Thirteen Million Dollar Pop (9 page)

“Bollocks,” Dwyer said, and tooled on out toward Kolodnik’s home address.

“Well, aren’t you the big-time Charlie Potato?” Waddy Dwyer said to himself as he crouched in the woods a good distance away from Kolodnik’s home. Hidden in a stand of old growth oak, he glassed the lavish dwelling with Swarovski 10×42 binoculars. The house was a heavy-beamed Tudor, with decorative leaded glass windows along the ground floor, a peaked slate roof, and landscaped grounds, including pool and tennis court, surrounded by a tall, wrought iron fence. The place was more English manor than regular house.

He had parked several streets away, and had gone through the woods for a good stretch to get a look. With the binoculars, along with having seen the security at the office, it was fairly easy for him to deduce that Kolodnik wasn’t at home. But the home security team certainly was. Another four men, at least, Dwyer determined, based on the two outside and the movement inside. He saw the telltale lumps under their jackets beneath the left shoulders. Probably Uzis or MP5s on slings, like the bleeding Secret Service carried.

He considered his options. A high-powered rifle from a quarter mile away while the man was at the kitchen sink. It was doable. He recalled a similar operation on a diplomat in South Africa more than a decade back. There were two on security there, who were put down after the shot, with the door kicked in and the target finished up close. But that was quasi-military, with plenty of support. There had been choppers for extraction. Here, a deer rifle with a telescopic sight was easily gettable, but night vision optics was not. It’d also be a cold bore shot, the barrel not
warmed up. Then there was that leaded window glass to consider. It could cause a deflection, which might in turn cause a wound, not a kill—or, worse yet, a miss, with no chance of follow-up.

There was more poor news along with all this, Dwyer saw. Besides a pair of black Range Rovers outside in the driveway, and a Mercedes convertible in the open garage, there was a heavy-looking blacked-out Chevrolet Suburban that appeared modified with armor to his eye. There was also a moving truck being loaded with boxes and luggage. A team of darkie moving men was doing the hauling, and the security wasn’t even helping, which was another sign of their professionalism. So it seemed Kolodnik was soon to be on the move, and there wasn’t going to be much time for proper setup. There could be even more men inside, Dwyer realized, his mood blackening further. Four, six, eight, ten, or a hundred, it didn’t matter. Kolodnik was covered tighter than a pair of balls in shrunken wool shorts. This thing was a walkaway. The operation was rogered. Right up the arse.

Back in his car, sucking on a Coca-Cola and a hamburger from some barf-hole drive-through window, Dwyer considered where he was at, and it wasn’t a pretty place. He’d spent his life applying force for profit. He’d worked his plums off for three decades to create a skill set and a name, a name only whispered in certain circles, but one that was nonetheless
the
gold standard in the field. He’d built a business, starting at the end of the ’80s, when the Berlin Wall came down and six million other soldiers were downsized and looking to go private. In the face of this competition he’d dealt with all stripe of unsavory bastard, demanding to be paid up front, cash on the nail, and making his fortune. So a failure was one thing, and it was bad, but having things unwind and lead to arrests would be a disaster for his reputation and his business, and he hadn’t hit his walk-away number yet. To come this far, to get this close, only to have it come apart during stoppage time was unacceptable.

Another five hundred thousand pounds would get him there, to the amount that would ensure security for the rest of his days. Living in Wales, unbothered. Diving in the Maldives twice a year. Two, two and a half years’ work to get that last five hundred thousand quid, he projected. But it might as well be five hundred million he was looking for. The reason people hired private was to get their jobs done faster and better than doing it themselves and to transfer the risk of harm or arrest to someone else. So there was no room for error. Reputation was everything in his field. It was binary. Zero-sum. One either got it done every time, or one was to be avoided like botulism. Waddy Dwyer could either be the hero or the asshole. So here it was, decision time, and one last chance to get paid. Things had shifted from a finish to a cleanup. With the original objective now unreachable, that left Waddy Dwyer a single choice: containment. But first he was going to talk to that cunt Gantcher, because he goddamn sure wasn’t heading home without his money.

Behr was driving back toward the city when he remembered the favor he owed, and dialed the number Susan had given him. After two rings, a cigarette-roughed voice answered.

“Decker,” it said.

“Hey, this is Frank Behr. Your wife is friends with my girl,” Behr said, trying to keep the tone of the condemned man out of his voice. “I was supposed to call you to meet up.”

“Yeah, hey. And when you did, I was supposed to go,” Decker said without enthusiasm but also without pause.

“So when do you want to do it?”

“When do you?”

There was no sense in dragging it out, Behr figured. “You on shift tonight?”

“Nope.”

This didn’t surprise Behr, knowing what he did about Decker’s forced vacation.

“So how about in a little while?”

“All right. Where?”

Behr cast about for a place to meet and said the first one that popped into his head. “The Wild Beaver.”

“Wild Beaver …?” Decker couldn’t keep the laugh out of his voice.

“I’m not far from it. Six o’clock?”

“All right then. Six o’clock.”

Behr still had time to make it back to the office for a few ceremonial hours, but missing the marketing meeting as he had could result in a reprimand he wasn’t much interested in. And there was another thing he was much more interested in at the moment—Bernie Cool.

Behr stopped at the library on Meridian and used his laptop and their Wi-Fi to do a background on Kolodnik. What he found was a pretty picture. As a matter of fact, it was a Rembrandt. Bernie grew up in Gary, ran track in high school, attended the University of Chicago, did two years at a large commercial real estate outfit, and then went on to Harvard B School. He married his college sweetheart, came back with his MBA, and began buying and refurbishing apartment buildings. By age twenty-eight he was breaking ground on his own developments. His operation had grown and grown since then. Industrial space, office parks, and towers throughout the Midwest. There were reams of information about Kolodnik’s company and the deals it had struck and the construction projects he had put up. He’d had kids along the way, and there were civic distinctions and philanthropy. There were sub-three-hour marathon times, wins as a quarter horse owner, Boone and Crockett whitetails, and a club championship in golf out at Crooked Stick, where Bernie had even served as president a few years back.

