THE FIXER SPOTTED HIS TEAM WAITING FOR HIM OUTSIDE Madison Square Garden and took a deep breath to calm himself as he crossed Thirty-first Street to reach them. One of the two men, Jason, had his hand resting on the handle of a black rollaway suitcase, as though he planned to catch a train from Penn Station beneath the Garden.
Calm yourself, he thought. You can fix this if you stay calm. It wasn’t going to be easy; he was used to being in control and having his plans follow a logical order like moves on a chess board. But the whole Kingston job has been one big clusterfuck from the jump. Every time I fix something, it comes undone.
Some of it he blamed on the client. If that idiot hadn’t been bragging about his travels in the presence of Michelle Oakley, she would still be in the dark. Some of it he blamed on bad luck. But he knew that ultimately, most of the blame fell on his own shoulders. Either because he hadn’t anticipated problems, not as he was paid to do, or he’d ignored the warning signs that he was losing focus.
Maybe he was a little too preoccupied with his toys and living the good life. And he’d broken the rule about jealous girlfriends: get rid of them. It was particularly galling that he’d told himself at Christmas that it was time to send Sherry packing. But he’d also become lazy. Sherry met his needs, and it was always tough to find a young woman with her attributes, as well as convenient limitations, and then break her in.
Only now, it’s all coming back to haunt me. He had to fix this. The people who’d hired him and already paid him an outrageous sum of money didn’t tolerate failure, and they had a very long reach. In fact, he’d heard through channels the previous night that one of their other independent assassins had eliminated a government witness in a Manhattan courtroom during a trial!
After accompanying Todd Fielding to his bank, where he and Josh had retrieved the flash drive of the photographs taken of him at the Oakley mansion, he’d left them at a Bronx apartment he maintained as a safe house. He planned to keep the private investigator, who was drugged up on pain pills for his amputated finger, alive only until he could interrogate Sherry and make sure their stories jibed. Then they’d both be on their way to that New Jersey hog farm.
But when he’d reached his Fifth Avenue apartment, there was no sign of Sherry. She hadn’t answered her cell phone, either, and apparently had turned it off, because his buddy at the Agency couldn’t trace it.
The mystery had been cleared up somewhat a few minutes after he arrived, however, when his office phone had rung and the caller ID said his girlfriend was on the line. “Hi, babe, where are you? You have me worried,” he’d said as though nothing was amiss.
“You ought to be, fucker,” replied a deep male voice. “You took my partner after you cut one of his goddamned fingers off. Well, two can play at that game. We got your girlfriend, and if you want to see her again, you’re going to do it our way now.”
“What makes you think I want to see her again? She betrayed me,” the Fixer had replied dryly. He’d glanced at his computer to see how the tracking of Sherry’s cell phone was progressing.
“Well, if you don’t care about her,” the man had said, “maybe you’d be interested in certain photographs.”
“I have all the photographs I need,” the Fixer had replied. “Our mutual friend was kind enough to hand them over to me, including the extra flash drive.”
“We ain’t talking about the same photographs.” The man had chuckled. “These are of you and your three gorillas leaving a certain Chinatown office. Todd thought you might try coming at him. I’m sure you or your goons must have seen our associate, an attractive brunette, come to the door. You’re pretty good but apparently not good enough to spot me and my camera in the bakery across the street. Todd figured he might need a little insurance so that he don’t end up in some New Jersey swamp. And by the way, if that happens, these photos go to the cops along with the address of your swanky little Fifth Avenue pad.”
The Fixer’s smile had disappeared. “Okay, so what’s the game?”
“Hold on, Cochise, that’s not all I’m offering,” the man had said. “You’re going to give me Todd and a significant sum of money—by the way, for fucking with us, the price has gone up to one million—and in exchange, you get your girlfriend and a certain flash drive containing certain state secrets we got from the house of that broad you killed. Does Client 032355-JK mean anything to you?”
The Fixer had never wanted to strangle someone personally as much as he did Judge Kingston at that moment. “I believe we might be able to make a deal,” he’d said. “But I won’t be able to get that kind of money together until tomorrow.”
“You got till tomorrow night,” the man had said. “Just so we’re clear. My pal Todd stays healthy, including keeping his remaining fingers and toes, or the deal’s off. Capice? I realize that you’re going to slap him around a bit for this. He’s a tough cookie, but tell him he can go ahead and give me up. I’ll be long gone before you come looking.”
At that moment, the location of Sherry’s cell phone had come through on his computer. “God damn it!” the Fixer had sworn. The signal was coming from the underground parking garage in his building.
