King Con

Chapter Thirty-Three.

THE CALL CAME FROM THE HYSTERICAL EXECUTIVE AT exactly twelve-thirty-five in the afternoon.

"This whole place is on fire!" Victoria screamed through the receiver and then, while the Fire Department dispatcher was talking, the call came in from the building's Direct-Dial Sentry Fire Alarm System. They had electronic confirmation of the blaze at the Penn Mutual Building. "We're trapped up here! We can't go down, the stairs are filled with smoke."

"Go to the roof," the dispatcher on the phone told the panicked C.E.O. "Get everybody up there."

Grady Hunt saw the smoke billowing out of the twenty-fifth-floor windows from his surveillance position across the street. He immediately sensed he was in trouble. He and Denniston ran inside the building just as the first Fire Marshal's unit screeched up.

"Hey, you can't go in there!" the Fire Marshal yelled, but Grady ran in anyway, with Denniston right on his heels.

The building lobby was clear of smoke, but the elevators were full of people from all floors, pouring out in a panic. The alarms were ringing loudly. Grady was knocked down on his way into the elevator, and then run over like a calf in a stampede.

The Fire Marshal grabbed Grady, pulling him to his feet. "I'm not gonna tell you again! We have a three-alarm on the twenty-fifth floor."

"Get your fucking hands off me, Smoky," Grady said, pulling out his badge and pushing it in the fireman's face.

"I don't care if you're President Fucking Clinton. Get the hell out of this building, asshole!" the Fire Marshal screamed.

Then Grady and Denniston grabbed the startled man, knocked him down, and jumped into the elevator. They made it all the way up to the twenty-fourth floor, where the elevator computer-locked and prevented them from going any higher. They jumped out, found the fire stairs, and ran up to the top floor of the building. Smoke was billowing down the staircase at them, and when they got to twenty-five, they could see why… There were two huge wastebasket fires burning on the top landing.

"This fucking guy," Grady said, as he burst through the fire door onto the twenty-fifth floor, which was almost completely full of smoke. Several of the plate-glass windows had been broken on the east side and smoke was billowing out into the afternoon air. Under each broken window was another raging trash can fire. Nothing else on the floor was burning. The cans were full of stuffing ripped out of the office chairs and they were putting out thick, black smoke.

Then they heard an approaching helicopter. "Roof!" Grady yelled. He and Denniston pulled guns and ran back to the fire stairs.

As they were climbing to the top, they could hear the chopper landing. When they broke out onto the roof, Beano was waiting. He delivered a solid right cross to Grady's square jaw. The Fed catapulted back onto the landing and was out.

Alex, Tommy, and Victoria were running to the chopper, which was just setting down.

Beano looked over at a shocked Denniston, who was now holding his pistol, half-pointed at him. Beano kicked at the gun and it went flying out of Denniston's hand. He and Denniston faced off. Beano didn't think this blond pastel prince was going to be much trouble. Then he got the Vanilla Surprise: Denniston lost his temper and exploded in a rage, charging Beano and taking him down.

Tommy saw this from the helicopter and looked over at Beano, who was now rolling around with some guy in a tan suit he'd never seen before.

Tommy had thought the building was on fire and wanted to get the hell out of there. He had not seen the trash can fires because Beano had lit them and let the floor fill with smoke before breaking the windows and steering a shaken Tommy out of the conference room, where he had just finished packing up his briefcase with stock certificates. Victoria shouted, "Up on the roof!" and he'd gone without asking questions, lugging his briefcase with him. Now, he looked out of the helicopter and saw his personal corporate geologist getting pounded. He climbed down to help.

"Only got room for one more!" the chopper pilot yelled, so Tommy, who didn't want to lose Dr. Clark just yet, got out, walked over to where Denny Denniston was choking Beano, and calmly kicked the Vanilla Surprise in the head. He helped Beano up and they moved to the chopper…

"What about that other guy?" the pilot said, pointing at Denniston, who was sitting with his head in his hands.

"He said it's okay to come back and get him on the next trip," Tommy said.

