Real Estate
“I don’t recall us sending you to get us a thief,” Dunnigan said. He was looking at Westlake now. Ramirez silently encouraged the latter to stand up straight and look like a professional. As if reading her thoughts, Westlake straightened slightly. Westlake was the sort of guy who always tried to make himself look smaller and less noticeable than he really was.
“We can always use another scrounger,” Saoirse said. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her wheelchair and selected one. She glanced at Ramirez. “Want one?”
“No thanks,” Ramirez said, though she did. Badly. She’d quit just before the apocalypse. Her third attempt. So far, she hadn’t surrendered to temptation. The fact that cigarettes were hard to find made it easier.
Saoirse shrugged and lit up. She’d been on holiday when things had gone bad, or so she claimed. She’d never mentioned family, or any sort of significant other. Then, a lot of people didn’t like talking about what went on those first few days after the dead had risen – Ramirez included. Regardless, Saoirse had a way about her. And she had a head for organization. That came in handy these days, when they had almost forty people, including kids, to take care of.
“I had another use for him in mind,” Ramirez said.
“Oh?” Dunnigan turned his gaze on her. “And what might that be?”
Saoirse might be the mayor of their little community, but Dunnigan was the sheriff. He had been one of the first to see the potential in the lodge. He’d been a trucker and had been asleep in the campground when the first walkers had stumbled down the road. He’d turned his rig into a shelter, and set about organizing foraging parties over the course of the following days.
By the time Ramirez had shown up, Dunnigan had already overseen the clearing of the lodge and the first few fortifications they’d made. Even better, he’d been carrying a load of chain link fencing, concrete mix and the like to a construction site somewhere north of them. It was a lucky thing for everyone he’d stopped when he had. Without the materials he’d been hauling, they’d never have been able to make a go of it.
Frieda stepped close to her, one hand on the small of her back. Ramirez turned and smiled. Then she cleared her throat and said, “We need to move.”
The words tasted unpleasant in her mouth. For better or worse, this place had become home. More, it was a place of safety – of familiarity – in a strange new world. But if the experiences of the past few months had taught her anything, it was that you couldn’t count on the familiar. The others traded looks. They’d discussed it before, but come up with no workable options.
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Saoirse said, finally.
“I might have found us a place to go.” She felt Frieda’s hand tighten on her shoulder and she reached up and clasped it. Frieda had been in Saranac Lake on a corporate retreat when the dead rose. They’d met in those early weeks, gotten to know one another. The old cliché – one thing led to another. She pulled Frieda’s hand around and kissed her knuckles. Westlake saw the gesture but said nothing, for which she was thankful.
Saoirse gestured to Westlake. “And what does he have to do with it?”
“I know where it is,” Westlake said, sipping his beer.
Ramirez looked at Dunnigan. “Ever heard of the Bonaro crime family?”
“Who hasn’t?” Dunnigan said. “I was a long-haul trucker before all this shit hit. The Bonaro had a grip on a whole bunch of the local teamster unions for years.”
“Yeah, well, the Bonaro are smart. That’s why they outlasted almost all of their rivals. The FBI took bites out of their organization – small fry. No one important.” Ramirez looked at Westlake. “Until our friend here.”
“He doesn’t look like a mobster,” Saoirse said.
“I’m not,” Westlake said. “What I am is the guy who can get you to the Villa.”
“Which is?” Frieda asked.
“It’s a mob hideout,” Ramirez said. “Off the grid, somewhere remote, best of everything that money could buy. Or so the stories say.”
“Stories?” Saoirse said. “You don’t know?” She looked at Dunnigan, who frowned, but said nothing. Ramirez could read the doubt on their faces. She pressed on.
“We thought it was an urban legend. A few agents were convinced it was a floating operation – a hotel one year, a yacht the next. One guy in the Las Vegas field office insisted it was actually at the top of one of the casinos.” She looked at Westlake. “But our friend Westlake claims that it’s been here in our backyard the whole time.”
“How does he know?” Dunnigan asked. He sounded suspicious. Ramirez didn’t blame him. Everything she knew about Westlake told her he was running an angle. He wanted to get inside the Villa, but why? It had to be important to him, whatever the reason.