The caller had laughed. “I guess you figured out where I am,” he’d said. “Just so you know I mean business, I’m leaving you a calling card on the windshield of your Porsche. Nice car, by the way, but it could use a paint job.”
The Fixer had slammed the phone down and yanked open his desk drawer, seizing the 9mm gun inside it. A few moments later, he was sprinting out of the apartment for the elevator. If that asshole so much as leaned up against that car, I’ll . . . he’d thought as he waited impatiently for the elevator to reach the parking garage.
When the door had opened, he’d emerged with the gun out ready to shoot, not caring if any of the other residents were in the garage or not. Seeing no one else, he’d moved quickly to where he’d parked the Porsche. Beneath one of the windshield wipers was the “calling card,” a severed finger still wearing a ruby-encrusted ring (but not the ring) he’d bought Sherry for her birthday. If that wasn’t bad enough, what really infuriated him was that the bastard had keyed a long scratch along the side of the car from hood to trunk.
It had taken him several minutes to control his anger. After which he’d walked to the building’s security office, where he’d demanded to see the garage security tape for the past hour. But the young officer, a new guy, had apologized and said that “a glitch of some sort” had knocked out the building’s security cameras for an hour, and he was waiting for the repairman.
“Glitch! You dumb son of a bitch!” the Fixer had screamed at the young man. “Didn’t you think to go check to see if maybe someone was breaking into cars?”
The caller had phoned in again that morning, this time, according to the GPS locator, from the sidewalk outside the Oakley mansion. Rubbing my face in it, he’d thought after the conversation was over.
He’d hoped that the twenty-four-hour delay would buy him enough time to track down the caller—either someone on the streets would hear something, or the caller would make a mistake, leading to a swift bullet to the head. But he had to admit that Fielding and his associates were better at this game than he’d thought.
The most surprising was Fielding himself. He’d come off as a pansy, but he was a tough nut to crack. As the caller had surmised, the Fixer had his men slap the Brit around and finally resorted to cutting the tip of the pinky off his right hand. The crazy bastard had screamed, cried, and passed out, but he’d stuck to his story: he didn’t have a partner or an attractive brunette as an associate. He’s a hell of a lot tougher than the act he puts on, he’d grudgingly conceded, looking down at the unconscious figure of PI Todd Fielding.
The caller had left specific instructions. One of the Fixer’s men would enter Madison Square Garden with the rollaway suitcase containing the money and wait to be contacted. The Fixer was to head down into the bowels of Penn Station beneath the Garden, where he, too, would be met. Once the caller’s associate had verified that the money had been delivered, “you’ll hand over Todd Fielding, and we’ll give you your nine-fingered girlfriend back and the key to a locker that contains what you killed the late Miss Oakley to get.”
“How do I know it’s the only copy?” the Fixer had asked.
“I’m sure you’ll bring a laptop to verify what’s on the disk. And if you’re as good as I think you are, you’ll have software that can determine if it’s been downloaded again. If I’m messing with you, your guy walks off with the money.”
Twenty-four hours later, the Fixer patted his suitcoat to feel for the plastic-wrapped finger in the inside pocket. He intended to feed it to the son of a bitch who had dared to damage that most exquisite example of German engineering.
The Fixer looked at his watch. “It’s time,” he said to Jason and Lex. He looked down at the rollaway suitcase, which, in addition to a million dollars in counterfeit money a friend with the U.S. Secret Service had loaned him, had a false bottom beneath which was an acetone peroxide bomb. “Be careful with that thing. It doesn’t take much to set it off. The contact is going to want to take it into a restroom stall to count it. Let him go. Then, when I have what I need, I’ll give you the word, and you blow his ass into the next century.”
The Fixer and Lex walked into the Garden and made their way to the entrance to Penn Station. The plan was to wait until he had the evidence of Kingston’s involvement and the blackmailers were all together counting their money and congratulating themselves. If anything happened before that, Jason would set the bomb off, and they’d all make their getaway in the confusion.
The nice thing about the acetone peroxide bomb was that it was a favorite of terrorists. In fact, within an hour of the detonation, several shadowy overseas “radical Islamic” groups would claim responsibility. Allahu Akbar, he thought as he entered Penn Station. Let Al Qaeda take the rap; they’ll appreciate the publicity.
The caller had said to head for the Long Island Railroad ticket office, where they would be contacted. As they reached the area, Lex tapped the Fixer on the arm and nodded at an attractive brunette walking toward them with a big Italian-looking brute. “That’s the MILF I saw in Chinatown,” he said.