The helicopter lifted off and away. They flew to a chopper pad five blocks down and were let off. Beano, Alex, Tommy, and Victoria got out, then the helicopter pilot lifted off to return for the last man on the roof. Alex was shaken. He'd had enough and wanted to go back to his office. Tommy, Victoria, and Beano cabbed back to the Penn Mutual Building and slipped into the parking garage, where they got in Tommy's rented car and sped away without being seen in the commotion.

"Here's to the fucking oil," Tommy said, as he raised a glass of Scotch and drank it down. He already looked half in the bag, grinning at his captive audience of Beano, Miss Luna, Wade and Keith Summerland. Keith still had his left ear bandaged from where Victoria had hit him a couple of days before. "Where're these fucking girls?" Tommy asked Wade, who had made a deal to have some strippers brought over from the Pussycat Theater in the Tenderloin District.

"They oughta be here any minute, Tommy," Keith said, and Tommy poured himself another glass, then looked over at Victoria.

"You say you've never been to Vegas?" he asked her, and she shook her head. "This broad looks real familiar. This is like fucking drivin' me nuts, but I'm gonna pin it down."

They were in Tommy's suite at the Ritz. He had the stock certificates in his open briefcase on the table. "So here's the deal," he said, turning back to business and looking at Beano with a lopsided grin. "Since Dr. Sutton turned out to be a fucking hemorrhoid specialist instead of a physicist, I ain't giving him his end. His twenty percent goes to me. And as for your twenty percent, Dr. Clark, I'm thinking it's way too much. What the fuck did you do?"

"Mr. Rina," Beano said. He had lost his prop glasses on the roof in the struggle with Denniston and was now squinting at Tommy, pretending he could barely see him. "I did everything. I found the field. Without me, we wouldn't have the oil company at all. We made a deal, and a deal is a deal," he said lamely.

"You got our deal on paper?" Tommy asked, grinning maliciously.

"Well, no," Beano said, "but we have a verbal agreement."

"We do? Got any witnesses to this fucking verbal agreement?"

"Dr. Sutton-"

"He don't count. Anybody else?"

"No sir, but surely you remember-"

"No, I got no recollection of no deal with you, douchebag. And since that makes it your word against mine, I sure hope you ain't calling me a liar, 'cause if you are, I'll fucking ballpeen your geeky ass through the floor." And then he smiled and looked at Wade and Keith, who were smiling with him. "This business shit ain't so tough. Everybody makes it sound tough. Not tough at all." The two ex-linebackers' smiles were strained and unnatural, like the grille of a fifties Buick. Tommy was only five-eight, but he scared the two exlinebackers to death.

Joe Rina pulled up to the front entrance of the white alabaster Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Stockton Street. He got out of his chartered limousine and walked on the balls of his feet into the lobby where Reo Wells was waiting for him. They moved without talking into the bar and sat at a table in the back. It was five-thirty in the evening, and the bar was beginning to fill up. The sounds of clinking glasses and laughter masked their hushed conversation.

"What've you got?" Joe said softly.

"I don't know what the hell's going on here, Mr. Rina, but something sure is."

"Lay it out."

"Tommy is definitely hanging with the guy whose picture you faxed to me. They been all over the place. Right now he's upstairs with the guy and some overweight woman named Laura Luna. He's also got two of your people from Las Vegas, Keith and Wade Summer-land."

Joe flinched slightly. He had fired the Summerlands for doing a chip skim in the Bahamas two months ago. He had told Tommy to take care of them; now he was hanging with them instead. He pulled his emotions back. 'What about my five million?"

"Never saw it, Mr. Rina. But that doesn't mean it's not in his briefcase or in his luggage."

"Right. How many people do you have here?" Joe asked; his anger was burning, the ash from that emotional fire making his eyes black, his voice brittle.

"Five guys, including me. All graduates of John Wayne High. Event-trained, ex-Delta Force incursion specialists."

"Okay, let's go find out what my big brother is up to." They got up and walked out of the bar right past Theodore X. Bates, who picked up the house phone and dialed Tommy's suite, letting the phone ring once and hanging up before Tommy could answer. The call would signal Beano and Victoria that Joe was on his way up.

