Verona

Seven

Monday, May 5

Two Months before Donald Lark’s Funeral

Andy and Loi were lying in bed at the Riverside Hotel.

The promised “minute or two” had grown into an hour.

Loi now whispered, “You said there was another piece you wanted to add.”

“This is the part we don’t share with Detective White.”

“I’m intrigued.”

He kissed her forehead, rolled onto his back. “I have a confession.”

She nodded and twined his chest hair once again. This was a habit he could get used to.

“I’m guilty of armed robbery.”

Loi lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t just let that one sit.”

“My father’s real security conscious. I told you. But I could still figure out parts of his operation. Sometimes I’d follow a courier from his office — you know, on his way to make a money drop. Before he got there, I pulled on a ski mask, stuck a gun in his ribs and took the cash.” Andy shrugged. “A perfect crime. Nobody was going to the police. And my father was sure another crew had done it.”

She slapped him lightly on the arm and grinned. “Shame on you!” Then she tenderly kissed the spot she’d whacked. “You needed the money?”

“Needed? No. Wanted? Yes. To piss my father off.” He chuckled. “Anyway, who can’t use a half million in unmarked bills?” Then he grew somber in voice and somber in spirit. “We’re doomed, you know.”

“Romeo and Juliet.”

“True, but I’m thinking something else: We’re doomed because we can’t lead normal lives. Any hope of that died years and years go.”

“Normal life,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t know how... Can I confess something too?”

“Be my guest.”

“I’ve got a bad side to me.”

“Makes you all the hotter.”

She cuddled closer and gave a sound that resembled a purr. “Every once in a while, when I’m in the mood, I upload ransomware onto some company’s network. You know how that works?”

Andy’d heard of the crime. “It encrypts their data, like payroll and accounting, intellectual property. If they pay into a crypto account, the hacker sends them the decryption key.”

“That’s it. If you ask for under fifty thousand, it’s just the cost of doing business to most companies. They may report it but usually even that’s too much trouble. I have to say it was the only time I’ve really felt alive lately, squeezing some corporate idiots for money and watching my Bitcoin grow.”

Andy said, “They fucked us up, our dear fathers. But they taught us one thing.”

Her beautiful face shone. “How not to run a crime syndicate.”

“Exactly. If we had a crew, we’d do it right. You and me.”

“Is that what the other piece is?” Loi asked.

He nodded. Then he added, solemnly, “We do this, there’s no going back.”

“There’s nothing to go back to. Our childhoods are scorched earth... So? Next steps.”

“First is calling room service. I seem to work up an appetite around you.”

The couple was back on the couch in front of the hotel room’s coffee table, with eggs and toast and champagne before them. Additional hotel stationery too.

More ideas, some forming, some misting away.

“I think I know how to recruit Max and Ki. We cut a deal with White for their immunity.”

Loi considered this. “That’ll be the starting point. But the most important thing they’ll want is a job. If they agree to bring down their bosses, nobody’ll hire them.”

“But we will. At double their salary. Max’ll go along. He’s taking care of two elderly parents, and his mother’s disabled. Ki?”

Loi didn’t have to think long. “He’d love the chance to work with us. He’s been like a second father. The only reason he’s still with Father is to protect me from him. He once said if he ever whipped me again, it would be the last time. A job and immunity, he’ll be good.”

“Okay. Ki and Max are on board... How’s this for a plan?” Andy explained he’d ask his father to hire him to oversee the books and the paperwork of his real estate company. He would only have access to the company’s legit operation, of course, but with Loi’s computer skills she could probably hack into the man’s secret files and find where he stashed his cash.

When Detective White and the Organized Crime Task Force arrested Andy’s father, the cops would find some money, along with the drugs and weapons, but Andy and Loi would have already taken the bulk of the cash money and destroyed any digital trace of its existence.

This stash would be their start-up capital — plus the money Andy has stolen from his father and Loi’s ransomware profits. They’d use it to create their own syndicate, based on a whole new business model.

