped off a UFO, but he opened the door. At the elevator he repeated his question.

The marshal looked over his shoulder at Carter's office door. It was closed. “We're going down to pick up your weapons, then we're going to put your equipment back in your van.”

The elevator door slid closed and I pushed number five. Finney held his valise in both hands and looked blankly at the floor. Marshal Johnson stood with his face turned up and watched the numbers change above the door.

I asked Ron for his cell phone, dialed the house, and got a busy signal. “What's Tina's number?” I asked Wendy. I punched the numbers in as she reeled them off, and Tina answered.

“Hi,” I said, “this is Art Hardin, your neighbor. If you're not too busy, I wonder if you could do me a little favor.” Everyone in the elevator stared at me like I had lost my mind.

“Sure,” said Tina.

“I'm trying to reach my house, but I can't get through. I wonder if you would look out the window and see if my son's car is in the yard.”

“Don't have to,” she said. “I heard him start that thing up and roar off just a couple of minutes ago.”

I looked at Wendy and said, “You heard them leave a couple of minutes ago?” Relief washed over Wendy's face.

“That's right,” said Tina. “You know, you really need to do something about those mufflers.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. The elevator stopped at the fifth floor and the door opened. Finney reached over and stuck his finger on the hold button. “One more thing,” I said. “Could you look out on the lake side? I'm expecting a couple of guests. They're both police officers from Grand Rapids. One of them is a black fellow and the other guy is white and has a bandage on his face. I told them they could come out and fish.”

“They've been out there for about an hour,” said Tina, “but they're using a rental boat from over at the Willis's.”

“They should have used mine,” I said. “I guess they didn't want to impose.”

“The guy with the bandage on his face is doing more talking on his cell phone than fishing.”

“They're probably looking for me. I promised to grill up some burgers. Thanks a ton, Tina. I'll talk to you later.” I punched off the line and handed the telephone back to Ron. “The boys made it out, and Chuck and Paulie are still in the rowboat.”

“As long as your sons are safely away,” said Finney, “it might be best to hold off taking Karen back to your house until we have things sorted out.”

I looked at Wendy.

“I guess,” she said.

“I know I'd rather wait,” said Karen.

“Good,” said Finney. “Let's go back up and see if Ralph Sehenlink is in his office.” We filed off the elevator.

“Are you going to need the video?” asked Ron.

“We'll make do with the photographs for now,” said Finney.

“Go and delouse my house,” said Wendy.

The elevator door closed. We picked up our sidearms and the marshal
surrendered Ron's equipment. We tried to talk him into carrying the equipment downstairs but he wasn't having any.

“So what's the plan?” asked Ron as we exited the building. “I suppose we can sit on the porch and stare back at them.”

“Not much else we can do, now. Too bad. I hoped they'd lead us to the Russian.”

At the van we loaded up the equipment. “I always heard that those mob guys agreed not to blow each other up,” said Ron.

I closed the slider and opened the passenger door. “I think maybe the only rule is: The last guy holding the money wins.”

Ron fired up the truck. At the ticket booth Ron rolled down the window and held out his parking stub and a couple of singles.

The woman in the booth didn't reach for the stub or the money. She leaned forward to look at me, then craned her neck to examine the van.

“You guys named Craig and Hardin?” she asked.

“That's right,” Ron said.

She took Ron's money and stub and laid them on her desk, then picked up her telephone and dialed.

“What's up?” Ron asked.

She showed Ron a wait-a-second finger. “Marshal Johnson, please,” she said into the telephone. She put the parking stub into her machine. The sign on the side of her booth lit up with a charge of a dollar and seventy-five cents. “Yeah, Marshal Johnson? This is Patty down in the booth. The guys you wanted to talk to are here. … Okay!”

She handed Ron a quarter and the handset from the telephone in her booth. Ron had to hike up in his seat and lean out to get the phone all the way up to his face.

“Yeah, this is Ron Craig … Yeah, he's sitting right next to me. … No, we didn't. … Oh, my God … there shouldn't be anyone in there. … Yeah, we're on our way.”

The black-and-yellow striped parking ramp arm rose. Ron handed the telephone back.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

Ron nailed the gas and we roared up the ramp to the street. “A police officer was just shot in front of your house.”

“Who?”

“The marshal didn't say, but they think that the shooter may be holed up in your house.”

“There shouldn't be anyone in the house.”

“That's what I told him.” Ron squealed the tires turning right onto Ottawa and floored it. “He said that the state police had sent for their SWAT crew, but they wanted you there in case one of your boys was in the house.”

“Gimme the phone,” I said. Ron handed me his cell phone. I dialed up the house. I got the answering machine. I recited the time and then yelled into the telephone, “Ben, Daniel, if you're there, pick up the telephone! C'mon, if you're there, pick up the phone!” I waited. “Anybody—Chuck, Paulie, if you're there, pick up the phone.” I waited some more. Nothing.