Joe and Reo Wells took the elevator to Tommy's floor and met up with two specialists in gray suits, with eyes like licked stones. They were standing in the fire stairs. Reo referred to them only by their mission names, Doughboy and Reefer.

"Okay, you know the S.I.O.P. Get the whole unit on standby," he told them.

Doughboy, who was the unit XO, started to whisper into his walkie-talkie. After a minute, a door opened down the hall and another man in a gray suit, with an earpiece, stepped out and waved Reo over. They walked down to the door where the man was standing and entered the room without talking.

Joe found himself looking at two men and a lot of sophisticated equipment. Three tubes attached to a junction box and computer were sticking through the wall into the adjoining suite.

"What the hell is all this?" Joe demanded.

"Anti-terrorist wall scope," Reo said. "Your brother is next door in that room." He pointed to the wall with the cables through it.

Joe looked at him flatly, his expression demanding an explanation.

"If you want, we can take out his back-up right through the wall."

"How? You can't see them," Joe asked, amazed at all of the equipment that was stashed around. It had come out of four large suitcases, which lay open and mostly empty on the floor. There were two large helmets with full-face-plate visors lying on the bed. Each helmet was hooked up to an assault rifle by flexible metal cable that ran from the huge sophisticated gunsight into the left side of the helmet. Another cable ran out of the other side of the helmet and was connected to the computer, which was attached to cables stuck into the wall.

"All this stuff was developed to use against terrorists in hostage situations. That wand over there reads and catalogues exactly where all of the metal or concrete support beams are in the wall. Then, with high-speed drills, we go through the wall and insert three miniature video cameras. We then computer-key each person in the room by color and bulk. The 'hits' are green, the 'no-hits' will be on the face-plate visor screen in red. The computer over there references all of the input and blends all the components together. The result is you can see right through the wall, including all the structural elements, so when you fire, you won't deflect off an interior wall support. Put on the helmet there and look through the gunsight."

Joe went over and put on one of the helmets, snapped the visor down, and picked up the gun.

"Gotta stand on one of the X's we drew on the floor. That's so the computer won't get screwed up on the sight lines."

Joe stood on one of the X's they had put on the carpet with adhesive tape, then pulled the gun up and looked through the sight. "Don't see anything but the wall," he said.

"Turn on the power," Reo said; one of the team flipped a switch and instantly Joe was looking down the sight of the assault rifle right into the room next door. It was green-tinted magic. The five people in the room were all color-keyed. Three of them were red; the two wide-bodies were green. As he moved the gun from right to left, he could actually pan through the building wall supports, seeing the concrete pillars and metal cross structures inside the wall.

"The soft green targets are Tommy's gun-bunnies, the two linebackers, Wade and Keith. They're cut-downs. Your brother, the woman, and this guy who hit your casino, we marked in red. They're no-hits on the S.I.O.P."

"What the hell's S.I.O.P.?" Joe asked, as he watched the fat woman move out of the suite's living room and into the bathroom. Since they didn't have a camera on the bathroom, she walked out of frame.

"S.I.O.P. is Single Integrated Operation Plan," he explained. "Wanna hear what they're saying?" and he flipped another switch and Joe could hear Tommy's drunken voice:

"… like he's the only one knows shit about anything. Like if it weren't for fuckin' Joe, we wouldn't even have a fucking pot to piss in."

It took all Joe's self-control to keep from squeezing off a shot right then. He'd never talked bad to anybody about Tommy. Their relationship was the Sicilian bond of brotherhood, and here Tommy was putting him down to a roomful of strangers. He wanted his five million back or he would have pulled the trigger and ended Tommy's life on the spot. He lowered the gun and took off the helmet, unable to listen to any more.

"You gonna hit the Summerland brothers?" Joe asked.

"This is all quiet ordnance." Reo nodded. "Nobody will hear anything. Those two are packing, and they're main line resistance. If we take them out first, it eliminates any possibility they'll bring smoke during the action."

"Okay, let's go. Let's do it," Joe said impatiently.

