Every Man a King

24

Oliya and I sat in the front of the Lincoln while Mel lounged in back.

“You hired me for the Lanyard job?” Oliya asked our passenger.

“Yeah.”

“That’s strange.”

“Strange how?”

“Paul Lanyard worked for exBank. It was presented to me like his employers wanted to protect him.”

“Just the opposite. There was this high-up dude there that was worried about something Pauly knew; probably that this guy was stealing.”

“And Lanyard was a friend of yours?”

“Never met the man.”

“But you paid fifty thousand dollars for round-the-clock protection?”

“There’s no price tag on right.”

Olo was definitely puzzled by Mel. For some reason that tickled me.

“What about maybe was?” Mel asked her.

She explained about the six assassins sicced on me, probably by her bosses.

“Huh,” Mel said when she was through.

Belle Harbor, Queens, is set out on the Rockaway Peninsula. It was the site of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 on November 12, 2001. Everybody on board died. Five bystanders were also killed.

That tragedy aside, Belle Harbor is one of the poshest neighborhoods in the sleepy borough. Has its own beach. The house we were looking for was on Bay Circle, number forty-five.

Augustine Antrobus had provided me with three Russian names that had been known to move illegal oil. I’d looked them up on my phone at Dingo’s. I was pretty sure that the guy I was looking for was Yuri; he was the only one who lived in New York.

It was a two-story home wrought from yellow stone, with a deck on top that probably looked out over the bay. Lots of windows. It was a rich man’s residence.

Mel jumped out and attached a barely noticeable microtransmitter wadded up in something that looked like gum to the post of a mailbox across the street. Pretending to be checking addresses, he inspected the old-fashioned box, then turned toward the car and said aloud, “No, Joe, I told you it was on the other block.”

From there we drove over to the local shopping area and parked on the third level of a three-floor parking structure. Mel brought out a computer and plugged it into the cigarette lighter socket. We watched the front of the rich man’s house for the better part of four hours.

There wasn’t much talk during that time. The few words we did say were of no consequence. We simply watched. I’m sure that between the three of us we had eyes on that home longer than the sum total of all other people looking at it since the day it was built.

Right at sunset the garage door lifted and a cherry-red Tesla slipped out and down the driveway. The driver got out at the curb and picked up a discarded beer can from the gutter. He climbed back in and drove off.

Still, we didn’t talk. I started the car and drove down to the street. Within four blocks we were two cars behind the red Tesla.

Yuri Fleganoff drove to a yellow-and-green building in Brighton Beach. It was a Polish restaurant with a large bar area. A guy who looked to be loitering around the front jumped to attention when the electric car pulled up. Yuri climbed out and handed the lingerer something. The man hustled into the car and drove off.

Parking around the corner, the three of us walked to a pizza joint down the block and across the street from A Taste of Warsaw, the place Yuri went.

We ordered a large meat-eaters pie with black olives and three beers.

While waiting for the feast, Mel offered to check out the bar and the guy out front.

“Might as well wait for the food,” I suggested.

“Naw, man. He could come out any minute.”

So Mel split, leaving Oliya and me to watch the front door of the restaurant across the street.

“What is it with your friend?” Oliya asked after a few minutes of silence.

I sipped my beer and considered. I didn’t want to lie but, then again, there were many things that only I knew about the sociopath.

“Back when I was a cop,” I began. “More than a decade ago, I arrested Mel.”

“What for?”

“He was climbing out of a manhole three blocks from where a heist had just been stopped by the FBI.”

The pizza came. It took up most of the table.

Oliya and I chowed down on a couple of slices and then picked up two more.

“So what happened after you arrested him?”

“They put him on trial.”

“For the heist?”

“Yeah. He was definitely a part of it. But there was nothing to prove that. Nobody in the crew would testify against him, so the prosecutor asked me to um... embellish.”

“And you refused.” It wasn’t a question.

“I figure that if we want citizens to obey the rules, then we have to too.”

“So you and Melquarth became friends.”

“Sometime later, having nothing to do with Mel or the heist, I got into trouble with the force. They framed me, tried to kill me, and then fired me instead. I went through a hard time and then Mel showed up. He wanted to play chess.”

“He wanted a friend.”

“Yeah. He had decided to go straight and liked that I had rules.”

“He’s a very dangerous man.”

“It’s a dangerous world.”

Mel returned almost forty-five minutes later. He told us that he preferred cold pizza and ate for maybe a quarter hour.

After the last bite he leaned back, letting out a very satisfied sigh.

“They keep the cars in an open lot just down from where we parked,” he said.

“Can we get in?” Oliya asked.

“There’s a fence in back. The guard got somethin’ goin’ on his cell phone.”

“What about the restaurant?” I asked.

“Lotta young Eastern Euros looking for a good time. Wherever Yuri went I couldn’t see. Probably up these stairs they have toward the back.”