Their fathers’ problem was that they were stuck in the mentality of a gangster movie from the 1980s: Martin Scorsese crime, The Sopranos crime. Smuggling and selling drugs and guns, running whorehouses, human trafficking, demanding money from brick-and-mortar retailers for protection.

Nagle and Yung didn’t realize that that approach was pathetically outdated.

Trade unions? Robots ran most of the manufacturing and longshore and stevedore operations, and the new face of labor — the tech industry — was geographically dispersed and not unionized.

Construction? Huge international companies were accountable to shareholders and kickbacks were easily detected.

Graft at city hall? Too risky now that whistle-blowers got rich quick, and everybody with a camera phone and a blog was an investigative reporter, eager to out corruption.

Protection of retail operations? You couldn’t shake down Walmart or Amazon, and a mom-and-pop store couldn’t afford to pay serious sums.

Bookmaking and running numbers? You could gamble everywhere legally now.

Drugs? Grass was becoming legalized, and demand for street heroin and coke was waning and prescription opioids were being more tightly controlled.

Organized crime needed to wake up to the twenty-first century. Andy and Loi threw ideas back and forth for hours, and their syndicate took shape. They would sell forged prescriptions through the dark web. As for sex, no more massage parlors or houses of prostitution or trafficking in women and girls (the latter unacceptable to both of them, in any event); they’d use Eastern European servers to run porn chat and hookup websites, identify the married men and politicians, extort tens of thousands in exchange for not emailing wives or outing the men on social media. They would also sell some of the incriminating data to competitors and political opponents. And classic business protection? Ransomware, again.

Then Andy fell silent.

“What?” Loi asked, frowning. “Having second thoughts?”

“No. But for this to work we’ll have to take it one step further.” His eyes were cool as he regarded her face. “It’ll have to get ugly.”

“We’re the doomed lovers, Andy... Go on. As long as nobody innocent gets hurt.”

He said, “Not innocent at all. Donald Lark.”

“The crime boss running the Panhandle. Nothing innocent about him.” She frowned. “I heard Father and Ki talking one time. Lark ordered a hit where the target’s whole family was killed, even the kids.”

“If Max and Ki agree to sign on, the first step is, they’ll kill Lark. That puts the Panhandle in play.”

“He’ll be hard to get to.”

“Every Friday he takes a route to his summer place through this deserted area thirty miles out of town. Max and Ki can handle it. That’s what they’re good at. And they’ll plant stories Lark was killed by somebody out from New York, New Jersey.”

“So, Lark’s dead,” she mused. “Our fathers’ll go to the funeral to telegraph they’re making a move on the territory. We’ll find a bar or restaurant near the funeral parlor, and it’ll look like you and I hooked up there.” She laughed. “Oh, that’ll drive them crazy.”

“Our fathers’ll probably have Max and Ki interrogate the bartender — to see if it was a legitimate pickup or if either of us was fishing for information. Max and Ki’ll pretend to grill the guy, and they’ll come back to our fathers with the story that everything was legit. It was love at first sight.”

Loi laughed and kissed his cheek. “My dad and yours’ll start spying on us, recording what we say.”

“Your father’ll hope I spill something about mine. And vice versa.”

“Oh, we can feed them all sorts of good stuff.”

“We’ll stir the pot, get the rivalry going — that’ll make it easier to set up the kidnapping. They make mistakes, get arrested. We take the money and open up shop. What do you think?”

She tapped her glass to his. Her long kiss was his answer. She asked, “Timetable?”

“It’s May now. I’d say two months. July’ll be good. That’ll give you time to get into my father’s accounts and find his safe houses. It’ll take a while to convince White and the cops to help us and set up a deal for Ki and Max. And plan the kidnapping sting.”

“So we have to be secret lovers until then?”

“Afraid so. We can’t quote ‘meet’ until the funeral.”

“Two whole months?” Loi pouted.

And quite the luxurious and erotic pout it was.