“I knew the guy who put in the toilets,” Westlake said. Ramirez frowned, but Westlake went on before she could interject. “They had a whole new water system installed and got new toilets to go with it. The guy who put them in, he used to… well, give me a head’s up on occasion. You know what I mean.”
Ramirez stared at him. Of course he’d had people on the inside. It should have occurred to her sooner. That was how guys like Westlake operated. “You had a plumber casing places for you?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now. No more plumbers.”
Dunnigan grunted. “Plenty of plumbers. Just no running water.” He grabbed a chair and sat down. “Maybe you should start from the beginning.”
Westlake took another sip of beer. “OK. So. Back about a hundred years ago, there was a mine up here in the Adirondacks. When the mine shut down, a bunch of bootleggers took it over and hid their booze in it. Somewhere along the way one of them got the idea to turn the place into a speakeasy. Which they did when the mine got turned into a lake. It was so profitable that they decided to expand the business…”
Frieda cleared her throat. “Not that I’ve got a thing against the occasional history lesson, but what’s the point of all this?”
Westlake looked at her. “I’m getting to it. So anyway, these bootleggers – the Bonaro – expanded the business. Made their speakeasy into a hotel of sorts. Neutral territory for those with the right connections. Dutch Schultz stayed there. Capone. It was supposedly a place where deals got made – it’s where Lansky and Luciano had their talks with the Department of the Navy, during World War II. At least according to a guy I knew.”
Frieda opened her mouth, but Westlake didn’t pause. “Anyway, the Bonaro expanded the joint multiple times over the years. It got bigger and bigger, until it was less a hotel than a fortress. Everything you’d need to hole up and wait out a Federal siege or, say, a zombie apocalypse. They called it the Villa.”
Dunnigan leaned forward. “And it’s here? In the Adirondacks?”
“Hand to God.” Westlake raised one hand and put the other over his heart.
“Where, exactly?” Saoirse interjected.
Westlake smiled and shook a chiding finger in her direction. “I’ll tell you that when you agree.”
“Agree to what?”
“A deal,” Ramirez said. The others looked at her. “Westlake knows where this place is. He wants help getting in.”
“Help from us,” Frieda said, frowning at Westlake.
“In return, you can have the place,” Westlake said. He looked around. “It’s easily twice the size of the lodge, and probably better protected. Think of what you could do with that. Think of how many lives you could save.”
“Westlake, enough,” Ramirez said. “You don’t need to make the hard sell here.”
“Does he not?” Saoirse asked. “Because this sounds too good to be true.”
Frieda nodded. “Saoirse is right. What’s the catch?” She looked at Ramirez as she asked it, and Ramirez felt a flash of guilt, quickly banished.
“It might not be unoccupied,” she said. She glanced at Westlake, daring him to argue. “He seems to think Salvatore Bonaro was headed up here when the dead rose.”
“I’m guessing that’s bad?” Saoirse asked.
“He’s the current head of the Bonaro,” Ramirez said. “Which means, if Westlake is right, he won’t have come alone.”
Dunnigan was silent for a moment. Ramirez knew him well enough to know that he was weighing the pros and the cons. “We haven’t seen anyone go up the Adirondacks – or come across any sign of such a place. If they’ve been up there since all this started, why haven’t we seen hide nor hair of them?”
“Like I said, it’s a fallout shelter.” Westlake finished his beer. “Bonaro was probably planning to come up here anyway, before everything went to hell.”
“Why?” Frieda asked.
“Because Westlake here turned state’s evidence – or was planning to,” Ramirez said. “He was going to tell the Feds who he was working for when he and his pals hit that armored car in Milwaukee.”
“Bonaro?” Dunnigan guessed.
Westlake shrugged. “Someone connected to him, anyway. Sal doesn’t like attention, so chances are he was already up here. The Villa ain’t some cabin in the woods. It’s the center of a very big, very illegal web. Sal probably locked the joint down when the first news broadcasts hit the airwaves.”
Saoirse frowned. “It’s been months. That’s a long time, these days. If they had supplies, they might have run out.”
“My guy said they had enough food to last for years. And not just food. They got a greenhouse, they got generators, they got solar panels, they got their own water, they got comfy sheets, and they got enough guns and ammo to gear up a small army. All of which Ramirez says you need.”
“I still don’t understand how they could hide such a thing,” Frieda said.