Marlene and her cousin, Detective Sergeant Bobby Scalia, gave each other a high five when they received the report from Clay Fulton, who was waiting with Sherry in a limousine that had been parked on Thirty-First Street, that Jim Williams had arrived and was conferring with two associates.
“One of them has the suitcase,” Fulton said over the radio. “Williams and his pal are going inside. The guy with the suitcase has split off, but he’s going in, too. I love it when a plan falls together.”
“This one’s not there yet, Clay. Be careful,” Marlene said. “I don’t like you taking this risk.”
“Is that a nice way of saying I’m getting too old for this? Besides, darlin’, I’m always careful,” Fulton replied with a chuckle. “And I think we all owe Warren a little for services rendered. Taking this bad dude down is going to be a pleasure.”
“Has anybody seen Todd Fielding?” Marlene asked.
“Sherry says no sign of him up here,” Fulton replied. “I’m off to do my part.”
Scalia nudged Marlene. “This is our guy, right?” he said, looking at the pair of men who were approaching the LIRR ticket office.
“Yeah,” Marlene replied. “But where’s Fielding? We need him to ice this guy for sure.”
Scalia shrugged. “Let’s go ask him.”
Like gunfighters in a western movie, the two pairs of antagonists eyed each other carefully as they walked up to within several yards. “Where’s my partner Todd?” Scalia demanded.
“He’ll be along shortly,” Williams replied. “Where’s Sherry?”
“She’ll be along shortly,” Scalia shot back. “I take it you found my little calling card and my artwork.” He made a gesture and a screeching sound, as though scraping paint off a Porsche 993 with a key, and laughed.
For a moment, Marlene thought Williams was going to attack her cousin, even though he wasn’t nearly as big a man. Bobby was doing everything he could to provoke him, acting out the part of the tough Italian wiseguy and laying the Queens accent on heavy.
Responding to her call, Scalia had met her the day before at Penn Station after Marlene had left Sherry at the loft for safekeeping. She’d quickly brought him up to date on everything she knew. “You want to go check out what’s in locker 3412?” she’d said, holding up the key that had been sent to Warren by Michelle.
“You bet.” He’d smiled. Locating the locker across from the Long Island Railroad ticket counter, they’d opened it, and her cousin had carefully placed what they found in evidence bags.
Worried that Detective Meadow might see them if they returned to Westchester County, they’d gone down instead to the Criminal Courts Building in lower Manhattan, where Marlene had explained what was going on to the chief of the DAO detectives, Clay Fulton. “Can we borrow an office and a computer, please?”
“Only if I get to play, too,” Fulton had replied.
Inside the locker at Penn Station, Marlene and her cousin had found a flash drive containing the files for numerous documents, including an appointment calendar with the name “Brandy Fox” at the top and “Client 032355-JK” listed on nearly all of the dates since the previous October. The client had apparently been so taken with the young woman that he saw her several times a week, including every day during the week and a half leading up to two days before Christmas, when Brandy Fox’s calendar suddenly went blank. The files also contained images of canceled checks from the account of “John Klein” deposited into the account of Gentleman’s VIP Club Inc., as well as results from a company Marlene recognized as a DNA-testing laboratory.
And finally, there was a letter from Michelle Oakley explaining what it all meant. It had been addressed to Marlene’s client.
Dearest Warren,
If you’re reading this, it means that I’m gone. And if so, I’m okay with that, and I want you to be, too. I will have paid for my sins and hopefully redeemed myself a little. I am meeting tonight after our date with a man named Jim Williams, who works for Judge Jack Kingston; you might remember meeting both men at your sister’s party. For reasons that will become clear, I believe Williams intends to try to silence me, and I’m counting on you to make sure my voice gets heard.
What I’m about to tell you will come as a shock. As I said, I’m not the girl you remembered from that wonderful summer so long ago. I have been, for more than a year, the proprietor of a call-girl service that offers sex and companionship to men with lots of money.
I won’t try to make excuses for what I’ve done. I can only try to atone now.
In my business, called the Gentleman’s VIP Club, I had a number of young women who worked for me. One of them was Rene Hanson, the young woman you’ll remember who disappeared shortly before Christmas. For many reasons, some of which you’ll find documented elsewhere here on this flash drive, I doubted the “official” version that she had climbed aboard a plane bound for Mexico, never to be seen or heard from again. That simply was not Rene.
Rene was in love with one of her clients, 032355-JK, a rather simple code for the birthdate and initials of Judge Jack Kingston. I believe that when you turn this evidence over—and I would suggest that you do so to your friend District Attorney Karp, who seems to be one of those increasingly rare creatures known as an honest man—the police will find plenty of evidence to implicate Kingston in her death. And there is one more item that should do it, if it can be located . . .