And the two sharpshooters put on their helmets while Joe and Reo went out in the hall to meet Doughboy and Reefer. Doughboy was carrying a room service coat and an empty champagne bottle he had removed from a cart outside one of the rooms. He shrugged off his jacket and put on the white coat with epaulets on the shoulders, then knocked on the door.

It opened a crack and Tommy stuck his face out. "Yeah?" he said.

"Complimentary champagne from the Manager," Doughboy said, holding up the dark glass bottle.

When Tommy unlatched the door, Reo and Reefer hit it hard, knocking Tommy backwards into the room. He stumbled and fell. "Take this fuck," Tommy yelled as he was going down.

Wade and Keith pulled their guns and, simultaneously, two holes appeared in the wall. Both of the linebackers went down from the kill-fire, like head-shot buffalo. Immediately blood started to stain their white shirt collars.

Joe walked in and looked disdainfully down at his brother, a black mixture of anger, betrayal, and disappointment filling his eyes. "Yeah, without Joe we sure wouldn't have a pot to piss in. You sure got that right, Tom."

Tommy was up on his elbows, astonished by the presence of his brother. "What are you doing here? I thought you were in Jersey."

"I thought you were in Sabre Bay till I found out you were robbing my bank in Nassau."

"Joe… you ain't gonna believe this. We're rich!"

"Where's my money, Thomas?" It was cold the way he said it. He had never called Tommy "Thomas" before. It was almost as if he were addressing somebody he didn't know.

Then Victoria came out of the bathroom. She had removed the body appliances and she wasn't wearing the wig. She looked like herself now as she swept into the room, laughing. "Tommy, honey, there's no toilet paper in the…" And she stopped to look at Joe Rina and the room full of strangers holding silenced automatics.

Tommy finally realized where he'd seen Laura Luna before, but it was too late.

"It's you… you're Victoria Hart," Tommy said.

"You're actually fucking the bitch who was prosecuting me?!" Joe was so mad, he was actually shaking. Tommy had never seen him like this. "Where's my money, Thomas?"

"It's gone, Joe. I bought us an oil company. Look't this," and he moved to the table and grabbed for his open briefcase to show his brother the stock certificates, but they were gone. They had been printed on flash paper, which bookies used to keep their betting records. Victoria had scooped them up on her way to the bath-room and dropped them in the toilet… They'd disappeared in seconds.

"You cunt! You took them. They were here a minute ago, I swear, Joe. Tell him!" he screamed at Beano. "Tell him about the oil company."

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about, Tommy. What oil company? There's no oil company. Just give him his money back. Please, we shouldn't a stolen it in the first place. I knew it," Beano pleaded.

"Whatta you mean, there ain't no fucking oil company?" Tommy said. "Whatta you talkin' about? We used the money to buy the stock."

As Tommy started to get up, Joe kicked him in the face with his shoe, sending him back against the wall. Tommy flashed his anger, jumped to his feet, and started to charge his brother, but two guns were pointed at his face and he froze.

Joe had the hammer back on a nickel-plated revolver and now, slowly, he moved the barrel toward Tommy's eyes. "Where's my money?" he said.

"It's gone but we own the company," Tommy said.

"The money's in the trunk of his car," Beano corrected him.

Tommy looked over, confusion and panic in his beady, lizard eyes.

"Let's go see," Joe said coldly.

They took the elevator to the underground parking area and Tommy was forced, at gunpoint, to give up the keys to his rented Lincoln. Joe popped the trunk open and there, in the back, were the two suitcases that Tommy had brought from Nassau. Joe reached in and opened the suitcases and pulled out several stacks of money, still with the Nassau bank bands around them.

"How'd that get there?" Tommy said, unable to believe his eyes.

"Let's just end this," Joe said to Reo, who waved an arm. A van pulled up with the two sharpshooters in the front seat, then parked next to the Lincoln.

Then Reo produced riot-control plastic wrist cuffs and put them on Beano, Victoria, and Tommy. Reo pushed them toward the van.

"I'm your brother," Tommy said, looking into the hate-filled eyes of Joe Rina.

"I don't have a brother," Joe said. "I used to, but he died."