“Best place to hide something is in plain sight,” Westlake said. “They had it on the books as a resort for a time – everything legal and above board, but that didn’t last long. Then it just sort of vanished.”
“Vanished?” Frieda asked, doubtfully.
“Yeah, you know, records got torn up and maps got changed.”
“They changed the maps?” Saoirse asked, in astonishment.
Ramirez ran a hand through her hair. “Easy enough to do when you have that sort of money and influence.”
“Except the old ones.” Westlake cracked his knuckles. “I’m talking real old, pre-war maps. The sort you can only get in antique stores and flea markets.”
“And you had one?” Ramirez said.
“Did. Unfortunately, it was in my car. Which you did not want to go back for.” Westlake smiled thinly. “So much for that, huh?”
Ramirez rounded on him. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“You never asked,” he shot back.
Ramirez was about to respond, but felt Frieda’s hand on her arm. She swallowed what she’d been planning to say, her mind whirring to piece together Westlake’s plans. “It doesn’t matter,” she said slowly. “You wouldn’t rely on a map. You must know where it is.”
Westlake hesitated. Then nodded. “Yeah. I do.”
“Good enough.” She looked at Dunnigan. “We’ve got people here who know the area. Labrand, for one.”
“Sayers,” Saoirse added. “She knows the mountains better than anyone, even Labrand.”
Ramirez frowned, but didn’t argue. She didn’t care for Sayers much. The former park ranger was a textbook misanthrope. Her idea of helping people was putting a bullet in them before the zombies got to them. But Saoirse was right. Sayers knew the High Peaks better than anyone in any of the camps.
“If he’s right, the Villa could solve all our problems in one go,” Ramirez went on. “We’d have room for everyone, food, and ammunition. We could move up there, then strip the camps at our leisure and start fresh.”
“The camps… you mean bring everyone in on this?” Dunnigan asked.
“Why not?” Ramirez gestured. “We could use the help, after all.”
Dunnigan took his cap off and scrubbed the back of his head with a rough palm. “We need to do something. I just don’t know whether this is it. Going up into the mountains, with the way things have been – that’s not like riding down the road in a truck.” He glanced up as someone knocked on the door.
Ramirez turned to see Hutch poking his head through. He looked worried. That was never a good sign. “What is it?” she asked.
“Some tourists came to visit,” Hutch said.
“Tourists?” Westlake asked.
“Walkers,” Saoirse supplied. “Most of the zombies we get these days aren’t local. They wander in from out of the area. Or so our resident zombologist swears.”
“She knows what she’s talking about. I wish she didn’t, but she does.” Ramirez looked at the others. She could tell that they still weren’t convinced, not wholly. Westlake was an unknown, a self-professed criminal, and she was asking them to take a bigger risk than just strip-mining an abandoned town. She looked at Hutch. “Hutch, show Westlake the sights while we talk in private.”
“What about the tourists?” Hutch began.
“Labrand and the others can deal with them,” Ramirez said.
“Whatever you say, boss.” Hutch gestured to Westlake. “Let’s take a walk.”
Westlake looked like he wanted to protest. Ramirez cut him off with a glance. “You’ve made your pitch, Westlake. Now give us a minute.”
Westlake met her eyes and nodded, reluctantly. “Fine.” He let Hutch lead him out of the room.
Ramirez waited until they’d gone before she spoke. “I know it’s a long shot, but we’re down to the wire here.”
Dunnigan sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“Remember when we hit that big-box store over near Lake Placid?” Ramirez went on, pressing her case. “We got volunteers from all three camps. That way, no one got left out and no one took on too much risk. Why not do the same for this? It’ll benefit us all, right?”
Frieda nodded. “I agree with Estela.”
“Quelle surprise,” Saoirse said, but with a smile. “I do too, as it happens. What about you, Dunny?”
Dunnigan scratched his head again, adjusted his cap, and nodded. “May as well share the risk, if we’re sharing the wealth. I’ll put the call out. We’ll see who bites.” He fixed Ramirez with a stern look. “You certain he’s on the level?”
“About this? Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“You think or you know?”
Ramirez was silent for a moment, wondering how best to answer. Then she shrugged. “Heck if I know, Dunnigan. Either way, we have to hope he’s right. We don’t have much of a choice.”