Kolodnik was a Lion, and a Kiwanis and Rotary member, and the head of the state real estate association the governor had commissioned several years prior that advised on the statewide affordable housing panel.

Is that where he met the governor?
Behr wondered.

It could have been, though it could have also been on countless other occasions at myriad venues and events. Indiana wasn’t the largest pond in the world, and the big fish got to know each other pretty quickly. The most recent wave of press had to do with the Senate appointment, of course, and the one before that
had spanned the previous three years and dealt with a venture that was something of a departure for him business-wise.

Kolodnik had partnered with a few other players on a large job: the Indy Flats horse racing track and casino—what was known around the region as a racino. It was a major development about twenty miles southeast of the city. There was a brand-new track and infield with a top-of-the-line grandstand connected to several hundred thousand square feet of casino floor packed with slot machines, video poker, and blackjack tables, along with restaurants, nightclubs, and even a few shops. Ground had been broken and a large, high-end resort hotel was under way; and a concert venue was planned. The project had been heralded as the financial salvation of the central Indiana economy. Everyone involved was expecting a windfall, and as such there had been a deal struck where the racino was supposed to pay the state a 250-million-dollar license fee, in the form of a roughly 75-million-dollar annual tax, to operate over the course of the next few years. From the tenor of the articles when the place had opened two years ago, this should have been a drop in the bucket. In fact, there were plenty of attendant op-ed pieces bemoaning the sweetheart deal and how the state was getting ripped off. But a year after opening, the economic crisis washed over the country and the world, and it didn’t spare the Indiana gambling business. Apparently money had been lost by the consortium—lots of money, as in tens of millions—and now the venture was pushing the state for a rebate and renegotiation of the license fee. “Otherwise,” Lowell Gantcher, the president of the company, said in the article, “the racino faces bankruptcy, and the area will suffer the attendant loss of hundreds of jobs.” Behr wrote the name down in his notebook.

Predictably, there was another wave of op-ed pieces claiming the corporation had willingly entered into the licensing deal with the state, and now they had to live up to it.

Behr noticed that mention of Kolodnik in the articles had dwindled and ceased as the project moved from the development to the opening phase, and he wasn’t sure how deeply Kolodnik
was invested in the future of the racino, but from what he’d seen, and from the paucity of comments from him, Bernie Cool sure wasn’t sweating it too much. Behr wondered what it was like, winning or losing tens of millions in the horse racing game. He’d sure as hell never played that much on the ponies.

Where in the bloody hell was Banco Alfaro?

That was Waddy Dwyer’s question at the moment. The mobile number he had for his shooter was dead, as it had been for the past three days. There was no outgoing voice mail, no recording, nothing.

And why in the fuck did they call him “Banco,” which was short for “money in the bank,” when his real name was Juan, and he was such a bloody piece of shit?

That was probably a better question, Dwyer thought, but it wasn’t going to help him much now. He needed to find Banco, to hear how he’d bollixed the operation, and if he and the backup shooter—and driver he was sure to have used—had been further compromised. There was an account number in the Caymans, where Dwyer had wired the first half of the money, but good fucking luck reverse engineering that into anything useful. Dwyer did have an address on a small apartment where Banco had been staying during prep. Of course the tie-dyed bloke wasn’t going to just be sitting there, waiting for him or anyone else who might come knocking after the botched op. He would’ve gone into his hidey-hole for certain. But the address, 157 Keller Street, was all Dwyer had, which was why he was currently sitting outside the cheaply built, low-slung, tobacco brown apartment house.

He’d been squatting on the place for four hours and had yet to see a tenant come or go. He had his eye on the lower left-hand
unit, marked
MGR
. on the building placard. Dwyer had knocked, gotten no answer, and had resigned himself to waiting it out. But here came a little man, walking with a shambling gait, a couple of grocery sacks banging against his knees. His skin was nut brown, including his mostly bald pate, and he wore a plaid utility shirt, twill trousers, and battered work shoes. He made his way to the manager’s unit and barely had his key in the door before Dwyer was on him.

“Hey there, buddy,” Dwyer said, adopting what the Americans called a Southern drawl. If he had to raise a ruckus to get what he needed, Dwyer preferred the cops to think they were looking for an American rather than a Welshman, and he found the Southern drawl the easiest jump for his tongue to make.

“Yes?” The manager turned.

“What’s your name, bud?”

“I am Elihu,” the man said with a Spanish accent.

“How you doing, Eli-yute? I’m looking for a good buddy of mine who was staying here for a while.”

“Yes, sir, who?”

“Aw heck, he’s hiding out from his ex-wife most of the time. His name’s Juan, but he might’ve been going by something else.”

“Yes, there is no Juan here. I’m sorry. He is
hispánico
?”

“Yep. Salvadoran fella,” Dwyer said.

“Oh …”

“He would’ve probably just moved out. He has sort of spotted skin …” Dwyer didn’t know what the condition was called, but Banco had some white discoloration on the skin on the side of his face.

“Yes, there was a guy, José Campos. He was here for six months only. Nice guy, very strong. Black hair, maybe this tall.” Elihu held his hand up at head level. “He left last week.”

“Hell, Eli-yute, that sounds like him. He happen to mention where he was moving?” Dwyer asked. There was nothing but a pause out of the manager. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell his ex-wife,” he continued, adding the winks and eyebrow bumps the Southern fellows seemed so fond of.