Michelle explained that her plan was to force Kingston into admitting his guilt in Rene’s death so that her parents would “learn the truth about her fate” and perhaps retrieve her body for burial.
And if he won’t do that willingly and intends instead to keep his secret by killing me, then I hope my death will bring about justice for Rene.
In closing, I don’t expect you to forgive what I’ve done. But I wanted to thank you for that summer we had long ago and reminding me at your sister’s party, and I’m sure our date tonight, of the girl I used to be.
You were a wonderful friend then, Warren Bennett, and I can tell you’ve become a wonderful man. Maybe in the next lifetime, I’ll make smarter choices.
Love always, Michelle
Apparently, Michelle had put the flash drive in the locker at Penn Station the day she was murdered. At first, while driving with her cousin to 100 Centre Street, Marlene had wondered why the other woman hadn’t just given it to Warren for safekeeping. But the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that Michelle hadn’t wanted to endanger Warren, not knowing that he’d already been set up to take the fall for her murder.
Michelle had sent the key to Warren and given him that riddle to solve just in case something went wrong during her meeting with Jim Williams, Marlene thought. If nothing had happened, she would have retrieved the key from Warren while on their date, with no one the wiser.
After a quick scan of Michelle’s materials, Marlene, Scalia, and Fulton had quickly come up with a plan. They wanted to nail Williams for Michelle Oakley’s murder and clear Warren. But now they also wanted to bring down Judge Kingston, who had precipitated the whole thing by killing a young call girl in his home.
Using Sherry’s security card, they’d entered the underground parking structure off Fifth Avenue and called Williams. The severed finger had been Scalia’s idea. He had a friend in the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office who’d loaned it to him from the morgue. He’d placed it on the car and then scratched the paint.
“A guy like that loves his cars more than his mother, if he had one,” Scalia had said. “I want to get him so pissed off that he can’t see straight.”
Leaving one of Fulton’s men in the security office to play the part of the guard waiting for the camera repairman, they’d returned to Penn Station and replaced the flash drive in the locker.
Now, despite the circumstances, it was everything Marlene could do not to laugh as Bobby chomped loudly on a stick of gum and smirked at Williams about damaging his car.
“That’s funny,” Williams said with an effort. “I’m going to have to remember that one.”
Scalia quit chewing. “Let’s do this,” he said, pulling out a cell phone, punching in a number, and then speaking into it when it was answered. “Clay, we’re with our friend. Do you have the suitcase?”
“I’m going into the restroom to do a little counting,” Fulton replied.
Scalia turned to Williams and handed him the key. The detective pointed to the lockers. “Over there.”
The four of them walked over to the locker, which Williams opened. He leaned in, removed the flash drive, and handed it to his partner, who quickly placed it in a small computer he was carrying. The younger man scanned the files, pressed a few buttons, and nodded. “It’s here, and it hasn’t been downloaded anywhere else,” he informed his boss.
“Now, hand over my partner,” Scalia said, “and we can all be on our merry way.”
Williams pointed down a concourse to where two men were approaching, one of them with his hands bandaged. “Where’s Sherry?” he asked.
It was Marlene who answered by pointing back in the direction Williams and his man had come from. He looked in that direction and saw a tall white man accompanied by a large black one approaching. “She’s upstairs with detectives from the New York Police Department, you son of a bitch,” she replied. “In the meantime, I’d like to introduce you to District Attorney Roger Karp and Detective Clay Fulton of the NYPD.”
Williams snarled and turned back toward Marlene, his hand reaching under his coat for the gun in the holster. “Blow it!” he yelled into the microphone pinned to his shirt pocket.
However, there was no corresponding sound of a bomb going off. Instead, he found himself looking down the barrel of a gun held by Scalia. “You and your boy put your hands where I can see them,” Scalia snarled. “Or I’m going to save the taxpayers a lot of money. You’re both under arrest for the murder of Michelle Oakley.”
As her husband and Fulton hurried up to help secure the pair, Marlene looked down the concourse to where Todd Fielding and his captor were surrounded by plainclothes detectives with guns drawn.
“You’ll never make it stick,” Williams said when she turned back to face him. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with. I’ll be out by morning.”
“Maybe so,” Karp said as he stepped between Williams and his wife. “Bobby, you want to read him his rights?”
“With pleasure, Butch,” Scalia said. “Then I think I’ll go get his Porsche and drive it to the impound lot.” He looked at the prisoner. “Hope you got good insurance.”