Ron laid on the brakes and then accelerated through a right turn onto Pearl Street. “C'mon! Ben! Daniel! If you're there, pick it up!” No response. “There's no answer,” I said. “Where the hell are you going?”

“Johnson said he'd meet us at the ramp that comes out from under the federal building onto Michigan and lead us out to your place,” said Ron. He turned right onto Monroe and honked on it. We had to stop at the crosswalk while a half-dozen pedestrians meandered across the street from the Hall of Justice. When the last of the group was clear of the bumper, Ron stepped on it. One of the pedestrians flashed us the bird and yelled something obscene. “Johnson wanted to know if we'd called in a complaint about Chuck and Paulie loitering in front of your house.”

“Wasn't us,” I said. “Maybe Wendy called.”

“Said it was a man and that the call came from a pay phone.”

“Doesn't sound like the kind of thing that Finney would do.”

We rounded the corner onto Michigan Ave and found Johnson already waiting on the apron in his tan government sedan. He had one of those magnetic blue rollers on the roof, and red and blue lights flashed from the grill. He pulled out without waiting for us to slow down. The marshal led the way toward my place at speeds exceeding those available to mere mortals or any such lesser lights, especially civilians. A deputy doing radar duty in an unmarked county car on the Beltline Highway launched himself after us, and Ron and the marshal pulled over. After a brief conversation with the marshal, the deputy took the lead with lights and siren at full code.

I dialed the hospital. “Can you tell me if Officer Milton is still a patient?”

The hospital operator put me on hold. When she came back, she said that Officer Milton was in room four-fifteen. I asked her to connect me. A male voice answered. Moaning and mumbling, he said that he was Officer Milton. He wasn't.

“This is Mike Lyle,” I said. “How ya doing?”

“Quite well, considering the accident.” I knew the voice. I'd listened to hours of it on surveillance recordings. “The doctor said that I'll be here for another day or two.”

“You don't sound much like Paulie,” I said.

“My face is bandaged.”

“How were da ribs?”

“Not as good as the borscht, Colonel,” he said, “and congratulations on your promotion.”

“I'd like to know how you came by that information.”

“I have found business makes for very much stranger bedfellows than politics. Please to stop by, won't you?”

“Kind of busy right now. How long you going to be in town?”

He laughed. Then he hung up.

“Who was that?” asked Ron.

“Paulie's alibi.”

“Sounded like you knew him.”

“You got that recorder on?”

Ron checked the dash. “No,” he said. The van heeled into a hard right as we turned onto Cannonsburg Road.

“Colonel Volody Rosenko.”

“The guy in the pictures Elizabeth dropped off?”

“Yeah.”

“You didn't tell me.”

“Need to know, pard—and now you need to know.”

“Small world.”

“He had a partner, Sasha Solutzkof—a guardian-angel type—people don't see him until he's the last thing they ever see.”

“A couple of old Soviet hoods?”

“Spatnez trained GRU types. When I first met them they were hot on the trail of a Society of Manufacturing Engineers trade show. They followed it through four states trying to get their hands on some computer-guided laser machine tools.”

“How'd they do?”

“They found a design engineer who had tax problems and paid him a quarter million for a retro-engineering prototype.”

“Bet they got medals for that little coup.”

“No. We slipped Solutzkof a Mickey Finn in his room service orange juice and put him on an airliner bound for Caracas. My partner and I carried
him on board and told the stewardess he was so afraid of flying that he had to be medicated to make the flight. We covered him with a blanket but my partner took his trousers.”

“Roger?”

“He was only a lieutenant commander then.”

“Boxers or briefs?”

“Boxers—you know the European kind, no fly.”

Ron laughed and said, “He flew to Venezuela in his no-fly shorts?”

“Wore the blanket to the Soviet Embassy. We have pictures.”

“But the machinery?”

“Shipped to Toronto as farm equipment—except we substituted an old lawn tractor with a rod knock.”

“What about Rosenko?”

“Figured he needed to go to Toronto to pick up his tractor. We thought that was the end of it until the design engineer turned up with a bullet in his brain and a Mauser twenty-two lying on his chest. The bug sweepers found a shaped charge in the earpiece of the telephone on my desk. Turns out our boys hijacked trailerloads of cigarettes in Virginia and sold them in New York to get their money back. Guess they dropped off a resumé while they were in town.”

“Why didn't you roll them up when you had a chance?”

“They hadn't harmed anyone or destroyed any property to gain custody of the machinery. Since they'd come up short a quarter million in hard currency, the plan was to let nature take its course, Soviet style—tidier for us that way.”

The trip to my house took twenty-six minutes. We found my yard awash in lights of red and blue. As we approached, an air ambulance pulled pitch off my lawn. A county patrol officer stopped us at the entrance to my drive, but the marshal flashed us in with his tin.

A twelve-foot aluminum skiff drifted on the lake about twenty yards from the opposite shore. A police helicopter coursed over the cornfields and apple orchards that filled the bluff above the lake on the east side of the far strand. To the west and across the lake in the heavily wooded section, tracking dogs could be heard baying in the heavy cover.