“Did you make it to his car?” I asked, meaning something more.

“I did.”

“So all we have to do is wait.”

“Yeah.”

With that, Mel went into a story about a guy he knew whose dream in life was to escape from a supermax prison. He was an adviser to active participants in heists around the world. He had vast knowledge of electronics, locks, and explosives and knew about a thousand ways to confound pursuit from dogs to helicopters to angry mobs.

“He’s the one who trained me in interrogation methods,” Mel said.

I knew Mel’s ways of interrogation. If I ever doubted that he was crazy, just his way of getting information disabused me of that notion.

“He never got caught,” Mel said. “Because he only talked to people, never selling paraphernalia or scouting. And, like I said, his big dream in life was to escape from a maximum-security prison.”

“Did he ever do it?” Oliya asked. She was really interested.

Mel nodded and said, “Pelican Bay.”

“That’s the worst there is,” she exclaimed. “How’d he end up there if he was so careful?”

“His wife was having an affair. He knew it. She was younger and needed more than he could give. But one day he came home early. Somehow she had broken their agreement and was feeding the boyfriend lunch. Brisket, I think. Anyway, Peter — his name isn’t Peter — Peter walked in, saw them chatting, and for some reason he lost his cool. He got a gun from the den and shot the guy in the shoulder. Then, when his wife couldn’t stop screaming, he called nine-one-one and reported the shooting.

“He pled guilty and was sentenced to Lompoc or something.”

“I thought he was at—”

“Pelican Bay,” Mel finished. “Yeah. He attacked a guard and so they sent him there. Spent four years cultivating a medical condition that had him seeing a doctor maybe three times a year. The doctor passed letters from Peter, not his name, and various people in the outside world.”

“So he escaped from a hospital visit?” I asked, the sneer smeared all over my words.

“No. That would be cheating. The doctor had to visit Pete in stir. There was a special clinic. Well, one day there was a substitute for the doctor who smuggled in a small arsenal and various other tools. They subdued six guards and made it to the escape car without killing anyone. That was one of Pete’s prerequisites — no one could get murdered in the operation. He’s a little like you, Joe.”

“Where is he now?” Olo asked.

“On an island in an ocean with his young wife and two kids.”

“He took her back?” That was me.

“Here he comes,” Oliya said.

Looking in the direction of the Polish restaurant, I saw Yuri talking to the semiofficial attendant who parked his car. The guy ran off, leaving the Russian doddering by the front door.

“I’ll go get the car,” Oliya said.

She left hurriedly.

“That’s an extraordinary woman,” Mel commented as she went out the front door.

“I think she thinks the same of you.”

“Really?”

“Do I have to worry about it?”

“What you mean?”

“Come on, man. You know what I mean. Are you stalking Olo by secretly hiring her?”

“Never even seen her in person before today. I only hired her because I was told she was the best Int-Op had.”

He seemed to mean what he was saying.

“There’s Yuri’s car,” I said.

Yuri was already two blocks down when Oliya pulled up to the curb, but that didn’t matter.

“What’s the plan?” she asked as we trailed behind.

“If he takes the same way back, he’ll go past that cemetery near his house.”

“You want to ram him?”

“No.”

“It was something about the way he shot the guy,” Mel mused from the back.

We were approaching the border of Queens from the Brooklyn side.

“What guy?” That was me.

“Peter-not-Peter’s wife’s boyfriend.”

“He shot him in some special way?” Oliya asked.

“Not really, but old Pete had never shown such passion. That’s why the wife needed outside stimulus. Pete was as dependable as the old Ford your grandfather drove. When he shot the boyfriend her heart opened wide.”

“Wow,” I said. “Damn.”

“Drop back a little,” Mel said to Oliya. “We don’t wanna spook the guy.”

“We don’t wanna lose him either.”

“I put a transmitter under his bumper and a little surprise under the dash.”

“What kind of surprise?”

“The kind that makes everybody’s life easier.”

It was fully dark by the time Yuri led us back to the peninsula.

We were cruising past the Memorial Homes Cemetery as we came to a red light. Yuri’s red Tesla was in the lead, with a light blue Hyundai behind him and Loopy’s Mark VII taking up the rear.

“This is as good as anywhere,” I said.

There came a faint click from the back seat.

The light turned green but the Tesla didn’t move. The light blue Hyundai honked and then veered around the red car angrily riding the horn.

“Killed a man one time for honking at me like that,” Madman Mel observed.

I cracked the door and told Oliya, “Pull up on the cemetery road.”

I got out and she pulled off.

The driver was unconscious behind the wheel. That was because of the gas bomb Mel had laid. I let down the backrest and rolled the little Russian into the back seat.

Behind the graveyard chapel we moved Yuri to the trunk of the Lincoln and then drove for four hours to a good-size stone farmhouse just outside Brattleboro, Vermont.